It's been a while since I last posted here - 18 weeks exactly. Some of you know the real reason I stepped away from the keyboard, but for those who missed it, life took an amazingly good (and chaotic) turn with the arrival of our son Minchu 10 weeks ago. All the time leading up to the birth was spent in parks, walking around the colourful streets of Basavangudi, and spending what felt like the last few days of being just a couple with Varsha.

I wanted to push this out - one so that I can talk about Minchu and the changes he's brought to our lives, but also because this newsletter celebrates the last week of my 34th revolution around our friendly neighbourhood star.

-Teej

🚨 The Poop Protocol

It's 3 am. The baby grunts with a long mmmm. And the diaper, which we use only at night, has become heavy and soggy. Pulling yourself from the half-asleep state, while your partner is exhausted, only chaos reigns during the night.

This is when we developed the poop protocol - a simple system that kept our sanity intact, and made managing the midnight blowouts seem like a breeze.

1. Warm water in the kettle, within arm's reach

2. A caddy with

   1. Fresh diapers/langots neatly stacked nearby

   2. Clean clothes, in case you need them

   3. Small towels folded

Sounds quite obvious, right? But here's what I learnt - even smart people make questionable choices in the face of chaos (and sleep deprivation)! The protocol is about having systems in place, so that your brain doesn't have to think - a ritual, nay, a habit - that you can run on autopilot.

The magic of having systems in place is that you know by the end of it, your desired outcome will be fulfilled. It's the assurance that lets you coast while working at 30% capacity.

Meal prepping, coding with AI/LLM, everything is a system that you can develop and leverage!

🕉️ Dichotomy of the Ancient vs Modern

I joined a sandyavandane class, essentially to understand the nuances of some of the Vedas that we were taught as children. sandyavandane for those of you who don't know, is essentially a sun salutation - praying to the light coming from the sun. Every weekend, I sit in a class of 400 others and recite and understand 3000-year-old hymns praising the pagan roots we have - the sun, the water, etc.

This, juxtaposed with the software work I currently do, felt like jarring cognitive whiplash! I mean, how do you reconcile ancient wisdom traditions while building AI-powered apps? But lately, I'm realising they're not opposing forces - they're complementary forces(?) for different problems.

The Vedas teach presence, patience, and connection to something larger than immediate desires. Code teaches iteration, problem-solving, and building systems that serve others. Both are technologies for human flourishing, just operating on different timescales.

And both have enough meaning buried deep inside, if you have the right tools to peel them open!

🛏️ The Floor Bed

For the longest time, I've had a floor mattress. Luckily, my partner, too, was accustomed to a floor bed long before I met her. When we moved to Mysore, one of the first things I did was dismantle the cot and convert the mattress to a floor bed - not by choice, but because the bed proved to be too small for the three of us!

Best. Decision. Ever!

Suddenly, everything seems easier in the room - night routines, poop protocols, and the best part - no fear of the baby (and more importantly a parent) rolling off! This has also enabled easier nursing positions, simplified sheet changes, and felt like an upgrade instead of a compromise.

This is happening everywhere in my life now.
Limited work hours due to baby care? I'm shipping more focused, intentional projects.
Can't travel easily? I'm exploring my immediate neighbourhood more deeply (discovered a new idli joint nearby!).
Fewer social commitments? Deeper relationships with the people who matter.
No time to send out this weekly newsletter? Let's face it, I have no excuse other than "I have a new human".

Sometimes, the constraint is the solution! When you can't have everything, you discover what you truly need.

🎯 The Vision Test

Before Minchu, I was the king of shiny object syndrome. I still am!
New project idea? Let's do it! Interesting opportunity? Why not! My attention was scattered across a dozen half-finished projects.

Now, with maybe 2-3 focused hours per day, I've developed what I call the "Vision Test" for any new idea:

1. Does this directly accelerate my path to the farm vision?

2. Can it be completed in less than 10 hours total?

3. Will it generate recurring income with minimal maintenance?

If it's not three YES answers, it goes into a parking lot and gets forgotten like the cars and bikes outside a Bangalore police station. This simple filter has been life-changing.

When resources are scarce, you stop optimising for options and start optimising for outcomes.

🖥️ AI Coding Assistants

Years ago, I led a team where I had one amazing coder who couldn't communicate, and one amazing person to talk to who would take forever to understand the docs. Cursor + Claude is exactly like an unpaid intern version of these two!

I've spent significant time with both tools (and some with ChatGPT for its superior image generation capabilities). I've had days where I think I'm shepherding the tools in a good direction, only to realise they've walked off a cliff and I need to trash all development. Days when some of the changes the tools suggest amaze me.

What I've realised is that it's a lot more art than logic - similar to how managing a team is! Prompting, nudging, and making sure things are broken down into the smallest of pieces is how you can get work done by them.

It's like Aladdin's genie - Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space - LLMs now have amazing capabilities, but lose their context very easily.

End Note

Writing this feels like coming home. The newsletter format forces me to step back and extract meaning from the daily chaos, which is exactly what I need right now.

Life with a newborn is simultaneously the most natural thing in the world and the most disorienting. Every day brings new challenges that somehow feel both unprecedented and eternal. But buried in all this beautiful chaos are lessons about systems, priorities, and what matters.

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week, hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey, and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

P.S. - Minchu says hi. He also says "waaaah", but I think that's unrelated to the newsletter quality. Also, go read Minchu's weekly posts.

I wrote parts of this a while ago. Schedule, perfectionism, and life just got in the way of publishing. Quite a few of you checked in on me during this hiatus, and I'm truly grateful for all of you :)

Someone I met once said, "You're the guy who apologises for posting something late", and I don't know where to start apologising from - not just for you the audience, but also myself for letting me slip so much!

Today will be a little heavy, and a little raw - I'm slightly unprepared, and running this on a stream of consciousness - sort of.

A while ago, I came across a couple of people who're vocal on Twitter (currently X), who tried to live a day or two in the life of a delivery agent of some 10-minute delivery apps. I have more to whine about this later in the newsletter, but this got me triggered about what and how we (as a culture) are sharing with our world and neighbours.

My mother grew up in an apartment complex equivalent of the 50s - called a vatara. It was essentially a few houses surrounding a central courtyard, with an alleyway to the main road. There's no fixed size of a house, and every home ends up being unique. Amma organised a meetup of all the people who co-lived with her in this vatara - and some 60 people attended the reunion. Much better than 25 families visiting each other.

This made me think about how families are designed now, versus our grandparents' era. How common modes of entertainment brought us close. And what learning would mean for the world going forward?

I hope you all enjoy reading/listening to this as much as I've enjoyed putting it together.

-Teej

⚛️ Atomic Families

As mentioned above, my mother grew up in a vatara community of homes - her cousins are as close to her as her siblings. Appa fondly narrates stories of how he helped his large family with bulk buying groceries, how he and the siblings wore similarly made dresses because they would buy material by the yard, how hand-me-downs worked between them and even how he was dressed as a girl for a long time because he had 4 elder sisters!

Contrasted this with my childhood where I couldn't keep in touch with my cousins, or we were taught to express individuality quite early. Both my parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and even hustled to give us the life we lived. But this also meant I was shuffled from school to daycare, from school to staying by myself while I waited for my mother, from doing homework to fixing my dinner on those rare nights both of them were away from home.

I see people around me growing their families and making similar decisions our parents did to build everything from scratch. Nuclear families. This style of living has been on the rise with projections of over 65% of all households being in this mode by the end of the decade from over 50% this year.

It's a fine balance between the mental health benefits of nuclear families and the social/cultural pillars of having larger families. Children of nuclear families have been shown to have better health especially because they're exposed to consistent parenting, have better innate conflict management skills, and better channels of communication. Elders however have shown signs of social isolation because they're unable to connect with others in their age group after living by themselves for decades, generational knowledge and stories are lost because people are disinterested, and parents are usually overwhelmed because of the lack of support.

While I've stayed away from home for a fair bit, I do understand the value of keeping my family close. But there is a lot of give and take, and compromises between individuality and the group dynamics - something that can work only in a world of reciprocation and mutual understanding!

Subscribe now

📺 Shared Contexts

There used to be a time when I watched Dragonball Z, and ran to school the next day to talk about how long Frieza's fight was taking (30 episodes actually) or laugh about how useless Krillin was.

Having a fixed schedule of entertainment from the idiot box made everyone watch the same-ish things. This created a social thread of shared contexts that people could relate to. These threads brought people together and grew communities. There were the anime/cartoons friends, saas-bahu families, and quizzing folks. Labels are attached to people because of something they all did individually but could relate to as a group.

Fast forward to today, and these communities though larger because of the borderless world of the internet, are fragmented across geographies and timezones. I don't know more than a couple of people around me watching Solo Levelling, there's hardly any social contact with people entertained by the same kind of Lo-Fi music I use to focus/study, even having conversations about movies is difficult because people have access to watch them at leisure.

On-demand media, though it's created a plethora of options, has broken that automatic conversation. The shared contexts we were able to fall back on between topics are now replaced by negotiations of (re)establishing that connection. Which feels like work.

What was the last movie you watched?

Leave a comment

📚 Education of the Future

It's a warm sunny morning. We're sitting on the lush green grass of Lalbagh, under the tall trees, talking about kids. Some of my friends are coming to an age where they'll start looking for a school for their young ones. We're not on that path, yet.

In the distance, we see a group of children. Engrossed. Not with each other or play. But with the phones in their hands.

There's no denying the power of the dopamine factories we've invented for ourselves. There's no escape from the convenience this brings us. But what was made to connect people is now unravelling to show the lines of discontent and disconnect.

Education of the next generation, I imagine, will look wildly different. Instead of the rote learning we were subjected to where we memorised formulae and derivations - machines will help us remember and abstract away the details until necessary. The way tertiary education in India is split between applied science and pure science, AI and other technologies will create a drift at the primary schooling levels too.
I mean, you don't need to know how to find a determinant of a matrix when you're building a shader for your indie game on Blender.

