Manasi, Adi and I always spoke about wanting to live in a commune, not more than few minutes away from each other and being able see each other every day. This way, we’d be able to spend a lot of time together, nurturing and deepening our friendship.

While not in its ideal form, I did get to actualize some of our thought experiments when Kunal decided to move to Berlin some three years ago. It meant that I’ll have someone living within 30 mins distance who I’ve known for more than a decade.

Over the next two years that he lived in Berlin, I learned a lot about local friendships. Some I anticipated, and others were totally new learnings. Kunal left Berlin for India last year. Last week, I was wondering what changed since he left, and what can I do differently about my friendships to make them feel more like our school friendships.

This article is a reflection of some of those thoughts.

Why I think friends from our school friendships hit different

Whenever I meet someone who I studied with in school or university, we immediately hit off. It somehow seems to matter a lot less that we’ve not been in touch or haven’t spoken in years. Time has flown, lives changed, many important life milestones passed without having the other person involved, but all of that somehow doesn’t seem to matter much. We still meet, laugh, make fun of each other and hang out like there was never a break in the relationship. Why?

Here’s my take:

First, school and university times are tough. Long commutes, lack of ample cash in pocket, academics, coming of age woes, family drama, insecurities etc meant we suffered through a lot of crap together. At the same time, we also had some wonderful times. We got to experience secure friendships, love and moments of intense joys. Going through diverse, emotionally high times together teaches us a lot about people that a well planned brunch at an uptown restaurant where everyone is talking about safe topics with filters doesn’t get you.

Secondly, being in the same room for a large part of the day everyday for years helps too. I don’t find it coincidental that my best friends from school and university life aren’t people I filtered through consciously like we do on the meetup and dating apps, but just folks who were in the same classroom as me, had the same schedules or lived close by. In other words, I just had a regular exposure to these people with mix of me liking to spend time with them, it being easy to find time to spend with them and then sometimes just not having the option to not spent time with them.

We were just forced to be kind to each other, take care of each other and help each other. Well, we weren’t, but we’d still have to see each other the next day, so we might as well. We formed our little communes slowly, and then we stuck with it.

Having a local friend

Having a local friend from school meant that I could reach out to him in the evening and ask if he wants to get dinner. It meant that I could rely on him to be there for all house parties and even help clean up when the guests have left, casual ranting session or just a evening to chill together.

Having a local friend also means there’s someone who’s aware of the ins and outs of your current life and can give you critical feedback on things and ask the tough questions. Away from home and parents, it is good to have a person to rely on for pointing out when you’re being stupid.

Having a friend who I can meet multiple times a week also changed how I perceived the city and passage of time. It establishes a nice social routine and de-stress, have a nice dinner and talk about the week.

How can we “fix” adult friendships?

Of course, local friendships are a privilege. In bigger cities, it can be challenging to build longer term friendships due to a multitude of reasons. Some of these reasons are extrinsic, and there’s not much that we can do about them. But there are steps that can be taken on an individual level to foster secure local friendships that feel like a commune, improve our mental well being and make us feel home.

1. Being spontaneous – I’ve found that being able to see a friend at a short notice is often a very positive signal of how fast the friendship will grow. Building a deep friendship often requires hours and hours of context sharing and supporting one another through thick and thin, and being able to do it more often is always going to help, especially in the busy adult life.
2. Being well adjusted – As we grow older, we build higher and thicker walls around us. Some of these walls are non-negotiable, but others are just preferences in things or our tastes. Our preferences and tastes can subconsciously exclude people and make them feel distant. Being well adjusted to me means to have a personality that’s compatible with different kinds of people and situations.
3. Showing vulnerability – As a 30ish year old figuring things out, I think it helps to open up about what we’re not good at, struggling with, insecure about rather than sticking to safe topics all the time. As a bonus, the early one does that, the sooner they get rid of people who might find something non-negotiable, thus freeing up more time for the people who stick around.
4. Speaking your mind, losing the filter – With the best intentions, we often hide our thoughts and feelings. This often leads to boring and dull conversations that don’t have any emotions in them, like a corporate presentation. If you’ve ever come out of a chat not remembering a single thing that was talked about, this is why. Everyone was so busy not saying anything potentially offensive, share anything personal or expose any weakness that nothing got said at all.
5. Respecting invitations – Simple one: If you’re accepting an invitation, try to actually make it. If you’re going to be late, let them know. If you can’t make it, say you’re sorry and plan the next one yourself.
6. Committing to people – Large cities like Berlin make it very easy to have a busy social life without any real need to connect deeply or invest in anyone in particular. But making local friends that I can see every week requires really committing to people. It means prioritizing meeting them, reaching out proactively and spending quality time with them. It also means finding joy in meeting the same set of people that you already think you know most things about, instead of constantly seeking to meet exciting new people.
7. Mixing friends – Mixing friends from different walks of your life is often nerve wrecking, and understandably, many adults avoid it. I’ve found that the people who introduced me to their friends sooner stayed my friends for longer. Perhaps that level of security with your existing friendships makes those people great friends in general. Or perhaps because we got along so well from the start that we were destined to stay good friends anyway? I’m not sure if that’s a causation, or just a correlation, but I often try to involve new friends with my existing set of friends for this reason.

