Bhardwaj Rish

This is a continuation from The Google Interview Day . Read this as another chapter in the story of my life. I really wanted to try writing in a story format, and I'm happy I gave it a shot!  - My heart was roaring. So loud I could hear it through my earphones as I walked into work. This was going to be THE BIGGEST week in my life, and I could not share it with anyone around me. Today was the day, my recruiter, Broza, had told me on Thursday when I last spoke to him. I walked into work, late again having overslept thinking that'll help time pass faster, anxious for what was about to unfold. I felt like Tom feasting on a whole chicken, only I was feeding on my nails. It was a fairly breezy winters day and though it should've snowed 10 feet deep based on last years snow galore, it was just crisply cold. Yes, crisp is how I'd call it because the city I was in felt much like a walk into a city that didn't know we had been through the industrial revolution. Funny, I th...

This is part two in the series of my Google Interview. Part One: Conversations with My Father . I wanted to try out alternative writing formats / story telling formats, and I'm really happy with how these are coming along. This is a mind monologue - the kind we all have.  - Ah, I can't eat too much. My stomach still feels it. Yes, yes I know this is huge. But hey, I get to see a Google office for the first time in my life! Man that'll be quite something. Okay, what's the time? 8:50. Hmm, I've got 20 minutes to finish this breakfast before I start walking to the office. What's it going to be like? Okay Rish calm, calm down. Let's breathe in, breathe out for the next 10 minutes. *A few deep breaths later* , ah it's the first interview I'm giving in 3 years! Okay, I've practised really hard, I know it. I've given more mock interviews than the number of interviews all my interviewers combined have taken. Okay, what's the time now? 8:54! No, n...

I read a few story books this month - non-stop really and their way of writing made me want to write a blog post in a story-book manner. I'd say, read this as a chapter in my book of life - one of the most important days in my recent past. There will be a couple follow up posts. - I was looking outside the window from my hotel room that Google had booked for my night before the interview. It was a sunny post-summer day in August, and it was warm enough to walk out in a t-shirt, but would get cold enough later on in the night to have to wear something on top.  A couple rings on the phone and my father answered with the regular pleasant "hallo puttar". We always greet each other with a hallo rather than a hello , probably something we picked up from living in Switzerland. "So today's the big day Pops! I didn't think I would be this nervous, but I do feel it", I said. I'm a confident person in most situations - well except when I have to talk on stage -...

While I sit and laze on the comfort of my three seater sofa, I think to myself, as all great men before me have, I should be making great use of this perfect Sunday afternoon. The sun is out, the birds have chirped all morning, I woke up on time, and I don't have any laundry to do today. Now you see, a day like that is a day that's special. I look around, I see my phone. The thought of doing something great passes by for a sec, as I unconsciously pick up my phone for a quick peek. I forget my plans to conquer the day in the moment, and as all jobless men before me have, I scroll through Instagram. Not that I really care for Kendall's yet another magazine cover, or my friend's dachshund being a little extra cute. Some of those Spongebob memes are really rewarding though. It's just that my brain needed slight off-tracking, to make sure I feel guilty and curse at myself for not making great use of this great day where the laundry is already don...

Of course I'm not just gonna give it right away. That'd make this a boring read. I'm going to put in a whole lot of adjectives and verbs creatively thought out to describe exactly what one feels when doing this particular sequence of actions, rarely performed by many. It's this mind bending, limb stretching, mental limits pushing, pain barrier breaking, ass hurting, barehands crocodile fighting, body wearying, physically draining, hand taxing, thigh numbing, psyche perspiring, soul drudging, power grinding, back breaking, torso drenching, chassis soaking, frame wetting ability to do burpees* be consistent, at anything. To just have robotic-like consistency in anything you do. The hardest part of living in my opinion is getting yourself to do something, anything. It's to convince your mind, to motivate yourself to do more than just the bare minimum to survive. Now, there are a set of things you're almost forced to do - going to school, waking up for wor...

...is almost meaningless. Have you ever been in a situation where you're so engrossed and deep into a conversation that one topic leads to another, and suddenly you're diverging into multiple things, and both of you speak together, and so, you stop the person you're conversing with and say, "sorry, you were saying?". At this point I realised, what I was going to say barely matters. We were having so much fun just talking, that the actual subject didn't really matter. We'd carry on and move to another interesting topic where we could spend another couple hours talking. This is a bold statement to make, but the content of the conversation is never relevant . All that the conversation is facilitating is assessing and matching wavelengths . What you are talking about doesn't matter, as long as you are talking and not just speaking - or even that, if at all. Put yourself in various situations. Picture yourself meeting this Polish girl at work you i...

There's a thing about final good byes. My favourite movie over romanticises it, how the last time you say goodbye at an airport is the most important, that you have to look back, and look at her, look at life as it was, one last time. Why is it that we want to make them special? That we go as far as judging the entire journey based on the last segment that got us there. That we devalue everything, if the last memory of it wasn't the best one. I don't quite know what I was expecting on my last day at Tonbo. I had done all the handover, written all the documents I had to, talked to all the people I needed to a month before my last day. And somewhere in my mind, I was expecting (?) for something extra special to happen on the last day. Now you have to know, this was my first job, and I was pretty attached to the people and the work I was doing. I had spent a good 3 years at the place. And so I suppose I was wishing for the skies above the office to clear up, for Ju...

Maybe I'm over-romanticizing it, Maybe I'm not. Maybe we never know what we have until all we want is what we don't have Maybe we knew and maybe we loved it I don't miss you. I miss the idea of you. Maybe we can't ever go back to it Maybe someday we might choose not to I want our ground. And I want you there. I want it to rain a little, and then for it to stop. And for us to talk and not just speak. Of things that mean nothing, but mean everything to us. Maybe they weren't of any importance to anyone. Maybe we never cared. I might throw it all away once I have it again. Maybe you will do the same. All I want is to think out loud. And discover my thoughts all over again. Without you trying to convince me of anything. Without me trying to assert or force what I feel. It's surprised me every time I think of it. How you and I were the best at what we were. And then we were strangers. And how we still are. Love is transient and...

The Real-Time Human Some of us need to be real-time-like systems - people who work in operations for example - making important decisions quickly, switching contexts and the job they're doing as soon as something of higher priority interrupts them. Take an air traffic controller at a busy airport for example. The person is bombarded with constant information, performs calculations, has to maintain composure under pressure and makes important decisions based on short-term memory in a fixed time. The GPU-like Human There are then GPU-like humans that can only do a very particular task, but do it very well. A very busy cashier for example - can swipe hundreds of items at a supreme pace, bill and move on to the next customer like slime rolling down the line - but as soon as one of the customers in line asks them a question, or speaks in a language they don't understand, the cashier crashes to a halt, almost as if they've malfunctioned and has a stress attack! ( Th...

You meet this friend you haven't met in a while for dinner one day, and you're at the table talking about what each of you is making of your lives. And so, naturally, you share with them your plans of this trip with your girlfriend to this small city in Germany where the beer is great, how you're working on writing this book comparing instincts of man vs animal, and how you're trying, albeit not too successfully, to work-out regularly for a healthier lifestyle. Months pass, and you meet this friend again. And funnily enough, you're saying the same damn things again! You still haven't gone on that trip, you've barely worked on your book, and your body looks the same as it did the last time you met. You did, however, go for a couple of woodcutting workshops and ever since you've made plans to make this small birdhouse in your balcony. The plans are only in your mind, but you share them with your friend nonetheless. Yeah. 6 months later, sam...