Category: 2020

Kindness

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This morning I was awake really early, and I decided to go for a longer run than I usually do. I set myself a time goal of 1 hour, which is about 15 minutes longer than the “long runs” I usually do, and opened up the Nike Run Club app I’m using to track my runs to see if I could find a one-hour guide to keep me company. I was lucky enough that Eliud Kipchoge recorded something with Nike. The minute I found out about that – I was thrilled. Who isn’t? Eliud Kipchoge fascinates me as a runner [because apparently, I’m becoming one of those now], because of his decision to quit track and take to marathons, because of his belief that humans are limitless and boundless, and because of the way he smiles even when he’s firing on all cylinders trying to keep pace with his target at the end of his run.

If you don’t know about Eliud Kipchoge, please Google him. I encourage you to. He was one of the athletes behind, and trained for Nike’s Breaking2 projects, and one of the most talented athletes in the world.

And so I began.

It was a pretty awesome run, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I ended it feeling good about myself – and actually feeling like I could have gone longer at the same pace, which is what the “Coach” told me I should feel.

However, two things stood out. First, the music. All throughout the run, I listened to strains of African music from the accompanying Spotify playlist. This was incredible. African music is traditionally perceived as being a percussive-dominant musical genre, and this is generalizing the continent. The Black Panther score was a representation that this was untrue – in mainstream music. That playlist though, was a perfect compilation for a long run that introduced me to so many strands of that continent’s music. I loved it.

The second, was what Kipchoge kept reiterating each time he came to speak on the guide. Each time he interrupted the music, he said “Be kind to yourself”, and I’d ease off. I’d stop stressing about the next stride and how it would feel – or the next lap, or the next couple of minutes. I’d smile. I’d ease off the tension in my muscles, ease off any clutter in my brain, and be kind to myself. I was running – and I was super pleased with myself all morning.

Thanks, Mr. Kipchoge.

Afternoon Lectures

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Extra lectures should be prohibited. A few caveats before I make this argument.

  1. Unless they significantly add to knowledge or, in the alternative, the absence of the extra lecture diminishes the value an individual gets out of a particular course, lectures ought to be conducted within the scheduled class hours.
  2. Extraneous circumstances which may require extra lectures – such as the cancellation of classes. These too, however, should be slotted within the regular time-table.

Naturally, these thoughts stem out of the fact that I had a set of extra guest lectures this afternoon from 2pm – 4pm. I paid attention for some time and then, I must confess, I switched off and began to read a book. This is traditional/typical University behaviour. My reason for switching off was primarily because the afternoon is when I usually switch off and take time to do things that I consider leisurely, and there was no way I was giving that up for the lecture that happened today.

I think afternoon lectures are just unproductive for all parties.

I recognize there is no argument here. This is just a display of frustration in some keystrokes.

Also, it’s March, so the attendance calculations have begun every morning. Sigh. I will miss these days.

A Very Peculiar Problem

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I face a very peculiar problem each night (or morning – essentially, at any time) that I go to bed. It’s the sort of conundrum that leaves me frustrated each morning. Every time, I think to myself – I’m going to avoid feeling this way tomorrow morning. I promptly forget to address the issue though, and I wake up the next morning feeling the exact same way.

My history with sleep issues is well documented on this blog and elsewhere. The largest problem remains the sleep cycle itself; and the ability to fall asleep. Other historical problems have been things like achieving the perfect body temperature before drifting off – the kind where you feel cool enough to snuggle up in something, but just about warm enough that you don’t sweat through the night. Then there’s this stupid thing.

Basically, my mattress, lengthwise, is shorter than I am. I’m not particularly tall – I’m average height. The mattress though, just about three inches shorter than I am. The result of this is that some portion of my feet juts out past the bed every night. No matter how high up I leave my below. I’ve experimented with tons of things, including crunching up the legs a little. At some point during the night though, I end up stretching out entirely and that’s when it gets bad. It’s irritating not because there’s some portion of the foot that’s always without support in the morning. The mattress also has this lining which some portion of my foot goes over – a little ‘bump’ of sorts, making all of this very uncomfortable.

One of the solutions I had in mind was to sleep diagonally, to apply the Pythagoras theorem. I soon realized I’d need a bigger bed to do that.

Golden rule for future mattress & bed purchases: always make sure it’s slightly taller than you.

Declaration of Holidays

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So, I’ve technically been on holiday for 10 days now. 3 of those days have featured exams – which are extended holidays with 1.5 hours of focus; since you’re fully in charge of how you spend your time. Thanks to the fact that juniors at University still have some exams left to write (the poor souls), I’m lucky and privileged enough to have another day off tomorrow.

