anik's blog

Four books that I gift and recommend the most

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last Saturday, after Cubbon Reads, I went to Blossom at Church Street.

I had taken a few old books to exchange. But I didn’t have anything particular in mind that I wanted to get for myself. So I was just looking for books that I have read already, which I could gift to friends in the future.

Which made me think about which books I gift and recommend to people most often.

It would probably make a vey long list, but I’m not in the mood to write too much and I want to get this published, so I’ll keep it limited to four books for now.

Figuring

Author: Maria Popova

Popova writes about the human condition with such care and delicateness. Her prose is as elegant as it is insightful. My favourite sentence I’ve ever read anywhere comes from this book:

This is my favourite book to gift to people (especially on their birthdays) for a few of reasons:

I know most people haven’t read it, so there’s little risk of the gift being redundant,
her writing is accessible to a general audience who may otherwise not read a lot of non-fiction, and
most importantly, as you can see from the quote above, her writing is often very touching and leaves you with a desire to experience more of life, with all its imperfections and oddities.

Sadly, it seems to have gotten incredibly difficult and expensive to get a hold of a fresh copy of this book. The first time I had gotten it was on Kindle for a price of ₹266. Last year, I had got a paperback copy of it — for a gift — for ₹800 and a hardcover — also for a gift — for ₹1,500…

As of today, the Kindle version costs ₹1,600, the paperback costs ₹1,829 amd the hardcover costs ₹2,600 on Amazon. Even Blossom and Bookworm do not have any physical copies of it last I checked. (Not that it will stop me from gifting it though.)

The Enigma of Reason

Authors: Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

I like recommending this to people because most people find the premise of this book very counter-intuitive.

Mercier and Sperber’s thesis is that reasoning is not primarily a decision-making or truth-seeking tool. It is a social tool. Which we use to justify our beliefs and actions to others.

I love talking about this every opportunity I get, for nothing explains the quirks of human behaviour better. I’ve also had lovely long conversations across multiple sessions about this book with some of my best friends.

I have not yet managed to convince anyone to actually read the book itself though (it is a bit dense). But I’m an optimist. I shall keep gifting and recommnding until one of them does.

Bullshit Jobs

Author: David Graeber

You are not going to lose your job to AI (not in the long-term sense at least). Because your job is probably already “bullshit” and never needed to exist in the first place.

(In which case, LLMs making things more “efficient” becomes rather irrelevant.)

I’ve been talking to people about this book a lot lately because the topic of the job losses because of AI comes up a lot these days. Although Greaber wrote this before LLMs were a thing, much of what he wrote applies to the current situation very well.

Even beyond that, I like talking about this book because, to some extent, we can all relate to the argument being made here. Especially those of us working in the tech sector. Most of our jobs could stop existing tomorrow and it would make little to no difference in how people in the world go about their lives.

We are all aware (consciously or otherwise) of the pointlessness of most of the things we do for “work”. Yet, there is a pretense that we have to collectively maintain. That we are doing important things; that the hour-long meeting first thing Monday morning is necessary; that those quarterly and yearly plans we are creating are of any consequence; that things need to be delivered on time. Else, something dire will happen.

It’s all, as Greaber aptly puts it, “bullshit.”

The Righteous Mind

Author: Jonathan Haidt

I like this book because it made me more tolerant, forgiving, and open-minded about other people’s political and moral beliefs.

A sense of self-righteousness comes naturally to those of us with a socially liberatarian (not to be confused with the American usage of the word) and economically left-leaning world view. And we often attribute other world views as coming either from a place of ignorance or, worse, malice.

Friends and acquaintances from a former life will know how judgemental (and possibly noxious) I have been at times on Facebook and WhatsApp groups while arguing with them about the incorrectness of their political views. (I do not, however, regret my combativeness on those groups. For often, it at least made those people stop gloating about Modi and the BJP, if for no other eason than to avoid the unpleasantness of engaging with me.)

Haidt presents a framework to understand how people’s moral intuitions are formed. Some people have a greater sensitivity to certain moral foundations than others. For instance, liberals value care, fairness and freedom more than conservatives do, while conservatives value loyalty, authority, and sanctity more than liberals do.

These are innate traits that Haidt compares to taste buds. Some people have greater sensitivity for sweetnes than others. It would be a folly to say that those who don’t have a taste for sweetnes are morally inferior. Similarly, it is a folly to say that people with different moral intuitions are better or worse.

Haidt suggests that understanding these moral intuition can help us have more productive and less judgemental conversations with those we find disagreeing with.

And, what I have also found, is that it also helps in getting other people to see your perespective. Because you can try to redirect their attention from one set of moreal intuitions (say sanctity amd respect for authority) to another (say care and reduction of harm) — instead of wasting time throwing facts an arguments which rarely have any persuasive effect in these conversations.

_Note:_ The layout for this post is inspired from [Five Books](https://fivebooks.com), my favourite place to get book recommendations.

Weeknote #35 [W26.26] - Product Management with LLMs, and half-yearly reading and watching recap

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Product Management with LLMs

I’ve been working as a Product Manager at work for the last two months.

I think this is probably the best time to be a PM because of LLMs.

The most fun part of the role right now is the amount of autonomy I have relative to when I was working as a product designer. I can take up a project and just get it done end to end in a way that I couldn’t before.

Last week, I took up a project for rolling out an NPS survey to our users. This is something I had been wanting to do for the last six months. But as a designer, it is difficult to get things like these prioritized — there’s always more urgent issues that needs taking care of. And it would also need developer bandwidth, which is always in short supply.

But now that I am a PM, and also have Claude, I can just decide to take something like this up and run with it.

The reason I took up the project was mainly so that I could also make an analytics dashboard to go with it. I like looking at data. I spent my childhood making Excel sheets out of everything I could think of. I started a coin collecting hobby just so that I could maintain an Excel inventory of all the coins I had, with tables and charts for which year and mint each one of them was from. I like looking at tables and charts. And I like presenting data in a way that is clear and useful. So this was also just an excuse to (i)indulge myself, (ii)find a distraction from otherwise not so interesting work.

Anyway, what LLMs made possible here were faster and cheaper iterations. Because of which I worked on it in a way I have not done before in a work environment. If this had gone through a normal workflow, we would first have had to write a PRD, figure out all the edge cases, make designs end to end, and so on. But since this was unlikely to break anything critical, I skipped all that. I started with rolling out the survey form directly, which took not more than a handful of prompts on Claude. Then I made a very simple dashboard design with Claude Design (which is a tool I have changed my mind over a couple of times already — from feeling it was completely useless, to a cute gimmick, to now feeling that it is almost essential; maybe I’ll write more on that in a later note), and then kept adding things based on feedback from the team about how presenting the information would be most useful.

It takes less time now to build something and deploy it to production now than it would previously take to write a PRD for it. That, to me, is a very exciting. For I have always hated PRDs and thought of them as a waste of time. A functioning prototype is, in most cases, more useful than a PRD. (I don’t think this applies to everything, of course. For anything critical, where shipping the wrong thing could break things, I think we should still need to be slow and considered.) And there are many side projects which used to remain stuck at the bottom of the pile because they were never urgent enough. These can now be taken up, shipped, and iterated with very quickly.

Half-yearly reading and watching recap

I read a lot last week because I realized that June was coming to an end and that I was way behind my yearly reading target. I think I ended up finishing three books just last week.

I read a lot on the weekdays whenever I got a chance, plus I also went to Cubbon Reads again on Saturday (where I pleasantly ran into Santrupti, Jatan, and Devanshi).

Since half the year is now over, this seems like a good point reflect on the reading and watching goals I had set for myself at the beginning of the year.

For films, my target for the year was 250. I am currently at 128, which means I am slightly ahead of where I need to be.

For books, my target was 80. Which means I should have been at 40 by now. Instead, I am only at 28.

This is funny to me because at the beginning of the year I had confidently assumed that 80 books would be the easier target, and that 250 films would be the more difficult one. It has turned out to be exactly the other way around.

The reason that I am ahead of the film target is mostly the film club. Curating for it has meant watching more films than I otherwise would have. It has also meant finally ticking several things off my watchlist.

Reading, on the other hand, suffered a bit in March and April when I was moving houses and hosting people for dinner all the time.

The extra film watching has been both fun and a bit like homework. I have watched things I would probably never have chosen on my own, and I am glad for that. One Cut of the Dead is one example. I have watched it three times already this year. It is so much fun, so clever, and one of those films that makes you fall in love with films all over again.

But there have also been films that I had to drag myself through. Holy Motors, Cecil B. Demented, Angst are a few that come to mind.

Weeknote #34 [W26.25] - HSR Reads, making people start Mataroa blogs, and watching eight films a week

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m never going back to HSR Reads

I went to HSR Reads with Jatan on Saturday. I don’t think I’ll go back again.

A few weeks ago, I had gone for Cubbon Reads. Which I enjoyed. The absence of the noise of traffic was a pleasant relief. I liked the aspect of being in nature, amidst greenery, with the sound of birds chirping.

HSR Reads was not like that. The venue is a park next to a rather busy street. So I could still hear a lot of noise coming from the street.

Plus, since it is a smaller park, there were a couple of kids playing cricket right in front of where we were sitting. Which made it difficult to concentrate on reading.

We went for breakfast with the people there after the reading got over. I think Jatan had mentioned Cinema Next Door to someone so she asked me about what kind of films we screen. Her favourite filmmaker was Quentin Tarantino.

I am never getting over accusations of being a snob. Because it is true. I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in the conversation after Tarantino was mentioned.

I have also been recently going out to my local lake with a book to read in the mornings (when I wake up early, which is not often). The lake feels far more peaceful than HSR Reads.

I’ve realized that I don’t particularly care about discussing books with strangers. Nor do I need accountability to make myself read. I mostly want an excuse to spend a couple of hours reading somewhere pleasant. The local lake works perfectly well for that.

And if I want to be around people and potentially socilize, I think Cubbon Park remains a better option.

Setting up Mataroa blogs for friends

At the end of my first Indie Web Club session, Tanvi had very kindly set me up with a Mataroa blog.

I remember feeling not very convinced at the time that Mataroa was the most interesting blogging platform for me to get started with. It seemed very bland and unexciting.

But I was wrong (and Tanvi was right). If you don’t already have a blog, Mataroa is the best platform to start with for several reasons:

it does not cost anything.
it is bland and unexciting, which means you can focus on writing rather than fiddling with themes and settings.
it is easy to export your posts if you later want to migrate to something more fancy.
it does not have its own discovery algorithm (like Medium or Substack), which makes posting something a lower stakes (and, therefore, easier) decision.

As we were discussing in this week’s Indie Web Club session, the biggest barrier to blogging is often not the writing itself, but the feeling that you first need to build a website, choose a theme, buy a domain, and create a whole system. Something like Mataroa removes those hurdles.

Last week (I think it was at kavz’s potluck), Mariam and I were admiring Tanvi’s persistence in helping everyone who comes to Indie Web Club set up their own Mataroa blogs in a very gently assertive way. At this Saturday’s session, we had our chance at playing Tanvi’s role. We got Afeefa and Himanshu started with their own Mataroa blogs. (That’s four Mataroa blogs in this paragraph!)

Eight films a week

For next month’s theme for Cinema Next Door we are planning to screen films featuring some form of sexual trangression and/or intense violence (think: Possession).

This is usually not my go to subgenre of films to watch. Which has meant that I’ve had more catching up to do than usual. I’ve watched 26 films this month already. Usually, I average 3-4 films a week, but I’ve been doing double that this month.

Which means that this has been a great opportunity to get a few things that have been on my watchlist for years checked off, and also to watch films which I’d usually not watch otherwise.

A few surprsingly nice finds this month have been:

While it has been fun watching some of these films, I’m still mainly a sucker for sincere slice-of-life stories. That, I think, is never going to change.

Weeknote #33 [W26.23-24] - Socially exhausted

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We did three screenings for Cinema Next Door last week. There was the regular Tuesday slot at Underline, another one there on Friday, and also our first screening at Atta Galatta. Attending three screenings in a week, moderating the discussions, and socializing with people after the screenings is clearly not something I am built for. (Until last year, more than one social outing in a week was too much for me.)
Among the films we screened were Cinema Paradiso and Close-Up, two of my favourite films. I was able to rewatch Cinema Paradiso during the screening. I couldn’t do the same for Close-Up. By then I was exhausted, and we had also overestimated the number of people we could host at Atta Galatta. There was barely any space there for us anwyway. So kavz, Kasturee, and I ended up sitting out the screening.
After the screening at Atta Galatta was over, I stayed back to attend a script reading of Love in the Cholera of Time with Mariam and Himanshu. I hadn’t been to watch a play in more than a year, so I was very glad when Mariam mentioned she had an extra ticket… I am not sure if I liked it. But I wouldn’t say that I disliked it either. I’d like to see the full production some time.
The next day, which was a Saturday, I made beef porridge and arrived late at kavz’s potluch lunch party. My natural inclination is always to find the quietest corner at a party, which is what I did there. I was glad to have Manu and Mariam’s company, for I did not have the wherewithal to introduce myself and start conversations with too many new people after the week I had had.
The week before that, I had spent Saturday at work because my company decided to hold a monthly business review meeting. There was no good reason why it could not have been on any other day of the week. This complete lack of respect for other people’s time is one reason why I will never again want to work at an Indian company.

Weeknote #32 [W26.22] - Eid, Indie Web Club Anniversary, and evening walks

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Eid dinner at Munazzah’s

For Eid, I had the best biryani I have had in years.

Munazzah had invited me and a few friends over for dinner. Sulfath made the mutton biryani. It was wonderful.

It made me think about all the times I have ordered biryani from restaurants over the last two years, and how unsatisfying they have been in comparision.

I ordered biryani from Paradise (terrible choice) later in the week, and it was just so bland in comparision. The last time I had satisfying biryani was December of 2024, when I had made it myself for a lunch party with friends from TPCC.

Which makes me realize, I haven’t made biryani in almost 2 years. Something to rectify soon, I suppose. (But having vegetarian friends makes it diffcult.)

On a different note, I also bought a new kurta for the occasion. Which I ordered from Instamart. I did not know Instamart sold kurtas.

Indie Web Club Anniversary at Underline

At the IWC anniversary, during one of the breaks.

Saturday (May 30), I spent the entire day at Underline.

It began with the Indie Web Club’s 1st anniversary celebrations, after which we had a screening of City of God for Cinema Next Door in the evening.

The IWC anniversary event featured 12 short talks (each one was 8 minutes long) by regulars in the community. I was very impressed by how well organized the event was. Seldom do speaking events run on time. I think, if my memory is not failing me, this was a first in 24 years of attending various seminars and lectures.

My favourite talks were probably the one by Chitin on Tecnho-feudalism and Sagrika’s on finding your writing voice.

I really liked Sagrika’s talk because it made me think about my own writing voice on this blog, which I hope to write more about soon.

My blog got mentioned a couple of times in some of the presentaions, which was super gratifying. And in the end, I was also asked to cut the cake because apparently I have attended the most number of IWC sessions.

Evening walks after work

I have taking 30 minute walks after work every evening.

Lately, I have been going to the office more often. The office isn’t very far from where I live. So instead of taking an auto, I just walk back home. And I stop for tea and snacks at a Chai Resto in between, during which I also read whatever book I’m carrying with me that day.

I had first started evening walks in Kolkata in 2021. I’d go out for an hour long walk after work at 5pm. That provided a very useful buffer between work and life outside of work. I had kept it up for the next 2 years, but stopped somewhere in between for reasons that are now too far away in time to pinpoint accurately.

I am hoping to make evening walks a regular habit again. It kept me sane during what was otherwise a deeply frustrating work week.

Mango curry

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mango Curry, with basa fillet

One of my favourite places to eat out at Bangalore is Moplah’s in Koramangala.

Every time I go there, I order their mango curry. I love it because it has the perfect combination of tanginess, sweetness and spice.

I remember really liking it the first time I had it because of how unexpected the flavor was for me. Mango was something I had only ever had as a fruit and never in a savory dish.

So last year, I thought, why not try making it at home.

This isn’t the exact same recipe as Moplah’s, it is only an approximate, but I quite like it regardless.

Tips

I use slightly under-ripe Banganapalli mangoes for the recipe. I haven’t tried other varieties of mango but it should work with many other varieties too (but then again, why would you pick anything else over Banganapalli anyway?)
I like to add fish to the recipe sometimes. Just add the fish slices into the curry after you add the coconut milk and simmer for 6-8 minutes more, and you’re done.
I would suggest having this with sticky or over-cooked rice (although regular rice works well enough).
I also enjoy having this with a side of fried potatoes along with the rice. I find it goes well with anything that is starchy.

Ingredients

1/2 tbsp Mustard seeds
3-4 sprigs Curry leaves
~20ml Coconut oil
200g Mango
100ml Coconut milk
12g Salt
2 tbsp Corriander powder
1 tbsp Chilli powder
1 tbsp Turmeric powder

Method

Heat the coconut oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the mustard seeds and curry leaves, and let them splutter.
Reduce the heat to low. Add the chilli powder, corriander powder, turmeric powder, and salt. Stir quickly for about 30 seconds to cook the spices without burning them (add a splash of water if needed to form a paste).
Add the mango pieces and about 50ml of water. Stir well, cover, and cook for ~5 minutes until the mango is soft.
Lower the heat completely and pour in the coconut milk. Stir to combine and simmer gently for 2-3 minutes (do not bring to a boil to prevent the coconut milk from curdling).
Taste and adjust the seasoning as needed, then remove from heat.

