Weekly Letter 30/2025

Extracurricular activities

During school, my parents sent me to all kinds of art classes - keyboard, vocals, and dance. On my own, I went to cricket classes. I couldn’t pursue any of them to the fullest. I used to regret that, but I came to terms with the fact that not everything needs to be pursued to make a career out of it. Today I can sing when friends play antakshari and dance at friends’ Sangeet. When we play box cricket, the captains recruit me earlier to their teams 😛. I’m happy I learned these things!

These are called “extracurricular” activities in school. It seems like a loaded word. “Extra” as “optional,” to be done during leisure, after completing homework. The IIT coaching center fad was less when I was in school. Otherwise, I would not have done these extracurricular activities. Even then, as curricula increased, these extras kept dropping off. The first dropping point is the 10th standard when I left Cricket. I used to play city-level leagues until then. Now I only aim to hit a straight six in that box (because we don’t score with pull shots anymore 😪). 11th and 12th gave final rites to most of the extras.

Only in the last couple of years did I start not feeling them as extras. It started with theater classes. Then I took classes/workshops in creative writing, poetry, Cheriyal painting, dance, and horse riding. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been attending Kalarippayattu classes. I took some of these classes purpose-oriented, as they were needed in my acting gigs. For the rest, I took them without any purpose in mind. Exercising muscles that we’d not get to use in the knowledge economy jobs is a joy in itself.

These classes give me a great start to my mornings. I don’t have any laziness getting out of the bed. Even when a day goes bad, I look forward to the next morning for these classes. My batchmates in Kalarippayattu classes are predominantly of the age 6-10, and it’s fun to learn with them. Few of them teach me when I pose wrong. I’m trying to befriend some of these kids 😛, but they seem scared of me.

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I wrote a statistics blog after a long break. It discusses a rare case when confidence intervals fail. While it is rare, it does mess up our understanding of reality when it happens. I received one comment that showed this problem in practice.

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I finished reading “The Shortest History of War.” If you are interested in military affairs, it is a good read. This is my favorite note from the book.

Within a society/community/nation, we live by an assumption that we need not kill each other when we quarrel. We accept rights to everyone in our community. Over the history we kept expanding the size of this community - from tribes .. castes.. to nations today. War can only be ended when we can expand this "community" to include all of humankind.

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Some fine things I’ve read/watched this week:

1. Writing is thinking: A small op-ed discussing how writing is the way we think. A similar discussion is available in chapter 2 of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, and a couple of Paul Graham’s essays: Writes and Write-Nots, Putting Ideas Into Words

   

2. I watched the Traitors show on Amazon Prime. It is based on Mafia, a party game. We actually played Mafia on Sunday and then got to know that Traitors is based on that. It does have the unnecessary drama of a reality show. So, I kept forwarding and watched only the mafia game part of the show.

3. I watched Saiyyara movie. If you like movies like Aashiqui2, you’ll enjoy it.