Musings | Ayush Mangal

Do it for the plot

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

(This turned out to be a very weird rant. I am writing a blog after 1 year, you can skip this)

Well my bank now says I can’t be free of debt anytime soon

Yours truly has been 25 for a while and is almost about to turn 26. At this point, I feel like my life has taken a form which I never even imagined to be possible, for better or worse. I have also started seeing signs of a quarter crisis in my behaviour. Randomly trying to do a startup, going to Japan solo randomly, deciding to go for a master’s after a random conversation with a senior, it’s been a weird year. If I look back at the last year and try to figure out my rationale for doing the things that I did, I find no real reason other than what one of my dear friends might say — Just do it for the plot. ( I used an em dash; I DID, not ChatGPT, you judgemental prick).

On paper, and in reality as well, my life as a 25 or so year old in BLR couldn’t have been better. I was employed in one of the hottest AI startups in India, getting paid more than I knew what to do with, I had a fairly active social life, and my health had never been better. I also had enough free time to pursue whatever hobbies I wanted to and also study whatever I wanted while getting paid. I was getting better and better job opportunities, both in India and then increasingly abroad, and I was starting to explore the founder/startup ecosystem in BLR and attracting interest from some really cool people.

Why, then, oh why, did I decide to throw it all away? Why did I decide to move to a different country, zeroing my savings and racking up massive debt and dealing with job uncertainty, away from all my friends and family and everyone I care about and love?

So much, just for a plot twist, eh?

Even though I am almost sure I have aphantasia ( the lack of visual mental imagery, comically manifested by my total inability to imagine a mental abacus while being put in an abacus class in my childhood for 3 years straight), I kinda have this mental image where I had the realisation that I need a plot twist in my life. The image is of me sitting in a pretty cafe in South Delhi (or in Indiranagar/HSR in BLR or Jubilee Hills in HYD) and sipping my hot chocolate (Blue Tokai ftw for this) and reading a book on my Kindle, without any care in the world. Adjusted to my own needs (which are not really bourgeois), money has sort of lost its importance; I can go on international trips, I can buy whatever I want, eat wherever I want. Any form of art is made to inspire you to ask questions, and the only question I can think of when I ponder this particular imagery is — Is this it? Is this all I want to do in life? — Cue an immediate episode of a quarter-life crisis.

So for a while, I did what any self-respecting 24–25-year-old techie would do when faced with a quarter-life crisis. I tried to find meaning in new hobbies. I never thought I could sing, so I joined a singing class and also learnt guitar, keyboard and cajon. Although it ended up with me not being able to do any one of these even semi-decently, I now know I am at least capable of doing any of these if I just put in effort. I never thought I could do a pull-up, so I joined a callisthenics class and broke my front tooth, but I can now easily do one or 10 (okay, maybe not 10 that easily). Oh, I have also been practising doing handstands for the last 2 years and can kinda get away with a decent one about 20% of the time.

I got bored with my 9–5 job, (although it was more like a 10–10 job 🙈 ), even though it was full of exciting problems ( my task for a day once was to recreate the one piece Wano trailer using a video model, or to listen to ASMR audios to teach our models to whisper or to try to replicate the voice of some of the most famous people in India or to figure out if we can do GRPO on TTS models to improve their pronounciations) and insane amounts of ownership ( I directly reported to the CEO, and had practically infinite freedom to approach problems however the fuck I wanted and a semi-decent amount of GPUs to play around with). I got approached by recruiters daily and had to explicitly turn down many lucrative offers regularly (my peak moment was saying F you to a big HFT firm in India cause they refused to pay me for a take-home assignment ).

Oh and I also travelled a bit. I was totally blessed to have found an awesome friend group at MSFT, and have been to Vietnam, Pondicherry and Ladakh with them over the last 2 years. I also ended up living the otaku dream on my trip to Japan, alone. Needless to say, all the travel needed money, which my job provided for, and I also was lucky enough to have employers who respected holidays ( I once took a holiday on a day which turned out to be one of the worst messes in our company’s history, and to their credit, they didn’t call me even once )

Why oh why, did I leave this life? Answer 1 — Cause I am an idiot. Answer 2 — Just for the plot?

The above 2 answers are probably the real answers. But if someone asks me to give an answer which sounds better and more motivating, I think I have one.

I realised at 25 that no matter how badly I fuck up my life, I can always come back to India, take some tech job and earn my daily expenses since India is fucking cheap, (unless you have a health issue or want to start a family). I have zero family responsibilities being the youngest kid; nobody in the whole world depends on me, and I really don’t have many materialistic needs ( after seeing my apartment, a friend commented that I live like someone earning 20x less than what I do ). My parents are middle-class but well off, and can comfortably provide me a bed in their home whenever I want them to. They are insanely loving, supportive and will fight against the world for me if needed.

