Month: February 2020

De-cluttering the Internet

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The title is a little unclear. There were better options, but I’m not doing you or me any favours unless I confuse you sufficiently to make you intrigued enough to read the rest of what I have to say for the day. If you’re here now, welcome: I’m happy to have you. Please read through till the end for a delightful surprise. Where, you know what you’ll find? Thanks to infinity scroll, another post of mine. Delightful, I know.

I spent the better part of late evening yesterday and today morning decluttering my life on the internet. I’m not entirely sure what prompted this decision. I feel like I got to this deep desire to clean up my internet footprint because of a desire to procrastinate some work I had – and yes, unlike previous occasions, where I’ve slipped into calling everything I do “work”, I’m talking about actual work this time – with deadlines and a deliverable. Imagine. I had completed all my usual procrastination techniques, ended up on a weird place on YouTube, which is when I decided to take this step. It took my about 5 hours, and I’ve ended up in a place where I now have a clear idea of how better I can declutter. So of course, you get to read all about it.

I have 3 active user profiles that enable me to login to web services. 2 of these are hosted on Gmail – and I’ve been using Gmail since 2006-ish, when you had this amazing counter that showed you how much storage Google would offer you if you signed up – every time you moved to the login page. At the end of my YouTube binge, I felt the need to organize my e-mail inbox better: put labels on everything, make things easier to navigate. So I started doing that, and about half an hour into it, I realized it served no purpose for me. I pretty much knew most e-mail IDs I regularly e-mailed. I usually mark things that need a response from me as “unread”, and I keep a journal to remember whom to respond to – it’s very rare that I miss e-mails as a result. So after 30 minutes of painstakingly figuring out how to label things, and what sort of labels I envisioned in my ideal inbox, I ditched that idea altogether – deleting every single label I had created, including some automated ones.

Then, I realized I used a few services on the internet where I had duplicate profiles. This disturbed me. I don’t like having two profiles. I’m a straightforward person on the internet, and I’d rather have everything that’s public about me attributable directly to me – rather than through some web of discovery and trail searching people have to push themselves to go through. Most of these duplicate profiles were created through legitimate accident. How, you ask? Simple.

Like I said earlier, I have two Gmail accounts, right? Well, one was my first Gmail account – and my daily usage e-mail ID till I finished up Grade 12, at which point the alternate e-mail ID was my spam box (I signed up for subscriptions & things with it), and post Grade 12, because I needed to look more professional (my old e-mail ID, as you may be able to tell, was not), I switched them around. The old alternate ID became my primary ID, and the default moved over to my secondary. That ended up in a couple of changes and at that time, I reconfigured mails to move around accordingly. Everything was peaceful.

Except, then this thing called Gmail integration came along and erupted around 2013-14. The problem with Gmail integration is that it is super convenient and easy. You don’t have to keep creating multiple accounts & remember multiple passwords. All you need to do is remember your Gmail password, and you can pretty much sign-in to every service imaginable on the internet today. So why is this a problem? Well, for people like me – who are signed in to two e-mail IDs, sometimes we make the mistake of accessing the service with the wrong Gmail ID. That leads to the creation of a duplicate profile. This happened on multiple applications.

So what I did yesterday was I reversed that process. First, I figured out all the applications to which I had given access to my Gmail. Then I logged in to each of those services and deleted my user profile. And finally, I revoked Gmail’s access to these applications. Several of them are applications I don’t use anymore, or will never use in the near future, so it’s a good thing they don’t have my data. 

Similar things had to be done with WordPress as well. Massive kudos to them though, their Happiness Engineers basically helped me migrate an entire website, content, and a domain to my alt (but default) profile in a jiffy.

Then, the closure of the entire Gmail process was to delete an e-mail account I had created exclusively for the purpose of backups, given that my 15GB storage on my primary account had expired. Given that I purchased Google One this year, I no longer needed it. So I migrated all the data and shut that off too.

The result: a decluttered internet footprint. Something still in progress. I’m sure I have accounts I don’t remember creating and data I don’t remember sharing (but have consented to), but it’s time to live a leaner life here. Keep fewer passwords to remember, not give random applications access to my e-mails. Just be a little more aware of what I’m giving up & for how much convenience I’m trading off my information for.

One day I’ll figure it out.

