30 by 30

Update: 5th September 2025. Striking off a few more items (only 8 years beyond 30!)

Update: 23rd November 2014. Struck a few more items (Only 2.5 years remaining to complete the rest. So. much. pressure.)

Update: 6th November 2011. Yay, striking off a few items of the list

The aim of this post is to list 30 things which I would want to do before I turn 30 (I turned 21 yesterday). Got inspired by this and this. So, here goes my list (in no particular order):

• Learn to play Electric Guitar and start my own Rock band
• Write a novel on my philosophy of life (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance style) (2012; Wrote a 100+ page unpublished book that successfully wooed by wife into marrying me)
• Start a startup incubator (Ycombinator style) (2024; started Lossfunk, flirted with the idea of incubating companies)
• Start my own (successful) startup (see Wingify)
• Go to the moon (I know it sounds crazy!)
• Earn Rs 100 crore (I know this sounds naive!) – (2025;  went waaay past it! Sold Wingify to private equity firm)
• Read thoroughly The Road to Reality
• Publish a paper in Science or Nature
• Reduce India’s poverty by at least 10%
• Produce something creatively viral (I guess some posts that I wrote will qualify for that?)
• Travel backpacking across Western Europe (Partially done. Did a road trip in Montenegro in Oct 2011; Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Italy in 2012)
• Make a truly creative Artificial Intelligence program that can learn and perhaps pass the Turing Test (2025; passing the Turing test is trivial now, can train an LLM trivially)
• Make a short-and-slick movie that earns more than what it takes to produce it (
• Sponsor my parents’ world trip (I really really would want to do this) (yay! they’ve been to many, many places now)
• Learn a foreign language (preferably Spanish)
• Live for a year or so in Silicon Valley (doing an MBA/MS at Stanford perhaps?) (was there for a couple of months; realized the oppurtunity is here back in India)
• Read entire Calvin and Hobbess collection (Bought the collection and started reading it)
• Do Skydiving and Bungee Jumping (2025; did both by now!)
• Spend a year or so at MIT AI Lab
• Buy a (small) country (it is not impossible)
• Read all the popular books on Philosophy, Psychology, AI, Sociology, and Cosmology (Ongoing effort…)
• (My secret wish) Spend sometime somewhere without spending a penny from my own pocket
• Produce a truly breath taking theory (in the leagues of Theory of Evolution, Relativity and Gravity
• Travel to at least 30 different countries (2025; stopped tracking)
• Being featured in a good business magazine (Featured in a few already)
• Being admired by businessmen, scientists and students (cough cough)
• Learn to draw better cartoons
• Read and understand the history of philosophy (Read Sophie’s world. History of Philosophy is next)
• Read and learn about world’s religions and mythology (not interested anymore. Cosmology and mysteries of universe is way more interesting)
• Make a 40 by 40 list

Hopefully, some of the things will come alive for me. So, life, here I come!