Of course, that’s all how I think, and how I’ve come to think after my few years here in Berlin. I stick by these principles and do my part in making building a little commune in the foreign city I’ve found myself in, building on top of the lessons I’ve learned after having Kunal live in Berlin for a couple of years.

In closing

Maybe someday, all of my friends do move to a little town where we all live together, see each other for coffee everyday and support each other in all walks of life. But until then, I’ll try to keep improving my friendship skills. I’ll turn 30 this year, and I think this skill is going to be one of the more important ones going forward.

Thank you for reading.

Happy new year!

Time flies. It feels like just a few weeks ago that I arrived in a cold grey Berlin for the first time, having lost a suitcase. But it was 2,192 days ago.

The day I arrived here wasn’t my best, and the next few weren’t much better either. But eventually, things worked out and the city really grew on me. Let me rephrase. Cities don’t grow on people. It is the people, the experiences and the sense of belonging that makes us feel home.

A year before I moved to Berlin, I was living in Nahur, Mumbai trying to make sense of why one set of walls feel like home while the other just a place to sleep. What makes a home, home? Fortunately for me, the important lessons learned then were used time and again whenever I wanted to feel homely in this foreign city, in a foreign country.

This week I’m crowd sourcing some new year resolutions from my close friends inspired by Moxie, and trying to shape the year forward to the best of my abilities. It has been a busy week at work, since everyone is back from vacations. That, and catching up with people that I hadn’t see in sometime means I’m having a packed week.

But I still wanted to find some time to write this article. It is a way of snapshotting this moment in time. Lots of positive changes over the last couple of weeks including a visit to CCC Congress, Freiburg, reading books like Tuedays with Morrie and The Last Lecture and a lot of introspection.

The books and the introspection gave me a profound realization that the passage of time doesn’t stop, and it passes fast if we don’t keep moving, keep growing in life. Not only am I getting older, but so are the people around me. If there’s something I really want to do, now is a good time. I knew this, of course. I just had forgotten it lately.

Thank you for reading!

I spoke about my adventures in Uzbekistan briefly in my previous blog post. Apologies if you couldn’t read it because it was in German. I spent nearly two weeks with a German group and a German tour guide and couldn’t not use the opportunity to write my very first blog post in a language that I’ve spend countless hours learning.

Something that I didn’t mention in that blog post, mostly as I was trying to keep it brief due to the language, was an interesting encounter that I had in Samarkand towards the beginning of our journey.

In Samarkand, Uzbekistan, as we were heading out of a Quran School, I saw another south asian person walking in the opposite direction. Now, since I had landed in Uzbekistan, I had not seen many south asians despite reading that there are many Indians who go to Tashkent to study medicine. So seeing this guy made me instinctively wave at him and ask if he was a “Desi”.

He said yes, he was from India, from Karnataka. Super! I thought. He told me that he’s on a road trip from Bengaluru in the south of India all the way to London, traveling some 25,000kms and visiting 40 countries along the way. I found it extremely fascinating.

We chatted for another minute or two and exchanged phone numbers. He was supposed to pass through Berlin so I invited him to reach out whenever he passes by so that we could meet. In all honesty, I didn’t expect him to do so, or for it to work out.

But couple of weeks ago, he reached out saying he’ll be passing through Berlin and would like to meet up for dinner. After some back and forth, he and his daughter finally made it to Berlin on a fine Saturday evening. I took them to Sarvana Bhavan and we had good south Indian dinner.

After that, we walked all the way to Alexanderplatz, and then headed to Warschauerstr, and then walking back to Ostbahnhof after seeing the East Side Gallery. In the end, we were out there walking until late in the night. In spite of me meeting these people for the first time, we connected very well and had a great time.

The next day, we met again for dinner at the very same restaurant. I told them that I was already feeling a bit sad that they were scheduled to leave the next morning, onward in their journey. I was genuinely sad after having felt a bit invested in their journeys for the past couple of weeks concluding with that dinner at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

They’re still in touch, and I’ll probably see them again someday in India. I think the whole story was quite fascinating for me. A random wave at a stranger and that led to a meetup in Berlin and perhaps new friends in India. Life is chaotic and random. But sometimes, beautiful patterns come out of the chaos. The trip to Uzbekistan itself was pretty random, and then this extra layer of chance bringing few folks together was just cherry on top. A story that I’d keep telling people!

