Life notes – Close Read

Games and life

Yesterday, July 25, was a big day. Ironhide Games released the long-awaited fifth edition of their tower-defence game ‘Kingdom Rush’. I bought it as soon as it launched and completed its primary campaign in one sitting of several hours. Called ‘Alliance’, the game combines the gameplay of ‘Kingdom Rush: Vengeance’ and Ironhide’s ‘Junkworld’, together with aspects of ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’. The game also continues a long storyline that began with the first ‘Kingdom Rush’ game, released in 2011, and last updated in ‘Vengeance’. For what it’s worth, it’s a good story, too.

In ‘Kingdom Rush: Origins’, Ironhide introduced Vez’nan as a powerful wizard who becomes corrupted by a gem called the Tear of Elynie to become a malevolent power threatening the kingdom of Linirea. In the games that followed, heroes and towers from several parts of the kingdom, ultimately including King Denas, were tasked with defeating Vez’nan and his allies. In ‘Vengeance’, Vez’nan returned to exact revenge against King Denas — or so it seemed. ‘Alliance’ describes Denas’s return as well as Vez’nan’s efforts against a greater evil called the Overseer, who is also the ultimate boss in ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’.

A screenshot from the game 'Kingdom Rush: Alliance'. — A ‘Kingdom Rush: Alliance’ skirmish begins…

I love tower-defence games and among them ‘Kingdom Rush’ is my favourite by far. I own all editions of it as well as have unlocked most towers and heroes in each one. At more than a few points during a work day, I like to break one of these games out for a quick and hairy skirmish or — time permitting — a full-on campaign on a high difficulty setting.

But while I like to play as often as I can, tower-defence doesn’t fit all moods. I have 13 games on my phone: the five ‘Kingdom Rush’ games, ‘Junkworld’, ‘Monument Valley’ I and II (and the expansion packs), ‘Loop’, ‘1010!’, ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Rytmos’, and ‘Lost in Play’. They’re all great but I’d single out ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Loop’, and ‘Monument Valley’ for particular praise.

‘Idle Slayer’ is a top-notch incremental game (a.k.a. idle game): the game will continue irrespective of whether you interact with the player-character, the player-character can’t perish, and gameplay is restricted to tapping on the screen to make the character jump. The whole point is to slay monsters — which the character will if she/flies runs into them, automatically pulling out an omnipotent sword when she gets close — and collect slayer points and to pick up coins and gems, which the character also does if she runs/flies into them. ‘Idle Slayer’ thus eliminates the player (you, me, etc.) having to be challenged in order to reap rewards. It’s just a matter of time, although occasional bursts of speed and character abilities purchased with slayer points can make things exciting.

I agree with what journalist Justin Davis wrote in 2013:

“Idle games seem perfectly tuned to provide a never-ending sense of escalation. They’re intoxicating because upgrades or items that used to seem impossibly expensive or out of reach rapidly become achievable, and then trivial. It’s all in your rearview mirror before you know it, with a new set of crazy-expensive upgrades ahead. The games are tuned to make you feel both powerful and weak, all at once. They thrive on an addictive feeling of exponential progress.”

Right now, this is where I’m at: 209 decillion coins in my kitty and racking up 110 octillion coins per second, plus whatever I pick up as I keep running…

A screenshot from the 'Idle Slayer'. — My player-character is named Mintana. She’s awesome.

Second is the amazing ‘Loop’, an endless series of puzzles in each of which your task is to link up some open-ended elements on a screen such that they form a large closed loop. You can tap on each element to rotate it; when the open ends of two elements line up in this way, they link up. The game is minimalist: each level has a plain monotone background and elements of a contrasting colour, and there’s beautiful, low-key instrumental music to accompany your thoughts. ‘Loop’ is the game to get lost in. I’ve played more than 3,500 levels so far and look forward every day to the next one.

A screenshot from the game 'Loop'. — The two rings in the bottom-left corner are linked up.

Third comes ‘Monument Valley’, but in no particular order because it’s the game I love the most. I don’t play it as often as I play ‘Kingdom Rush’, ‘Idle Slayer’ or ‘Loop’ because its repeatability is low — but it’s the game that redefined for a younger and less imaginative me what a smartphone product could look and feel like when you play it. ‘Monument Valley’ is an ode to the work of the Dutch artist MC Escher, famed for his depiction of impossible objects that toy with the peculiarities of human visual perception. The player-character is a young lady named Ida navigating a foreboding but also enchanting realm whose structures and vistas are guided by the precepts of a mysterious “sacred geometry”. The game’s visuals are just stunning and, as with ‘Loop’, there’s beautiful music to go with. The objects on the screen whose geometries you change to create previously impossible paths for Ida take time to move around, which means you can’t rush through levels. You have to wait, and you have to watch. And ‘Monument Valley’ makes that a pleasure to do.

