Author: Pradeep

  • Pen Festival 2025 + Ramsar Bakery

    I went to the Pen Festival yesterday with my daughter. I had written about the last time here.

    The Festival had graphologists, pen doctor, leather covers and bags, lots of fountain pens, some paper stationary, and inks. We met Vishwesh and Vipul.

    Image: V’sign Neo (maroon) for my wife. V’sign Cute (green) for my daughter, her first fountain pen. Daughter and me, on the right. Image credit: Pradeep Mohandas.

    We got two pens – one for my wife and another for my daughter.

    We were heading back from the venue back home when the pleasant aroma of the bakery caught me.

    I drank the cola flavour after a really long time. I opened the crimped down glass bottle cap with an old style bottle opener tied with a twine around the refrigerator handle.

    The refrigerator had various flavours. My wife drank the lemon flavour a day before when we passed through here. I tried a sip.

    We got this at Ramsar Bakery in Pune. It was on the way home on a route Google Maps had suggested we take.

    Image: Crimped Down bottle cap (left) from a brand from Pune called Ardy’s. Nankhatai (right).

    We bought nankhatai. The man sitting at the counter offered our son one. When his eyes lit up at the taste of the nankhatai, the man offered him one more. We bought a pav kilo (250 gm) of it. My daughter liked it too. My wife was crazy about it too. We finished the pack that evening.

    My wife said we should buy these every time we pass through that road on the corner of a busy street where the scooters park adjacent to the side walk, sometimes causing a traffic commotion – a cacophony of horns from scooters behind them who now have to change their paths.

  • Weekly Notes 3/2025

    2173 weekly left. 5 Weekly Notes shipped including this. Yay, etc.

    AI generated image to try and represent this week. I wasn’t this relaxed, though!

    Space Heavy

    This was a very space-heavy week. Most of the week was spent on X and LinkedIn, where these updates are mostly available. I wish it were not so.

    India docked two satellites in orbit, 3 Indian space startups flew to orbit onboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin reached orbit, SpaceX’s Starship had a wonderful booster catch and the blow-up of the Ship on the way to orbit.

    I summarize most of the Indian activities in the 65th edition of Pradeep’s Space Newsletter.

    Personal

    This was also a week of doctor visits – for my son and for my wife.

    I missed going to either the Indian Science Festival and the Pune Public Policy Festival. I am planning to go for the Pen Festival.

    I got my driving license renewed after holding it for 20 years. Renewed for 10 more years now.

    Reading

    I am continuing to read these books:

    • Moustache, S Hareesh, Trans. from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil (77% completed)
    • The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper, Rolland Allen (37% completed)

    I also enjoyed reading these links:

    Watching

    I only watched Asura this week on Netflix. I need to write about it here on the blog. This line from the trailer made me choose to watch this, “Girls are like Asura … Asuras are Indian gods. Outwardly, they have virtues like justice, wisdom, and courtesy. Though, they love to slander.” It made me think again about what Asuras really are.

    You may also enjoy watching:

    Writing

    I am so happy with a lot more personal blogging that I did this week.

    Blog posts

    Newsletters

    I got back to writing on Roam Research again.

  • Hold-it-all

    My wife gifted me this hold-it-all for New Year’s.

    I had been browsing Amazon, Flipkart, and Instagram for a hold-it-all from Indian artisans. My wife saw me frustrated with the search and decided to make one herself.

    On the very next day, she stitched the hold-it-all from left over clothes from her various tailoring experiments. If you notice the picture carefully, you can see an orbit close to the bottom of my heart with a P in it. With just this logo, she captured my current interest in healthtech and space!

    She had missed one of the end bits of stitching. She has since been delaying stitching that bit till today when it was finally ready to show the world.

  • The Dhuradhurapatradi Scale

    This morning was strangely cold. My upper body felt warm while my lower body felt chilly. I thought about why that might be but could eliminate several reasons. Then I remembered my bottle of Dhuradhurapatradi.