I came into the weekend – atleast on Friday, with some amazing expectations and ambitions. Given that exams were over, the excuse of “studying” and neglecting some piled up work was gone, and I had so much time to fill up with the other things I wanted to do. Instead, what I have done is binge Grey’s Anatomy.

Grey’s Anatomy is a show I have an unsettling relationship with. I don’t follow it all the time, but whenever someone mentions it after a while, I feel the need to go back to it immediately and catch up with everything that’s happened in the show. I first watched it around Grade 9, I think – and slowly it became a part of the dinner routine with my mum. As Star World’s policies changed, the show went off air, I followed it for a while on fmovies, and then gave up on it entirely. I’m in awe that its lasted 16 seasons already – and I really don’t know where the show will end, and at what point Grey’s character arcs will feel complete and fulfilled.

The binging was enjoyable. The realization that the entire day (and night) had passed away, not so much.

Of course, I’m taking no blame for this whatsoever. To me, this is a systemic problem in the manner that holidays are declared. Let me explain. I think the manner in which holidays are declared; or mails are sent out, is that they often inform you that a particular day is a holiday – leaving you to process & make the cognitive link about when the next working day is. The positive framing of the message “2 March is a holiday”, means that your brain first realizes “oh, tomorrow is a holiday – no classes” and lives in that bubble till the evening of 2 March. At which point you switch over to the inevitable realization that 3 March is a working day. That gives you too much time to procrastinate everything – including how much you enjoy yourself. As a result, I would argue, that henceforth, declarations of holidays ought to be made in a manner that emphasizes how little time the “holiday” lasts – with particular attention being given, in any announcement, to when the next working day is.

My ideal declaration announcement is below:

Hello children!

Tomorrow, 2 March, Monday, is a holiday. This means you get an additional 24 hours to yourself before having to comply with some schedule that this University follows for classes. Out of those 24 hours, you will sleep for 8 hours, leaving you with 16 hours to enjoy yourself thoroughly. Use it well, because 3 March, Tuesday, at 9:30AM, you have to come back to class for attendance purposes.

You see how balanced the language is? It conveys joy, but also conveys the limited scope of the holiday. It feels compliant with social decorum. It doesn’t use too many exclamations or celebratory phrases. It underscores how fleeting the holiday feels – therefore, enabling you to process the fact that you’ve got a certain amount of time to put to good use.

Law has taught me how to construct arguments well.

Leap Day

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There was no way I would miss having a timestamp that said February 29 on this blog. I don’t think I’ve posted on a leap day in the past, although law school has given me the opportunity to see one already before this.

The past three days were filled with mid-semester exams – and now that those are done, I realize I’m closer to the end of law school as an undergraduate journey than anything else. It’s mind-boggling to me that I will be a lawyer qualified to practice in India [not admitted to the Bar] in under 2 months. How lovely is that?

But that’s for another post.

Today’s post is about making the most of this extra day. I genuinely think I’ve done that. I’ve been trying to reset my sleep cycle which means I’ve stayed awake for the full day [since 12AM] and I’m looking forward to sleeping tonight. I used those extra 8 hours to binge-watch Formula 1’s amazing Drive to Survive show on Netflix. Then I watched India v. New Zealand and followed Karnataka v. Bengal.

And then, I read. I’m so glad to be able to read fiction books again after exams. Being transported to another world is outstanding.

I’m happy to have these extra 24 hours in 2020. I know where I’d like to be when the next one of these rolls around in 2024. Time will tell if that happens – and I cannot wait for that to come along.

Holding a Fountain Pen

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My left-handedness has made this world a strange place to navigate. This comes with everyday things – including the use of scissors and nailcutters. The most frustrating thing I have to overcome though, genuinely, is the art of writing. There are so many obstacles as a left-hander. Desks in science labs are always on the wrong side. Spiral bound books affect your ability to write smoothly. You can’t see what you’ve written before because your gargantuan hand and the angle you hold pens in covers everything you write. It’s very frustrating. As a child, I used to come home with black hands because my hand would smudge lead from my pencil all over. It was awful.

When I graduated to using fountain pens, I started to discover angles at which I could make this art form of writing work reasonably enough. I practiced writing every day, using the opinion-editorial pieces from newspapers as things I would write out. It got me into the habit of reading the news, improved my handwriting and improved the speed of my writing – which is still devastatingly slow.

