Blog

  • 35mm person

    I enjoy being boring in some ways. The love for analogue things has been ingrained in me in that kind of “boringness”. I like leather notebooks, I like fountain pens. I love the feel of clicking download on a WeTransfer link that my local photography shop sends me to unwrap the godawful photographs that I took on vacation without thinking of much. The most recent purchases of mine that have been purely towards my own entertainment is a steady stream of film cameras and film stock. And the older I become, the more tied to 35mm film and fountain pens my habits become.

    This September, I traveled to northern Spain and clicked three film rolls worth of photos. Since we are talking about half frame photographs, that is 72 x 3 = 216 photos (!). The wealth of this is an unparalleled riches of photos for me.

    I have started posting more on karma.kodak with more of those experiments. Most of them go out to a select audience of 2 or 3 of my friends. But it makes me LARP as a 35mm person and that is all one needs on some days.

  • Summer Malaise

    There is a kind of lethargy that is only prevalent amongst people who are belong to the academic space. Some of us experience this lethargy in the temporary form—the post-examination lull, the post-semester emptiness etc. For some of us who have existed in this sphere for a while, the summer malaise is something that is a constant. I have felt, for the last nine years at least, that I should be doing more during summer and yet, every summer passes without much of a dent on my reading list.

    Perhaps this is only heightened by the lull that the end of an era makes you feel. Since I defended my thesis in the beginning of summer, I have gone into phases of complete tiredness and complete euphoria. For the first time in years, I told a few friends, I have no exam in sight. And for the first time, this summer malaise is an eternity of tediousness.

    Not that I am not doing things: I have been grading, working on projects, and writing (a bit) but this has been a kind of summer where I have spent most of my time wondering if this is the peak of adulthood: this portioning of time where I am not sure of the value of time that I am keeping for reading, writing, etc. The external validation of semester grades and exams that has regulated time for me for so long (since 1996, to be exact) has ceased and I am here: reading the news, getting all kinds of insurance, and trying to see the rates of insurance and investments. This summer malaise has an recuperative effect usually. But this time, it has seemed like a different thing. An unending horizon of time which, both limited and daunting in its unendedness, is the canvas of the every day.

  • An Annual Update + Plans (sort of)

    I have wanted to updated this space for a while without coming to terms in terms of what this kind of thing means anymore. The more social media saturates spaces, the more it becomes difficult to create without either catering to the kind of writing and “content creation” that would gather more eyeballs or creating a kind of echo chamber that is akin to the academic work that I find myself doing anyway. This is why a website, like a private website of someone who is working in the humanities is a strange private-public interface. The goal, I hope, is to be able to document things (research, random bits of writing, workshopping bits of writing in public) rather than create some kind of content machine that is regular and geared towards more clickbait.

    And since the last update on this site was more than a year ago, here are some of the more important life updates that need documenting:

    So what did I do?

    I published some academic work. This was a co-edited issue with my colleague Florian Schybilski at Kairos. The link to that issue can be found here.

    I wrote some poetry that got published in the wonderful Bombay Lit Mag.

    I defended my dissertation! This seems like a small thing since I had already handed in my work in September. But I think there is a space where our minds completely hand over stress to the future. And that stress just sits in wait of a moment to come in. As it did for me last week, when I defended my thesis in a small room in Uni Potsdam. I will be looking at publishing now that I have my work in place. And this is one of the things that I want to reflect upon (read: force myself to work on): to actually read my dissertation and document the way I am reading this five years after writing the first chapter.

    I moved! Moving in a place like Berlin is a kind of miracle that one hopes to witness, either for one’s own self or for their friends. To find an apartment in one’s old neighbourhood is even stranger. I am learning about the new places in my old ‘hood.

    Reading more books! Quite a few people who go into academia, especially in literature, end up never reading for pleasure again. Maybe it is because people are busy in a hundred different projects with the pressure to publish or perish. Soon enough we end up in a situation where there is absolutely no space for people to be able to enjoy the act of reading that brought them into the academic line of reading in the first place. I want to document the books that I am reading right now and want to do it in a long form manner that is not encumbered by character limits.

    So that is that for now. The end of May 2024, starting things over.

  • A Post-Dissertation Reading List

    This is a reading list that I kept building for some reason as I kept writing my dissertation towards an end… But here it goes:

    • After by Vivek Narayanan
    • Affinities by Brian Dillon
    • Baburnama by Babur
    • Twilight in Delhi by Ahmad Ali
    • Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
    • The Sixty Five Years of Washington by Juan José Saer
    • An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
    • Tamas by Bhisham Sahani
    • Chinatown by Thuận

  • The Beginning of an End

    I emailed my supervisor some months ago that I could see the endgame in sight. This was about my dissertation, but it could also be about the way one’s transitions in life often work—in retrospect. I started working on my dissertation so long ago, not in terms of time but simply my headspace, that writing the end of this project now seems like inhabiting a different world. In that world, I hadn’t lost a parent, the pandemic had not happened, and generally, I think I got a lot less exhausted. What exactly does one do about endings? Perhaps the more important question is, how do we even see endings when we are forever being oscillated between endings and beginnings, in the dense fog of adulthood?