[Read today] Approaches to writing two-sentence journal entries

in

I'm a technical writer by day (a great career path if you want to pursue it), which means that work days are often spent tethered to my desk while I scrutinize documents on a computer monitor. When my eyes need a break from the screen – or my brain needs a respite from whatever task I'm completing – I spend a minute or two on my journal.

Weekly Notes: 3/52

in

Happy to report that apart from a slight knee pain flare up this week, this week continued its streak of being a quiet productive week for me. Work at the studio, art, incorporating some decent sized walks and a lot of meeting with friends. By this Sunday, I was quite sapped and spent many many hours just in bed.

  1. Last week, I made a Replit app to visualise the movement of dancers in space. I wanted to see how it would look on a dancer performing Aigiri Nandini and spent some time tweaking the settings to visualise this.

2. On Tuesday, it was Lohri a midwinter folk and harvest festival that marks the passing of the winter solstice and the end of winter. It is a traditional welcome of longer days and the sun's journey to the Northern Hemisphere. Avinash, Varsha, Gouri, Rasagy, Garima and Kenneth came over and there was much dancing around the bonfire on the terrace. Much of the dancing was quite funny and I relegated to my bed at sharp ten completely spent.

3. On Wednesday, we also had Noopur’s birthday dinner at Matsuri - the Japanese restaurant attached with the Chancery Pavillion. She is a big Japanophile and so it was a no brainer for her birthday celebration at a Japanese place. I wasn’t too happy with the vegetarian dishes but the shared laughter made up for any blandness in the food.

4. On Thursday, it was Pongal - a multi-day Hindu harvest festival celebrated by Tamils. The festival is celebrated over three or four consecutive days, which are named Bhogi, Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal and Kaanum Pongal, beginning on the last day of the Tamil calendar month of Margazhi. Thai Pongal is observed on the first day of the Tamil calendar month of Thai and usually falls on 14 or 15 January in the Gregorian calendar.

According to tradition, the festival marks the end of winter solstice, and the start of the Sun's six-month-long journey northwards called Uttarayana when the Sun enters Capricorn. It is dedicated to the solar deity Surya and corresponds to Makar Sankranti, the Hindu observance celebrated under various regional names across the Indian subcontinent.

At the studio and at home, it was a holiday and I went to eat some butter idli at Rameshwaram in the morning after my walk.

It was also Avinash’s last day at his current workplace and we went for dinner and beer at Toit. I have seen his journey for over a decade now and his work ethic is always a source of deep inspiration for me. I wore a cute pinafore that Noopur had gifted me that felt really cute :)

5. On Saturday, Pooja released her book on Indian Street Lettering at the Champaca and after a full day of painting tiles at the studio and chatting with Rashmi and Gouri, I made it to the bookshop to hear her conversation on how she put together the book, her snippets of conversation with street letterers were enchanting and honestly having seen her entire journey of documentation for years now, I came back quite inspired as well.

6. Spent Sunday grabbing some real good coffee from Still and dipping into the book I am reading this week.

That’s it from my week!

Weekly Notes: 2/52

in

This week was a quiet productive week for me and this is how I’d like my days and weeks to go. Doing leaps at work, having the mental energy to create personal work and then to have a great book hold my hand is the very definition of paradise for me.

  1. I was able to do four inversions in my yoga class this week. Handstand, head stand, shoulder stand and a variation of the scorpion pose. All of this is heavily assisted by my yoga teacher but after four months, I am finding it freeing to just hang upside down. I need to work constantly on the weight distribution but the I love the tiny improvements.

  2. During this week, I was able to use some spare time to work on a 3D visualisation app on Replit where I drew trail lines on Indian dancer movements. I found that once you start using a vibe coding tool like Replit, the quick visual output becomes addictive and the pace of experiments keep increasing and so I also spent 2-3 days tweaking the output.

  3. This entire week, a small group of college friends shared their outfits of the day and this gave me a cute reason to dress up a little everyday.

  4. Continuing my crafting streak this week, I was also able to spend half a day painting tiles for a very special project. I am getting a lot of help from Rajvi and she is guiding me on colours, helping with glazes and will be undertaking the final step of glazing and firing them.

  5. This week, I was able to make two narrative illustrations and I felt like I was able to communicate the essence of what I was trying to say in a very minimalistic and analogous style. I feel I want to continue this series in a lot of other mediums as well.