The style of education though, that's something I've been fascinated about. AI is already embedded in the schools to keep the place safe, and for admin work (that's a bridge I'll have to cross when I come to it), but not so much in the teaching aspect. When LLMs can explain concepts better and more personalised, we should evolve the role of the teacher to more of a guide who shows how to do things instead of someone who just gives us notes.

The alternate systems like Montessori and unschooling etc seem very lucrative. Where a child is trained to be a lifelong learner, and avenues of passion are created for them to follow. Technology can help create more personalised choose-your-adventure style games for learning, and truly break barriers of language.
But all this depends on how well the facilitators are equipped and retooled.

What are your thoughts on this?

🪔 United by a Festival

It's 1893. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, against all laws set by the Britishers that prevented political congression, brought together people to celebrate a long-forgotten festival. A festival we now celebrate with a flair that has become rather worrisome.

Ganesh Utsav was designed by Tilak and the reformers of that era as a covert operation to plot against our colonial past. Tilak encouraged the pandals, with mass installations of the Ganesha idols, and created opportunities for fanfare - with plays, Satsang, debates etc - anything that can unite people across castes, creeds, and even religions. The festival emphasised unity and brought everyone together against a common threat.

Similarly, the Shivaji Jayanthi festivals, the Salt March, and the Lucknow Pact showcased cultural platforms to bring people of all religions together. The Ganesh Utsav was one of many examples that threw light on how cultural and shared traditions can be repurposed for reformation, fostering unity and collective action.

While the Ganesh Utsav has been co-opted by right-wing nationalism currently, events like the Hornbill Festival, Sindhu Darshan, and Rann Utsav are gaining momentum in creating cultural platforms that try to unite people.

Have you been to these festivals?

Leave a comment

🌚 India's new oppressors

How gig workers are toiling away their lives

"lack of job security, irregular wages, and uncertain employment status for workers", is what the NITI Aayog describes the current gig economy that powers the consumerist 10-min delivery and similar labour marketplaces.

There was a time when I was the e-commerce delivery agent for my mother - she would tell me what the kitchen pantry had run out of, and I would zip away with a tote to the Kirana store and buy things. In under 10min. And I would accept payments in bubblegum or chikki.

Now, there's a folder of apps on my phone, and everything is a touch (and more than 10 minutes) away.

There have been numerous people talking about how the pricing, especially for fresh produce that's not regulated as much, is much higher on the apps than in the market. Now and then there's a post empathising with the delivery agents who bring the things we've ordered in paper bags or compostable covers.

The movie Zwigato follows the life of one such agent. It humanises the person with the absurdly large bag that even looks uncomfortable before wearing it.
One of my friends recently wrote something in a similar vein.

Nothing shouts "money is power" louder than the verbal abuse and tantrum someone throws when an order is messed up. 100 years ago, it was the colonials who threw those who couldn't afford under the bus, and now it's us throwing the youth into an unsustainable pit. 80% of all unemployment is from this youth bracket, and yet they work more hours than our corporate bums to make ends meet. The longer-term impact of pushing our youth into this line of work also means we begin to lag behind other economies that can better equip themselves for the future!

"There's no bonuses anymore, only EMI", regretted an auto driver when I asked him about how the driver marketplaces are.

Updates & Errata

• One side-project I just started is nestnow, to help people find rental homes and flats in Bangalore. Let me know what you think!

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here.

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

I'm sorry for going AWOL again. A bunch of you reached out asking if everything is well, and I'm truly touched ❤️

Things were hectic with interviews and festivals two weeks ago. We were in the middle of Shravana - the season for all festivals. We celebrated the arrival monsoons with nagapanchami (mostly to make people aware of snakes in the rain I suppose), we also had a sense of renewal with the upakarma and spent a lot of time with family with raksha bandan and varamahalakskhmi puja.
The month has put a lot of emphasis on spending time with my loved ones, and eating a lot!

And the last week, because of all the food and the rain, I fell unwell. My resetting flu, as a friend called it. 3 days of fever, cough, syrups, and antibiotics. I'm a lot better now. But I truly miss the deep podcaster voice from last week. 😹

-Teej

🎉 Festivals

We started the hiatus with naga panchami on the Friday.
It's a paganistic festival celebrating the start of the monsoon, and the snake deities who usually symbolise fertility. As the rains flood snake holes the festival also makes people wary about our slithering friends. We try not to cook with a hotplate/girdle as our ancestors believed this would hurt snakes seeking refuge in the clutter of the kitchen. A sweet made of raw rice and jaggery is distributed too.

Went to a cousin's wedding reception on Saturday and ate peanut curd for the first time. The food was lavish, and the relationship "cousin" is used very loosely here. I have a lot of relatives, and my parents are very keen on adding more people to the family tree - so much so that they've made contact with branches of the tree that are around 7-9 generations away. I honestly adore their effort, but I lose track of how we're all related (though I was instrumental in making a map of the tree a while ago).

We observed manglagowri vrata on Tuesday. We kept this low-key this year. An arishina gowri (cone-shaped mound using turmeric paste) is made and worshipped. Though we don't observe the fast at home, we do celebrate the shakti which represents prosperity and fertility. The vrata has stories that are narrated as part of the ritual, and usually talk about the benefits of observing the vrata.

I had a family get-together on Thursday. My paternal uncle opened a commercial building, and many met up for some havan and food. It was refreshing to meet this side of my cousins after a while.

Went to my parent's house for varamahalakshmi puja on Friday. This is more of a cultural event than a religious one at my home. We don't use a kalasha at home but celebrate the festival with an old brass idol of Goddess Lakshmi that my grandmother used. The festival is to seek prosperity and abundance from the goddesses (like most of the other festivals in this season). Neighbours were called and tamboola were exchanged - making this a more community-growing event.

V had a performance on Sunday. She performs veena fairly regularly, for seemantha (Indian baby shower), and other events. We ended up going to a rayara mutta with another artist friend and ate a heavy but simple meal.

Sunday was another large family get-together. I was down with fever for the week, and luckily recovered enough to engage with people for a couple of hours. Met more cousins, and had a lot of fun with this event!

For those of you who don't know, my partner is a GSB Konkani. Her community's guru has come to a samaja near our home (after 45 years I must add). We spent some time at the samaja during gokulashtami. This is a bigger festival for V than me, we spent some time making sweets and went to the samaja at night to celebrate Krishna's birthday.

How was your Shravana? What festivals do you celebrate?

Leave a comment

🍅 Garden

The WhatsApp group for gardening has been thriving because of the Thindi Capital community.

I found out that we had tomatoes growing out of the pot, and they had a calcium deficiency - Blossom End Rot. Someone in the group asked me to treat the soil with some slaked lime water. I finally got around to doing it, but most likely the damage is already done.

Our cute little fiddle-leaf fig decided to shed all but one leaf. Looks hilarious, but I feel a little sad. This also reminds me to change the pot this weekend!

I did change the pots for our mint and basil. They're taking root, and their own time to grow. They look a lot lot healthier than what they seemed like in their previous pots.

The basalesoppu has thrived! We have multiple shoots creeping up some string trellis, and we've harvested them a couple of times for making some delicious tambli!

Share

🚧 Side-projects

What started as an amazing impulse of uploads with code.with.teej, suddenly stopped.
There are some good ideas in the pipeline - enabling better search, showing notations for songs, and my idea of curating events. Let's work on this in the coming week.

On the sidelines, I've been redeveloping my website to shift from logseq to obsidian backed. I got most of the things working, except for the deployment on SST. The issue I'm facing is that in production, the files aren't available to process. I should perhaps look at alternates - in either how I handle deployments, or set up a pipeline for data extraction. I'm inclined to the latter - not because I know it's easy, but because I think it's easy.

I was also rebuilding my talapettige project to use Faust Programming Language instead of the current tone.js. I believe this DSP-based approach will have a cleaner sound, and make things better concerning the timing etc.
I can also work on a hardware device to use this DSP output on a later date (could be a S2 in code.with.teej)

🤾🏼‍♂️ Sports as a Signal of Progress

1 silver, and 5 bronze. That's the number of medals we've won at the Olympics 2024.
India is a "young" country when you measure how recently we've gained independence. But we often hide behind this and don't talk about how the most populous country sends a delegation of 150 people to the largest sporting confluence.

There are 3 major events we can look at in the world of sports - the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Cup, and the Olympics. Each has a larger pool of participation and a relativistic decrease in what India brings home.
The only time India bagged a major success was when we hosted the first-ever Commonwealth Games and grossly overrepresented the country.

All this is to show some hard evidence of a John Adams quote I once came across - "I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.". Though India claims to be a young country, we've always been a collection of princely states that indulged in arts and sports. Somewhere along the way of being dominated we lost that knack and slipped off the global table.

Progress here means a lot of things. Someone can pursue a dream of being an athlete, and the infrastructure can support such dreams. It's the choice given with enough financial security for someone to perform at their peak consistently. It's also time for an audience to seek out and encourage talent.
The dot-com boom of the 90s essentially rewrote what is considered lucrative to pursue as a career. This is the same in the startup boom of the 2000s, and the rise of the gig economy in the 2010s.
All this sidelines taking up a sport at a professional level - because people either don't have the grit, time, or money. Sure there are budgets set aside by the government, but how much of that ends up in a sportsperson's wallet or at the grassroots to encourage fresh talent is anyone's guess.

Things aren't all that bleak though - the last 2 decades have seen immense progress, and things are picking up. My only tussle is that we're over 75 years old, and have the largest talent pool, and yet we're unable to foster sportspeople as well as we should.

Tell me what you think!

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

Wow, what a fortnight it has been. We ran around and met a bunch of people which kept us on our toes. This is also why I couldn't write this post last week and broke my 10-week streak. I was bummed about it, but I guess life happens.

What I thought was a habanero plant, turned out to be a random flowering plant. I caught up with a few friends of mine, went to a dance show, and walked around the neighbourhood parks looking at pretty mushrooms.