My handwriting went through several iterations of cursive before settling on what it is today. In Grade 9, my mother suggested I switch over to black ink and write straight and small cursive. In Grade 11, I rebelled by writing in the slopiest cursive imaginable. My cursive today sits at a pleasant 45 degree angle to the line I write on. Sometimes it goes even further.

All of this context is because this morning, I started studying for tomorrow afternoon’s examination. I realized, in that process, that I hadn’t picked up a pen all year – till today. All notes I’ve taken have been digital. Including the notes I take at meetings. So today was the first time I dusted off the pen, filled it with ink – scratched on multiple pieces of paper to get the ink flowing and started writing again.

Jee whiz is my handwriting terrible. In a way, that’s a good thing – it’ll mask some of the faffery I am bound to do in tomorrow’s exam. In other ways, it’s not so good. Maybe the next three days will be the duration in which I make a return to neat handwriting.

Exams Are Postponed

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I slept really late last night, apropos my terrible sleep cycle (am I using apropos correctly?). The aim was to wake up this morning and begin studying – a task that would have fixed the sleep cycle. I need to be wide awake between 3 and 4:30pm, which is the time I’ll be writing exams, and I desperately wanted to do that today, to get into the habit of things. Except, I woke up and saw an e-mail on my phone that said exams had been postponed by a day and promptly went back to sleep. In fact, most of what I can remember from the day is sleeping. The other part is watching YouTube videos and reading. I’ve got 4 hours left in the day, in which I aim to start studying. We shall see how productive that ambition is in some time.

I can’t recall when my exams were postponed last. I remember there being some discussion around the postponement of exams owing to a senior national leader’s passing a year or so ago. The atmosphere on campus was this crazy blend of celebrating the fact that we may be getting a day off; when instead we should have been in a state of national mourning or such.

Before that, I don’t think exams at school were ever postponed. I’m the kind of person that stresses out about exams so I would have absolutely detested them getting postponed or advanced when they were given a designated date. Today, however, knowing that this is the last set of mid-semesters I will likely write, I’m absolutely okay with the postponement. It doesn’t affect me too much.

I would imagine the juniors at our University are less than pleased.

Reading the Obama White House

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Introduction

In the past 4 years, since Donald Trump took over the Oval Office, I’ve been intrigued by the circumstances that got him there. I’ve missed having President Obama in power. There are only a handful of instances where the policies and politics of America has a direct impact on my life as an Indian. I’ve missed having President Obama because of the optics of everything and the image he projected of America. There was a quiet, commandeering strength about him, as opposed to the 3am twitter updates that President Trump (still not used to this) offers up. The result of this has been a lot of reading about America, and about Obama himself – and what the White House is like and what it represents. I was interested in understanding how Obama forged a White House in his image, and what Presidents do once they leave – which set me forth on a journey in reading several books. I’ll leave ratings and links to these books below, but here are some things I observed that were common through these narratives.

Most of these books are memoirs written by former Obama White House staffers. A few disclaimers:

  1. There are more books describing the Obama White House I haven’t read;
  2. I have read books presenting arguments which criticize the Obama White House; and
  3. I have not read books about previous White Houses. My experience with the other White Houses come from History reports and pop culture.

The Books

  1. Ben Rhodes – The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House – *****
  2. Dan Pfeiffer – Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump – ****
  3. Alyssa Mastromonaco, Lauren Oyler – Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House – ****
  4. Katy Tur – Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History – ***

The Stories 

I loved reading through each of these because they portrayed an incredibly personal narrative of some of the most defining moments in the last few years under Obama’s presidency and during the 2016 Elections. There’s a ton of insight that would have ordinarily been available only if White House staffers were entitled to maintain personal twitter feeds during their time in the White House.

Alyssa Mastromonaco and Dan Pfeiffer write the books that will make you laugh about Obama. Everyone knows President Obama had a great sense of humour, knew how to make people smile (and when), and both these individuals tap into a goldmine of memories they’ve created with Obama front and center to tell you the kind of things you wouldn’t have expected from the Commander-in-Chief, including comments on people’s wardrobes.

If Mastromonaco and Pfeiffer write about Obama the person, Ben Rhodes takes Obama the professional and gives you insight into that separation of powers (do you see what I did there?) Something I’ve wondered about is the kind of toll that certain decisions and politics takes on the personal lives of those in power – and how personal lives actually unfold with so much chaos and noise all around you all of the time. Rhodes tackles this issue-by-issue, almost – constructing a wonderful timeline of everything Obama & him experienced in the White House. In each chapter, Rhodes explores what Obama the President and Obama the person felt – where they coincided, and where they separated, and the burden this placed on him. At all points, the book exudes this warmth that Obama clearly imparted on all of the members of his Service – individuals who still feel privileged to have been a part of things.

