a bougainvillea tree in spring

My Tree

Pritam MondalLeave a comment

I see this tree out of my window,
It’s so beautiful with flowers in spring,
Pink petals mixed with white,
Such vibrant colours in bright sunlight.

Full of life and quiet fertility,
Its shade shelters the frequent felines,
The tree looks perfectly divine,
I wonder why though.

Why does it look so beautiful,
So magnificent, who is its admirer?
As far as I can see, I find no other of its kind,
It looks so beautiful yet carries a solitary tone.
If there were many trees such as this,
Would it look as gorgeous as now?
Or would it become ordinary?

Would it be happy among more of its kind,
becoming ordinary,
Or would it rather remain this gorgeous living
art in my garden,
With all the fauna living their hearts out
beneath it?

I don’t know if it understands us, this beautiful
motionless existence.
Does it matter to it whether we earth crawlers
praise it at all?

Is its exuding beauty a silent cry, longing to find
more of its kind?
Is it telling the birds to spread the word?
The word of its existence,
The word of its beauty.
Times have changed how things are done here,
and birds have changed too,
Their ways, even their verbs.

I took a picture of the tree and showed it to my
friends, posted it publicly,
And people from all over the world saw it,
All praised its beauty.
I wonder if some of them have seen a similar tree,
Will they tell their tree about my tree? Will they
become tree friends?

I wonder if the tree out of my window knows
this happened,
I wonder if it would have consented, or been
happy about it.
What if it did not like being captured?
What if I did not do a good enough job showing
its beauty to other trees?
I could never know.

I would like to believe it’s happy,
But even if it isn’t, I wouldn’t really know, would I?

Sometimes I think, why would such a
magnificent tree be born outside my window?
It should have graced the garden of some
inspiring persona,
Maybe a great poet, a great mind, someone
truly important,
The ones for whom songs are written.
In those songs they could have used this tree,
like Newton’s apple tree,
And people would never hear the end of it.

But it didn’t.
Such a magnificent tree was placed in our backyard.
Not naturally, no. It was brought as a sapling
and planted here.
We did not know it would become the
extraordinary, gorgeous existence it is today,
But we truly hoped so.

Now it lives among us ordinary folks,
my beautiful tree,
Oh gracious you are,
I will tell everyone how great you are.
Don’t you worry.

For I know one day it won’t be spring anymore.
I will keep you in memory and cherish you the same,
Long after the birds forget your scent.
For I have seen you shine, rivalling the Sun,
For I have seen you in winter when the leaves turned brown,
And you still looked beautiful in a careless fashion.
I will look after you, oh my beautiful tree.
And ages from now, long after we are gone,
People will still say,

Such a beautiful tree.

The Generation That Won’t Choose Windows

Pritam MondalLeave a comment

Microsoft Windows 11 never feels fast and zippy, not even on the most capable hardware out there.

✍️ I do not recommend anyone to install Windows for personal use anymore.

It’s 2026 and Microsoft Teams still feels uninspiring and lifeless. Ironic for a mass communication tool.

✍️ I do not recommend anyone to use MS Teams.

Microsoft is burning bridges. Both Microsoft and NVIDIA are doing a disservice to gamers.

Playing games on Windows is a pain we only put up with because there weren’t worthy alternatives. That has changed in recent years.

AAA games that work on Mac or SteamOS are a much, much better experience to just play and enjoy.

Microsoft and NVIDIA need to get their act together. Everything in the world doesn’t revolve around Azure services or greedily configured, weirdly priced AI hardware.

The reason Windows became so dominant is because many of us grew up with it. It was cheap, not walled, and we could do whatever we wanted. It was fun. Eventually, when we grew up, we adopted it at work because of that long relationship and familiarity.

Today, Windows caters almost exclusively to cloud services and enterprises. It doesn’t feel welcoming to personal users. Memory management is bonkers. Power management is so poor it has practically ruined the Windows laptop ecosystem. Microsoft still doesn’t understand how sleep works on devices.

