It’s been a really long time since I last blogged. My attempts at living a moderately disciplined and occupied life has been quite a success. That would mean a major change in lifestyle from my college days.
Recent updates include:
a. moving to a newer apartment near Powai lake in Mumbai.
Moved in with my former (first one at college) roomie – Koushik Mandal(!) and his department-mate (and my batch-mate from Hall3), Sidhant Dash. They’re cool folks (barring Mandal’s mandalism at times). Each of us were living with other non-IITK, non-Y4 batch folks earlier – this was the primary criterion that prompted the move for each of us.
b. managing to read fiction.
I read ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ – a collection of short stories and ‘Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of The World’ (novel) by Haruki Murakami. He’s a Japanese author and I read the English translations of these. The last fiction I read before these was Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Dr. Roger Ackroyd” four years ago! I’ve been a passive consumer all along – anime, movies, TV dramas, you know, the kind that don’t require the mental weightlifting as in the case of active media – books.
In a recent Wired article, two abilities were distinguished – “The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively.” Being the kind of person who’d been chasing after Google search results until recently, I might’ve adopted the former as my dominant mode of thought and maybe reading “larger” material might improve the situation. Not that this is primary motivation to read- just that it’s a welcome throw-in that comes with it, I guess. Looking forward to another Murakami piece – ‘Kafka on the shore’.
c. weekly anime-sessions.
Vishnu, Karan and I meet up on weekends trying to catch up with anime. I haven’t been able to watch anime like I used to in the past year. But these weekly sessions are fun.
We’ve been watching ‘Aura Battler: Dunbine’, an 80’s show, it’s about 49 episodes long and I think we’ve reached 38 episodes through!
The past 3 weekends I’ve been introduced to the new ‘Dr. Who’ show and I’ve found it a really good British sci-fi show so far. I’m usually wary of insanely long shows – long as in several seasons over the years. For one, I fear getting really sucked into it and wanting to watch it all or read it all. The same reason that keeps one away from, say, ‘One Piece’. Maybe I should stop being such a “perfectionist”.