Personal

This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 19th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) I blame Mahe for this post. Hey, Jason! Can you please write an article on how to build a website like yours, where I can post my blogs? Check out her blogs, here and here. This one is squarely aimed at all the young ones, who are convinced that they need to be writing. (Maybe, it was me who convinced you, in the first place.) You are young (or like me, forever young) and broke (also like me). You need a place for your thoughts to call home. You need a place to write, and grow and focus more on what you want to say about life and what you study or what you work at, or the portfolio/showcase of thoughts you will slowly build. ...

I lost my Mai today. Until my mid 30s, I rued the gulf that stood between Mai and me. While my parents insistence on teaching us English, as our primary language has benefited me immensely, in most everything I do, the one thing that I feel sad about is that I speak my mother tongue (Konkani) in a slow halting manner. 1 Which meant that I never could talk well with my grandmother. I am one of her oldest grandchildren, and I never got to have heart to heart conversations with her, the way my other cousins did. And yet … ...

Yes, I preordered Cal Newport’s, A World without Email. https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/02/10/announcing-the-email-academy/ India folk, go here - https://www.amazon.in/World-Without-Email-Reimagining-Overload/dp/0241341418/ Having read 5 of his books, I know this will make a big difference to my life. What I have actually done though, is tried to repay Cal in a small manner for his podcast at https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/ ...

*Image, courtesy [Tom Gauld][tgt]* This post was first sent to my newsletter on February 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Welcome to the first, “serious” newsletter of 2021. This was supposed to be my year end post, but life, as usual got in the way. Now that I’ve jammed both the blogs together, most of the personal stuff is going to stay focussed on stuff about books and reading and writing and a few photos thrown in once in a while for good measure. Seems like that is what I was doing most of last year, anyway. ...

I have been telling the young ones, that reading the things they consider important, needs to be engaged. Engaged with the words. Engaged with the flow. With the author. Her ideas. The way she makes her case. Or tells her story. To wrestle with what is being said, or left unsaid. To build a mental model with the ideas being presented. To write it all down. To wrestle with the work and draw your own conclusions. (which might not necessarily be what the author intends). ...

This is just a play post to do a few things. One, I am now testing categories for the blog. So that the tech folk can subscribe only to the tech rss feed if need be. Second, I need to get into the swing of writing things again. It’s only been close to a month of not writing, but I already feel rusty 😂 I have been watching a lot of Netflix and other online streaming media last year. Well lot is relative. Definitely not as many as the books. But what I realise, is that I just spend my time endlessly browsing through what I want to watch rather than, you know, actually watching something. I also realise that most of my watching is mostly stuff I already watched. I want my old Holmes, or Yes Minister, or Suchet’s Poirot. Stuff I already have, offline. But not easily accessible, since it lies on an external hard disk, which I need to plugin to my desktop and then watch. ...