The picture is from a bridge on the way to Kappad. It is artlessly out of focus and I was probably breaking more serious rules stopping over the bridge and taking a picture (than the rule-of-thirds-and-tilted-horizons). All I can tell you is (that) the gradients were as insane as expected.

The evening tints itself into the night sooner these days and I start late at 5:30; the ride is an hour (or sixteen buttery smooth kilometers) long, in good (as in almost no-) traffic and when the sun sets around 6:15 on regular days. By the time I get to this (picture-situation-above) it is already ISO60000 lighting and getting noisier and I resort to sunken-cost-thinking to keep pedalling. The beach is empty (save for a couple of couples and a late-evening-gathering-of-bros and the volunteer lifeguards inspecting the groynes for traces of selfie-takers-with-good-night-mode-endowed-cameras and alcohol-related intentions [deadly combination, that, on an artificial wall extending a good length into the evening retreat-monsoon sea]) and not many engines are running to pepper an otherwise good sea-wave-static with misfiring pistons. I record some sea-silence then give up when the bros decide to walk past discussing relationship troubles. (I have nothing against relationship troubles; ninety-nine-problems, etc. But that over sea-noise makes for a shoddy ASMR bit after.)

The sky is clearer and starrier than (even) my nostalgia-tinted-recollection of how clear and starry the night sky in remote (-ish) parts of Kozhikode is. It isn’t an average kinda clarity—the sky is clear and tinted green-to-orange in colours that would be illegal in a design foundation course from this end to that end and all around. Whatever is left of the moon is bright enough to drain the few solar-street-lights trying hard to keep up with the falling light. The edges of the sea glisten in silvery reflected moonlight bits. I move closer to the edge to double-check if it is a school of fish taking diving lessons. I think of taking a picture to show off later, and I do, only to realise night-mode on the phone means other unspeakable things. (Despite the inherent snobbery, I catch myself in the act of taking phone-pictures—panoramas of square subjects even—too often these days.) Lying down with the new aggressive™ helmet[1] on, I count the same stars many times over and decide it is better just to watch out for stray crabs trying to burrow new bases into my Kurta-folds. A couple of confused-crabs-crawling-over—you down, this whole lying-on-the-beach-looking-up-at-the-sky business starts to lose its charm.

The ride home is mostly eventless. It is a night so low on traffic, cresting a granny-gear-climb (there are at least three on the route, depending on how out-of-breath you are and how thicc the tyres) almost always rewards one with a kilometer long stretch where it is nice to coast and let the bicycle take you wherever it takes you. I think I understand some of the Punjabi kids in Gurgaon at some meta level now, zigzagging over asphalt on a Friday night in their open-top Audis. (Part of the fun in coasting over a low gradient is in going even more aero and pretending you have TT bars on.) Portions on the way back are so silent (shout out to ULCCS!) the Schwalbe Silentos are the only sources of notable noise over crickets and freewheel. Their naming is a road-stud-faced lie. The one-minute (more like thirty seconds) stretch through the banana orchard is not in season and is an eerie wasteland of free-standing plantain-support-poles.

Rides alone in the night—not solely because I prefer it that way; because I have no friends… to ride with—are a mix of tension, eerie clarity on life etcetera, worrying when the headlight[2] is going to run out of juice because you failed at adulting and recharging stuff when stuff needed recharging, wondering where you left the Staedtler mechanical pencil, etc. It is problematic when you’re riding to get away from too much clarity, etc.

—

1: I got this one because the other, more sedate commuter helmet gets too hot riding to work. Because the aggro™ makes me go faster even when presiding over a traffucked junction. Because it is way more noticeable and aero unlike the last one (a brick, a sizeable one, sideways, with a huge sail to top things off, in comparison). I keep wearing it lying down because I have no clue where I can prop it up without getting sand allover places where sand has no business getting allover. Because it was awkward to lie down and hug the helmet on my chest and look like a confused sea otter in action.

2: NiteRider replaced my Swift-450 with a -500 no-questions-asked. I love how this unfolded: the USB bit inside failed in an year-and-then-some; I read their lifetime replacement policy and left the thing with BoatRider; they replace it a couple of weeks later and call me up to go collect the new one. (Would I have preferred repairing this? Did I have the tiny soldering apparatus even if I could manage the tutorial-watching? Yes, and No.) The 500 is bright-as-hell and warms your hands when pretend-riding TT-style over the bars.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

