Hi, I'm Chethan — a Cloud Architect writing about software, personal finance, telecom, and automobiles.

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• Our five day Goa trip, stop by stop

  By Chethan · Oct 07, 2026

  We live about 35 km from the Karnataka coast, so a beach on its own has never been enough to make us pack the car. Goa, with its reputation for crowded shores and parties, was never on our list for that reason. Then we decided to see what else it had to offer, and drove down from Karkala in our Tata Punch with the kids for five days.

  We based ourselves in a service apartment at Majorda and spent the days chasing forts, museums, forests, waterfalls and temples instead of sunbeds. Some of it was better than the reviews promised and some of it was a letdown. Here is the trip day by day, with the costs, the wrong turns from Google Maps and the honest verdicts.

  

  Rocks and a quiet shoreline at Tilmati

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• I Set Rules to Buy the Dip. Then the Dip Came.

  By Chethan · Oct 07, 2026

  In August I started cutting my portfolio down to a short list. Then the market fell before I had finished, and that list went on sale.

  It’s my first time doing this, so read it as a log rather than advice.

  For years my investing was a monthly SIP plus the odd stock I bought when something felt cheap. “Felt cheap” was doing a lot of heavy lifting there. When prices actually fell, I did one of two things. I waited for them to fall a bit more and missed the rebound. Or I bought early, watched the price keep sliding, and had nothing left when it got properly cheap.

  This year I tried something different. I wrote the rules down before I needed them.

  

  Three levels, each buy bigger than the last

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• Building a Heavy-Duty Extension Box: 4 Wiring Tips

  By Chethan · Sep 04, 2026

  Commercial plastic extension boards are practically disposable. A couple of minor drops on a concrete floor, and the brittle internal plastic standoffs crack, leaving 220V live terminals floating loose inside a flimsy shell.

  

  The old board that started this project - a tiny screw-mounted plastic standoff holding the socket block had snapped off inside

  Electrical shops readily stock boards like the one that broke. A wooden one like this has to be made to order, but it fixes the durability problem outright. Real safety, though, comes down to mechanical details most basic diagrams overlook.

  Past wiring jobs I’ve pieced together from whatever YouTube tutorial came closest to the job at hand. This time I worked through it with AI instead, which gave instructions specific to this box’s layout and a quick check of the wiring before anything went live.

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• The AI Repatriation Cycle

  By Chethan · Aug 28, 2026

  Thomson Reuters just launched Thomson, its first proprietary large language model. Not a fine-tuned wrapper around GPT-5.5 or Claude. It’s a model the company owns outright, trained on its own compute, and it’s already live inside Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal, reviewing up to 10,000 documents against up to 100 questions at once, with every answer traceable back to its source. It’s exactly the kind of high-volume, judgment-heavy review where a purpose-built model’s edge is measurable, not just claimed, and Thomson Reuters has said this is only the first rollout, with more of the product line expected to run on Thomson over time.

  That’s the headline. The interesting part is why, and it’s a pattern enterprise infrastructure has run through before.

  

  The same three-stage curve cloud adoption went through, playing out again for AI

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• Money Has No Memory: Pruning My Portfolio

  By Chethan · Aug 14, 2026

  I started direct stock investing in 2013. Like every investor, I tried sticking to the basics: buy quality, diversify sensibly, let compounding do the work. My philosophy has been buying stocks of companies making products I use or buy. Occasionally, I also bought them based on what I read or the company’s leadership. I also attempted to spread risk by buying two companies of sectors I had invested in, e.g., two bank stocks instead of one! But just like most portfolios after a few years, mine was no longer a lean, well-oiled engine. A pile of accidental bets had taken over: satellite positions bought on a whim, cyclical laggards I wanted to be rid of, cash scattered across redundant instruments, and demergers I never asked for, like Tata Motors splitting into TMPV and TMCV, or ITC spinning off ITC Hotels, that left me holding miniscule slices of businesses I hadn’t actually chosen to own.

  I started the exercise of pruning my own holdings recently, consolidating everything into a focused, high-conviction core. The hard part wasn’t the analysis. The numbers are easy enough to run. What’s hard is dismantling the behavioral traps that kept me holding on to positions that I might think twice before buying today.

  Here are the ideas that got me through it.

  

  Same capital, fewer, larger bets

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