Thursday, May 13, 2010

Things I wanted to do in my life

Things I wanted to do in my life but couldn't get around to doing due to various external and internal factors. Internal ones are the usual suspects - lack of committement, time mismanagement, procrastination, day dreaming, running after wrong things for wrong reasons for criminally wrong amount of time. External factors - well..... that is another story which I should let be unformed and unsaid.


So, here goes the list:
  1. Get a Bachelors / Masters degree in Computer Science (I will rue this my whole life)
  2. Enjoy my B. Tech. life with wanton abandon (external factors, you owe me this in next life)
  3. Go infinitely more trekking in Bangalore and from Mumbai
  4. Play decent cricket (I am supposedly an Indian male but my passport could be taken away for writing this)
  5. Swimming
  6. Play basketball / volleyball / football on regular basis
  7. Get at least medium level belt in any form of martial arts
  8. Play at least one music instrument - guitar, keyboard, drums are top 3 choice
  9. Learn dancing formally
  10. Learn one foreign language (German, French) and one Indian language (Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada) with fluency in speaking 
  11. Euro-trip
  12. Took up some post of responsibility in Cultural Activities at college level
  13. Gymnastics / skate-boarding / roller-skating / skiing
  14. Learn astronomy / astrophysics
  15. Go camping / spelunking / rappelling / rock climbing / long distance running / cycling
  16. Learn Perl, Python kung-fu :D
  17. Have one major literary skill in which I am quite good (writing stories, poems, comics, drawing caricatures / sketching)  
  18. Fly an aircraft (Dad, I owe you this one)
  19. Learn palmistry
  20. Adorn funky hair-styles (missed this by a long margin :D ) and facial hair while I still had the chance 
You may be thinking if I have not done any of this then what at all I have done? :)

    5 comments:

    ferret said...

    The palmistry and guitar, i've heard of that before with some more bit of detail :)

    ganesh said...

    These 20things will delay the stage of 'dispassion' in ur life to a large extent... I would say increase the number... Thr might be a chance of multiple rebirths :)

    this is in response to ur mail "The 20 somethings...."
    I would like to do all those things which I believe I CANT (I am avoiding Moksha for ever)

    arpec said...

    I am still to figure out but i believe the list would be too long to complete in this lyf... :)

    Ankit said...

    Taking stock of the bucket list of New Year 2011:

    3. Put up some decent effort in trekking. Well not exactly trekking; but going out to places in and around Mumbai which can't be classified into shopping-malls and movie theaters. As an offshoot, developed more panache in photography skills. This should continue as a recurrent activity.

    14. Astronomy / astrophysics: It should be very easy to start with for Beginner's / Dummy level. haven't taken up as other projects occupy time.

    16. Perl / Python - fu: Started making headway beginning this year. Since over an year and half, have had pretty bad luck at technology front. On or the other device getting conked off even after multiple repairs. Laptop has become nearly unusable (keyboard failure leading to stopgap keys remapping onto still active keys, system clock not working, one 512MB RAM card seemingly gone kaput, other RAM card keeps doing segmentation fault, no CD ROM which means effectively I can't get into serious harddisk partitioning / boot-sector plays / GRUB install) So, launched into alternate plan for now. Installed Cygwin and got most GNU utilities working (grep, xserver, emacs, gcc, perl), got CLISP with SLIME for emacs. Now I have started producing code in LISP and its fun to watch the sheer power of this language. Feels great to see recursion work so beautifully.

    20. No chance ever now :) I should better strike this off my list.

    Lets do 10, 15 and 18 this year. (And also a secret mission to get #1 done too :D)

    Ankit said...

    Time to take stock again.

    #1. Get a Bachelors / Masters degree in Computer Science (I will rue this my whole life) - Looks like finally it could be a possibility. The tools are here (edX, coursera, udacity, class-central). Now, I just have to show perseverance and take it up steadily. I am quite excited about the way MOOC (Massively Open Online Course structures are changing the rules of HigherEd.

    #5. Swimming - Now, this again is looking quite possible. I have figured out a swimming pool offering swimming classes pretty close to home. Their membership rates are rightly priced and look viable. So, for this one now the ball is completely in my court.

    #15. Go camping / spelunking / rappelling / rock climbing / long distance running / cycling - Though this ought to be a recurring activity, I can slyly tick this off for current year owing to the adventures in Ladakh.

    #16. Learn Perl, Python kung-fu :D - Aah, here there is far more happening than meets the eye. This is surely going to be ticked off. By the way, for those interested, do check out sites like codecademy, hackety-hack, etc.