— Richard Powers, The Overstory

I read parts of Overstory perched high(…ish) above the ground, atop a concrete Maple in Vijayawada. The balcony at the eleventh floor fortress is surprisingly calm and reading-inducing, despite (or maybe, because of) the drizzle and the breeze and the bird’s eye view it shoves on you unasked. It is only after I leave the raintrees alone and come home, that the strange and lamentable significance of the building-naming-scheme[1] sinks in. Whether the builders or the people-generally-upset-at-the-absurdity-of-naming-things-after-what-was-destroyed-on-the-way-to-the-things-themselves like it or not, being in a building named after a tree (I was in Pine for most of my stay; the choice of name made severely appropriate by how gloriously alone I was for the last three weeks.) makes you see and do things differently, say, from being in a building named after itself. (Hostel 13 said HOUSE OF TITANS in university-gothic letters—awkward-cornered inlines, protruding outlines, stab-serifs[2]—and one always felt someone shrouded in security-uniform-colours was about to ID you getting out of the john.)

I read significant parts of the book (the ‘Roots’ is poetic and a guaranteed tearjerker) with the day’s newspapers laid open to the Aarey disater with an effing parking lot over dead stumps. This was reminiscent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide in ways more than one and none of those ways was fun.

With all the teaching, I’ve been more than drowning the bicycle-trips to the studio in truckloads of carbon-footprinting. On a peculiar night at AmalodTheGreat[3] over cups of thick tea, I quasi-decided to ride to the next course (in Hyderabad) and failed to realise there was not under- but over-one-thousand kilometers separating home from the college. It would have easily taken 10 days with hundred-plus kilometer days to get there in time for the first day of class. This, I am not prepared for, with the many projects deadlining in November. Yet, it looks like a good opportunity to turn courses into aftermaths of long-distance bicycle-trips; it seems like the only strict brief one could give oneself to stick to the road and hope for tailwinds. Wishful thinking: the money made from the courses can then go into funding the trips and not into unnecessary bits of gear that tie one down to a place. (I’ve come to terms with there being nothing wrong with tying oneself down to a place, mentally. Besides, the place I am tied down to is beautiful; yet it is a place in place.)

1: The other structures are named after Walnuts and Teaks. There is a tea-shop under Teak that is good material for low-hanging-fruit-puns. I’m in two minds about Walnut and Maple; they don’t do poetic justice to the the whole shebang, IMNSHO.

2: Joke! Just in case.

3: AmalodTheGreat is Vijayawada’s chai-gate in limbo. (From Wordweb: Limbo: ‘The place of unbaptized but innocent or righteous souls [such as infants and virtuous individuals].’)

Like most (eh?) five year olds who grew up on a steady diet of Manichithrathazhu, I was madly, hopelessly, somewhat anachronistically in love with Shobhana.

Without fail, the film marked the bringing-home of new video-viewing technhology. Post purchase of a VCR, VCD player, DVD player and so on, depending on the year, on the way home from one of the few weirdly architecture-d appliance shops (one was clad in a three-storey tall wall of glass and falling water) in Kozhikode, we would stop religiously at this video cassette shop in Kakkoor (that gave way to the CD rental shop where we reenacted the ritual with eerily similar longing despite the advancing years) and relieve the shopkeeper of a recent copy of the film. We continued the tradition long enough to watch the YouTubed version as we brought in the flat-screen TV only couple of years ago. Like Shobhana, Manichitrathazhu hasn’t aged a day since my feverish five-year-old-boy encounter with her uncompromising, wholesome grace.

Various heroines made mincemeat of what was left of my cardiovascular system and associated parts later in my teens. Yet Shobhana remained the sole, spirited image of a fierce, unattainable, truly significant, other. Over at r/kerala, someone mentioned this 2002 Karan Thapar interview with her and she is variously bold, beautiful (duh) and intimidating. If I say any more, this is going to sound like an unsent inland-love-letter. So, here is the thing.

Ten (…ish) rules for students and teachers. Half-way through the Typography-1 course. Good kids, unforgiving weather, too many holidays, not enough LAN cable, too many exercises in the spreadsheet, not enough hours in the day. Better chocolate-tarts at Baker’s Inn (no apostrophe in the original and I do have a problem with that) this time around. Number six reads:

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

Link

Despite being in Mrs A’s reading list from college and his turning up (often tucked away into uncanny corners) in commercial bookshelves everywhere, I’d delayed picking an Oliver Sacks book up, thinking I’ll find one in a library someday or technically ‘borrow’ one. Vintage Sacks is from SPLRC (of the DiceyDewey’s fame). Sacks makes chemistry (of the trivalent-bond-and-isotopes kind) feel deeply personal. (The chapter is titled Stinks and Bangs.) I wish chemistry textbooks from my literature-starved hostel years were written with such love and sense of adventure. In twenty-twenty-perfect-hindsight, I think the textbooks (the NCERT ones in two-colour offset [1]) took things too seriously and forgot test-tubes over bunsen burners were also supposed to be fun in mysterious ways. (This is a well […ish] description of Sacks’s description of test-tubes-over-bunsen-burners.)

