Category: Life notes

Reading books, writing words

It suddenly feels like a lot more people have been reading a lot more books. Or maybe they’re talking about it a lot more. I have one friend who went through more books in 2021 than there were weeks. And I’ve been quite jealous looking at her and others’ Instagram and Twitter feeds about all the great books they read and the places to which the books transported them. I want to go to those places too! But instead of reading books, I just really want to go to those places.

I lost my ability to read books years ago, probably around the same time, and probably because, I began to read articles, essays and short stories more. I don’t really miss it except when most of the people I generally interact with put their book-reading on display, typically at the end of each year. When I shared this sentiment with my friend, she said I should just give it time and that I’ll get the ability back at some point. Sage, but also unfalsifiable, advice.

Instead, I’ve found considerable solace – when I’m feeling down vis-à-vis reading books – in the realisation that I may not have read many words in books, but I’ve read many words in probably every other form of the written text than books (excluding social media posts). I launched The Weekly Linklist in July 2020 after an app told me that I’d been reading 12,000 words or so per day on average for at least a year until then. I believe I’ve read many books’ worth of words but just not books per se.

It’s helpful to frame things this way because the longer I didn’t read a book, the more stigmatising it got in the circles in which I moved and still move. “Oh, you can’t read books? I’m sure you will soon.” Some people implicitly make a virtue of reading books. Reading books is important, no doubt, but I’m wondering if things have got to a point where reading 50,000 words is less important than if they were printed on paper, glued together and published as such.

Granted, there is value in both presenting and consuming a single argument (used in its broadest sense, such that it encompasses fiction as well), or some non-tenuously related arguments, across tens of thousands of words. But not every argument that’s present this way is good (i.e. there are bad books) nor are shorter arguments inherently inferior. Yet books, and book-reading with them, have accrued a certain prestige that doesn’t attend to, say, essays.

Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m a frog in a well and there are other wells where frogs talk about all the great essays they read that year, share news articles talking about the same things, whose Instagram pages are replete with screenshots of essay titles, and so forth.

I’d originally intended to write a short introduction and then segue to the annual presentation of the number of words I’ve written in the previous year on this blog but the words snowballed. So:

  • I wrote 117,573 words in 2021 on this blog – bringing the cumulative total to 831,826 words.
  • Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series is a little over a million words long. I hope to cross that figure next year.
  • These words were published in 118 posts, which means the average post length was 996 words. I’m happy with this because it continues my trend of writing longer posts on average since 2014 (when it was 665 words).
  • However, I don’t see the length increasing much past 1,000 words because I like my own posts and articles, on The Wire Science, to be that long. And I’m pleased that I’m able to keep track without consciously keeping track (my first and final drafts aren’t very different unless I’ve made a big mistake.)
  • The vast majority of the posts were categorised ‘Analysis’.
  • In the last quarter of 2021, I mostly reacted to things that had happened instead of synthesising insights, and I didn’t like that.
  • I also wrote 127 articles on The Wire Science and The Wire in 2021 – the second-highest in a single year and for the second time in excess of 100 for the same publication. (The highest in both cases was for The Hindu in 2013.)
  • Thus far, I’ve written 845 articles across The Wire Science, The Wire, Scroll, Quartz, Hindustan Times and The Hindu.

Stream of nothing

I decided to go out this evening.

First I went to Bookworm’s new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to back, room by room.

I picked up the first book I saw, The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. I like to hold something.

The store was quite big. Even though there were 30-40 people there, I could still find an empty room in which to fart in peace and have no one hear.

There was a Tamil-speaking dude in the store. He assumed that no one else there understood Tamil (he said just that out loud, unless of course he was trolling the rest of us), and was giving his companion pretentious gyan about books in the science section.

I picked up The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus and randomly opened it. Page 93: ABSURD CREATION Philosophy and Fiction. I continued reading.

All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could not persevere without some profound and constant thought to infuse its strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange feeling of fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their task amid the most stupid of wars without considering themselves in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude nothing. There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

I liked it. Shortlisted.

I came across the science section. Ugh.