A screenshot from the game 'Monument Valley' II. — Unobtrusive pink, lush green, obsidian black.

It should be clear by now that I love puzzles, and ‘1010!’ is perhaps the most clinical of the lot. It’s Tetris in pieces: you have a 10 x 10 grid of cells that you can fill with shapes that the game presents to you in sets of three. Once you’ve placed all three on the grid, you get the next three; once a row or a column is filled with cells, it empties itself; and once you can no longer fit new shapes in the grid, it’s game over. ‘1010!’ takes up very little of your cognitive bandwidth, which means you have something to do that distracts you enough to keep you from feeling restless while allowing you to think about something more important at the same time.

A screenshot from the game '1010!'. — What does losing mean if you can never win?

‘Rytmos’ and ‘Lost in Play’ are fairly new: I installed them a couple weeks ago. ‘Rytmos’ is just a smidge like ‘Loop’ but richer with details and, indeed, knowledge. You link up some nodes on a board in a closed loop; each node is a musical instrument that, when it becomes part of the loop, plays a beat depending on its position. Suddenly you’re making music. There are multiple ‘planets’ in the game and each one has multiple puzzles involving specific instruments. You learn something and you feel good about it. It’s amazing. I’ve only played a few minutes of ‘Lost in Play’ thus far, and I’m looking forward to more because it seems to be of a piece with ‘Monument Valley’, from the forced-slow gameplay to the captivating visuals.

A screenshot from the game 'Lost in Play'. — A scene from ‘Lost in Play’.

Aside from these games, I also play ‘Entanglement’ in the browser and ‘Factorio’ on my laptop. ‘Factorio’ is the motherlode, an absolute beast of a game for compulsive puzzle-solvers. In the game, you’re an engineer in the future who’s crash-landed on an alien planet and you need to build a rocket to get off of it. The gameplay is centred on factories, where you craft the various pieces required for more and more sophisticated components. In parallel, you mine metals, pump crude oil, extract uranium, and dig up coal; you smelt, refine, and burn them to get the parts required to build as well as feed the factories; you conduct research to develop and enhance automation, robotics, rocketry, and weapons; you build power plants and transmission lines, and deal with enormous quantities of waste; and you defend your base from the planet’s native life, a lone species of large, termite-like creatures.

I’ve been playing a single game for three years now. There’s no end in sight. Sometimes, when ‘Factorio’ leaves me enough of my brain to think about other things, I gaze with longing as if out of a small window at a world that has long passed me by…

A screenshot from the game 'Factorio'. — [Polyphonic robot voice] This facility mines copper ore, smelts it to copper plates, and feeds it to factories that make copper cables.

The meaning of 294-227

As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consumed everything in its path in its aggressive bid to stay in power. If it is being pushed back, it is not a feat that can be the product of nothing.

After a decade of resistance without outright victories, in a manner of speaking, the pushback is a resounding abnegation of the BJP’s politics, and by doing that it embodies what the resistance has stood for: good-faith governance informed by reason and respect for the spirit and letters of the Constitution.

Embodiment is a treasure because it gives form to some specific meaning in our common and shared reality, which is important: it needs to breach BJP supporters’ pinched-off reality as well. There needs to be no escaping it.

Embodied meaning is also a treasure because the meaning is no longer restricted to “just” shouts of protest carried off by the wind, words left unread or protests the national government saw fit to ignore.

This is 294-227 — or whatever the figures are once the ECI has declared final results in all constituencies.

It’s a win for democracy, but a lot of my elation is coming from the notion that the outcome of the polls also demonstrate not only that journalists’ work matters — we already knew that — but that we’re not pissing into the wind with it. It’s being read, heard, and watched. People are paying attention.

Congratulations. Keep going.

12 years and counting

I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industry itself — the thing that others survive — and the observances don’t mean anything as such. This said, my professional clock runs from June 1 from May 31 and the day is when I break up the last 365 days into a neat little block of memories and put it away, with some notes about whether anything was worth remembering.