I’m about to head to Vijayawada for a re-run (hardly; same river, not twice, all that) of the typography course and think this divine-ish intervention calls for a much more end-products-unknown approach for it to balance out the dashes-dots-spaces-pedantry.

In an excerpt from Uncle Tungsten, Sacks footnotes Euler’s thoughts on lights, colours and (inevitably) music.

The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.

I’m so going to find a way to shoehorn that into a lesson on the black-on-white-and-readallover typography landscape.

1: Their managing science textbook diagrams with just two colours (often a sedate palette at that) wasn’t particularly amusing then. Wish I could say I was entranced, etc., but in reality, I was stuck SunTzu-ing my way to entrance exams like almost everyone else.

I’ve had this phone since 2012. The 7-year itch is a good self-deprecating joke to go back to, for lack of material isn’t exactly uncommon but I realised it was no small feat on an email thread to V. The phone was a Diwali gift from Co (I had started working there after the dip) and was light-years ahead of the Nokia I was wielding to scare dogs away on my way back home in the ill-lit streets of SushantLokPhaseOne.[1] It is—technically—not the same phone in Theseus-terms; I’ve replaced the screen twice (Once on my own for INR 500; an achievement I wish I had a certificate to show off for. I’d moved out of the hostel-with-the-neighbour-with-a-pentalobe-screwdriver by the time that broke again.), taken the camera module off after short-circuiting the flash innards riding to Wayanad in the rain, with the second screen broken (and not taped over like in the scan here) and the phone soaking up water in my raincoat’s pocket. In the beginning, I could do serious damage (or so I fantasised) with just the phone and a fruit-branded ecosystem. The photos looked alright with heavy-handed Instagram filters but it was the scan-for-processing that worked like a charm. Tethering the thing to the Mac was flawless and I could go from sketch to vector in a matter of minutes.

Thanks to being so far out of the OS update loop, I was getting two-three-even-four days of life from a full charge. It had essentially become a Nokia if one were to discount its breaking often in the last couple of years. Except for the orientation-challenged 30-pin connector, it was perfect for a low-tech lifestyle in spite of the smartness bits. As a phone to make calls and type properly punctuated, smart-quoted text messages with, it delivered way more than what I had come to expect from seven-year old electronics with screens on them. Yet, I was dreading the day the thing finally needed replacement not because we had fallen in love. I do believe it is perhaps possible to feel quasi-mystical connection with things, especially when they have known intimate stuff about your choices for years. While it is somewhat (…) true that I am too much of a cheapskate when it comes to undoing purse-strings over anything other than upgrades to bicycle-parts that don’t really need them, I was also dreading the loss of street-cred (no?) and facing the possibility that the next phone might not last as long as this one. Plus, how long do I wait before markering the figleaves out of the selfie camera from the inside?

I’ve made the switch to a more (…ish, at least) modern thing with a lovely greyscale view doodad that I switch out of only to make sure the colour bits still work. It is thinner and taller and wakes up when lifted and given scritches with love. Or maybe I am mixing this up with Miss K on that last one.

Now, hold my Sambharam while I congratulate self variously over apparent frugality and finally being able to superswipe people on Tinder.

1: Diwali, light-years, ill-lit, Phase One. Stop reading if you aren’t laughing hysterically already.

Dried moss (lichen) on the rock makes it super-grippy[1]. The climb up is easy, in-spite of the fixed-gear ride leading up to it and my being out of breath (not planned) and water (planned cockiness I now regret). Lying down on the pockmarked summit (it isn’t a sizeable climb; just a sizeable climb right after a ride and unfortunate decisions) rewards one with a breathtaking third-floor-terrace-view framed for the most part by coconut groves long overdue their general grooming. (That does remind me of the aerodynamics of riding a bicycle while bearded but that tigress we shall address later.) It is near-silent, except for the faraway beats of a song being played at some wedding reception (today is one of those weekends after an astrologically well-endowed week and it shows) and the odd Bullt misfiring in the distance. (You are never far from a motorcycle in these parts, remote as the parts are.) I can hear the birds—most are crows heading home, some bats waking up—flap their wings. It is an odd sound; something you don’t want to expect as BGM while attempting to contemplate life, the multiverse, rising price of gold, etc. I grew up in a house near this rock and was denied late-evening visits till I was old enough to ride a bicycle without people waiting along the road as if it was leTour. It was a fuller rock-formation ‘back in the days;’ many homes got built over solid foundations since then and what is left of the quarry is a cricket-badminton-coconut-drying field in the non-rainy months. The niches left in the rock-face where boulders were blasted out make for a gallery worthy of ticketed entry. Some brilliant, harmless village-funds-redirection makes for ample lighting post sundown—when someone decides to get the Panchayath to fix the LD-Resistors on the electric-pole LEDs. The LEDs are not in the mood to work today. The scene is hiplessly un-lit. The only shop (down the rock along the gravel road; the blue tarpaulin in the photograph) in these parts is shut (the shopkeeper is a shout away, and it isn’t like there are no motorcycles around for a trip to the town). My new-old phone—after seven years of missed application updates and broken glass—is good at stitching panoramas. I remind myself throwing away the little green paper pieces was worth the effort and then quickly re-seal the waterproof pouch.