When everyone stops using Windows on their personal computers, will anyone still recommend it for work?

This is happening while Valve is perfecting SteamOS.

Here’s my prediction: if Microsoft doesn’t change its current trajectory, there’s nothing in the world that can save Windows in the long run. I’m talking 10–12 years. Give it one generation. This generation will grow up with Macs or SteamOS, and when they enter the workforce, they won’t feel the need to switch to Windows.

Why Are We Still Tying Music to Words? Let’s Break Free

Pritam MondalLeave a comment

Late night thought,

what if we unleash the true power of music by freeing it from the constraints of language? It’s the words, the damned words, programmed to always make sense to human ears. These words inherently represent human civilization.

When you hear birds chirping, waves clashing, mermaids humming, you realize there are deeper levels of musical cognizance that far surpass what could be articulated with a limited human vocabulary.

This is why abstract art thrives – I want abstract music! Let’s do it.

Let us liberate songs from the shackles of meaning and allow them to soar.

Listen to a song spoken in a foreign language; you would still feel the emotions, proving that you don’t really need lyrics to make sense always.

Think of instrumental music with no vocals, but now replace the instruments with gibberish syllables suited for the flow. The phrases don’t have to follow grammar; verses don’t have to make sense. It would be so freeing 🕊️.

You wouldn’t believe me – this thought came to me while I was reading a research paper on chain of thoughts modeling of large language models, and it turns out language itself is holding back their performance. If an artificial brain has to liberate itself to gain true thinking prowess, it needs to think not with human comprehensible words.
True beauty, true elegance, the purest form of beings are expressed in abstractions, and it needs to be encouraged more in all kinds of disciplines.

Let’s not limit our creative thinking within boundaries of our vocabulary, express the expressionless by expressing the expressionless

The Mystery of the Failing System: A Software Engineering Investigation

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You know how detective stories—whether in police dramas or medical series like House or The Good Doctor—always have that moment where everything seems fine… until suddenly, it’s not?

Software engineering is no different. If you love detective stories, debugging systems might just be your kind of thrill.

Let me tell you a real story.

Chapter 1: The First Signs of Trouble

A few days ago, a critical system we built started failing. Users reported that some operations weren’t working. No clear error messages. No immediate patterns. Just a lot of complaints.

It felt like being on a plane in clear skies and suddenly hearing the engines sputter—alarming, yet no obvious clue why.

We kicked off our investigation.

  • Were the triggers firing correctly?
  • Was Lambda executing as expected?
  • Was the engine service running properly?
  • Was SNS failing to send messages?
  • Was the API erroring out somewhere?

Everything seemed to be working. No outright failures. But something was definitely wrong.

To make things more confusing, this was happening in both dev and QA environments.

  • If the issue started in QA, why was it now happening in dev too?
  • And why weren’t we seeing any obvious failures in the logs?

We checked everything we could access, but we didn’t have direct access to the QA job queue. However, we did have access to dev’s queue, and the failure was present there too.

This ruled out a one-off deployment bug. It wasn’t just a bad rollout affecting one environment.

Something deeper was wrong.

The system was broken in multiple places, yet there was no smoking gun.

Chapter 2: The Clue in the Logs

After hours of combing through logs, we finally found something:

Lambda was failing to access an SSM parameter due to insufficient permissions.

Strange. The IAM policy showed that Lambda had access. Why was it still failing?

Digging deeper, we noticed something odd:

  • The permission was assigned at the parent level for the SSM parameter.
  • But the error was occurring on a specific child parameter.

That’s when it hit us—encryption keys.

Each environment has its own encryption keys. Lambda had permission to read from SSM, but it couldn’t decrypt the child parameter because it was encrypted with a different key from another environment.

This explained why it was failing in QA—but why did dev suddenly start failing as well?

That didn’t make sense.

In QA, the problem was clear: Lambda was trying to access a parameter encrypted with a key from a different environment, which it didn’t have access to.

