Tag: Daily Blog

Hair Maintenance

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This is the longest I’ve gone without cutting my hair. I’ve explored my relationship with haircuts on this blog, here, for example, but it’s only when you don’t have the ability to get a haircut that you’re able to truly define what the haircut means to you, and what, in a sense, it’s always meant. As a child, my father instilled in me very early on that I ought to have neatly cut hair. At University, I often relied on my benchmates in class to confirm whether my hair was long enough to necessitate the solo trip to the barbershop, and sitting through episodes of a Gujarati sitcom I did not want to enjoy but enjoyed anyway. The frequency with which I had my haircuts dropped from one every month to one every alternate month. My haircare routine was simple. Oil my hair once in a week, maybe twice, when it was longer, and shampoo every alternate day – to help with general cleanliness.

The shampooing felt necessary because of how much I sweat at college. There’s a humidity in Gujarat that just doesn’t exist in other States I’ve visited, and every two days I felt unclean if my hair wasn’t shampooed – because it began to smell, or something of the sort.

Now, this long hair I’ve now grown, which somedays, feels like a mane because it’s grown out the sides and the back, and merges into my beard when I grow that out, needs so much extra maintenance. It refuses to sit in place and behave the way I want it to. The thing I’ve learned about why haircuts are necessary, for me, isn’t just the practicality of having shorter hair. It’s also about being able to let go of this weight that grows on us month-on-month. It’s the same with nails. Each time you allow them to begin growing afresh, you allow yourself the opportunity to let go of all the stuff that’s burdened your head for months past.

Now? Things are a mess.

Calling Old Friends

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I love keeping in touch with people I’ve met in my life, because it’s difficult to look at any of the friendships or relationships I’ve had in the past and say “my life would be better without that person”. I think I’ve been privileged and fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful people – people I’ve had disagreements with, fundamental disagreements, people I’ve hurt, people who have hurt me, but all wonderful people with their hearts in the right place. So thinking back to friendships I no longer have access to is sometimes a painful thing. When my brain decides to meander along to that place, I often find it resting on my school friendships – because at the end of Grade 12 I felt like we had all just become one big blob of friends, but that vanished soon after. In a lot of ways this feels magnified in my head. My brain enlarges small issues, something I’ve been working on, and I’m sure this is one too. A small change in the way we kept in touch somehow magnifying that we weren’t friends, or as close anymore.

Yesterday I was thinking about three people I hadn’t heard from in ages, so I messaged them this morning and had short phone conversations with one of them. That’s what convinced me I had blown everything out of proportion. It felt like nothing had changed at all. We’d just gone our own paths, having stopped for a while to meet each other along the way, but taken different turns after meeting – with different destinations in mind. Those roads aren’t that far apart that you can’t find the space to meet again. Phone conversations feel like the best way to do that, even if you just recall how you met the last time. I think I want to do these sort of catch-ups more, even if I’ve derided the practice in the past. Maybe it’s just a result of the conversation today, and maybe it’s just the circumstances – but calling old friends and hearing from friends with whom I went to school will always occupy a special place in my heart.

Taking Pictures

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I’m not great with photography. Not in terms of it being a hobby, or a profession for me, but in terms of how I respond to requests for photographs, or when people ask me to take photographs generally. I’m usually okay with it, but I rarely take photos of everyday life, or of things I see around me on the day-to-day. Photographs for me, are reserved for trips I go on, or when I meet people I usually don’t meet. Special events, in essence.

This morning, while cleaning the house, I stopped at the wooden cabinet that contains photo-albums from when I was younger – these carefully compiled archives of regular moments of us as a family. I didn’t do anything “special”, I was just a regular baby-child, but my parents had captured every single moment. Or at least it felt that way. Each photo had a neatly-worded caption under it, and it felt like I could point to a photograph and my parents would tell me what transpired on that day in history. Of course, advances in technology have rendered hard-copies of photographs and physical archives a little moot in today’s world, but for that time, wow. It was incredible to look at how much effort went into compiling these, because they would have to put in a request for negatives to be developed into photographs and then select photographs from that pool to figure out which ones made the album.