And what do you do when you have someone who has your back? You bungee jump (10/10 experience btw, totally recommended, I remember feeling like, if I end up doing this, no other risk would feel big in the future, and that has been partially true). You jump without fear ( but a lot of adrenaline ) from a cliff, and let gravity and the inertia of your motion guide you, oh, and you enjoy the view. Once you are safe at the bottom and safe again, all you want to do is try again.

I think my master represents exactly that. I am trying to do the most moonshot thing I can imagine other than opening my own startup ( for which I don’t have a cofounder or an idea I want to spend 3 years on ), and it’s also something I have regretted not doing a lot of times over the last 4 years. Is it the best financial decision? Definitely not. The best career decision? Probably not. A decision my parents are happy about? Nopes. A decision I am happy about? Kinda.

The kid inside me has always wanted to study in a nice college in the US. The kid inside me also finds robots to be cool and wants to be a mechanical or electrical engineer. The kid inside me loves AI, but not LLMs. The kid inside me is also obsessed with the US, having watched unhealthy amounts of History TV 18 in my childhood. The kid inside me also just really loves to study and do research. The kid inside me also loves college and wants to escape from adulting. Master’s in Robotics at CMU is the kid taking over the reins for a little while, kicking the startup tech bro Ayush outside for a while.

I guess I will turn 28 whether or not I go for a master’s. My life will have some plot regardless, and knowing myself, it won’t be straightforward. Might as well try to increase the entropy of the universe while I am at it. If I have one guiding rule over the years, let it be — Just do it for the plot 😛

Originally published on Medium.

A long walk to work

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently 24 years old, with a professional lifespan of ~2.5–3 years , so talking about something spanning 40 years of my life, while I haven’t even lived 25 of my own in the first place, feels a little weird, but what else do you do on a nice lazy Sunday morning? Also out of the 24 years lived, I just remember the ones from around the 16th year, and so I really feel more like 8 year old¹, the first 16 years all seem coalesced into this one giant panorama of blurry snapshots of past memories².

While no one can predict how long a career would last, owing to the unpredictability of both death, and health³ , if all goes well, it would at least be for 40 odd years, if not more, owing to the improvements in healthcare, given that society sets an average retirement age of 60ish?

Even though I can’t really imagine sitting on a beach⁴ somewhere, enjoying my retirement reading books for the rest of my life after that, there would be some element of work, in some form. Given the fact that my ability to create impact would probably be the maximum at that age, given the connections I have hopefully developed by that time⁵, and the free time that old age would provide, should more or less offset the depreciation in productivity that a declining health will lead to.

Thinking about this long journey ahead, actually feels quite relaxing, it takes the pressure off my shoulders to reach certain “milestones” earlier in life, since there is quite a bit of time to do whatever I want to do. It makes it okay to spend a few more months in the city you have come to love⁶, in a job that you don’t love anymore, or spend a bit more time with the people you have come to think of as family, before leaving your nest once again. It makes it okay to take that job that excites you, but doesn’t pay that well. It makes it okay to stay with your family for a bit longer, and put aside the plans for exploring the countries you want to explore for sometime. It makes it okay to spend some more time learning the ropes of your field, to become a student again and pursue your intellectual curiosities a bit more.

Taking this long view, also makes me appreciate the value of the people around me quite a bit. It only makes sense, that other people will have their own 40 year career around me, and will achieve things which are incredibly hard to predict right now. You never know who will become what, or who you’ll get close to, and it just makes it super important to treat everyone well, and also looking back at the brief career I already have had, it was the people who defined the life I was having⁷.

Another important thing to take care of is quite obviously my health. I am already kind of a fitness enthusiast of sorts⁸, but there is a lot in the mental space that needs to be worked upon. It becomes evident on the days when I am sick, or even slightly under the weather, how futile everything else suddenly seems, and all things come to halt, until my body is back to normal, so if this machine needs to be working for 40 more years, it will only do so under proper maintenance and under acceptable workloads, its possible to overclock it a bit at times, but not always⁹.

Also, the work I do will definitely change over time, I will probably not be an IC for 40 years, and my work will not be defined by what I do, but what I enable other people to do¹⁰, and thus its increasingly more important to get better at people skills, not just my technical skills. Also, the field which I work in, which is currently AI, might change, and I might find an alternative career more fulfilling, or just be forced into it due to any number of reasons¹¹, this puts things in perspective, when it sometimes feel like the work I am doing right now, is the only sort of work I’ll be doing forever.