Lapel Pins

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This evening, my friend and I struggled to figure out how to unpin a flower lapel pin that he wished to wear on his suit. We twisted, we pulled, rotated, watched YouTube videos, and it took 20 minutes for us to realize we could go to the website of the lapel pin manufacturer and figure out if there was a guide, or anything helpful really – to help us sort through this mess.

Naturally, we got around to chatting with a chatbot. We typed in “the lapel pin won’t unpin”, and then got transferred to a human operator – to whom we sent a photograph of the product, and got more instructions about how exactly we should be holding the lapel pin in order to successfully unscrew it.

It took us a good half an hour.

First, I would never have thought that lapel pin manufacturers would have a chatbot/human operator providing instant support over the internet. Second, that feeling of accomplishment at the end of this experience is something I want to mimic in every avenue of my life henceforth.

That is all for today.

Nappytimes

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This is not a post about diapers, or the convenience of being a baby who gets to poop at his mercy and then get tended to by adults. This is a short post about the afternoon nap, and my belief that there is something in the air these days that is pushing me into a slumber every single afternoon post-classes.

I’ve never enjoyed afternoon naps. I’m not sure why it is, because I like sleep, and I enjoy being able to recover when I am tired. I like sleeping during the morning, and I often do – in class. However, it feels odd to me to be asleep after the clock moves past 12pm. Over my study holidays across 2013, 2014, and 2015, my mom used to try to force me to get some sleep in the afternoons, to make up for the kind of late nights I used to keep trying to get information into my brain. I refused outright. Never developed the habit in school. I didn’t develop the habit at University either, largely because I spent most afternoons outside my room.

This semester, I have (so far), been able to maintain a healthier sleep cycle than I have had over the last nine semesters. Law school and hostel life changes how you sleep in a number of ways, and for me – even on days that law school and hostel life didn’t affect me, I slept very little. However, this semester I’ve pushed myself to sleep as early as I could, and wake up as late as possible – in addition to napping in class and catching sleep every time I spot a chance.

As a result of the night sleep cycle, I assumed that I would never feel sleepy in the day. Except that assumption has been incredibly flawed. I’m sleeping every afternoon after class for 2 hours at minimum. Given my history with sleep, this could be down to a sleep deficit my body is only understanding now. Or, and this is my prevailing theory:

there’s something in the air. 

Given that summer is slowly arriving on campus, I’m extremely hopeful that this afternoon napping business also stops. While it’s an extremely liberating feeling to be able to sleep in the afternoons without too much stress or thinking about places I need to be and things I need to be doing, I feel like it takes away from my day. And, worse of all, it’s keeping me awake longer than I would like at night. Wish me luck.

Dal Chawal

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Last week, I heard about a compliment someone wrote for another person: he is simple like dal chawal. I chuckled; it was amusing, succinct, and true. Dal chawal is a simple food.

However, to an NRI South Indian child who grew up on rasam and sambhar, dal chawal wasn’t exactly a staple. I mean, I ate it sometimes when we dined outside, or at my best friend’s house, but it was rare that we cooked it at home for the first 10 years of my life. Maybe we did but I can’t recall it now. Memory is a strange thing, and sometimes things establish themselves in your brain far later than when they were first introduced to you. Perhaps dal chawal’s prominence in my own diet started much earlier, but it’s only properly lodged in my brain from Grade 6. Shankar Uncle made some incredible dal over the years. It was through him + the yelling my mother doled out to him on occasion (mostly friendly ribbing), that I learned how many kinds of dal there were. Dal fry, jalfrezi, tadka, and many more. Honestly, can’t remember – haven’t remembered the difference. They just taste really good.

We cooked dal on camp tours as well, and people made some phenomenal dal that we ate on our treks. I loved it, and eating it out of our bowls in the cold, dark hills, surrounded by a bonfire, with my schoolmates is a memory that has remained with me since.

Dal was also the first thing that I cooked when I made food for myself over summer. I had hurt my hands and knees in a cycling accident, and I really wanted some food that I could get comfort out of, so I forced myself to cook the dal. It lacked salt – and I’m so grateful my flatmate bore through it with me, but making that food brought some sensibility to what had been a whirlwind in the day.