We’ve got so much technology at our disposal today that I have an archive of most (if not all) photographs I’ve received since 2013, because everything’s just steadily backed up to the cloud. Today, though, after seeing all those images, I was looking back to photographs from University, to see if I could find some I’ve taken of my friends and I. I realized that there was a disproportionately low number of photographs – most of the photos I have from the past 5 years are just to commemorate things I’ve deemed special. Spending the last month in lockdown and recognizing University life’s come to an end, sometimes I wish I had more photos of the mundane. The dirty bathrooms, the dusty hostels from the first days I went back to campus, the room on each day. Just so I could look back on everyday of my life and point to something I wanted to cherish.

This blog makes it easy for me to do that with words, but I think one of the things I want to be doing more is taking more photographs. I was explaining this to my parents today. A large reason why I didn’t take photographs was because I felt they would take away from the experience of living a moment out in first-person, because I’d look through my phone or camera lens to capture it. I prefer, in that I’m more comfortable with words, so it always felt easier to describe the things I’ve seen or done using words. I guess that only conveys some of it though.

Stories are nicer when you can tell them using multimedia, to really engage with people’s senses, so to speak.

For me though, I want to be able to capture every day a little better. So starting today, I’m going to be trying to take a photograph a day. This was an ambition of mine for the newsletter as well, just so I could sneak in my perspective on things. This is just something I want to enjoy though.

I’m not going to “set-up” shots. I don’t think I want to do that as much. I’m just going to take a photo of one thing I find interesting each day. Maybe along the way I’ll learn a little more about photography too.

Let’s see how this experiment pans out.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 28/30

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Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.

Gosh, today’s prompt is a doozy. So many rooms to pick from.

A-201 

The bedroom was to the left of the hall,
Its door right behind the tiny desk I called my office,
You wouldn’t have considered the possibility that 3 slept in the room,
But for us, it never felt too little.

Straight ahead from the door was the attached bathroom,
A small alleyway to the right led you to the rest,
A large king-sized bed to stretch out your legs,
White cupboards lining the walls to store clothes, books, the very best.

Originally there was a large, Alder Hardwood Table,
Resplendent in the light that hit it,
A Windows 98 Desktop computer rest comfortably there,
“Tell Me Why?” played on the VCR mounted in the right corner top,
On a small black television that I watched from the bed.

Soon, however, my parents wanted me to be independent,
So one summer, when I was in India – a remodelling was done –
The computer table disappeared altogether, the VCR did too,
I came back to find a bunk-bed in its place: capacity – one.

I’ve played cricket in the space between the bed and mine,
Chipped off edges of walls with tennis balls,
I’ve hit my head on the edge of the bed with a towel on my head
(Ruining my kindergarten photo no less),
And hurt myself in that house countless times.

However if I search within myself to find, really
Find the person I am,
It seems to me it all started in that room, because
Today I have a room with a bunk-bed, with cupboards underneath,
I keep my books neatly organized, stacked, yet, food in the room,
I do not eat.

The royal blue on my pin-board matches those old cupboards well,
And the wood in my room is Alder too,
You may leave houses and rooms, it is evident –
But they will never leave you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 27/30

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Today’s prompt is to write a poetic review.

Curd Rice 

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways –
I love thee as the perfect palate cleanser
Between courses in a meal,
The ultimate finale to them all.
I love thee as my meal itself,
With tadka, with pomegranate,
Or the simplicity in plain serving,
I love thee on plates,
In bowls,
And from banana leaves,
In English,
In Kannada,
In Tamil, and Hindi – even in tongues I don’t speak,
I love thee across continents,
Europe, the Americas, and
Africa too
I’ll find you to in Antarctica if I had to,
Mosaranna, I love you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 25/30

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It’s difficult to put a prompt like today’s into words, so here’s the hyperlink to the original. As is the case with most poems that ask me to do more than one thing, I find it easiest to try to incorporate as many as I can without taking too much stress.

10 Seconds

In a ten-second span a lot goes through my head,
Its’ incredible to me how I can sway from joy to
Angst, to sadness, to
Dread,
Yet what I admire is the tenacity of the brain – to
Find the small spots of yellow in a
Palette that can sometimes feel grey.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 23/30

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It’s a little sad that’s we’re down to our final week of GloPoWriMo already. Another 7 poems and we’re done for the year. Today’s optional prompt asks me to write a poem springboarding from the shape of a letter in the alphabet.

