Excursions

We had guests at our home today early in the morning. Usually, I would get a lot flustered when there’s an unplanned visit. Not today, as these are the guests that I generally look forward to meeting in real #life. And the meeting we had. It started with lots of chitchats about nothing in particular. Chitchats are usually that, aren’t they?

We followed it up with a brunch, all delicacies of our choice and liking. Home delivered. A movie screening with popcorn at home. Winding the fun down with fresh mango ice cream. Everything was sprinkled throughout with lots of chatter and laughter.

I love such pleasant mornings when you meet folks you enjoy spending time with.

On the other hand, this messed up my routine thoroughly. I didn’t do anything that I had planned to do. A couple of projects have been pushed to tomorrow. Some planned study time with my daughter got delayed. I hardly spent time alone with myself as there was none left. I didn’t exercise; I screwed up my diet. I hardly read anything – the streak, alas, is broken.

Fortunately, a streak that isn’t broken yet is spending the time before bed staring at the cursor blinking in this space. That I enjoy doing, and I am glad I didn’t miss it even on a day like today of messed up routine.

I thoroughly enjoyed Vaalvi, a Marathi dark comedy thriller. I don’t remember the last time I laughed out this loud while the characters in the movie handled one serious situation after another. I wasn’t laughing at the idiocy of the film or the characters; rather, the movie wanted me to laugh. Therein lies the brilliance of this film.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it’s an intelligent film. Sure, it has moments where it leans towards absurdity. But if you recognise the tight budget for Marathi movies and ignore such rare moments, you can enjoy even the absurdity thoroughly.

I wish this movie was more readily available. Do watch the trailer – I am sure you will enjoy it.

There is a sudden rise in minimal blogging engines that claim to have simple, no-nonsense writing interfaces. I guess many developers realise there is no point in fighting the big platforms like WordPress and Ghost on the features they are pros at. Strip out everything bloggers do not want and call that a simple system. But it is difficult to be simple and still attract users – you can’t roll out the same features WordPress has, just in black and white.

As I have noted in a couple of #meta posts till now, write.as does it well. It has got a brilliant writing interface and a wonderful default reading experience. It is not minimal. It is just pleasant enough. And it is in this restrained form that it achieves simplicity and yet looks and behaves aesthetically to appeal to users.

In quest of going minimal, many systems strip out the polish off the features they provide. They look ugly. To me, it matters how the systems look. If where I write doesn’t give me a pleasant vibe, I may not visit the place that often. I am picky about the fonts in the places I read stuff at. Flaunting system default fonts is not my definition of simplicity.

A simple system is not one that makes and gives no choices. Instead, it makes bold, opinionated choices.

It was a wonderful morning today – I spent time reading and #writing a lot. Nothing public. I made a journal entry in Day One after almost a month. And read a few posts from the read-later backlog. As I browse social timelines daily, I come across many excellent articles that I push to be read later. The list, though, continues to pile up. In my read-later queue are articles going back years which I know I would never reach. But they stay there, forgotten.

I do not like this and wish I would improve on both – make private journaling and reading from my feeds & queues more regular. However, I recently found brilliant services for this.

Given my love for Day One, I was psyched to read the recent update of it being available on the web. It makes the service even more accessible. I made today’s entry from the web interface itself, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how clean the experience was. With the feature still in Beta, though, the developers have warned of the possibility of losing the data. That’s not something I would like; hence I logged off immediately. But I do see the potential.

I am enjoying using Readwise Reader (also in Beta) as my read-it-later service. It has everything I want - support for subscribing to RSS feeds and newsletters. However, the most significant benefit is its integration with Readwise (duh, of course). So my highlights from the articles are regularly presented along with those from the books on Kindle. I love the experience Reader provides and wish to use it more.

I find it funny, though, that it is not my smartphone that I enjoy doing either of these tasks. Instead, the smartphone continues to be a distraction, something to be kept feet away from myself while reading or writing. That is all.

I watched all four episodes of The Romantics today. I loved the first two that documented the early life of Yash Chopra and the Yash Raj Films. I especially enjoyed the references to the early 90’s movies – especially the music. That was also my biggest gripe with the docuseries – it just didn’t speak enough about Yash Chopra’s taste in music. And his love for lyrics.

I remember listening once to Javed Akhtar on how valuable the lyrics, the words, and the poetry was to Yash Chopra. “If music is the body of a song, lyrics are its soul,” Javed Akhtar had said. Yash Chopra understood that.

So as I got nostalgic while listening to all the songs from the yesteryears – Waqt, Kabhi Kabhi, Silsila, Chandni, Darr – play in the background, I wished the makers of The Romantics had spent a whole episode just on his appreciation and quest for good music. There are so few Indian directors left who still value music as a core identity of movies. Yash Chopra was one of them.

Somedays are frustratingly productive, leaving me drained to the core. I am that today. What started as a routine day gradually turned into a busy nightmare as it went along. The only positive is that it was productive. I did everything that I had planned to complete in the morning, and then I did some more. I also checked off a couple of unplanned but priority tasks that got added to my list.

I am not fond of such a level of productivity. Not that I don’t want to work. I love working, especially when that work involves any amount of coding. The more complicated the problem, the better I feel.

But I have found over 17 years of working that such productivity levels aren’t sustainable. They leave me exhausted, needing that much more of a downtime and cool-off period. I would prefer consistently efficient days to the occasional burst of high productivity.

That said, there is some innate pleasure in such productive days. As I wind off the day well spent today, there is a smile of satisfaction on my face. Could I push some work to tomorrow? Sure. But it becomes difficult to pull away once I am in the flow.

One would think that years of experience at work make you immune to such bouts of focus. But there is no negating the drive for productivity. Especially for someone who loves what he does. Someone like me.

It’s summer enough for a nice natural’s ice-cream. With dry fruits overloaded.

Since uninstalling YouTube from my phone, the first result that comes up as I start searching for the app (typing “yo”) is Day One. I take that as a nudge to get away from the phone. I like that! 😎

Too much is said about how AI - ChatGPT & likes - is already challenging our being. Our personhood. But AI can learn from and build over only its training data.

What makes us human is we invent our own training data. As long as we keep the bulbs in our heads flashing, we have nothing to fear.

I have always carried a clean-shaven face, yet I often want to sport a beard. Sure, I frequently keep an unkempt stubble. 2-3 days of facial hair is my look when I am not meeting someone. But if we are going out, I shave. Or if we are expecting guests at home, I shave. And if I see a tired me looking back at me in the mirror, I shave. Keeping a beard hence has not been easy for me.

I inherited this clean look from my father, who he shaves daily without a miss. That is part of his morning routine. A cup of tea can wait. I have rarely seen him with stubble, let alone a full-grown beard.

Yet, as I write this, I carry a week’s stubble on my face today. I am pretty certain that I want to grow a beard this time. There is a fad amongst men in India to keep a well-trimmed beard. And that last part makes me nervous. It is not easy to keep a beard. It takes effort to maintain it. The beard needs attention. It needs grooming. I know because I already feel itchy after a week without shaving.

I know there are oils and beard washes to help with the discomfort.

But I ask myself, why put myself through all this trouble? Why not just go with what I know and am more comfortable with? Am I ready to pay the price of experimentation on the face? Well, time to find out tomorrow.