Weeknote #31 [W26.21] - Experiments with L-theanine, transitioning to product management, and more cats

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Trying out L-theanine to manage inattention symptoms

I started taking L-theanine tablets last week.

I saw a couple of YouTube videos in which people with ADHD mentioned that L-theanine along with a cup of coffee helped them. L-theanine is a compound that is naturally present in tea. Among other things, it is supposed to make you stay in a calm but alert mental state.

I did feel that I had a more productive week than I have had in the rest of the year so far. I got a lot of stuff done at work. I slept more than usual. And slept on time more days than usual. I also went to Cubbon Reads on Saturday morning for the first time in 3 years in Bangalore. Something which I have been wanting to do ever since I came here, but never did because I am usually passed out sleeping on Saturday mornings. And then on Sunday morning, I went to the market at Chichpete for the first time as well.

I would be sceptical of attributing the increased productivity to the effects of L-theanine yet. It could very well be that the intentional act of taking a tablet is acting as a placebo and making me feel more focused. There have been so many things in the past which I’ve tried that worked for a while initially and then didn’t. It remains to be seen how this works out.

(And placebos can do wonders. I am reminded of this example that I keep coming across. A study in which they found that fake knee surgeries had better outcomes than actual surgeries. [^1] There is also another study in which they found that “branding of a tablet appears to have conferred a treatment benefit.” [^2])

Transitioning into product management and thoughts on optimising career choices

Speaking of experiments, I’have been running another one.

Last month I was asked at work to transition from working from a product designer to a product manager. (Because who needs designers now? Claude can do it!)

I didn’t think too much about it and said yes to it on instinct.

Since then, I’ve been thinking, what criteria should be used for making such career choices?

I think I have made peace with the fact that most of the work I’m going to be doing in my career is going to be essentially pointless. [^3] The point of having a job is so that I have enough money to be able to do more fun stuff outside of work. Like hosting dinner for friends, decorating my home, or running a film club.

And if that is the case, it makes sense to make career decisions that optimize for the highest possible remuneration.

I also realized that you don’t do yourself any favors in terms of earning more if you stay at the same company for too long. The best way to increase your salary is to keep switching jobs and roles frequently. That is what the current job market rewards.

Even though I personally see the appeal in working as a product manager, I am going to go ahead with the change. It’s the most sensible decision I can make for myself, considering long term career prospects. Because when I apply for my next job, I am going to not only have more options available to me, but also more options which will pay better. (And if I hate it too much, I will at least always have the option of going back to being a designer for my next job.)

Temporarily more kittens

Kittens from downstairs

I had two more cats with me for a couple of days last week.

These were two tiny one-month old kittens. Their mother is a stray cat who comes and goes at my neighbor’s place.

So one afternoon, the kids from downstairs, Zeinab and Luqman, come with two kittens, and they ask me to take them. I try saying no. I’m not very good at it. So they just leave the kittens there with me and go back down. And I like cats at this point. I am not entirely against the idea of having a couple more cats with me.

And the two of them are absolutely adorable. Plus they also get along with Malcolm surprisingly well, almost immediately.

Funnily enough, the next day, the kids come back and they ask for the cats back. I realized that both their parents have very different ideas about what to do with the cats. The kids’ father thinks that the kittens should stay with the mother cat for as long as possible. The kids’ mother on the other hand — who has to stay at home and actually take care of the cats — would rather give them away. Which also makes sense, given that she already has to take care of three kids who are an absolute menace and two more cats other than these two kittens.

[^1]: Moseley. et. al. (2002). A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee. [^2]: Faasse. et. al. (2016). Impact of brand or generic labeling on medication effectiveness and side effects. [^3]: In the book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber describes how nearly 40% of the workforce feels that they are engaged in jobs that are pointless. Graeber then goes on to argue that the idea that a capitalist system is “efficient” is practically a myth. Most jobs don’t exist not because they are needed, but because people need to be kept engaged and employed for the system to not collapse on itself. (Which is also why AI won’t realistically take over any jobs in the long-term. New equally pointless jobs will be invented to keep us all occupied.)

Weeknote #30 [W26.19–20] - Stalking, a home café, and transitioning into product management

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What do you do with disgruntled people when running a community?

Week #19 started off with me being stalked and harassed.

We had removed someone from the Cinema Next Door’s WhatsApp group. That person’s brother showed up at the screening at Underline on Tuesday and started screaming at me. He was asked to leave the venue, which he did.

Two hours later, we found both the brothers waiting outside Underline. Supposedly to confront us again over this guy’s removal

We had to call the cops at that point.

It never is possible to keep everyone happy when you’re running a community, nor should that be the goal. But I wasn’t expecting for some people to react this badly!

It’s just a film club at the end of the day; how does someone get so upset by being removed from it that it ends with us having to call the police?

Home café at Mariam & Munazzah’s

The week ended much more pleasantly.

Mariam & Munazzah organized a home café at their (very spacious) place. I baked an orange & poppyseed cake for it.

I spent most of Saturday there (and way longer than I had expected).

I tend to dislike parties with large groups of people. Or so I though. My usual goal has always been just to escape as quickly as possible. But I now realize that might have just been because of the people I’ve previously been around.

Most of the parties I used to dread were college or work parties. Loud, alcohol-heavy, and usually full of people I never really connected with. I don’t particularly enjoy being around drunk people, and I suppose I never liked most of the people I work with or went to college with.

This party, and the one before that I attended with this many people (which was hosted by Tanvi), I enjoyed myself more than I expected.

Anyway, if you had to buy a ticket for the event, that’s on me. I suggested that. xD

Transitioning into product management

My role at work has changed from being a product designer to a product manager.

Because who needs designers when Claude can do everything for you, right?

A lot of what is happening in work right now leaves me feeling perpetually frustrated. We’ve reached a stage where teams have to sneak in perfectly good ideas as “AI projects” because otherwise they are not seen as worth pursuing. I was literally told, “don’t bring projects if they don’t use AI.”

I said yes to the change because, hopefully, it 'lllead to me getting paid better at my next job. Which, I think, is the most useful metric to make career decisions on.

Weeknote #29 [W26.17–18] - Cops, poems, and housewarming parties

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I have missed another weeknote — second one in three weeks.

It’s funny how I didn’t miss any for like half a year, and then once I miss one, it becomes so much easier for my brain to be okay with the idea of missing another one.

I’ve reliazed that I like writing my weeknotes, when I am in a reflective mood. The last few weeks I have been way too frustrated and demoralized by how things are progressing work-wise to take out any time for reflection (I’ve been playing online chess instead).

CND event shut down by cops because of noise complaints

We had a visit from the police during the screening of The Handmaiden at The Bangalore Local.

I saw people on X speculating over what might be the reason.

The story, however, isn’t particularly interesting. The cops didn’t even know that we were screening a file, let alone what film we were screening or what it was about. Apparently some rich & influential neighbors complained about the noise — and this seems to be a recurring problem at the venue — and the cops were insistent that we shut it down. So we did.

I was glad.

The first reason was that I had a pretty bad headache on the day, so I felt relieved to be able to leave early. And secondly, organizing events at any venue which is not Underline Center feels like a chore. This breaks allows us to take a pause, and focus on Underline events for the time being,

Using house warming parties as a way to get myself to get the new house cleaned up and organized

I hosted the fourth — and final — house warming party at my new place on April 26.

The whole series has been very fun. I’ve used them as a way to trick my brain into cleaning up and getting the new house organized.

And also to cook.

I have been cooking less than usual over the last few months. It is a result of multiple things: being out of the house too often (for CND screenings and other events), feeling too tired to cook because of how mind-numbing work is when all you do is write Claude prompts all day, and the new kitchen being a bit too small.

The last part is unfixable. In the sense that I cannot physically increase the amount of space that my kitchen has. So I need to figure out workarounds. I’ve already put the fridge and the pantry outside in the living room, but I still need to make more space for me to be able to cook freely. And I don’t yet know the best way to go about it.

Anyhow, I’m done with hosting parties for a while.

I haven’t had a restful weekend in the longest time because there always a screening, and if not, I’m hosting people for dinner. I need sleep.

I wrote poems for the first time in 15 years

I went to Shruti’s poetry workshop on Saturday (April 25).

The last time I had tried writing a poem was when I was in school and had a crush on a classmate. It was very cringe and I never tried again.

Poetry is not a medium which does a lot for me.

I have been thinking about the kind of poetry I wrote that day and what kind of poetry that generally moves me. And I think it is always the kind which is very visual, which makes you paint a clear picture in your mind that appeals to me.

I do not know yet if I will post the two very short poems I wrote. Maybe I will add a poetry page which isn’t added to the RSS feed and not easily discoverable from the home page.

Weeknote #28 [W26.16] - Weekly AI rant & curation for CND

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Weekly AI rant

At work, we planned a product roadmap for FY26-27. I have zero faith in what we have planned.

To begin with, the whole idea of making a product roadmap for an entire year seems misguided to me. We are barely able to stick to weekly sprint plans because sales always comes above product in the list of priorities. What hope does a yearly plan have?

But quarterly and yearly plans are the way corporate logic works, so what else can I do but play along?

A much bigger concern I have is “AI”.

A lot of the product roadmap is built on the foundation of the AI hype train. Which I have many concerns about:

Everybody is overestimating the actual amount of work we will be able to put into production because “Claude Code will do it in a day.”
We have planned a lot of AI features. Some of these are for critical workflows which require more accuracy than LLMs can guarantee.
We do not have control over the models we use. OpenAI/Anthropic can decide any day to alter the way their models work (as they have done this week, and will do again). Which may (or may not) alter the way our product behaves. The point is that it is a variable completely out of our control, and I am failing to see wisdom in so optimistically relying on these models.
Our users most probably do NOT want AI in many of the use cases that we’ve planned. Which includes customer support. AI bots for customer support are almost universally hated. Put them in a situation where people are already stressed (while making an insurance claim, for instance), and things will only get worse.

CND curation for May

The films for May to be to screened at Cinema Next Door has been finalized.

We’re doing films on cities. Films in which the urban environment features prominently. The point is to explore the idea that the built environment affects the people who inhabit that space. In ways that are sometimes obvious, and sometimes not.

We’ve gone for a lot of geographical variety, which makes sense, considering it is a curation on cities.

Here’s the list of films we are going with:

Salaam Bombay, India
Blade Runner, USA
Oslo, 31 August, Norway
Mahanagar, India
The Battle of Algiers, Algeria
Kayo Kayo Colour?, India
Manila in the Claws of Light, Philippines
City of God, Brazil

It is a joy to be able to screen indie films

I’m most excited about Kayo Kayo Colour?, which is an independent film from Ahmedabad. I had watched it at IFFK 2024, and I think it will provide a lot to discuss after the screening. I definitely know one question I want to ask everyone related to the film.

We had been reachin gout to indie film makers in India since we started back in December.

But we had no luck until Wafa from La Paata Films replied and gave us permission to screen Kayo Kayou Colour?

We are also planning to print out some merch (posters & postcards) and make those vailable at the venue for purchase. The revenue from that will also go to the studio. We’ve never tried this before, so I’m not sure how it will go.

But I’m happy that we get to support a independent film, and I hope we can do more of this in the future.

A few films which didn’t make the list

Here’s also a list of additional film which I really like, but didn’t make the list:

The Umbrellas of Chebourg, France
Labour of Love, India
Ek Din Pratidin, India
Il Tetto, Italy

Weeknote #27 [W26.14–15] - Amaira’s first week, coversations with friends, and bullshit jobs

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I missed posting a weeknote for the first time in 27 weeks. This one is going to be a combination of the last two weeks.

The arrival of Amaira

The kids dowstairs finally left for their gandmother’s place for the duration of their summer holiday (which they sadistically kept reminding me was 40 days long).

They left their 6-month-old kitten, Amaira Fathima, with me.

Amaira Fathima, my roommate for the next 40 days

Amaira has been settling in well. She kept hissing at me, Malcolm and everything else in existence for the first two days. She also kept trying to escape every opportunity she got, almost jumping off from a window once.

I was very afraid of a fight breaking out between her and Malcolm. I have had my share of angry violent cats in the last few months and I don’t want to deal with violent at once. So I kept her locked the study for the first two days.

But she is a cat after all. And all of this was nothing a bribe of a few treats couldn’t fix. By day 3, she seemed at ease. She’s now very cuddly with me, running around and being a mischief in general (I have had to hide all my dustbins because she kept overturning them in search of treats), and is happily bullying Malcolm all the time (who has a look of, “are you seeing this shit?” on his face every time I look at him).

Conversations with friends

I had a few great conversations these last two weeks:

Both weeks ended with long conversations on justice and morality with Munazzah. These were very fun for me, because I got to take a contrarian stance argue from perspective which I don’t usually hold.
I had an interesting conversation with Jatan about China’s poilitics, economy and their recent advancements in technology.
I made a list of books that changed the way I see the world for Mariam, which I plan to elaborate on and publish on the blog some time soon.

What am I reading?

I added a new page on the blog on what I’m reading. It has a few numbers and charts along with a list of books I’m currently reading and a list of some of my favourites.

I don’t know what I want to do with it yet, but do something I will.

AI is ruining my life, again

The completely irresponsible and narrow-minded obsession with “make everything AI” at work has robbed me of whatever little joy a corporate job can sometimes offer.

I spent the last two weeks:

writing prompts and skill.md files for Claude,
in endless meetings on how to replace existing workflows with LLMs and AI agents, and
talking about and hearing other people talk how to efficiently use Claude to get projects done.

I do not see how this leads to anything improving much. I still maintain that LLMs are a fad which won’t change much about the nature of work is organized.

The cost of writing content and code is going down, sure, but when was that ever a bottleneck?

The bottleneck is always higher up the chain, in decision-making. And using LLMs to replace anything that involves decision-making is fundamentally misguided. Most decision-making jobs (i.e., managers) exist not because they are essential, but because companies need someone to hold accountable (read: blame) when things go wrong. Companies will still need someone to blame when using LLMs.

Indeed, it is not just managers; most jobs which exist today are mostly superfluous. They exist for reasons which are not immediately apparent.

In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argued that a significant portion of the workforce is engaged in tasks that are ultimately pointless. They serve no meaningful purpose beyond maintaining existing social and economic structures.

If we accept Graeber’s premise — and there is good reason to — there are no meaningful efficiency gains to be made from LLMs. For the natre of work in present day society has little to do with efficiency.

Potato and leek soup

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is my go to soup recipe. It is simple and comforting, and the recipe is difficult to get wrong. You can adjust the ratio of ingredients to your liking, and it will still turn out great. (Just be careful with the nutmeg powder.)

Slightly browning the potatoes and leeks adds a lot of depth of flavour to the soup. You can also switch out the oil with butter for richer flavour.

Garnishing with fresh cream is also a good option while serving.

Ingredients

20g Oil
2 large Leeks
400g Potatoes, chopped
1 litre Water or chicken stock
15g Salt
1/2 tsp Black pepper
1/4 tsp Nutmeg powder

Method

Wash the leeks well, separating the layers to remove any grit, then slice them thinly.
Heat the oil in a heavy pot over high heat. Add the leeks and chopped potatoes and cook for 4-5 minutes until they start to brown.
Add the water or stock, salt, black pepper.
Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 18-22 minutes until the potatoes are soft.
Blend the soup until smooth in a blender.
Pour the soup back in the pot and add water until you reach the desired consistency.
Add the nutmeg powder and taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.
Serve hot with toast.

Chocolate & orange brownie

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t like desserts much. But I like brownies. And I like how chocolate and orange go together. Plus, this is relatively easy to make, and very hard to get wrong.

So this is an almost perfect dessert for me.

Ingredients

75g Dutch cocoa powder
150g Butter
150g Sugar
3 Eggs
90g All-purpose flour
1/4 tsp Salt
From 2 oranges Orange zest
50g (optional) Chopped walnuts or chocolate chips

Method

Preheat oven to 175C (350F). Line an 8-inch square tin or a small rectangular baking dish with parchment.
Take room temperature butter (or melt it in a microwave or in a saucepan over low heat) and whisk in the sugar and cocoa powder while the butter is still warm.
Add the eggs to the batter and whisk until well mixed.
Add the orange zest and mix.
Fold the flour and salt into the chocolate mixture just until no dry streaks remain. Stir in walnuts or chocolate chips, if using.
Pour the batter into the lined tin and smooth the top.
Bake for 30-40 minutes (lower end for a more fudgy brownie, and higher end for a more crumbly one).
Cool before slicing and serving.

Weeknote #26 [W26.13] - Second housewarming party, Claude Code, cat-sitting

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I hosted my second housewarming party this week

I had a much better grip on the menu this time.

I finally managed to get some leeks from Instamart, so I made the potato and leek soup I had planned last time. I also made lasagna for the first time, including the pasta from scratch. It was quite fun.

Alongside that, I made a beef ragu to go with spaghetti. Since one of my friends doesn’t eat beef, I needed an alternative. I had already prepared béchamel for the lasagna, so thought, “Well, if I have to make an alternative for the beef, why not do something with what I have already?”

Dessert was a chocolate brownie with orange zest.

Unlike last time, all the dishes went well together. I felt quite content. I also felt more in danger and had more time to sit and talk to people in between. Which is not something I got to do last time at all.

This was the menu, finally:

Potato & leek soup
Mushroom lasagna
Beef ragu, with spaghetti
Mushrooms, in bechamel sauce
Chocolate & orange brownie

My kitchen feels too small for hosting

Now that I have hosted two dinners, I realize that the size of my kitchen is quite inadequate.

