Hello, 2016!

2015 is done. We are now onto 2016 and as always it is a good time to use the New Year milestone marker for all major activities- both professional and personal.2015 was a good year in many ways personally and professionally. As a family, we were very busy with work, school and home but closed out the year with a good vacation. I organized a bunch of stuff in my local community, some of them small and one particular one, really big. All of them were remarkable team efforts that made me a bunch of new friends. After a period of lull in the last few years, my reading is on an uptick and I read more in 2015 than 2014. I hopefully learnt more too. My fitness levels continue to be reasonable, thanks to the wonderful folks at LifeWorx CrossFit.My book "Mahabharata for Kids", continues to be a steady seller on the Kindle bookstore with zero publicity and I continue to contribute all of the proceeds to worthy causes.Professionally, I changed roles from engineering to being a Product Manager. Something I have aspired to do for a while now. I am learning quite a bit in my new job and it has been an interesting and pleasurable experience. Amazon Lab126 continues to be a place where I am learning every day and I am very thankful for that.This is usually the blog post where I talk about all my writing and how many views I garnered in the previous year. 2015 turned out to be very interesting in that regard. I continued to be excited about blogging but a curious thing happened- I stopped enjoying the process of typing stuff. My love for analog tools (fountain pen, pencil, paper and ink) has grown exponentially and I have a half a dozen blog posts fully written up on a small notebook but without the enthusiasm to type it up. Often times, I hear of people getting tired/bored or out of touch with the physical act of writing. I have gone the other way. I am not as excited about typing as I am about composing my blogs on pen and paper. I am still looking for tools that will do this translation for me. That said, I wrote much fewer posts in 2015 that ended up getting far more views than ever before. With 50% less output, I managed to double my readership from 30000 views to 60000+ views in 2015. Much of this was due to the network effects of writing on LinkedIn. I am thankful to LinkedIn for giving me that reach.So where does that lead me to in 2016-

• I hope to read more. Much more.
• I hope to write more. Much more.
• I have a bunch of interesting projects in the works in various stages of progress - I hope to get one of them out in public this year.
• I hope to contribute more of my time and resources towards the right kind of causes and to make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate.
• And most importantly, I hope to spend as much time as possible with my precious family.

The world has had a tough 2015. Between natural disasters[1][2] and man-made disasters[1][2][3], we have lurched sideways as humanity. There are things to hate and not be optimistic about but humanity as a whole continues to want to do the right things. Atleast most of us, anyway.I will leave with this parting thought from the bestseller "The Martian" wonderfully written by Andy Weir (must-read in my opinion).

If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are a**s who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?”