Tag: Blog

Great Electricity

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

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

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

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.