It was a mess, and there was barely any space to keep anything or any room left to actually work. All the counters were full of cutlery and dishes.

I either need to move some things outside the kitchen so there is more space to work, or install wall shelves and cabinets to make more room.

I really hate having a small kitchen because of how limiting it can be. The lack of space makes you want to cook less, which is the worst thing that you can hope for.

Work is shifting from Figma toward Claude Code

I’ve been using Claude Code a lot for work lately.

I think we are moving to build the workflow where It will be replacing what I used Figma for. Instead of building things in Figma and handing them off, I’m now generating prototypes directly in code.

This has been as frustrating as it has been fun. On one hand, it is exciting to give it a short prompt and get a clickable prototype in like ten minutes. On the other hand, it is frustrating to see small UI issues that would take a couple of seconds to fix in Figma or with actual CSS. You end up giving it a lot of prompts to fix them, and sometimes it still does not understand.

Finally started the design system work

Now that we have been given a Claude subscription, I can finally get started on the design system work I had mentioned months ago.

It had been at a standstill because nobody the bandwidth to work on it. I have picked that up now. Hopefully it reaches a stage where other projects can start consuming it, but I have not done anything like this before, so it remains to be seen how it goes.

One other benefit they offer is when you are dealing with really old, clunky interfaces, which are outdated, undocumented, and never prioritized because they technically still work. Redesigning those things from scratch is a pain, and often they never get picked up because who is going to rebuilding it from scratch?

LLM has changed that because you can describe what you want in a prompt and get something which is noticeably better within minutes.

I have unexpectedly and unwillingly become a cat-sitter.

The kids who live downstairs from me have bullied me into cat-sitting their six-month-old kitten.

They will be away for a month and a half at their grandma’s place, for summer vacation.

I am becoming an involuntary cat person now after having decided not to have pets for the last 30 years. First with Malcolm, and now soon with Amaira.

I hope the two of them don’t fight, for right now I don’t have the energy to deal with two angry and murderous cats simultaneously.

Cinema Next Door is becoming more sustainable

We have now our first monthly curation for Cinema Next Door planned for April that happened without my involvement.

That feels like a huge marker of success to me, because it gives me some hope that this thing can run without me. If this is going to be sustainable, it has to function without relying on any one person. This is a good step towards that direction.

Personally for me, while it has been extremely fun to be involved in starting and then running a film club for the last four months, it has also been mentally and physically draining. I do want to be able to take breaks so that I can recover and not always be so tired.

Reviews introduce us to new perspectives and help us collectively think better

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was written partially in response to a prompt shared at meetup #19 of Indie Web Club Bangalore on Feb 8, 2026

Reviews matter because human reasoning is social.

We like to think that we arrive at our beliefs through careful thought. But in most cases, we make decisions intuitively and only later construct reasons to justify them.

This is how our minds have evolved to work. And it comes with one significant limitation: we are very bad at questioning what we already believe.

Exposure to external perspectives acts as a correctional measure.

And this is where reviews become valuable. They introduce us to ways of seeing that we would not arrive at by ourselves.

With this essay, I want to explore two ideas:

why sharing reviews publicly is valuable, and
my personal framework for evaluating media.[^1]

External perspectives make us better seekers of truth

In The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber argue that reasoning evolved primarily as a social tool — something we use to justify ourselves to others, not to discover truth in isolation.

As individuals, we tend to settle for the first explanation that feels plausible. There is little internal incentive to keep searching for better ones or to look for disconfirming evidence.

A deeper search for what is true happens only in groups — in dialogue with others. When we are exposed to new perspectives presented by others. Or when the validity of our own justifications are challenged.

Mercer and Sperber argue that this type of group deliberation is a highly efficient evolutionary strategy. We retain the benefits of quick intuitive decision-making as individuals, while still managing to avoid gaps in reasoning with the help of the social filter of the group.

Good media widens our perspectives and makes us reevaluate our mental models of the world

If exposure to other perspectives improves our thinking, then media can be evaluated based on how well it enables this.

At its best, a film, a book, or a song (or even a review), lets us inhabit the mind of another person. Whether that be of the author, or that a real or fictional character. We gain access to a perspective which is external to us.

The value of a piece of media lies in its ability to (i)illuminate us with these new external perspectives, and (ii)use them to expand or reevaluate our mental models of the world.

I use three questions to judge whether a piece of media has something valuable to offer:

Does it provoke self-reflection?
Does it make me think about my relationships with other people?
Does it make me think about how society is structured?

Good media does not need to do all three. But the more it engages with these questions, the more likely it is to help us question and expand our mental models.

In Arrival, Amy Adams’s character is faced with a difficult question: If you had to forgo the most meaningful relationship in your life to avoid the pain that lies ahead, what would you choose to do?

The film provokes self-reflection by putting us in her shoes and making us wonder what we would choose. The question becomes, what kind of a person are we actually?

In Normal People, Connell is so unsure of his value as a person — as someone who can be loved —that he is never able to truly come to terms with Marianne’s affection for him. His lack of self-esteem forces him into infuriatingly bad decisions which push the two away and lead only to regret. It makes us reevaluate our own attitudes within our relationships, for who has never had self-limiting beliefs about themselves?

The films of Eric Rohmer, through casual conversations between characters, show us people who are often clueless in their romantic pursuits. These are people like us, who claim to know what they want, yet whose actions tell us otherwise. They make us wonder, how sure can we be of our own romantic desires?

And in the works of Ken Loach, individual lives are never detached from the systems around them. Bureaucratic delays in providing welfare (I, Daniel Blake), gig jobs (Sorry We Missed You), responses to immigrants and refugees (It’s a Free World…, Ae Fond Kiss, and The Old Oak) are all portrayed by placing them within the systems and structures which shape them. They make us question why society is organized the way it is — pushing people into hopeless struggles that they can never get out of.

By presenting us with these questions, media can play an almost epistemological role. That is, it can make us question: “Do we actually know what we believe to be true? How did we arrive at what we believe to be true? And, what do we not know yet?”

Emotional engagement is fundamental because it determines whether we bother to consume something or not

For any reflection to happen though, a work must first hold our attention.

Because our responses are driven by intuition, we only engage deeply with something if it affects us emotionally. Without that initial engagement, we dismiss it before it has a chance to communicate anything.

Emotional engagement makes deeper thinking possible in the first place. Without it, none of the questions above ever come into play.

There is also value in mere entertainment

That said, not all media needs to challenge us for it to have value.

For entertainment is valuable in its own right.

There is value in things that get us through the dreariness of work, or which soothes or entertains us after a long day.

These kinds of works — which are merely entertaining and nothing else — can sometimes be the difference between finding the motivation to get through another day or not, and that is a utility worth respecting in itself.

Reviews introduce us to new perspectives and help us think better

There have been many times when I have disliked something and then read a passionate review which made me see it in a completely new light.

If media exposes us to new perspectives, reviews extend that process.

When we write about what we consume — and put it out in public — we contribute to the pool of perspectives available to others.

We also make our own interpretations open to scrutiny and disagreement.

This does three things:

It forces us to clarify what we think, and why
It helps others see something they might have missed, and
It makes it possible for others to tell us what we might have missed.

Reviewing media is part of the process through which we collectively become better seekers of truth.

[^1]: I use the word “media” instead of “art” because “art” is often used to describe very different kinds of things — ranging from canonical works of literature to 30 second GRWM reels on social media. Both uses are valid, but it makes conversations using the word “art” very imprecise.

In some contexts, “art” is also treated as something almost sacred, and hence beyond criticism. I’ve often encountered responses along the lines of “it’s art!” as a way of dismissing questions about purpose or utility.

Thinking in terms of “media” instead frames these works as forms of communication, making it easier to evaluate their utility and effectiveness.

Weeknote #25 [W26.12] - First housewarming party, fake deadline, and an incoherent menu

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Housewarming party as a fake deadline to get things done

I hosted my first house warming party on the 22nd.

I needed to get it done because I would have kept procrastinating on a lot of decisions otherwise.

I’m sure I would have left multiple unopened boxes lying around if not for the pressure of making things look good for the party.

The date for the house warming party acted as a very useful fake deadline. It helped me fast track a lot of decisions which I would have normally spent a lot of time overthinking about.

Although my mind understands the benefits of satisficing over optimizing, its natural instinct is still towards optimizing. A common side-effect of which is decision paralysis.

All that goes away, however, with a deadline in sight.

Because I had invited people on 22nd, it forced me organize my pantry and get my kitchen operational. I also needed somewhere for people to sit, which meant buying a sofa. I needed better lighting too, which meant getting lamps (instead of relying on some truly atrocious green-coloured overhead lighting).

Large vs. small groups

Another decision I needed to make was whom and how many people to invite.

I realized I have made a lot of friends and acquaintances in the city over the last 3 years. So there was a choice to be made: either have a large party with a lot of people, or smaller groups of people spread over multiple parties.

The obvious option was to invite everyone and get it done with in one go. But I sided with the latter option. I feel a lot more at ease in smaller groups of up to 5-6 people compared to larger groups.

More importantly, it is also easier to cook for less people (to me, there’s no point to hosting a party if I don’t get to cook).

Anyhow, I do want to try hosting a larger party at some point, to see how that would feel like. Just not now.

Planning a very incoherent menu

I was so occupied unpacking things and assembling IKEA furniture, I got very little time to consider what to cook.

There’s a shop near my place that sells duck. So the first thing I got was that. I had no idea about what to do with it though, because I had never prepared duck before.

So I decided to add three things which I knew would work well — a soup, beef porridge, and an orange and poppyseed cake.

The original plan was a potato and leek soup. But I couldn’t find enough leek anywhere — in the market or online — so I had to scratch that out. I replaced it with a pumpkin soup because that was easier to source (in retrospect, a mushroom soup might have been a better choice).

Then I realized I had to add something without meat for the main course because not everyone invited liked meat. Which led to the addition of a mushroom ragu with spaghetti.

And finally, for the duck, I decided to go with a tried and tested coconut milk curry recipe — which, so far, has worked with every type of meat (fish, prawns, chicken) or vegetable (chickpeas, mushroom) I’ve tried.

The final menu looked like this:

Spiced pumpkin soup
Mushroom ragu, with spaghetti
Beef porridge
Duck, in coconut milk curry
Orange and poppyseed cake

All the items in the menu turned out quite nice individually. But in terms of coherence as a meal overall, I’d have to rate it a 0/10.

Beef Porridge

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last year, I came across a 10th century Abbasid meat porridge recipe on V. Birchwood’s YouTube channel.

The meat porridge reminded me of haleem, and I wondered what if I combined this recipe with a traditional haleem recipe.

The Abbasid recipe uses a combination of goat’s meat, goat’s milk and rice for the porridge. For my recipe, I didn’t do much but take a basic haleem recipe and add milk to it. And since I was adding milk, I decided I might as well add some cheddar to it on top.

A message about the beef porridge from a friend

The result is something which is not very far away from a haleem, but I find this recipe has a creamier and more complex flavour due to the addition of milk and cheese.

Tips

Use fattier cuts of beef; the higher fat content gives the final dish more depth of flavour.
If available, add some beef or chicken stock along with the milk for a fuller flavour.
Adjust the milk quantity gradually. Too much can thin the porridge more than intended. Keep adding milk if needed until you reach the desired consistency.
All the measurements here are approximate. The dish is quite forgiving, so feel free to adjust the quantities according to your preference.

Ingredients

1kg Beef (boneless)
100g Chana dal
100g Dahlia (broken wheat)
100g Urad dal (white)
~400ml Milk
~3tbsp Ghee
50g Ginger
~50g Caramelized onions (birista)
2pcs Mace
4pcs Clove
1 Cinammon stick
1/2tsp Nutmeg powder
1tsp Garam masala powder
~20g Salt
3 Bay leaves

Method

In a pressure cooker, add the beef, a bay leaf, a pinch of salt, and enough water to fully cover the meat. Cook until the beef is tender (about 30–40 minutes, depending on your cooker and the size of the pieces).
Allow the pressure to release and open the cooker. Add chana dal, dahlia, and white urad dal along with 1tsp salt and another bay leaf. Add more water if needed. Pressure cook for another \~30 minutes until the mixture thickens into a porridge-like consistency (the grains and lentils should be fully broken down).
Once cooled, remove the beef pieces and pound them with a meat hammer until they fall apart into fine strands.
In a large pan, heat 2 tbsp ghee. Add a bay leaf, cinnamon stick, cloves, mace, and caramelized onions. Cook on low heat for about a minute until fragrant.
Add the porridge to the pan and mix in the shredded beef, stirring to combine.
Add nutmeg powder and garam masala, and cook for a few minutes.
Pour in the milk and stir well. Add grated cheddar and cook on medium heat for another 10 minutes, allowing everything to come together into a smooth, rich consistency.
Finish with a spoon of ghee and additional caramelized onions before serving.

Weeknote #24 [W26.11] - Moving in, the kids downstairs, and the loss of privacy

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On Sunday (March 8), I moved to my new place in Bandepalya.

Within a couple of hours, I was greeted by three kids — Zainab, Luqman, and Suraiya — my downstairs neighbours’ children.

Before finalizing the flat, I had asked their uncle — the owner of the flat — if it would be okay to bring a cat. This information had evidently reached the kids, and they had been waiting for me to arrive so that they could meet Malcolm.

In my previous place, I didn’t know any of my neighbours by name. That had been intentional. Being anonymous comes with a greater sense of privacy. And I like my privacy. So I had no intention of changing that this time around.

But I guess that’s not going to be possible now.

The three of them have been coming over every day. On Monday, they showed up straight from school, still carrying their school bags, and settled in as if my flat were their own. Later at night, they brought me some of the biryani their mother had made. The next day, I sent down some mutton curry.

I find the whole thing very sweet — and horrifying!

Kids can be a menace.

First, they do not truly understand that you may have things to do which do not involve entertaining them. I spend a good 3-4 hours everyday now with them trying to either keep them occupied or trying to get them to leave. Sometimes all three arrive together, sometimes one at a time, but once they’re in, they stay. If one agrees to go back, another refuses. The rotation continues.

And then there are the questions.

“Are you Muslim?”

“No.”

“Hindu?”

“No.”

“Christian?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

I tried explaining that I don’t follow any religion. But that didn’t satisfy them much.

I wondered if I should explain further that I am an atheist, and why I don’t like religion… but then, I don’t want to get in trouble with their parents.

Then came, “Where is aunty?”

For a moment, I thought they meant my mother. But I was the uncle here. They were asking about my non-existent wife. I told them that I do not have an “aunty”. Suraiya, the youngest, didn’t seem very convinced. Everyone else in the building is married. I don’t think she can imagine that there can be an uncle without an aunty. She has asked me the same question at least three times since

Weeknote #23 [W26.10] - Moving houses is a bittersweet experience

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I finally moved out of Electronic City this week.

I spent the better part of the week packing and sorting through my things. I have to do the reverse now, and unpack and organize everything all over again. Which is usually a thing I’ve always liked in the past. But I am way too overwhelmed and sleep-deprived at the moment to enjoy this.

Moving out of a place you’ve lived in for a long time is always a bittersweet experience. It feels like permanently closing a chapter of your life that you’ll never return to again.

I had lived in that house for almost 3 years. Long enough to have a certain sense of self that got tied to it.

This was the first time I had lived completely independently, without having to follow anyone else’s rules or conditions. That is the kind of experience which changes how you think of yourself fundamentally.

I hosted quite a few lunches, dinners, and watch parties with friends there. Over time I became a person who hosts and cooks for others. Which is not something I had imagined for myself. Some of my fondest memories of the house are of the meals I cooked for others. (For shared meals are rarely ever only meals; they are all about the conversations that accompany them.)

It had started with a few Sunday lunches with a few friends, which later expanded into dinner parties with larger groups.

I also got to cook dinners semi-regularly for (and with) Lynette (who was my closest friend in Bangalore at the time), and later Liz (who was my partner for about a year). These were often simpler and less elaborate meals — sometimes salads, sometimes rice and dal, or sometimes just roti — but in many ways more satisfying than the parties.

If there is one thing I wish for at the new house, it is to be able to carry on the tradition of hosting and cooking for others.

Finally, living there also marked a period of relative sexual freedom for me.

Right before moving to Bangalore, I remember having a conversation with a date about how Kolkata was sexually liberating for her because she had her own place there with nobody to answer to. Bangalore, and this house in particular, was that for me.

Before this, I had always lived either in hostels inside conservative college campuses or with my parents. Having a place of my own granted a kind of privacy and autonomy that was new.

In retrospect, I did a lot of proper adulting for the first time in that house. These will be fond memories, and at the moment I feel sad leaving them behind.

Weeknote #22 [W26.09] - My mental map of Bangalore, and AI hype ruining my week

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Moving houses and my mental map of Bangalore

I had been planning to move out of Electronic City ever since I changed jobs in October.

My previous office was in Electronic City, so living nearby made sense. I suppose that’s a bias my parents instilled in childhood. Growing up, we moved cities every few years, but we’d always live close to school (often within walking distance). I think because of that, the idea of staying somewhere far from work feels unnatural to me.

Last week, I finally finalized a new place near Hongasandra metro. (I haven’t moved yet, that’s happening this weekend.)

But even before moving, I have been thinking about how the move is going to significantly shrink my mental map of Bangalore. And that thought reminded me of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, which describes how everyone has their own mental maps of their cities in their heads.

My mental map of Bangalore: the area in gray is no longer going to feature in my map after I move out of Electronic City.

