Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding … It’s the bitter potion through which the physician inside you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.
- Kahlil Gibran
Something I’ve come to realise more recently as I’ve tried to pen this down is it’s perhaps a bit inopportune and foolish to call any year scary and transformative: they all are, one way or the other. For me, a good year now is a good balance, an inspiring contrast, an indelible imprint free from any qualifying adjectives. I no longer hope or want an “easy” year; when I reflect back on 2023, all I see is a sine wave: some of it of my own design and conscious architecture, and some of it informed by events about as random as randomness gets. Therefore, I’ll refrain from calling last year transformative.
It was good, though. I learned that:
- That it’s totally fine to overpay at the last minute to attend a music festival in Mumbai’s unforgiving humidity to see that one band you’ve wanted to see ever since you first listened to them in a bedroom you’ve long since forgotten. The Strokes, good friends, and a few expired beers at a shady bar around the corner of Mahalakshmi Race Course can make a busy, sticky, and dusty Mumbai infinitely more tolerable.
- That despite my excessive argumentation with myself and my friends about consumer culture and the marketing machine and everything that’s perhaps corrosive to society, I still fucking love wrist watches.
- Maybe this extends to other objects that perfectly combine art, utility, and engineering. Hmm.
- That striving for spontaneity in your daily life is a good thing. A great thing, in fact.
- Within reason, of course.
- That Marrakesh is pretty much Old Delhi - which means it’s the same mix of charming and crass. Drinking copious and unhealthy amounts of thé à la menthe while enjoying banned literature in the evening cool of a mad desert city makes the trip itself worth it. Jemaa el-Fnaa with its various questionable smells that emanate from the million plus questionable food stalls coupled with groovy Berber polyrhythms will also leave an impression on you - at least I hope it does. Good or bad? Doesn’t matter, I think.
- That Louis Cole is fucking tight. I’m forever indebted to the coworker who introduced me to his music.
- Check out the entirety of Quality Over Opinion. Some other songs that left an impression: I’m Tight, When You’re Ugly, and I’m The President by Knower.
- That people who once got together due to a shared concern or principle or some-such years ago can still grow into incredibly different humans as they grow old, and that’s one of the more wonderful things about growing older - there’s lesser pretension. The ties that bind loosen up, or better: get reconstituted.
- That I still suck at texting. It’s 2024 now and I still suck at texting. Whoever’s reading this: call me up, or better, let me know if you’d like to see me!
- That the restoration of agency and control has been the biggest personal win in my recovery from trauma. Taking responsibility and acting out with honest intent for pretty much everything that happens in your life is a solid, solid advice that I wish I’d received when I was younger.
- That writing corny poems while taking long walks across the Hill Garden and Pergola in Hampstead Heath when the sun is out and abundant is how I get my kicks. My challenge now remains to publish the said corny little poems, which I might get to someday.
- “The art is not the art, the art is never the art: the art is what happens inside of you when you’re creating it.”
- That a job can be a lot of things, but ultimately it can just be a job. As long as it gives you enough time to improve upon yourself and fulfil your passions/purpose WHILE paying the bills rather handsomely, it’s really enough. It’s more than what most people will ever have, which drives home the point about gratitude and all that.
- Maybe the romantic fascination of leaving everything to pursue your dreams is ultimately the better thing to do, but it’s not a luxury I’m allowed yet. I had to realise that the starving artist lifestyle simply isn’t for me, for now: someone who likes experimenting with fashion, art, technology, engineering, books, and various other paraphernalia would be really, really unhappy for a long time while waiting for a future that might not even arrive. Present’s pretty fucking cool, even though well-intentioned technologists are pretty much hellbent on killing all that’s good about humanity to serve more ads.1
- That a trip to Peak District affirmed what a trip to Lake District already taught me last year: The UK is fucking beautiful. Walking underneath a starry sky breathing fresh air and traversing inclines with a friend while discussing pointless questions about life and death and everything in between sometimes makes me want to stay here forever.
- The food’s really not that bad; meme culture thrives upon exaggeration. Keep an open mind!
- That I’m really not fucking sure anymore if I’m an introvert or an extrovert. Extroverts call me introverted, and introverts call me extroverted. The label “ambivert” makes me puke in my mouth. I think the best way forward is to not give a fuck and let people decide for themselves. There, one stressor removed.
- On above, I think it’s wiser to use as little labels as possible to define your identity. Your name’s sufficient, most of the times. People get to, and should, decide the rest. It’s their prerogative.
- That I need to find more places like The Prince Charles Cinema2.
- That I totally forgot that programming is also a creative exercise. While writing a big project from scratch sometime last year I rediscovered why I fell in love with computers in the first place - that they are, underneath all the bells and whistles and curved displays that no one asked for, elegant machines that have potential for near infinite creativity.
- That Steam Deck’s pretty fucking cool. One of the few purchases I’ve made over the years that I don’t completely regret. I’m yet to mod mine and run some emulators, but I’m all for open handhelds, and I’m definitely here for a Proton future.
- That verification ≠ validation. Some of my work got shortlisted at The London Library’s Emerging Writer’s scholarship last year. I didn’t ultimately get a place in the programme, but just the verification of the fact that writing is a worthwhile pursuit I can spend my entire life doing has brought some peace and contentment to my otherwise fluttering and frenzied heart.