P

Like a proud windsock,
Or a hoisted flag,
A cutlass, unangled,
A scimitar with a handle,
Portable paper fans,
All of these represent the letter P,
Initially just a box in Hieroglyphy.

Vacuum Cleaners

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The first house I properly remember living in is a perfectly-sized apartment for a young one and two adults. It’s the house I remember having my first sleepovers in, where we folded out the green sofa we had and my friends and I slept there. It’s where I remember spilling milk on the wall because I accidentally knocked down an entire glass with my right hand, and it’s where I first remember eating my mother’s pizzas. Aside from these memories and more, including a bunk-bed surprise, my first tryst with a vacuum cleaner comes in this house.

We had a vacuum cleaner at all of the houses we lived in when I was younger. Now I’m not sure what brand it was – and whether we had only one vacuum for all those years or not, but I’ll explain whatever I remember of it. Memory is a fabulous thing, but it’s likely that the vacuum cleaner I describe is a blend of two vacuum cleaners we had. The only things I’m certain of is that it was either a Hoover or an Aftron, and it was either red, or silver.

The rest is honestly a whirr. Quite literally, a whirr – the most powerful whirr you’ve heard. Biswa has this lovely segment on the irritating sound that motorbikes make, and my vacuum cleaner hit that frequency and more. It was not possible to live in peace in that household when the vacuum cleaner was on. The size of the house made everything echo so you heard the vacuum whirring about 4 times for 1 whirr. While we moved across the corridor to a new house, I think that was the thing I was looking forward to the most – the fact that there was an extended passageway and multiple rooms made it almost certain that in the hall, the television would be protected from the vacuum cleaner’s engine.

That was not to be.

I disagree with this Physics principle on emotional grounds, but I learned that sound travels fastest in solids. Never was that more true than when one wall separated me from the vacuum cleaner. I was in the hall, watching television, eating food, while the house-help that assisted us with maintenance vacuumed the rooms. But the sound traveled through the walls and pierced my ears like nothing else.

I knew I would love living in India when we moved here and didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. The jadu did all the jadoo and swept away all sound. For years, I lived in silence, yet a clean surrounding at all points. Till I went to live in France for 6 weeks. The vacuum returned, and with it, all the trauma of my childhood. I was really grateful for a small house and a roommate, because I had to vacuum only half the time, and I could stay outside and far away from the sound when vacuuming was being done, but oh man – on the days I vacuumed, how I wished that these things made less sound.

I thought my saga with the vacuum cleaner had come to a close. Till this lockdown happened and I was home alone. Remember how I said we didn’t have a vacuum? Turns out, our vacuum was in hiding all along. My parents told me where it was to make my life easier, and the convenience of everything has made me love cleaning up the house and doing the chores every day. Vacuuming is a joy because you can see dirt disappear. Dust vanishes before your eyes revealing smooth surfaces. I am no longer scared to make a mess because I can vacuum it away.

I’ve learned how to deal with the sound. My solution so far has been to vacuum quick. It’s worked. My ears can tolerate short bursts of this (and the mixer), so I try not to expose myself to it for too much time on any given day.

However, I’ve made another discovery about the vacuum cleaner, a discovery that has changed my life – and is the sole reason I wrote this post.

You see, my assumption about the vacuum cleaner is that it sucked dust up into the unknown; a void where all dust disappeared never to be seen again. This morning, after finishing up my vacuuming I noticed the vacuum felt considerably more heavy than it did at the start of the month. Then I noticed some flaps. Naturally, I opened them. Lo and behold, the vacuum had an interior!

First, I examined the source of my pain, the vacuum’s motor. After which I found the vacuum’s dust bag where I saw a collection of all the dust and hair the vacuum had sucked up over the past month. I gagged.

Turns out, dust isn’t decimated by the vacuum cleaner. It’s collected and stored for us to clean out. For it’s convenience this machine really sucks, I must say. First it makes that horrible sound, then I have to see and clean the dust it collects? We need a vacuum cleaner that instantly burns all the dust it collects and leaves ash or something. Some technology advancements are owed to society after this medical crisis blows over.

