Tag Archives: life

Defining slow things in life

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!

10th Anniversary Of Blog!

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!

2020 was a long time ago

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!

I’m A Five Year Old Berliner Today

Some 1,826 days ago I arrived at Berlin Tegel Airport. Missing my connecting flight, losing my luggage due to that and landing in a completely dark, freezing and rainy Berlin wasn’t pleasant, but it also wasn’t that tough. I was just happy that I finally stepped foot in another country, and given how long I prepared for this journey, I was glad it had finally started. The kind HR person from the company I was about to join was at the airport to pick me up which I’m extremely grateful for to this day.

The first super market trip was nerve wrecking, and not just because I only had 100 Euro bills with me and was worried I’ll get yelled at by the cashier. But I managed to have dinner that night (as depicted in my picture above), and sleep well. And then to my surprise I also managed to survive the rest of the week. And the rest of the month, and the year, and then some.

I did more than just survive, as one ought to aspire for. I made friends, traveled to pretty places and ate good food. I learned a new language and experienced a culture that was totally foreign just five years ago. I learned to play a musical instrument, play chess and cook tasty food. I did a lot of what I had only dreamed of, including landing my dream job at Mozilla.

Reminiscing on the time from my first day in Berlin till today, I have a lot to be grateful for, lot to smile about and a lot of notes on how to do better in the future.

I’m writing this eating delicious glutinous rice ball dessert, to celebrate the little milestone. The past few years brought us all a lot of changes, and it feels like the world is caught in turbulence. I wonder if I am only thinking so because I’m getting older and tend to pay more attention to what’s happening around me, or if everything is actually happening faster.

It was undoubtedly an interesting journey living through these last five years here in Berlin, and I’m looking forward to the next.

Thank you for reading!

Living a couple of nights at Marine Drive, Mumbai

When I was little, going to downtown Mumbai used to be exciting. A huge metropolitan city with double-decker buses, zoo, planetarium etc was sure exciting for a kid. Even as a young adult, my university friends and I would take the train to the city center to sit by the water front at Marine Drive or Bandstand. The city of Mumbai has fascinated me for a long time, and I’ve always wondered what it must be like to live in the center.

Of course, living in the fancy areas of downtown Mumbai is close to impossible if you don’t already live there or are extremely wealthy. Since I was neither, it always remained a wonder. Back in the day perhaps I’d have said that I’d love a home in the city center, but lately I’m over that thought. The steeply rising prices, the commodification of places of residence and prevailing view of buying a home as sort of a financial investment has been quite off-putting for me, to the point where I no longer desire to own my own place in the city.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped being fascinated by the idea of living in downtown Mumbai.

Fortunately for me, a friend was visiting Mumbai and decided to book a room in one of the poshiest parts of the city; Marine Drive. The “fortunately” part is about him booking a room big enough to accommodate me during his three day stay in the city.

Living at Marine Drive

So how does it feel to living at Marine Drive? Amazing. With a sea view, the sunsets are a delight to see from a french style full height glass windows. I could see all the people sitting exactly where my friends, family and I have sat numerous times. I woke up early to go for a morning walk and grabed a coffee along the way, something I literally dreamed of doing for years.

Eating casually at some very good restaurants, or going to a evening musical at the Opera House just a short walk away or having problems like having to travel quite far up north to get to the “regular” part of the city were a delight and I felt extremely privileged and fortunately to be experiencing it.

In closing

Yet another of those silly bucket list items got ticked. Sure, living the permanently would be cooler, but this is probably a close second. Or perhaps living there permanently wouldn’t have made me appreciate it as much as I did now.

Even as I was living in that hotel room, I knew how much I’m going to miss the couple of days that I’ll spend there. Now, as I’m writing this, I can see how my past self very accurately predicted that. I’ll end with a picture of sunset over Arabian sea from the hotel room’s window.

view of marine drive from my hotel room

Thank you for reading!

