Hello dear reader, and welcome to the twentieth edition of this newsletter! This started off as an email thread to a few close friends [cc’d, not even bcc’d] where I shared thoughts, links to interesting things I came across, conversations I had, and sometimes, random shower thoughts. I am surprised that I’ve kept this up for 5 years, and I going back over the editions, I thought about what the purpose of writing this was.
It was hard to answer.
Last month, I was helping a friend buy gifts for his extended family who was visiting. Fifteen minutes into staring with glazed eyes at size 41 of the brown and white shirt and the white and brown shirt (why does it feel so much easier to gift women things than men?) the saleswoman, faith lost, wandered away. It was then that I realised that gifting is an art, and some people are really good at it. As we went back and forth between shirts, stores, and parking spots, I began categorising the different types of gifts.
I don’t mean just birthday gifts, or expensive gifts, or compulsion gifts - those are a lot of pressure - but thoughtful gifts. My mother gifted my closest friends razais just before we went off to college. It’s strange to suddenly receive a blanket to take home after dinner, but they’ve moved cities with it and treasure it to this day.
Handmade gifts, like a painting, or something someone built or customised always feels so special. Children are particularly good in this gifting category. Van Neistat’s gifting philosophy is an interesting one; he says that the best gifts are nice, made, and thoughtful, but a good gift can be a combination of any two of those qualities.
Delightful/unexpected gifts, like a moisturiser that smelled like Cadbury Dairy Milk that an aunt gifted us as a kid. These gifts have something unique about them, like a packet of astronaut food from the space museum a friend got me.
The “Do you want this?” hand-me-down gifts. Something that is precious to someone, but they don’t have use of it any more so transfer ownership to you because they deem you worthy of that object - jackets, gadgets, perfumes, water bottles, curtains - it can be anything. My space feels like a collage, littered with objects that belonged to other people, and I love that.
Regifted gifts. The kind that mostly are still in their original packaging - the post-birthday party ritual when we were kids included making a separate pile for the gifts that would be regifted. Once, my sister received a regifted gift and the card from the original gifter had not been removed, so it was addressed to the person who gifted it to her.
Books are their own category. “I think you might like this” is one of the most exciting lines to hear.
There are the I-saw-this-and-thought-of-you gifts. A packet of tea or coffee, or even if it’s just a snack someone picked up for you on the way from the grocery store.
Gag gifts - things that are not particularly gifting material, but they are some running inside joke between two or more people. They’re usually inexpensive, and the only aim is to have a good laugh. Some gag gifts I’ve received - nasal spray, a book called “World’s Best Party Games” (published in 1987), One Direction posters, an empty packet which said “This was a cinnamon bun. We saved you from it!”, among others.
Tradition gifts. A friend once ordered a drum kit for her husband’s birthday, but it didn’t arrive on time. So she took a print out of the intended gift on an A4 sheet and gave that to him instead. The elusive drum kit never showed up, and for every birthdays after that they gave each other print outs of gifts they were going to buy each other.
There are unremarkable/routine gifts, like dry fruits, which come in abundance during this time of the year. Actually, as I get older, I’ve begun to appreciate those dry fruits more. When did I become this person?!
Time, time, time; ever the obsession. I looked out at the road and suddenly thought - when did they stop making cars with antennas? A friend recently showed me Tim Urban’s calendar of a life charted out in weeks, looking at which put me in a strange panic. The potential love interest of a close friend said that he would only be ready for something romantic the following month because the number of months you dated someone is the number of weeks you need to get over them. She deleted his number and didn’t meet him again. The bones in our body regenerate every ten years, apparently. I love this life stats generator by Neal Aggarwal.
Our lives are all we know and have, but we’re just blips in the larger scheme of things. Nothing puts things in perspective like comparing the size of an astronaut to the size of the sun, which you can do in this interactive visualisation called The Size of Space - also by Aggarwal (his website is so much fun!). Honestly, anything related to outer space usually makes me weepy, and I choked up watching this short animated film about a glove which slipped from the hand of an astronaut and is now floating in space.
NASA sent a spacecraft to see if it would derail an astroid, and we live in a time when we have telescopes powerful enough to captured what it left behind, which is this.
“Everything we see in our lives is just the tip of the iceberg, visually… so I had this moment where I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder what a tear looks like up close?’”
Rose-Lynn Fisher studied the chemical make up of dried tears under microscope. She found that a tear of laughter looks very different from an onion tear in close-up. She says, “Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage… It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience”
While asteroid devastation and tears, being physical, are something we can see and examine, how do we measure that which we cannot see… like emotions? Photographer Roselena Ramistella’s attempts to answer this through her photo series “The Warmth”. She documented, on a thermal imaging camera, the bodily response of refugees in Sicily as they answered questions she asked them. What I find interesting is that although you don’t get a picture of the subjects through their facial features, you can see their deep emotions as they play out in different colours. It’s so private, and yet so anonymous.
“… accessing and showing something that is unreachable through language. An attempt to photograph the unphotographable; to capture and visually articulate emotional transformations in a person’s body. To Roselena, documenting people in this way serves to “enhance their individuality” and shows “how the root of emotions is the same for every human being.”
Do couples start looking alike as they spend more time with each other? Allow me to sidetrack from the heaviness of outer space and the collective human experience with this fun Instagram account called Siblings Or Dating? Each post is a picture of a couple and the game is that (as you may have guessed from the name) you have to guess if they are siblings or dating. Weirdly fascinating.
It’s a great way to kill some time, and I really recommend it as an ice breaker.
So… why do I write this newsletter? I suppose it’s a reminder to myself to “be in love with life” - to see something strange or funny or wonderful and feel, if even for a second while scrolling, that click of recognition.
Yes, we are blips, little specks of dust, yet we strive to make meaning of our lives. We go on and do things to feel happy and worried and excited and regretful and entertained, to constantly feel connected. This newsletter is my attempt to find those things seemingly small and silly, and pick them up for a second, examine them, and look at them with wonder like Rose-Lynn Fisher saw tears as “aerial views of emotion terrain” under the microscope.
I love this clip of Joaquin Phoenix’s character reading from the book Star Child in the film C’mon C’mon (2021).
“You will be plunged into earth’s river of time… there will be so much for you to learn and so much for you to feel… pleasure and fear, joy and disappointment, sadness and wonder…You will grow up, travel, and work… Over the years, you will try to make sense of that happy, sad, full, empty always-shifting life you’re in. And when the time comes to return to your star, it may be hard to say goodbye to that strangely beautiful world."
It’s been nice to hear back from you over the editions, to have you connecting with the things that I’m connecting with, and to feel the warmth of response to this little newsletter which gives me much joy to write!
With much love,
Nitya