My mental map of Bangalore has changed quite a lot over the years.

We construct mental models of the world which help us navigate it. So, naturally, our mental maps of cities expand and shrink depending on our routines and where we spend our time.

In 2023, JP Nagar was a big part of it. But that was replaced by Indiranagar by the end of 2024 when Dialogues Cafe closed down and TPCC screenings moved to Underline Center. HSR Layout only appeared on the map recently, after I changed jobs a few months ago.

The AI hype is ruining my week(s)

I spent all of last Sunday at work because they had the bright idea of organizing an AI hackathon. There are going to be more in the coming weeks.

Sundays are supposed to be for sleep, and the whole thing has well and truly wrecked both my mood and spirit for this week. All I can say — from the bottom of my heart — is fuck AI and all the hype around it.

To be clear, I actually do like LLMs. I use them fairly often to help me think through ideas. And parts of both this blog (comments section) and the Cinema Next Door website (TMDB API integration) were fully vibe coded.

But liking it is one thing, and believing the hype around it is another.

A lot of hype around LLMs is predicated on the hope that they’ll keep getting better and keep replacing more human functions. That hope rests on brittle foundations.

LLMs are fundamentally unintelligent. Earlier, I talked about my mental map of Bangalore. Having reference frames of the world makes us able to simulate real world scenarios in our minds. I can imagine all the traffic, the smoke, noise, heat and humidity I’ll face when making a journey from one point to another in Bangalore. All that is accounted for in any decision I make. LLMs do not, and never will, have that ability.

While our brains can simulate multiple possible scenarios through our internal models, LLMs operate by only predicting the most likely next token in a sequence based on patterns learned from large amounts of text. We can keep throwing more compute and data at them, and they’ll get better at guessing the next token. But that will never approximate anything close to actual human intelligence. It is a dead end.

The more complex problem you throw at them, the harder they are going to fail, and the more human oversight they will need.

Which is fine. As long as we temper our expectations, tools like these can still augment human thinking in very useful ways…

Just don’t fucking come for my weekends.

Weeknote #21 [W26.08] - A few nice conversations

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had quite a few nice conversations this week.

“We should not care about art”

On Friday, I met Kabeer and Mayank, who were my seniors at BIT Mesra. I do not have many fond memories of that place, and I realized while sitting with them how long it has been since I have made a conscious effort to think back to those years or to get in touch with old friends from there.

We talked late into the night, eventually the conversation turning to controversial opinions. None of them turned out to be particularly controversial within the group. The closest we came perhaps was my claim that, “we should not care about art” (something which, hopefully, I’ll write more about on this blog soon).

Color sliders

Saturday was Indie Web Club day.

I arrived just as Azan was showing Ankur and Tanvi cool stuff that can be done with the OKLCH color color space. Which immediately made me want to try it out on my blog. So during the session I added the color slider that you can now see on top right (if you’re reading this on Substack, check it out here).

Color slider on the top right, which you use to change this blog's theme

The way that OKLCH works, based on human perception of colors, it is easy to set the hue as a variable and change it dynamically (with a slider in this case) without worrying about breaking accessibility.

I also had a nice conversation with Calra about How Minds Change, the audiobook I had just finished. And there were several other interesting conversations with Jatan, Saachi, and Devanshi.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends

On Sunday, for Cinema Next Door we had a screening of Eric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, which was hosted by Mariam.

There were several difficulties during the screening. Firstly, we had to start late because there was another event at Underline right before. Then we had to pause the screening twice. Once to fix subtitles and then because the projector started showing a warning. But thankfully, during the discussion it was a relief to hear that people seemed to love the film regardless.

Rohmer is one of my favourite directors, and this is my favourite film by him. I love his films for how he shows, with a a combination of humour and empathy, how strangely we sometimes behave in pursuit of love.

I did an incredibly idiotic thing during the discussion. I had forgotten to insert the SD card into my camera. None of the photographs I took were saved. Which makes me almost want to cry because I remember thinking I had captured some very nice moments.

Cabbage, lightly sautéd with garlic

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, I was on a work call when I overheard a colleague of mine talking to his cook.

He was irritated. He had a whole cabbage in his pantry and had no idea what to do with it, He doesn’t like cabbage. Neither do his roommates.

I told him I had a solution. And right there on the same call, I dictated this recipe to his cook.

Since then, my colleague has told me multiple times that this recipe has “brought in a revolution.”. It made him and his roommates like cabbage. Something which he thought would be impossible.

Why this recipe works

There are two natural qualities that cabbage brings to a meal:

freshness (as with any leafy vegetable), and
crunchiness

A lot of us in India think we do not like cabbage because the way it is often cooked in traditional recipes destroys both these qualities.

In Indian recipes, cabbage is often cooked for a long time, until it is soft and mushy. And the spices used in these also overpower the delicate freshness that cabbage can bring. (I personally do not mind this style of consuming cabbage as well, if it is spaced out enough - like maybe twice a year.)

This recipe, in contrast, works with the natural characteristics of cabbage, and adds ingrediends which completement that.

Tips and tricks

Use fresh cabbage for the best results.
Not overcooking the cabbage, so that it retains a bit of crunchiness is the most important part of this recipe.

Ingredients

200g Cabbage, sliced
5-6 cloves Garlic, sliced
~6g Salt
~15g Oil
~20g Butter
~5ml Vinegar

Method

Add oil to the pan, add sliced garlic and temper on medium heat until the garlic turns light brown.
Add the shredded cabbage and salt, and stir on high heat for 1-2 minutes until you see slight browning.
Cover the pan and let the cabbage cook on low heat for 5-7 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Once the cabbage is tender, add the butter and a pinch of water, and stir till the butter melts and coats the cabbage.
Add the vinegar and stir well.

Weeknote #20 [W26.07] - Rest & recuperate

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent more time working on the sales pitch which I talked about last week. Which meant that this week was as hectic as the one before, work wise.

The good thing about this week was that I finally had a weekend — for the first time in months — in which I had nothing to do. I stayed at home, slept an ungodly amount of hours, made lists, and watched lots of films in the remaining time.

I have missed weekends like these. I like spending time alone with myself at home, cooking food, cleaning, reading books, watching films without being distracted about work… and I hadn’t had much of that lately.

I won’t get to have this kind of weekend again for a while either (not this month or the next at least) and I’m already sad about it.

I watched five films on Sunday, in preparation for the March curation for Cinema Next Door. These were mostly films from Africa.

List of the highest rated African films on Letterboxd.

I also complied list of the highest rated African and South American films on Letterboxd because I realized I haven’t watched a lot from those regions. I’ve found that having lists on which I can track progress goes a long way in motivating me to get things checked off the list.

Weeknote #19 [W26.06] - Growing Cinema Next Door, chaotic sales pitches and the positive addition bias

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am very late with this weeknote. Both last week and this week have been very chaotic.

New venue and more for Cinema Next Door

Me, Abhijna, kavz, and Manu at The Bangalore Local before the screening.

Last week, we did our first screening at The Bangalore Local.

We screened Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild. It was our biggest screening so far, with 53 people attending. Tickets sold out days in advance and we kept getting messages from people asking if more seats would open up.

I had been worried about the venue because the screening was on a semi-open terrace. I was concerned that outside light and noise would affect the viewing experience. Especially since the film heavily relies on atmosphere and immersion to really work. After the screening, however, most people said that they didn’t notice any disturbance (except for the mosquitoes).

An unexpected outcome of the event was that since I arrived very early, I made a pre-screening playlist while we were setting things up and waiting for people to arrive. I’ve been listening to it on repeat ever since.

Since I have been hosting mainly at Underline Center for the last two years (with both TPCC and CND), things have found their own rhythm there. I don’t have to think about the logistics at Underline anymore.

But hosting at a new venue forced me to make a lot of decisions which I had forgotten you have to do. Because curating involves not only picking just the films, bbut also making sure the environment and the overall experience itself is pleasant. The playlist itself actually came out from testing several sound system settings to make sure that the audio sounded right.

Upcoming collaboration with Alliance Francaise

On the day of the screening, Abhijna, Manu, and kavz also went to Alliance francaise de Bangalore to speak with their director about collaborating with them for future screenings.

I was supposed to go as well. But the traffic on Hosur Road that day meant that it would have been impossible for me to reach on time. So I went straight to The Bangalore Local and made some small updates to the website (mainly adding a sold out sign to event listings so that less people would ask about them).

Sold out sign on the CND website.

I was initially anxious about not being present for the meeting. So far, I’d been involved in pretty much all conversations related to the club and it felt weird missing out on something significant.

In hindsight, it was a nice thing to have missed it. I’ve never wanted the club to be something which is dependent on my presence (or any other individual’s for that matter). We all want it to be an actual club, a community, which can exist on its own and sustain itself.

I don’t know if we’re still anywhere near that goal yet, but this was a pretty nice reminder that we’re not doing so poorly and we’re on the right path.

The next step should be to involve more people in running the everyday operations of the club. Personally, I’m thinking it’ll be nice if I can step aside from the curatorial discussions for April and have someone else take my place. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, the meeting itself was successful. Alliance Francaise has screening rights for a large catalogue of French and African films and they seem willing to work with us for hosting screenings. So we may pick a few from there in the coming months (with La Haine probably being the first choice).

OKRs, reaching 2,000 followers, and saying no to people

We also recently got featured in an article on Homegrown about film clubs in Bangalore.

Their Instagram post about the article somehow reached a huge audience and it nearly doubled the number of Instagram followers on our account in a week.

When we initially set tagets, we had planned to reach 1,000 by the end of January (we ended at 997), and reach 3,000 by the end of March. At the time, those numbers had felt ambitious. But the way things are going, it looks like we were being too conservative. In fact, we are exceeding our targets on pretty much every metric we had listed.

With hindsight, I realize now that our expectations were shaped too much by our experience with TPCC. With how bad things were going there, we had — to some degree — internalized the idea that there’s not too many people interested in films or film clubs. So it’s nice to find out that assumption was entirely incorrect.

This growth and success comes with its own set of problems of course.

Tickets have been selling out very quickly. There are more people who want to attend than we can accommodate. And so we’ve been saying no to a lot of people. We’ve also been contacted by 3 additional venues interested in hosting screenings with us. For which, again, we do not really have the bandwidth.

Saying no so often feels uncomfortable. But I suppose it is a good problem to have.

Chaotic sales pitches and positive addition bias

Work has been unusually hectic because we had an important sales pitch. If the client signs, they’ll be the company’s second largest account in terms of revenue.

Although I work on the product team, I was asked to set aside everything else to work to help on the pitch.

One of my favourite things to bring up in conversations is how the English language has a positive addition bias.

What this means is that whenever there is talk of “making things better” or “improving things”, people instinctively think of adding things first.

I got to see this play out repeated while working on this sales pitch. At every meeting with the client, they would brainstorm on new ideas to add to the product. The sales team, understandably eager to secure the deal, would say yes to all of them. This meant we ended up trying to prepare a demo in one week that would normally take months to build properly.

Since building an actual product wasn’t realistic within that timeline, I suggested creating clickable Figma prototypes instead (why do I do this to myself?!) I had thought it would be manageable and also probably fun to work on something new.

What I didn’t anticipate was that Figma prototypes remove most feasibility constraints. Once I started working on it, the scope kept expanding with every internal conversation with the sales team. Add this, and add that was the usual refrain.

So I spent all of last week working on things most of which I knew would never see the light of day. Roughly 40 hours wasted working on things that will only ever appear in 10 minute demo, And honestly, I hope they stay that way, because it will be a nightmare for the development team if they ever actually had to develop some of those ideas.

I don’t really blame the sales team. They have their own targets and incentives.

The structure of the organization, however, where the incentives of the sales team so divorced from the product team’s, feels questionable. This, I also learned, has been long standing frustration product team, because a lot of priorities often shift to accommodate promises made during sales pitches.

Sorshe Pabda

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is an easy, Bengali style fish recipe (which I’m cooking for dinner tonight).

You can use cashews as an alternate to poppy seeds if you don’t have them in your pantry.

Ingredients

500g Pabda fish
2 tbsp Black mustard seeds
1 tbsp Poppy seeds (Posto)
2 Tomatoes
5-6 Green chillies
1 tsp Turmeric powder
1/2 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder
1/2 tsp Nigella seeds (Kalonji)
4-5 tbsp Mustard oil
to taste Salt
small bunch Fresh coriander

Method

Clean the fish and marinate with salt, turmeric powder, and a little mustard oil.
Prepare a smooth paste of black mustard seeds, poppy seeds, and 2-3 green chillies.
Heat mustard oil in a pan until it smokes, then lightly fry the fish on both sides. Remove and set aside.
In the same oil, add nigella seeds and slit green chillies for tempering.
Add turmeric powder and red chilli powder to the oil (in low heat and stir continuously to prevent burning).
Add the tomato paste and saute until the oil separates and the raw smell goes away.
Add the mustard-poppy paste and cook on low heat for a minute.
Pour in about 1 cup of water and salt, then bring the gravy to a boil.
Gently add the fried fish, cover, and simmer for 5 minutes.
Finish with a drizzle of raw mustard oil and fresh coriander leaves before serving.

Weeknote #18 [W26.05] - Attending another film festival, on interviews, and small talk

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Attending another film festival not as good as IFFK

I went to BIFFes on the weekend.

I had already been to IFFK in December, so watching as many films as possible wasn’t particularly high on my agenda. I ended up watching only 3 films over the two days. All of them were nice.

This was my second time at BIFFes, and the thing stood out to me most was how much better organized IFFK is in comparison.

The first screening I went to started 15 minutes late, and they abruptly cut off the projector before the end credits rolled. At another screening, they turned on all the lights with 5 minutes left, people started leaving, only then to realize that the film wasn’t over. The film’s emotional climax still playing out on a half-visible screen.

A certain amount of chaos comes inevitably with large crowds. And while the organizers at BIFFes did seem to be trying to manage the situation, there was an obvious lack of forethought. They were reacting, without preparation, to problems as they arose. Over the course of two days, I overheard more angry exchanges between attendees and volunteers than I did over an entire week at IFFK.

The management at IFFK, in contrast, is mostly invisible. Things largely work because they’ve been planned well in advance and good planning like that is barely noticeable.

I think what bothered me most about the overall experience here was the general lack of consideration for the audience’s experience.

A good interview should bring out the interviewee’s unique perspective

I also attended a talk with Anurag Kashyap at BIFFes on Saturday. He was being interviewed by the critic Baradwaj Rangan.

The quality of conversation between the two was trite. Most of the 30 minutes was spent by Kashyap lamenting on the present state of things (audience inattention, studio interference, etc.) and glorifying how things used to be better before.

The low point was when Kashyap complained about his driver watching his films on a mobile phone rather than a big screen. Because “the film wasn’t made for that medium,” and “you will miss so many details on a small screen”.

Respectfully, who cares?

I have little sympathy for these normative notions on how a film should be watch, which fail to realize how elitist and exclusionary they are.

There will always be more value in a film providing casual entertainment to someone after (or during) a long day’s work, than in a room full of relatively affluent audience gushing over the moody lighting, the sound design, or the craft of filmmaking.

Regardless… Lamenting about the present, and glorifying the past is only natural to the human condition, and one’s tendency to do so increases gradually as they grow older. I complain about how so many things — the internet, the TV, and whatnot — was so much better 15 years ago when I was growing up than it is today myself (and I still have a lot of growing old left to do).

Those are, I think, fair enough things to say. But that’s precisely why a good interviewer has an important role to play. A good interviewer has a job to move the conversation along to other — more interesting and insightful — topics. And Rangan didn’t come prepared to do that.

When we listen to someone being interviewed, what we really want is access to their singular experience. Anurag Kashyap is an interesting enough filmmaker. There’s nothing particularly interesting, however, in hearing him complain, in vague generalities, about the “second screen phenomenon”. A stronger interviewer might have steered the conversation toward what makes him who he is, rather than allowing it to drift into familiar complaints.

As with the screenings themselves, the quality of conversation offered here was also a failure of responsibility towards the experience of the audience.

I can’t small talk

On the metro back from Lulu Mall to Electronic City, I was reading Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works. A very friendly woman standing next to me tried to start a conversation by asking me about the book.

After briefly explaining to her how the world really works, I asked her if she likes to read. “Only self-help books,” came the answer.

That was the moment when an involuntary and unconscious sense of what can only be described as my own snobbishness kicked in. My ability to physically engage in further conversation evaporated. I tried very hard to think of something polite to say — anything, really — but no words came to me. She smiled, said “you please carry on,” and looked away. Embarrassed, I did the same.

While I’m quick to argue that people shouldn’t be judged by how where they watch films… I am not beyond hypocrisy.

Pad Thai

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pad Thai is considered the national dish of Thailand, and for good reason. It has a perfect balance of sweet, sour, and umami flavours, while being extremely easy to make.

The recipe below is a simplified version of the classic Pad Thai, and can be made with ingredients that are easily available here in Indian grocery stores.

The recipe is quick enough to cook for a weeknight dinner after work (which I do often), but it still feels like a treat. Just make sure to have all the ingredients prepped and ready, as the actual cooking happens very fast!