Nowadays, in my mess, I find myself resorting to dal-chawal as frequently as possible. I feel like I’ve eaten enough orange gravy for a lifetime generally, and my mouth has grown a little tired of the flavour of the other curries we get in the mess. So I’m mixing things up and eating dal, curd, and uppinkai together for most meals, and I’m loving every minute of it. It brings back all of these memories and feelings I have associated with the meal.

Analogizing Law

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My parents and I spoke for nearly 40 minutes today, which is a relatively longer conversation, even for us. Several of our long calls are memorable ones. Today’s definitely one of them. I don’t want to contextualize too much, but my dad and I spoke for a while about what public international law and constitutional law entailed, and how I imagined they intersected. I didn’t want to faff my way through any portion of the conversation – so I engaged with the questions he put forth and tried to answer them as honestly as I could. I enjoyed it. It made me think about how best to simplify the kind of complicated English we tend to slip into in this profession.

I analogized things with a burger today. Maybe that’s something I can take to the classroom someday soon.

Great Electricity

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Last night when we were about to turn the lights off, my roommate spoke to me from his bed. He told me that when he entered the room, the electricity meter was at 512 units. Now we’re at 2300 units or so. He looked at me and said, ‘Tejas, look how much we’ve consumed’. I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was. It was true. We had consumed all those 1800 odd units of electricity. With 50 units allocated to us for each month, that comes up to 36 months – because we’ve never strayed beyond the allotted electricity limits. Not even when we had a standing fan, which stopped standing – and then collapsed by our fifth semester.

I haven’t noticed these things before. Usually someone comes around once a month to take our meter readings – and I look to ensure that he’s jotting down the right numbers, but apart from that, I haven’t cared too much. I check my emails when they send out the dues list to ensure I don’t have payments to make, but then it’s business as usual.

My roommate’s pretty much in charge of most of the electricity stuff in our room. He switches off the meter before heading to class – unless something is charging. It’s rare that it’s on the entire time. When it is, it’s usually because it’s summer and we’re out of the room for a few minutes, and switching off the fan would mean disaster, with hot wind all over the room. Most of my responsible electricity consumption is something I’ve picked up directly from him. That includes shutting down my laptop before I sleep, which is something I never did before: under some assumption that I would lose important files.

When he told me about the amount of electricity we had consumed, I realized that this was possibly the last time I would have to care so little about it. I’ve learned a lot of things on this campus – and being less wasteful with electricity is one of them. But I’ve not cared about the payment of electricity bills, or the source of my power generation. I’ll be out in the world in a couple of months – which is when I’ll definitely have to care. I’ll be responsible for electricity bill payments and keeping track of consumption to ensure I’m not going overboard.

I’m not too concerned about keeping track of consumption. Climate change has scared me sufficiently. What I am keen to learn though is the art of managing bills: one of those things almost every adult complains about at some point or the other.

I turned off the lights last evening and went to bed, only to be reminded of a modified version of Uncle Ben’s quote, which my roommate has crafted:

“With great power comes a great electricity bill.”

A Life, Lived | Stoner, by John Williams

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Introduction 

My weekend has been filled with reading and books, which is just the weekend I needed to recover for the week that lies ahead. On Friday, I spent a couple of hours on Goodreads, trying to figure out the stuff I wanted to explore and get through by the time Sunday night rolled around. Stoner was a fresh find, an indirect find, so to speak. I saw a book about John Williams’ life – a book that described itself as an essay about why Stoner was the perfect novel, and I was intrigued. I’ve only ever heard of the name John Williams in the context of film scores, so to hear that there was this celebrated novelist I knew nothing about who seemed to have a cult-like following for this “perfect” book, I had to read it. Thus it was that I sat on my desk last evening after a scrumptious meal and I made a new friend: William Stoner.

Also, no, the book is not about weed.

Plot Summary

John Williams navigates you through the life of William Stoner, a lifelong academic and a Professor of English at the University of Missouri. You’re introduced to Stoner posthumously in the first chapter – an introduction that lays down clear benchmarks for the kind of expectations you should have from the book. Williams tells you in no uncertain terms that Stoner was an ordinary man, who had an ordinary career – who did nothing extraordinary. Over the course of subsequent chapters you learn about Stoner’s upbringing on a farm, and you’re transported through the different phases of his life and the different decisions he takes – in finding love, in working on English Literature, in understanding the impact of war. It’s really an unremarkable plot. Quite simply put: it’s one man’s journey through life.