Internal monologue: The books in the science section are all written by scientists, and many of them cross over to comment on other issues as well. Why is no book here written by a social scientist, a philosopher or a thinker broadly who crossed over, made sense of some science and wrote about it? There’s Nietzsche, and then there’s Camus, who builds over, around, under Nietzsche with much less impeding prose. It didn’t seem to me to be an indictment of the philosophers and thinkers but of how science is understood these days – what it contains and what it can tell us about the world and life today, and who gets to talk about that.

But what about exceptions like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Gould? I’d spotted Sacks in another section, but more importantly both were blah.

Consider the authors of the science books. There is no diversity. The hits (according to Bookworm) are by the same people who wrote the hits I read a decade ago, even two decades ago. And most of the new writers are writing about similar things in similar ways.

I spotted and hung on to Being and Event by Alain Badiou (two friends had recommended it) and Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for a bit, but finally decided to go with The City We Became and The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s the first time I’m going to be reading Jemisin.

I went to Blossoms next, to return two books I’d bought there a couple weeks ago and finished reading. I got Rs 350 in store credit. Awesome.

I’d been anxious about where I would eat. I’ve always had Church Street dinners at Coconut Grove but wanted to try something new this time. Brik Oven it was – just because it had people in it, so it must be good I figured.

I picked a fig and onion pizza. It was excellent. The staff was great, too, not entirely reserved but not too chatty either. They had a wood-fired oven that made me think about climate change. Where do we draw the line?

I daydreamed: if I was really rich, I’d set up an anti-growth fund. It would have money I’d give to companies to keep them from doing foolish things in the pursuit of scale or more capital. We’re already seeing this with pharma and online erotica.

I paid the bill and called a cab. So much traffic getting out of Church Street. So much stress for the driver. Wish I could help.

I got my earphones out, plugged them into the phone and resumed compiling a new walking playlist. I called it ‘Dark Energy’ because I was looking for energy but not of the uplifting variety. Des Rocs was the star, but I also loved ‘Cabin Fever’ by Reignwolf.

As we waited at a signal, in a sea of yellow and red lights, the headlights of a car behind us went off just as ‘Outta My Mind’ hit a crescendo. It was a moment, I smiled to myself.

The earphones’ right earpiece kept popping out of my ear all the way home, had to keep putting it back in. I thought my earhole was shrinking. Haven’t stranger things happ–

Hey, it’s raining.

Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

Homo medicatis

With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India’s COVID-19 response, soaring across the length of India and plunging into my veins, somewhere in Bangalore. And with every tug away from the compulsions of public healthcare and towards petty politics, the needle tugs at me in turn, its point dragging through my flesh, the blunt cylinder of its form cutting through my skin. I feel a bloodless injury on my body inflicted by an apathetic actor hundreds of leagues distant, and utterly powerless for it. Can you imagine the assault of such a foe? There’s the simple brutality of its strength and then there’s the ignominy of being told that your wounds are accidental, that you deserved neither the attention of your alleged assailant nor the consideration that everyone else has reserved for designated survivors. There is even pain but I cannot hear its wail clearly; it seems to originate from somewhere deep within me, so deep I can only hear its fading screams for help. I am doused in a sourceless, timeless numbness – the site of a revolution that is both ongoing and dead. I am the foregone conclusion of the state’s subjection, the fixed destination – one of many millions, of course – of whatever vaccines, drugs, therapies and philosophies it is determined to wreak; I am simultaneously the constant source of its strength. Imagine a god sustained by the faith of the dying-but-never-dead; does it take not their submission or prayers but their persistence in the face of diseases it will unleash for granted? When it increased the dose gap for Covishield from four to fix, then eight, then twelve and finally to sixteen weeks, the needle tore and tore and tore. Every change was a humiliating reminder of the control the state has grown to exert on me, on the fundamental biochemical defences millennia of evolution has instilled in my body, your body, our bodies. It is unacceptable at this point to insist that one dose of Covishield later, we are X% protected against mild disease and Y% against disease-requiring-hospitalisation by the delta variant. The variant has little to do with why I am reluctant to catch a flight to Delhi, where I long to be, or why the first thought when I wake in the morning is to wonder which member of my extended family has become the latest to succumb this year. Why, even before the vaccine, I was rendered mad ahead of choosing between Covaxin and Covishield. There was, and still is, no data in support of one and the other was, and still is, triggering terrifying – yet rare – blood-related consequences in some people, and both sat poorly with my knowledge of my own illnesses. And this was just me, a person aware of and able to navigate this swamp of nefarious possibilities; what of those who knew less, or knew but could do little to ensure the best outcomes for themselves? Would they be the triply ignominious, the triply neglected? Such foul and abject degradation. I have friends and family who expect to hear from me answers to their questions about how the vaccines work, what the new variants of concern are, and what they themselves ought and ought not to do. But even as I prepare, I become keenly aware of being conscripted to the state’s myth-machine – with the first utterance of “don’t worry” to fall in line with the other GI Joes. But only one misstep and the state waits, on the other side of the road, with irons at the ready to accuse us of lying, or of course seceding. And so the path ahead, the path of a free and unfettered citizen, becomes narrower and narrower, until we are all just needles in veins.

