What happened to my minimalistic lifestyle

I used to be a minimalist. But now anymore. I own five headphones - one for the laptop, one for iPhone(its jack is unique), one for the sony mp3 player which I used for jogging and the Bluetooth headset that I used with the iPhone earlier. I have five or six watches. Despite my donating almost all my dresses that I have not used in years I still have a rack full of clothes, two helmets ( for a single head), five pairs of shoes and Six bag packs!!.  And then it is ridiculous to call me a minimalist. Actually, where did I go wrong? 

Most of them I purchased on the spur of the moment. What I learned is never to purchase something when we want it. Purchase when we need it and only when a purchase is the last option.

Lies by the government

Patriotism: It is a tool that is instilled in the citizens ( and in the military ) so that they are scapegoats of the government. I have huge respect and admiration for the military. But it is disappointing that they are nurtured to be a victim of politicians' vested interests. 

Tax: They say that the taxes are levied to finance the government activities such as public works, construction of roads, and better medicare, for the welfare of the poor people. But the reality is, that this money is used to feed the government officials. The total expenditure on pay and allowances was almost 2 lakh crore in 2017-18 for 30 Lakh govt employees. Considering the population which is 138 crore, each citizen who is not a government employee has to contribute around Rs: 2000/- per year to feed this privileged class. The accelerating fuel price and income tax can be attributed to this.

Vote: We have two choices in our elections - either vote for the worst or someone who is next to the worst. Literally, we don't have a choice.  Ours is a society that begs for loaves of bread. Here can see citizens begging in front of politicians for their rights. Can we see this in a developed country?

Showcase to bookshelf

Ours is an old home built-in 1995. We had this showcase which is out of the fashion these days and we have some books which were scattered on a table shelf. Many of them have been damaged over time. So I thought why would we use this showcase as a bookshelf.  

Couldn't keep all of them but at least that space was well used. The Krishna idol belongs to my sister in law. I am not religious.

Store personal data locally

 It doesn't make sense to store all our personal data on a cloud that is situated in a different country. When usability becomes a priority over privacy we rely on the giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. and trust them with our personal data. But that is not a long term solution considering the huge volume of data that is generated daily. The providers can hike the prices of the cloud when they have enough of our data. We need our own alternatives. We can make our own low-cost cloud at home and sync our data locally. With a static IP and open source tools we can even sync to our set-up remotely. I am planning to create such a setup for my own use. I will update the details on the fly.

There are a lot of challenges:

• Should have sufficient backups of our data locally. ( atleast three dard disks ).
• Should be powered and connected to internet all time if it is accessed remotely. Also need a static IP.
• Security issues with static IP.
• Mobile softwares required

I have a desktop PC that I am planning to use for this. Not started yet - will update the details soon.

Places to visit

 Places to visit