Activity has reduced, but I think that's okay. The weather has been bizarre. It's hot. It's cold. It's all over the place. I also joined yoga as I wanted to switch focus between strength and flexibility.

-Teej

💻 code.with.teej

code.with.teej has been good. I streamed more in the last two weeks than in the last two months I guess. Got a bunch of things done - from updating the database, creating API endpoints, and even adding dark mode (which no one asked for, but which app doesn't have dark mode these days?).

Response to the stream itself has been lukewarm - I guess the afternoon slot is best for solo work, not for others to hop in. But the afternoon slot works well for me, while I fight the want for a siesta.

Like/Share/Subscribe

The project - rasika.life has garnered good feedback. There have been numerous suggestions for making things better. A short list of feature requests looks like this:

• Adding content for the glossary, for people to get acquainted with terms

• Adding support for notations for the songs

• Being able to search for a song regardless of how it's spelt.

Some nice technical challenges within feature requests. It's exciting to be working on this, and now that the slump of setup is done, I feel the momentum is good to keep me going :)

Take a look at the site, and let me know what you think. There's a limited set of songs right now (karnatik.com in comparison has over 8000 songs' lyrics). I'm adding things slowly, while improving the quality of life of the end user and not making them scroll multiple times to search.

Become a Rasika

🪴 Leaves of our Balcony

As I mentioned, what I thought was a spicy chilly turned out to be a Marvel of Peru or Sanje Mallige. This had been disappointing - after waiting months for it to bloom.

The rains have been nice - we're seeing a lot of green in the garden. We got a random tomato plant, I think (I want to stop guessing the plant till it is fruits/flowers). Somehow a curry leaf plant also has managed to survive in all of the mess.

We also got a cute fiddle leaf fig from the nursery. They recommended changing the pot - which I haven't gotten around to yet.

I'm worried about our Mysore garden though. It had taken a beating the last time we were there, and hopefully, it'll pull itself together long enough for our next visit.

🥗 Fruits of Someone's Farm

We tried a farm produce service last week and were disappointed in the quantity of veggies we got.
The service said it would be a few kilograms of veggies, fruits, and leafy greens. And for the same price from the local market/q-commerce apps, we could fetch a lot of lot more.

Honestly, the price of food has gone through the roof, and the prices of even basic ingredients seem quite outrageous. Especially given the kind of inputs these vegetables/fruits are grown with.

Cooking has been similar this fortnight too - 1 in 4 meals is outside 😹
The bheemanamavasya lunch was very festive and felt elaborate, but it came together in less than an hour! We also borrowed a friend's convection oven to play around with baking. Experiments are bound to explode soon because of this!

I'm desperately looking out to starting my farm at some point. If you know any parcel of land nearby, do get in touch ❤️

📄 Mini-essays to Learn

What if there was a way to learn exponentially fast? If this took 10-20 minutes when the idea was fresh in your mind, would you practice it? If this was 100-500 words you had to write, what would be stopping you?

Mini-essays are exactly this. They are held together in the same essay structure of start-body-conclusion. Mini-essays are made to be created easily, usually in a single sitting, and talk about a single topic. These can also start conversations or thought processes that give rise to other long-term efforts.

Sparks need to be captured because it's how you engage with ideas and the world itself. Spark to remark is a nice way to document what interests you. Anything can spark interest, the only way to fan these embers is to ask "because". In this world of overloaded consumption, stopping to ask why something piqued interest is like stopping to smell the roses.

Some useful frameworks are writing about experiences, opinions, or events.
Experience, "this happened to me", hooks the reader with an emotion that can be visceral.
Opinions, "Here's a strongly stated thing", almost always generate polar reactions. People either love what you're writing about, or hate it, and they'll engage regardless.
Events, "this happened on this day", are more journalistic. But this can be tied to a story style of writing.

Free writing is a way to explore ideas when things are still nascent. It's a way of thinking on paper, similar to how morning pages create insights. Rewriting this insight for a particular audience makes it a mini-essay.

Curating your PKM system can also pop up embers that have been buried. This is one of the biggest reasons to capture thoughts and ideas and revisit them periodically.

Balancing curiosity with clarity can make mini-essays more engaging. Think of them as how TV shows are written - where the audience's emotions are played with to keep them drawn in.

Organising mini-essays with tags that are outside the content itself can help resurface the idea at a later date. Also equally important is to keep track of the references, so that you can revisit the inspirations of the mini-essay.

Mini-essays are a way to make better notes. They generate insights and can be thought-provoking. It ties Feynman's techniques of teaching to learning, where the minimum audience of your mini-essays is a future version of yourself.

📸 Say cheese!

For those of you who don't know, I was a photographer for a couple of years of my 20s. I transitioned from a hardware developer to a web developer, and in-between I explored the wonderful world of performance photography.

I speak about this part of my life because sometimes I miss being behind the camera and capturing the world in front of me. Especially when the world in front of me is filled with students from my friend's dance school.
The performances were amazing, and the students did a fabulous job carrying themselves on stage. There were a couple of pieces from some senior artists too.

It's also this kind of event I want to capture and amplify using rasika.life. What do you think?

Leave a comment

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

The past week has been hectic, in terms of geography, again. We were in Mysore for a bit, trying to revive some of our plants (and a very beautiful curry leaf shrub).

I had a lot more plans for the week, but things couldn't be executed, and we ended up chilling at home for my partner's birthday. It was fun - we ate churmuri (a snack meal made of puffed rice), got a yummy cake to cut, and spent time with people we've missed the past few months.

You should order from Cookie & Treats!

And, we ended up Netflixing and chilling a lot. Honestly.

Bad Newz was at the cinema, and it's worth watching if you have an afternoon to spare.

Keeping this edition small too!

-Teej

🥙 Cook-at-home Challenge

This started as a small challenge and an accountability group.

We ended up cooking over 70 out of the 100 meals in the past month. We still have a long way to go, but this feels like a good baseline to bounce off.

We want to cooking easier and healthier - especially for individuals and small families. Sundri is one project along these lines.

🪴 Reviving the Garden

5 weeks of not watering has taken its toll on our Mysore garden. It's not as blessed as our Bangalore one, which is automatically watered by the rain, but it's managed to survive.

Thanks to yet-another-whatsapp-group, of garden enthusiasts, I think I'm in the right direction to keep these plants alive.

The curry leaf plant was given a good trim, better soak and mulch. Luckily, it's not dried, and I hope to visit it soon for some compost top-up.

Errata/Updates

• I streamed. Someone asked me why I stream. I stream to stay accountable, to build in public, and to say it's ok to make mistakes while people watch - because within that discomfort lies an opportunity to grow.

• An idea a neighbour and I discussed at some length was gati irode jagatu, loosely translated to "the world lies in a pace". We spoke about how the generational gap is changing because of the adoption of technology. And how technology can make or break human connections. I want to ponder more about this, and if you have recommendations about how this flux changes how we connect, please send them my way!

• I appreciate those of you who spoke to me after the post on vulnerability. ❤️ You all made my week!

• I also got a better microphone. Expect the audio quality to be a lot better going forward 😄

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here.

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

It's late while I'm writing this.

I had an idea to write about all week, but it was daunting to talk about it.
An idea of vulnerability, and how it shapes our decisions.
It shaped mine most recently by not pushing this newsletter out quickly.

Being vulnerable is difficult for anyone.
There was a time when I was a lot more brash. I wore my heart on my sleeve - pursued passions on a whim, told people I liked (or disliked) them, and dropped things I didn't enjoy - all in the name of being open about things.
Then society took over and told me what is nice and what isn't. I "tamed" this outspoken part of me, and eventually silenced it.
Built walls. I buried a bunch of things, that actually over the last few weeks, I've unearthed.

Here's me, trying to break down my walls.

This is going to be a short one.

-Teej

🏝️ Open Waters

Diving into the deep end, I'm back on the job market - not because I'm not enjoying doing what I do, but because I want to create some additional buffer (and a piece of farm) to sit on.

And the job market has been terrible.

I'm torn between the life of an individual contributor, vs a manager.
I enjoy both ends of the spectrum. I love to make things. And I love to work with people who make things.
I've mentored dozens of builders, interviewed hundreds, and read through thousands of profiles. But now, being on the other side feels very awkward.

In the past, I've tried to build a culture where I've encouraged my team to talk about their struggles to create more collaboration within themselves. My team was never reprimanded for asking questions, like I've said in the past - there are no stupid questions. Creating a space for people to ask for help was always a priority.

If you know someone who can benefit from hiring a web developer, or a manager, please send them my way :)

💃🏻 Life of a Rasika

I started streaming again. :)
Wasn't very happy with yesterday's stream, mostly because I got stuck on reading documentation, but it is what it is.

I'll be fleshing out rasika.life. Have plans for tomorrow to create the database, and add a collaboration layer on top of it.

The biggest thing I want to do with this project is make it easy for people to find lyrics for the songs artists are performing, and help people who want to learn too.

All in due time 😄

⚡️ Vulnerability's power

This video by Brené Brown was something that triggered a bunch of these thoughts early this week. My key takeaways from the video were:

1. Vulnerability is needed for joy, creativity, love, and connection. As I mentioned, I feel like parts of me were lost with time, and this process of digging up memories has been a journey for me. Here's my way to embrace my vulnerability.

2. Perfectionism is always the enemy - we're trained to put up walls because something doesn't sit well, or look right. We often look at the downsides of vulnerability - the discomfort of negative emotions etc, but numbing this also takes away the joy, gratitude, and happiness that comes with it.

3. Shame, as Brown puts it, is the fear of disconnection. Humans are social by default, and it's the fear that others will discover our flaws that make us shameful, and feel unworthy of connections.

4. Courage and bravery aren't the same - courage is about being imperfect, and vulnerable, and telling the story of who you are with your whole heart.

5. The belief that we're not enough is what keeps us away from connections. Vulnerability is about breaking this belief and healing the shame associated with it.

Vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness. By sharing our vulnerabilities we allow others to connect deeply with us, and forge stronger relationships. This is also self-care, which exposes our limits and boundaries. Being vulnerable also means we're preparing ourselves for the possibility that someone may not respond how we hoped.

Errata/Updates

• Something new is cooking - a long-term project. 🤫

• Thank you all for the support for Sundri Foods! The support has been overwhelming ❤️

• We harvested basale soppu a few times already, and the plant is still thriving. The monsoon rains have been magical. We also got two cute muskmelons.

• Our cook-at-home accountability group is slowly growing. And we have a garden enthusiasts group now too.

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here.

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

I've been a long-term anime addict.

My childhood, of whatever I can remember, was filled with watching anime and cartoons.

For a very long time, we didn't have cable and had a black-and-white television set. I used to watch DuckTales and TailSpin, on DD Metro. Many evenings, I used to go to my friend's house to watch cartoons on the Toonami segment on Cartoon Network - Centurions, Dragon Ball Z, and Pokemon. I vividly remember rushing from school to my friend's place, not to hang out with him but to watch cartoons with him.

We finally got cable, and my addiction to Toonami and anime in general only grew further. I fell in love with Flame of Recca (enough to watch it again as an adult), where I learnt what it means to be a ninja grow and discover what you're capable of. I convinced my friends at school that the Ninja Run was the best way to run. I learnt self-reliance with Dragon Ball Z, what treating friends should be like with Pokemon, having larger-than-life goals with Centurions, and fell in love with tech with SWAT Katz. There are a lot more I indulge in with cartoons, and this is something I want to be able to expose the next generation to as well.

On to the newsletter!

-Teej

PS: Just a random thing: collecting some anonymous feedback here, let me know what you think of the newsletter so far!

Leave feedback

🧘🏽 Breathe like your life depends on it

Demon Slayer is an anime that follows Tanjiro (the protagonist) in finding a cure for his sister who was turned into a demon after an attack at his home.
The anime is top on my list for anyone getting started with anime in general - mostly because of the style and direction it has.

One of the coolest things about the anime is the fighting style, which showcases a lot of breathwork. This breathe-work stuff seems a lot more possible to achieve and even master, as compared to the power systems of other anime like Dragon Ball Z, or Hunter x Hunter.

This video which goes a lot deeper, talks about how Demon Slayer's power systems have strong roots in what's possible in the current world.

Breathing is the most fundamental thing we do. And controlling how we breathe affects us in many ways consciously or otherwise.

Again, I was a child when I learnt that animals with longer lifespans breathe slower, thank you NatGeo. Hummingbirds breathe 250 times per minute on average, while tortoises breathe 4 times. Hummingbirds live for 3 - 5 years, while tortoises live 30 times longer. I trained myself to breathe slower, and I feel I'm relaxed most of the time because of this.

Wim Hof, renowned as The Iceman completely credits a style of breathing to his achievements. Dedicated training and hyperoxygenation are what helped him survive the Arctic ice, and also enabled people like David Blaine to set records. This technique which involves 30 deep breaths, holding your breath till you feel the urge to breathe, and then a deep inhalation to fill your lungs and belly with fresh air - has roots in Tibetan Tummo Breathing where monks have truly mastered the cold. Wim Hof also claims this technique has helped him (and others) heal from various illnesses and symptoms.

Holotropic Breathwork is a technique that was developed in the 60s to achieve a psychedelic-like state without the use of psychedelics. People claim the experience has given them spiritual awakenings, and mystical visions.
From the short time I've spent learning Sudarshan Kriya by Ravi Shankar, I've felt similar episodes in the past. It could be from the reset the breathwork talks about, or the hyperoxygenation similar to Tummo.

Regardless, there's a certain mindfulness property that breathing has, and the meditative effect it has is truly calming.

Have you practised breathwork in the past?

Leave a comment

Also, just a friendly reminder… Breathe. 😄

👁️ Gazing is Trataka

Trataka is continuous gazing. It's a form of meditation, where you don't allow your mind to wander, till it calms down and everything else disappears. It is described as one of the six cleansing processes for the body and mind - and often the last one as it prepares the practitioner for higher awareness (which wasn't the case for me).

As told in a story of Arjuna; Dronacharya has an elaborate setup where his students were supposed to shoot the eye of a wooden fish tied to a tree by looking at its reflection in the pool of water below. When Dronacharya asks his students what they see before making the shot, everyone except Arjuna answers tree, fish, pool of water etc. Arjuna says "I only see the eye of the fish". That is Trataka. Where everything other than the object of focus disappears.

A way to practice this is to sit in a calm room and stare into the flame of a candle. With practice, the duration you're able to stare improves. And so do the benefits - improved concentration, better sleep, and more grasp on compartmentalisation.

Have you tried this?

𐂫 Samurai Your Way Out of Laziness

It should be obvious that I love all the culture that has come out of the Land of the Rising Sun.

The 7 ideas shared in this video to overcome laziness:

1. Kaizen - to improve continuously. Like Atomic Habits outlines, start with small goals and build on them. Consistency is key.

2. Mushin - focus on the now. This is a Zen concept that means being undistracted and fully present. Meditation helps.

3. Fudoshin - adapt and accept. This is about maintaining mental and emotional stability no matter what happens externally. Focus on what you can control, and take action to put yourself in a more favourable position. Journalling has helped me with this - especially the morning pages variant.

4. Hoshin - prep work. Staying calm and composed is how anyone can handle escalated situations, and this concept emphasises being prepared for such scenarios. Weekly/Monthly reflections help with this, something I haven't done in a while, to be honest.

5. Shoshin - beginner's mind. Staying curious is the only way to learn. Having an open mind, and an eager attitude creates growth opportunities. Often I've said - there are no stupid questions.

6. Wabi Sabi - beauty in imperfection. Don't chase perfection, the ideal is unattainable. Appreciate the flaws, see value in the things as they are, forgive yourself and practice self-compassion.

7. Zanshin - awareness. Humans aren't built to multi-task. Single-task. Focus on the task at hand. I know this digital world makes this more difficult to practice - and I've been working on this. Slowly.

💎 The 98/2 Rule

This thought on Farnam Street made me think a lot.

People spend 98% of their time talking about flashy things that contribute only 2% to the results while overlooking the fact that 98% of the results come from consistently doing the boring basics that few notice.

Also known as the Shiny Toy Syndrome.

The past year, I've spent a lot of time looking at new frameworks, new ideas, new ways of growing a community etc. And very rarely given each of them enough time, energy, and love to see something to completion (or some celebratory milestone).

This letter by an unfinished project by Peerlist hit a similar nerve.

How long is your to-be-done list?

🤔 IshaRumi Beyond Form

We went to a fun theatrical show that combined Ishavaysa Upanishad with Masnavi of Jalaluddin Rumi. The show was put together by Sunaad - a group of singers from Bangalore with artists from all walks of life who are passionate about Hindustani classical music.

There were a lot of ideas presented - in song, dance, and a bit of drama too.

• Infinity. All that is full, all this is full, from fullness does fullness emerge, when fullness is taken from fullness, fullness remains.

• Let go of the ego, and seek the truth.

• Whose wealth is it anyway?

• "So'ham asmi"… "He am I"… "Anal haq"… "I am Truth" 

The show was excellently put together. The lights added to the elements of the stories, and the music was amazing. The stage was small for the 20+ artists though.

They have another show in Mumbai if anyone is interested.

Share

Errata/Updates

• I will be making a fresh batch of Instant Rasam Powder this weekend. If you want some, let me know here.

• Streaming tomorrow for sure!

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here.

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

This was a good week - we made and ate 16-18 (depending on how you count) meals at home. We did end up slipping and eating outside for a couple of days—a solid B for effort.

A dear friend showed me his garden after last week's post, and it's beautiful! I'm looking forward to the day I can live off the land, and become self-sustaining. This has been a goal that's been taking root for years, and hopefully, the coming year or two will be fruitful in that direction (puns intended).

Surprisingly we haven't cooked anything with coconut in the past 2 weeks. I remember an episode before the pandemic where we were quite upset for not having coconut - mostly because of bad math on my side, but having the flavour-bomb of a spice mix has been good enough for most quick meals. More on this in this edition.

Subscribe now

-Teej

🍱 Tumbled off the Cooktop

10 days. That's exactly how long it took for me to miss a plate of masalapuri enough to buy one outside. Well, a lot longer, but since we're committing it to the public, I'm going to count it as 10 days.

The weekend was hectic. We had a bunch of events, and I know it's not a good excuse, but we did end up eating outside.

The accountability group on the other hand is slowly growing! Come be a part of it. We're still sharing photos, and adding in recipes. We even debated what's the difference between hummus and usli, apart from the obvious texture of it. Fun conversations indeed!

Join the WA group

👒 The Hats We Wear

Earlier in the newsletter, I mentioned about reinventing ourselves. This video I watched this week started churning my thought process on the different hats we wear during these mini-lifetimes.

The video talks about the divine goal someone is put on Earth for. I want to take a slight deviation and declare that everyone is here for some reason. And the archetypes the video talks about are exercised by everyone at some point in their life.

Awakeners rouse others from their existential hibernation - similar to how a parent shows the world to their child and teaches them how to wade through the society and environment we're surrounded by. And as they show the path, they learn a lot more about the world.

Healers sense the unspoken pain of longing for acceptance and understanding - similar to the closest of our friends, that family we chose to surround ourselves with instead of the one we're born into. Friends show empathy and create a haven to be ourselves without the risk of judgement.

Warriors stand up for what they believe is right, with an indomitable spirit - similar to how we stand alongside our belief systems when we're angry. It takes real courage to be angry and non-violent, and it comes with discipline and resilience.

Visionaries expand the boundaries of perception - similar to how our partners can help us see better when we're stuck on a problem, or offer suggestions on how things could be. Visionaries create an environment for others' creativity to thrive and create opportunities for growth by shattering the barriers of limitation.