What is more, his entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Giorgio Agamben

Notes on mindful email use

Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is versatile, but most people seem to use it in annoying ways (based on the email traffic in my professional inbox). I’ve been using only my email for work for five years or so now, and even before used it over phone to the extent possible. I hate speaking on the phone with people who aren’t at least close friends or family.

However, this seems to be a ridiculous proposition in journalism circles: I’m not sure of the history here but if you have a phone and you’re starting off as a journalist, you’re expected to be reachable – by every Tom, Dick and Harry – by phone. People will call you repeatedly even if you’re not picking, they’ll WhatsApp you next; sometimes, they’ll send you an email and then call you to let you know they’ve emailed you. Sometimes they’ll follow up both with a WhatsApp message saying, “Please don’t forget.” (I’m not a forgetful person – but there’s a first time for everything).

Worst of all, they will share your number with others without asking you; most of them won’t even check whom they’re sharing your number with. They were asked, so they will answer.

Another group that will react to your insistence on using email as if it was a joke is PR people. In 2016, I did a story about TeamIndus with help from their PR team, and to this day, I haven’t been able to get my phone number out of some database PR people share among themselves of numbers of journalists they know. No amount of promises to “do the needful” seems to have the desirable outcome.

At the same time, most of those who do use email use it in ways that suggest they think it’s the opposite of a phone call. Here are some tips (read: desperate pleas) to use email sensibly, especially if the recipient receives scores of emails a day.

  1. “Phone calls cost money, emails are free.” – Emails cost more than money; they cost peace of mind. You shouldn’t hit the ‘compose’ button just because it’s there. Ask yourself if you really need to send the email you’re thinking about. If the answer is ‘yes’, ask yourself if you really need to send a whole new email or if you could tack your message onto an existing email thread. Following three threads with inputs for the same story exacerbates the cognitive demand, and leads to inbox hell.
  2. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – This is exactly why email is awesome: so you don’t run around making decisions for the both of us that help only you. I’m not in a hurry to respond because I’ve got my own priorities. If I’m free and it’s still my working hours, I’ll reply as soon as possible (which is often something like 10 minutes); if I’m not but the email seems important, I’ll acknowledge it. If you need a quick reply, the decision has to be a joint one: say so, say by when and – most importantly – say why.
  3. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – It’s because you get to make phone calls willy-nilly that you start to assume you’re justified every time you think you’re in a hurry, without waiting to evaluate if the matter is actually urgent or you’re just an impatient time-brat. But often this extends to email, too: unless you’re my boss, simply insisting you’re in a hurry isn’t going to get you anywhere if I’m in a hurry, too.
  4. “I’m just following-up to make sure…” – Dude, email works. If you’ve sent me an email, I’ve got it (unless you’ve spelt my name and/or the organisation ID wrong; in that case the email server will send you a heads-up). Follow-ups are okay if the recipient hasn’t replied for at least 24 hours, or in particularly extenuating circumstances like being promised a reply by a certain deadline and for that deadline to have been missed.
  5. This is an organisation-specific thing, although I suspect it’d apply to many small newsrooms: Don’t cc a bunch of editors if your email only needs the attention of one of them, or you’ll bloat their inboxes with emails they may never need to read, destroy their peace of mind and incur their ire. You can also avoid the bystander effect. If you email three editors, each one will think one of the other two will respond while focusing their attention on the billion other emails that only they can answer.