The writing, however, is incredible.

Characters

It’s pretty evident from everything I’ve said above that the character: Stoner, is central to the entire plot. He drives it forward, slows it down, and brings it to a close. Some books which place a singular character at their center, or a singular perspective at the forefront struggle because they don’t establish the character’s voice early on. As a result, expectations are wayward. Williams does this remarkably well.

First, he stays away from writing in the first person at any point. The entire book is told in third person, giving the author more control over the kind of observations he is able to fit in about Stoner’s life – about Stoner’s temperament, for example.

Second, Stoner is set up very, very early on in the book.

You can tell that he’s in for a life of hard work and challenge. This isn’t exclusively because of the description of his farm-upbringing. Williams also achieves this end by labouring through descriptions of Stoner’s entire thought process. When, early on, Stoner is faced with the decision of going to school or continuing to stay on the farm – Williams doesn’t cut to the chase and reach the outcome (Stoner goes to University). Instead, Williams explains everything that terrifies Stoner, what excites him – and why he ends up acceding to his fathers’ pushes. For me, as a reader, it helped me understand Stoner’s motivations, but it also laid out how much thought (sometimes fruitless) the character put into everything he did. Thinking is hard work – and setting up a character who ponders deeply about everything, who doesn’t fully comprehend or rely on intuition early on in the book sets him (and you, the reader) up for everything that you’re going to see.

Third, supporting characters are eased into the story in small batches. Williams makes it clear that the focus is never supposed to be away from Stoner. Even when the scenery changes – like when Stoner moves to University, or the times change – like when World War I breaks out, Williams doesn’t introduce more than 2 characters into Stoner’s life arc. This clarity of writing allows each individual’s character arc to develop fully (only one character is written out early – killed in action), but more crucially, it allows Williams to lay out, slowly, Stoner’s dynamic and interaction with each person. That enables them to be more organically involved in Stoner’s life. This is best illustrated not through Edith, but through Gordon Finch. Finch is introduced as a friend. Stoner and Finch get on really well – exchanging observations about University life that you’d only ever exchange with your closest peers. Finch disappears, enlisting for the war, and returns in an administrative capacity more senior to Stoner. However, their rapport doesn’t change – and lasts right through to the end. Now, Finch was introduced with another character, Masters (the character who dies young). In my view, settling on a small group reflects the reality of the life of an academic. More central to the argument I was making though, is the fact that it allows for the development of more meaningful interactions with these characters – which keeps the spotlight on Stoner. As the reader, you’re rarely caught onto picking a favourite character: you’re firmly on Stoner’s side, interested solely in the kind of relationship and impact each character will have on his life.

Conflict

After I read the book, I went on to read a few essays I mentioned earlier – about why Stoner was the perfect novel, and they all point to the way conflict is explored. Each one of them highlighted how conflict was introduced at exactly when it needed to be in Stoner’s arc.

While I agree with that, I think some nuance exists in the kind of conflicts introduced. There are the big conflicts: the one with Lomax, the affair Stoner has and the conflict with Edith, the conflict when he tells his parents about continuing on with his studies in English Literature. However, conflict remains a central theme throughout the book – one that shouldn’t be ignored. Williams’ success doesn’t lie exclusively in the fact that he is able to introduce these big conflicts at the right time.

To me, a large portion of that success is owed to the lucidity of his writing of an internal monologue and the internal conflict that Stoner faces almost on a daily basis. We’ve explored this in the above section – on how this helps set up Stoner’s character. Here, what I’d like to concentrate on is the role of this internal monologue in those bigger conflict arcs.

I shall illustrate this through the conflict with Lomax (the conflict with Edith has too many layers and will give away too much of the book). Professor Lomax is another faculty in the English department who Stoner has several scuffles with, climaxing in the big scuffle regarding whether a particular graduate/doctoral student should receive passing marks in his oral examination. Now, while this entire scuffle could have been projected through the single dimension of being an indirect power struggle in the department between Lomax and Stoner, a large amount of the conflict’s introduction takes place through the internal monologue.