Something about enjoying the journey

Last Sunday I visited the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe near Kassel, Germany. I was wow-ing the entire time at probably one of the most impressive pieces of architecture I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes. If you do get a chance, I’d highly recommend paying it a visit.

So we started our hike from the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe and started climbing the hundreds of steps that lead all the way up to the Hercules monument. I read somewhere it is a 250 meter elevation. Whenever I paused to take a look at how high I had reached, it got more and more impressive.

I was eager to reach the top. I tried to rush my way through some of the points of interests along the way to reach ever so higher to get a better view. I had my little camera with me, and I wanted to get the best view. Finally, we reached the top of the hill, but there was a whole building up there, on top of which was the Hercules statue.

Of course, I wanted the best view, so I started going up the stairs of the building trying to get ever so higher. The stairs got narrower and narrower as I rushed to the top. But finally, I was there and tried to look outside through the small windows.

The view was underwhelming. It was more or less the same that we’d been seeing for some time during this hike up the tower but this time through tiny windows that had a lot of dust built upon them. I took a picture, and started walking down after not too long up there.

I was thinking about it in the car on the way back to Berlin, and I realized this is just how I sometimes go about my life; rushing towards a goal while not appreciating the views along the way, thinking something better awaits me at the end of it. I’d have slowed down, had I known how little joy the reaching the destination would bring.

Fortunately, I could appreciate everything a bit more on the way down the hill. Unfortunately the same cannot be done with passed time and experiences.

In closing

We live we learn, and such experiences are always a good reminder to slow down and appreciate the views around us; appreciate the present consciously and intentionally for it cannot be re-experienced.

Thank you for reading!

Mai bada hokar kya banunga?

(Note: This article is written in Hinglish, and requires the reader to know Hindi in addition to English)

Socha ek post Hinglish mai likh du. Whatapp aur baki saare apps pe dosto ke sath toh aise hi baatein hoti hai, toh phir iss blog pe kyu nahi.

Koi khaas aisa topic hai nahi mere pass. Saturday ko ek dost se baatein chal rahi thi, aur vo kisi baat pe mazak mai bola “Mai bada hone ke baad…” aur hass diya. Joke yeh tha ki bade toh already ho gaye hai, aur kitna bada hona baaki hai?

Usse milne ke baad jab ghar jaate jaate maine socha, akhir bade hue hi kab? Kab vo pal aaya zindagi mai jab hum sab bade ho gaye. Socha maine akhri baari “Bade hone ke baad…” kab kaha hoga.

Kuch khaas yaad nahi, par shayad college ke shuruvat ke saalon mai. Tabhi vo transition hota hai na, hum chahe jo vo kar sakte hai to humari placement hogi ya nahi. Shayad ussi wakt kaafi logo ke sapne chote ho jaate hai aur life ke boundaries thode jyada clear ho jate hai. Ussi ke sath responsibilities aa jati hai aur society ke set template pe zindagi aage badhti chali jaati hai.

Job, uske baad shadi, shayad bacche, agar naseeb hua toh ek acha ghar, gaadi. Bas yehi sab mai vo “bade hokar kya banana hai” wala savaal kahi dabb jata hai. Aur phir yuhi kabhi baaton baaton mai yaad aa jata hai vo saval, jo bachpan mai kitna aksar pucha jata tha.

Padhne ke liye shukriya!

Recover the cost of a BVG ticket via the USB charging port inside the bus

So I was merrily riding a bus yesterday on my way to Potsdamer Platz for a Dosa lunch when I noticed this:

Image of a usb port inside of the buses in Berlin

And a couple of thoughts hit me: What’s up with the piss stains? 🤷

And something I could actually answer: How long would I need to use this USB port to make up for the 3.20 that I paid for this ticket.

Now, a day later, I have a calm Sunday morning to ponder all of life’s most urgent questions so let’s get back to the thought from yesterday.

Power draw from a USB port

The best way to know exactly how much power I can draw from that port would have been to test it.