6. On Saturday, my cousin-grandmom and aunt came for lunch and I was able to hear them talk about my grandfather who passed away when I was quite little. Hearing about how kind and gentle soul he was made me think of him and we spent an afternoon reminiscing about my grandparents. That evening, I went to watch Dhurandhar with Aditya and Pallavee and found the movie engrossing enough that I didn’t feel four hours of screen time as much as I was fearing.

7. I also started work on Escape Velocity Grants and would write more about it in the next issue.

All things considered, a gentle yet consistent week of work!

Weekly Notes: Week 1/52

First week of the new year and I am not making too many new resolutions this year. Whatever habits I started accruing the last year would compound better if I am able to stick with them this year.

This week leading up to today was surrounded by friends and family and therefore, they are going to feature in this set of weekly notes for me.

  1. I was in Hanoi leading up to the last days of the year and for most part of the trip, I was down with fever and a bad throat rash. My cold turned me towards soups and teas and I couldn’t have even a single glass of Vietnamese cold coffee. However, the old quarter of Hanoi was so full of colour and picturesque that I picked my phone camera and engaged in some very intentional photography.

  2. On the flight back, I watched Audrey’s Children, a beautiful biopic on the pediatric oncologist, Dr. Audrey Evans who brought the survival rates of children suffering from neuroblastoma from 20% to 85% with her work.

  3. With Shobhit and Nishita around, the last days of the year went by in a warm embrace of easy smiles and chatter. A lot of coffees were had and on 31st night, I wore my best pajama set and gave in to the din that was our living room.

  4. Between 30th and 31st December, was able to take a couple of hours to sit by myself and write my yearly reflection and also plan the year ahead since that was quite important to do and I am really happy I got to do that. I am realising that a solid block of three hours is all I need to return to myself either by drawing or writing or thinking and I am really hoping that I don’t lose this thread this year.

  5. Nishita runs a podcast and a consulting co. for creative businesses and we recorded a short episode on my experience of building Anomalie Tattoo Co. It was fun to record a podcast in pajamas (I think pajamas are an emergent theme for me this year)

  6. I was also very happy to have finally met Gunjan - my school friend who I know since pre-kindergarten. She is an extremely inspiring artist and now a restauranter and we met after two decades!

  7. Finally, I shook off my inertia and made way to meet my grandmom and cousin an hour away from where we live. Sushant is a contemporary artist and it’s always a deep pleasure to talk with him on art, galleries, making a living as an artist in a completely unpretentious breath.

A bubble's shadow

in

When I asked ChatGPT for proverbs by different cultures on bubbles as a metaphor, I got a list of top ten. I am listing a few down below:

  1. “Human life is a dream, and glory is like a bubble’s shadow.” (Chinese)

  2. “A bubble’s dream.” (Japanese)

  3. “The world is like a bubble.” (Persian)

  4. “Man is but a bubble.” (Greek philosopher, Anacharsis)

Quite evidently, across civilisations and cultures, we’ve witnessed this fragile child of soap and water and elevated it to take on the great burden of being the metaphor for life itself.

Looking back, it’s obvious that the little bubble gets this credit of being compared to a magnitude of time that is the human life. The bubble starts its life almost accidently. A thin film of soapy water stretching out helped by the dual nature of soap molecules - one end attracting itself to water and the other repelling it. Imagine the poetry!

This attraction and repulsion stabilises the film and when air is blown, it stretches itself into a sphere and a bubble is born.

One witnesses this birth in awe and wonder. The physicality of blowing air from one’s lungs, watching the soapy film gently accommodating all the blown air and stretching in all directions before changing its very dimension. As soon as our baby bubble is born, light from the universe comes to speak to it and that’s how one sees the sequence of a rainbow playing out right in front of our eyes.

In the colour progression of a bubble, this is how it goes:

  • Greenish/yellowish for a 1 micron thick film.

  • Bright blues, greens and reds swirling around in rainbow-like bands for thicknesses of ~500-700 nm.

  • Pinks, purples and deep blues with thin film of ~200-400 nm.

  • Black or transparent for extremely thin film < 50 nm.

The black (or transparent) appearance is when the film has become so thin that its unable to reflect visible light. At that moment, at very top of the bubble appears the “death spot”.

The bubble bursts shortly after.

Here is a handy diagram of the colour spectrum in a bubble’s lifetime.