But in dev, this shouldn’t even happen. Unlike QA, dev doesn’t have multiple environments, so the KMS encryption issue shouldn’t exist there at all.

That meant something else was wrong in dev.

We updated the key permissions, redeployed Lambda, and tested the fix.

Lambda was now working fine in both dev and QA.

But both environments were still broken.

Chapter 3: The Hidden Adversary

With Lambda fixed, dev should have started working again.

But it was still broken.

At this point, a rollback was tempting, but we had a major release coming up, and reverting now would cause unnecessary panic and delays. Tension was rising—time was ticking away.

We checked the logs again. Nothing new. Everything looked fine.

So we changed strategies. Instead of blindly searching, we actively simulated the issue.

  • We created a debugging tunnel.
  • Attached a debugger to the running API instance.
  • Stopped the engine on the server.
  • Ran the engine locally to see what happened.

The API was working fine.

But then we noticed something strange—jobs were getting pulled from the queue but were not hitting our local engine instance.

That meant something else was consuming the jobs before they reached our local instance.

This led us to suspect there might be a hidden engine instance running somewhere.

We checked the server.

And there it was.

A rogue process—an older instance of the engine, still running on the server.

Someone had manually started it—probably for testing—and forgotten to shut it down.

It wasn’t part of our deployment system. It wasn’t updated. And it wasn’t visible in the usual monitoring dashboards.

Since our system supports multiple instances only when they share the same deployment, this rogue instance was causing conflicts.

We killed the process.

Dev was now fully operational.

But QA? Still down.

Chapter 4: The Missing Piece

If the rogue process was the problem in dev, was the same thing happening in QA?

We checked for hidden instances in QA. No rogue processes. No extra engines running.

So if there was no hidden instance, why was QA still failing?

That’s when we realized:

QA doesn’t just have the engine service.

It also has the processor service.

And in QA, the processor service runs across multiple swimlanes—each engine server can have multiple swimlane instances, and the processor service runs on all those instances.

A quick check confirmed our suspicion:

The processor service was stopped on Swimlane 1.

And the reason test jobs were failing?

It wasn’t a coincidence—the testers had explicitly configured all test jobs to run only on Swimlane 1.

So even though other swimlanes were running fine, every single test job was failing, making it look like the entire QA environment was broken.

Why was it stopped?

It turned out, another developer had noticed that jobs weren’t running in QA.

To debug the issue, they had stopped the processor service to run it locally—but never restarted it.

This was a classic case of a mistaken diagnosis.

  • The real issue was in Lambda.
  • But since the developer was looking in the wrong place, they thought the processor service was the problem.
  • They stopped the processor service, but never restarted it.

And since Lambda had been fixed, but the processor was still down, QA remained broken.

We restarted the processor service on Swimlane 1.

Chapter 5: The Final Fix

To summarize, here’s what we had to do to restore everything:

  • Fixed Lambda’s encryption key issue.
  • Killed the rogue engine process in dev.
  • Restarted the processor service on Swimlane 1 in QA.

The system came back to life.

And with that, the mystery was solved.

Falling Leaves Requiem

Pritam MondalLeave a comment

Listen to the skies, the falling leaves are telling a story,
One that I have forgotten now.
I can never quite make out what they’re saying,
But I know it’s the story I’ve wanted to remember for so long.

For so long, I have been searching alone,
Trying to give meaning to words that feel unknown.
I’ve been watching in silence, living by myself.
I’m too weak to be great, too strong to give up hope.
Drowned to the depths of mediocrity,
Wishing the story could end differently.

The world is filled with lazy fools,
Dedication, determination strong willed live in delusions.
Empathy, sympathy, and unspoken bonds, all in vain.
It’s a dark, gloomy world, but we might just make it work.
Take action with every breath, inaction rots away the brain.
Molecules composing life, chemistry influencing mind,
And faint little music, like whispering leaves, unheard but there.