Last year of course, I joined The Hindu as deputy science editor and began a new chapter in many ways (see here and here). One that I’d like to take note of here is The Hindu’s paywall. As you may know, thehindu.com has soft and hard paywalls. You hit the former when you read 10 free articles; the eleventh will have to be paid for. The latter is the paywall in front of articles that are otherwise not freely available to read. Most articles behind a soft paywall are straight news reports and, of course, The Hindu’s prized editorials. Analyses, commentaries, features, and most explainers are behind the hard paywall.

We all know why these barriers exist: journalism needs to be paid for, and better journalism all the more so. But one straightforward downside is that the contents of articles behind paywalls are rarely, if ever, represented in the public conversations and debates of the day — and I haven’t been able to make my peace with this fact. Yet.

Eight years at The Wire spoilt me for it but the upside was clear: everything from analysis to commentary would be part of the marketplace of ideas. Siddharth Varadarajan was clear The Wire would always be free to read. Of course, The Wire and The Hindu are different beasts and pursuing very different survival strategies, and on the path The Hindu is treading, quite simply forcing people to pay to read has become necessary.

This shift has also forced me to contend with my own writing — mostly explainers, op-eds, and reports of physics research — being confined to a smaller, but paying, subset of The Hindu’s readers rather than all of them as well as to the public at large, which in turn often makes me feel… distance, not readily visible, if at all.

Just one more thing to figure out. 🙂

End of the line

The folks at The Wire have laid The Wire Science to rest, I’ve learnt. The site hasn’t published any (original) articles since February 2 and its last tweet was on February 16, 2024.

At the time I left, in October 2022, the prospect of it continuing to run on its own steam was very much in the picture. But I’ve also been out of the loop since and learnt a short while ago that The Wire Science stopped being a functional outlet sometime earlier this year, and that its website and its articles will, in the coming months, be folded into The Wire, where they will continue to live. The Wire must do what’s best for its future and I don’t begrudge the decision to stop publishing The Wire Science separately – although I do wonder if, even if they didn’t see sense in finding a like-for-like replacement, they could have attempted something less intensive with another science journalist. I’m nonetheless sad because some things will still be lost.

Foremost on my mind are The Wire Science‘s distinct sensibilities. As is the case at The Hindu as well as at all publications whose primary journalistic product is ‘news’, the science coverage doesn’t have the room or license to examine a giant swath of the science landscape, which – while in many ways being science news in the sense that it presents new information derived from scientific work – can only manifest in the pages of a news product as ‘analysis’, ‘commentary’, ‘opinion’, etc. The Wire has the latter, or had when I left and I don’t know how they’ll be thinking about that going ahead, but there is still the risk of science coverage there not being able to spread its wings nearly as widely as it could on The Wire Science.

I still think such freedom is required because we haven’t figured out how best to cover science, at least not without also getting entangled in questions about science’s increasingly high-strung relationship with society and whether science journalists, as practitioners of a science journalism coming of age anew in the era of transdisciplinary technologies (AI, One Health, open access, etc.), can expect to be truly objective, forget covering science by the same rules and expectations that guide the traditional journalisms of business, politics, sports, etc. If however The Wire‘s journalists are still thinking about these things, kudos and best wishes to them.

Of course, one thing was definitely lost: the room to experiment with forms of storytelling that better interrogate many of these alternative possibilities I think science journalism needs to embrace. Such things rarely, if ever, survive the demands of the everyday newsroom. Again, The Wire must do what it deems best for its future; doing otherwise would be insensible. But loss is also loss. RIP. I’m sad, but also proud The Wire Science was what it was when it lived.

Happy Lord of the Rings Day

War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist country, and there are more of them every year, the states have claimed they’re at war against “anti-national” forces within and without. War is everywhere. At this time, where does fantasy fiction stand, what can it do?

First, the genre itself is often centred around military action as a means to challenge protagonists and resolve conflicts. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the skirmish on Weathertop showcases Aragorn’s leadership; the Battle of Helm’s Deep is where Théoden truly returns as the king of Rohan; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the stage on which Denethor fails, Faramir rises in his stead, Rohan’s crown effectively passes to Éowyn, and Aragorn does something only Gondor’s ruler can; the Battle of the Morannon is a test of every protagonist’s mettle as they distract Sauron and his armies in a doomed stand long enough for Sam, Frodo, and Gollum to destroy the ring; and the Battles of Isengard and Bywater are where the ents and hobbits, respectively, retake their lands from Saruman’s rule, unto the powerful wizard’s political and then mortal demise. Even outside the trilogy, war is never short of a great contest between good and evil.

