Hi, I am Atharva. This is my personal website. It's quite non-topical. Just a place where I write stuff.
Some of my beliefs
- A life worth living is one that is mindfully observed.
- The world is fractally interesting and surprisingly malleable.
- Live with playful sincerity and a strong belief that we can always do better.
Things I do
I spend most of my waking hours as a member of nilenso, a tech cooperative. Through nilenso, I get to work with various organisations' software systems—my favourite one that I got to tinker with so far is one in which we add feedback loops to help countries prevent millions of deaths caused by heart disease.
These days I'm the "AI guy" at nilenso, and this technology has always been personally exciting for me, though I don't particularly enjoy the discourse around it. I believe there's a lot of consequential work to do here.
I also write and make art for fun. Some old digital art stuff is here, sometimes it's weird outsider music like this. I have also made POV Bangalore Thindi videos.
I find that there's always lots to write about. At any given moment I might have 20-30 unpublished drafts of things I could write about scattered across all my digital dumpzones. If you want to write too, I found On Writing Well to be the unblocker that eventually got this site going.
Ideas that have a deep influence on how I think
- Antifragile made me sensitive to uncertainties and non-linearities that drive the world.
- Thinking In Systems: A Primer is perhaps secretly the most optimistic book I have ever read—because it revealed to me that every important thing ever is a system that we can't impose our will on, but one we can dance with and lovingly redesign into a better one.
- There are many "instantiations" of systems thinking where we see this—here's one about designing society through architecture and here's one about your role in policy.
- Mindfulness practices have definitely changed how I perceive the world and think in a way that I haven't been able to satisfactorily describe yet—the best I can do is implore everyone to give it a solid attempt.
- I Am A Strange Loop, a book about how animate beings can emerge from inanimate matter, made me appreciate the fractal depth of abstractions and why we need them.
Other interests
- Food, flavours, and the craft of cooking.
- I like most things, but I'm partial to Karnataka Thindi, Sichuan Cuisine, Konkan coast flavours, Japanese Cuisine, Ethiopian Cuisine, Thai Cuisine... (as I type this I realised this list will soon morph into a paragraph so I'll stop here)
- Home-brewing coffee.
- Writing.
- Art (currently leans more towards consumption than creation)