Ingredients

120g Dried flat rice noodles
100g Shrimp (optional)
50g Tempeh, cubed (optional)
20g Raw tamarind
2 tbsp Fish sauce
1 tbsp Soy sauce
15g Sugar
2 cloves Garlic, minced
2-3 Spring onions, chopped
2 tbsp Crushed roasted peanuts
3 tbsp Vegetable oil
2 Lime wedges

Method

Soak the raw tamarind in about 1/4 cup of hot water for 10-15 minutes. Mash it with a spoon and strain the pulp, discarding the seeds and fibers.
Soak the rice noodles in warm water for about 20 minutes until soft. Drain and set aside.
In a small bowl, whisk together the prepared tamarind pulp, fish sauce, soy sauce, and sugar to make the Pad Thai sauce.
Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a wok or large wok over medium-high heat. Add shrimp and cook until pink. Remove shrimp and set aside.
Add remaining 2 tbsp of oil to the same wok. Saute garlic and the white parts of the spring onion for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add tempeh and stir-fry until golden.
Add the drained noodles and the sauce to the wok. Toss everything together over high heat until the noodles absorb the sauce and soften.
Return the shrimp to the wok and toss briefly to combine.
Serve immediately, topped with crushed peanuts and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Weeknote #17 [W26.04] - Recruiting user research participants, involving more people in Cinema Next Door, and a recovering Malcolm

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Recruiting user research participants for consumer-facing apps is hard

Recruiting participants for a consumer-facing app has turned out to be more difficult than it was for the internal apps that I’ve worked on previously.

I’ve been arranging usability testing sessions for a few weeks now. About half the users who accept invites don’t show up. The ones most likely to turn up are people who’ve had bad experiences with customer support. Those conversations usually go in a completely different direction from the set agenda of the sessions. Not that this feedback isn’t useful. It is. But, sometimes you just want to focus on the thing at hand.

On internal projects, recruiting users was never this hard because we had, in a sense, a captive audience. With a consumer-facing app, users don’t have any real incentive to participate. Most of my users are HR professionals with packed schedules, and giving feedback to us is understandably at the bottom of their list.

The only thing we can offer is an early look at upcoming features. It’s cool, but in practice it doesn’t seem like enough yet to convince people to reliably show up.

Involving more people Cinema Next Door

People colouring bookmarks after the screening.

One of the main ideas behind starting Cinema Next Door was to involve more people in running the thing. Whether that’s curating films or just for hosting events.

I’m not quite satisfied with our progress on that front yet, but… we made some progress this week.

On Sunday we had our first community pick — Where is the Friend’s House? — hosted by Vishesh. After the screening, we also had a drawing session led by Yukti (yourjournalproject on Instagram).

Next month we’re planning something similar, but for writing instead of drawing, hosted by Mariam.

Malcolm is slowly recovering

Malcolm on my bed

Malcolm’s been doing better over the last couple of weeks.

Before he left in December he was around 5.1 kg. When he came back three weeks ago he’d dropped to 4.6 kg. He’s now back to 4.8 kg.

Still not at his old weight, but he looks visibly healthier now than a couple of weeks ago.

A list of blogs I like reading

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of days ago, I noticed in my blog’s analytics that I’ve been getting a few visits from srikanthperinkulam.com.

I don’t know Srikanth personally, but when I checked their site, I realized they have a blogroll and had linked to my blog on it. I thought that was a very kind and generous thing to do. (Thanks Srikanth!) It’s so wonderful to discover people like this, organically, than therough social media algorithms and feeds.

So I thought I should add a blogroll on my own site as well, which I’ll keep adding to as and when I discover something nice.

For now, here are a few blogs and newsletters I follow and genuinely enjoy reading:

Weeknote #16 [W26.03] - Curating films, and chasing reading goals

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Curating films for February

A scene from Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala

Next month’s curation theme for Cinema Next Door is going to be “What we talk about when we talk about love”.

The idea for the theme came from a book Manu had read. We had then run a poll on the CND WhatsApp group, with options for a few more themes, and this came out on top.

So I spent most of last week watching films for the curation. And after a few tense discussions with the rest of the group, here’s a tentative shortlist we’ve arrived at for now:

Phantom Thread (2017)
Mississippi Masala (1991)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
Amour (2012)
Days of Being Wild (1990)
Wings of Desire (1987)
Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987)
Maurice (1987)

(1987 was clearly a good year to talk about love.)

As always, things might change. And we’re unlikely to be able to do all 8 films, as there are only 4 Tuesdays in February, and we don’t want to be doing screenings every weekend.

A possible new venue in Koramangala

We also spoke with another venue in Koramangala: The Bangalore Local. They have a large terrace with a projector and sound system where they want to do screenings.

We might do 1 or 2 weekend screenings there if things go ahead. The terrace setup is appealing, but it also means someone has to handle logistics, ticketing, etc. And we really need more people in the team to manage these events if we are going to expand to new venues. At the moment, we are all quite stretched.

Catching up on reading targets

This year, my target for books to read is 80. Which translates to about 1.5 books per week.

I’ve gotten off to a pretty bad start as I didn’t finish anything in the first two weeks of the year (because I was too busy watching films). But I finished two books last week, and am currently in the middle of these four books:

How to Read Literature Like a Professor (on Kindle)
The Design of Childhood (on Audible)
How the World Really Works (Paperback)
The Body Keeps the Score (Paperback)

I also now have a page on the blog for collecting quotes from the books I read.

Deadlines have carried me for years, but may no longer be enough (or, do I have ADHD?)

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve known for a few years now that I exhibit a lot of symptoms commonly associated with ADHD.

The DSM-5 identifies two symptom domains associated with ADHD: (i) inattention[^1], and (ii) hyperactivity and impulsivity[^2]. I have nearly all the symptoms associated with inattention, but none of the hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms.

Why am I considering a diagnosis?

I think I first made the association while going through the DSM-5 for a college project on mental health around 2019.[^3] (A project which, typically, I never completed.)

I’ve always been skeptical of self-diagnosis. And I’ve never pursed a clinical diagnosis either. I always felt that it was unnecessary to pathologize something I believed I could manage with a little discipline and a few behavioural tweaks.

Lately though, I’ve been finding things more difficult.

The last few months have been messier and more chaotic than usual. Not in any dramatic sense, but enough to give me the growing feeling that I need to get my house in order. I don’t know whether a diagnosis would help with that. But maybe it’s a conversation worth having.

So, this is an attempt to articulate, for myself, what exactly I’m experiencing, with a bit more clarity than the vague notions I’ve had floating around in my head so far.

I need deadlines to get things done

One pattern that’s been present for as long as I can remember is how tightly my motivation is coupled with upcoming deadlines.

I almost never struggle to finish work. But what I do struggle with is sitting down and getting started on tasks in any meaningful manner until the pressure of an approaching deadline becomes unavoidable.

Struggling with and finding ways around submissions at Architecture school

The first time this became a serious problem was at Architecture school.

Before that, assignments at high school were easy enough that it never caused trouble. Even then, I’d never actually do my “homework” at home. Either I’d finish it in class as soon as it was assigned, or I would finish it in class on the day it was due.

At Architecture school, assignments were more complex, and required more time to complete. The ones I struggled with most were Architectural Design (AD) assignments.

In out first year, we were required to submit only hand-drafted sheets. Drafting with ink on paper is slow, unforgiving work. Its not something you can compress into a few hours before a deadline. As a result, I was perpetually behind schedule and constantly struggling to keep up with the workload.

This pattern continued for the next five years. I never broke the habit of waiting until the last moment to start. But I developed a few workarounds to the problem. In later semesters, when we were allowed to work digitally, I would set myself fake deadlines to get the sheets printed — usually two days before the actual submission date. This didn’t really give me more time to work, but it did help me avoid some of the panic and anxiety that submissions otherwise caused.

The amount of time I managed to spend on assignments had a direct impact on the quality of work I produced though. In my final semester of Architecture school, things got so bad, I was genuinely unsure whether I would pass (thankfully, the jurors were kind).

Getting more reckless in recent times

Over five years of architecture school and two years of design school, I learned how to work around the way my brain operates. I got through it successfully — even if not very comfortably.

More recently, I’ve become more reckless with this approach.

In office work, much of what I do is less demanding than college was. Because of that, I’ve often been able to get by without the scaffolding that helped me earlier. I’ve mostly been winging it, leaving things to the last moment, and that has been good enough.

The recklessness probably started with my first UX job interview.

It was with Infosys, for a job I didn’t particularly want. We were given an assignment to complete the day before the interview. I didn’t bother. Instead, I got sidetracked working on a completely inconsequential — but far more interesting — elective assignment on Urban Design Politics. For the assignment, A friend and I were making a small booklet titled The Architecture of Totalitarianism.[^4] The content of it wasn’t particularly enlightening, but I was really into the project because I wanted to get into print/editorial design at that point in life (and the booklet we made, I thought, turned out pretty neat).

Anyhow, on the morning of the interview, I sketched a few wireframes right outside the interview room in about 5 minutes. I got the job offer based on that anyway and thought, “that worked?” And so my work life has followed that pattern ever since.

The cover of the booklet we made for The Architecture of Totalitarianism

At my current job, which I joined three months ago, the variability in workload has made this harder to manage. Some days, there’s simply too much to do at once. That’s compounded by the fact that I often haven’t worked on the things I was supposed to, because I got sidetracked by something more interesting — like building a design system or redesigning a random dashboard from scratch — while waiting for deadlines to properly get started on actual tasks assigned to me.

This means that Im no longer avoiding the last-minute panic and anxiety I had learned to manage for years.

Not being able to sleep until physically exhausted

Some of my problems are, I’m certain, are made worse by poor sleep… My sleep quality has been poor for a while now (by which I mean ~15 years).

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been sleeping 4-6 hours per day, on average. I have been unable to fall asleep until I reach a point of physical and mental exhaustion (which reminds me that I need to go to the gym more often). This usually doesn’t happen on most days until 4AM, and sometimes even later. And since I often have meetings in the morning, I have to get up regardless of how much sleep I got.

This is not a particularly new pattern. I cycle through periods of very poor sleep followed by stretches where my sleep schedule is between decent to great. What worries me now is that the bad periods seem to be getting longer, and the good ones shorter.

A constant state of mental fog is one of the consequences of poor sleep quality. And that’s something I’ve been noticing way more lately compared to when I was younger (is this how getting old feels like?). On days when I feel more rested, things do feel different, but those days are becoming increasingly rare.

An attempt at clarity over definite answers

The cost of the problems mentioned above has never been catastrophic.

On the contrary, Ive occasionally used these patterns to my advantage. Over the years, I’ve learnt to trust my ability to hyperfocus before deadlines and produce a large amount of work in one chunk. That’s allowed me to free up time for things I enjoy more: like reading, watching films, or working on random personal projects.

Still, even if not catastrophic, these problems have been persistent.

I’ve resisted framing any of this in terms of ADHD for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t identify with most of the traits associated with hyperactivity. And two, I’m also deeply wary of how casually the label gets applied in everyday conversations. Too many people confidently describe themselves as having ADHD (or other disorders) without ever having been diagnosed, and that makes me suspicious of my own conclusions.

I’m not writing this to arrive at a conclusion as such. I’m writing it because I needed to articulate some of these patterns. If I do decide to pursue a proper diagnosis, I’d want that conversation to be grounded in something more concrete than a vague sense of unease over procrastination.

[^1]: ADHD (inattention) symptoms (I have all of these): - Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes - Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or activities - Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly - Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish tasks - Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities - Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks requiring sustained mental effort - Often loses things necessary for tasks or activities - Is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli - Is often forgetful in daily activities

[^2]: ADHD (hyperactivity and impulsivity) symptoms (I have only one of these, guess which one?): - Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in their seat - Often leaves their seat in situations where remaining seated is expected - Often runs about or climbs in situations where it is not appropriate - Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly - Often talks excessively - Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed - Often has difficulty waiting their turn - Often interrupts or intrudes on others

[^3]: The project was about student mental health in residential educational institutions. The literature review suggested the state of things to be pretty dire, and the survey data confirmed it. A majority of students reported feeling some form of distress, and a significant number reported symptoms of depression and anxiety, and thoughts of self-harm.

[^4]: Download link for the assignment on The Architecture of Totalitarianism. (I wouldn’t suggest trying to read the text, it’s barely coherent. The layout though, I hope you find pretty.)

Weeknote #15 [W26.02] - Malcolm, the cat, returns; and setting up likes, comments & notifications

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Malcolm, the cat, returns

Malcolm had left around a month ago, right before I went to Trivandrum for the film festival.

His original family still hasn’t moved into their new place, so he was kept at someone else’s house in the meantime. It doesn’t seem like he had a great time there. So now he’s back with me.

While he was away, he got neutered. And got a thermal burn from a heating pad during the procedure (which, apparently, Google search tells me, is not a very uncommon thing). The entire right side of his body is badly burnt. The poor thing has also lost a lot of weight.

On a more positive note, after an initial few hours of frostiness, he’s seems to be way more affectionate and cuddly than he used to be earlier.

Malcolm wearing a cat cone, to prevent him from licking his wounds.

I don’t know how much of that can be extrapolated beyond a cat, to how we as humans feel (or how much of it is just me projecting)… But it makes me think about how distance and physical absence can sometimes heighten affection. Or at least make it suddenly more noticeable again. Routine renders things invisible.

You can now leave likes and comments

I’ve added the ability to leave likes and comments on the site. (That’s already a couple of things done from my list of things I wanted to add to my blog this year.)

I was afraid it would be complicated, because I haven’t really tried setting up dynamic backend databases before. Until now, the site setup was extremely simple: a couple of Astro layouts, simple CSS styling, Markdown formatted posts, and very little JS. Even the Cinema Next Door website only uses runs on a static database with no real-time interaction.

Supabase as the backend database

To my surprise, it didn’t turn out to be too difficult to set things up. I used Supabase as a backend database, with two tables — one for likes, one for comments — and relied heavily on some very unglamorous vibe coding (with Gemini) to connect everything to the front end.

The downside here is that all this significantly increases the complexity of running and maintaining the blog. Apart from the backend database, I also had to create two new dynamic React components for the like button and the comments section.

Setting up notifications with Discord

Once that was done, I wanted a way to actually know when someone interacted with a post. I needed a system to get updates/notifications.

Manually checking the Supabase database for updates felt too tedious. So I was, at first, thinking of setting up some sort of login and admin dashboard to be able to see all that. But that seemed like a whole project of its own. The simplest solution turned out to be setting up a new Discord server and connecting it with Supabase with a webhook.

Now, when someone leaves a like or a comment, I’ll get a notification on my phone (through the Discord app). I find the whole thing delightful.

Rohu, with cocnonut milk curry

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kavya told me this is the best fish recipe she’s ever had the last time I made it for her. It is my favourite too.

Like most of my go-to recipes, it’s quick to make and uses ingredients that are almost always available in my pantry.

Despite it’s simplicity, it packs in a lot of complex flavours because of the way the spices and fats are combined. The dish brings together spices traditionally used in Bengali cooking – paanch phoron – with a coconut milk and curry leaf base that’s more characteristic of Malayali cuisine.

The initial inspiration for this combination came from a chicken curry with a coconut milk base that I once ordered at a Malayali restaurant in Calcutta.

Soon after, I read Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. One idea from the book that stayed with me was that a cuisine’s flavour identity is shaped by the fats and spices it commonly uses.

Certain pairings are immediately identifiable. Ghee with garam masala is distinctly North Indian, mustard oil with paanch phoron is distinctly Bengali, olive oil with herbs like basil or parsley is distinctly Mediterranean.

Combining fats and spices from different cuisines is the easiest way to experiment and create something new and interesting. That’s what gave me the idea to combine Bengali spices with a coconut milk curry base (other than me incidentally being in Calcutta and ordering from a Malayali restaurant).

Cooking tips

If possible, try to get Rohu cut-pieces from a larger fish. It may cost 2-3x more per kg, but the difference in flavour is worth it. (That said, a small whole fish still tastes perfectly good.)
I like to add a small amount of flax seeds whenever I’m blending something. They’re a good source of dietary fibre and are only bioavailable when ground, which makes an onion-tomato paste a convenient place to include them. They add a slightly earthy, nutty flavour, so use them sparingly as it can easily overwhelm rest of the flavours.
I used to marinate the fish with salt and turmeric for 15-20 minutes before cooking, as is customary. Over time, I’ve realized it doesn’t make much difference to the final flavour for me, so I skip that step now.
In traditional Bengali fish dishes, the fish is often cooked twice: first fried, then simmered in a curry. I strongly recommend not doing that here. A coconut milk-based curry works best with fish that’s very soft and tender, and the firmer texture of fried fish doesn’t suit it.

Ingredients

500g Rohu
100ml Coconut milk
40g Onion
60g Tomatoes
3 Green chillies
1/2 tsp Flax seed
1 1/2 tsp Corriander powder
1 tsp Turmeric powder
1/2 tsp Mustard seeds
1/2 tsp Fennel seeds
1/4 tsp Corriander seeds
1/4 tsp Nigella seeds (kalonji)
1/4 tsp Fenugreek (methi seeds)
1 Bay leaf
1 Dried red chilli
1/2 tsp Corn flour
~8g Salt
~20g Coconut oil
15-20 Curry leaves

Method

Quarter the onions and tomatoes, and blend them with the flax seeds and 1 green chilli until you get a smooth paste. Add water during blending, if necessary.
Add the coconut oil in a pan, and add the mustard seeds, fennel seeds, corriander seeds, nigella seeds, and fenugreek seeds. When they splutter, add half of the curry leaves, the bay leaf, and dried red chilli.
Add the onion-tomato paste, and cook on low heat until the oil separates.
Add salt, corriander powder, turmeric powder, and cook on low heat for 1 minute.
Add the cocunut milk, and roughly equal amount of water.
Add a cornflour slurry to the curry, and stir until the curry comes to a boil (this is to make sure the cocunit milk doesn't curdle).
Add the rohu, and cook on low heat for 8 minutes.
Turn off the heat and add the rest of the curry leaves, and 2 split green chillies.
Let it rest for 5 minutes before serving. (The fish will continue to cook slightly in the residual heat while it rests.)

