Category: Blog

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.

 

Ubermensch

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Zarathustra defined this person as someone who was willing to risk it all to save humanity. Today, however, I had a pleasant encounter with someone who was literally an Ubermensch: someone working for Uber. I had gone to Ahmedabad to learn things, do errands – and the return trip was halted thanks to a few canceled rides. On getting a cab, therefore, I just felt gratitude and an immediate rush to sit in the vehicle and get going. I wasn’t in a particular hurry or anything. There were no deadlines awaiting me on campus. In fact, it was the exact opposite. The evening was marked aside for hobbies and things I had procrastinated – things I would complete in my own sweet time. I was ready to sit in the car, listen to some music, fall asleep – wake up on campus and get going again.

That was not to be. Instead, I was greeted by the biggest smile, called “Tejasbhai” right off the bat. Thus began my 45 minutes with Iqbal. He initiated conversation: asking me where I was from and what I knew of my home city – and proceeding to talk to me about Uber itself. I’ve held a longstanding fascination and admiration for the company, and when driver-partners are willing to engage in conversation, I try to understand their motivations and the company culture as much as possible. From my experience thus far, most driver-partners are disillusioned by the model at present, but stick with it because they’ve committed to it. A large portion of their discontent stems from the fact that when Uber rolled out in India, the company paid out several incentives – and made promises of continuous earning streams that would match this throughout the time that a driver-partner was registered with the application. However, as time passed by, and Uber gained enough of a driver-base to no longer have to spend as much as they were on driver-partner retention/attraction, everything faded away. Drivers’ earnings dropped. A lot of things have changed over the years internally as well, and drivers’ have complained about the way their requests and complaints get handled.

Today, however, Iqbal acknowledged that this may be the case for several individuals, but had never been the case for him personally. He told me his story: that there were bad customers, bad ratings, and weird interactions with the company, but that these were in the minority, and were a rarity. More than 90% of his interactions with Uber were fine – on all sides. When I pressed him about his motivations, he told me two things: first, the freedom & independence that Uber gave him, and second, the kind of job he did earlier, and how this was way better. I agreed on both fronts, but I was curious about earnings, so I asked him about them directly – since we had built a rapport. Iqbal explained something that has stuck with me throughout the day.

He explained, quite simply, that Uber was the kind of application where you got as much out of it as you put into it. You spend more hours driving, accept trips regularly, don’t cancel on them – and treat customers well – and you’ll get paid high amounts, be treated well by the company. The minute you start mucking around and acting picky about taking short trips, or rejected destinations – the company knows something’s most definitely up. That affects how they look at your profile, and by extension – you.

To me, the reason this stuck with me is because it’s translatable to so much of life. We all get what we put into life. Every day. Like Iqbal said: sometimes it’ll suck. But 90% of it turns out alright eventually. It motivated me enough for the evening & I didn’t procrastinate any of the work I had any further.

In fact, I’m still doing some right now.

I tipped Iqbal – and I hope that Uber will ensure the tip reaches him. I learned a lot from this Ubermensch.

Not Done Yet

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Ever so often, for all of the freedoms that final year gives us – there are some consistent reminders that we aren’t done yet. That we’re close to finishing this entire journey that we started, but that there’s so much to go before we conclude that journey – close this chapter, so to speak. This past week seemed to have given us too many reminders of that – and this upcoming week appears to be doing that too. I’m not a fan of that.

Last week we sat for 4 hours of class every single day. Our timetables are super flexible, given that everyone is in-house faculty, and that we – for the most part at least, stay on campus. That means that every evening, or even just a few minutes before class starts, you can be intimated of a timetable change. For the most part, in the last week, we got intimations around 8pm the previous day. However, there was this one day that I was particularly excited to have some relief from the boring mood 4 hours of class put me in – and I was on my way to eat breakfast in the mess when I discovered that class had in fact been moved around to accommodate 4 hours.

This week features submissions: the first of this semester – and most certainly, not the last. We’re getting reminder e-mails about deadlines (and multiple reminder e-mails). Faculty are changing instructions in some subjects at the last minute. It’s all the usual stuff I’ve grown to expect from University as a result of the last 4 years. Just a little unfortunate to be experiencing it again. I’m definitely going to celebrate the final set of submissions I put through on this campus. If nothing, with a milkshake at least.

I’m definitely more jaded and tired this week (on a comparison to last week). I feel like sleeping more – and I can afford to indulge myself in it, but it feels really boring to sleep through when I can be doing so much more.

Like, write.

Gatecrashing

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If you’ve followed my life along, something you must be aware of is how much I struggle to describe and introduce people to each other. I’m not the greatest at explaining how I know someone – especially when they’re family friends, or people I know through other individuals, and quite often I’ll struggle through variants of introductions before finally just saying their name. My social circle is a big web which strictly affirms the principle behind the six degrees of separation, and that interweaving makes introductions all the more difficult.

I wrote this introductory paragraph after thinking about how to explain a family friendship to you folks; before deciding to skip past explaining the relationship.

Last evening, I had the good fortune of catching up with family friends over dinner. The circumstances of the meeting were extremely amusing to me – they were in town for a wedding, so I was hopeful of meeting them after their festivities were done. Instead, I was invited to join in, getting a free meal and my first experience of attending a function where I know nobody – barring my family friends. It was fabulous. To me, it affirmed how much time and energy goes into trying to figure out where to meet people – and in making plans, rather than concentrating on the prime reason to meet someone – just the act of meeting them and wanting to catch up.

Relationships like these demand preservation. Not through photographs, blog posts, or memories. Just through the act of being present when presence is possible.

Weekend Mastery

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Mastering a weekend, to me, is the art of telling yourself that you’ve got two days to catch up on everything you need to catch up on – and not beginning till Sunday evening, before it’s too late and it’s the Monday. At least, that’s been the story of my weekend thus far. It may improve a little over the next couple of hours, but even if it doesn’t, and this is all my weekend is – I have loved every minute of it. I’ve slept a lot, managed to read a fair number of books. Life is swell.

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.”

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.