There have been many flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to JRR Tolkien’s epic and its style, yet it’s just as true that every English attempt at epic fantasy since the trilogy has either basked in its shadow or tried to escape from it. Another way in which Tolkien foreshadowed the genre is in terms of its authors: predominantly cis-male and white. Despite the variety of factors at play that could influence who becomes an author of epic fantasy fiction, this is no coincidence, at least insofar as it determines who becomes a ‘successful’ author – and just as well, it’s not a coincidence that so much of modern fantasy is concerned with similar depictions of war.

Bret Devereaux wrote in his popular blog that Amazon Primevideo’s Rings of Power fell so flat even though it had borrowed heavily as well as branched off from Lord of the Rings because, among other things, it failed to “maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well)”, rendering it “impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules”. Yet even with the ‘rules’, Tolkien’s narrative arcs within his books were modeled perceptibly on the Arthurian legends. A similar complaint can be foisted on other (esp. white male) works of epic fantasy fiction, which have been concerned on a metaphysical level at least with recasting the past in a different light, unto different ends.

I admit I haven’t read enough of epic fantasy – all of Tolkien, a smattering of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing), some of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Brandon Sanderson, Marlon James (BLRW), and George R.R. Martin – to be able to write with any kind of authority about the genre, but for this I blame partly myself and the rest Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series spoiled me for anything else. My own tendency to read the work of the cis-white men of fantasy is also to blame.

However, Erikson, unlike any of the other writers I’d read until then, both within and beyond the genre, is also a white man yet his Malazan series treats war differently: its tragic toll is always in view thanks to Erikson’s decision to train the narrator’s focus on its smallest players, the soldiers, rather than on its kings and queens. This is how, for its well-earned reputation as a military epic bar none, the series itself recounts a tale of compassion.

And having read and re-read the Malazan series for more than a decade (to the uninitiated: it’s possible to do this without getting bored because of its rich detailing and layered story-telling), war – including ones of annihilation, which can apparently be fought these days without the use of terrible weapons – is if nothing else the ultimate examination of purpose. It is brutal on people, the land, the cultures, and the planet for much longer after it ends, and it magnifies through these effects and the methods by which they are achieved the moral character of those conducting this violence.

Like others I’m sure, I feel completely powerless against and often dispirited by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, and the systemic violence the Indian state continues to inflict on its poorest and most marginalised sections. The best tools of opposition available at my disposal are my words, my ideas, my morality, and, if a situation demands it, some spine – and all four good fantasy fiction can inspire in abundance.

I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of a film sometime back (can’t remember its name now) in which he said good story-telling can inspire us to become our best versions of ourselves, that even should the film flop on other counts, it will have succeeded if it can do this. These words are applied easily to any form and mode of story-telling, including epic fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a tale of good versus evil but it’s also a tale of friendships and their survival through untold hardships, and while some may disagree it was good story-telling. In the end, whether or not it succeeded and also setting aside the moralities of the time in which it was written, it strove to inspire goodness.

The Malazan series strives similarly (present-tense because Erikson is still building out its lore) and, to be fair, does it much better, directing its empathy at almost everyone who appears in the books (excluding – spoiler alert – the truly vile). In our present time of seemingly incessant conflict, it helps me look beyond the propaganda both noisy and subtle at the people who are suffering, and with its stories refill senses constantly on the verge of depletion. If we just let it, fantasy can step up where reality has failed us, alerting us to the infinite possibility of worlds within worlds, new and necessary forms of justice, and of course how and where we can begin to cope together.

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂

Previous editions: 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Note: I chose to ignore sci-fi in this post. I suspect “sci-fi” and “fantasy” are at the end of the day labels invented to make marketing these books easier, but I also stuck to fantasy per se so I could finish writing this post in a finite amount of time.

A difficulty celebrating Chandrayaan 3

I’m grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29.

After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon’s south polar region, there was widespread jubilation, but I couldn’t celebrate. I felt guilty and distressed, actually, with the thought that my well-rewarded scepticism of India’s affairs these days had finally scabbed over (and back) into cynicism. Even the articles I wrote on the occasion had to pass via the desk of a colleague, who helped spruce them up with some joy and passion.

I had a few hypotheses as to the cause. One was that, by virtue of knowing what exactly happened behind the scenes, and having followed it for many years, I saw the really wow-worthy thing to be some solution to some problem with Chandrayaan 2 that, if fixed, would lead to success today. But something about it didn’t ring true.