Teachers can communicate complex ideas with clarity and compassion - like our mentors who understand the footing we're on, and bring concepts to the level of our understanding. Mentors often walk alongside us and help us cope with our world through fresh perspectives and offer a path of learning where minds and hearts can flourish.

Bridge-builders see beyond the differences between people and have a deep compassion for the human experience. We're all bridge-builders. We're constantly trying to understand and empathise with others. This takes patience and listening, but once in a while, we understand the common thread that intertwines between the complex emotional and social landscapes and binds us all.

I do think these hats are often worn multiple times every day, based on who we're interacting with and the situations we're put into. Did any of this resonate with you?

Leave a comment

🛠️ The Right to Repair

The right to repair is the legal right of owners of devices or equipment to freely modify or repair products.
Many companies these days build products in a way where repair could be impossible, or expensive enough to warrant replacements. This is called planned obsolescence.

The movement of the right to repair has been against this, where companies are forced to adapt designs that allow repairs easily, original spare parts are made available to end users and third-party service providers, repairs aren't hindered by some software/licence, and the repairability of the product is communicated clearly to the end user.

This entire train of thought came up when I was busy dismantling my pasta maker machine to clean it inside out. We made fresh pasta today, and the machine was a key appliance for this.
Dismantling was fun. Though I didn't take photos of that flow, I was able to put things back together.

My appa often recalls stories of me breaking things apart, to see how it works. Many times I've felt like Sylar from Heroes - the supervillain who was on a journey to understand how people got superpowers.

⏰ Overclocked and yet Under

This article talks about a neurological epidemic that's growing these days within organisations - Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). Symptoms include distractability, impatience, and inner frenzy.

This is usually from a brain overload / overwhelm. People have difficulties setting priorities/goals, managing their time, and staying organised. And most organisations don't look at this phenomenon with empathy and often punish those who need help.

Remote work has fostered ADT too, by removing people away from the social stimulus that comes so easily in a physical workspace. The social stimulus that's needed to trust your colleagues, and create bonds of friendships. The isolation that comes with remote work these days has created undue stress.

ADT is an artefact of the modern world - our parents and the generations before them probably see this as laziness/distraction. It is brought on by the demands of our time, and the attention that everything craves. Milan Kundera describes the speed in the modern world as"the form of ecstasy that technology has bestowed upon modern man." The addiction to speed makes us demand it when we can't possibly go faster anymore too!

The fixes for ADT are to create an environment that promotes positive emotions and allows for a human moment every few hours, sleeping well, organising, and slowing down when you get overwhelmed (which we also covered in the past).

The biggest reason I dig into this rabbit hole of Attention Deficit Disorders and Traits is because I feel I've been burnt out in the past, and this is my way of letting people know how to look for the smoke before the fire.

Have you been burnt out? How were you able to rekindle your passions?

🌶️ Introducing Sundri

We've been making these amazing spice mixes. My family has loved it, and some of my friends have raved about it in the past.

First up, we have this instant rasam powder.
It's instant because all you need to do is boil a tablespoon full of it in a cup of water for 5 minutes, and you'll have delicious rasam ready to be served.

We've made an array of dishes with this already - be it eating it as is with rice and ghee, tomato rasam, sambar/huLi, and even bitter gourd gojju.

With Sundri (inspired by sun-dry), we're planning to have a subscription-based product, so that you never have to run out of a spice mix. We're also experimenting with more spice mixes and formats to make every meal a flavour bomb that can be put together easily

If you're interested in this, please let me know here.

Learn more about Sundri!

Errata / Updates

• Spent more time on designing a PCB. I need help with layout, it feels like forever since I worked on hardware.

• I'm streaming next week for sure. I have the week planned! Subscribe on Twitch/YouTube

• We became Superhosts on Airbnb (finally again), and crossed 900+ reviews! If you haven't seen our properties yet, please add them to your wish list, and visit sometime soon! 😄

• LoFi music in the background is from here.

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here.

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

This week has been slow - mainly because I've been focussing on eating better, and getting back to my exercise routine.
I miss running, and the 2-3 week gap has made it a tougher battle to get back.

I've also been distracted a lot more this week - by a shiny-object syndrome, which has put me in a pickle for productivity.

-Teej

🥘 Cook-at-Home Challenge

This has been a fun experiment to do. We've cooked and eaten a total of 21 meals this past week, and it has been incredible.
Street food still makes my tummy rumble, but I've been able to actively avoid it. Kind of counting the days to when I can eat masalapuri, but I'm assuming we'll end up making it at home.

I started a small accountability group on WhatsApp, where we talk about food we've made at home, and post photos to make sure we don't fall off the bandwagon. Feel free to join in on the fun! :)

Join the group!

💪🏽 Tagda Raho

Gardimane had been hit-or-miss - in terms of learning.
The workout was amazing - nothing feels as good as playing in a mud pit, especially as an adult.

I joined Tagda Raho as an alternate a couple of months ago. It has been going great so far! The structured programme is something I enjoy a lot more, though the group isn't as chatty as the gardimane bois.

Looking forward to something that works with both worlds. Maybe.

🍪 Migration to Hardware

The past week I've been bingeing on a lot of hardware content - from schematic design to printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing, and even playing with KiCAD - a tool for designing hardware.

All this feels like from a different lifetime ago when I used to play around with Eagle (a similar software tool) to build custom PCBs for games I envisioned for Technites - the entertainment division of my college's tech fest
We built a 400 sqft game board on our department building and played Tetris on it from half a kilometre away. We handled everything from creating the software that was needed to run these games, to the mechanical structure that could handle the winds of the Mangalore coastline after the monsoons. We ran into a hundred problems, but they were all solved by some sheer ingenuity and grit. 😄

All this currently means that my coding projects took a backseat this week.

😵 The Death of a Language

A conversation between a new friend and my mother-in-law made me think about this topic.

When do we call a language dead? When there's no one to speak it? When there's no written work left? When there's no memory of it being used?

It is said Bangalore has fewer Kannadigas by the day. Understandably enough, given the proximity of non-Kannada-speaking states people would come here looking for opportunities.
One Uber driver, a long time ago, was pleasantly surprised that I spoke to him in Kananda when his default language of interaction was Hindi. "Saar, ee cab-alli Kannada maathadi ond vara mele aagbitide (Sir, it's been over a week since anyone spoke Kannada in this cab)".

The conversation mentioned earlier was about how my friend's grandmother stopped speaking Konkani, a language she grew up with after she moved to her husband's home who didn't speak Konkani. With life getting busier, it eventually trickled down into only small phone calls, and neither her kids nor her grandkids (my friend) picked up the language.

Some of you know that I'm a half-gult. My mother's side speaks Telugu, but have been in Bangalore for generations. My father's side speaks Kannada, and that has been the language at home. My school strongly discouraged speaking in local languages and forced English. I think in English and have to translate things mentally when I have to switch to Kannada (though most of it is automatic which isn't the case with Telugu). I don't speak Telugu, apart from the most childish/basic words - mostly because I was never exposed to it, and now I'm too shy 🙈.

I can't even imagine the number of things that are eventually forgotten into oblivion.

🏫 The Museum Around Us

Earlier this week, a screenshot of a tweet (currently called post) that went viral caught my eye.

This got me thinking about how everything around us was someone's brainchild, someone's passion, someone's life's work. And we can either be watchers and coast through this museum of artefacts, or be observers and learn from them to make our things, or be curators and edit things to mean something more (or less) for the next person who comes around, or conservators and maintain things to mean the same as the original artist intended.

A side quest thought of this is what Julian from Baumgartner Restoration often talks about - conservators aren't editors, their job isn't to make something better but to restore the item to being itself.

The next time you step out, I urge you to walk through this museum and interact in a more meaningful way.

Errata / Updates

1. The garden is doing well. We harvested lots of basale soppu (Malabar spinach) for one of the lunches earlier. We've also been harvesting bits of mint, and periwinkle flowers.

2. No stream this week too - mainly because of a network issue. We've been running on mobile hotspots for almost a year, and we're finally getting a broadband connection. Expect the coming week to be a lot better for code.with.teej

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

Vacationing so hard, that I don't remember what to write about.

It's been raining cats and dogs in the South, while I hear the North getting roasted with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius for days. The summer here touched 40 for a couple of days, which was unbearable, I'm scared to think of that environment for weeks/months! I also hear the kind of devastation that awaits the breadbasket of India - crops don't like high temperatures too, and I've seen first-hand how stressed plants yield less.

On the slightly bright side, the random cloud bursts amid sunny days gave us rainbows this week.

The other amazing thing that's been happening of late is that all BBMP-run parks in Bangalore are open throughout the day. This has been a boon for us as we enjoy the sun and the green, and the weather has been perfect to soak in both.

-Teej

🥘 Cook-at-Home Challenge

The past few weeks have been hectic. With everything that's happening (or not happening) with the business, we haven't been able to eat homemade meals as much.
It's usually been a roti-curry (a Bangalore invention), or some thali, or just sambar-rice meals. In any case, more food is made in kitchens that we don't have transparency over. And this has become important to us, given all the shams that the FSSAI has been under the looking glass for.

We decided to challenge ourselves to cook and eat homemade meals for the next 4 weeks. Four because it ends well with my partner's birthday near the horizon, and god knows I can't go a month without eating a plate of masalapuri (the pandemic has been a testament to this with us making variations of the dish during the lockdowns).
The precursor to this endeavour was the breakfast ideas sheet from the 1st edition.

We plan on having a few stir-fries - a dish I've never made authentically, a lower reliance on foods completely made outside, and more prepped dishes like hummus and tofu to make the meals faster.
We also have a flavour bomb of an instant rasam pudi that our friends and family have raved about. The powder is very versatile and makes a range of dishes for the South Indian palate.
And of course, make more snacks. We've been on 2-meal diets and 3-meal diets, but invariably end up craving crunchy/sweet snacks and things like biscuits have been saviours. But we'd like to replace them with some homemade alternates.

Let me know if you'd be interested in this journey, or want to join us in the challenge 😀 having a community of people doing this will make things easier for all of us involved.