So much for a 40+ year long career, so many things to explore, people to meet, places to be and…

Work to be done.

Tangents

My emotional age, might actually be somewhere around that lol
This reminds me of the ending of the Death’s end, when SPOILER ALERT, the entirety of humanity is converted from a 3D world, to a 2D image of sorts, only in my case, its like time is flattened into one place for the first score of my life, so it would be more like a 3D cube.
Increasingly started to think about health-span, instead of just lifespan after reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To
Actually, make that a library, my old bod might need the beach sun, but the brain would crave library, OR actually, I’ll take my Kindle equivalent to the beach lol
I currently suck at making professional ( or even for that matter personal ) connections, but that will hopefully improve over time, or I’ll shamelessly latch on the connections of the few people I know, similar to how my strategy for making friends as a kind of introvert is to just befriend one very extroverted person lol ( cue to my super extrovert pseudo-sister here )
Hyderabad — home, hardest city to leave.
There is this view of not making friends at work, I disagree with it, maybe its just yet to be broken naivety, but its impossible for me to not connect with the people I work on a more personal level, when I spend almost the entirety of 5/7 of my days with them
Someone recently pointed out, that this is in fact not the case, I am just good at controlling my impulses for junk food and I just like to work out lol
Which is a bit hard while working in a rapidly growing startup
While I’ll always want to be an IC in some capacity, I do understand that I am not super talented enough to keep growing in that role, and will have to leverage other people’s talents to make up for my own
Plain old market forces, or a war, AI automation, hostile AGI takeover, something like the cultural revolution in China, climate change, health, family commitments, aliens, super-intelligent animal takeover, or

Originally published on Medium.

Wake up to reality

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Given the (debatable) fact that we come into this earth tabula rasa, or as a clean slate, its is very interesting to observe it being slowly written on, and erased, time and time again, becoming more of a used slate, with dust traces from the past settling as biases withhold (there is a word for exactly this, which my dumb self will later use google to figure out — EDIT — Palimpsest), and new spaces made for me to be sensitive about issues which I was till now unaware, or simply ignorant of.

Yours truly, has never been much of a politically inclined person, social issues were never a concern for an upbringing, which was middle class enough to allow glimpses into the fact that something was potentially wrong with the world around, but also privileged enough to allow the bliss that is ignorance.

Well, shit changes…..sometimes, when you least expect it.

While reading books is usually seen has a harmless hobby, a mere pastime of the intelligentsia, a thing people do on lazy Sundays, with a well brewed cup of coffee in hand and the sun shining through the window, (totally not describing my own Sundays.. ahem) sometimes, they are not so harmless, and might change the entirety of your being, in just a few pages. Afterall, most of society, is driven by a few religious books, and most political philosphies, were first written as a book or a manifesto or a treatise.

While I started my reading journey, with typical young adult, coming of age books ( the harry potters, Percy Jackson, Colleen Hoover? ) , over the last 1 year or so, there is a whole new genere which is starting to attract me. And with it, came a whole new phase of discovering a new sensitivity to the society around, which I inhabit.

This is not a political piece however, I still don’t have a political philosphy of my own, and as someone who hasn’t even voted yet, ever, I am the last person to say anything about any social issue, but I will do so anyway, cause…it’s my blog lol

When talking about social issues, does it make sense to only talk about the country you live in? or are you supposed to talk about the issues which are faced in the world in general. Should I talk about racism in the US, or castesim in India? Is a global problem like climate change one that demands attention, or the threats to democracy in the world’s most populous country the issue? With so many things wrong in a world, which pretends to be working absolutely fine like clockwork, what problems do you claim as your own, what problems you chose to ignore as somehow less worthy of care, how do people develop their own socio-political agenda? I have no clue.

Are you supposed to follow a bottom-up approach, trying to make small improvements in the world immediately around you, or do you take a top-down approach, and campaign the fix the largest problems we face as a society. I personally feel more attracted towards the top-down approach, since I feel powerless against the tyranny of the masses, and the pestilence like nature of the inertia to change, renders a bottom up approach inefficient and a Sisyphean attempt at best.

I have never felt much attached to the nation I was born in, I didn’t chose to be born in this weird as hell world, with more problems than solutions, I didn’t chose the religion my family adopts, nor the cultural surroundings which have tainted my view of the world, in their view. I believe that the first 22 years of my life, were a blip, with barely any identity being formed, or maybe I have just dissolved whatever identity I had created in the past.