Chide'r pulao

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

![Chide'r pulao](/images/chider-pulao.jpg)

Chide'r pulao

This has been my go-to comfort mean ever since I moved to Bangalore in December 2023.

As far as I know, this is a distinctly Bengali dish, quite different from the poha that is more popular in north India.

I like it mainly for two reasons: (i) it reminds me of home, because my mother would often make it for breakfast, and (ii) it takes less than 10 minutes to make, with ingredients that are always available in my pantry.

Variations of the dish include adding raisins, cashews, or vegetables like potatoes, carrots, and peas. (I prefer the simpler version described below.)

Ingredients

60g Chide (poha/flattened rice)
20g Raw peanuts
40g Onion (diced)
2 Green chillies (chopped)
10g Oil
5g Salt
1 Bay leaf
1 Cinnamon stick
1 Clove

Method

Rinse the chide under running water until soft but not mushy. Drain well and set aside.
Add oil in a pan, fry raw peanuts until golden, and set aside.
In the same pan, add more oil. Temper with bay leaf, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves.
Add the diced onions, and saute until translucent.
Add the softened chide and cook on low heat for 2-3 minutes.
Add chopped green chillies, salt, and fried peanuts. Serve hot.

Things I want to add to my blog in 2026

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve lately been enjoying playing with my blog and adding new features.

Over the last week, I added an analytics tracker, icons for post categories on the home page, a dark mode and a reading-time estimate at the top of each post.

Before that, I had added a recipe section with its own layout, and a weeknote with a couple of charts.

None of these are hude changes, but they make the blog feel more like my own space to me. And I’d like to keep that momentum going this year by adding more small features.

So, here’s a few more things I’ve had on my mind:

[x] A comments section - I get a few comments on Substack when I repost there. I’d rather have that on the actual blog. Plus, maybe there’s a way to experiment with what comments look like when I do that? It could possibly be something less like a traditional thread structure, and more like a wall of sticky notes (which is a pattern I remember from my early days on the internet).
[x] Likes and other quick reactions - A lower-effort way to respond without having to commit to writing a comment.
A search bar - With time, the archive will grow, and finding older posts will get harder. A search bar is a basic affordance. (I have no idea how to go about implementing this though.)
Add links to random posts at the end of each post - So that readers have a chance to accidentally stumble upon other things.

I don’t really have a grand plan for what I want to do with the blog at the moment. It’s too early for that. For now, I’m satisfied with just messing around and seeing how it evolves.

It already feels way cooler than anything I could have imagined 3 months ago. (Huge thanks to the people of IndieWebClub Bangalore for the inspiration!)

Weeknote #14 [W26.01] - Blocking people, moral questions, and coconut water coffee

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Blocking someone as a question about who I want to be

I’ve lately been getting unprompted barrages of abusive messages from someone I used to (and still do) care about. I have no idea why they are doing this, nor do I know how to respond.

My friends advice me to block them.

The mechanics of blocking someone is simple. Open the options menu, tap on “block”, and you’re done. Two clicks.

But there is a different problem for me. I have never thought of myself as someone who gives up on people. For better or worse, that belief has become a part of how I see myself, even if I never consciously chose it.

The act of blocking itself is easy.

Asking whether this is who I am — or want to be — is less straightforward.

What do I owe myself vs. what do I owe others?

Finding an answer also makes me consider a broader moral question: what do I owe myself vs. what do I owe others — especially those I care about?

I am aware that I have a duty of care to myself. By choosing to not blocking them, I’m allowing myself to be repeatedly subjected to abusive language. I’m letting something beyond my control affect my mental health. Worse, I’m possibly enabling behavior that I simply find unacceptable.

And yet blocking them would mean withdrawing at a moment when they may be acting out of distress.

People rarely behave atrociously in a vacuum. There are circumstamces in which emotional self-regulation is physiologically impossible. These are times when kindness can help, and abandonment may make things worse than it is already.

I do not know which decision I’m more willing to live with. One option feels like a failure of care toward myself, the other is a failure of kindness toward someone I care about. There are no good choices.

PS: The only easy way out of this dilemma would be if I could convince myself that blocking them is, in fact, the kindest thing I could do for them at this moment. I’m not there yet.

Coconut water coffee

On a lighter, and far less existential, note…

A few weeks ago, I had briefly written about my recent troubles with coffee.

This prompted a short discussion on the topic with a friend who mentioned that their favourite way to prepare coffee was with coconut water (!?), something which I had never heard of before.

I tried making it this week, and it was… interesting. I can see the appeal. It has a pleasant mouthfeel. But, it feels strange because it doesn’t taste how you would expect coffee to taste.

It is the kind of thing I can see growing on me if I try it more often — which is precisely what I don’t want to do, since I want to give up coffee altogether.

34 apps I used a lot in 2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I wasn’t planning to track the apps I use, but after seeeing a few posts on IndieWebClub Bangalore, I thought it would be a good idea.

After all, I do end up more than half of my waking hours in front of one screen or another (and sadly, I do not see that changing in the forseeable future). So there definitely is some value in tracking what I’m using (if not also how much).

Some of these apps I have been using for a while, and some are new and have changed my habits and expectations in ways I cannot think of going back from to a time without them. (The ones marked with a star below are the ones I cannot do without.)

So, here’s what I’ve been using a lot in 2025:

Browsing & other generic internet things

Zen Browser - Best browser UX by a wide margin, cannot think of going back to any other browser and not feel frustrated.

Firefox Lockwise - For password management. I really should switch to something else soon though, considering it was deprecated a long long time ago.

Namecheap - For domain registration. I have 3 domains registered with them.

Umami - For analytics. Started using it just a few days ago. Has less features, but better UX than Google Analytics, and also is open source.

Media consumption

Spotify - For music. I’ve been using it a lot more towards the end of this year than I did in previous years.

Audible - For audiobooks. Listened to 36 this year.

Letterboxd - For tracking films. Have been using it more or less every day since 2012.

Google Sheets, Storygraph, and Goodreads - For tracking what I read. I primarily use Google Sheets, but I also log on Storygraph for the stats, and use Goodreads for the reviews and to see what friends are reading.

VLC Media Player - Best thing ever made for watching videos (films especially) on a PC.

Writing & thinking tools

Obsidian - For writing long-term notes (zettelkasten), and also as my default markdown editor sometimes.

Samsung Notes - Easiest and most uncomplicated way to take short-term notes on my phone.

Astro - Not technically an app, but the framework on which this blog and the Cinema Next Door sites are built.

Substack - For sending out my blog posts as a newletter to a few friends who subscribe.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity - For writing feedback, generating YouTube video summaries, and web search summaries respectively.

Code, design & photography

Figma - For work, for making posters, and other random design tasks. Has more or less replaced the entire Adobe suite for me (I miss using InDesign though).

Excalidraw - For messy visual thinking, mind maps, flow charts, and explaining things to others over video calls.

Antigravity - For writing code.

Adobe Lightroom Classic - For photo editing.I use the desktop only classic version, and not the new cloud-based version.

Communication & navigation

WhatsApp and Instagram DMs - For instant messaging and staying in touch with friends.

Google Meet - For video calls both at and outside work.

Google Maps - For navigating around Bangalore (and other cities); finding bus routes; and finding shops, cafes, and restaurants.

Uber - For booking cabs and autos.

Yulu - For short rides around town on the Yulu Miracle moped.

Fitness & wellbeing

Google Fit - General health tracking, which includes tracking steps, pulse rates, weight, blood pressure, etc.

Hevy - For logging my weight training sessions at the gym.

Bend - For stretching and yoga.

Misc.

Instamart - For buying groceries and other things online.

Artos and Google Sheets - For tracking my stock market investments.

SMS Organizer by Microsoft - Auto organizes SMSes based on content. Tracks spending, account balances, and card limits all just from SMS data. Love the UX, has been my default SMS app for years. (Has stopped working now for the last couple of weeks though for unknown reasons.)

Banana bread

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Banana bread is super easy to make and is a great way to use up overripe bananas.

I have a habit of buying a lot of bananas, which I then don’t use up in time. So I often make banana bread with the extra bananas.

Ingredients

3 (~300g peeled) Bananas (ripe)
200g All-purpose flour
80g Sugar
100g Butter (melted)
2 Eggs
1/2 tsp Cinnamon
1/2 tsp Baking soda
1/4 tsp Salt
20g Chopped walnuts

Method

Preheat oven to 175C (350F). Line a loaf tin with parchment or grease it well.
Mash bananas in a mixing bowl until smooth with small lumps.
Add melted butter/oil, sugar, and eggs. Whisk until combined.
In another bowl, whisk flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.
Fold dry ingredients into banana mixture. If batter feels too thick, add a splash of water or an extra spoon of mashed banana.
Stir in chopped walnuts, if using.
Pour batter into loaf tin and smooth the top.
Bake 50-60 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Weeknote #13 [W25.52] - Recipes, parties, orange cake, and completing yearly goals

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The orange poppyseed cake (top) I baked this week. (Photo: Kavya)

A new recipe section for the blog, to help me from forgetting recipes which I don’t make often enough

I began the week by adding a recipe section to the blog and published the first recipe: onion & tomato uttapam.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I have no interest in becoming a food blogger as such. But I keep forgetting recipes which I only make once in a while, and then I have to hunt for them all over again online. Writing them down and putting them up on the blog feels like a practical reference for my future self, and also a fun way of documenting bits of my life in the kitchen (which has anyway kept growing larger, into a core part of who I am, over the last few years).

The layout for the recipe page is inspired by Bong Eats. I love their UX. The feature to be able to strike off ingredients and completed steps on the site is extremely satisfying. And it helps a lot when actually cooking. Little things like that, things that add a sense of delight go a long way in making a difficult task feel less daunting.

There are rough edges in the layout still (the fixed header at the top is broken, the layout probaly won’t work on some tablets, and I forgot to add serving quantities). But it’s a start, and that feels good.

What recipes to put up next?

Now I’m thinking about what to document next. The recipes that would probably be most useful (at least to me) are the ones I’ve tweaked over time and might not be available elsewhere, and the ones I keep Googling because I never remember the proportions.

A few candidates might be:

Rohu in coconut milk curry - Fish with Bengali spices (paanch phoron), but in a Kerala style curry with a coconut milk base.
[x] Chide’r pulao - Poha the way my mother and grandmother make it at home, and not the usual North-Indian version which is more popular.
[x] Banana bread - Mostly because I forget the the correct proportion of ingredients every time, and wish I wouldn’t have to do a Google search to look it up.
Beef porridge - Beef with lentils and spices that go into haleem, but cooked in a style inspired by a Mediterrenean porridge recipe.

Parties are still overwhelming, but they are a good excuse to bake cakes

Me at the Christmas party. (Photo: Kavya)

Tanvi invited me to her Christmas party this week.

I usually find parties overwhelming and tend to avoid them. But this time, I was glad to be invited. It turned out to be quite fun, and I got to meet a lot of very cool people. (Although parties are still not something I’d do very often.)

The party was also an excuse for me bake an orange poppyseed cake, which I’d been meaning to try out, but would have never gotten around to baking just for myself.

While the cake turned out better than I had anticipated, my favourite thing in the party was actually Atharv’s cheese board (the smoked cheddar especially).

Completing yearly reading and film watching goals

Since 2020, I’ve set yearly reading and film-watching goals. This year’s targets were 72 books, and 200 films. As of Sunday (Dec 28), I’ve completed both.

It’s fun tracking these numbers over the years and noticing the ups and downs.

Next year, I want to push up the numbers a bit higher: 80 books, and 250 films. I feel confident I can do 80 books, but less so about the films. But now that I run a film club, I do want to push myself more.

Weeknote #12 [W25.51] - A week of watching films in Trivandrum

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Watching films at IFFK 2025

I spent most of last week in Trivandrum, watching films, and having dinner with Manu afterwards. I also met my friend and ex-colleague Arjun a few times, who was attending the festival too.

I ended up watching a total of 25 films at IFFK this year — more than I’d watched in either of the last two years, and more than I’d expected to going in.

6 favourite films from IFFK 2025

A few of those 25 films stayed with me long after the screenings ended. The common thread between them was, I think, the sentiment of tenderness in how they looked at their characters.

Here’s the 6 films I liked the most:

Naseem

Saeed Akhtar Mirza (the director), who was present for the screening, introduced Naseem as an epitaph to an idea of India that ceased to exist on December 6, 1992 — the day the Babri Masjid was destroyed. Made soon after the destruction, the film itself is actually filled with immense warmth and tenderness. It is centered on the relationship between a teenage girl and her grandfather, and the stories they tell each other.

The tenderness between them, and within their stories, acts as a counterpoint to the direction the country took in the following years. And it is precisely this stark contrast that underlines the tragedy of that choice.

Young Mothers

Set in a care centre that supports young teenage mothers, the film follows four residents as they navigate life after childbirth. The difficulties they face range from absent partners to difficult family situations to substance abuse and unresolved past trauma.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to simplify. It does not look for root causes that can be neatly diagnosed or fixed.

To be human is to accept that we all must suffer a degree of inevitable misfortune. Some of characters in the film are wonderful people trying their absolute best, while also being supported by those around them. Yet, that does not make their circumstances any easier to navigate. The film’s position is almost stoic: misfortune is inevitable, and no amount of good intention makes it disappear. What does matter is the presence of institutions — and people — that make it possible to live through hardship with dignity.

The Stranger

An adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel of the same name. I liked this far more than the book, which I had strongly disliked when I had read it around 5 years ago.

Where the novel seems to ramble on about existential detachment, the film turns that detachment outward, reframing it as a critique of bourgeois apathy toward the world around us. I love things that allow me to approach a familiar idea from a new angle, and this film does exactly that for me with Camus’s book.

Read a slightly longer review here.

Cactus Pears

A tender depiction of repressed desire and forbidden love in rural Maharashtra. What I admired most was the film’s refusal to treat attitudes toward homosexuality as uniformly hostile or tragic (which is the default approach Indian indie films tend to take, and one I’ve grown tired of).

People here are often annoying, and sometimes grossly intrusive. But that annoyance is survivable, it can be tolerated. Alongside it exist genuine pockets of care, most memorably in the form of the protagonist’s mother.

Not everything needs to be doom and gloom all the time, for that is not an accurate portrayal of reality. The film finds room for hope, without also denying the persistence of regressive attitudes toward sexuality.

Miroirs No. 3

A film about grief, told with a lot of gentleness and compassion.

It places side by side two contrasting responses to loss: one woman who cannot overcome the grief by her daughter’s death, and another woman who seems untouched by her boyfriend’s death.

Their chance encounter helps them come to terms with how to deal with loss in their own ways. As they spend time together, their feelings of guilt and grief are temporarily displaced and softened by the sharing of mundane rhythms of everyday life — cooking, cycling, washing dishes, painting fences.

Read a slightly longer review here.

The Chronology of Water

This is Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, and while it was a difficult watch, it was impressive in equal measure.

The film opens with the declaration that memories are stories, and so choose yours carefully. What follows is the protagonist’s attempt to reshape and reconstruct her own memories — many of them marked by past abuse and trauma — into something more bearable, something easier to live with.

What is both brilliant and, at times, frustrating is the film’s refusal to follow a conventional narrative structure. The unfamiliarity of the form and recognizable patterns of storytelling can be disorienting. But since the film is about memory and its reconstruction, the unconventional form is actually in service of the central of the film (it’s not breaking with convention just for the sake of it). Even if that sometimes comes at the cost of narrative cohesion, it is a bold and refreshing choice.

Onion & tomato uttapam

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This month, onion & tomato uttapam has been my go-to meal when I’m short on time.

This is a dish I’ve loved since childhood. My mother used to make it often. And back in the summer of 2018, when I was doing a 6-month architecture internship in Delhi, I would have this for lunch 3 out of 5 days in the week.

Earlier this month, after having an onion uttapam at Tanjore Tiffins, I realized that I needed to make this at home. Despite being a favourite, I had somehow never made it myself previously.

Ingredients

90g Rava / semolina / sooji
60g Curd
70-100 g (as needed) Water
4g Salt
1/4tsp Baking soda (optional)
40g Onion, finely chopped
40g Tomato, finely chopped
2 Green chilies, chopped
10g Oil

Method

In a bowl, mix rava, and salt. Add curd and most of the water; whisk to a smooth, thick pourable batter.
Rest batter for 15 minutes. Add more water if it thickens too much.
Just before cooking, gently stir in baking soda, if using.
In another bowl, mix chopped onion, tomato, green chili, coriander, ginger, and a pinch of salt.
Heat a non-stick tawa on medium. Grease lightly with oil. Pour half the batter in center and spread into 5-6 inch thick circle.
Immediately sprinkle onion-tomato mix over top. Press gently with spatula.
Drizzle 1 tsp oil around edges and a few drops on top. Cover and cook 2-3 min until base is golden and crisp.
Flip and cook 1-2 min until veggies soften slightly.
Repeat for second uttapam. Serve hot with coconut chutney (optional).

Things I want to get done in 2026

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Life seems to move along with less friction when I have projects to look forward to.

With the year coming to an end, it feels like a good moment to write down a few things I want to get done next year.