The image from: https://soapbubble.fandom.com/wiki/Evaluating_Bubble_Color

In a matter of mere seconds, one witnesses the improbability of birth, the play of gorgeous light followed by its death. So fast is this cycle played out that one finds oneself in a state of emotional suspended animation because there simply hasn’t been the time to react.

Bubbles are beautiful because their ephemerality is faster than the grip of our consciousness.

Now one can simply dip the bubble ring back in soapy water and blow out more bubbles but one does grieve the passing of a beautiful, resplendent bubble a little bit, isn’t it?

This grieving took the shape of a collective sigh at the packed auditorium where Louis Pearl also known as the “Pope of Soap” was performing his sold out show “The Amazing Bubble Man” at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2025.

In a 60-minute show, Louis - now a 67 year old was blowing bubbles and he had been doing this for 30 years now. During the collective gasping and sighing of the audience (that seemed to have all of Edinburgh’s little ones in attendance), my mind found the time to shift between the bubbles and the artist.

A wikipedia entry reveals Louis turned away from pathology and medicine after viewing the cadaver of ‘philosophical entertainer’, Alan Watts. Another death reference.

It was while studying local aquatic species that entailed scuba diving, he became fascinated with the bubbles he was exhaling and began to look at them with scientific curiosity.

“In a college art class, during a mandated two-minute performance he blew into a giant bubble using an Impala horn which would serve as inspiration for his future career.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Bubble_Man

Louis Pearl stood on stage explaining the science of bubbles, Bernoulli’s principle, the life cycle of a bubble in its colour shifts, his story of how he came to be blowing bubbles for a career.

All this while, his hands were busy making huge, most beautiful bubbles I had seen in my life. He enveloped little kids with giant bubbles, made a mama bubble and blew tens of bubbles inside a make-believe bubble belly. He made a bubble caterpillar and taught the audience how to make bubbles with common items found in homes.

For those 60 minutes, the entire audience was in the palm of his hands. The gasps of seeing those huge, shiny iridescent globules of rainbow light and the signs when each of them burst was the only music in the performance.

I left the auditorium in deep awe - both at the artist and the medium. It takes a truly great artist to elongate an ephemeral bubble of a life and ascend it to heavens, doesn’t it?

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

in


Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Dan Albergotti

 
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

Weekly Notes: 26/52

Picking up from the second week as if nothing happened in between.

  1. Cousins were here and the entire Sunday was spent in saree shopping, some books and coffee at Champaca . I bought Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I can’t say I wasn’t swayed by the gorgeous cover. Followed coffee with a hearty Andhra thali at Nagarjuna which didn’t turn out to be as spicy as I was expecting.

2. Monday was quite busy with both my cousins coming over to the studio for a one-day internship post which I had to follow up with their rewards of a few games at Loco Bear. It was a day of wins for me though where I emerged victorious at bowling and shooting. Unfortunately, I cannot attribute any of my winnings to some conscious skill and would need to file it under a heavenly stroke of luck.

3. Took a flight to Mangalore with Puja who took me along to visit an orthopedic doctor for my back pains. We were joking the entire time that this is how we manage a girl’s trip in our late thirties - with trips to the orthopedic doctors. However, I got to spend two days and one night in Mangalore and fell in love with the quaint city. It was completely taken over by the lush green cover and the slightly salty and humid air of the ocean town was palpably nicer than the dry Bangalore air.

4. By saturday, I was exhausted and badly needed some centering. So I spent almost the entire day painting. Friends came over in the evening and it got late at night.

5. On Sunday, I went to shop for an upcoming trip and the flavour of the season is dark academia. It was a hunting spree for outfits and I did get a few very nice ones. I am starting to relish the prospect of putting together an outfit. There has been a long conversation with myself on the vanity and self expression of it and the shortness of life and youth has won the argument.

6. Over to the next week!

vita contemplativa

A cousin came to visit and was requesting his mom to get him an expensive watch. It was shocking to my system. The demand was outrageous to me. He was relentless in his request. My patience was giving away.

Then I told him off over dessert. “You should buy such expensive things when you start working.”

“Buy this when its own your money. Travel when you are married. Go to watch movies with your husband. Change the curtains when its your own home. Buy a better phone when you start working.”