It doesn’t matter to me that someone else’s inbox has 12,353 unread emails and that that doesn’t affect them. Having more than a couple dozen unread emails at a time stresses me out. And I think it might be better if we all assumed this is the case with all email recipients. The less mindful you become about using email, the more you encourage the recipient to impose an extremely high bar of acceptance on the email’s contents, maybe even reject whatever you’re writing about on the first available excuse.

(The less said about spammy websites the better, although Indian government websites have been particularly awful. One ID shared to IRCTC while booking a train ticket will suddenly mean updates about ‘Mann Ki Baat’, job openings at ISRO and posters from the Indian Army telling me about the perks of signing up.)

How we communicate with each other at work also has a mental-health side that too many people overlook too often. There is no device vibrating furiously on my table, a name wrought bright on the screen, with a green icon insisting I drag it up. There are no single ticks waiting to turn double or grey ticks waiting to turn blue. Many people are able to organise their work lives around phone calls and WhatsApp messages; I find them too intrusive.

However, the act of intruding isn’t the technology’s doing, even if it facilitates the intrusion. Users can often make a decision to be less intrusive, and they need to do so more often.1 They need to remember that there’s a way to use email wrong and that that could have the same effect as phone calls. Inculcating email discipline could also help others use email more peacefully, without having to contemplate paid-for solutions they may not be able to afford just to get away from your habits.

Finally, this is a two-way street: you can’t be an email user in bad faith – never responding to any emails and/or using it in infuriating ways yourself – and expect others to be different. My own pleas are suffixed by what I aspire to offer in return, and in fact what all emails should elicit: broadly, an honest, sound, considered reply.

1. Of course, I write here in the extremely limited context of a well-to-do urban email-user corresponding mostly with others who fit the same description. Smartphones in general are intrusive but we can’t just use them differently and incur the attendant benefits if other people don’t join you and continue using smartphones as usual.

13 years

I realised some time ago that I completed 13 years of blogging around January or March (archives on this blog go back to March 2012; the older posts are just awful to read today. The month depends on which post I consider to be my first.). Regardless of how bad my writing in this period has been, I consider the unlikely duration of this habit to be one of the few things that I can be, and enjoy being, unabashedly proud of. I’m grateful at this point for two particular groups of people: readers who email notes (of appreciation or criticism) in response to posts and reviewers who go through many of my posts before they’re published. Let me thank the latter by name: Dhiya, Thomas, Madhusudhan, Jahnavi, Nehmat and Shankar. Thomas in particular has been of tremendous help – an engaged interlocutor of the sort that’s hard to find on any day. Thank you all very much!

Lord of the Rings Day

Here’s wishing you a Happy Lord of the Rings Day! (Previous editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.) On this day in the book, Frodo, Sam and Smeagol (with help from Gandalf, Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, Faramir, Eowyn, Theoden, Eomer, Treebeard and the Ents, Meriadoc, Peregrin, Galadriel, Arwen and many, many others) destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Orodruin, throwing down Barad-dûr, bringing about the end of Sauron the Deceiver and forestalling the Age of Orcs, and making way for peace on Middle Earth.

Even though my – rather our – awareness of the different ways in which Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature more broadly are flawed increases every year, in the last year in particular I’ve come back to the trilogy more than before, finding both that it’s entwined in messy ways with various events in my life, having been the sole piece of fantasy I read between 1998 and 2005, and more importantly, because Lord of the Rings was more expansive than most similar work of its time, I often can’t help but see that much of what came after is responding to it in some way. (I know I’ve made this point before but, as in journalism, what stories we have available to tell doesn’t change just because we’re repeating ourselves. :D)

This said, I don’t know what Lord of the Rings means today, in 2021, simply because the last 15 months or so have been a lousy time for replenishing my creative energy. I haven’t been very able to think about stories, leave alone write them – but on the flip side, I’ve been very grateful for the work and energy of story writers and tellers, irrespective of how much of it they’ve been able to summon, whether one sentence or one book, or the forms in which they’ve been able to summon it, whether as a Wikipedia page, a blog post, a D&D quest or a user’s manual. I’m thankful for all the stories that keep us going just as I’m mindful that everything, even the alt text of images, is fiction. More power to anyone thinking of something and putting it down in words – and also to your readers.