Stoner first notices this student when he sits for a graduate seminar Stoner teaches – and Williams elaborates Stoner’s thoughts at the start. In fact, Williams creates a narrative of doubt through every interaction that Stoner has with the graduate student – which culminates the introduction of the conflict with Lomax. Without these deliberate portions of the narrative devoted to exploring Stoner’s internal dilemma about how the student in question has been admitted, the larger conflict loses value. More importantly, what Williams is able to achieve is the opportunity to introduce a counter-narrative and a counter-characterization that is equally powerful by allowing Lomax to replay the entire monologue from a different perspective.

It is a phenomenal lesson in storytelling.

Concluding Remarks

I recognize that a large part of my analysis may not make sense without a reading of the book. Hence, please read the book. It is short and well worth any time you may have. The Guardian wrote about how the book had a ‘sad tone’, and how Williams himself was confused at why people thought Stoner led a sad life. I have to agree. There is a sadness to Stoner, but there is also joy – in equal part. Remember, Stoner’s life is ordinary. It is relatable. Therein lies it’s power.

I loved the book. As someone contemplating a career in the academy, this was just a beautifully told tale of someone determined to teach, and to love, to the best of his capabilities – while making mistakes along the way. A life truly lived. Another great book I’ve read in 2020, earning ***** (5 stars).

Hobby Immersion

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Offlate I’ve had more time on my hands – in terms of fully being in my control of how I spend my time each day, than I have in recent memory. It’s probably been about 4-odd years since I felt this way. That has seen a return to some hobbies, and a return to a lot of things I wanted to be doing. I can’t say that this is what I’d like to be doing a couple of years from now, but what I can say is that it’s bringing me a lot of joy at the moment. A couple of things I’m doing way more than I’ve done in the past few years are: reading, playing the piano, and exercising. The only one of these I’ve actually done to a reasonable level at University has been reading, so the other two take a lot of effort to actually get around to and do. Each day I search for something new to inspire me to pick it up and actually do; instead of ideating it.

One of the consistent things I’ve found inspirational is knowledge. I really enjoy hearing people talk about the stuff they know about both classical music and exercising. I love reading about it too. This has also become something that’s true of my reading. I love reading more because there’s so much to read, but because I’m continuously motivated by the people who’ve read more – who write and share the stuff they’ve read. I’m inspired, to say the least. All of this has led to this realization that there’s an endless, boundless amount of any activity you could be doing.

That has me a little worried.

Specifically because one of the things I’ve observed about these individuals who talk/share their experience with any activity is that they’re all “qualified”, so to speak. People who write academically about books; or who review books professionally – they all seem to come from a position of authority/specialization because they’ve devoted their time to that craft. This is true of exercising and of music too – all those commentators who commentate on what music represents, and coach on how to run better, none of them are amateurs or hobbyists. What I found a little more worrying is the kind of nuanced specialisms there are. Let’s take books as an example: there are these people who write only about Science Fiction. But then it goes one level deeper: they write exclusively about African Science Fiction, or Chinese Science Fiction. That’s all they seem to read & comment on.

Last evening I was wondering whether hobbyists are demotivated from picking things up because of how endless hobbies seem; or owing to the kind of specialists there are in a field. Then I got around to thinking about whether I want to reach that kind of specialization: given that I enjoy listening/consuming media commentaries thrown to me by these specialists (irrespective of whether I agree/disagree with their outcomes).

For a while I lingered on my answer being yes: I’d like to exhibit some sort of preference, or niche, in every hobby I take up. I look at my consumption of the piano at the moment: I’m loving every moment of it, but I’m playing for an hour, reading music theory for a couple of hours, and listening/reading about classical music for a while each day. It’s extremely immersive – but it’s also super general; there’s no specialism there at all. For me to develop a preference for an era in classical music, for example – I’d have to first find an era I like, and then begin to consume that era’s music with a particular obsession. Being a specialist requires some form of obsession or the other. I could be wrong, but you need to be dedicated, you need to truly love the art form you’re calling yourself a specialist in.

For me: in a lot of ways, that felt, well, counterintuitive to what the idea of a hobby is. I don’t want to be too serious about it; I just want to enjoy it. I want to enjoy the generality, the gaining of knowledge and experience in the hobby. I’d like to remain at ease, without pressure of any kind in any of my hobbies. I’d like to be a generalist, I guess. Even in my reading, I don’t feel like I’d like to be walled within having preferences for genres. In exercising, I don’t want to restrict myself to a particular kind of activity.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to take my hobbies seriously. I still want to immerse myself in them as much as I can.

