• Many would reckon that Machine Learning is now the new oil these days. And I would most likely support that. Personally I got exposed to the world of ML in my undergrad days but it had always remained a black box for me. One of the major motivation of joining a Masters program was my intent to peep into this black box. I signed up for this course called Computational Data Analysis(CSE6740) offered by Prof. Negar Kivyansh. Every lecture I attended, I had this eureka moment where I understood the why behind a particular method. This blog (or blog series) is my attempt to follow the Feynman Learning Technique. So lets see if that works!

  May 05, 2019

• With the increase in the accessibility of technology, language barriers have slowly started to break down. The world has started to mix these languages in order to make communication more intuitive and easy. This can very evidently be seen in multi lingual countries like India, Turkey, etc. I spent the early months of 2019 trying to understand and learn the processes to analyse such multi-lingual texts. I am planning to write a series of posts explaining my findings and learning.

  May 02, 2019

• I have always been fascinated by sleep. I have had my parents advice me to sleep well before every exam - but obviously I never did. I took up this book to understand why people usually stress a lot on good sleep. And 15 pages into this book, I kept this book aside and slept because it was already thirty minutes past my bed time. And ironically even the author suggests the reader to sleep.

  March 30, 2019

• One week leading to the Thailand trip, I set out to write a long list of fears I wanted to conquer through the whole experience. I even asked several of my close friends to help me point those out. 

Many times while travelling we tend to forget that along with the luxury of relaxation, we have an opportunity to really step out of our comfort zone.

  May 01, 2018

• Recently I have been really fascinated by Buddhism - especially the intense devotion and motivation of the people to study the religion. To be frank, I was never curious about learning about Hinduism and I don’t see many being curious about the same. I met several people in Thailand who have been staying there for months to learn more about the teaching of the Buddha and practice meditation. There sure must be something of Buddhism which even attracts several atheists to give religion a shot.

  March 06, 2018

• It has been one week since I returned from my Thailand expedition - and it has not been that bad. Obviously, I don’t think I will ever be satisfied with myself, and that is perfectly okay. So, I hit the gym regularly for the whole week. I set up a good working space at my home - though could not work as much as I wanted to. But at least, there is some start.

  February 25, 2018

• Just about 12 hours to go before I fly off to my first longish solo travel to the much famous land of smiles. My mind is wandering in all sorts of directions, but the majority opinion of my brain cells is - “What the hell? Don’t go Achyut!”

  January 30, 2018

• It has been just 19 days in 2018 and I have realised how different, surprising and unplanned this year is going to be. I left my first job to explore new things and it has been 19 days since and I have not improved my skillset even by a tiny notch. I say I took a break to get to know me more, but in reality I have not done any experiments to say that. Freelancing is not working, or rather I have not put in enough efforts to make it work. I am hardly reading any books. I started gym for a week and then have not worked out since the last five days. I got into a bit of a mix in the personal space.On the whole, I am just letting life slip by during one of the most amazing period of my life, a period which most only dreams of. But, I am just wasting it.

  January 18, 2018

• So, as always, I did not end up making this a habit. Various incidences in my life have forced me to conclude that I can never create a routine of my own. But I badly want to challenge that conclusion and therefore instead of waiting for this to become a habit and then make it public, I will be posting every journal entry on Sundays over my facebook & instagram handle. Game on, life!

  November 19, 2017

• I missed writing the journal last week because of the Diwali celebrations at home. And there I am, writing this at 12 on a Sunday night.

  October 29, 2017

• It really took some convincing to write this thing today. The only question popped up to me was, “Why should I write it when no one reads it?” But then, I write for myself :)

  October 15, 2017

• Yes, I love writing. But lately I have been thinking on the motivation behind it. I have been asked why I write and the best answer I can come up is, it pushes my boundaries, it pushes me to try new things in the first place so I can write about them. And frankly, that is the truth.

  October 08, 2017

• Has anyone felt that sheer guilt from within?
  something inside you wants to curse you,
  break you, punch you and pull you down the stairs
  into the infinite void till you cannot match your own sight

  August 29, 2017

• Living alone in a big city like Delhi gets boring sometimes, especially on the weekend when you have watched almost everything on Netflix that interests you. But for a bibliophile like me, the city has a lot to offer. Storytelling meetups and workshops to some unique(at least for me!) ideas of borrowing a human for half an hour and reading him/her. Luckily I stumbled upon one such event in Delhi and I couldn’t just miss it.

  August 20, 2017

• I vividly remember the gloomy evening when
  I boarded Suryanagri Express for the first time.
  Three large suitcases, a bag on the shoulder,
  and a million scattered thoughts.

  August 05, 2017

• For people who know me, understand how the word travelling can ignite a spark within me. For me, the only positive of staying in Delhi was being at an overnight distance to most of the destinations in the Himalayas. Three weeks into my first job, I was starting to curse myself for wasting three weekends and so hastily I booked my tickets to Dharamshala and my accommodation at Zostel-Mcleodganj. And this is how I found my north star, something that I can always go back to - the concept of travelling alone!



  August 03, 2017

• One of the first things we are taught in Programming 101 is to write a well structured & commented code. And as any newbie would, we ignore this lesson and focus on achieving the end result. Continuing the same learnings, I coded a R(the R language!) script to be run on files amounting to 30GBs! This was my first professional experience after my graduation and I did not want to fuck up. So, I structured the code, wrote all the comments and ran it on all the files. And what happened next?