Everything came rushing back pointing back to needle of time long forgotten - it wasn’t me admonishing him. I was parroting what I heard over and over again over years and years. Your desires are secondary to adult milestones. You haven’t earned joy yet.

It was hard to hear those words that used to pierce me through my chest being uttered to someone else through my own mouth but recognising this inheritance was important to me. Recognition of self, seeing and noticing the patterns that we perpetuate out of ignorance and laziness of thought is the absolute first step to breaking the cycle.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.

Hannah Arendt

Watch: The forgotten women of the Bauhaus

in

A riveting lecture on the forgotten women of the Bauhaus.

Among the women covered in the lecture, I was taken in by the story of Friedl Dicker. Read this passage on her on Wikipedia.

Dicker-Brandeis and her husband, Pavel Brandeis, were deported to the Terezín "model ghetto" on December 17, 1942. During her time at Terezín, she gave art lessons and lectures with art supplies she smuggled into the camp. She helped to organize secret education classes for the 600 children of Terezín. She saw drawing and art as a way for the children to understand their emotions and their environment. Dicker-Brandeis insisted that each child must sign their own name, not allowing them to become invisible or anonymous. In this, she persisted in pursuing her goal "to rouse the desire towards creative work."

In September 1944, Brandeis was transported to Auschwitz. Dicker-Brandeis volunteered for the next transport to join him. Before she was taken away, she entrusted Raja Engländerova, chief tutor of Girls' Home L 410, with two suitcases containing 4,500 drawings. Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in Birkenau on 9 October 1944. Her husband survived.

After the war, Willy Groag, director of the Girls' home L 410, brought the suitcases with children's drawings to the Jewish Community in Prague. From the nearly 660 authors of the drawings, 550 were murdered in the Holocaust. The drawings are now in the Jewish Museum in Prague's collection, with some on display in the Pinkas Synagogue.

In praise of imbalance

in

She would wake up at 4 AM before her cat got the chance to take a long stretchy yawn of the morning. Make coffee for herself and get to work. From 4-9 AM, before the world could amble out of its unmade beds and drag its feet to the toilets, she would be done with a solid 5 hours of painting.

After a break of a couple of hours where she would squeeze strength training or running (depending on the day of the week), she would be back at work - her design studio at noon and continue to work on pushing creative limits till 6.

By 8, dinner would be done and then the daily dose of friends or movies would ensue.

Everything would have space on her schedule. Healthy eating, healthy movement, boundless creativity and time for relationships.

I would want this to be a longer paragraph when maybe someone is writing about my days but sadly, I don’t have three days like this in continuation. Its going to be four decades of me living one earth and yet, why is it that I am dragging myself towards a work-life balance at which I am failing desperately?

What is this elusive bird of paradise that I am unable to catch hold of. It certainly promises the quiet beauty and surrender of self towards the clock. I get a feeling that this balance, this living by the clock would hold the capacity for ultimate freedom from the relentless badgering of fatigue of decision making. I’d be waking up on time irrespective of the season of the year, I’d be eating my protein irrespective of the mood of the day, I’d be a productive member of the society and I would save myself from my own moods and whimsies (of which are innumerable). I’d basically transform into an angel the likes of which hasn’t been seen in human history.

Unfortunately that doesn’t happen. And so it is all the more important to question this irresistible urge towards this gold standard of life everyone seems to be harping about.

Truth is, I would have been okay chasing a standard of life had it not been at odds with my reality, my lived experience. My fondest memories of life so far have been the times when I have unmoored myself and given way to experiences fully submerged. Exams for which I studied whole nights, early dawns seen through my stinging eyes while browsing the vast deserts of blogs written by friends and strangers alike. Sitting by myself reading a book with only the tik-tok of the clock as company - striking 2, then 2:30, then 3:30 am. I remember the outlier days and nights as the time in my life in which I lived the most. Sure, at the time, it was hard to comprehend the importance of those anomalous days, but looking back, every such project that has led me a little off the balance has contributed the most in my personal growth.

The question remains: how to remind myself not to let life go by balancing my days to death. Perhaps the answer lies in compressing life into small moments worth remembering

Weekly Notes: 2/52

in

This entire week went in a blur. Infact, on Wednesday/Thursday, I did catch myself confused about the status of these weekly notes because I knew a lot wouldn’t have been achieved worth writing about.

But a life was lived and it deserves a mark.