At the end of this very, very elaborate thinkpost, I have but one conclusion. This thinking was pointless. Like most things, figuring out how I want to enjoy something or what it brings me, or how I’d like to interact with it means I need to do – not think.

Analysis is sometimes useless.

I did, however, get a blog post out of it. It’s a brainfart of a blog post, but it is a blog post all the same.

Sleep-in’

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The weekend is usually when my roommate and I both catch up on any sleep we’ve lost over the course of the week. Or, in the case of fifth year, overcompensate for the sleep deficit we’re battling from the last four years.

I was speaking to some classmates from school yesterday about how it’s been 5 years since we gave our board examinations to get out of school, and how it’s been 7 years since our 10th Grade boards. The one thing that cracked us up was how these board exams seemed like the scariest endeavour at the time, but we’re looking back at it like it was some joke. I wouldn’t trade-off the effort I put in for my boards for anything; I loved studying for all of them, and I really enjoyed the month of giving exams. I would, however, take away the kind of stress I put myself under at the time. Wholly unnecessary. Maybe without it, I could’ve enjoyed the process a lot more.

In any case, the reason I mentioned boards is because what we also realized is that there’s a ton of information from our education that we don’t use everyday that’s still trapped in our brains. An example is the concept of an “oxygen deficit”. When I see sleep deficit, or actually, wherever I see the word “deficit”, that’s the only concept I associate it with. Even though it’s wholly incorrect. The Board I studied taught us the concept as an “oxygen debt”, but I remember it as an oxygen deficit instead. Why? I don’t know. But I can still tell you exactly what the syllabus needed us to remember. It was this: Oxygen debt is removed after exercise and during recovery thanks to aerobic respiration of lactic acid in the liver, the continuation, after exercise, of fast heart rate to transport lactic acid in blood from muscles to the liver, and the continuation, after exercise, of deeper breathing supplying oxygen for aerobic respiration of lactic acid.

How this information is something I need to remember verbatim in my life on the daily is not something I understand. Yet, I do. What I was wondering about this morning, when I thought about the sleep deficit I’ve accrued, is if there’s a similar process of recovery outlined somewhere.

All I know is that my process of recovery involves a ton of sleep. I woke up this morning, ate breakfast, and came back and slept till lunch. After going for a run in the evening, I slept another two hours.

It was awesome.

Catchy Tunes

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Our brain is ridiculously wondrous in its sheer complexity. One of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out is how my brain classifies different kinds of music as being catchy – and how each of us has such uniquely different tastes in music, or the kind of music that we end up humming along to/that we find catchy. More specifically, how despite all of these variations in our tastes, pop radio ends up ensuring that we end up humming along to the same tunes. It’d be extremely difficult, for example, to find someone who didn’t find the song “Happy” peppy and upbeat – whose rhythm was lodged in their brain immediately upon a first listening. This is similar of other songs too – “Moves Like Jagger” is another one that comes to mind immediately.

Okay, I’m not thinking about this remotely as academically as I make it sound in the above paragraph – I just re-read what I had written. Honestly, what I’m trying to understand is why this song – “Sing It With Me“, which has an incredibly humorous/cute music video is absolutely stuck in my head. I first heard it yesterday, and it’s been playing on loop throughout the day. Quite literally, every minute of my run today was spent listening to this song, which is not something I’m used to.

The science community owes me an explanation. I don’t particularly take issue with the fact that the song is stuck in my head – because I quite like it, honestly, but I feel like this is going to be on loop for a while now, or at least till I find another song to replace it.

I’m probably going to spend the rest of the day reading about this. Leads, as always are welcome.

Update:

I took a break in posting this because I wanted to see if I could at least contribute an amalgam of some observations from what I’ve read. Apparently most catchy songs do a couple of things:

  1. Start off lower than the highest pitch they will eventually reach;
  2. Have a lot of repetitions in patten;
  3. Have a consistent rhythm/bassline; and, shockingly
  4. Apparently resemble earlier, well-known pieces of music, like nursery rhymes.

This means two things:

  1. I’m now trying to figure out how many songs I’ve heard fit the bill (the answer is, several)
  2. I now feel like I have the tools to clearly make a pop song that gets stuck in everyone’s brains.