Some good books I read recently

Since January 2020

Read

  1. Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko
  2. Every Creature Has a Story, Janaki Lenin
  3. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
  4. Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist, Frank Close
  5. Shoes of the Dead, Kota Neelima
  6. The Overstory, Richard Powers
  7. Wild and Wilful, Neha Sinha
  8. Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis
  9. Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
  10. The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Reread

  1. On Nuclear Matters, Praful Bidwai
  2. Toll the Hounds, Steven Erikson (Malazan 8)
  3. Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, Vaasanthi
  4. Karunanidhi, Sandhya Ravishankar
  5. Still Bleeding from the Wound, Ashokamitran
  6. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder
  7. Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Now reading: A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman

Next

  1. Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici
  2. A Burning, Megha Majumdar
  3. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
  4. When the Whales Leave, Yuri Rytkheu

Thanks to Srividya, Jahnavi, Dhiya, Shankar and Siddharth for the recommendations!

End of a tab-hoarding era

Google Chrome just pulled the plug on the Great Suspender browser extension. The Great Suspender allowed its users to keep lots of tabs open at any time on Chrome without guzzling RAM, which Chrome is notorious for – simply by keeping the tab open but not displaying any of the page’s contents. When a user does need to view the page’s contents, they could just click the ‘frozen’ page and the tab’s contents would load then. So by getting the RAM consideration out of the way (mostly), the Great Suspender engendered certain questionable browsing habits, like believing that I could read everything I discovered on the internet or had been shared with me (and which was worth reading, of course) if only I could keep track of them. At last check, my Great Suspender extension was handling 48 tabs.

Now that Google has eliminated the extension without nary a warning, I – like many thousands of users – find ourselves suddenly bereaved, with a giant tab-shaped hole in our lives. I’m not even sure, even though a few hours have passed, if I’m feeling good or bad about this. The reason appears to be that the extension’s original developer sold it to another, unknown person in June 2020, this person snuck in some malicious code in a subsequent version, and it’s been downhill from there (more info and some technical workarounds here).

There are of course other extensions like this one, especially now that this particular one is no more, but the Great Suspender also came recommended from many of those tech-news sites like Mashable. I also don’t have the competence to independently judge how good and safe each one is. Perhaps more importantly, for tech-semi-illiterate or -illiterate people like me, to discover that extensions like the Great Suspender can include and run malware also imposes another layer of wariness towards add-ons, plug-ins, etc. It’s another issue to evade, yet another point to look out for in articles recommending these things, and until I get a recommendation that’s that robust, I’m going to give extensions of this sort a skip.

This also means I need to pay more attention to how I spend my time online. Without being able to hoard tabs, I need to focus on pages I’m likelier to consume soon instead of mindlessly trawling through everything that strikes my fancy. A laptop with more RAM is also out of the question considering how costly they have become. A couple small mercies: I don’t have to give up the luxury of being able to reading an article long after I’ve discovered it, when I’m in just the mood for it, thanks to Pocket.

Update (8:42 am, February 7, 2021): As one reader pointed out, there’s also One Tab – an extension that allows users to collect links to multiple tabs in a single page with the click of a button, and restores them with similar ease. But while it seems like a different way to execute the same paradigm, of working around Chrome’s RAM needs, it may also impose an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mindset that allows users to ‘collect’ tabs en masse but may not help them remember that they’re there. So using One Tab to dispense the same duties that the Great Suspender did will also require behaviour change, which is costly. So let’s see.