Move to HSR/Indiranagar by the end of March: I currently live in Electronic City, which feels like a world apart from the rest of Bangalore. It makes commuting a chore (and an expensive one). I want to move to either HSR (which closer to my new office) or Indiranagar (which is closer to most of my friends). The trade-off is that I have a spacious 2BHK all to myself right now, and I doubt I’ll get even half that space for the same rent in either location.
Get a MCWOG license: I’ve been wanting to get one for a while now. I had gone to a driving school last year to apply for one, but for whatever reason they applied for a MCWG (i.e. Motorcycles With Gear; I want a Motorcycles Without Gear license instead).
Buy a scooter: I had been relying on Yulu for the past 3 years to get around small distances in Bangalore. But they have drastically reduced their coverage area while also reducing the number of parking spots they have, making it far less reliable option. A scooter seems like the obvious solution.
Finish my portfolio: It has been lying incomplete since forever. I’m hoping the early part of next year will give me some breathing room to work to finally sit down and finish it. So that I can apply to more jobs later in the year.
Travel
- Kochi, for the Kochi Muziris Biennale,
- Kodaikanal, possibly to try shrooms, and
- Goa: as a part of my goal to travel to all states in India at least once (this would be my 23rd).

Weeknote #11 [W25.50] - A new home for the blog, and arriving at Trivandrum for IFFK

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A new home for the blog

I have a new home for my blog at blog.anikthink.com

It’s built with Astro and simple HTML, CSS, and Markdown.

I ended up not going for Ghost as a CMS for now (which is something I had mentioned on my last weeknote). I do think I’ll need one eventually. I don’t want to make a GitHub commit every time I want to post something. Which isn’t really possible from my phone, especially when I’m traveling without my personal computer (like right now).

At the same time, I like the simplicity of the current setup.

I sometimes wonder if the medium I publish through shapes what and how I end up writing. I like the bare bones nature of mataroa (thanks Tanvi!) Its lack of polish seems to help me be more unfiltered in my writing, perhaps because it feels lower-stakes, less demanding of perfection.

Arriving at Trivandrum for IFFK

I took a bus from Bangalore on Friday evening and arrived at Trivandrum on Saturday morning.

The bus reached Thampanoor at exactly 7:59 AM. This was a minor tragedy. Reservations for the next day’s films at IFFK open precisely at 8:00AM every morning, and they run out in seconds.

In the two minutes it took me to get down from the bus, most seats were already gone. I managed to reserve only the less well-known films — the ones no one else seemed to be booking, and I hadn’t even heard of before.

I had also missed booking anything for Saturday itself, having woken up late on Friday.

This meant that I spent a lot of time at the Nishagandhi auditorium, the open air theater where you don’t need reservations.

Some of those lesser known films turned out to be rather good. I probably wouldn’t have chosen them if not forced by circumstance, but letting go of plans ended up being part of the pleasure of this trip.

Weeknote #10 [W25.49] - First screening of Cinema Next Door, and why I should stop drinking coffee

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

First screening of Cinema Next Door

We finally had our first screening of Cinema Next Door last Tuesday on Dec 2. We screened Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.

40 people turned up!

That’s not a number I had anticipated. When we were doing screenings for TPCC, the average attendance was around 11-12 over the past year and a half. We had hit above 30 only once in that time. So the response we got was quite overwhelming in a positive sense.

I was unsure how it would pan out until a day before the screening. The registration link for both the screening, and the season pass were both not available until Monday afternoon. I thought we’d barely get any people.

Working on the CND website

I also spent a bit of time working on the Cinema Next Door website.

It’s a bit rough around the edges, doesn’t look particularly good on the phone yet, and some links might not work… but at least it’s up and running.

I decided to go with Astro on top of Sanity as a CMS for this one. Mainly because I want to move my personal blog (the one that you are reading right now) to something more custom; and I’ve been thinking of using Astro for that. (The idea that’s been floating on my mind is to use a static Astro site which uses the Ghost API as a headless CMS. I don’t want to use the Ghost front-end because themeing Ghost is bit of a nightmare, and way more tedious than what I expect designing a static site from scratch would be. I tried theme-ing Ghost for the now defunct TPCC blog, and while that was fun, I don’t want to do that again.)

Anyway, I took this also as an opportunity to play around with Google’s Antigravity. I did not like it (mainly because it seems to use too much compute by default, unless you manually switch to “fast” mode, even for simple tasks and runs out of credits really fast). I think I’m gonna stick with VS Code + Copilot for now.

For the first time in my life, I might be addicted to coffee

I’ve always actively disliked coffee.

Or I should say, I had.

That started changing when my friend Lynette gifted me a bag of 500g instant coffee for my birthday last year. I took more than a year to finish that bag… but since I had this huge bag of coffee lying around which I had to somehow finish, I started experimenting with different ways of making coffee. I tried varying the portions of milk, cream, dark chocolate, and coffee until I hit a combination I like. I even ended up buying a frother.

Anyhow, all that experimenting led me to eventually get over my hatred of coffee. That has now become a problem.

My new office has a nice coffee maker. I find myself perusing it whenever I’m in office and need a break (which is something I never did before Lynette’s gift).

The trouble is, I’ve always struggled with sleep. Drinking multiple cups of coffee on top of that has been, naturally, a recipe for disaster. I’m now probably getting the least amount of sleep I’ve gotten since my final semester of college.

I had listened to the Michael Pollan’s audiobook, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. In which he writes about his own conflicting relationship with the drink (along with a brief history of coffee drinking).

One of the worst things about a coffee addiction, he writes, is that it creates a negative feedback loop. You drink coffee, which makes you sleep worse, which makes you wake up tired and groggy, which makes you go back to using coffee to get over the grogginess.

I need to start hating coffee again. Soon.

Rules for writing on the web: use lots of descriptive headings, be skimmable, and anti-clickbait

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Since we are talking about writing styles in this week’s IndieWebClub, Bangalore meetup, I think it’s a good idea to outline explicitly some rules which I tend to intuitively use for writing on my blog.

The principles I follow are quite simple:

Use descriptive anti-clickbait titles
Use lots of headings inside posts to make them easy to skim
Limit posts to no more than 3 ideas at a time

Use descriptive, anti-clickbait titles

A title should tell you what you’ll get before you open the post.

This comes primarily from a deep personal hatred of clickbait titles.

I want to you to know — even before you land on an article/post — whether it might be something worth your time or not.

But beyond that, the experience of reading on the web is different from reading something on print. When you’re reading a printed piece, you’ve already made a decision that this is something you are interested in. You don’t mind investing the next 15, 30, or however many minutes or hours sitting down and reading.

On the internet, most people will land on an article by random chance (while they probably have another 20 tabs open, waiting for their attention). People need to be able to decide quickly whether something is worthwhile for them. Having clear, descriptive titles, for me, is a way to respect that

So, my post titles are extremely descriptive, such as my weeknote from last month: Weeknote #7 [W25.46] - Selecting films for Cinema Next Door, the joy of rediscovering something familiar, and building design systems

Use lots of headings inside posts to make them easy to skim

This follows from the previous point. Skim-ability helps readers decide where to focus and where to move on.

Clear, descriptive headings break up posts into smaller, more consumable pieces.

The idea is that you get an idea of what the post is about by scrolling through and having a brief glance a the headings. If a particular section interests you, stop to read (otherwise redirect your attention to one of those 20 open tabs on your browser, or even better if it’s something not on your phone or computer).

Limit posts to no more than 3 ideas at a time

More than 3 disparate ideas at a time = too much cognitive load.

Cognitive load is bad (we are overloaded as it is, being constantly online). And when something tries to cover too many ideas, it becomes so much harder to follow.

This principle comes from my work as a designer… A key principle there is to aim for clarity, and to remove what is inessential. The same principle I try to apply to writing.

The more things you have on your mind, the less time you are likely to spend on questioning, reflecting, and wondering. Whereas, the fewer ideas you hold at once, the more thoughtfully you can explore them.

Note: I realize that I may be writing this with an amount of certainty that is more than I actually feel. I am quite conflicted about the final point. There is value in writing about unconnected ideas together. Bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas can reveal links you wouldn’t notice otherwise. But there’s a point where it becomes too tedious and scattered to be useful. For now, three ideas feels like a good balance.

Weeknote #9 [W25.48] - Malcolm the cat leaves, and registering for IFFK

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This is going to be a shorter note than usual because I spent most of the week recovering from cold.

Malcolm leaves

Malcolm. the cat, was staying with me for the last 4 months because his original family had moved to a smaller apartment which didn’t have space for him.

He left last week on Saturday, for a new place, because I’ll be traveling to Trivandrum later this month for IFFK.

Maybe he’ll be back again after I’m back from the trip. But that’ll depends on how he adjusts to his new place. It wouldn’t be nice to keep moving him around every other week, especially if adjusts well to the new place.

I have never had a pet before, so it’ll be interesting to see how the separation affects me. I usually get over humans pretty quickly (as a matter of habit from childhood), let’s see how it goes with cats.

IFFK as an yearly ritual

I registered for the International Film Festival for Kerala (IFFK), happening between 12th-19th December. I booked a bus as well as the stay for a week (which is something that always makes me anxious).

This is the third time I’ll be attending IFFK, and at this point it is becoming sort of an yearly ritual. I first went there in 2023, had an amazing time, and then went back last year too.

I usually end up spending a couple of days at a backpackers’ hostel in Varkala after the festival, which tends to be even more fun. But I think I may have to skip that this time. But I haven’t booked a return ticket as yet.

PS: CInema Next Door

The first Cinema Next Door screening is today, and we’re already sold out — something which has never happened in 1.5 years of screening for TPCC at Underline Center. We’re off to a seemingly decent start.

Weeknote #8 [W25.47] - Sickness, design tokens, pad thai, and screening schedule

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was sick, but at least it made me rest

I am late with my weeknote again, this time because I had a bad fever over the weekend.

My temperature touched 101F, and it didn’t help that I had not been getting good sleep the entire week (which is an entirely separate problem… and not a new one).

I’m oddly grateful for the sickness though, as it forced to rest and get some sleep that my body clearly needed. I slept for nearly 20 hours over a 24h period between Monday and Tuesday afternoons.

I suppose it really wasn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. I’ve had much worse bouts of sickness in the past, particularly in childhood and when I was in college. Somehow, my sickness frequency has dropped drastically in recent years—most likely because I work from home now and meet fewer people.

So of course, I fell ill right after going to the office three times in one week.

Naming design tokens is a headache

Last week, I wrote about creating a new design system for work.

To create a design system, you have to start with a set of design tokens. Design tokens are essentially aliases, or variables, that you reuse across your project: colours, spacing, font-sizes, and all that.

Naturally, I found myself obsessing over something seemingly trivial: how to name the tokens.

Which is such an inane problem, when you think about it. I know what tokens I need, but I can’t decide how to name them.

Should the token be called color-button-primary-bg, or button-bg-color-primary, or some other variation of it?

I should have realized it earlier, but there is no universal best way to name tokens. All major design systems (MD, Ant, Carbon, and so on) differ from each other in how they define their tokens. The only sensible approach really is just to do “whatever works for you and your team” (and then stick to it).

The good news is that the front-end team agrees that we do need a new set of design tokens because existing ones (or mostly, the lack of them) makes their job harder.

The second thing we agreed on was that we would like to use Storybook to document our design system and component library. We used Storynook my previous project and it easily saved us hundreds of hours during design and development.

Separately, I’m also working with the marketing on a brand guidelines document. (It’s interesting how even multi-million dollar companies can operative, and even thrive, without something which I would have otherwise thought to be fundamental.)

I made pad thai, should I have a recipe section on my website?

I made pad thai for the first time last week. It is an exceedingly simple recipe for how good it tastes.

The first time used wheat noodles because that’s all I had. But I wanted to try it with rice noodles, so I made it a second time a couple of days later. Turned out pretty amazing both times.

I love trying new recipes. The best (by which I mean: easiest to follow) recipes tend to be on YouTube. And while YouTube is often the easiest place to learn, videos are a pain to shuffle through when you need to go back and forth between steps. Written recipes should solve this, but most recipe sites are a mess.

The recipe pages on the Bong Eats website are a joy to use, and there are a few other bakery websites which I’ve come across occasionally which do things well. But generally, the state of affairs is sad.

Which makes me wonder: should I start a recipe section on my website? Could be fun.

Cinema Next Door schedule for December

This one is a bit of a cheat, because this is an update from week 48, and not 47…

The licensing situation for the Cinema Next Door screenings is more or less sorted.

I’ve set up an account on Instagram and now need to set up the website next.

Anyway, here’s the schedule:

Weeknote #7 [W25.46] - Selecting films for Cinema Next Door, the joy of rediscovering something familiar, and building design systems

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Cinema Next Door — the name for the new film club

The new film club finally has a name — Cinema Next Door.

In last week’s note, I’d written briefly about why we want to start a new club. The basic idea is simple: to be a place which is open and accessible to people. To make cinema feel less like an elite and exclusive pursuit and more like an open door. We’d place which can be:

a non-intimidating introduction to people wishing to explore films, and
a place where you bring your friends and have fun with them (while watching films, of course).

We went through a bunch of options (Beyond Subtitles had quite a few fans), but we settled on Cinema Next Door. It has a friendly neighborhood-warmth feel to it which, I think, encapsulates the spirit of what we’re trying to do best.

(But it’s still early days, and we might easily change things up before the first things. So, suggestions are welcome.)

Shortlisting films to screen in December

We’ve also made a shortlist of films we want to screen for the opening month (December).

We’re not following a strict theme per se, but we’re trying to give a taste of the kind of programming we want to do in the future: a mix of films across the world, which is playful, reflective, and also occasionally challenging.

Here’s the tentative list:

La La Land (USA)
Pather Panchali (India)
In the Realm of the Senses (Japan)
Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan)
Back to the Future (USA)
Eyes Wide Shut (USA)
Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Hong Kong)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (USA)

A few of these are dependent on licensing, so things might shuffle around by the end of the month. But for now, this feels like a good starting point.

Kadana Kuthuhalam, and the joy of rediscovering something familiar

I went to Neeraja’s Bharatnatyam recital on Wednesday.

It ended with a thillana — one I thought I recognized immediately as Raghuvamsa Sudha. I had first encountered that piece about a decade ago in the form a violin instrumental by TN Krishnan and had immediately fallen in love with it (this was back when I had a fleeting interest in learning the violin).

Except, the thillana at the end of the recital wasn’t quite the piece I knew. The lyrics were different, and the arrangement kept drifting into directions that felt familiar yet distinctly unkown. This mix — a sense of recognition coupled with surprise — gave me an unexpectedly strong dopamine hit. I’ve been listening to both songs on loop ever since.

As I’m writing this, it makes me think about how innate the explore-exploit intuition is in us. We like enough familiarity to feel safe, but we also need enough novelty to stay curious. Like a child alternating between clinging to a parent and wandering into a new playground. We thrive in the space where both coexist. (I realize that’s another good principle for curating at the film club.)

Aside

I looked things up later. The reason the pieces sound so similar is that they’re both set in the raga Kadana Kuthuhalam — and the thillana is actually derived from Raghuvamsa Sudha.

A thillana (which is something I was unfamiliar with previously), by the way, is traditionally performed at the end of a Carnatic concert. The closest Western classical equivalent is probably the coda in a sonata. They’re both energetic, rhythmic and meant to end a performance with a flourish.

Setting up a design system from scratch

This week, in my day job, I needed a number stepper component — the little thing with +/– buttons to change a value. I went looking for it in our design system and realized it didn’t exist. And I also realized that I do not like the design system.

I’m working at a startup — ad-hoc decisions, disorganization, and a “we’ll fix it later” attitude are traits that come with the territory. A cursory look at the design system file tells that story clearly. Our buttons do not have hover/active/focused states for instance, among other problems.

Anything that doesn’t break functionality isn’t a priority right now, and that makes sense for for the context I suppose. It works just well enough to ship to production, and there are time when that’s enough.

This is a very different experience from the last major project I had worked on — which was an internal webapp for Mecedes-Benz. I loved how well-structured and documented their design system was. I’ve moved from one extreme to another.

And it’s fun! Building things from scratch means I get to use everything I learned there and apply it here. Nothing in the current file is really reusable, so I’ve started drafting an entirely new design system. Next week’s goal is to get the developers and product managers on board and begin fixing the components already out in production.

Weeknote #6 [W25.45] - On film clubs and feeding friends

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Starting a new film club

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about starting a new film club. That idea began to take shape this week.

The problem with existing film clubs in Bangalore

Most existing screening groups in Bangalore don’t function like clubs. They select films, but there’s rarely room for members to shape that experience — whether it is by curating, hosting, or contributing in other ways. This was a common complaint I came across within the TPCC (The Parallel Cinema Club) community, in particular, over the past two years.

They also tend to miss the sense of play and discovery that draws many of us to cinema in the first place. There rarely is a screening to which you’d want bring your friends to. (I have taken my friends to a few, only for them to never come back again.)

Finally, the approach to curating often feels detached from the world around us. I’ve always felt that films matter most when they move us personally or challenge us politically — and not just when we analyze the technical decisions that went into their making.

Coming next: December screenings at Underline, Center

As of now, the plan is to start with weekly screenings at Underline Center from December. We’re working on finalizing the name, and the curation for the first month as of now. Hopefully, all of that will be settled by next week.

The goal is to create a space where watching films feels both joyful and reflective. A space you’d want to return to every week.

Cooking for friends is easier than cooking for myself

On Saturday, I had invited a few friends over for lunch.