Classes (and Jokes)

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I do believe that the faculty who teach us are well aware that we, as a batch in the final semester, are paying very, very little attention to what they are teaching. The subjects aren’t core papers, or as necessary as to amass widespread inherent interest among every student. One would understand the number of students whose interests are captured falling, especially given that we are on the cusp of completing our degree – but they’re dwindling. They’re so low, you can see people falling asleep or deciding to do their own thing in the classroom within 5 minutes of attendance being taken. I digress though. The force of this paragraph was meant to convey that the faculty know this information. They know that we care very little – but that we will pay attention if something is being communicated about portions, internals, or something else that’ll genuinely concern us.

Sometimes they adopt that strategy to get us to look up for a few minutes. Very unexpectedly, someone will say the words “Continuous Evaluation”, and for a couple of minutes everyone’s heads will shoot up. If nothing, to memorize the date when it’s due so you can ask the batch what is actually due the evening before the deadline – sometimes even the morning of. Or they’ll say the word “Internal” and all of a sudden you’ll be awoken from any slumber to try to understand if there’s an added component of work they’re going to make you do in final sem.

Some faculty are genuinely trying. We’re allowed to take laptops into class for drafting, which keeps you interested because there’s a bigger screen to stare at. That faculty is being super innovative. Apart from his usual quirkiness and sharing thoughts of the day with us (which are genuinely nice to watch), he’s been using technology to keep us engaged with what he’s teaching. Even if it doesn’t get the whole class hooked; it’s worth applauding the effort.

Today, however, I saw something that I think I’d like to practice if I ever get a teaching job. The art of the poor joke, executed to perfection. You see, a part of being in the last semester is a bunch of people leaving class citing various excuses – and not returning because there really is no incentive to return once you’ve left and veered out of class. One faculty sensed someone leaving – catching them just as they shut the door, and exclaimed “yeh dekho, pehli wicket gayi”

Now you see; there is no way for me to explain how fantastic her comic timing was on this joke. It was perfect. She also chose a cricket joke – which is universally understood in India. The best part was that she kept following it up with other cricket jokes: she drank water in the middle & called it her “drinks break”, and when she caught someone unsuccessfully sneaking out, she called it a “dropped catch”.

As you can tell, the jokes got worse as the class progressed. Nonetheless, it gave me material for this blog post, and caught my attention sufficiently such that I missed my mid-day snooze.

I wonder what the faculty will try tomorrow.

Old Dog, New Tricks | Play It Again, by Alan Rusbridger

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

Introduction

First off, I must apologize for the title. I tried long and hard to find something more suitable, but nothing felt quite as right as this did. Apologies, Mr. Rusbridger, if you do read this.

Secondly, some context. This marvelous book was recommended to me by the genie that is Goodreads, thanks not in small part to my recent completion of another book on classical music (which I should hopefully review shortly), and the fact that Year of Wonder is now a book I am currently reading. My own history with classical music is long and storied. It forms a part of a poem, and a blogpost from early 2016. At present, I am falling in love with it all over again. I’ve begun piano classes, I listen to more classical pieces, I’m engaging with my own study of music theory – and I’m enjoying every bit of it. However, it has been 6 years since I properly attended lessons and focused on technique instead of playing things by the ear. As a consequence, my dexterity is something I am relearning. In that sense, finding this book felt like more than a coincidence. My review might therefore be coloured by this experience.

Plot Summary 

Pretty straightforward really. Rusbridger explains it in a video he recorded, which you can see here. In a series of diary-style entries, Rusbridger recounts taking up the challenge to learn and play Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G minor Op. 23, which is one of the most daunting pieces of music ever written. There are added layers to the challenge, though. First, he gave up the piano when he was 16, and took it up as a serious hobby only past the age of 40. Second, he’s got a day-job (and not any day-job. At the time, he was Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian). Third, he wants to learn it in a year – committing to do so by giving himself 20 minutes a day of dedicated practice. To anybody, developing a habit over the course of a year by attempting it for just 20 minutes of a day sounds ludicrous enough. To commit to learning a fresh piece of music – and something that lasts 10 whole minutes isn’t just committing to a habit – it’s committing to teaching yourself something new that develops on past knowledge, which is incredible.

To give you a spoiler alert: yes, he manages to play it, and rather successfully, I might add. There are snippets of his playing in the video I’ve linked above.