And if Rhodes gives you that insight, into that warmth, Katy Tur is able to write about the exact opposite – the narrative that Trump was able to tap into in order to unite the country not through action, but through words – none of which exuded warmth and inclusion, but exclusion at its highest.

Concluding Thoughts

These make for good reads if you’re interested in the changing face of American politics. You’ll take to them far easier if you have bias, I think – as with most pieces of literature. My bias shines through here.

Ideas (and Inherent Value)

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Over the last few months, I’ve had a lot of time to think about a range of things in my life. A large number of these thoughts have centered around the passage of time: what I’ve let go of from the past, where I am in the present, and what I’d like to be doing in the future. In the middle somewhere, I got very frustrated with myself because I kept looking to a benchmark I created and manufactured for myself in the future, without focusing much on where I am and what I want to be doing in the present. The purpose of these thoughts felt very useless. I didn’t fully recognize why I was thinking about them and where they were coming from, or what role they were playing.

I’ll illustrate this. I enjoy writing. I’d always think about – and get all these incredible ideas about what I could be writing next. Things I want to read and research about – thoughts I hadn’t seen expressed on any other medium I had read. Things that I would look forward to reading about and creating a piece about. Then I’d think about them more: crystallize plans for how I’m going to go about writing these pieces, what source material I’d pick up. Ultimately, I’d procrastinate. Most of these ideas were time-sensitive, they were highly relevant in the context of an event taking place at the time. So although I’d get around to all the reading I wanted to do, I’d never actually get around to the writing. Why? Because I felt it wasn’t as relevant anymore. This put my thinking and my ideating at a precarious position for me. It placed all of my thinking right in the middle of thought and action. See: the reading is always an excellent takeaway, but the writing would have been even better.

So I’ve been thinking about why these ideas, especially the unfinished ones, those unclaimed ones that lie in the back of your brain, matter. Since January, I’ve progressed to using OneNote over Google Keep to keep track of things in life. Not because I want to get hyper-organized, but more for this one experiment. Mentally, I decided that I would write down every grand idea I had. I’d jot them down and categorize them. I’d spent all of the thinking time writing. Even all these thoughts I had about reading plans – I’d type them out as I was thinking them.

This has led to a lot of random notes, including one that says “Read a book” under a heading that says “Cars”. I do not remember the idea I had anymore, nor do I have context apart from a time-stamp. For the most part though, the notes are reasonably contextualized. They’re almost a transcription of that little voice in my brain that talks to me for most of the day, so they’re reasonably accurate in depicting my thoughts at any given point of time.

What I’ve measured out is that for every 10 ideas or notes I write down, I execute 1 of them. The ones I execute are often the ones I execute immediately after ideating them and writing them down, ones that energize me enough not to procrastinate that idea. So, jumping straight into things helps me.

So, what’s the value of those other 9?

I’ve read back all these notes I’ve taken, and I see so much processing happening. For me, ideas stem out of sensory cues for the most part. Most of my ideas come from things I read, with some of them coming from things I hear. I think the value of these ideas I have just lies in the fact that it means I’m processing some of what I’m hearing and seeing. Then there’s the other aspect of things. I find that several of these ideas are interconnected, so there’s a lot of synthesis taking place – and a lot of connection of random pieces of information I would have spotted on two ends of the internet.

Of course, the value of having 10 ideas is that maybe 1 translates into action.

All of this thinking ended up with more thinking. Should ideas have value at all? Can’t they just be that: ideas, without anything attached to them, normatively?

The definition of an idea, as a noun is: a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action.

Reading that definition pretty much answered that question for me.

It’s definitely possible. The value of an idea doesn’t rest in its conclusion, or on the action you take at the culmination of ideating. It’s in the ideating itself, and the application of mind that goes into thinking or suggesting, or figuring out a possible course of action for anything.

Which means I could have avoided writing all my thoughts down for a whole month if I had read that definition first.

Optics: Red Carpet Treatment

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On today’s visit to Ahmedabad, all I could notice was how much development had taken place since my last visit there (which was on Wednesday). It caught me off-guard. There were lights put up at every single bus station I passed. I saw metro stations and their pillars being painted and decorated with the colour scheme the Amdavad Metro is going to rock at some point. There were new ‘walls’ and ‘gates’ up at different parts of the city, and several posters featuring the Donald and our own Prime Minister. All of this is essentially the equivalent of someone cleaning up their room in order to impress a visitor or give them the idea of someone living a super-organized life. It felt very pretentious to me.