I ended up cooking more dishes than I had expected. The meal consisted of:

Rice
Dal tadka
Postor bora
Shukto
Mullet, fried
Palak chicken
Palak paneer, and
Banana bread

When I cook for myself — if I do that at all — I usually cook rice and one dish to go with it (two, if I’m in the mood, but that happens rarely).

Cooking for myself sometimes feels like a chore (especially when I’m not trying out a new recipe). But when I know I’m doing it for friends, I find myself more naturally interested.

I think the same impulse works with the film club (to an extent) — watching films together with other people makes the experience more exciting.

Weeknote #5 [W25.44] - In the Mood for Love

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t know what I did this week, but it felt unusually busy.

Perhaps because I was out (of the house) so often. I went to my new office three days (watched In the Mood for Love one of those days too), met my friend Kavya once, and attended the Indie Web Club meeting on Saturday. I was out of the house five days out of seven. The last time I was out that many times (excluding vacations) was probably five years ago (before Covid struck in 2020).

In the Mood for Love

Amid all the chaos, this week’s highlight was watching In the Mood for Love again. This time on a big screen at Bangalore International Center (BIC).

If I had to pick one film as my favourite, it would be this. It was my fifth viewing of the film, and somehow it grows more endearing the more I watch it.

What I love about WKW’s style is that it lends itself quite naturally to densely layered narratives. With each viewing, you find new — and previously unexplored — meanings and narrative threads. Part of that comes from how WKW makes his films. The story isn’t fully written before shooting. It evolves.

When we meet a potential lover at a restaurant — as the characters in In the Mood for Love do, or as we might in our own lives — we might confess our feelings and step into a romance. Or, just as easily, we might hold back out of fear that things could go wrong… and decide to move to a different country instead (I’d choose the first option, even if my favourite characters don’t.). And if you think about it more deeply, each of these versions could branch into many others — every choice splintering into still more possibilities.

With WKW, since the narrative isn’t set at the beginning, he shoots multiple versions of what could have been. The film comes together as a coherent whole only in editing — assembled from fragments of all those possibilities.

The result is a film which has an organic, almost anarchic quality to it that mirrors the experience of real life far more closely than most stories do.

Hot takes that I'll keep updating, or break into independent posts later

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’m at my second event of the Indie Web Club, Bangalore. Today, we were talking about digital gardens and one of the prompts was publishing a “living document” — something which isn’t in a finished state at the time of publication, and keeps evolving over time (like a Wikipedia article).

In the spirit of the prompt, I’m gonna write a list of hot takes I have (and I have many), and hopefully keep coming back to update it once in a while.

Also, taking inspiration from Ankur’s post, I’m going to present my hot takes without nuance, context, or evidence.

Most of your opinions should be incorrect, or else you’re not thinking (independently) enough.
People (almost) never make decisions rationally.
People use the word “art” to justify a lot of nonsense.
Design is more useful than art because you design things for people.
Cultural appropriation is not possible. All culture evolves through borrowing or acquiring ideas from elsewhere; the alternative to cultural appropriation is no culture.
The world would be a better place for everyone without personal vehicles (cars and motorbikes specifically; bicycles and scooters are fine)!
Windows is an objectively better OS than MacOS.
You should not take notes while reading a book (most of the time).
Romantic relationships are less important than friendships.
You should never start working on something without imposing constraints on yourself. (I’m out of time for today, so the list ends here for now.)

Weeknote #4 [W25.43] - A new job, dating apps, and film clubs

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This weeknote is for last week, I’m almost a week late with it.

A new job

I joined my new job on Oct 22nd (Wednesday). I like the place (so far). I’m working on a product which helps companies manage their corporate group health insurance policies for their employees.

What has stood out most so far is the reliance on measurable metrics as a decision making tool, something which I found altogether missing in my previous job,

On dating apps

I created accounts on the various dating apps that be these days. I’m not convinced of their utility in the way they are advertised — that is, them being a place to find love and intimacy.

Dating apps can be useful nonetheless. For instance, if you have gotten out of a relationship recently (as I have), the act of making a profile and meeting new people can be the occasion for an internal narrative shift.

##On film clubs

A club, of any kind, is a place where you meet new people and make friends. It is the social aspects of a club — the idea of community built around common interests — that makes a club a club.

Unfortunately no film club in Bangalore fulfills this role at the moment. Not even the one I’ve been part of for the last two years. The more time that passes, the more TPCC (specifically the Bangalore chapter) moves in a direction away from community building, and more towards gatekeeping an abstract idea of how films should be curated and watched. It is time for something new.

Weeknote #3 [W25.42] - Shooting a film, leaving my job, and how to read 60 books a year

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Shooting a film with friends over two days

My friend Siddharth, who I had first met at TPCC a bit more than a couple of years, had been planning to make a short film for a while.

We finally shot the film, which is titled Vanchit, over two days last week — Friday and Saturday.

I helped out as a production assistant. Which meant, I didn’t do much other than operate the clapboard and move the lights and reflectors around. It isn’t exactly the most physically arduous job in the world. But, I realized that if you’re holding reflectors (or anything) for long periods of time, having good balance and core strength can certainly help. Which, evidently, I do not have as I felt exhausted after both days. A reminder that I need to exercise more regularly.

I had always (well, not actually always; but around since the time I started watching films around the age of 17-18) wanted take part in the making of a film. So, that’s one thing off my bucket list.

Being part of a film crew, even if it is mostly amateur, does give you an insight about what goes on behind the scenes to make a film possible. While it was the first film for most of us involved, we were fortunate to have Siddhanth (who is a different person from the Siddharth mentioned above, and who we also know from TPCC) on the team as he has both worked on films professionally and directed his own film previously.

Siddhanth prepared the call sheet for both days, which made it easy for the entire team to be on the same page. Thanks to the preparatory work done by him, we went into both the days rather well prepared ad even finished shooting on time on the second day (which is not something most of us were expecting).

I think if I were again a part of another film crew again, I would feel a lot more at ease, knowing what to do better because of this experience

Leaving my job at Infosys after 5 years

Last week also marked the end of my employment at Infosys, after almost five years.

I had previously written about my frustrations with their notice period. But, thankfully, there’s nothing that a couple of strongly worded emails cannot solve. So I did finally get an early release.

Infosys is a good place to work at when you’re starting your career. You get to work on good projects, for well-known clients from around the world. It can be a great place for growing into a role and building confidence.

However, it is also a place where you stop learning quite quickly after the initial period. For Infosys, at its heart, is a very conservative company.

Much of growth and learning in life happens from asking questions, being bold and taking risks where you may be wrong. All these things are antithetical to the culture of the company. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, for there is much value in being boring and reliable. But that also makes it a not very interesting place to work at for too long. Which, I guess, explains its ridiculously high employee turnover rate.

How to read 60 books a year

Last week, I also finished reading my 60th book of this year. Which is already as much as I had read in all of 2024. I want to take that number up to 72 by the end of this year though, which would bring the average up to a nice 6 books per month.

There are very few things in life one has control over. Reaching places on time, and how much one reads are two things that I like being on top of (and the former helps with the latter.)

People often ask me how I manage to find the time to read as much as I do. So, here’s a little how to:

Read multiple books simultaneously. Some books can be tedious, and you might get stuck with them for months. If you wait to finish the book completely before starting a new one, you’ll have large periods of time during which you won’t have much to show for.
Carry a book everywhere. I’ve done a lot of my reading this year while commuting on buses or between meetings at work. On my previous project, I had to be on a lot of meetings in which I wasn’t really required. Excellent time to read! Reading while commuting is equally good, With Bangalore traffic as bad it is, I am often able to get good 1-2 hours chunks of reading done when I would otherwise be doing nothing but cursing traffic.
Reach places on time. Most people in India, if you’re supposed to meet them, do not arrive at the pre-determined time. They are inevitably late by an hour or so on average. Waiting for people on such occasions used to be annoying. Until I discovered that I can use the time to read. And now I like want people to be late so that I can read more. Two birds, one stone, and all that.
Audiobooks. Audiobooks are an amazing cheat code. Nearly half of the 60 books I’ve finished have been audiobooks. I listen to them while cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, or when walking to the grocery store. Makes otherwise mundane everyday tasks feel enjoyable and productive.

If you’re on Storygraph, you can check out the books I read here. Or, if you use Goodreads, you can go here.

Weeknote #2 [W25.41] - Howling cat, lemon spray, and the lack of critical thinking in Indian education

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Howling cat, lemon spray

Malcolm had his second episode of uncontrollable howling today. Like the first one, it was brought on by the neighbourhood stray female cat. She is probably in heat. I had gone out to throw the garbage when Malcolm got a chance to get out of the door, wily little creature that he is. He smelt her and that was that — he went bonkers. (He’s not neutered.)

I didn’t see it happen, but I suppose the two of them had an altercation too, because I saw the other cat with a pretty bad scratch on her (poor thing expected some action, but got the wrong kind). Malcolm seems unharmed. Which is a happy surprise, considering how incompetent he generally is at everything. He isn’t the type of cat who you’d expect to win a street fight, but here we are. Although I haven’t been able to inspect him fully yet; he is still in rage and won’t allow anything to come close to him. I’m locked inside my study. He won’t allow me out. I had to ask my neighbour to come and close the main door of the house from the outside so that he doesn’t escape again.

The last time this happened, I had to spray copious amounts of a lemon spray outside the house to keep the other cat away. Cats hate the smell of lemon for some reason. I need to buy another bottle.

For the time being, I’m just waiting for Malcolm to calm down so I can get out of my room.

What I’ve learnt over these two episodes — and the multiple battle scars over my hands and legs that I’ve acquired — is that there’s nothing you can do when a cat is in rage. They’ll maul you to death if you give them the chance. All you can do is get away and let it calm down on its own. Perhaps that’s a lesson to carry over to human interactions too.

Malcolm the cat, and having pets and babies

Malcolm isn’t my cat. He belongs to a friend of a friend, who can’t keep him for a while. So he’s been with me for nearly 3 1/2 months now.

I adore him. I don’t particularly understand the reason why, other than him being a helpless fluffy ball of fur. He’s not particularly affectionate, doesn’t really do much; mostly just eats and sleeps. This is probably how having a baby feels like — which, thankfully, I do not plan on having.

I had not planned on having a pet, either. The idea always seemed rather burdensome. And the pet, if you get one, never gets to have a choice in the matter of whether to be with you or not. How can you ever be truly sure that you’re not making its life miserable by keeping it with you? Pet owners will say they know their pet loves them. Me — I’d rather not take the chance.

Moral qualms aside, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy having Malcolm around and didn’t fall in love with him.

A week of rest, possibly thanks to our education system

I’m switching jobs and serving my notice period at my current company.

Indian companies, you may know (if you’ve had the misfortune of working for one), can often times be unbelievably irrational.

To begin with, they’ll put notice periods of up to 3 months in the employment contract. Which means that you are asking 3 months of work from someone who has zero motivation or incentive to work you. Why would any manager with even half a brain ask you to serve that? Beats me.

Worse, I have had literally no work for the last month. Considering that, I asked them to release me early. They didn’t, nor have they given me any work. (Good for me, I guess: I get a few weeks of much-needed rest, while being paid for it!)

I suppose there’s something to be said about our education system here. Most schools in this country would criminalise critical thinking if they were given the choice.

Our education system punishes people for asking questions and thinking for themselves. Now that I think back to it, the amount of times I had fallen out with my teachers at school simply for asking questions they weren’t expecting is stupid. This pattern continued on to college. I always saw myself as a bit of an anarchist (in theory, if not in practice), so I didn’t mind it much.

But, here, you’re supposed to follow a template that’s been handed down to you. Go beyond that, and you’re in trouble. Managers in Indian companies are products of this system. The fact that they then make decisions which you wouldn’t expect from a right thinking person isn’t too much of a surprise.

Having said that, the new company I’m moving to is also Indian. And so far, the limited interactions I’ve had with the people there have been rather refreshing. I’m actually excited to work there. Here’s hoping next time I’ll have something nice to say about working for Indian companies!

On the writings of David Foster Wallace

This week, I finished reading a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace.

Informatively, the value of the book was questionable. But I am glad I read it. I like the way he writes — which is an eclectic combination of journalism, commentary, and personal anecdotes. It’s a style of writing which draws me to it, for that’s the way I used to write when I was younger (although I never did reveal as much of my personal life as he does).

If for nothing else, I appreciate the book for inspiring me to write a bit more.

5 books on understanding how we make decisions

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

As a product designer, much of my work revolves around decisions — how to arrange elements on a screen, what to emphasize, what tone a line of copy should take, etc. Each of these choices, however small, accumulates into something that either feels right or doesn’t.

To make these decisions with any confidence, I’ve found it helps to read. Not just about design, but about how the human mind works. How do we, as people, think, choose, and make decisions? Why are we drawn to certain patterns over other, and why do we mistake our impulses for reason?

Here’s a list of books that have expanded my understanding of human decision-making. They began as a way to design better, but they’ve ended up shaping how I see people, myself included.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Author: Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman’s book gives us one of the most enduring ideas in modern psychology: the division between two modes of thought. “System 1,” quick, intuitive, emotional — and “System 2,” slow, deliberate, analytical.

We live, it turns out, mostly in System 1. It’s efficient, energy-saving, and often wrong (but rarely disastrously so). System 2 intervenes when stakes are high, when we stop to think, or when something feels off.

Kahneman teaches us that much of our confidence in our decision-making abilities is misplaced. Our biases are often invisible to us, and our rationality is but a fragile illusion. But in understanding these limits, we gain a better understanding of ourselves and, perhaps too, better judgment.

The Enigma of Reason

Authors: Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber

We often assume that reasoning evolved so we could make better decisions, or arrive at the truth of a matter. Mercier and Sperber offer a more uncomfortable — but perhaps liberating — hypothesis: that reason evolved merely to persuade others.

According to them, our minds are less like scientists than spin doctors. In most cases, we make decisions intuitively (Kahneman’s System 1 again), and then use our reasoning capabilities to defend what we’ve already done. This works out well, they argue because us humans are social animals. We discuss our decisions with people, and it is other people who provide us with alternate perspectives and show us errors in out thinking processes. This turns out to be more efficient than evaluating the pros and cons of every choice individually.

Reasoning, in other words, is primarily a social function — a tool for explanation and persuasion, and not decision-making.

The Righteous Mind

Author: Jonathan Haidt

If The Enigma of Reason examines how we think, Haidt explores why we feel the way we do about right and wrong.

He likens our moral sense to a palate with six taste buds — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Each person, each culture, mixes these in different proportions, producing the rich and often bewildering variety of human morality.

Through this framework, political divisions becomes less like battles between good and evil, and more like disagreements between people with different moral emphases. Haidt gives us a language to see and understand with empathy people with inclinations different than our own.

The Person and the Situation

Authos: Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett

This book talks about one of our most persistent errors: the belief that people act as they do because of who they are, rather than where they are.

We forgive ourselves by citing circumstance (“I was late, tired, under pressure”), but deny others the same courtesy (“He’s rude. She’s selfish.”). This is known as the fundamental attribution error.

The book’s message is simple: behavior is fluid and depends on circumstances. The kind person may act cruelly when rushed; the cruel person may act kindly when calm. The situation shapes us far more than we care to admit.

Alchemy

Author: Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland — being an advertising man — writes with a charm and playfulness natural to a stalwart of his profession.

His central argument is delightfully contrarian: that logic alone cannot solve human problems, because humans are not logical. We are driven by perception, emotion, and context — and often, the most elegant solutions are psychological, not technological.

Why make a train one minute faster, he asks, when you could make the journey more enjoyable (so that people don’t spending an extra minute, or five, on the train)?

Alchemy is a celebration of lateral thinking, i.e., thinking outside the box.

Closing thoughts

Reading these books has certainly made me a better designer. But I think it has also made me a little more patient — with users, with my friends and colleagues, and with myself. It’s always humbling to be reminded of how much of what we call “rationality” is just storytelling after the fact.

But, as these books suggest, that’s not a flaw in the design of the human mind. It is what makes us so wondefully human.

Weeknote #1 [W25.40]: Writing in public, reflections on breaking up, and thoughts on structures

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

On writing in public

I’m writing this post at a meeting of the Indie Web Club at Underline Center. The last time I had a public blog was around 12 years ago. I have written things then — journals, essays, and the like — but without putting them out on the internet. This is my attempt at starting again. The last few times I did this, I stopped after people I knew in real life started reading my blog. I’m more comfortable with the idea of strangers on the internet reading my thoughts, than friends and family. I wonder how long I’ll last this time.

Reflections on breaking up

I broke up from a one-year relationship around a week ago. It was the conclusion of a year long, fulfilling relationship. It came at me unexpectedly, and therefore I was sad. But moving on can be as much as source of joy and curiosity as it can be a source of sorrow. For leaving one thing behind is always accompanied by an invitation to discover and do new things. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. The earliest memories being of leaving behind not relationships, but places as friends, when I’d move cities as a child with my parents.

One structures and frameworks

The topic for the Indie Web Club meet was weeknotes. The idea is to put out a list of things you’ve been doing (or pondering on) once a week. I like the idea. The idea of having a structure to fall back on. Whenever I’ve tried to write things over the last year or so, I’ve been weighed down by thoughts of how to structure what I’m writing. I tend to go for long-form essays, as that’s the format I’m probably the most comfortable with. But that takes a lot of time and energy. The end result being that I rarely end up finishing what I start: I’ve published a total of exactly one article this year.

A structure makes things easier. You have something to full back on when you don’t have the mental bandwidth to think and be creative. And on better days, when your creative energy is high, you can experiment and break rules and come up with something new and unexpected.