24 years.
That's as many hours in a day.
A life is about 4 days.
That's not a lot of days. Especially when one day has already passed.
And what a day it has been.

I have virtually no memories from midnight to 3AM, save for one around 2:45AM, where I remember walking down the street with my father to visit my mother in the hospital, in labour with my brother.
Except I have been told that this never happened.

A few memories around 4AM. Standing next to the teacher's desk, going ahead of the class whe learning numbers. I could count till a hundred when my classmates were only counting to 10. And an embarrassing one: peeing in the kindergarten class chair because I was too scared to ask to go to the toilet.

Our family moved from Bhopal to Hyderabad around 5:30AM, and my brother and I spent a lot of time in the car sleeping. With our tiny baby sized pillows, coloured yellow and pink. I began primary school soon after. I remember crying on my first day, not wanting to go away from mom. We lived close to my paternal grandparents at the time and for the next 2 years (and maybe more, I can't remember), our uncle that travelled internationally for work would get us remote controlled cars as gifts every time he came back.

Around 7:40AM, our school had a quiz competition on Independence Day, about the history of the Indian freedom struggle. It was all the 3rd grade sections from all the branches of the school. My section finished dead last with an impressive tally of zilch.

We moved to the outskirts and into an independent house (the house we currently live in) around 9:30AM. That came with a change of schools, and the hour between 10:30AM and 11:30AM has a weird premise.
The whole school had separated boys and girls into separate sections. A few of the academically stronger boys (me included) were sent to the girls section so that "we could have some competition". We were all in our hypercompetitive "Battle of the Sexes" phase and just went with it at the time. Looking back, I can't help but wonder what the hell was going on in the principal's mind.

A new school at 11:30AM (because, let's face it, the previous one was weird) and that was much better, with me staying there till I passed 10th grade around 3:30PM.
Around 11:50AM, we went to Kerala for a week on a school trip. An hour later, we'd go to Rajasthan on a similar trip, and I made a friend I still talk to. I would not go on another school trip because sometime in the next hour, some schoolchildren had drowned during a similar school trip, and that put everyone on edge.
This school also gave me the opportunity to go to a few competitions, and I will discuss them among other important events chronologically.

Around 1PM, a group of 6 of us were sent by the school to a competition where we were split up into engineering and creative groups. The engineering group had to create something out of lego-like tools that could help mitigate natural disasters, and the creative group had to create a video to go with it.
The creative team ran into issues - we got done dirty by the (lack of) software on the computer provided to us. The engineering team came up with a floating raft with tank treads and a crane. Our models were also supposed to be practical, which was the reason we scrapped the helicopter blades. Cranetank still won us the engineering challenge.
A few other teams had the same crane + tank idea, but as far as I saw, ours was the only one that was also designed to float.
One team in particular came up with a city that sits over a giant hole and is on a movable platform, so that if a tsunami hits, the water can just go underneath the city into the massive hole. The name of the school had "stars" in it and, well, we joked that that's what the residents of the city would see when hit by an earthquake.
Huh, we were a mean bunch.

1:10PM brought my first crush, a crush that started developing after the girl left the school. I have not been able to contact her since. It would be stupid if first crushes didn't always occupy a special place in your heart.

Around 3PM, I'd gone for a few more competitions.
One was run by Byju's, it was mostly logical/educational, and I ranked first in the city. I got a tab for being the school topper and another for being the city topper. The school topper tab is no longer functional, after I bricked it trying to run a custom OS on it. The city topper tab is still functional, if woefully outdated, and is currently sitting on table, displaying my planner website. Because that's the only job an Android Kitkat device can do now.
Another competition was the Spell Bee competition, and I ranked second in the state. I was good friends with the girl who ranked first until we drifted apart. We were both chatting on stage while the other contestants were in the limelight just to cool our nerves. Bonding through shared trauma, I guess. The edited and televised video is on youtube, and I will not be sharing it for embarrassment reasons.
Just a minute before the clock struck 3PM however, I'd be seriously contemplating suicide for the first and only time. I didn't attempt it, and just as well, because the building was nowhere near tall enough. I hated myself for even contemplating it, and didn't find my way back to self-love until 10PM after a rollercoaster of a journey.

Graduated 10th around 3:30PM, like I said earlier. Went to FIITJEE, and found another wonderful group of friends to bond through shared trauma with. These bois still occupy a valuable place in my life.