The next best thing is to try and guess based on some indicators. From the color of the port, it is safe to conclude it is a USB 2.0 port, and not a USB 3.0 port. From Wikipedia, we see that a USB 2.0 port intended for high power devices allows for a current draw of a minimum of 0.5 amps. The voltage is also standardized to 5 volts.

Amperes times Voltage gives us the power output of the port, which is 0.5 amps x 5 volts which is 2.5 watts (again, at a minimum).

Measuring power consumption

2.5 watts is the power that can be drawn from the port. To calculate how much energy can be consumed over a given time period, we need to simply multiple the watt number by the time number. Typically, it is measured in watt-hours.

My electricity company bills me for the kilowatt-hours I consume. If I use my TV that’s rated at 100 watts for 10 hours, it will be billed as 1000Wh, or 1kWh of energy consumption.

Price of electricity in my area

Electricity does not cost the same everywhere, and not even in the same area. Even the same provider might use different prices depending on the time of consumption and a whole list of other factors.

Looking at Vattenfall’s website (an electricity provider here in Berlin), I can see prices range between 25.07 cents / kWh and 33.37 cents / kWh. To make it easy for calculations, I’m going to go with 30 cents / kWh (all cents).

How much electricity can I buy for the cost of a BVG ticket?

For €3.20, the price of a single BVG ticket at the time of writing, I can consume (3.20 / 0.30) kWh, which is 10.667 kWh (or 10,667 Wh) of energy with my current electricity provide.

How long do I need to use the USB port to cover the cost of the ticket?

To find the time duration in which our 2.5W port will output 10,667Wh of energy, we simply need to divide the target consumption number by our consumption rate:

10,667 (Wh) / 2.5 (W) = 4,266.8 hours (the Watt unit nicely cancels out giving us the number of hours)

Which is roughly 177.8 days, or just under 6 months.

This time can roughly be cut by half if BVG changes the USB ports to 3.0 guaranteeing a minimum current draw of 900mA but I’m not holding my breath.

How much will a ticket effectively cost if I make full use of my ticket’s validity to charge a device?

Now of course being in a bus for 6 months is going to cost more money for season ticket and I might never recover my full ticket.

But what about the journey that I’ve already paid for? A BVG single ticket is valid for 2 hours. If I make 100% use of the time a ticket is valid for to charge my device, what’s the effective cost of my ticket?

At a minimum of 2.5W for 2 hours, I’ll consume at least 5Wh. At 30 cents / kWh, that’s 0.15 cents worth of electricity.

That’s 0.15 cents or €0.0015 that I can immediately recover from my ticket price, effectively making my single journey BVG ticket cost not €3.20, but a jaw dropping €3.1985 😎🫡

In conclusion

So there you have it. Go grab your 0.047% discount on BVG tickets! Subscribe for more financial tips. Thank you for reading!

Want to write more

Back in the day, I’d try to publish an article every month on my blog. It was difficult, but I’d still manage it for most part. I just looked at my last published article, which was in March, and the plethora or drafts sitting there, receiving little to no love.

Whenever I come across blogs with last published articles from years ago, I wondered what might’ve happened. Why (and how) do some people manage to keep publishing long form content after all these years, while others have given up on blogs. Some of them have done so in favour of more short form content that has taken over the web in the last decade or so. And of course, there’s a whole spectrum in between, where I see myself right now.

I came across this idea of perceived cost of doing things, depending on how much time it takes. For example, if I have an article that took my 2 months to finalise (and thus get satisfaction from), my brain might associate the cost of writing a long form article to be 2 months, thus discouraging me from picking up my computer to write again. If the actual satisfaction is derived from people finding my writing useful, then the gratification is delayed by several months or even years.

Creating a meme for Instagram, on the other hand, gets me gratification within minutes. Of course I know how these things work. But possession of a piece of knowledge isn’t very useful if it cannot be applied in a meaningful way.