That’s been my adventure of the day.

Open-Ness

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There are several things I’ve taken up during this lockdown: things I’m finding helpful to give me a sense of routine, as well as mini-goals to look forward to each day to keep busy while being away from University and sitting at home. So far, I’m enjoying all of them. For the most part, each day feels distinct from the last (on occasions I don’t write, the days sort of meld together). I start each day clearly knowing what I’m trying to do through the day, which I find particularly helpful, and I end each day feeling grateful for having the day to spend the way I’ve wanted to – without University pressures or anything of the sort.

I have, however, noticed one thing. Most of this, whether it’s the research I’m working on, or the new skills I’m trying to learn, or even the reading I’m doing – it’s all happening on open-source software systems, or openly accessible sources that are not behind a paywall. Paywalls are prohibitive, and that argument stands, and yes, of course, I could get behind the paywall by paying a fee and breaking it down. However, most of the things I’m enjoying at the moment, including plays and concerts are happening on software that doesn’t contain paywalled content – take Twitch, or YouTube.

This is an incredible thing.

I fully understand neither Twitch or YouTube are fully free, but you get my point. The content I’m accessing is free, and for the majority part, most content is. Select portions of content are behind the paywall.

Now, I’m conservative with the money I spend, so it takes me a while to commit to spending on something, including books and resources. I usually turn to open source stuff anyway, since they’re almost at par with their paid compatriots.

However, the current success of openly accessible things is telling me one thing. After this coronavirus pandemic ends, I’m joining the open-access brigade with more passion and fervour. I understand the economics of things, but I think the open-access model can be made viable if people chip in and actually contribute to things, and financial backers end up backing these open-access things. And opening up access opens up a world to the person creating whatever media is being consumed because more people will consume the good.

Atleast go freemium.

And not barebones freemium.

The Theory of Music: A Personal Arc (II)

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In the first part of this personal arc, I basically explored what theory of music had become for me at the time: a personal project – something to set my mind to. I wrote that post in the first week of March, having just completed my ABRSM Grade 5 Music Theory exam – at a point where I didn’t worry too much about the result at all. Truth be told, I frankly didn’t think about the results past that first week. Too much has happened in the world generally, and to me, personally, since. The events of that week, and of that day feel like a blur in my memory, since most of my time went in preparing.

My results came in this morning, and I was elated to discover I had passed.

I was thrilled. Of course, some portion of this joy came out of passing the exam and not having to think about that Grade anymore. A larger portion, however, stemmed out of the fact that I had accomplished these results by self-studying. Mind you, these are not excellent results – I achieved a Pass. However, the satisfaction of seeing my own effort bear fruit and reflect well according to the yardstick to which I prepared is not something I’ve experienced to often before. Large swathes of material have been taught to me, or I’ve been fortunate to have good teachers for. With the ABRSM exam, I had access to the same resources everyone preparing for the examination did: the standard examination content. It felt nice to look at today’s result, and say – hey, I did that!

About 15 minutes in, after telling my parents, I had some time to step away from things and look at these results a little more carefully. Yes, I had done that. I had actually put in the effort to prepare according to the curriculum designed, and actually learn everything I was interested in learning for the exam. It was uncanny, therefore, to think about the role the Universe had played in all of this. What prompted me to look up music theory, when I was at home in December – when I could have chosen any project at all? How great was it that an exam was available in March, giving me precisely the right window of opportunity to prepare? How fortuitous was I to be able to study for that exam – and write it, exactly 7 days before the number of coronavirus cases in India began to rise?

I looked at the results a little differently. They felt blessed – like some conspiracy had worked in my favour, and I felt more grateful – not just for all of this, but for the background I had in classical music that allowed me to tap into a reservoir of knowledge while preparing for the examination. For the network that enabled me to ask my friends doubts where I had them, and for the means to afford the preparatory material and the examination itself.

When I looked beyond the results, I thought about how much this examination gave me. It gave me a chance to study and drive myself toward an objective of mine, and an opportunity to rediscover classical music in a way I had only shallow knowledge of before. I am no expert on theory today, but I loved learning all the information I picked up during the examination, and I’m eager to see how much more I can learn. It rekindled and reactivated a part of my brain I had put to ‘sleep’ mode for 6 years, since Grade 11 and my antics on FL Studio.