Another that did was rooted in an anecdote I’d heard or read many years ago, I can’t recall where. There was a stand-up comic event in Bombay. During a break, the comic steps out to the side of the building and has a smoke. A short distance away, he sees some people from the audience stream out for some fresh air. A beggar approaches this group asking for money. They tell him that if he shouts BMKJ, they will give him 10 rupees. He does, and they hand him the money and walk back in. The comic (who is the narrator) then says that he doesn’t want to make this crowd laugh and leaves.

I don’t know if I have ever been a nationalist but I have been and am a patriot. In his article, Pathak berated the “muscular nationalism” fostered by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its consequences for the forms that the education, practice, and expression of science have taken in the country. In this milieu, he wrote, he couldn’t bring himself to overtly celebrate the success of Chandrayaan 3, tracing his arrival at this conclusion from the ‘first principles’ of the reactions to the mission, its “political appropriation” by the powers that be, and the unglamorous nature of work to bridge the “gap between technology as a spectacle and science as a way of life”. It is this articulation for which I’m grateful: I couldn’t find the path myself, but now I know.

Celebration isn’t for the outcomes of a single mission on one occasion. It’s for all the outcomes of a process that assimilates many impulses, driven by multiple beliefs and aspirations. Chandrayaan 3 may have been a resounding success but imagine it is one point in a process, and then take a look at what lies behind it. I see an island called ISRO, the unique consequences of India’s fortuitous history, and the miracles that have become necessary for celebration-worthy scientific success in India today.

Among the distributed sweets, the light and sounds of the firecrackers, and the torrent of applause, I sense the comedian’s jokes to ease the mind of a nation that preserves this state of affairs.

Irritating Google Docs is irritating

The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use Docs every day to write my articles and edit those that the freelancers I’m working with have filed. I don’t use tools like Grammarly but I do pay attention Docs’s blue and red underlines indicating grammatical and typographical aberrations, respectively. And what Docs chooses to underline either way is terribly inconsistent. I have written previously on how Docs ‘learns’ grammar, based on each user’s style, and expressed concern that its learning agent could be led astray by a large number of people, such as Indians, using English differently from the rest of the world and thus biasing it. Fortunately this issue doesn’t seem to have come to pass – but the agent has continued to be completely non-smart in a more fundamental way. This morning, I was editing an article about homeopathy on Docs and found that it couldn’t understand that “homeopathy”, “homeopathic”, and “Homeopathy” are just different forms of the same root word. As a result, correcting “homoeopathy” to “homeopathy” didn’t suffice; you have to correct each form to remove the additional ‘o’.

It gets worse: the same word in bold is, according to Google Docs, a different word…

… as is the word with a small ‘H’.

Google has a reputation for having its fingers in too many pies and as a result neglecting improvements in one pie because it’s too busy focusing on another. There is also a large graveyard of Google products that have been killed off as a result. There’s some reason, for now, to believe Docs won’t meet the same fate but then again I don’t know how to explain the persistence of such an easily fixable problem.

Refusing battles

“Pick your battles” is probably the most important thing I’ve learnt as a journalist. A lot of it is probably due to my firm belief that science has always been political, and getting people to see this has often left me grappling with difficult questions in a variety of areas, which in turn required my engagement with a diverse multiplicity of people, ideas, and problems. In the course of working like this as a journalist for a decade, I got to contribute to as well as publish some wonderful work. But it also took me a decade to be honest to myself and admit that I was going about all this the wrong way.

Constantly questioning myself and my privileges as I began my journalistic career had, over time, pressed into my skull the idea that, given the resources at my disposal, I could always do more than I was doing at any moment. So I took on more work, and more kinds of work, even as I began to interpret the resulting stress as an inability to be as efficient as necessary. By mid-2022, this misguided conflation had exacted a heavy toll on my body. My doctor immediately ordered a change in gears and my therapist helped me figure out that I hadn’t picked my battles. But I soon realised that the bigger mistake I’d made was underestimating how difficult declining all the other battles would be.