Join WA Group

🌱 Alive and kicking after a week of neglect

We were away from our small balcony garden for over a week.

I left the pots on the sill to capture whatever rain runoff was available, and this seemed to have worked beautifully for the most part.
The melon has grown larger, the basil has thrived, the curry plants died and it was known, and the multitudes of periwinkles have all taken root well.

Just when I think I've understood something about the garden, I end up knowing there's a ton more to learn.

We have a similar garden in my in-law's home. And I'm thinking of rigging up some way to keep the plants alive there too. I would deeply appreciate any thoughts/ideas that can help!

🧑‍🎨 Learning the fun of design

Modern Japanese design is known for its minimalistic nature and the zen principles it follows.

This great article talks about a kid's show that emphasises design and the ability to break down hard problems into solvable components. The playful nature with which the show ran with the segments that engaged and inspired kids and young adults was instrumental in putting modern Japanese design on the world map. There aren't many episodes on YouTube, but this playlist is a great start to the rabbit hole.

One great thing the article also talks about is that recognition of great work creates a feedback flywheel that enables more generations to enter the field.

This very closely reminded me of M.A.D. by Rob on Pogo, where the emphasis was on creating art with some functional aspect to it. Briefly scrolling show listings (yeah, I'm from the generation that has those), I very rarely spot a show with a similar agenda.
Or maybe the YouTube culture has taken over this aspect, leaving the idiot box that adorns our walls to stay as an idiot.

Honestly, I've learnt a tonne from these shows and the SUPW (Socially Useful Productive Work) classes in school, about craft making and the sheer joy of building tangible things.

🕰️ Productivity lies

Speaking of Productivity, the race to stay productive starts as soon as one graduates, or turns into an adult, whichever is sooner based on the responsibilities held by the individual. Unfortunately for some, it's a lot sooner.

Social media has made escaping this busyness impossible, with everyone posting and relating to achievements and goals. We're often left with a feeling of existential dread, thinking we could've done a lot more, instead of doom-scrolling for 2 hours.

Apart from avoiding social media, Cal Newport's Slow Productivity talks about doing fewer things. 1 project a day. Lesser context switches.

We're often told about leveraging habits, to make things feel automatic - eg leaving your exercise shorts at the door so you're compelled to go workout, or leaving the charger outside the bedroom so you're not bringing in devices into your sleep area. This is akin to a ritual where you tie these tasks to specific times of the day.

Having a to-do list flooded with all your tasks simply adds to the overwhelm. An approach that's worked for me is maintaining 2 lists - 1 list of 3-5 things that I want to achieve on a given day, and another a backlog of things I would like to do at some point. Ideally, the backlog is tagged with required energy levels, so that it's easy to pick out what you want - but you discipline yourself to only dig into this backlog once your main list is empty. This is the principle of a pull-based task system.

A friend and I were just talking about how time has been zooming past in our 30s. There are so many things to do, and so little time to do it all. Having a list offloads the bulk of this overwhelm away from your head, so you're better prepared to seize the day.

📚 Play to learn

If someone can't explain it simply, they don't know it.
Behind that jargon is a lot of insecurity.
- Justin Welsh

We had a unique opportunity to test out a game with a set of children today.

The premise was simple - talking about the water cycle, and how settlements grow or die based on water available. The agenda of the game was to help kids understand the tradeoffs between growth and consumption, and what second-order effects would look like for a large population.

The game itself wasn't hard to communicate, but the underlying concepts were difficult for kids to fully understand. There was a disconnect in how ideas like evaporation and condensation were related to groundwater recharge and consumption. And we felt it wasn't just because of the medium of teaching, but the method of pedagogy the kids were exposed to as well.

Now, I'm no expert in these fields, but I know enough to identify rote learning from understanding. And the kids we interacted with today were quite the experts in the former - and I felt a sense of privilege that my parents could afford to put me in a school where I learnt to learn.

I'm honestly interested in this field, and want to dig deeper - education is something that makes me tick and the impact that's possible is immense.

Errata / Updates

• Long time since I streamed. I'm finally back home, and this will change in the coming week.

• I've been spending a lot of time watching and learning schematic design and PCB making. If you have any resources, please send them my way 😄

• A couple of you resonated with the multipotentialite post. Would you be interested in an accountability group, just to keep abreast of what's going on in your world?

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

I turned 34 this week. I'm currently in full vacation mode. And yes, I just finished binging Bridgerton season 3.
I'm writing this sipping on tea lovingly made by my maava, sitting on the balcony, listening to bird chirps and lorry honks.

A theme I've been thinking about has been around reinventing oneself. A conversation from 2019 with a close friend of mine came to mind - about being a multipotentialite - people with many creative pursuits and interests. We recognised each other as fellow multipotentialites and discussed how our environment isn't built to foster people like us.

Multipotentialite personalities don't necessarily stem from the lack of excitement from a single topic (in contrast to the Japanese's Shu-Ha-Ri to master something very deeply) but from a deep-rooted want to learn/practice many things. Similar to what Scott Adams advocates - becoming very good in multiple domains, and marrying them together.

Let's jump into this week's edition! Do share the post with your friends :)

Share

-Teej

🍞 Breadwinner meets laser swords

The past week has been crazy hectic on our business front.

First, the elevator gave way, and getting it fixed was a chaotic mess.
There were numerous issues with service agreements, delivery timelines, and many he-said-she-said.
Things are functional now, but it all feels like a bandaid rather than a permanent fix. We're yet to decide on a course of action for making this more hands-off.

We got a name board laser cut for the building.
One of my besties arranged for a visit, where we got to spend some time looking at large machines fire beams of light to melt steel and blow it off with Nitrogen/Argon. Precisely moving according to the design laid out in the control machine, with large gantries to hold up the heavy equipment and rows of spikes to secure the plate steel.

The factory was huge, and it brought up all thoughts of the missed opportunities of being able to work in such a place. We were here on my birthday, and it felt nice to get to see these machines too!

My father had been spitballing a few ideas on organising an educational tour of such factories, to experience what happens in these giant sheds - think Discovery's How It's Made, but in real life.
I want to call it a theerthyatra for to-be mech-heads.
Would you be interested in such a tour?

🐶 Same, but different

This talk by Randy Deutsch that I had come across years ago, had been instrumental in how I think about my career. My parents have also walked this walk - and shown me first-hand how important it is to have multiple concurrent streams of interests.

I've been a hardware engineer, photographer, software engineer, engineering manager, and now most currently - a real-estate manager. And this list is just the main gigs. The side gigs are far too many to list or count. All in the last dozen years.
The single line that connected all part of this career track was me being able to make a difference - and being able to scale this. And all this feels like something I've been doing for myself - and not for somebody else's idea of my life.

What Randy talks about is having a Major/Minor career, and reinventing the minor one every few years - to keep things fresh - to permit yourself to explore things. These concurrent careers give you the room to have multiple creative outlets depending on how the markets/environments are.
He calls this "alchemy" - where you're taking apart your skills and passions, and putting them together to reinvent yourself.

He suggests looking at your career as a set of sigmoid curves - you start learning something new and become an expert eventually at it. Somewhere in between, you pick up something new again and jump off to a different curve (the dotted one). Doing this every few years, again, will help you learn a lot more and offer far more opportunities to grow. This also helps you control the trajectory of where you're going.

What are your current side gigs?

Leave a comment

💿 Everything is a remix

Speaking of alchemy, this video is my annual watch (there have been previous editions).

When you take something old, and use it in something new - that's remixing. That's creating. To build complex things from simple ideas.

Sampling ideas and combining them into new ways is probably the most defining thing humankind does.
From music (video has great resources on it), to stories (what Disney does with folk stories), to memes (no one can deny screenshotting and changing text labels anymore), to software (most are sampled and remixed), to even this language (context is adapted into the medium of communication).
The idea of original thought is quite farfetched and rare.
Sure there are laws on what is infringement, and boundaries of appropriation, but evolution at its core is about remixing and seeing what works.

Copying ideas is essential to creativity. This is how we learn. This is how we grow.
Remixing is not plagiarising - where one takes credit for someone else's work. Remixing is finding another interesting perspective when one puts multiple ideas into the melting pot.

The three important processes while remixing are - copy, transform, and combine.
In the context of a home cook, you copy a recipe that has worked for someone else, transform it into your own by switching out ingredients (switching tomatoes to tamarind is something I do often in the kitchen), and combine them to make new things (I reckon vangi-poha was made when someone tried making vangibath and realised they ran out of rice).

Leaving this section with this Omeleto video on an original idea.

🥱 Boredom as a path to fun

Back in 2009, one of my besties and I ended up at IIT Bombay's cultural fest - Mood Indigo. More of my besties were supposed to come, but life happened, and they didn't show up. We were part of a larger contingent from my college and didn't gel too well with them.
To beat the boredom on the train, we spoke about weird and crazy possibilities. Like how the Hindu lunar calendar would look if the Earth had 2 Moons. Or what the course of evolution would look like if electron clouds formed just a little bit differently. The ideas were truly mind-boggling for a pair of 19-year-olds. I wish we had written them down!

We ended up taking all the workshops at the fest. And I mean all of them.
We explored DJ-ing, juggling, and a lot more, and found we were quite good in a few. Enough to consider alternate career paths if software wasn't our thing anymore.

I think I'm at those crossroads now. Software doesn't spark that joy - at least working in a software company doesn't. And this has given me a chance to get bored with things. To find joy in just doing things. To have fun.

Our environment too isn't conducive to boredom at all! Entertainment is so accessible, that the consumption of content is magnitudes higher than the creation of content. All because we don't allow ourselves to sit idle and get bored anymore.

Slide into my DMs if you have ideas around this

🧮 Being a polymath

And finally, on how to balance all these interests. I came across this video recently, which sparked the thread in my head.

Embrace your inner multipotentialite, and understand that you may have an array of interests.
Once you're able to come to terms with this hit me up (just kidding, but I would love to know what your current passions are).

