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Weeknote 37 2026

Published on: 13/09/2026

Last edited on: 13/09/2026

Huge Ranogli in a Jain temple

Life

Paryushan

My main reason for visiting home is attending the Paryushan Mahaparv, maha means big and parv means festival. Basically, Paryushan is the name and we call it “big festival” :). It’s a 8 day festival celebrated by the followers of Jainism, where we increase our usual spiritual activities along side fasting, bhakti (singing devotion songs to the God), pakshal, puja etc. One important distinction between usual Hindu fasting and ours is we do not eat any food, NONE, no fruits, no milk, no sabudana, nothing. It’s a fast with water only diet. Water itself has rules too. It needs to boiled water (consumption after cooling down ofc :P), and can only be drank between 48 minutes after sunrise to 48 minutes before sunset! These are the rules we strictly follow when doing Tapasya(jain fasting).

Everyday people daunt at the idea of staying hungry for 16-18 hours, while Jains have young kids not eating anything for a month! Its called Maskhaman in our language! There are fasting periods longer than this too, but that’s where most of the people stop. There’s a special name for a fasting period of 8 days called Atthai. Loads of people do Atthai during Paryushan. And the next step down is Telu/Attham. This is where you fast for three days. And finally you are down to 2 and 1 days called Chhat and Upvasa respectively.

I had done an Atthai when I got my first job, I still remember asking my manager to delay my joining by a week because I knew I would feel so weak that my brain would stop working. Btw, before this long fast, I had only ever done Upvasas (one-day fasts) in my life. Hence, I consider myself a bit lucky that I survived Atthai without anything bad happening 😅. This time I did a Telu i.e. three days, in fact I just did a Parna (meal that ends the fast) before writing this weeknote xD.

I would definitely write about my experience, but to create some hype around the same and answer reader’s wonder a bit, I did not get hunger pangs AT ALL! Jains have mastered the art of fasting and it is definitely worth a try listening to their words on the same :).

Friends

I met SO MANY friends this week! Its always a blast calling them all up and trying to fit in as many visits, gup-shup and snacking sessions as possible in a day xD. I have a LONG TIME friend named Sanyam, you can call us chaddi-buddy or best friends whatever. Both of us, whenever we meet, we somehow end up in a tripsy (three people on a motorbike). This time was no exception, as soon we met, we went for our usual gedi (loafing around) and met another one of Sanyam’s friend, where we decided to do some snacking and few minutes later we tripsying to the snacking place xD.

Food

Surat is a snacking heaven! There’s just so many varieties of quick bites available all over the city that you are tempted to have some all the time. I have a list of places I always visit whenever I am back home, I haven’t visited all of them this time, but soon, after Paryushan ends :P.

I had Aloopuri and Mayo Pav. It’s hard to explain HOW GOOD these things are! Are they unhealthy? Everything in Surat is. Can you have them everyday? Definitely not. Are they tasty? HELLA YES!

I also had Amul’s Ice cream after so long. There’s a huge factory of Amul walking distance away from my house, so I have grown up accustomed with Amul’s flavour of ice-creams, biscuits, Shrikhand (Milky Mist is just the worst regardless), chocolates, etc! I got an unsual craving just before the start of Paryushan to have some, so we rushed in the evening, just before the sunset time to enjoy some xD.

I ordered a tricone which was Kwality Wall’s oreo cone’s ripoff. It was really good, but when did this shit become so expensive!! It’s 95 rupees now! I hope I don’t get addicted to it 🙈.

Tech

This week I spent a lot of time in the weeds of GPU virtualization:

This is a deep rabbit hole, but something I loved getting sucked into. I did not know a lot about kernel abstractions like VFIO and IOMMU, but now I understand them to a reasonable degree. Someday, I gotta do some projects based on them :).

I also introduced another feed in my RSS reader: tag-specific lobsters feed. Tags I included were: rust, zig, compilers, performance, distributed, networking, formalmethods, plt, osdev, databases. Ever since doing this, I have re-realized (first realization was when I joined lobsters) lobsters gets such good stories!! I have just been seeing AI doomerism in their top feed, and I am glad I tried this out cause I am back to reading super high quality tech articles again. I might actually remove the top feed from my RSS reader if the quality of trending articles stay the same 😓.

Reads

If readers choose to ignore you (perhaps forever!), you will have undermined yourself: instead of attracting readers you will be actively repelling them. So other judgement about its use aside, using an LLM will increasingly become simply…​ ineffective.