Thank you for reading.

I came across the idea of slow living and slow things in life through some videos, and wanted to document some of my own after-thoughts on the matter for future reference.

Here’s a synopsis of the original idea: With technology, a lot of things are sped up. Communicating with a friend or family is an instantaneous act. Airplane travel have made traveling anywhere around the world an at most two day endeavor. Access to most of human knowledge is usually a click or two away. Generating a plausible-sounding article draft on a topic takes a minute (caution: ‘plausible-sounding’ is lifting a lot of weight there).

But should the end goal be to speed up everything in life? Intuitively, we’d all say no. But then, how do we know when we’re doing something that should be optimized versus something that we’d always like to do slowly, without the need to speed up or optimize? I suppose one way is to define some of the slow things in life, and be mindful of them.

This article is my attempt at bringing conscious thought to these activities and have a reference to look back to later. In the process, I hope you get some ideas too!

Reading a book

There was a time when I read regularly. It has since then turned into very occasional bursts of motivation when I try to read a book as much as possible, ideally to the end, in one sitting as I know I might not get back to it soon again. There’s always something else I should be doing rather than taking some time to read a good book. Perhaps I should try blinkist.

Not only is relying on bursts of motivation significantly more inefficient than just small but consistent steps towards a goal, it is also not very fun. Trying to read fast and get to the end of books has made me not want to read all. It sucked the joy out of immersing myself into a book and swimming in the sea of thoughts created by the author. The same is true of book summarizing services.

I don’t want to rush through a book, reach the end only to have not understood anything and lost any motivation to re-read it properly again. Worse, I don’t want to read/listen to a summary of a book, feel like I’ve gotten everything out of it having missed most of it. Then why ruin the fun by speed-running through the book barely letting anything stick on the wall of my mind.

I feel like this is a big miss, and I should see to it that I don’t ruin reading completely for the sake of reading faster.

Hanging out with a friend

I live in Berlin. One of the nice things about this city is that I’m surrounded by very friendly people who I love seeing often. Growing older, I’ve often found myself scheduling hangouts with friends that feel inadequate or too organized.

I don’t want to see a friend for an hour after which I have the next appointment scheduled. The hangout feels shallow, and like a task when it is scheduled so tight in terms of time or agenda. I know that my favorite hangouts are hangouts without a strict agenda that just flowed into its own unique shape.

I’ve also realized that most of the deeper conversations I’ve had with my friends were in private setting with no time bounds. It takes time for conversations to naturally flow into a deeper state, where people think before responding and have time to express complex feelings and emotions. I really value these conversations as they’ve done a good deal to shape my thoughts, and for that reason, I’d like to always find adequate time for my friends.

Time for myself

I often pack my schedule to the point where I’m constantly chasing behind the next task on my list, the next person I have committed to meeting or getting on a call with, and so on. Some weeks I hardly have a single evening to myself where it is just me, my home and nothing else.

I’ve found that empty evenings with no plans are a nice way to recharge, think, play guitar, paint or do anything unplanned. They’re meditative, and help zoom out and refocus. This time must not be rushed, or spent in worry. This leisure shouldn’t make me feel guilty. This downtime is important, just as sleep is.

Cooking and eating a good meal

With home office and heavy workload, sometimes I cut corners on my meal quality. I grab a quick snack in the afternoon or just eat something that barely qualifies as food, much less dinner, in the evening.

I’ve also noticed how much joy it brings me to take time to cook something nice for myself. I’m an okay cook, and given an hour of time, I can cook a good meal that I’m extremely satisfied eating. Whenever I skip on this and order something from outside, I am always reminded of how little time that saved and how significantly less satisfying it felt.

That’s why I try to take my time to cook. Even if it eats into my other task time, it is worth it. It must not be rushed, and it isn’t something worth cutting corners in.

Vacation time

I get a limited number of days off per year. This creates a compulsion to always have a lot of plans crammed into vacation time. If I take a day off, and I don’t completely jam pack it with todos, I feel guilty that I didn’t use my day off well.

It doesn’t have to feel this way. A day off is a day off, whether it is spent doing some adventures or just relaxed with a nice cup of masala tea and some snacks watching an anime. Sometimes it is okay to go to a new city, visit museums, walk around all day until the legs hurt. Other times, just staying home is golden! Perhaps an off day while in a new city doing nothing but eating and sleeping isn’t a bad idea either.

I am particularly bad at this, but I’ll try to remind myself that if I always try to follow a template during my off days as I do during my working days, it kinda defeats the point of the off day.

In conclusion

Working in tech, and trying to optimize everything we work on, sometimes we can go a bit too much in the other direction with things that should be left untouched. Capitalism hasn’t help this case either, having convinced us to keep automating and abstracting our life and moving to the next levels and creating more value (whatever that means) as fast as possible.