The key learning I've had is that not all hours of the day are created the same for an individual. Different tasks are meant to be scheduled or pursued at different energy levels. Example: It's easier for me to write at sunset than to write first thing in the morning, while I feel sleepless after working out in the evening.
Understanding this internal clock, and energy bar is key to being able to pursue multiple passions.

Other things like timeblocking, pomodoros etc will help to stay on track, and systems like setting SMART goals will make sure you don't get overwhelmed.

A periodic stock listing of your passions can also help focus on what's interesting currently, and park your other ideas or close some loops.
I haven't practised this well enough to preach, but documenting the journey can help pick up things where you left off instead of restarting things from scratch.

Errata / Updates

• I wasn't able to stream this week. I'm vacationing too hard 😅

• Some of you loved the Masalapuri story. Hope the instagram feed sparks joy too! I will eventually get this rolling ❤️

• A few of you resonated with the kids these days section. This was heavily inspired by Ryan Holiday's Daily Dad.

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

I would love it if you could take this 2 min survey too!

Start Survey

If you enjoyed this, give the previous post a read too!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

Week 3! Birthday week! As a ritual, I spend some time walking down memory lanes to figure out things that have stood out for me - things worth talking about again.

While the last year has been mostly about chilling, and doing whatever the reverse of getting burnt out is; the last couple of days have been hectic.
Mainly because of operational issues with the business that my wife and I run - we have a set of serviced apartments that people love in JP Nagar. Our elevator stopped working recently, and we've had issues getting it repaired.

Anyway, I'm excited about this edition of the newsletter - a wave of nostalgia coming up!

-Teej

🥗 Plate full of sunshine

It's pouring now in Bangalore—the perfect weather for a perfect meal - street-side masalepuri.
Spotting a shop isn't difficult - they're ubiquitous - a 4-wheeled cart, with a cool white LED light these days. A cart with plastic covers full of fried puri, the usual suspects of onion-tomato-carrots, boiled potatoes, vessels with masala and peas - interchanged onto a stove to keep both hot and a pot full of spicy pani. A blue tarp keeps the rain out these days, a few plastic stools or chairs for their patrons to sit on, and a couple of buckets for people to keep their plates once they're done.

"Anna ond masale", and the vendor buzzes into a frantic one-person assembly line.
Cracks a few maida puri into a white ceramic plate, spoons a ladle of peas, and another of the green (or brown) masala usually made of a potato-onion base spiced with pudina, adds a spoon full of finely chopped onion-carrot salad and diced tomatoes, pinches of chat masala and salt, and teaspoons of spicy green chutney and sweet-tangy tamarind chutney. Tops the entire plate with some sev, garnishes with coriander, and serves with a steel spoon.

I honestly think masala puri is a perfect meal - if made at home. It has all the carbs from the starches, fats from the oils, and enough protein from the cooked peas.
But... It never stops with one plate of masala puri, does it?

"Anna, ond panipuri".

What is your go-to snack?

👨🏼‍🏫 Meeting an old teacher

This was 2015 and is a story that answered all the "did you get thrown out of college" questions on FaceBook.

A few friends and I got into a random water fight in my pre-university college.
For those who don't know, I spent a couple of years at Deeksha, which we proudly declare was a prison of sorts for high-achievers. I was in the 3rd batch and the college management was still getting a hold of things and how students could co-exist in the space. The place was quite strict about dressing and essentially tried to keep the focus on studying, and less on the teenagers-having-fun bits. Students carried tomes of textbooks, and sheets of homework, while all dressed in pinstriped white and blue shirts and blue pants that made us, unfunnily look like inmates. The college too, was in the middle of nowhere, at Thalekettpura Talaghattapura.

After, I-don't-remember-how-we-got-into-a-water-fight, we tried going back to class. My friends were slightly faster than me, and I missed slipping into class before the lecturer came in. While I was waiting to get in, the principal spotted me as he was angrily walking upstairs - I reckon to yell at someone else. He asked me to wait, and wait I did.
It felt like an eternity, and we heard him yell at other hapless teenagers. Imagine a gunshot dispersing a flock of birds - but a human-voiced gunshot.
The principal finally came down, and "spoke" to me. He took me to the gate of the college and told me to not come back.

While I was trying to figure out my options, the student counsellor came out of his corner office in the library and said, "How will you go home now? Come sit under the fan in the library."

This core memory came flooding in, on my way to a run, when I saw this person in a flat cap, fumbling with his phone near my home.

We spent some time catching up and reliving this story.

BBB and chips kind of birthdays

I grew up in a quarter - an apartment of sorts, where at least one parent shares the workplace with every other kid's parent. Birthdays were meticulously planned and executed by my parents - and this was something I looked forward to at the start of the school year, to call all my friends home and celebrate it.

Amma baked a cake a couple of times, and Appa was amazing at the decor, they would reuse the paper streamers, and confetti from the previous party. Amma would make a big batch of bisibelebath - a rice-lentil dish loaded with veggies - truly a one-pot meal, and Appa would bring salt and spicy potato chips from the local All Hot Chips. We would make some Rasna together, and move the furniture so that the TV isn't the centrepiece of the living room but one small table with the cake and me behind it.

Friends of all ages. Many from the quarters who I played with daily. Loads of photos in old analogue film cameras. Good food - one can never go wrong with BBB, chips, and juice; and cake.

Birthdays seemed so simple back then. And this menu seemed so universal (for a Kannadiga family).

Epistemology and managing what you know

Epistemology - the theory of knowledge.

Farham Street is an amazing resource for topics that make you think.
The question of how you know that you know what you know (not even paraphrasing) is detailed here. This is something I've pondered about a lot.

Sure, there are textbooks, and notes you've made as a child - to know what you've learnt. But as an adult, this slowly fizzles away.
Sure, there are books in your library (or an anti-library), to know what you've read about (or what you're willing to read); but does this get distilling into your knowledge somewhere?

A lot of the knowledge we acquire is via the lens of our experience - and subjective to our perception. This borders on solipsism, but it's important to think about knowledge as a social agreement of mutually consistent comprehension of things. For example: an apple is red because most people in society would call that colour red - and someone who is blind to the colour wouldn't be able to differentiate between the red everyone calls it and let's say orange. This is because all our perceptions stem from the same physical world, and hence there's room for consistency in understanding things as a group.

Tying this into knowledge management, there's a great idea of zettlekasten - a personal library of notes of what you've come across.
I've tried building this for myself - and I've kept falling off the bandwagon for ages. Mostly because I never thought I had an end goal for these ideas.
But I've found a way to give them a fresh lease of life - most of what's written in these newsletters comes from my zettles - my notes about others' thoughts.

Would you be interested in reading more about this meta-framework?

Kids these days

The world is in constant flux - with every generation having it easier than the previous one.
I remember my father's stories of how he had to man up and shoulder his family when he was still a teenager - something I've been lucky enough not to go through at the same age. My mother told me stories of how she wanted to support her sisters before she could get married herself.

But this doesn't mean being a kid is easy.

With everything being so connected and accessible - it's a lot tougher for kids to break out of their shells, to get out of their comfort zones, to face the world while just being silly.

I remember cycling on empty streets, slipping on sand, and returning home with bloodied calves. I remember climbing guava trees and hanging upside down, just because I could. I remember fighting with my best friend and returning to being besties the next day.
Now, all of this is a lot harder. Children aren't allowed to explore what their bodies are capable of, in fear of getting hurt. With the advent of digital media, there's a permanent record of what was said, and kids are trained to become editors of their own thoughts, to remain politically correct at a very tender age. The youth aren't just allowed to be silly and stupid anymore.

All this limits their chance to grow. To explore their minds and bodies. To experiment and make weird choices. To distance themselves from their immature selves. To just kid around.

Errata & Updates

1. I'm thinking of switching to a daily schedule for code.with.teej instead of the current weekly version - more because I feel like there's more that can be done with a faster cadence. Rasika.life is live, and we're adding features slowly :) Let me know what you think!

2. A lot of you loved the garadimane post - places are teaching how to work with mudgars, gada etc too. One I go to is Tagda Raho, more for their structured way of teaching over the community-driven one at my garadimane.

3. Some of you reached out empathising with the curry leaf plant. This batch too shrivelled up and died.

4. There were a few questions about how I record the podcast version of the post - I use Apple Voice Notes and edit in Garageband. The previous post had 200+ umms and aahs that I cut out.

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

If you enjoyed this, give the previous post a read too!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

I legit didn't realise how the week flew by. It feels like yesterday I wrote the first edition, and I'm here again, writing this today.

The feedback from last week has been amazing :) A lot of you loved this format, and I think it's a six (for the cricket lovers here). Thank you!
I know I've to work on the audio, and I will. Hopefully, today's podcast version is better.

A friend said "Morning work felt like entering a battlefield" last week. And it made me think about my break (flexing my privilege here), and how amazing it has been. It's been a while since I stood on this battlefield.
The chaos that comes from the lack of stand-ups, townhalls, etc other activities I was once expected to attend, has made me miss the structure and the interactions with colleagues.
Honestly, I miss the pre-pandemic schedule, where you could switch off work mode at 7 pm. And also something about doing things in your 20s vs 30s (maybe a topic for a future edition).

Speaking of colleagues, we're all looking for a tribe essentially, someone to share our journeys with - the highs and the lows. I'll touch upon this later again, but I'm amazed how workspaces enable a lot of this for grown-ups - given that people are willing to spend 40+ hours a week in that context and with very little play involved.

What do you think?

-Teej

🐻 Garadili karadi (Bear in the gym)

One of the biggest things I've been working on this past year is my physical self. I've tried gyms in the past, and it never clicked. I never found joy in lifting heavy things, and given that I sweat a lot easily, I've become very conscious about how I feel at the end of a workout.

When we shifted to Basavangudi, one of the things that immediately popped on maps was a garadimane or akhada - essentially an Indian traditional gym.

