What will 37 be like?

Over the weekend, I was browsing through my website’s archives and saw this –

I wrote this one on March 20, 2022. And I’ll be 32 next week! My god. That was fast. Soooo much has happened since.

Since I wrote this newsletter, I have –

Dated the loml
Gone shoulder’s deep into sarkari office life (cannon event)
Visited the motherland (Toronto)
Told family I want to marry (went well)
Handled the annoyances of organising a Punjabi wedding
Got married (cannon event?)
Handled the annoyances of patriarchy and familial expectations (deffo cannon event)
Moved to Delhi, lived in Vasant Kunj (fancy)
Got a job at the World Bank (? why ? how ¿ what)
Shat myself with anxiety thanks to the World Bank job (not proud)
Helped Poonam finish her PhD
Road tripped to Ludhiana (obv), Dalhousie, Dharamshala, Shimla, Santiniketan
Travelled to Goa, Trivandrum, Kuala Lumpur, Langakawi, Singapore, Hyderabad (iykyk)
Had a series of shitty Airbnb experiences in Bombay (iykyk 🐀)
Travelled on a double-decker airplane (🐳)
Done some interesting work projects (not surprising)
Written 18 newsletters (there were 19 before and 19 now)
Tried to create a software product startup (didn’t work)
Got on the front page of Hacker News thanks to the said software (nice)
Tried to create a SaaS startup (gave up)
Learned to swim (finally!)
Got good at yoga and dance-cardio (flexi-sexy)
Got to work on another World Bank project in Assam (enjoyable)
Travelled to Guwahati a dozen times in a single year (sheesh)
Watched Dua Lipa, Linkin Park, John Mayer, and Karan Aujla – LIVE (bruh)
MOVED TO GOA (¿que pasa?)
Made sooooo many new friends
SHAVED MY HEAD (what in the world)
Set up a Raspberry Pi home server (so much fun 🏴‍☠️)
Adopted a cat 🍪🐈 (meow)
Got into cycling, restarted playing basketball, did slacklining (briefly)
Continued running (working on that Zone 2 cardio)
Used swimming as a workout (gulu gulu)
Got into quizzing (SEQC ftw)
Danced at my college wife’s actual wedding (annulment fulfillment)
Danced at my childhood bestie’s wedding (about fucking time)
Read a lot (60+ books it seems)
Made sooooo many great memories with my lomlpreet

As of today, I feel –

healthy (go sports!)
fairly settled in my career (as good as it gets for a consultant)
curious (all these fun projects and so little time)
chill (sussegad-maxxing)

Full gratitude attitude is happening, friends.

Look at how much the world around us has changed in just the last four and a half years. In March 2022, I had beta access to GPT-3. It was… okay. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity – none of these things existed. The AI mania was still away. Musk was trying to buy Twitter. Modi was still the PM of India. Mamata Didi the CM of West Bengal. Trump was in the rear view mirror. Russia had just invaded Ukraine. Dhurandhar was not a thing. We were still blissfully unwaware of the Epstein Files. Aam Aadmi Party had just won the election in Punjab. Arsenal hadn’t won the league in twenty years. Diljit hadn’t yet become a global star.

More personally, I had no clue that in less than one year from that newsletter’s date, I was going to marry this person that I had known literally three weeks at that time. All the bullet points on the first page of my current CV did not exist at that time. I couldn’t have imagined that I’d be typing this response post sitting in Goa.

It’s mad, bro. I knew life would happen but that’s a lot of life. Is this how it’s always going to be? Or is it a sigmoid function and I just happen to be on the slope right now?

In that 2022 newsletter I told you about how my brother once said “32 is the new 28”. As a soon-to-be 32-year-old, I honestly don’t know what that means. But 32 sure feels fun! Certainly a lot more fun than any of the previous years.

Here’s to the next five years, I guess? I’ll see you guys before that I am sure. Perhaps another 19 newsletters till 2031.

Most of you who receive this newsletter are past the 30-year turnstile (and some well past it). How do you feel about this? Have the last five years been mad eventful for you as well?

Tell me! Text/email as always.

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