Around 4:40PM, the four of us formed two pairs to enter Technothlon by IIT Guwahati - pairs of two from all over India, participating in a series of logic puzzles. The first round was a written round, in which my duo placed 35th, I believe. We then went on to the second round in Guwahati, and we finished 2nd after a clusterfuck. In the rotating chess round (one player from each team played a move each, then the players swap, they play a move each, then the original players play as the opposite colours from where they started, repeat) we ended up setting up a lot of captures (one of us would leave a black piece hanging, and the other would take it playing white) and gathering a lot of points, until I saw a chance for a checkmate. We were not allowed to speak, so I had to gesture to my teammate the plan, and he fumbled it and we lost out on some potential points. We still took home a lot of points from all the captures, but I was rattled and dropped a few more points after the lost checkmate.
Then there was a round where we had to create logical circuits, and I arranged the components so well and it had no reason to be time dependent but for some reason it was. I think it's some capacitance in the breadboard. Anyhow, the seniors couldn't figure out why it was a time dependent circuit and we were docked points for it.
Then we had to make a light-following bot which we had to speedrun a maze with. We accidentally made a light-avoiding bot but we still solved the maze in a reasonable amount of time.
Eh, 2nd place is good enough. Although I'm still salty about the lost checkmate and the illogical logical circuit.

4:45PM, and a lecturer at FIITJEE lost his cool and shouted at the whole class about how if we don't start putting in effort now, we will not be able to deal with the effot life demands later on. This was a breath of fresh air from everyone saying "JEE ke baad maze hi maze hai", and that was the motivation for me to develop an insane, unsustainable work ethic, with one goal. Do as well as possible in JEE. It is said that the best racecar is one that goes as fast as hell and breaks down at the finish line, and that was what I did. I consider it a success. I also do not recommend it unless you have plenty of downtime after the race ends for some equally insane maintenance.

4:55PM brought a science camp hosted by IISc Bangalore, and it had some interesting lectures. We visited a supersonic aerodynamics lab and saw a shock tube in action. I wouldn't understand it until a few hours later, in college, and I hate the fact that our shock tube lab experiment was not held, thanks to CoviD.

5:30PM, JEE, and ranked 749. Aerospace in IIT Bombay. Started around 5:35PM. Got into a relationship as well. Long distance, with a friend from school. Also got into NCC. We would break up around 6:45PM, try the friends-after-lovers thing on and off until we cut off contact around 11:30PM.
At 6:30PM, I took up a position in the junior council of NCC and began working as a junior in a tech team. 7:30PM, I would quit NCC to focus on academics and to lead one of the 3 subsystems in the tech team. Trying to juggle all these responsibilities, and my mental health post-breakup (which I never took the time to process btw) was putting a lot of load on me and I finally broke down at 8:05PM. I was unable to meet deadlines for an elective course I chose and enjoyed and I was rapidly hating myself more and more.
So I took a stroll down to the lakeside and had a nice long think about what I wanted to do from here (I also probably creeped out a couple but that was the least of my worries). Two things were clear. I wanted to be worthy of my own love again. And I wanted to do at least satisfactorily well at my academics. I ended up dropping the elective and managed to hit 21 deadlines in 23 days (that semester was insane), until CoViD hit around 8:15PM and was a blessing to my workload.
For tech team related reasons, I was running both Linux and Windows on my computer. I preferred Linux and was slowly shifting over to it. Around 8:30PM, the Windows on my laptop encountered a BSoD, and would refuse to boot again. I would run only Ubuntu since then.

While I managed to recover academically, I was not able to put in the required effort into placements, while also leading the whole tech team - I was promoted to co-Team Head. This, combined with the fact that fewer companies had come to campus placements, meant that I had to settle for a job outside of my core field of study, which I joined around 9:30PM. At 9:50PM, I jumped ship to a startup which at the time looked to be moving in a direction I wanted, but that has not panned out and I find myself working a fun job I see not much future in.

The first job was at an MNC, providing services for other companies, and I found myself shocked by how careless our clients were with their employee data. My faith in the assumption of privacy shaken, I decided to figure out how to make my life more private, and not store too much personal data on the servers of other people, namely Big Tech.
I started by getting my hands on a second-hand phone and installing LineageOS on it. My previous experience with the first tab was a warning to complete the whole process in one sitting. Successful. However, my personal laptop bit the dust around 10PM, and that halted progress on LineageOS.
Around 10:40PM, I managed to buy a raspberry pi. How I beat the scalpers is beyond me. I began running Nextcloud on it, and I plan on migrating my data from Google Drive to Nextcloud. I've got a 2TB hard drive for storage anyway. The hassle of setting up nextcloud made me realize how complicated this stuff is when it doesn't need to be. And that was where I came up with the idea of setting up this blog. For individuals to be able to set up their own cloud storage, since cloud storage is one of the most difficult things to do in a privacy-sensitive manner.
Privacy won't be the only thing on this blog, though. I will be discussing veganism (I turned vegan around 8PM), F1 (huge fan), and random thoughts I have. I hope to be able to post weekly, but let's see how it goes.

So that concludes the day of my life. A quarter of the way through, and not much to show for it. And a feeling that I've derailed it at the first chance I've gotten. But there are 3 more days to go and I owe it to myself to make the most of it.