    The bottle of Dhuradhurapatradi tells me how seriously I should take the cold I feel in my bones.

    My Dhuradhurapatradi Scale
    State of oilHow I should feel?
    FluidNot Cold
    Semi-solidSomewhat Cold
    Frozen OverVery cold

    The above table illustrates how I use the scale. Dhuradhurapatradi is a brand of coconut oil manufactured by Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala in Kerala.

    I have used the oil since my childhood. I developed the scale when I felt that people’s (ahem, my wife’s) experience of temperature was different than my own. I needed a neutral way to tell me how I experienced temperature.

    The weird weather this morning was a good example of my use of this scale. Today morning, the oil was semi-solid. So, I knew it was somewhat cold. This allowed me to fearlessly express my opinion about the weather to people who asked me about it.

    I thought of expressing this opinion on social media – where this post would not have been this long. However, reading Jatan’s post yesterday made me yearn for those days of the long blog posts. Hence, I wrote a long blog post instead of a short social media post.

    Also, a look at my Dhuradhurapatradi scale this winter, also makes me confident to opine that the number of days we experienced cold weather in Pune this winter were lesser than the number of days we experienced cold weather last winter.

  • The Morning Tea Incident

    This is the only remnant of the event that happened this morning. Interspersed with his scribbles.

    Tea stains among the scribbles

    My son was trying to get my attention. I was discussing something that was then important with my wife. So, despite shouting my name three times, he did not get my attention.

    I would like to think he considered the options before picking up my Portronics power bank and threw it at me.

    Weapon used to perpetrate the event

    My wife and I were looking forward to drinking a cup of tea after doing work in the morning. I was especially excited because I was going to drink tea in the new A47 The Explorer mug.

    The unfortunate target

    At this moment, I was looking at the updates on ISRO’s SpaDeX mission in  one hand and holding the Explorer mug in the other hand.

    The power bank grazed the cup and fell on the floor near the bed. The cup tilted enough to drop scalding hot tea on my waist and thighs.

    I managed to remove the Jockey athleisure pants that offered no protection and my new Wellbi bamboo t-shirt that did a good job of protecting my top.

    My wife applied the gel from the aloe vera plant from her garden to soothe the burned regions of my waist and thighs.

    My son looked at me as if to say, if only you had listened.

  • Weekly Notes 2/2025

    2174 weeks left.

    This week has been a blur. But, I loved the content that I consumed.

    Watching

    I am currently watching The Playlist about the Spotify story. I have reached the episode on The Coder. An important thing I learnt from watching this is the inevitability of compromise.

    • The Breakthrough – I liked the whole story but did not understand the ending and a few plot points in the middle.
    • The Grey Man – Surprised to see Dhanush in this one. Otherwise, quite an ordinary spy story.
    • Missing You – This was a layered story. I did not what this story was really about. The title applied to the core story as well as all of the side stories. Great storytelling.

    Reading

    I am still reading Moustache and The Notebook I mentioned in the last Weekly Notes.

    Writing

    I wrote two X threads, with the help of Grok.

  • Weekly Notes 1/2025

    2175 weeks left.

    I spent the New Year’s with my wife and kids.

    I had met up with Jatan in Pune during the science journalist’s conference. We had discussed about social media there. He’s written himself about some of the weirdness of social media here. People build an audience on a social media platform, the social media platform attracts more people who want to build an audience, and the social media platform wins while the people don’t. Yet people continue to flock to the different social media platforms.

    Writing or building your blog or website slows down the discovery process (like this, for example or on people’s blogrolls) but the people who discover things this way have a way of remembering you that is much better. I remember the people I found on blogs much more than the people I engage with on social media platforms. At the conference, I realized it is true the other way as well.

    I picked up writing on the blog from the next week onwards.