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong about creating short form content, and there’s nothing superior about people who create long form content. Personally, as long as I retain my ability to do either when I wish, I’d be pretty happy. I want to make memes and make my friends laugh, and keep publishing valuable content on the internet.

And that’s why I started writing in the morning today as I was on my way to meet some friends: To publish it immediately and remove some of the cost burden that has creeped into my head around publishing on my blog. Hopefully I can write more soon.

Thank you for reading!

Focusing on the beauty in the world with a camera

In late 2021, my friend Ed handed me his Canon 7D for me to try my hands at photography. I already had an itch to get into it but didn’t have the “gear”, or so I told myself. The camera came without a lens or SD card so I rode my bike to the Saturn store at Alexanderplatz and got myself a Nifty-Fifty; a Canon 50mm f1.8 lens. It is still to this day the most fun-to-shoot-with lens I own.

I’ve taken thousands of pictures since then. What’s changed between owning a smartphone (that features brilliant cameras) and owning a dedicated camera is that when I have a dedicated camera on me, I go looking for something interesting, something beautiful, something funny, something new. It is deliberate and intentional.

The world is full of patterns, symmetry, life, history, people, clues, colors, shades. There’s just so much that sparks curiosity. Would I find it interesting even if I wasn’t trying to take a picture? Probably. The camera on me reminds me frequently that I’m trying to focus on the beauty in the world that I can sometimes forget to notice.

Having a camera just gives me an excuse to step out, wander around, stare at walls, look at people and dogs and cats and insects and flowers.

The best camera is the one you have you on

I’ve read this quote at a bunch of places, and that’s why I got a paid pro camera app for my iPhone last year. A smartphone is perfect as a camera. It is always there, always charged and it is getting better at a rate faster than any dedicated camera system can imagine. It is getting to the point where smartphones are taking pictures that isn’t reality but what the phone thinks you wanted to shoot, but that’s a different topic.

But smartphones don’t just take photos. They have our social and work life on them, and they’re always connected. I struggle to stay intentional about anything with a smartphone around me, probably because it does so many things. And that constant state of being distracted by nothing in particular is quite exhausting.

What I wanted, for lack of a better excuse, was a camera that was just a camera. And that’s why I decided to get my self a relatively cheap point and shoot camera from Sony.

With the little Sony, it is as fun to take pictures with as my DSLR, but at the same time it is more subtle and it fits in my other pocket. It is like the best of both worlds! Of course, it isn’t without its drawbacks. It needs to be charged separately from the smartphone, the photos are worse than the DSLR and so on. But it is always with me and it forces me to be intentional with my hobby which makes it all worth it.

Photography as a memories generation tool

I remember watching this video where that idea of routine making time fly faster was exposed to me. I watched it many years ago and thought it was very true, although I had not had any real routine back then. Today, I kinda still think it holds true.

Photos are a good way to get back some memories, especially when they’re taken intentionally. I read somewhere that good photographers are intentional with their shots. They try to remember what made them take a picture. There’s a story associated with a picture in their heads that they can tell you. It isn’t about the camera or the lens or any of the technicality. Just the moment captured on film.

I’m trying to copy this–to think why I’m taking a picture before clicking the shutter button so that when I’m looking at the pictures later, I can really remember the scene very vividly; the scene in the frame, sure, but just as importantly, the scene outside of the frame–the sun’s warmth or the cold wind and rain on my skin, the sounds and my thoughts, and also did I decide to take picture of this very thing of all the other things. Like a wormhole back to that moment in time. That somehow helps make memories easier to go back to and make the time spent doing event the mundane-est of things count.

In closing

That was a bit all over the place, so apologies if you kept searching for a topic in this article and failed to find it. I just wanted to get it out. On a different note, I want to document my photographs better, but I’ve not found a good way to do so. Instagram isn’t ideal, and while Flickr might work, I find myself questioning how long will it be around. In the end, I think hosting an image gallery plugin on WordPress with my showcase-worthy photos might be a good idea. We shall see.

Thank you for reading!