  July 24, 2017

• I have never been a big fan of memoirs or biographies. However, Bill Gate’s on Paul Kalanithi’s autobiography motivated me to give this genre a try. I remember picking up this book on a train journey, and finishing it in one go.

  July 21, 2017

• And then we left for our own ways, just like we had come together after walking our own path on that sunny July 21st morning. Who knew, these four years will make us into friends, enemies, partners in crime, shoulders to cry on, faces we despise, but at the end, these very same people will make us cry while bidding our final goodbyes.



  May 04, 2017

• Startify has been one of the best decisions of my undergraduate life. We got this idea of documenting our journey in a form of a podcast when we were traveling with our E-Cell juniors. We had real fun while making this. Enjoy the conversation!

  April 02, 2017

• I always wanted to record a podcast of my own. And finally, after many failed attempts, we recorded this when we had gone out for a dinner. This podcast basically consists of three final year undergraduate students(one of them is obviously me), contemplating on their journey so far. We discussed a hypothetical situation where we were guaranteed our dream career on the first day of college, and then how this would have changed our stay at IIT Jodhpur.

  March 25, 2017

• I have been to many metro cities around the world, but the energy and liveliness we have in the metros of India cannot be matched. The Indian culture of family and the way we interact is something very unique. In this every adaptive world and times when we are adopting the western culture in all ways, this is something we should always hold on to.

  March 03, 2017

• PowerPoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate in a better way. The programmers behind PowerPoint saw it as a clever hack—a way to save time and money instead of creating slides the old fashioned way. It is an amazing tool for presenting your ideas in a way that the audience can relate to! However, we, the users, have made a complete mockery of presentations. To a certain extent, Microsoft is to blame for the dismal built-in wizards, templates and clip-arts - those hideous Microsoft creations.

  February 10, 2017

• In Power of Habit, the author examines why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while other seem to remake themselves overnight. The book is divided into three sections, namely Individual, Company and Societies. The author discusses how habits are formed in all three areas with some compelling evidences. Personally, I have always disliked self-help books due to the sole reason of them being boring. But surprisingly, Charles Duhigg has found an interesting way to present boring tips through this best-seller.

  February 10, 2017

• One of my major goals of 2016 was to inch closer to a particular career path that I will embark on after I graduate. However, like all new year goals, I am not even close to deciding what I want to do after I finish by B.Tech. These four years of college have been enlightening in many ways but unlike many of my batchmates, I have grown more confused about my future. There are infinite opportunities out there and with a tad bit of experience I have eliminated some and confused between some.

  December 29, 2016

• It is that time of the year again - the dreaded placements. The same block where once I used to hear noisy birthday bashing or the typical Hindi abuses while playing Counter Strike is now a hostile territory of men at work!

  September 24, 2016

• I am currently working on the B.Tech Project that involves predicting flight prices. To build the models, I needed historical flight prices. Unfortunately, such data is not available and so I had to build a scraper to extract flight prices daily and save it in a csv file.

  August 21, 2016

• I consider myself a newbie for the data analysis world. What I have understood so far is that data preparation is the most important step while solving any problem. Each predictive model requires a certain type of data and in a certain way. For instance, tree based boosting models like xgboost require all the feature variables to be numeric. While solving the San Francisco Crime Classification problem on Kaggle, I stumbled upon different ways to handle categorical variables. One of the method to convert a categorical input variable into a continuous one is One Hot Encoding/ Dummy coding.

  August 14, 2016

• We were failing to book a self-drive car for the last three weeks – sometimes due to license issues, or sometimes due to sheer bad luck. But not this time. We booked a Ford Figo(never book these, it will be the driver’s worst nightmare) from Zoom Cars well in advance. And since we had paid the money as well, there was no turning back. Thus, finally, Wayanad it was.

  June 21, 2016

• After a full week’s planning to hire a self-drive car and head out for a road trip, we finally ended up booking a train ticket to Pondicherry. I had recently bought a recording device to record my travel tales on the go so that I find it easy to accumulate it in a blog. I tried it a few times, but I find it better to write it down in Google Keep and then later decorate it into a blog post.

  June 10, 2016

• After a long long time, today when I entered the auditorium of MPS Jodhpur (a school in Jodhpur) I started missing my school again. As we grow up, we begin to get indifferent to things from our past. But that auditorium, those young kids in uniform and those teachers shouting at them to shut up, brought back happy memories from my Vidyani days.

  April 07, 2016

• I had written in my earlier post, that I would become an early riser this year. I tried and I failed. It has been 2 months and 21 days and I am ashamed to share that I woke up early only for 23 days. It doesn’t mean that I hated waking up early, I loved it. The serenity, the calmness and the solitude was addictive, but it wasn’t addictive enough to wake an lazy ass like me.

  March 20, 2016

• I woke up to the roller-coaster ride of our Himachal State Transport bus when it reached Bhunter(a small town before Manali). Last night was tough after being stalled at Ambala Cant for more than 4 hours waiting for our bus to which we finally gave up and boarded the local state transport bus. But as soon as we got down at Bhunter, the cold air brought a sense of freshness in our bodies. We had to search out our bags for warm clothes because it was damn cold. We looked somewhat like this –

  January 10, 2016