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 spend 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 of 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!

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!

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.

Thank you for reading!

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!

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!