    Reading

    1. The City and It’s Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami – I wrote a review here.
    2. The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper – Roland Allen – I made slow progress reading this week.
    3. Moustache – S Hareesh, Translated by Jayasree Kalathil – I started listening to this today.

    Writing

    1. I wrote the seventh edition of the healthtech newsletter, Towards Eternity.
    2. I got back to writing my space newsletter this week. You can read the sixty third edition of the newsletter here.

  • The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

    I mentioned in Weekly Notes 51/2024 that 2024 wasn’t a good year for reading. I found out in 2011 that reading Murakami helped me get back into the habit, and I often use it as a trick. I chose this book with that aim.

    This book is interesting because it is a new version of his first story, which was a novella (a long short story, as Murakami calls it).

    I listened to this book on Audible. The narrator’s voice was very calming for me.

    I loved the worlds Murakami creates in this book – a town surrounded by tall walls and a town surrounded by mountains. There are some music mentions, but not as many as in his other books. The worlds also felt like they were connected to each other.

    I didn’t enjoy the first part of the book because I was trying to figure out the metaphors, and my mind was full of questions. Once I stopped doing that, I enjoyed listening to the book. I made a few notes during that time that I should tear out and burn.

  • Weekly Notes 52/2024

    This is the last Weekly Notes for 2024. So, this may be a bit lengthy.

    I spent most of this year trying to do a lot of experiments. I think there was more experiments done than I had expected. I have not much in terms of results to show for it, save for very few. But, important lessons have been learnt which I hope to share below:

    1. I need more measurement in my life. I tried measurement at a bigger scale than I needed. For eg. I measured in weeks, what I should have measured in days, and so on.
    2. I need to capture the measurement in a plain notebook or tracker – and on Excel or Sheets at the very worst. Capturing data in apps locks it up in apps.
    3. I have heard multiple people talk about squeezing timelines. I tried it and liked it. For eg. Do in a year what you may think takes 5 years. But, take adequate care before you squeeze the timelines.
    4. I moved to a pocket notebook on Hiran’s suggestion. I moved to a declutteredcat planner for 2025 on Jyotsna’s suggestion. I am not using my Bullet Journal for a year. I need to learn to learn using a planner again.
    5. I moved back to setting goals this year. We set the goals for the family today.

    Reading

    With the multiple resets I mentioned above, I also moved back to tracking my reading with Goodreads. I had briefly tried tracking it with a page on this blog in 2023 as well as not tracking it at all this year.

    • The City and its Uncertain Walls – Haruki Murakami – I am listening to this on Audible on my transit to work as well at other times I feel like I need a slow narration where I don’t need to think to much or I need to stop thinking.
    • The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper – Roland Allen – I am reading this on the Kindle app on my phone. I do this when I want to try and spend the early mornings and late nights on the phone but want to stay away from the social media apps.

    Writing

    I moved back my writing on a blog to this one from other things I tried this year – blot.im and Ghost. I am still considering thinkdeli for my fiction writing instead of Medium.

    • I wrote the sixth edition of the Towards Eternity newsletter. A lot of my writing for space and reading on X has helped me to get to trends in a new field faster than I otherwise would.

    For claiming to be a writer, I am not getting a lot of online writing done these days. I am doing a lot more personal writing related to the end of the year and the beginning of the new year. I should be back with more public posts in the New Year.

    Here’s wishing all the readers a Happy New Year!

  • Weekly Notes 51/2024

    It’s close to the last week of the year. This year has been a mess, for the most part. There have been a few saves. Things have been a lot better closer to the last quarter. I think writing, both online and offline has played a major part in that.

    I have read, listened, written, and watched a lot less this year than any previous year. This year has been worse than even my previous year where I had an excuse of a one year old.

    Every time I open a tab on Chrome, I see this graphic.

    I have been writing a lot of notes to myself, as practice. The fifth edition of the Towards Eternity healthtech newsletter went out earlier this week. After that the week was spent trying to recover from a bad case of stomach aches and diarrhea.