Falling leaves, it comes down to this,
Stories are told before we perish.
And what do we do if they fail to captivate?
We pass the beacon to the next in line
Carrying our sorrows, our struggles,
dreams, and wounds, 
burdening them with generational pain.

A minor plays in a steady rhythm,
Melancholic tones fill the air.
Look at the dark skies and fallen leaves,
You can never feel every drop that touches your face.
Tears in the rain seem meaningless
But not to butterflies.
The droplets weigh too heavy for their fragile wings;
They must find shelter in time.

If all else fails, they fold their wings and remain still
Letting time pass.
With time, the rain will stop,
The tears will dry,
And the falling leaves will sing no more.

Rising Internet Stupidity will be the downfall of Facebook

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Facebook’s share price has plummeted over 70% this year, around 13% of it’s workforce, roughly 11,000 people were laid off. Investors are pulling away, advertisers have lost reliability, this year for the first time it’s daily user count has dropped since inception.

It seems to me that the illiterate, edgy boys have won; they have successfully ruined Facebook’s reputation and brought it to the ground. You would think this digital generation, who were born after Y2K, would be digitally literate, but it turns out most of them take technology at face value; they didn’t witness the transition in user experience, hence are largely oblivious to the intricate details of underlying complexities, and this reflects in their collective behavior as well.

Is there a way to both censor harmful speech and achieve healthy conversation with 100% accuracy across all cultures and political spectrums?

Then there are conspiracy theorists. Some clowns with tinfoil hats would say stuff like, “fAcebooK is sPying oN us bRo!!” So far, I haven’t figured out what that even means!

There are legitimate criticisms, and then there are conspiracy theories involving hyped-up media circuses, whistleblowers, and other such nonsense!

These clowns never ever talk about the Oversight board; they never talk about the extensive privacy settings. The thing is, they cannot talk about them because, as a developer, I have experienced this myself: Simplicity is better for users because they want many things, basically infinite controls. However, whenever we provide them those controls with extensive documentation and tips and manuals, they simply mess up and never understand how to use all of those features.

The same could be said of our constitution and penal code: if everyone had read them and understood their rights and limitations, we would have had a better society.

Anytime Facebook tries something innovative, these fucking dolts will have to ruin it for the rest of us. Say when Mark posted a virtual selfie in Horizon World, and the idiots swarmed in to troll how off the graphics look, like 90s graphics and what not, well, this entitled brats don’t understand that Meta is rendering that graphics in realtime for 1832×1920 resolution per eye, and that too without the use of a dedicated Desktop class computer.

Have you seen an 8K video inside of VR? Even 16K may appear blurry in VR; even a RTX 4090 may struggle to render at the highest settings in VR. But the stupid fucks and common trolls, of course, don’t pay any heed to such complexities.

I don’t know man, people have had it tough for sure in the last couple of years, but they have grown all their resentments towards tech giants and tech billionaires somehow, I don’t see much hatred towards billionaires from non-tech industries, but any day you come to the internet, you are almost certain to come across comments like, “Facebook is spying on us”, “Google is spying on us”, “Apple is spying on us”, “Jeff Bezos is Evil”, “Mark Zuckerberg is a Lizard”,” Bill Gates is illuminati”, “Elon Musk is a Man-child” and so on, at first glance, this might come off as mild banter or harmless memes but you would be surprised to find how much of this is internalised in today’s collective conscious.

All these things add up.

By vilifying these figures and corporations, these people may gain short-term victories, but there are harsh consequences, like layoffs, for example, and even worse if these tech companies stop building things because their visions are challenged so harshly at each step. Let us not forget that it was Zuckerberg who helped connect the world like never before, Elon who drove the global shift to electric cars and infrastructure, Bezos who believed cloud computing was the future, Bill Gates who eradicated polio, and Steve Jobs who gave us the smartphone era. Let’s not forget their contributions, and if you’re not grateful, at least don’t vilify them for trying.

May the Internet survive this wave of rising stupidity across the board.

