Tag: Blog

Field Day

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I had a field day today – quite literally a day out in the field, meeting people I had to meet. It started this afternoon, when I took a trip to WIMWI. I have fond memories of WIMWI from the month and a half I spent working on a project there. Going there post-class hours and sitting in the library to get things done gave me tremendous joy. Meeting my faculty at WIMWI and figuring out a research plan has got me incredibly excited about the possibilities that collaborating over the next few months will bring. All I’m hopeful for from this period is that I can repay the faith and trust that somebody has shown in me by putting in the work I’m expected to. Actually, I’m more hopeful that I’m able to learn something new about researching a particular subject in this time period. I think if I stick to my work and keep learning how to improve, it’ll match the faculty’s expectations and lead to a considerably reasonable outcome in any case.

After that, I scheduled another meet-up to pick up more work, which I did – always a fulfilling thing.

Then it was time for a delightful catch-up with a senior I have become friends with only after his graduation. Although I knew him from his time at University, I don’t think I anticipated how warm and friendly he would be – and how much I would regard him as a friend of mine in the years to come. As we discovered today, there is a large overlap in our areas of interest and the kinds of things we do in our free-time so I’m eager to see what I can indulge in with good company before I leave this city.

There are only about 6 weeks left now, if I look at my calendar a little more closely. That doesn’t feel like too much time. Summer will hit us all soon and I am fairly certain this means time will feel like it is stretching out, but perhaps it provides us with the perfect opportunity to begin planning the things I want to tick-off my bucket list.

A morning run on the Sabarmati Riverfront is one of them.

A meal at Sam’s Pizza is another.

Holi-Days

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Holi is usually a very vibrant time on campus. Especially when it occurs midweek. The only thing I look forward to, since I’m a little averse to how much Holi one can play, is the thandai they prepare in the mess for us each year. I’m looking forward to that this year as well. However, University declared the Monday before Holi (tomorrow) a holiday. That has meant a 4-day long weekend, and most people have taken advantage of this to take trips and go places – or to go home and visit their families. I wasn’t too interested in travel, given my music exam and my general lazy desire to spend time on campus as much as possible – to enjoy all of it before we graduate. Campus is incredibly dead though, and it reminds me of some of the nicest time I spent here, back in December 2017.

The quiet and long weekend also offers the opportunity to use time however you wish. I spent my entire day reading The Chronicles of Narnia, aside from doing the work that I needed to get done and ticking off things on my OneNote to-do list. [I love OneNote and it has dramatically changed my life, but more about that later]

Narnia was a world I was not introduced to when the movie came out in 2005. I was deemed too young to be exposed to that genre of film, and ended up watching the movie to prepare for my watching of Prince Caspian. Prince Caspian released the day my Grade 5 final exams ended in 2008, the same year we relocated from Dubai to Bangalore. To celebrate, my mother allowed me to invite all my friends to my house [we broke the curtain rod, which disappointed me] and took all of us out to Al-Ghurair Mall to watch Prince Caspian in the evening. We were understandably an excited bunch of 10-12 year olds. My mother and my uncle knew nothing about Prince Caspian, and I remember them cluelessly looking to us to try to understand our joy at the return to Narnia and all of the adventures the Royals went on through the entire show. My mom also did this incredible thing [I really do not know when], where she made us take a photograph outside the Prince Caspian poster and made us all individual mugs with the photo on it.

My memory of Narnia is just that. That amazing day, filled with wonder. I didn’t watch the third movie. Today, Goodreads prompted me that The Chronicles were the most-read in the Fantasy genre this week, which was more than enough excuse to launch into myself.

What a fabulous day it has been. I’ve been sitting on my laptop, in my room, yet transported with each book into a new adventure. Launched into a world other than my own. Narnia fulfilled everything that good fiction books have done for me. They’ve all allowed me to live a life that’s removed from the life I live here. Another planet, almost, where anything appears possible, and chapter on chapter, the unimaginable takes place.

Love that fifth year is giving me so much time and reason to read.

The Theory of Music: A Personal Arc

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When things go south, I find solace in work. I do always think about things – I think long and hard, and I think things through. I’m a compulsive overthinker. It is my hamartia, I’m aware of that. Work consoles me. It gives me the opportunity to shut my brain away from the thinking when it’s counterproductive. It allows me to shut out the outside world and concentrate wholly on efforts that are entirely within my sphere of control to try to achieve ends I’m searching for. It gives me space to think about other things for some time before I go back to thinking about everything else. When things weren’t going well for me because of my actions at the end of 2019, I went home and after some time, decided to try to find things to put my mind to.

My history with music is documented too much on this blog. Quick recap: went to lessons, dropped out of lessons, posted stuff on Soundcloud, stopped playing for a while, resumed lessons now.