- Thanks to Mrs. Jaya Kasan, for being incredibly kind to my problematic and petulant 15 year old self, and for suggesting that I should try my hand at writing someday. I hope you’re resting in peace. :’)
- Thanks also to Prof. Raj Ayyar, for mentoring me in critical thinking and philosophy, and encouraging my sulky and moody 20 year old self to write more. I hope you’re resting in peace, too! :)
- That the decision to remove some of the power from the modern smartphone and move it to purpose built consumer electronics has turned out… okay. I can’t in all honesty vouch for it. I realised it was a stupid pursuit from the get go. But getting a separate camera with a bunch of second hand lenses and walking around in London shooting photos of unsuspecting people and animals and objects in precarious situations has been extremely fun.
- A purpose built device feels so damn good to use, though.
- That I have a romantic fascination with Indian coastal cities, and riding a two wheeler across their long serpentine stretches is more joyful for me than speeding on wide open roads.
- Not good for my back though. Should’ve rented a nice motorcycle.
- That financially healthy ≠ financially responsible. I may be former for now, but in 2024 I shall aim to be the latter.
- That being a good friend to yourself will inevitably teach you how to be a good friend to everyone else that you value. Sounds fairly obvious and somewhat clichéd, but it’s staggering to see how far you can go by performing simple acts of acceptance coupled with the right amounts of self care.
- That in terms of being appreciated by my friends and family, a YouTube bass cover of some technically challenging song that I practiced a million times over will always lose to a simple pop music cover. Another seemingly banal yet important realisation emerges: there’s art for artists, and there’s art for everyone else.
- Creating the latter is perhaps more challenging, or so I feel.
- That analog note taking can only go so far. I picked up Obsidian over a friend’s recommendation last year, and it’s since turned into an indispensable tool for self organisation. I still heavily rely on pen and paper, but I no longer think any particular method is “superior” to another. You get to decide what works by first understanding how messy (or not) your own brain is.
- That smarts will only take you so far, but hard work can get you further.
- That it’s fine to try things every now and then that challenge your identity, preferences, convictions, and beliefs. Apply this to food, people, experiences, ideologies, theologies, etc.
- That that conversation that I thought meant something probably didn’t mean anything, or at least didn’t mean what I wanted it to mean. It’s hard to fight your own projections sometimes, but truth, among all the things it’s made out to be is also: humbling.
- That if being harsh on yourself worked out, it would have worked out by now.
- That you are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
- Ultimately, most of my 2023 was informed by taking action upon everything I felt like I should be taking action on. And even though there’s a lot more left, and a ton of commitments I haven’t delivered on, whatever I did manage to see through has, for the lack of a better adjective, made me more faithful.
- That quality only hurts once. Getting well made clothing and accessories is ultimately worth the tears you’ll cry when you’re paying for them3.
- That I was so incredibly dumb for blindly believing some idiot a few years ago who casually told me that Go is just an evolution of Java. I never bothered with it thereafter, and actively avoided any discourse about it. I discovered last year that it’s intended to be an evolution of C (although of course Rust is the one true saviour in that regard). I felt like shooting myself in the head point blank with a military grade sniper rifle afterwards.
- That when the waves are calmer and the tide’s quiet and the sun is forgiving, you can actually catch a restful little nap floating on the ocean’s surface around a beach front.
- That I’m not religious, but I do believe - which makes me agnostic, I think? As humans we get to manufacture our own relationship with God (or not), based on synchronicities we feel in our daily lives, and the ideas that inform our day to day existence. I now have good reasons to believe that whatever I believe in - some days myself, some days something in the aether4 - is okay with our relationship for now.
- On relationships: the thick smog and social unrest has definitely affected my love affair with Delhi, possibly for the worse. At this point, it’s mostly the ties that bind - old memories and family and loved ones. I feel spiritually stateless these days, and I’ve stopped asking myself questions around my eventual resting place.
- Wherever I do end up, I hope I’m in good company, if nothing else.
- That perfect is in fact the enemy of good. All that time spent getting that one note to ring out correctly while recording bass covers is ultimately not worth it5. Sometimes good is good enough and perfection can be honed in the after hours (when no one’s watching).
- That self absorption really is one of the most powerful bosses of all the final bosses when it comes to trauma triggers and mental health concerns. Hopefully I can fight it better this year.
- That Jazz basses are also fucking cool, and are even more versatile.
- That I should probably travel more, and take more breaks.
- That sometimes the best expression of love is also drawing your boundaries, by first developing the courage to draw those boundaries.
- I’ve chosen to both love myself and my family & friends equally, so walking this line between western individualism and eastern collectivism might prove to be a challenge.
- That some pop culture OCDs are not even OCDs: when did we reach a point in our collective humanity where doing some basic self organisational work started counting as a compulsive fixation? Standards?
- That ChatGPT and all these spawn-of-satan LLM tools can be incredibly fucking helpful. I’ve been able to successfully apply them for music, writing, and engineering. Shit, it’s even helped me discover a niche book that I couldn’t remember the title of and only knew by the colour of its cover and a vague idea of its themes6.
- That I tend to be judgmental during periods of self loathing, or when my own life’s down in the dumps. Knowing this has helped me fix things that needed fixing and only judge people that pretty much ask for it.
- That spending some time fleshing out your relationship with your siblings is ultimately worthwhile. Constants in a sea of variables, all that.
And so I’m rounding up my 20s. I’m 29 now. I had imagined that it would be alarming to creep up to the milestone of 30 - that it would cause me immense despair coupled with an immense longing for something without even knowing what that something is. Yet as time passes, on the whole, I feel less gloomy and more… whole? I am getting older, but the truth is that I had felt far more older, far more gloomy, more haunted by the idea of death in everything during most of my 20s.
My back does hurt more often now, though.