Tag: Daily Blog

Sleep-in’

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

The weekend is usually when my roommate and I both catch up on any sleep we’ve lost over the course of the week. Or, in the case of fifth year, overcompensate for the sleep deficit we’re battling from the last four years.

I was speaking to some classmates from school yesterday about how it’s been 5 years since we gave our board examinations to get out of school, and how it’s been 7 years since our 10th Grade boards. The one thing that cracked us up was how these board exams seemed like the scariest endeavour at the time, but we’re looking back at it like it was some joke. I wouldn’t trade-off the effort I put in for my boards for anything; I loved studying for all of them, and I really enjoyed the month of giving exams. I would, however, take away the kind of stress I put myself under at the time. Wholly unnecessary. Maybe without it, I could’ve enjoyed the process a lot more.

In any case, the reason I mentioned boards is because what we also realized is that there’s a ton of information from our education that we don’t use everyday that’s still trapped in our brains. An example is the concept of an “oxygen deficit”. When I see sleep deficit, or actually, wherever I see the word “deficit”, that’s the only concept I associate it with. Even though it’s wholly incorrect. The Board I studied taught us the concept as an “oxygen debt”, but I remember it as an oxygen deficit instead. Why? I don’t know. But I can still tell you exactly what the syllabus needed us to remember. It was this: Oxygen debt is removed after exercise and during recovery thanks to aerobic respiration of lactic acid in the liver, the continuation, after exercise, of fast heart rate to transport lactic acid in blood from muscles to the liver, and the continuation, after exercise, of deeper breathing supplying oxygen for aerobic respiration of lactic acid.

How this information is something I need to remember verbatim in my life on the daily is not something I understand. Yet, I do. What I was wondering about this morning, when I thought about the sleep deficit I’ve accrued, is if there’s a similar process of recovery outlined somewhere.

All I know is that my process of recovery involves a ton of sleep. I woke up this morning, ate breakfast, and came back and slept till lunch. After going for a run in the evening, I slept another two hours.

It was awesome.

Catchy Tunes

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Our brain is ridiculously wondrous in its sheer complexity. One of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out is how my brain classifies different kinds of music as being catchy – and how each of us has such uniquely different tastes in music, or the kind of music that we end up humming along to/that we find catchy. More specifically, how despite all of these variations in our tastes, pop radio ends up ensuring that we end up humming along to the same tunes. It’d be extremely difficult, for example, to find someone who didn’t find the song “Happy” peppy and upbeat – whose rhythm was lodged in their brain immediately upon a first listening. This is similar of other songs too – “Moves Like Jagger” is another one that comes to mind immediately.

Okay, I’m not thinking about this remotely as academically as I make it sound in the above paragraph – I just re-read what I had written. Honestly, what I’m trying to understand is why this song – “Sing It With Me“, which has an incredibly humorous/cute music video is absolutely stuck in my head. I first heard it yesterday, and it’s been playing on loop throughout the day. Quite literally, every minute of my run today was spent listening to this song, which is not something I’m used to.

The science community owes me an explanation. I don’t particularly take issue with the fact that the song is stuck in my head – because I quite like it, honestly, but I feel like this is going to be on loop for a while now, or at least till I find another song to replace it.

I’m probably going to spend the rest of the day reading about this. Leads, as always are welcome.

Update:

I took a break in posting this because I wanted to see if I could at least contribute an amalgam of some observations from what I’ve read. Apparently most catchy songs do a couple of things:

  1. Start off lower than the highest pitch they will eventually reach;
  2. Have a lot of repetitions in patten;
  3. Have a consistent rhythm/bassline; and, shockingly
  4. Apparently resemble earlier, well-known pieces of music, like nursery rhymes.

This means two things:

  1. I’m now trying to figure out how many songs I’ve heard fit the bill (the answer is, several)
  2. I now feel like I have the tools to clearly make a pop song that gets stuck in everyone’s brains.

Classes (and Jokes)

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I do believe that the faculty who teach us are well aware that we, as a batch in the final semester, are paying very, very little attention to what they are teaching. The subjects aren’t core papers, or as necessary as to amass widespread inherent interest among every student. One would understand the number of students whose interests are captured falling, especially given that we are on the cusp of completing our degree – but they’re dwindling. They’re so low, you can see people falling asleep or deciding to do their own thing in the classroom within 5 minutes of attendance being taken. I digress though. The force of this paragraph was meant to convey that the faculty know this information. They know that we care very little – but that we will pay attention if something is being communicated about portions, internals, or something else that’ll genuinely concern us.

Sometimes they adopt that strategy to get us to look up for a few minutes. Very unexpectedly, someone will say the words “Continuous Evaluation”, and for a couple of minutes everyone’s heads will shoot up. If nothing, to memorize the date when it’s due so you can ask the batch what is actually due the evening before the deadline – sometimes even the morning of. Or they’ll say the word “Internal” and all of a sudden you’ll be awoken from any slumber to try to understand if there’s an added component of work they’re going to make you do in final sem.