When I started studying music, my teacher made me study music theory – to prepare me for exams from the board that I was learning from at the time. I didn’t enjoy it. Especially Grade 1. I sort of knew most of it, so it never felt like I was learning anything new at all. At that age, I struggled to see how the knowledge contributed to my ability to understand music or my playing in any manner. There was also a large amount of homework to do each week, which didn’t materially help my levels of satisfaction. Grade 2 was a little better but we stopped midway through because my practical examinations needed a lot more in terms of my time and attention given that I was skipping Grades. Getting older has given me some maturity in terms of appreciating holistic knowledge. I enjoy knowing things to the most complete point I am capable of, and searching for gaps in my knowledge to plug them in with information. It feels like continuous improvement that I can materially see, and it gives me an enormous amount of satisfaction.

So when, in winter, I resolved to relearn my piano playing, I decided not to half-ass it this time. I committed to going to lessons properly. I wanted to learn how to read music again, because it’s a skill that’s equally as fascinating as being able to understand how to play music by ear. I also have come to realize that music, and most pieces of education aren’t things you can separate from each other. As you study portions of things, you sort of build overlapping competencies that help you along the way. I’ll explain and illustrate with two examples.

  1. The Musical Example: Learning scales and playing scales repeatedly. While useful in their own right, and a component of most examinations, playing scales repeatedly and perfecting them can get boring. Then you leave lessons and you’re trying to figure out pieces by ear – as you hear them. It’s easier to identify your keys and the key the song is in because you know what the scales sound like, note to note, and what notes are in the scale and out of the scale. It’s easier to identify progressions because you understand the tone and pitch any given key produces. If you didn’t play scales, I doubt you’d figure that out as easily.
  2. The Non-Musical Example: Studying the multiplication of fractions is extremely frustrating because it is difficult to see any practical use to when you will have to multiply fractions in your life. It is reasonable that you will come across some circumstance where you multiply fractions with whole numbers (here are three halves of a cake, how many whole cakes can we make?, for example), but fractions being multiplied against each other seems slightly less realistic. It’s, however, close to impossible to engage with calculus without being good with this skill. I learned this the hard way in Grade 11 and was reminded of one very bad evening in Grade 7 where my father and mother berated me for not knowing how to multiply fractions the day before my Math exam (after studying it for the whole year), and then taught the skill to me painfully well.

There are several other examples which prove this. For me, given the purpose with which I was starting (restarting) the piano studies, it felt difficult to ignore the theory aspects. I couldn’t put myself through lessons and I really wanted a challenge, so in December, I decided to self-study for the Music Theory Grade 5 examination. This was quite a stretch, given that I had only ever looked at the material for Grade 1 and 2 before. However, given that I was older, and that I had the time, and the fact that Grade 5, at least with the ABRSM is a precondition to attempting the higher Grades of any practical examinations, I was really motivated to give this a good shot.

If anyone’s attempting this, please visit this reddit link which is a question I asked about self-studying through to Grade 5 and some community answers which helped me prioritize my studying. Here’s the reddit link.

Over the past 2 months, I’ve been studying for a solid two hours each day, apart from lean patches and weekends I’ve taken off, and it’s been the most fulfilling journey imaginable. Last evening though, I got really scared. The exam was this morning and my usual fear of failing an examination came through in all its force. Of course, I turned to my dad. My dad reminded me I had done all of this for hobby purposes. He also wisely informed me there was no consequence to failing this exam. Truly, nothing. The exam and achieving the Grade would be a great affirmation of the studying I had done, but nothing prohibited a retake, and nothing took away from the kind of knowledge I gained – which was why I started this entire journey in the first place. I wanted to understand my classical music better, I wanted to know what went behind what composers think through and why some things sound better than others. That took the load off.

This morning, I basically told myself I just wanted to enjoy the exam. I walked out two hours later having had the happiest two hours I’ve had in a while, because I could figure out the questions. I understood the language they were written in, and the phrases they used – which meant that my studying had served its purpose. I read through some music and read through some more and imagined what it sounded like, which checked another box in my head. Of course, I answered 7 music theory questions, which was incredibly satisfying and fulfilling in its own right.

I don’t know if I’ll pass or not. I haven’t thought about it. There is a chance I will fail. I’m not worried. For the first time in my life, I’m actually not mortified at the thought of failing this exam. I’ll be disappointed if I fail, yes, but I’m not looking at this in terms of life and death, which is often how I’ve viewed exams.

This evening, after finishing up my work for the day, I started figuring out how to study for Grade 6, Grade 7 and Grade 8. I’ll work my way up through the material, and one day, give that Grade 8 exam. I’m looking forward to learning new things in music theory that felt intuitive but I couldn’t place my finger on (apparently that’s what the higher Grades are like).

I’m also considering working through the material from other boards – just to get a better-rounded view of this music theory business. It excites me. I’m very pleased that I took the decision to study all of this in December. It’s brought me closer to an art I knew I lost when I stopped my lessons – and it’s made me feel an incredible sense of attachment to a subject I felt (and feel) a large sense of imposter syndrome about.

Someone I knew once told me I was a passionfruit because I got incredibly passionate about the projects I took up. This feels like an adequate representation of that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.”