Aside from all of this, it got me to think closely about why I gravitated toward theory. Why does theory fascinate me? Why do I enjoy studying theory? Of course, the easy answer lay bare in front of me – these were the only examinations I was confident of preparing for without guidance. Other optional answers also felt easily accessible – that the theory examination is a prerequisite to the practical examinations with the ABRSM at higher grades, and that they help with a holistic understanding of the music we are training to play, and all sorts of things.

My love affair with the theory of music, however, pointed me to something very fundamental about the way I approach things. I thought back to Grade 11, and why I struggled with Physics the first time around. The theoretical foundations we had built in the subject at the IGCSE were toppled on their heads, and with poor guidance, coping with that change felt seismic. I thought back to things like fractions: the easy stuff that people understood in Mathematics because they could envision fractions as practical problems, but I found ridiculously difficult because they felt so abstract. I struggle with videogames that don’t have explanations for actions: which is why I couldn’t play Ratchet & Clank well, ever, but I could play Runescape reasonably okay.

It pointed me to how I prefer understanding and studying things – from the ground-up. Theoretical information somehow feels like it brings a sense of order and stability to the practical. Even if as an afterthought, or an aberration that helps to elucidate a creative passion, the theory underlying artistic license fascinates me because it suggests that things in this world as explicable. That fundamentally appeals to me, and the fact that there is a dynamism to this explanation owing to varying perspectives and schools is something I find most enjoyable.

So yes, I passed my theory of music exam, and the theory of music has become a part of my daily life. Along the way though, I had the chance to think about theories generally – and I liked that very much too.

To-Read

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It’s now been exactly a month since we were asked to leave campus. In several ways, this has been a month where I’ve been able to do all of the things I’ve envisaged doing with my time, but never been able to do because I’ve consistently been under the impression that I didn’t have the time to do these things. Rather, I didn’t make time for them. Things like learning the guitar – and reaching out to my friends for help with that. Or learning coding, and reaching out to my friends for that too. Writing book reviews and reading books every day too.

A result of the book reviews I’m writing every day now is that I spend a lot of time on Goodreads. Since 2016, Goodreads has been my go-to for several things: book recommendations, making friends,keeping track of my own reading. While I’ve waxed eloquent about how much I love the algorithm because it has introduced me to some great books, today, while uploading my latest review, I saw that the algorithm recommended a book whose plot made me instantly decide not to read it. I decided to look at some of my other current recommendations – and what I noticed was a disturbing trend of some poor recommendations, especially those that stem out of my to-read shelf.

I blamed the algorithm for a few seconds before recognizing that if this was a trend, there’s likely an issue with my to-read shelf that’s leading to these suggestions in the first place. I had about 500 books on there, accumulated largely in the past 6-7 months. Since I’m someone who enjoys a large range of books, in terms of the genres I read and like exploring, I generally add a book to my to-read shelf the minute the blurb looks interesting – without really looking at much else. Glancing through my to-read shelf I realized my mistake instantly. These are too many books whose subjects no longer interest me at all, and books I wonder when I was interested in even, resting on the to-read shelf.

I cleared it all out in 10 clicks.

My to-read shelf now contains 0 books. I’m going to build it from scratch, and actually follow-through on reading the books I add to that to-read shelf. While it’s likely to grow faster than I read books I add to the list, I feel like this will make me genuinely interested in tracking my interests and reading habits over time. I’m going to move books around shelves as well. I’ve created a “Not Now” shelf for books I add to the “To Read” shelf but decide to discard for the time being. That way atleast the algorithm can differentiate recommendations for me.

Only one of those ten clicks made me feel things. That last one. Oh, it was brutal.

It was only when I clicked that final time that it hit me that I had effectively just discarded all the books that I was curious about in the past 5 years – without reviewing them or taking a back up. I felt sad for a few minutes and ate a chocolate bar to overcome that.

I wouldn’t have read those books anyway though, honestly. Not one of my to-read books has “purposefully” made its way to my “read” shelf. It’s happened by accident.

Let’s see what I discover next.