  1. On Sunday, during the time when Orbit was getting her wash done, I went to catch the exhibition of the books of Kohei Sugiura. I was utterly disappointed because nothing could be touched! Imagine hundreds of books laid out in front of you designed by one of the most prolific designers and you can’t flip a page. It was crowded but surreal because people were craning their necks to look around the books to catch a glimpse of inspiration but I could see that everyone was disappointed.
    Luckily, I was present there on Friday when the exhibit opened and was able to flip a few magazines over before taking the wrong decision to come back later for a more peaceful preview.

2. At Anomalie Tattoo Co, I’ve decided to use this year to be intentionally present at events so a couple of days were spent in talking to some upcoming events and adding our new designs to the website. Everyday, I discover atleast 2-3 new things we can be doing with Anomalie Tattoo Co and discovering about it just lifts my spirits. I think this is what happens when your soul is aligned with the work you do and I consider myself lucked out that I am getting to build this little brand.

3. Paras’s parents arrived in the middle of the week and we took them to Toast and Tonic, a place that I’ve grown to enjoy not only for their drinks but also for their food. His mom doesn’t like cocktails a lot but she thoroughly relished the Herbalist - one of their signature drinks.

4. On Friday, we left for Coorg for a two-night stay with them and I am typing this weekly note from Coorg. This entire week, I had troubled sleep paired with pains and aches sprouting from random places and somehow I have managed to catch up on my sleep. I do need to go for a full body test once I am back in Bangalore because I feel bloated and not super energetic.

5. While in Coorg, I unfolded the inner immature flower-spotter in me and whipped out my favourite app to identify flowers. Here are a few of the species I saw.

This was this week and hope that the pace picks up a little next week.

Weekly Notes: 1/52

in

The first week of the year flew by quicker than one could blink. This year, it is one of my deep wishes for myself to take focus away from the instant updates on social platforms and direct that energy into filling the pages of my blog. Just like the old days :)

I spent the last week of 2024 in Goa with friends and it seemed like a lesson in Murphy’s laws - tilting towards the bad side. Everyone got the flu and I had a panic/anxiety/heartburn because of all the lack of sleep and black coffee consumption. So I have stepped into the new year a little wiser for limiting my coffee intake specially when I am sleep deprived.

  1. I have been reading The Other Side - a documentation and revealing of artists that leaned into their spirituality to create art. I have been making meditation drawings for over five years now. Something that I started making at a low point in life and have always assumed them to be non publishable pieces. The drawings are tiny to begin with and with no text around them, hard to understand by anyone other than me. This book gives me courage to continue my practice.

2. On the 1st January, while we were taking our flight back to Bangalore with problematic throats and cold, Nishita hosted her friends at home for an art party and they played around with an Anomalie tattoo she designed. It always feels nice to see people wearing these tattoos. Watching people look at a design and feel that it is a part of their identity gives me goosebumps!

Nishita’s friends sporting the tattoo she designed. You can get the tattoo here —> https://www.anomalietattoo.com/products/brown-kudi-temporary-tattoo

3. I came home to a pending list of dispatches I had to do for our upcoming collab with the Kairo Store - a brand whose tees I have really liked and we made a cute little postcard to send along our tattoos.

4. Visited an exhibit by Prof Kohei Sugiura where almost 100 of his designed books were on display with Noopur and Rasagy. The exhibit was so full that all of us decided to revisit it to actually enjoy seeing the books properly.

Noopur, Rasagy, Kenneth and Garima came home and we chatted and ate idlis and chikkis. Noopur gifted me the cutest hand made sweater, this graphic novel and a postcard and Garima and Rasagy gave a little working camera that fits in my palm. I have been blessed with friends who take so much time and effort to think of the most beautiful gifts and I do feel I need to make a zine of all the little gifts I keep receiving.

5. Started working on a book illustration project that I need to complete by this month and when I printed the existing illustrations, I figured that the readability was an issue so I need to redo everything I’ve done so far!

6. In the evening, Niramayee came over to hand deliver my belated most thoughtful birthday gifts (which featured this graphic novel) and by that point, I was just reflecting on all the good energy of this tribe around me. There’s something about sitting with classmates that lights a warm glowy bulb inside one’s head. The laughter comes so naturally and easily :) Oh, Rashmi brought flowers to the mix!

Ending the weekly notes with these are two sunsets. One is 31 December, 2024 and the second is 4 January, 2025