Good luck with your Maggi

You know when you’re cooking a packet of Maggi noodles in a saucepan, and you haven’t used enough water or don’t move the stuff soon enough from the pan to a plate once it’s done cooking, and you’re basically left with a hot lump of maida stuck to the bottom? That’s 2020. When you cook Maggi right, right up to mixing in a stick of butter at the end, you get a flavourful, well-lubricated, springy mass of strings that’s a pleasure to eat at the end of a long day. Once in a while you stick a fork into the plate and pull up a particularly long noodle, and you relish sucking it into your mouth from start to finish, with the masala dripping off at the end. That was probably many other years – when you had a strong sense of time moving from one event to the next, a sense of progression that helps you recall chronologies even long after you’ve forgotten what happened in March and what in September. For example, 2015 in my mind is cleanly divided into two parts – before May 11 and after May 11 – and memories of little personal accomplishments from that time are backgrounded by whether The Wire existed at the time. If it did, then I know the accomplishment happened after May 11. The Wire‘s birth effectively became an inflection in time that cut a little notch in the great noodle of 2015, a reference mark that created a before and an after. 2020 had none of this. It forsook all arrows of time; it wasn’t linear in any sense, not even non-linear in the sense of being exponential or logarithmic. It was practically anti-linear. Causality became a joke as the pandemic and its attendant restrictions on society fucked with the mind’s ability to tell one day apart from the next. So many of us beheld the world from our windows or balconies, although it wasn’t as if the world itself moved on without us. We weren’t there to world the world. Or maybe we were, but our collective grief at being imprisoned, literally and otherwise, seemed to be able to reshape our neighbourhoods, our surroundings, our shared cosmologies even and infused the fabrics of our every day with a cynical dye that we know won’t come off easily. Many of our lived experiences carried an awful symmetry like the circular one of a bangle, or a CD. How do you orient it? How do you say which way is up, or left, just by looking at it? You can’t. In the parlance of Euclidean geometry, 2020 was just as non-orientable. There was no before and after. Even our universe isn’t as bad: despite the maddening nature of the flatness problem, and the even more maddening fact of Earth’s asymptotically infinite loneliness, the universe is nearly flat. You’d have to travel trillions upon trillions of light-years in any direction before you have any chance of venturing into your past, and even then only because our instruments and our sciences aren’t accurate enough to assert, with complete certainty, that the universe is entirely flat and that your past will always lie in the causal history of your future. 2020 was, however, a singularity – an entrapment of reality within a glass bubble in which time flowed in an orbit around the centre, in perpetual free-fall and at the same time managing to get nowhere really. You can forget teasing out individual noodles from the hot lump on your plate because it’s really a black hole, probably something worse for shunning any of the mysteries that surround the microscopic structure of black holes in favour of maida, that great agent of constipation. As you stare at it, you could wait for its effects to evaporate; you could throw more crap into it in the hopes of destabilising it, like pushing yourself to the brink of nihilism that Thucydides noticed among the epidemic-stricken people of Athens more than two millennia ago; or you could figure out ingenious ways à la Penrose to get something good out of it. If you figure this out, please let the rest of us know. And until then, good luck with your Maggi.

Ending 2020

My blogging took a hit this year – as did everything for everyone. I couldn’t publish nearly as much as I’d have liked. While the average post length was the highest it’s ever been – 989 words – and audience engagement was through the roof, I had to just forget many ideas for posts I’d had because I lacked the time and more importantly any creative energy to produce them. Since around May, I felt like writing only on the weekends, and only if an idea or an insight crossed a threshold of interestingness that for some reason kept climbing higher.

YearPostsWords
201211981,710
20139671,096
2014163117,302
2015209181,233
20166455,206
2017135114,737
2018184145,530
2019169136,241
2020113111,752

That said, I have two takeaways from blogging this year. The first is a minor one – that I’ve published 1,200 posts in all now. I don’t think of this number except at the end of every year; its bigness feels reassuring, and reminds me when I’m down that I haven’t entirely wasted my time.

The other takeaway is that it’s certainly becoming harder to get through to The Other Side, as their louder commentators clamber further down their rabbit hole, and further persist with argumentative tactics guided not by reason or even the pursuit of common ground but by the need to uphold Hindutva at all times. And as they’ve dug their heels in, I’ve found I’ve been doing the same thing, although not deliberately. I’ve used the first person to refer to positions and the provenance of argumentative tacks more in 2020 than in any other year, and I’ve also been less and less inclined to spell my position – as if I’ve become sub-consciously aware that I’m no longer speaking out to change minds as much as to harden the stances of those who have already expressed solidarity.

I’m not entirely happy with this shift, this closing of the gates – even if it sounds more productive, as the engagement data also attests – because I don’t know whether when all this tides over, and it will tide over, I will be capable of reopening the gates as swiftly as I might need to. Granted, keeping the gates open even a little bit now – i.e. attempting to reason every now and then with those who aren’t amenable to reason – could prove injurious, but I remain convinced for now that it’s the smaller price to pay. And this is why I think the continuously rising threshold of interestingness is a coping mechanism of sorts, an internally supplied resistance to the hardening of the exterior.

I’m excited to find out where blogging, writing, reporting, editing, publishing in 2021 will take me – will take us all, in fact.