Jordan Peterson is wrong about Equality of Opportunity, here’s why

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My main argument against ‘Equality of Opportunity’ would be to simply look at human history, all of humanity started their journey from Ancient Africa in this cruel wide world and now suddenly there’s inequality among people.

Thing about humans is, everyone likes to hate someone beneath them in social hierarchy according to the zeitgeist, everyone, be it an elitist condescending a commoner, noble culture to savages, upper class to less fortunates, White Caucasian to Black Africans, Black people to Asians, minority A to minority B, men to women and so on.

‘Equality of Outcome’ on the other hand raises the question of fairness, in humanity’s search for a just society, equality of outcome questions the entire premise of ethics and morality itself, that is, why would a ‘lesser man’ get the opportunity when there’s plenty of the elites left.

I mean, why give a desk job to a woman when the statistics suggest men are historically more productive?

Why give a senior position to a black man when you know a white caucasian is more likely to seal the deal?

Why give the role of Mary Kom to a northeastern women when you have Priyanka Chopra with stellar track record?

Why worry about accommodating queer people in your workforce when simply denying their existence and continuing with gender binary is more profitable and requires less managerial expenses?

Why would you give a dangerous job to a desperate man when you can get a machine to do that work without all the liabilities of involving humans?

Why bother electing Dilip Ghosh or Anubrata Mondal to power, when they are seen as expendables by their own parties and the people are very much accustomed to see their leaders with brahmin surnames?

Why bother thinking about others when you can in fact think about Yourself?

Netaji flirted with too many dangerous ideologies, for anyone to carelessly follow him

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There’s a problem. I am concerned about this growing trend of hero worshipping in this country. Since childhood I’ve been observing Netaji was not one of the heroes much celebrated across India. I’ve often wondered about the political implications behind that, but now, for better or worse, the whole India seems fixated on making him the poster boy of Indian Independence.

My fellow countrymen have this weird fanaticism about hero worshipping, be it a cinema hero, a historic one or a mythic, when you elevate someone to the levels of divinity it becomes impossible value that person as a human.

We have seen it happen multiple times, with Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and now with Netaji. Members of every political parties are trying to claim Netaji in their niche ideological agenda, taking a certain aspect of his deeds and maximising that while carefully manipulating the masses to forget other things.

This is the reason, we need to consider all historical figures as persons not as some divine holy cow, so that it leaves some room for criticism and understanding the character better.

Blindly worshipping Netaji could be disastrous to this country, and to teach children from young age to blindly make him as a role model is also troubling. Netaji flirted with too many dangerous ideologies, for anyone to carelessly follow him.

For their own agenda, left parties have been trying to appropriate him as a Communist since few decades, which is not true. He had his views on communist revolution but he wasn’t a communist by a long shot.

People often wonder about what would have happened if Netaji was our first prime minister instead, they should know they he would have never become a Prime minister of a democratic India. He wanted a dictatorship in India and many of his “sudden admirers” today secretly wants the same thing so they’re using him to preemptively safeguard their position.

Enemy’s enemy is my friend is a good strategy I bet in a war, however, the frequent statues of Netaji we see on every roadside with him raising his right arm to a Nazi salute with a ‘Heil India’ slogan (which could be traced back to Hitler himself) gives another picture about him, who actually admired Nazism along with bits from Bolshevik movement, a Nazbol to precise.

INA was great for its contribution in raising morals of the whole country in later stages of Freedom movement. A lesser known fact in this regard is a division of Indian legion that fought in europe under the direct command of Waffen-SS. While we may overlook the European division of Indian Legion, the Japanese on the other hand were directly involved in INA’s eastern front. The Japs used to do shooting practice on captured British Indian soldiers, their war crimes alone can fill a book of history, if you think, had the INA been successful in defeating the allied forces, Japs would help establish a free nation in India, you are gravely mistaken. That was never the plan and was never going to happen.

