Now
A sporadically updated log of what I'm doing, reading or exploring at different points of time.
Now pages are less transient than a Twitter feed but more fluid than my About page.
Now
A sporadically updated log of what I'm doing, reading or exploring at different points of time. Now pages are less transient than Twitter but more fluid than my About page.
September 2024
September has been, without a doubt, the most trying month this year. It felt borderline comedic, trying to project stability and confidence outside while storms churned inside. The details I will leave between me and the pages of my journal, but I think I might’ve undergone a paradigm shift especially about my health and priorities in life. I feel grateful that I have a stable job and kind mentors who allow me the occasional slip while also acting as my anchor so I don’t remain adrift. I, however, still continue to beat myself up when I see dips in my productivity, and need to learn to treat myself with more grace.
I’m still in the thick of getting comfortable with agency and assertiveness. I tried to accelerate my progress with a session of therapy, but I was assigned someone who had no experience of corporate life and was also the same age as me, which wasn’t terribly reassuring. I realised I actually want someone who can work as a coach with, I guess, a CBT style of working. I’m still shopping around for someone who can give me that insight into myself and coach me without breaking the bank.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the kind of role I tend to gravitate towards in my career. For lack of a better word, I’m calling it an “amoeba” role: something that is defined by its very lack of definition. My seedling note on it captures how I think about it at the moment, but I’m sure my perception and comfort level will change over time. I still have minor crises about the risks of not following a linear path within a traditionally linear system, but I’m working through it.
I read a handful of books this month, which I’m really happy about. A Master of Djinn: fantastic world-building, but poor character-building and several instances where the story fell flat immediately after a momentous build-up. The Appeal was quite fun, despite the unpopular reviews. I felt like I was playing a game of Cluedo in book form. If We Were Villains was also a cracking read a la Donna Tartt (and, as a former Eng Lit student, anything that builds on Shakespeare has a place in my heart). I begun The Bee Sting by Paul Murray but the sudden change in writing style—a hundred pages of absolutely no punctuation— 1/3rd of the way in didn’t endear me to it. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a year.
I finally finished Castlevania: Nocturne and I loved it. I binge-watched a season of Emily in Paris on one particularly brain-rotting day and never went back to it, for good reason. In light of Maggie Smith’s passing (still very sad about that), I’ve picked back up on Downton Abbey.
My newsletter is still going strong, but there’s been an annoying development that I have no control over and don’t know how to fix. International subscribers can’t pay for my newsletter, which runs on Stripe by default, because Stripe doesn’t allow payments to Indian accounts anymore. Thanks to that, my paid subscriptions have plummeted and I’ve been getting frantic messages from subscribers who want another way to pay for my newsletter (which, separately, is something I’m extremely grateful for and humbled by). For now, I’ve hacked it with a Buy Me a Coffee page, but that means I have to monitor monthly payments and manually add and remove paid subscribers. I’m not sure how to make this process more seamless, and am on the verge of collapsing my paid tier entirely, even though the supplementary income helps so much. If anyone reading this knows a better fix, please please please let me know.
August 2024
For the first time in what I know to be years, I'm actually enjoying the rainy season in Bangalore (and also in the Nilgiris, where I just spent four days that, collectively, felt like a deep, releasing, cleansing breath). I think it has everything to do with how brain-melting the summer months were; I am now revenge enjoying the cool, wet breeze and fresh smell of petrichor. The commute to my new workplace remains nightmarish, but I am slowly coming to terms with the futility of fighting it.
This continues to be a season of reflection and reframing for me, fuelled in part by all the truthful writing I've been doing for my newsletter. My working hypothesis is that I am very attuned to cognitive dissonance, but just as reluctant to make the changes I need to make for it to…vanish. At the same time that I try to separate work and the rest of my life, I now more clearly see the behaviours and tendencies I have that underpin and colour both my work and *vaguely gestures to everything else*. Ira Glass talks about recognising the gap between your current skills and the ambitious work you want to create — I, likewise, see a yawning gulf between who I am currently am and who I would like to arrive at.
