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To Save or To Spend | A Dilemma

To save for tomorrow or to spend today is a dilemma that no one seems to have been able to solve. I guess it is one of those problems that competes with the prized unsolved problems that still exists in literature.  Of course there is no one solution that maps to all the people. So, I will assume a persona  ``You are a salaried individual who earned more than what you could spend and has an Indian mindset of saving for the rainy day and have been focusing on saving. You are married. You have kids who have completed their education and "settled" (in Indian lingo) meaning have started earning their living and are not dependent on you (may or may not be married, yet) and neither your family (parents/siblings) are not dependent on you financially. You have retired . You have a corpus and a monthly pension from your work savings (see Money Matters ). Now the dilemma is whether To Save or To Spend .'' A Theory In general, the majority Indian attitude is to save with the h...
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Indian Patent Filing | Individual |

 Indian Patent Filing. Can I file a patent by myself. No patent attorney. No, nothing. An Experience. Logging into IP Portal As soon as you land on  PATENT eFiling  page you have two options. Create a (a) Electronic Signature or (b) Digital Signature. I choose Electronic Signature more because of familiarity of using my Aadhar to esign (for example Indian Income Tax Returns) Q: How to Procure Electronic Signatures? A: As per the e-Mudhra policy, all e-filing users are requested to use only the e-Mudhra sign-up link provided on the IPINDIA e-filing portals to subscribe to the e-Mudhra e-sign. Users are advised not to register through the general emSigner website, as it may result in subscribing to a plan that is not aligned with the specific requirements of IP India/Patent Office. The sign-up URL is customized and specifically provided by e-Mudhra for e-sign users of various IPINDIA e-filing portals. Following the  URL  you go through a process of generating an ...

The Other Side | Retirement

When you are on a job everything is a time defined template and this flows into both your work and personal life. Clock is the main driver. The orbit (your journey) is highly templatized which very few or delta deviation.  When you remove the main driver, "The Clock", you move into a very different  orbit . Fortunately, the journey in this orbit is not a template. Everyone has their own way of moving in that orbit. Making the journey very personalized both in space and time. A few common observations Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday = *Day Purchase fewer things at a time to maximize the market visits Eating at a slower pace (eating a small yellow banana in 4/5 bites instead of 2/3) and chew food the way it is recommended by doctors all the time Picking up all calls. Even if they are spam/unsolicited and politely telling them you do not need a loan Multiple visits to open Senior Citizen Savings Scheme account - fortunately SCSS cannot be opened o...

After a Long Innings | Matter of Money

Background If you are anything like me, a salaried employee, you would have not worried about the money that the organization compensates you. At best, you would look at your salary slip, maybe glance through the deductions and make sure the amount mentioned after the deduction and the amount deposited in your bank match. You do a couple of times, which assures you that there is a match, and then you do not even look to match. You are happy if at the end of the month there is an SMS that your salary has been credited and that is it. Closer to your retirement or superannuation, especially if you are in an employment where there is no central/state government pension suddenly "money matters" especially because your monthly credits in terms of salary disappears and you need to plan or figure out how to try and fill that "monthly salary". This is when the deductions in your salary slip (which was not cared for all these years) requires your attention.  Read on, if you a...

Handwriting Recognition - A 2026 status check

Background : For years, I had a habit of writing whenever I traveled. No laptop, no apps, just a pen, a notebook, and pages of cursive observations about airports, flights, fellow travelers, and the emotions that come with being away from home. Two decades later, I decided to digitize those notebooks and make them available on Kindle, eventually publishing them as Transit Tales: Between Airports and Emotions: Travel Blog 20 Years Too Late (View on Amazon). As a first step, I assumed modern LLM-powered handwriting recognition would effortlessly convert the pages into text. Instead, the journey led to an unexpected discovery: handwriting recognition is still far from "solved." The apparent success of modern handwriting recognition is increasingly a combination of imperfect OCR and powerful language-model reconstruction. What users see is often not what the system read, but what the system inferred. Handwriting Recognition: Better Than It Looks, But Not For The Reason You Think ...

Finding Signals in the Noise

Finding Signals in the Noise (September 2026) From hidden patterns to usable systems   Sunil Kumar Kopparapu   Much of science is the art of finding signal in noise. Looking back, that idea connects every stage of this journey, from algebra and signal processing to neural networks , computer vision, and speech technologies. Looking back, the journey was never driven by a grand plan. Rather, it unfolded through a series of small discoveries, each opening a door to a larger world.  One of the earliest lessons was that aptitude is often acquired rather than inherited. As a schoolboy, mathematics did not come naturally. It was only around Class V or VI that algebra began to make sense, thanks to my father. What had first appeared to be a collection of mysterious symbols revealed an underlying logic. There was a quiet satisfaction in realizing that abstract notation could describe concrete relationships. In retrospect, this may have been the first encounter with a recurring t...

Travel Diary in the Late 2000's (Unfinished)

Dated: 2008 (OCRed from Handwritten Notes) Mumbai – London – Dallas – Las Vegas – Chicago → London – Peterborough → London – Mumbai I start off from home with a heavy heart – not sure why because it is just a few days trip. Maybe it is the healing wound in my back or the thought of seeing your family for a few days – not sure, might not really be able to analyze. I came in early – reaching terminal 2C of the international airport. Very crowded – the vehicle in which I came goes all the way to the end and takes a turn and drops me at the gate – I see BA and enter showing my e‑ticket . I see not many people; it is 10:00 pm – the flight is at 02:15 am. I make some initial inquiry and stand in the queue – the wait continues – the queue length increases as it takes 2 U turn and the baggage screening has not yet started – whew… more wait and around 11:30 the baggage screening counter opens – the queue begins to move slowly – both checked‑in and hand baggage go through the X‑ray machine – bo...