Category: Blog

Topsy-Turvy Day

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Today’s been a very topsy-turvy day. It’s been filled with some great highs, and some lows – so I’m ending the day feeling very “meh”. Has today been a good day? In parts, yes. Could it have been better? Yes, for sure. Am I still grateful for today? Most certainly.

I had an excellent start to my day. Woke up early this morning, got a run in and everything. Had a slow, leisurely breakfast. Was early to class. Stayed awake and read a bit of a book. Chilled in the afternoon, gave my synopsis presentation.

Then got confirmation of some news I had an inkling about in the evening. And another confirmation of some news I did not anticipate. That left me second-guessing how lovely the first half of the day had been. I wasn’t too hit by the news I sort of prepared myself for, but the second bit of news definitely knocked some of my good juju out the window.

I’ve struggled with expectations all my life, very recently too – which led to a lot of self-inflicted harm and a lot of introspection. I’m trying and genuinely working on cutting out expectations from several factors out of my control, but it’s a difficult process – and sticking with it sometimes feels like I have to let go of the optimistic side of me I so cherish and love.

Maybe it’s about striking a balance. That cautious optimism – the one that doesn’t place expectations but is always hopeful. I’m not sure. I’ll let that thought marinate. I meant to write “I’ll ruminate” but now I’m thinking about a good falafel sandwich. Yum. Man. Associative memories really suck.

Amidst all of this, the biggest highlight of my day was speaking to my dad on video call for 40 minutes, split into two halves. One in the afternoon, and once at night. I don’t think I’ll remember all these feelings the newses induced in me. What I will always remember is that I spoke to my dad today, for a long time. And we chatted. I’m so grateful for that.

[Summer] Rain

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It rained this evening. Out of absolutely nowhere. Atleast to me. I don’t check weather forecasts very often – because after living here for 4 years, it’s pretty much a standard weather cycle we go through, and there’s a clear expectation of what any given day may look like, given the circumstances.

The rain lasted all of 45 minutes, but it definitely created some chaos on campus. I saw one person’s room flood – which is standard for the monsoon semester, but not so much this semester. Everyone hunted around for their umbrellas. People conversed quickly, and made decisions about sprinting they’d regret in a few minutes. People showering scurried through the boys hostel hoping that a slanted sheet of rain would not touch their clean bodies.

It brought with it the smell of rain too.

I dislike the rain, but when it comes at the start of the hottest two months I experience every single year [despite my love for the sun], it’s pretty comforting that it has arrived.

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.

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.