My main watch over the past few weeks has been Cobra Kai. It's nerdy, it takes itself too seriously, it's downright hilarious, it's moving. In short, it's everything I could ever want in a show.
I also worked my way through my bedside reading stack over the last few weeks. The Burning God, the third book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, was disappointing and a chore to get through, which breaks my heart. My Goodreads review (read: rant) says everything I want to say about this book. Similarly disappointing was The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, which felt like a history textbook cosplaying as an Agatha Christie novel, and not in a good way.
The Ministry of Time, which I finished the night before I wrote this entry, was a much more interesting read. The sci-fi aspects leave a lot to be desired, I'm sure, but I've never been one to claim intellectual mastery over grandfather paradoxes and wormholes so this level of detail suited me just fine. I'm someone who would enjoy a mediocre story with great prose more than a great story mediocrely told, and this prose was luscious. Kailene Bradley wields metaphors like a scalpel and cuts to the bone with surgical precision.
August 2024
For the first time in what I know to be years, I'm actually enjoying the rainy season in Bangalore (and also in the Nilgiris, where I just spent four days that, collectively, felt like a deep, releasing, cleansing breath). I think it has everything to do with how brain-melting the summer months were; I am now revenge enjoying the cool, wet breeze and fresh smell of petrichor. The commute to my new workplace remains nightmarish, but I am slowly coming to terms with the futility of fighting it.
This continues to be a season of reflection and reframing for me, fuelled in part by all the truthful writing I've been doing for my newsletter. My working hypothesis is that I am very attuned to cognitive dissonance, but just as reluctant to make the changes I need to make for it to…vanish. At the same time that I try to separate work and the rest of my life, I now more clearly see the behaviours and tendencies I have that underpin and colour both my work and *vaguely gestures to everything else*. Ira Glass talks about recognising the gap between your current skills and the ambitious work you want to create — I, likewise, see a yawning gulf between who I am currently am and who I would like to arrive at.
My main watch over the past few weeks has been Cobra Kai. It's nerdy, it takes itself too seriously, it's downright hilarious, it's moving. In short, it's everything I could ever want in a show.
I also worked my way through my bedside reading stack over the last few weeks. The Burning God, the third book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, was disappointing and a chore to get through, which breaks my heart. My Goodreads review (read: rant) says everything I want to say about this book. Similarly disappointing was The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, which felt like a history textbook cosplaying as an Agatha Christie novel, and not in a good way.
The Ministry of Time, which I finished the night before I wrote this entry, was a much more interesting read. The sci-fi aspects leave a lot to be desired, I'm sure, but I've never been one to claim intellectual mastery over grandfather paradoxes and wormholes so this level of detail suited me just fine. I'm someone who would enjoy a mediocre story with great prose more than a great story mediocrely told, and this prose was luscious. Kailene Bradley wields metaphors like a scalpel and cuts to the bone with surgical precision.
August 2024
For the first time in what I know to be years, I'm actually enjoying the rainy season in Bangalore (and also in the Nilgiris, where I just spent four days that, collectively, felt like a deep, releasing, cleansing breath). I think it has everything to do with how brain-melting the summer months were; I am now revenge enjoying the cool, wet breeze and fresh smell of petrichor. The commute to my new workplace remains nightmarish, but I am slowly coming to terms with the futility of fighting it.
This continues to be a season of reflection and reframing for me, fuelled in part by all the truthful writing I've been doing for my newsletter. My working hypothesis is that I am very attuned to cognitive dissonance, but just as reluctant to make the changes I need to make for it to…vanish. At the same time that I try to separate work and the rest of my life, I now more clearly see the behaviours and tendencies I have that underpin and colour both my work and *vaguely gestures to everything else*. Ira Glass talks about recognising the gap between your current skills and the ambitious work you want to create — I, likewise, see a yawning gulf between who I am currently am and who I would like to arrive at.