This is FOMO but it’s also more than that. One way to define caste, class, and gender privilege in India (the benefits of all of which I enjoy, by the way) is to say that more privileged people can afford to fight more battles than less privileged people. Privileged bodies can also tolerate more harm (accidental, not deliberate) because they can afford good doctors and healthier living environments. But this sort of thinking misses the point, I realised later, because it overlooks sustainability. Performing 100 units of work and then fizzling out after five years is not better than performing eight units of work per year for many years. The latter is also advantageous because spending more time doing something allows you to persist – and enhance your credentials – in that community, establish more as well as stronger relationships, and mentor people. These things in turn bring advantages that working by oneself never will.

You probably already know all of this, but I want to make sure you know one more thing: not trivialising the allure of the battles you’ve decided to overlook. This problem is more than FOMO because FOMO implies a temptation to do something. But when you’re a privileged person and you’ve decided that you’re not going to fight some battle, you also need to deal with the allegations – both self-inflicted and inflicted by others, especially by people in your own circles and sometimes publicly – of having abdicated your privileges. Instead of not giving in to the resulting temptation, as with FOMO, you need to not give in to the resulting shame.

When I first experienced it, my self-esteem plummeted. I found myself clutching at straws when, for example, someone tagged me on Twitter demanding to know why I couldn’t do something about a news report with average writing, put out by the publication I worked at (along with hundreds of other journalists). The old me would have sprung into action, messaging the relevant editors, going into why XYZ is problematic, and becoming entangled in increasingly vexed follow-ups. But I’ve found that the shame eventually calcifies into a kind of courage, one that allows me today to say – after a few deep breaths – that while I’m sure XYZ is an important problem, I’m not going to pay much attention to it.

Rob McKenna

Anyone who reads Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and doesn’t come away thinking it belongs on the list of the best books they’ve read has to get themselves checked. I don’t think this about many things but if I had to think it about just one thing, it’d have to be Hitchhiker’s. I’ve also had one more reason to cherish the book than most, beyond its near-complete exploration of the human condition and unrelenting optimism. Since reading the book a decade and a half ago, I’ve accrued considerable reason to believe that I’m one of the characters in the book, in spirit. This is Rob McKenna, an ordinary lorry driver we meet for a brief yet exhilarating moment in the second half of Hitchhiker’s. The very first line about him goes like this:

Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everyone.

This is the bit I really connect with:

Splattered in his rear mirror a couple of seconds later was the reflection of the hitch-‐hiker, drenched by the roadside.

For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.

At least it made up for having been finally overtaken by that Porsche he had been diligently blocking for the last twenty miles. And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.

You see, whenever I’ve felt lousy, there’s been rain at my location. It rained on my last night in New York, in 2014, when I was done dropping out of university. It often rained in Bangalore, where I used to live until last year, but it would often also rain just as I was starting to feel low, preceded and succeeded by sunny days. It would rain for a few hours in the morning and then the sun would break out. It would rain without warning in much the same way a dark cloud descended on my psyche. This January I moved to Chennai and, much to my relief, I’ve continued to be Rob McKenna. Chennai has a barely-there relationship with rain, especially outside the October-December monsoon. Yet it’s rained every time I’ve been knocked down.

Just this morning, I woke up to overcast skies, brilliant arcs of lightning, and a ceaselessly cool wind blowing straight through my living room bearing flecks of drizzle (lovely word in Tamil for it, saaral). I’d gone to bed yesterday with a heavy heart and a murderous headache. Rob McKenna is a miserable bastard alright, but I’ve just loved the rain.

2022 in retrospect

2022 has been my worst on the record on several fronts. I had COVID-19 in the first month, which did a freaky number on my heart. My unexplained weight loss from 2021 continued its run into six months of 2022 before stopping suddenly, although all test reports came back normal and doctors were stumped. Bharat Biotech sued me and many others for defamation in a Telangana court. Stress and humiliation scaled new heights. Efforts to get a grip on my depression came to naught. Two long-term relationships came to an unexpected end. The blog was infiltrated once, possibly once more. I lost access to a a decade-old email account and, for some time, to my blog’s domain. I didn’t write as much as I would have liked, leading to the fewest words published in a year since 2016 (see the customary annual numbers below). On the bright side, I have many new beginnings to which I’m looking forward. I have officially blogged a million words (point #8 here is why this matters). It has been four years since I quit The Thing. I’ll be starting at The Hindu on January 2. I’ll be in Chennai again after five years and closer to some friends I have missed very much. (I’ll be speaking Tamil on a daily basis!) My health is getting better. I have room for new relationships and habits. I’m quite looking forward to 2023, and looking forward to looking back on 2022. I hope you have a wonderful year, too. Mask up, be good, and thanks for reading. 🙂