Welcome, dear reader, to my very regular newsletter!
I was very excited to put out my first music album, Colour The Bigger Picture in April! Most of the songs were written when I was around 16, and they brewed for a long long time while I gained the technical skills to record and arrange music, as well as the motivation.
They have been filled in, fiddled with, and refined over the years. They are songs with a lot of feelings, about a lot of feelings - and have all the raw and unpolished restless, fleetingness, dreaminess, that came along with them - sort of like a sonic representation of the inside of my head from that time. They fall off tempo, fall off genres, jump from knowing to not knowing again, trying to make sense of the bigger picture. The opening track, In The Backseat, is a remembrance of what it felt like to be a kid - a feeling I’ve found I struggle to connect with as an adult.
I would love to know what you thought of the album, and more importantly, how it made you feel.
Balcaos are a notable part of typical Goan houses - they are built-in seats at the entrance of the house where residents of the house sit and entertain people. I love the idea of this inside-outside in-between space . From a write-up at the Houses of Goa Museum:
The balcao or porch and the latter verandas are the areas of transition as one moves from the dazzling sunlight from street level into the relative darkness of the interior of the house or vice versa. Filtered light provides an area of adjustment while, the specially designed built-in seating, emphasises the social function of the porch.
In many cities, you acutely feel the lack of planning for non-commercial social spaces where conversation and mingling and socialising and gossiping, ideally, could happen.
Cities are designed for men, by men. The gender, class, and caste hierarchies play out so clearly in many aspects of city life, especially so in public spaces for leisure. As a culture, leisure is not valued enough. And going down the structures of hierarchies, it’s even more acute.
Women from erstwhile village communities have a strong, deep-rooted and sacred connection to lakes, but cannot recognise these water bodies in their new avatar, transformed as they are into landscaped recreational sites with long lists of prescriptive rules. Women from migrant worker families have no time for leisure despite a deep need for it – can there be some way to give them a break in public spaces? And what about the women that the public planner is perhaps most familiar with – from a middle-class or wealthy home, who seeks a place for some solitude and time with families to wind down after a busy day? Even she, who is the most privileged in this set, finds herself deeply disadvantaged in comparison to men.
I love the beauty of social media when it comes to community building, sharing information, sharing beauty, side hustles, passion projects.
It was through Instagram that discovered Nishant Mittal’s Digging In India archives, which has some real gems, including a Thai version of the iconic “Yeh Dosti”.
However, I, like many people I know, have a love-hate relationship with social media.
From Questlove: “I remember a passage from a pulp mystery novel where a character said he had emptied a liquor bottle and now felt just as empty as the bottle. That’s sometimes the exact effect of darting around the Internet. You are into everything but you are into nothing” ‘
This is relatable to anyone who has spent late nights mindlessly scrolling. You try to fill up time and emptiness, only to feel even emptier.
“So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world” [from George Saunders].
Instagram contributes to so much of what I personally pay attention to - I often forget that it’s not the real world. Although I’ve tried a detox several times, I find myself downloading the app again a few days later. My sister pointed out that it may be more helpful to rewire my mind and practice paying attention, which is much much harder than it sounds. Someone told me, “Life is what we pay attention to”, and that struck me as quite profound. Something which is at the forefront of your experience can be completely invisible to someone else.
On a lighter note, if you’re a user of social media, you may have come across the viral dance trend “My money don’t jiggle jiggle it folds”. This is where it’s originally from.
A friend agitatedly told me about how she used to watch Louis Theroux’s BBC show Weird Weekends long before the virality of the track [oh, the pain of having been into something before it became popular - you ARE superior but how can you prove it?!], so I thought I’d check it out. Some clips are available on YouTube, and it’s wildly entertaining, like the episode where he’s at a Thai marriage agency that helps Western men find Thai brides, or watching the consequence of him asking wrestlers if their sport is staged, or meeting with an extra terrestrial host.
Whether it’s a professional setting or an auto driver telling me that I should face my fears [more about that in the previous edition], if there’s advice coming my way, I’ll roll up my sleeves and get ready to note it down. I love collecting and storing advice; it makes me feel wealthy. So of course I absolutely loved reading Kevin Kelly’s 103 bits of advice on his 70th birthday.
There’s some practical stuff, like: “Keep all your things visible in a hotel room, not in drawers, and all gathered into one spot. That way you’ll never leave anything behind”
Some general tape-to-your-desk life advice, like “The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished”
And some things that I wish had worked for me, like: “Ask funders for money, and they’ll give you advice; but ask for advice and they’ll give you money”.
“Leap, and angels will appear” [a line I marked in Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto]
I hope that you’re paying attention to what you’re paying attention to.
With much love,
Nitya