The Writing 

I’ve often found that diary-style entries face the arduous challenge of establishing context in as few words as possible before developing plot, or rather, furthering plot in a manner that is engaging, yet succinct. Some preliminary comments on length and style before analyzing the writing itself.

Some books written as journal or diary entries end up writing these extracts at length. They feel well-edited, meticulously-crafted – that the thoughts come in a structured manner, or a structured flow at all points of time. While it is arguable that journal/diary writers do spend time thinking about what they wish to write about, I often feel that there is an erosion of the unfiltered thought that takes place when they are crafted to be literary. There’s a beauty to the natural flow of thought when somebody sits down with a pen and paper to write – the brain hops, skips, and jumps, and you can see that with the writing. It feels organic, and natural, with stops that are as abrupt as these thoughts themselves. There is no doubt to Rusbridger’s talent in the English language (he studied at Cambridge and was a journalist, for goodness sakes’), but what I loved here is that the diary entries never felt too long. While we do not know whether these were extracts culled out of longer pieces of writing from each day, there’s a flow to the book that feels like I could’ve sat and written it at home.

This does two things for me: one, it makes it incredibly easy to read, even when it’s discussing something like the art of choosing which piano to buy – something that is incredibly boring if you cannot hear the tone of the pianos being compared and the subtle differences in tone. Two, it makes the amateur portion of his piano playing feel more genuine. You can see that this is something he is incredibly passionate about – (at least this one project), but having the writing laid out in a very amateur-like way makes it feel more relatable.

Interweaving Subplots and Interviews 

The book would have been incredibly boring to the general public if it was exclusively about him learning new sections of the piece each day, with stylistic changes being described as if you understand everything about how the piano is to be played. It would make for excellent technical reading, and I wouldn’t mind reading that too, but that’s for another day. There’s a lot going on in Rusbridger’s life, as I pointed out. There is success not only in the fact that he does play the piece at the end of the book, but that he doggedly and determinedly ensures he gets in as much practice as possible whenever he finds the time.

It’s evident that he needs to make the time for this hobby. He explains, at different junctures, the WikiLeaks stories, the phone hacking scandals, and other stories – including the rescue of a Guardian reporter from Libya (where he conceives the title of the book). All of this means that pages turn not exclusively because you’re interested in finding out more about his journey with the piece, but also because you’re trying to figure out whether or not he’s succeeding in the other things that are the top of the priority list for the paper and for him.

While that is admirable, what I enjoyed even more was the fact that he presented the art of learning this piece in a very holistic manner. It isn’t him self-learning, or self-teaching the piece. In technicality, once you learn how to read music, you can pretty much learn how to play anything – for playing sakes’. It’s clear that he doesn’t want this. He enrols in regular lessons, which you can see changes his perspective on the piece by giving him an observer to play to every time he visits. There are nuggets of information from professional pianists whom he has the opportunity to spend time with (as a result of his day-job), and all their interpretations offers him with the chance to look at the music through his own eyes – and reflect in the music a story that he connects with, which I think is beautiful. He also speaks to neuroscientists to understand the art of memory and learning an instrument better in an attempt to figure out what the easiest way to commit the piece to his brain would be.

All of this portrays Western classical music and its performance as being so much more than the random notes and squiggles on a staff. Indeed, in various moments, Rusbridger taps into his historical knowledge to offer different views on the context and meaning of Chopin, which I absolutely adored.

The Personality 

This would’ve also been a little less interesting if the writing didn’t allow the personal side of the story to shine through. I’ve stated above how personal the challenge itself becomes, but Rusbridger takes that one step forward, involving the reader in several aspects and decisions he’s taking on the fly. This includes the fact that he ends up building a music room in his house, he buys a piano, and he attends a couple of amateur piano conferences. There is humour interspersed in his own reflections of the kind of mountain he’s trying to climb – all of which really allows you to see who Rusbridge is beyond this singular focus he has for a year.

Conclusion

Listen to a performance of Chopin’s Ballade. Then read the book. It’s a wonderful exposition of how immersive classical music, or any hobby can be really. For me, it’s deepened my own resolve to learn the piano to enjoy it as much as I possibly can, given the history I’ve got with the instrument. It’s also convinced me that I can learn new things at any age, and I’m never going to be dissuaded by my age as an excuse to learn a skill I’m interested in. Without much doubt, this book earns ***** (5 stars).