This is a community-driven gym, where you show up every day, and someone more senior than you will teach an exercise/movement. What's interesting is the use of a mud-pit, and lopsided/asymmetric weights that change how you train with them. And there's an extreme emphasis on low-intensity-high-repetitions. It's easy to expect someone to do 100 bhaski, but the same cannot be said about deadlifts.
The roots of the workouts stem from our agriculture-based lifestyle of yore. There's a lot of digging, swings, and balancing.

Eventually, some of these garadimane folk train to become wrestlers. Traditional mud-wrestling is a dying art though, giving way to the more popular mat wrestling and other forms like boxing, jujitsu etc.

Have you tried working out in a garadimane? Would you like to try it?

🌿 A pot full of dying curry

We have bunches of mint and basil doing well in tiny posts, and a small habanero sapling too.
There's some new gourd coming up, and I'm not sure what it is. Waiting for it to become bigger, and ripen :)

Our curry leaves though, they look so thin, frail, and almost dead. We got these from our neighbour, and somehow we're just unable to make it thrive.

Please help me grow a better green thumb!

💻 code.with.teej's debut

I started streaming on Twitch yesterday.
It's a little rough, a lot to learn, and needs better audio.
I was quite overwhelmed with how the stream would be, and what I would talk about etc, but then I remembered what I wrote last week, and just shipped it.

The first-ever edition talks about setting up SST.dev, which has a new "Ion Framework" to deploy serverless applications across multiple cloud providers, and using Remix.run with this framework to create blazingly fast websites. I also set up shadcn to help create a good starting point, though I haven't used the component library fully in the project yet.
Now, if any of this didn't make sense, please let me know, and I'll try to make something to convey my passion for code and tech better :)
If something in this made sense, and if you're curious to learn more, go to my Twitch/YouTube; or hit me up here :D

The project itself is about reinventing a very common resource for all Carnatic lovers - Karnatik.com, which has terrible UI but is a goldmine of information. I scraped data (and am attributing it all to the website, don't worry), and we're creating a web app that will work better on mobiles and small screens.
I have some larger plans for this project, and eager to share them with you as it unfolds.

Uff this is getting long. Time for an intermission.

🏔️ Starting the trekking hiking season at Rayakottai

A few of us went on a trek, or what my friends in the west call a hike, to Rayakottai - a small fort between Hosur and Krishnagiri.

It all started on Friday evening, with someone pushing to plan the trek on a WhatsApp group. People slowly trickled into the plan, and we eventually had something to execute.

A long drive to beyond Hosur for breakfast (highly recommend Pongal and Dose when you're away from Bangalore), and a small trek up the hill to a temple.

The route is well laid out, and the weather was perfect - cool breeze, with intermittent sun.

There's a longer route to the top of the hill which we couldn't go for due to the lack of time. I'm stoked for this trekking season, and documenting these routes better!

🫂 Making friends as adults

One of my fondest memories is making a friend some 25 years ago.
It was the day after Children's Day. My class, like everyone else, was at the auditorium, watching the teachers try to entertain us (which was way easier back in the 90s, compared to the lengths parents have to go for their kids now). After all the scheduled programming we headed back to class, and this kid was sitting in my space.
Going full Sheldon on him, I said "That's my spot".
What started as a disagreement, ended up giving me a friend who christened me TJ.

Finding situations like this, let alone finding people, is infinitely harder as an adult.
There was a phase back in the early 2010s when Twitter (currently X) was a haven to find like-minded people. Many became acquaintances. Some friends. Fewer became besties. And one became family.

The same cannot be said about the internet today. The whole space feels like a sticky hot mess that's best avoided. Not that it wasn't so earlier, but our collective naiveté made it a relative "safer" space.

A lot of my friends have had multiple simultaneous changes in their lives - moving cities, changing relationships, new jobs etc. One topic we always end up talking about is this - making friends in a new space, in a new environment.

It's interesting to think about this. How do you make friends as an adult?

Errata

1. Somehow this link to the #48in24 was messed up in the previous edition: Exercism #48in24 (turns out it’s how substack processes hashtags)

2. A friend warned me of the Toxic squash syndrome, which stems from the bitter-smelling gourd growing in my garden. Cautiously, we harvested the vegetable and made it into this delicious sambar with sweet pumpkin once we realised it’s not really bitter (but a little sour)

   

   Made ragi mudde with the sambar. Paired well too. Also, don't yuck my yum.

   

   As a backup, we bought one from the market too, and it looks so much different. Wonder what they use to make it so. No points for guessing which is from where.

End Note

Today's theme has been about finding your people. Let me know how you make friends, and how close you become to your colleagues.

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

If you enjoyed this, give the previous post a read too!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!
Teej

This is something new I'm trying to do 😅 (It's a little late for a New Year resolution, but my birthday is a couple of weeks away)

This isn't going to be a tech newsletter, but more of a compilation of everything I've been working on, and playing with - be it with food, health, code, or ideas I'm stockpiling in my head. Mostly anything that I've spent some energy on, and something I think would be worthwhile for you to look at too! I'm hoping to hear back from you on what you think about stuff I write, and maybe make things more interesting for both of us.

Some questions I've asked myself about this while starting - 

• Why this format? - I've tried blogging in the past, and have done a couple of versions of a photo-a-day public journal. They all have, at some point, felt like a chore and my interest has fizzled out. One thing that hasn't waned is my want to jot down things that pique my interest, and a never-ending to-watch/to-listen/to-read list. This newsletter is going to be an abridged version of those lists, coupled with a few topics close to me that I will frequent.

• Why now? - As I said, my birthday is a couple of weeks away - nearly 34 revolutions around the sun. It's an arbitrary thing, but feels like the coming year is going to be more chaotic than the last few. The reason could be for posterity, but right now I'd like it to be a pseudo-accountability thing, where I can show more than tell things. 

With all this said, let's get on with the newsletter :) 

-Teej

🥗 What's for brekky? 

naale thindige yen maadli? is a question that's plagued us for months now! Especially when we're with more-adult adults (read parents). 

Meal planning has worked, but one major issue I have with it is a chicken-and-egg problem of shopping-vs-planning. Do you shop first and then plan with what you've bought, or plan first and then look in the markets for what you need to buy? While I'll be working on something for this soon, I recently compiled a list of breakfast options available for a mostly South Indian palate. 

Check out the breakfast ideas sheet here.

Do let me know if you're interested in my weekly meal plans.

🪴 Stray plants in my pots

We got a few pots a month ago, and some mud. (side quest: Sadly, we have to buy mud too). Transplanted a beautiful but dying bird's eye chilly plant, and sealed its fate - chillies don't like being moved around. But out of the homemade compost, we got a creeper, which we had no idea to identify until the fruit started to mature recently.  

It's a beautiful Malabar Cucumber or bannad southekayi. The fruit smells quite bitter, and I'm not sure if that's a thing. Hoping it'll be good in a week or two, and we can make some nice alsande-bannadsouthekayi huLi (cowpea-cucumber "curry") with it!

🧑‍💻 Return to the code

This part of my life has legit taken a backseat the past few months. 

With whatever small projects I work on, I'm in absolute love with platforms like SST, and Remix. I'm working on an SST-Remix Starter template, loosely based on KCD's Epic Stack. Both SST, and Remix recently had major changes, and I'm still wrapping my head around them. 

I'm also launching a Twitch channel, to do some live coding. More on this in the next week 😄

If you have ideas on what I can build/clone on this tech channel, hit me up! One thing I think will be fun is doing Exercism #48in24.

🤔 On Overthinking

This video stood out to me the past week. It's a condensed version of Miyamoto Musashi's works and talks about being in the present and stopping overthinking.

Perceive that which cannot be seen by the eye

Acknowledge your inner fears and truly know yourself.

It talks about being in the present.

1. Adaptable
   Overthinking often occurs when one becomes rigid. 
   Let go of the anxiety that comes from pursuing perfection. 

2. Focus
   Don't dwell on things that don't matter. Get rid of all the fluff, and give your mind a path to pursue a purposeful action.
   Similar to the Pareto Principle, 20% of what you want to do gives you 80% of the results you seek.

3. Compare with yesterday not others
   You're guaranteed the 24 hours you have today, tomorrow might never come. Take things 1 day at a time. Commit yourself to 100% on today

4. Journey is the goal

   Rushing leads to mistakes and stress. Good things take time, and there's a natural rhythm to everything. 

5. Balance - Mind and Body

   Sync your mind and body; you cannot have a sound mind in an unkempt body, and you cannot have a fit body in a stressed mind. 

6. The way is in the training

   Practice makes permanent, and cut yourself some slack when it comes to goals.

Also, connected to this is something I read in Tiago Forte's newsletter on feeling overwhelmed because of the Zeigarnik Effect - where one remembers interrupted loops more than completed ones; and that one has to permit oneself to forget. 

What are your thoughts on this? 

📰 Fleshing out this newsletter

Taking a page out of Dann Berg's workflow, almost literally; I'm writing all this on Obsidian - my tool of choice for processing thought. Much of the format, and styling are inspired by , and I'm curious what my mileage will look like for this.

You should give him a follow on YouTube, where he goes deeper into Personal Knowledge Management and Obsidian. 

👍🏽 End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon! 

-Teej

I’m Tejovanth, known more as TJ in real life, and iBakasura on X(formerly Twitter).

The past decade, I’ve been a builder and manager, mostly in my comfortable corner. I’ve played with building SaaS platforms in events, real-estate, consumer products; scaled multiple engineering and tech teams across multiple organisations; run agencies and consulted with various domains. I’ve never really shared what my processes to find my calm in those storms were, but I look forward to changing it.

I’ve been trying to make sense of things, with documenting the games and experiments I play for just myself. But growth doesn’t happen in silos.

I want to share this journey with you. I’ll be talking mainly about creating proofs-of-concepts, scale ideas with tech, discuss food and health, and a lot more.

This is a piece of the journey!

Join me, as I talk about what I’ve been building, nurturing, and creating every week - and take a look at the archives to see what this has been like.

Subscribe now