For the future, I hope I find issues that I think are worth solving, people I want to support, movements which feel like my own, identities I adopt, and maybe again discard as the time goes by.

Whatever the case be, its finally time for me, to wake up to reality —

Originally published on Medium.

Occupational Hazards

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The term occupational hazard is usually used to describe “physical” hazards, which one is exposed to in the process of pursuing their occupation/work. Like being exposed to anthrax as a wool rearer, dangerous radiations for nuclear factory workers or just plain old back pain in the tech industry (I am turning 24, and my back is already starting to show signs of rebel, even if I am fairly physically active).

What stroke my fancy in one of my ever present parallel thought plane of mental existence, was the “personality” hazards which your career might expose you to.

I have been working in the tech industry for a little over 2 years now, and a little introspection makes it clear that my personality has been affected by my choice of occupation, if its been a hazard or not in this regard, is upto anyone’s guess.

I think my current mental utility function, the force that drives me, assuming I am a rational agent (which I certainly am not), is heavily conditionally dependent on my occupation. A lot of things which are important to me as a person, might not have hold any value for me if I was in a different career.

I am a deeply individualistic person (having already use the phrase “I” 9 times since beginning this article), and I don’t really care about anyone other than myself except maybe a very small handful of people, which sounds like something you’d say to sound dramatic, but I mean that in all seriousness. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is my innate nature, and how deeply I am nurtured by the occupation I pursue. Tech as an industry is individualistic, fascinated by powerful individual role models who created a path beyond all odds and despite all costs. With leaders using wartime terminology in boardrooms, somehow glorifying the horrific destruction that is a war, to the chants of doing “whatever it takes” to win the arms race to technical supremacy.

I am not looking to question the culture,I myself am a child of, but I wonder, what would happen if I took upon a different career path. What would be my values. Currently I only care about my own success, have little regard to whatever the hell happens to society or even the people around me, I am deeply meritocratic, almost certainly sapiosexual and I work in an industry which has seen an influx of the most talented (and often ruthless) brains of the generation, and is capitalism incarnate it its most glorious ( and scary) manifestation in the 21st century. People (including yours truly) are driven by profits, by academic/professional glory, relationships are put on the sidelines and the most unlikely of alliances are forged for a chance to get a chance to make an “impact” on the world, and transform our society, often forgetting, that that’s not the only way to make an impact or even the most “impactful” one.

In contrast to this individualism, I wondered, what if I went into maybe something like the military, what would that make of me. I don’t have any idea of what goes inside a military life, but surely it involves a level of sacrifice of the individual identity? Atleast while watching a military parade, with people clad in the same uniforms (maybe decorated with varying level of paraphernalia indicating their rank), marching in groups to the same beat, their must be a strong sense of belonging to a larger group and of surrendering yourself to a cause, for the greater good. I don’t think when my job is to literally protect other people, I would care a lot about what petty concerns make of my daily headache in my current life, and obviously that life comes with its very own (and MUCH more physical) occupational hazards, but I was just wondering if I was drawn to the tech world because it suits my personality, or my personality has just been moulded to like the work I do.

Or what if I was a doctor? It feels like such a noble profession, though I know there is a LOT of stress and pain and occupational hazards that go into that lifestyle, but again, would that have made me a “better” person, would my personality be more caring, more sensitive and empathetic to the suffering of others, or would it have made me numb to it all, due to the constant overexposure to it?

I also often wonder about the total absence of social responsibility I carry, bordering almost to an apathy to whatever socio-political issues in the world around me, always having a feeling that all these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, and are not my problem. But what if I was working in an NGO, would I have been able to turn away my eye and pretend not to see anything wrong while staring right at the problems that are omnipresent around us. As an example, I am finding myself unable to look street beggars in the eye, because it somehow makes me very uncomfortable, and I can’t do any better than just pretend they don’t exist or I don’t see them, and that is so fucking brutal, because its only a coin flip which decides which side of the line I was born in, and it doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to even make me cross lines from one end to another in the future, and be on the receiving end of being pushed around in a world, that pretends to not see you, exist.

Maybe it’s just the nascent emotional maturity developing inside me, as I am growing slightly older, although still being VERY young emotionally to be sensitive to a lot of issues, that my brain is making me think of all these things. It has affected the content I am consuming, the books I am reading (I am very much interested in history, political books, even though I didn’t like them before). I don’t know if its just a phase of life, where my brain is trying to figure out what its identity is, and how much of it, is just a result of occupational hazards in a mad industry?

Originally published on Medium.