The Municipal Corporation and the Government is spending a lot of money on this. I have a few concerns. I’m worried that the spending and the cleaning-up hasn’t been thought through: that all the money spent is not being spent in a sustainable manner. Why is this a source of concern? Because unsustainable expenditure by the Government, to me, always feels like money that is wasted. For example, they’re planting flowers in garden patches in the middle of the highway. I’m wondering whether they’ll spend for it’s upkeep after this State visit that’s taking place.

I’m all in favour of the red carpet treatment. Optics matter in this day and age (irrespective of whether or not you personally favour them; I don’t). We could, however, be spending less money on optics to be constructed overnight if we were sustainably spending on optics, or if we were actually living the ideal life we’re trying to portray this city lives out.

On Writing

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This afternoon, I read Paul Graham’s latest essay, on “How to Write Usefully“. It had an extremely intriguing title which drew me in almost instantaneously, and then went on to explain the characteristics of a “useful” essay. I love that premise. I love Paul Graham, and his work, and more often than not, I’ve found myself in agreement with his views. On this occasion though, I only love this piece of writing if I agree with the premise that there is such thing as a “useful” essay. To me, that automatically contemplates the existence of an essay that is not “useful”. As minutes passed when I thought about this, I recognized that I found this premise one that I struggled to agree with in its entirety.

The piece is great only if the purpose of your writing is for your writing to be “useful” to someone – and you’re writing with that purpose in mind. For me, however, writing isn’t about it being useful to anyone except myself. It provides me with an opportunity to express myself and my ideas in a manner that I want to, and enables me to reflect on things I think about privately on a public forum. I enjoy that. Sometimes this reflection is helpful to people. Other times it’s not. It couldn’t matter less to me.

In a convoluted sense, I know I’ll be following the principles he outlines when I’m writing a piece where my sole intention is for it to be useful. Other times I’m going to write as I please.

Learning the Kannada Script

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So tomorrow is International Mother Language Day, as declared by UNESCO. No, this isn’t a WhatsApp forward – and even if it was, it would be one of those rare ones which were true. Tomorrow is also a holiday at University, and as a result, one of my professors decided we’d celebrate the designated celebration day today. The best part about this is that he didn’t reveal his master plan to us immediately. Usually, he begins class with a positive thought for the day – something to catch our attention. Today, however, he played us this video at the start of class:

I’ve enjoyed listening to this song for a few years now, ever since I discovered it. Ever so often I learn some new trivia about it. As soon as it started to play, I discussed with my deskmate how it was written by Piyush Pandey: someone whose work at Ogilvy I admire a lot. We weren’t really taken aback by this change in routine by our professor – although he felt we should be. Once he declared why he had done it though (to show off the kind of diversity of tongues we have in India), we were stunned, and rapturous applause could be heard in our section. He then asked us all to greet him in our mother tongues: initiating a competition between the classes in our batch. We indulged him. I had to be prompted to speak in Kannada because I was put on the spot and I wasn’t entirely sure how to say “have a nice day” in Kannada. It was something that bought me some shame for a few seconds before my brain switched wiring to think in the language.

I love Kannada. It’s given me so much over the years. I don’t think I held an affinity or love toward the language till I moved to University. It was here that I discovered how much I missed hearing the language being spoken all around me. That led to some excellent things, including friendships in which only Kannada is spoken. I picked up Kannada because I heard it being spoken around me on one of my vacations, and my Kannada knowledge is limited to my ability to speak it in bits and pieces. I can’t speak the fancy Kannada – the spashtu version that the literary figures in my family talk in. I weave in English whenever I feel like and rarely follow the traditional grammar rules.

I can’t read or write though, so the script looks like flying popcorn to me too. Most Devanagiri scripts do.

However, I was adamant to change that. Today seems like a good enough day to announce this to the world, but I’ve been teaching myself how to read and write the language. I purchased a few copywriting books – the ones that kindergarteners use, and started to follow a few Kannada accounts on Twitter. I’m also indulging in my family group a little more and reading through random Kannada messages they send. I can’t understand most of the letters yet, but identifying the shapes I do know, and making their sounds, is enough for now.

The goal is to be able to gain enough proficiency with the script so I read Kannada literature one day. Then I’ll move onto another language.