Ever since I watched “Perfect Days”, I wanted to rush less and savor more. That bug of living a balanced, calm, and organized life catches on in spurts. It caught on this week again. I want this to bring some good changes for a long time.
So, I started with home organization. I have a dressing table fixed to the furniture at one of my room’s corners. I have not been able to use it for more than a year now because there was a coat stand infront of it. I couldn’t place that coat stand at any other corner —the door to my room, the work table fixed to furniture and the cupboard occupy the other three corners. I disposed of it. I can use my dressing table now. And for coats, I got cute self-adhesive wall hooks from IKEA.
It’s a simple solution. But how come I have let this inconvenience pass for more than a year now? I’m sure you pass off many such inconveniences as well. It reminded me of this essay by Amit Varma. He connected such simple behavioral patterns to broken governments. In my understanding, this happens because we rush, often for useless things.
Talking of inconveniences and governments, I am writing this letter from a train to Hyderabad from Vizag (All my friends are getting married). This train trip has been horrible. Immense delays and the word inconvenience doesn’t justify the pain people have to go through on Indian trains. Governments, with decades of experience in running trains, are still unable to run trains on time or even provide chairs for commuters who wait for delayed trains. We have let these inconveniences pass as well. May be, if we calm a bit and fix the inconveniences, there will be lesser need to rush.
I worked on Datasette. It is a great tool to publish your datasets - especially for journalists, scientists, NGOs, and local governments. It's also a good place for data analysts to practice SQL queries with real-world datasets.
I published Air Quality Index (AQI) data from 2015-24 on Datasette here: AQI Bulletins Datasette. This dataset is created by UrbanEmissions.info — for more analysis of this data, you can refer to this report: Link
I wrote a Python tutorial if you want to publish your datasets: Tutorial
I finished reading a book “అసమర్ధుని జీవయాత్ర.” It is also translated to English: The Bungler. Through an anti-hero, this 1947 book discussed themes like perfectionism, existence preceding essence, nihilism, nature vs. man, etc. The last but one chapter is my favorite. This will be one of the books I’ll re-read to absorb more from it.
I wrote a Telugu review of this book here: Goodreads.
Now, I hope this train reaches Hyderabad soon. There is a ~10 year old girl entertaining me with her innocent questions to her father.
Girl: Nanna, Why is my shoulder shaking when I shake my legs?
Father: Because they are connected.
Girl: Then why are my legs not shaking when I shake my hands?
My Perfect Days movie review: Letterboxd
I forgot! Here’s the link to the short-film that paid me as an actor for the first time 😎.