2020 - Annual Summary

This is a personal journal to document my highlights and experiences of this year. It's meant for feeling gratitude and, if possible, personal joy, and is by no means meant as an instrument of self-promotion. Why then do I share it in public? I feel that looking back at your year brings clarity and accountability. One year is a substantial amount of time, a great resource. It's a good exercise to assess how well it was used. Hopefully I will inspire some to take up something similar. Also, my format is there for my readers to use or not use.

This year has been one of the most fruitful years in my life so far. I thought up better technical ideas than before and was able to turn some of them out to the world in the form of papers, articles, talks and such. I clearly took very well to online mode of teaching. I read more than ever before. I drew more than ever before and grew better in my own eyes (which, believe me, is the hardest part!). I wrote a lot both technically and otherwise, though I couldn't publish anything in popular media this year. And I think, I kept improving my singing and my understanding of the nuances of music in tiny little steps. I am about to complete a year of living peacefully with my family under near-lockdown conditions. Knowing how divorces and domestic violence are on the rise all around, I would like to thank my stars on that count. I continued doing Yoga as per the regime started last year, and then diversified to jogging and cycling. Though I could definitely have done better on fitness front, I wouldn't say I did too badly there. I am a kilo or two lighter than I was a year ago.

 

The causes which drove these externally visible changes are deep inside me. It's impossible to write about them without sounding silly. But I will try to share a few reflections in the end of this post. Hope they will be found helpful.

(My near and dear ones! A request. If you see any omission, please remind me through a personal note.)

Research

Conference Publications

1. StaBL: Statechart with Local Variables (ISEC 2020)
2. Automated Testing of Refreshable Braille Display (HCC 2020)
3. Discovering Multiple Design Approaches in Programming Assignment Submissions (SAC 2021)
   

 Workshop

1. A Simulator for State Chart Based Language (Workshop on Research Highlights in Programming Languages, FSTTCS 2020)

Student Milestones

1. State-of-the-art Seminar of Varsha Suresh
2. State-of-the-art Seminar of Nikhila KN
   

Teaching

1. Programming Languages (Spring 2020, iMTech)
2. Fundamentals of Programming (Summer 2020, MSc Digital Society) 
3. Program Analysis for Software Engineering (Autumn 2020, PG Elective)
4. Programming in Python (Autumn 2020, iMTech)

Voluntary teaching. In summer 2020, I taught a short online course on 'Introduction to Programming and Computational Thinking' to some kids of friends and neighbours. As a note of thanks, the parents of the participants committed to contribute to COVID relief work.

Projects. I did a number of projects this year with various students. I consider the willingness of students to work closely with you a very distinctive evidence of your having connected well with them through your teaching. That way, I am very happy with this achievement.

Talks and Panel Discussion

1. Webinar on Online Teaching (July 2020, NIE)
2. Panel Discussion on Online Education (August 2020) 
3. Webinar on AI for Education (November 2020, MINRO)
4. Hindi and Premchand Sahitya (December 2020, IIITB Samvaad)
5. Symbolic Execution in Testing and Verification (December 2020, Philips)
   

 Books Read

1.  ग़बन
2. राग दरबारी
3. Sapiens
4. Talks in Washington (J. Krishnamurthy)
5. The Shape of the Ruins
6. The White Castle
7. The Moor's Last Sigh
8. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

... and many others which I started but left unfinished, as always.

 Art

This year was phenomenal in terms of my productivity in art. This is the first time, I am able to list (almost) all the drawings I have made this year. This itself is a phenomenon for me!

1. Milind Mulick's water colouring workshop -- July 2020
2. Stockholm Water painting -- August 2020
3. Laapataa -- Dishwashing
4. Laapataa -- Meditation
5. Laapataa -- Online Antyakshari
6. Laapataa -- Why PhD 1
7. Laapataa -- Why PhD 2
8. Laapataa -- Digital Migration
9. Laapataa -- Nothing works in India
   
10. Untitled comic strip -- Watering plants
11. How to do Studies
    
12. Motu Patlu
13. Autism -- Hold Mamma's Hand
14. Autism -- Do not drop things from the Balcony
15. Autism -- Behave Well in Shops
16. Pen Sketch -- Deserted Electronics City
17. Pen Sketch -- Landscape for Vigyan's Project
18. Lonely culvert

Photo links: My Drawings Laapataa

Highlights

1. Migration to online teaching
2. Migration to digital art
3. Vigyan's injury
   
4. Commitment to physical fitness
   
5. Promotion
6. Entry to Instagram
   

Entry

1. Kiki. My neighbour and friend Sabyasachi and his wife Jhuma was blessed with a daughter this year. Kiki's arrival and growing up through the last few months has been a source of much joy for our entire family.
   
