Weekly Notes 16/2024

April 20, 2024

This week: purchasing a villa plot, book recommendation “A Stitch in Time”, Vishu celebrations, health concerns, and cultural reflections.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

My brother and his girlfriend came down from Bengaluru for Vishu and we went and saw the villa plot again. It’s currently very much a work-in-progress with them just moving the land into place. Nevertheless, demand is high (& supply for such villa projects seem to be not that much in the city), everybody seems to like the concept and the other options we’ve considered are nowhere close, so a life event happened: I paid a deposit and booked the plot. The land has to be raised quite a bit from where it is now, so the real-estate agent keeps drawing rectangles in the air to point out where the plot would actually be ?

Well this is how it looks now. The land will be raised at least until that containment wall, if not more.

If you know me, you know I like amateur fiction. Here’s a recommendation: A Stitch in Time by Marsh Alien. It’s the usual do-over time travel story with a twist: the character travels into the future instead, realises he’s become an asshole and now wants to understand how to undo it. Pretty clever plot and good writing. Like all such recommendations, it’s a bit NSFW, but it’s a great story nevertheless.

We celebrated Vishu last Sunday. It’s Kerala’s New Year, and we’re supposed to greet the year by seeing Krishnan all decked up. It’s also the favourite festival for kids as they receive Vishu kaineetam (literally pockets of money) from every adult. And if you give more than you get, it’s a visible sign of middle age ?

Ammu went to a team meetup in Dehradun. Unfortunately she had to cut the trip short as she ran up a fever and a bad cough in between. I picked her up from the airport and took her to the hospital the next day. Our next IVF round is set to start next week, so both of us were a bit worried. Whatever she caught, I did too and had to take a day off to recover. The flu nowadays hits like a hammer and the brain fog during and afterwards is just crazy.

I think one of the reasons why I dislike Hindutva so much is its insistence on vegetarianism and its purity somehow. It has been imbibed into our culture so much nowadays that even delivery apps like Swiggy have it on their screens. Whereas in actual fact: most Indians (including Hindus) are non vegetarian, and Hindu literature is replete with examples of Gods eating meat and animal sacrifice. It seems to be part of BJP’s strategy to make everybody conform to their ideal of Hinduism and I’m sorry to say that that’s not how I practice as a Hindu.

What’s so pure about being a vegetarian?

When I grew up we had a tendency to refer to western medicine as allopathy. Read the history of the term though and it’s incredibly derogatory. I wish there was a better term for evidence-based medicine.
And finally, a movie recommendation: Saudi Vellaka (on Sony Liv). It was released in 2022, but we missed seeing it somehow and just caught up with it yesterday. It’s one of the best movies I’ve watched this year (& that’s saying something). The casting and acting is just brilliant and the way it portrays the ennui of long dragging court cases in India is just perfect. It’s also a perfect depiction of how the middle class in Kerala live: an amalgam of every religion and caste and everybody just helping each other out. There are a few bad apples in the ocean that is humanity, but that doesn’t mean the ocean itself is bad. Big props to Devi Varma as Ayisha Rawther.

Termtyper seems to be a neat way to combine language learning and typing. I had fun a bit with picking English and German.
Want to own a 3D printer someday (and a house big enough to fit one). The new Formlabs ones seem like it’s finally reached decent enough speed and automation.
This video about how real-time translation works (and its limitations and affordances) was fantastic. It’s also perhaps one of those fields that’ll go away entirely once we have reliable real-time AI translation.