My main watch over the past few weeks has been Cobra Kai. It's nerdy, it takes itself too seriously, it's downright hilarious, it's moving. In short, it's everything I could ever want in a show.
I also worked my way through my bedside reading stack over the last few weeks. The Burning God, the third book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, was disappointing and a chore to get through, which breaks my heart. My Goodreads review (read: rant) says everything I want to say about this book. Similarly disappointing was The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, which felt like a history textbook cosplaying as an Agatha Christie novel, and not in a good way.
The Ministry of Time, which I finished the night before I wrote this entry, was a much more interesting read. The sci-fi aspects leave a lot to be desired, I'm sure, but I've never been one to claim intellectual mastery over grandfather paradoxes and wormholes so this level of detail suited me just fine. I'm someone who would enjoy a mediocre story with great prose more than a great story mediocrely told, and this prose was luscious. Kailene Bradley wields metaphors like a scalpel and cuts to the bone with surgical precision.
June 2024
I am back to writing for my newsletter, Kindred Spirits, after unapologetically taking a break to find my confidence and rediscover my conviction (I wrote a little bit about that here and here). It was significantly harder to take a break than it was to get back into writing, but I definitely unstoppered a deep sense of okayness and trust in where I was in my writing journey. To celebrate that, I decided to make things official with a new domain name: readkindredspirits.com.
I am two months into a new work opportunity that came as a result of Obvious being sold (read Rahul Gonsalves' notes about it). Safe to say, it's a little fish in a big ocean sort of situation. It's too early to comment on whether this was a successful move, but I'm confident that I'm doing my best.
My unconventional role at Obv came with the advantage of vantage. It revealed a lot about the inner workings of startups and tech that I haven't had a chance to write about… but I think I can finally remedy that and distil what I've learnt into working notes and theories on this website.
Excitedly, I've gotten back into reading everyday. I just tore through Dragon Republic, the second book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, and I'm going to dig into the third next. Also on my TBR for this month is The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin and Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill.
I got a new low bookshelf for my study, now that I no longer work from home. It feels a lot more like a writer's den now, which has always been what I earmarked this room for. I still can't believe it's been a year since my housewarming ceremony — everyday I'm grateful for the cocoon-like feeling I get when I enter my home.
I got published in Yummy Colours' Concept of the Year for 2024, It's So Hard To Be A F*cking Squirrel These Days. This was my first time participating in a creative project of this scale and designing an activity capable of grounding people in the present. The final activity book is both an incredible collection of multidisciplinary inspiration and a collective experience unlike any other. Super grateful to be a part of it.
June 2024
I am back to writing for my newsletter, Kindred Spirits, after unapologetically taking a break to find my confidence and rediscover my conviction (I wrote a little about that here). It was significantly harder to take a break than it was to get back into writing, but I definitely unstoppered a deep sense of okayness and trust in where I was in my writing journey. To celebrate that, I decided to make things official with a new domain name: readkindredspirits.com.
I am two months into a new work opportunity that I can't talk about in public just yet, but safe to say it's a little fish in a big ocean sort of situation. It's too early to comment on whether this was a successful move, but I'm confident that I'm doing my best to actively lead and learn.
Excitedly, I've gotten back into reading everyday. I just tore through Dragon Republic, the second book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, and I'm going to dig into the third next. Also on my TBR for this month is The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin and Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill.
I got a new low bookshelf for my study, now that I no longer work from home. It feels a lot more like a writer's den now, which has always been what I earmarked this room for. I still can't believe it's been a year since my housewarming ceremony — everyday I'm grateful for the cocoon-like feeling I get when I enter my home.
I got published in Yummy Colours' Concept of the Year for 2024, It's So Hard To Be A F*cking Squirrel These Days. This was my first time participating in a creative project of this scale and designing an activity capable of grounding people in the present. The final activity book is both an incredible collection of multidisciplinary inspiration and a collective experience unlike any other. Super grateful to be a part of it.
