Completely done with my indoor existence for the past few weeks, I took my old point and shoot out and went on a walk around my neighbourhood. When I came back and began editing them, I noticed a lot more tricolours than necessary. I realise this style of editing is passé, but I always wanted to do it since when I first saw them. And if our 75th Independence Day isn’t a good time then what will ever be.

On Reading the Left Hand of Darkness Light is the Left Hand of Darkness In the edition that I read (from 2019, fifty years after this book was first published) there is an introduction, an author’s note and an afterword to go alongside the story. I had purchased it in November last year, read it in March this year, and managed to read the introduction, the note and the afterword only today in June of 2022.

Planning and reviewing ones year in a journal is a a great habit, it is like making a packing list for a long journey, and then checking things off. It gives you the confidence that you are prepared for what’s ahead; it gives you a sense of direction in life. But when you just write what you want from the year, and then write what happened, you miss a crucial ingredient - focus.

Increasing Typing Speed I am not aware of its Window’s counterpart, but the keyboard in iOS and MacOS come with a feature called Text Replacement (see references below). It’s very handy if your work involves a lot of typing. But what words should you replace? I figured the logical thing to do is find out my most frequently used words and replace the top 25-50. I found a python script** that let’s you run through a folder in your system and find the most frequently used words in the files in it.

Delhi Mostly Harmless Elizabeth Chatterjee’s book on her time in Delhi is charming. I picked up the book on the way back home to Bombay from Pune in February this year. I was about to start the second season of Bombay Daak, and it was an instinctive purchase; I hoped to find some inspiration on writing about a city, or gather a different perspective on how to look at one.