List the people you admire and look to for advice…
People I admire:
Family
We are what we are because of the ordeal of blood, toil and sweat they have gone through. To raise children is no less than surviving a protracted, entrenched battle. It deserves all the praise, appreciation, admiration and honour.
People who I look for advice:
Myself
No one else can locate themselves on the unique intersection and trajectory of space and time a life follows, and the best person who can advise you is you. I turn inwards when I need my north star.
Traditions and customs, to be precise. These tell you to look North and you look north. You have the option to look South, or even down, but you think ,”oh how stupid would that seem!” and you look north. So it’s all conventions.
But I think the question is not of a nature that requires Derridean soliloquy.
So here’s a list of things that give me direction.
Google Map
Real Map
Steering WheelWhen I am pirating aroundWhere NOT to goNo thanksIf direction is taken in a literal sense
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
John Green has written so many quotable sentences:
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
The Fault in Our Stars
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
Looking for Alaska
Usually, the first and the last line of a novel are quotable. I vividly remember this quote at the end of The Great Gatsby.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But my favorite quote of all time is the one this narrator from The School of Life just casually dropped in one of his videos. It has stuck with me since then.
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
When I was in the primary, the school was usually closed for a month from Dussehra to Diwali, giving us a much deserved respite from the child labor we were subjected to in the name of homework. It allowed us to lock away the books, organise bigger cricket tournaments, and catch the good old passenger train to the village to meet the cousins.
Diwali used to be my favorite Holiday because on a Diwali night, you were teleported to a utopian dream. Here, the night was not dismal, marked by a lost battle of faint stars above and fainter lanterns below against the engulfing darkness. On the contrary, it was a triumph of the weak but united. Diwali adorned my world with a string of soothing, flickering, buttery flames. It seemed like the stars had descended on the rooftops to keep an ancient promise. Diwali humbled and humanized the dark night.
Today, urbanisation has robbed Diwali of its charm and soul. Nowadays, it’s just a ritualised exuberance of glittering rice bulbs and deafening toxic crackers. The fire is disconcerting. The shine is blinding.
So these days, my favorite holiday is the one that involves not the light but the lightness of being. Academicians, after considerable deliberation, have termed it Sunday.
This is what I do on Sunday.
On some Sundays, I go shopping books.
More details here. If you’re in Delhi, and have not yet been to the book market, you can safely assume that you have deprived yourself of an experience that’s fundamental to human existence.
Sunday Book Market
I also go for a leisurely stroll. Just to inhale unadulterated oxygen.
In pursuit of peace
I eat Good Food when my purse is fat and my guilt stack is thin.
Measured gluttony
I meet friends and we talk about politics, movies and cricket. We mostly judge everybody. And that’s true fun.
With the tribe
I love reading Books and writing about those. I think what I have realised is if you read fast, you’ll only know the story. So you can do bookgraming.
But if you read slowly, you will know much more than the story. You’ll know the context, the themes, and most importantly, the art of writing.
More on this later.
Me and Brontë
Holidays are the boons that one should savour with absolute freedom. These are the only days, in our vassal-calendars, which give us the option to be truly human.
In fact, the idea has never brushed past the horizon of my neural universe. I have never wasted a single ATP bond energy contemplating a laborious trudge through the packed colonies of discourteous, thorny, poisonous flora. Nor do I derive any esoteric joy from putting myself in such adventures where one unplanned blink beckons some hidden tiger to pounce and bite off my limbs. Nor do I wish, in any of the parallel universes, to spend a night under a tent in such a hostile environment.
I am convinced to the core that our ancestors already spent centuries and millennia trying to explore and relish the wilderness, and eventually came to the conclusion that wilderness must be tamed. They created cities and civilisations so that we could camp our rump on comfortable couches and consume crispy calories to gain weight.
But what about the beauty of nature you ask? The beauty that’s unparalleled and demands that it must be beheld?
One word- Youtube.
I am grateful to the drones and cameras that brave the forces of nature and bring back to us its good parts, from all the angles. That’s enough camping for me.
In the era of overburdened shoulders, productivity is a difficult promise as efficiency slumps are inevitable. So except for a few cases, productivity doesn’t come naturally, but has to be induced. I too have a method, though not 100% effective, that puts me on the wheels. This is when I feel most productive:
After a long, peaceful sleep suffused with beautiful dreams,
A cup of ginger-elaichitea at 3 pm saves me from the otherwise unstoppable descent into drowsiness land
Timer-based study for the first two hours keeps me glued to the table, and away from distractions
Changing the manner of study: when I am bored of reading books, I listen to lectures. And when I am bored of that as well, I watch documentaries.
Note taking: keeps me alert and attentive.
Studying in bed when I feel sleepy
After a test: Regret and guilt drives me to revise
I wasn’t much of a discussion guy, but I met Lord Evans in Ranchi, and his curiosity was so contagious that by the time I left Ranchi, I was a proud nerd. Add to this the diverse exposure to different disciplines: from Maths to commerce to history; so I was inclined to study and understand myriads of themes. This meant I was interested in discussing everything under the sun and beyond. Still, if I must list a few, here is the list:
Microbiology and Genetics:
This is my latest interest, and I am building my fundamentals. What’s most fascinating about this is, all biology, at the most basic level, is chemistry.
Literature
I just love to discuss the novels and the novelists; and everything from the text to the context to the subtext. In fact, I can talk about books all day. I convert non readers into bibliophiles with my talks. They borrow my books. And never return those.
Cinema and Series
Who doesn’t like to talk about cinema?
History
I have an MA in history, and I can’t bear it when people peddle rumours and myths and political narratives as ‘history’. So I can’t help but correct them. The majority of them are already beyond cure, but still, I try to talk sense into the few.
Chess
I am rated 2000+ on lichess. I mostly play blitz, but I never miss a chance to talk people into developing a hobby of chess. I like to talk about its history and the present, and about the players and their genius and their eccentricities.
Cricket
Indians are born to discuss cricket. We discuss cricket everywhere- from melas to morgue.
Politics
Being political is the first sign of being an adult, in my opinion. So we talk about politics a lot. Mostly about the problems with the country’s politics.
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