But some things, especially ones that really matter, shouldn’t be cursed with the infinite growth and optimization virus of tech world. They are better done slowly.

Thank you for reading!

I can hardly believe it, but 6th June 2024 marked 10 years since I originally purchased nagekar.com, my beloved blog’s address. In terms of longevity, this is the longest running project of mine, and outside of a few friendships and family, it even predates most of the people I have in my life today. How interesting!

As I spoke about in my 5th Anniversary blog post, it felt very pretentious to get a domain with my name in it, only so that I can show off my [email protected] email address to plebs friends who were using gmail and yahoo mail.

The website itself was never very popular. Partly because of the inconsistency in terms of the topics I wrote about, the quality of my writing or the efforts (or lack thereof) I put into promoting any of my pieces. The SEO game is also lacking hugely, although I refuse to participate in bot pleasing.

But that is also what is liberating about this website. I’m literally writing this line as I’m waiting for RE8 local train on Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten train station. The activation energy to starting writing about a topic is minimal, around the same as writing a whatsapp message to a friend you’ve not spoken with in a couple of months. Perhaps lower than that, now that I think about it.

10 years ago, it would’ve been inconceivable that I might not even be in India when I’d be writing the 10th anniversary post. Or that there would be one for that matter. Or that I’d be working with my dream company. Conceivability, perhaps, is just a product of the size of your dreams and desires. More importantly, it is perhaps the size of what one considers is possible and feasible.

I was recently watching a video of Rahul Gandhi where he talks about this very thing; about how what one dreams about and thinks is possible depends on the environment they grow up in. Think about all the human potential that’s underutilized due to lack of being able to see a bird’s eye view of the world; to understand all the possibilities, whether it is through traveling, reading, or consuming diverse media from different parts of the world.

Anyway, I digress. This time, I want to dream big. I want to dream big enough that the dream scares me away; that I myself laugh at the impracticality and infeasibility of it all. And then still attempt to do it. As Rutger Bregman wrote in Utopia for Realists

One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them

What will June 2034 look like? I don’t know. That’s slightly discomforting. But then, no one does. There are innumerable possibilities for how things might turn out in June 2034, but I could also say that about tomorrow. And yet, we don’t stop trying. I hope to be a kind person tomorrow, and also 10 years later. I hope my blog stays, along with the thing we refer to as the Web, and everything we love about it.

Thank you for reading!

I’m playing a game of chess while listening to a remix album of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I finished work for the day, went to buy seeds to plant coriander and mint plants in my balcony, ate warm food and an Alphonso mango. In short, life is good.

This playlist always reminds me of the first half of 2020. Hearing about this new disease for the first time in the media and really not caring about it. Then all of a sudden, Berlin case #1 turns out to be a second degree contact.

It was a scary day. I remember fearing fear to the level that I had not experienced before. It was fair, to be honest. No one seemed to know what was happening, and all I was seeing was growing numbers on worldmeters.info‘s coronavirus stats.

Going through my Google Maps timeline shows an interesting stoppage in going to office or getting food outside in the middle of March, which was when I believe it hit us in Berlin, Germany. Within a week or two, most of the city went offline, so to speak.

Seeing the people we always met and hung out with on Google Meet calls was weird at first, and we wondered if things would ever change. It felt persistent and tiring. It felt like things would stay this way forever. It was overwhelming and I’d closely monitor any symptom I was showing and then trying to over fit it to Covid19 (with so many first hand experiences on the internet, almost any general sickness symptom could’ve been attributed to Covid19).

I still remember closing looking at the stats for age vs fatality graphs and convincing myself and my family that it isn’t that bad, although I didn’t believe it fully myself then either.

Masks were the norm. Shops had a N-people-only-inside ordinance, and sanitizing supermarket groceries was common. Entire days were spent just thinking about how life felt like before this new norm, and that was mixed with news of people dying, strangers and familiar names alike.

What a weird time. And I was one of the privileged ones who didn’t actually get affected nearly as much. A work from home job, residence in a country with state healthcare, parents who could afford staying indoors etc. I cannot imagine what it must’ve been for those who weren’t as privileged.

I regret not documenting more of my thoughts from that time. I tried to suppress it, trying to convince myself this is kinda normal. It has been more than four years since those scary first two weeks of lockdown. “Lockdown” feels like a strange word to type, but it had become such an integral part of our vocabularies back then.

It was a troubling time, and we’ve just come out of it, albeit not everyone and not completely. I feel grateful for being able to do the things that we couldn’t do during the covid19 time, things like hugging, eating out and traveling freely. Things that I took for granted before 2020. That year will serve as a good reminder of how quickly life can change, the fragility of it all and the importance to make the most of our now.

Thank you for reading!