All things considered, things turned out to be favourable to us, it was the end of second world war and the dawn of cold war, the allied forces realised, the colonies could easily fall into Soviet ideologies given how the oppressor and oppressed narrative was easily sold here. The INA led movements and rise of leaders like Netaji, Bhagat Singh just confirmed their suspicions. It was a lose lose scenario for Britain, in the end they gave up on colonisation instead of letting India become another fascist or Bolshevik nation to stand against allied forces.

The Fear and Dilemma

Pritam MondalLeave a comment 
The fear of messing up, that engulfs my psyche 
Being aggressive is not so much, a counter to it.
Every move I play, every word I say,
I know, will be judged, 
based on my roleplay.
If we are but a character in our own novels,
how capable are we to become the lead?
preferred by our choice.
Do we bend the story, kill the king?
set the Damsel in distress,
Only to have her rescued and marry her in a palace?

What do we do that makes it ours?
what should we do to keep it fair?
If Venus had come to earth, and we bowed before her,
would’ve been simple, not much unfair.
For I wouldn’t have to play always by the book,
For I wouldn’t have to seek new ways to look cool.
Things are changing and I’m ageing as well,
I know not much mistakes, I can afford before farewell. 
Judgement will be passed and nothing can be done,
I may be conscientious but am I really beloved.
How do I actualize, in Maslow’s pyramid?
Do I follow the Buddha and skip the in-between?
There’s been a hollow in my heart, for far too long now,
in the Quest to fill the void, I need to go on an adventure.
It is this that I have trouble with,
why do I have to be alone, in my own story?
This is a war that must be fought
For every inch of her precious soul, a pacifist will die alone.
A nice one will give up, a bad one will hurt,
How do I be one, who wins in the end,
How do I write it so it ends up being fair?

The damsel, I had made her in a poetic regret,
For she didn’t wish it to be rescued by me,
For she didn’t have to be in danger to begin.
How do I rescue her when she’s not in danger?
How do I make her fall in love?
When there’s little I can offer.
Leave it to fate or should I build it bit slow,
Or should I give up on my own novel,
As I’m not heroic enough of a character? 
Decisions that make us Kings, lead to the bloody boulevard
How can I be so heartless to soak her in blood?

Windows 11: A TikToker’s version of Windows 10

Pritam MondalLeave a comment

On this Tuesday morning, I jumped out of the bed and straight ahead went to check my PC health, whether I can install Windows 11 or not. While most OEM installed laptops bought within last 3 years should qualify for this upgrade, for Desktop computers it could be tricky. I know a lot of schools and computers that run decade old hardware, they most probably won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 11.

First thing I found was, TPM 2.0 was not enabled in my computer, that’s easy, went to BIOS settings and enabled it, I’m not running NVME SSD on PCIE 4 slots, so it didn’t complicate things.

Next, I got, Secure boot is not enabled. Now this complicates thing. I’m running on Legacy so for me to enable Secure boot, first I have to disable CSM, now to disable CSM first I need to convert my file system from MBR to GPT. all of these steps come with precautions.

Now, fortunately I wasn’t dual booting with any other OS at the moment so I went through all these steps and with a bit of luck didn’t encounter any problem while converting my OS drive to GPT.

Nothing could stop me anymore, so finally I installed Windows 11.

But now, what do I get in return?
— Start Menu doesn’t make sense anymore.
— Right click is horribly nerfed.
— Shift + Right click is fuckin gone.
— as Simple as Renaming file is now restricted in Quick access.
— Ryzen machines are slowing down by at least 15%

You can’t place the taskbar icons wherever you want. The widget thing, what the heck is that?? I’ll give someone a coke on a hot day to explain to me what that thing is. I mean on Windows 10 the weather on taskbar actually made some sense but this is shit.

After a day of use in my personal machine, I have already shifted the start button to Left position, otherwise every time you open a window start menu will keep moving to a different location.

Overall, I feel, Windows 11 is bright, colorful, dumb, and almost like a TikToker’s edition of Windows 10.