2. Hasuni's grandchild. Our domestic help Hasuni got a grandchild -- her daughter's son.
   

Exit

This year has been one of the worst in terms of the number of demises that happened in my extended circles. A major killer, expectedly, was COVID. But there were other reasons too.

Personal acquaintances

1. Tridib Roy Choudhury
2. Aseem Banerjee
3. Arun Kumar
4. Sunil Shetty
5. Surendra Mule
6. PVN Murthy
7. Sheetal Amte
   

Celebrities

1. Irrfan Khan
   
2. Sushant Singh Rajput
   
3. Rishi Kapoor
   
4. Soumitra Chatterjee
   
5. S P Balasubramium
6. Pranab Mukherjee
7. Rahat Indori
   
8. Edmund Clarke
   

Reflection

1. Problem decomposition. I can't trace back to the origin of this idea that big problems can be broken down to smaller manageable chunks. Over the years, I have started more and more interested in this idea. So much so that the act of trying to do something difficult has started turning into an exercise of problem decomposition. It won't be wrong to say that the whole fun of doing anything now is centred around this aspect. In 2020, I made significant progress in this direction.
   
2. Keeping journal. I have been planning my days for at least a decade if not longer. Recently, I came across an interesting variant of maintaining to-do lists: bullet journal. For the last one month or so, I have migrated to bullet journal. It's working well so far.
   
3. Looking at obstacles as milestones. This is very much a part of problem decomposition idea. You may start with a very restricted definition of the problem you want to solve. But you realise that to start taking the steps leading to its solution, you need to get certain things out of your way. It's been long an attitude to look at this secondary elements as hurdles or obstacles in the way of my doing what I want to do. However, a recent realisation has been that being able to look at unforeseen obstacles as an integral part of the problem is a very important part of keeping calm and staying focused.
   
4. Benefits of solitude. The pandemic has many evil aspects to it. And they talk a lot about them. And they are all true. But one thing that's true and not evil is the fact that the solitude and isolation it has brought has been soothing for the introvert part of me, which likes to sit quietly and talk to itself, and imagine and brood and create. It's hard to pin down, but it could well be that the reason why this year has been one of the most productive and rewarding years of my life so far could be this disappearance of the overhead of meeting lots and lots of people: students barging into the office, classroom of more students staring at you during the lectures, visitors, colleagues stopping by to say Hi. No, none of them is really bad. It's just that when we were working from office, it used to be just too many of them. It was draining and unhelpful beyond a point. Now, I am protected by this screen I face. Each meeting must be scheduled. I am allowed to not pick a call if I don't feel like. Yet, surprisingly, I feel I have had more meetings during this pandemic period than ever before. I have collaborated more. I have done more teamwork than in a face-to-face mode. Or may be, it's just that I have been able to make my interactions with other count more as I have been able to prevent my energies from getting dissipated in futile and unproductive socialisation.

Thoughts about the Coming Year

I definitely would like to see the pandemic losing its iron grip on humanity this year. I would like us all to be free to move around more: attend schools, colleges and offices, socialise more fearlessly and travel. I hope people who have lost their livelihood, things should brighten up for them.

What I would not want to change is the calm I hear from the road, the purity of air I breathe and the enjoyable experience of driving due to lessened traffic congestion. If the pandemic has taught people a few lessons about doing more with less, about finding methods of self-employment and self-reliance, I hope they don't quickly forget them once the pandemic goes away.

Personally, lockdown taught me many valuable lessons: about online teaching and collaboration, digital art, and most importantly about myself and my natural preferences, which indeed lean towards peace and solitude and not towards unbridled socialisation. I manifested in my productivity and the general pleasantness of my disposition. I would like to continue to give myself this peace and solitude even when things open up outside.