Some faculty are genuinely trying. We’re allowed to take laptops into class for drafting, which keeps you interested because there’s a bigger screen to stare at. That faculty is being super innovative. Apart from his usual quirkiness and sharing thoughts of the day with us (which are genuinely nice to watch), he’s been using technology to keep us engaged with what he’s teaching. Even if it doesn’t get the whole class hooked; it’s worth applauding the effort.

Today, however, I saw something that I think I’d like to practice if I ever get a teaching job. The art of the poor joke, executed to perfection. You see, a part of being in the last semester is a bunch of people leaving class citing various excuses – and not returning because there really is no incentive to return once you’ve left and veered out of class. One faculty sensed someone leaving – catching them just as they shut the door, and exclaimed “yeh dekho, pehli wicket gayi”

Now you see; there is no way for me to explain how fantastic her comic timing was on this joke. It was perfect. She also chose a cricket joke – which is universally understood in India. The best part was that she kept following it up with other cricket jokes: she drank water in the middle & called it her “drinks break”, and when she caught someone unsuccessfully sneaking out, she called it a “dropped catch”.

As you can tell, the jokes got worse as the class progressed. Nonetheless, it gave me material for this blog post, and caught my attention sufficiently such that I missed my mid-day snooze.

I wonder what the faculty will try tomorrow.

Sourcery

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Yes, the title of this post is a nod to the Discworld series, which I was very kindly introduced to by one of my friends when I was in my third year – and a series that I am yet to fully read through. This will be the year that happens, I feel that in my bones. But this is not a post about magic, or any of those arts. It’s more about the news and the ways I consume news on the daily.

I’ve been reading the newspaper for a long time. My introduction to the newspaper was originally because my cursive writing was suffering a little, so my father thought it would help me if I could copy out an entire news article – specifically the Editorial each day. The habit lasted around a month or so, before it faded away. As a source of information, my mother put me to task by offering up the newspaper on the table when I ate my cereal. I didn’t understand most of it in Grade 4 or Grade 5, but I got into the habit of reading as I ate breakfast. I started from the Sports section, a section I definitely understood, and stopped at the middle pages because it was time to go to school.

In Grade 6 and 7, I read nothing news-related. I don’t even actually remember too much of what was newsworthy between those years. Grade 8 saw a shift of schools and of priorities and things, and as I began to debate a little more and attend Model United Nations conferences, I understood the value of being a little more informed about the happenings in the world. I began to read the paper when I was in the mood to do so. It was by no means daily. My mom read the paper daily and my dad was super well-informed about regional information, which meant there was some amount of pressure at home for sure, but it often manifested itself in the form of my mother clipping out articles from the paper or writing “Tejas To Read” in an attempt to ensure I actually read.

Grade 9 and 10 saw me introduced to mint and mint lounge. That was influenced in part by my desire to understand international economics and international finance better. What it ended up doing though is broadening the kind of information I sought out on the internet when I surfed it daily from the beanbag in my room. I became a little obsessive about the Model UN circuit in Bangalore around the same time, and I genuinely believed that aside from oratory skills something essential to success in the activity was being a little more informed. I used that as an excuse to read all sorts of things related to the agendas I was researching for.

In Grades 11 and 12, when I began to prepare for the Common Law Admission Test, I subscribed to The Economist and a magazine that was aimed at competitive exam aspirants: Pratiyogita Darpan/Competition Success Review. I took the weekly/monthly editions and carried it in my bag, reading it on the bus ride to and from school, when I wasn’t sleeping. Those became my primary sources of world information.

Graduating to University saw me understand how biases function in media and reporting – an offshoot of my experiences debating, and I tried to pepper my news diet with a range of sources across the spectrum. My reading is eclectic, to say the least. I remember that for some time in second year, Facebook News became my go-to to find out what was happening in the world. It was a crazy time.

In the last one year, something I’ve noticed is that I’ve started to read the Guardian with an alarming frequency. It started off because I followed a couple of football matches and formula one races on the guardian website and enjoyed the reporting there. Subsequently, I read through a couple of news reports about Brexit, and one longform article, which looked good. I downloaded the mobile application. Soon I had subscribed to a couple of newsletters they sent out. Then I added them to my Feedly. And my goodness, there’s so much content they churn out every single day. More often than not, the conclusion of any perspective or argument they put out ends up agreeing with my internal biases and prima facie opinions I’ve formed, which means I go along to recommend that article to people as well.

That’s created a bit of an echo chamber for me, which I’m trying to tackle by exploring alternate sources of reporting as well.

But that doesn’t solve the problem entirely. Search algorithms all over the internet appear to have picked up the frequency with which I visit The Guardian’s website, because most of my top hit results are from that site as well. And the world must be working in some really, really mysterious ways because GUESS WHAT – the last book I read? It’s called Play It Again. I picked it up because the story appealed to me: a non-fiction tale of an older man trying to learn Chopin’s Ballades.

The man is the Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian.

So, this is a plea: if you have other sources that write as broadly, as well, and as engaging as The Guardian’s pieces are, recommend them to me. Thank you. Sidenote: they should be free too.