It starts to drizzle. Spray-and-pray in terms of hitting crucial electronics. Dried moss assumes oil-slick-consistency when wet. It glistens in rainbow colours. It starts redefining slippery. I think up scenarios where I am variously stuck on top for the night (no big deal, apart from it not being voluntary and my having heard foxes on other nights), slide down the rock-face face down (big-deal), run down yelling nothing (big-if-true-deal), etc. The clouds pass and the rain fades, not before my khakis burst into irregular polka dots of cold and start speaking clingon. There are many things worse than a shower that prematurely drops the mic, including having to slide down a rock-face, face down, etc. I am thankful of the polka dots and the added motorcycle-silence the rain brings with it. The bird-wings flap louder and the sound echoes against the concave rock-face. Ungroomed coconut trees let go of some leaves and coconuts in the wind. There is enlightenment in the air.

The ride home is slower, for there are no fenders on the #F00 and for the NR450 is awaiting its warrantied fate at the bicycle shop. (They haven’t called yet, despite the enthusiaashaan and promises to transcend customer-support timezones.) The motorcycles are out again and drain the puny backup front-light on the #F00 in their holier-than-thou beams.

1: Grippy, unlike the Supacaz tape that left me 5x poorer than the normal ones. Consider this my official review and stay away from them if you are hovering over an add-to-cart button somewhere on the internets.

On-camera oversaturation—with the Vivid Velvia film simulation mode—on top of a by-monsoon oversaturation. Shot on the battered Fuji X20; there is some poetic justice left in that.

I overestimated how much reach the calipers needed and wore the decals before moving back to the one-brake-life. The (geared and adequately clad in brakes) FC sees more of the road these days, yet it is so much nicer to break into a sprint on the #F00 when all you have to worry about is how far it will take for the braking to kick in.

Once you get over the SPLRC-C librarians’ own P2C2E way of dealing with Dewey’s Decimals, and one in every ten books with a live moth eating Rorschach patterns into its innards as you grapple with the expertly repurposed cardboard box for a cover, the shelves start to proffer gems like ‘Tower of Birds’ every other time you decide to drop by for new books.

Printed in 1989 by the USSR-state-owned Raduga (Rainbow) Publishers, Tower of Birds was an unexpected (as all things chanced upon at SPLRC-C tend to be) find that turned out to be full of sedate, often quirky tales of man versus (not really) the super- and otherwise natural. ‘The Piano Tuner’—the first, seventeen-page story by Viktor Kolupayev[1]—reminded me of Schickler’s short ‘The Smoker’ and set expectations just right. (A certain somebody may have scanned the pages if you can’t find a copy somewhere.)

For a chance find, the stories were appropriately overwhelming. That (alone) is not what made me fall in love with the book though. For a book that tiny (from an L*W point of view, not from a thickness one), it is produced with attention lavished to details most others would consider ripe for cost-cutting. (It is perhaps a Russian culture-thing and I am attributing great intent to it.) The book’s text-block is printed in black, except for the page numbers in green. That is a major oddity when nothing else of note—neither the titles nor the book’s half-title—is printed with the same green ink. The margins are lavish for such a small page size; you never run out of thumb-room as you fight the undulations of a packed state-bus over half-full potholes. One other thing that reminds you of potholes is the terrible justification; seven words per column is a recipe for major waterways in the text-block.[2] The colophon credits the designer[3] appropriately and does not make that seem an afterthought. The signatures are numbered (this is not the norm, even for Raduga’s own books I checked later at the library) for some reason. I don’t see that information being useful to anyone other than perhaps the book binding machine. To top things off in true socialist fashion, there is an honest appeal to the readers to share their comments on the book, at the very end.

Edit: Look at that contents page! It is beautifully—if a bit awkwardly around P278—typeset with one font at one size and two styles. Outside of a classroom, I’m a sucker for the one-face-one-size technique. Sadly, it lacks true italics (and oldstyle numerals, if we are at it) and the tabulation is a bit wonky, but its heart is in the right place.

If this is/was propaganda, this is propaganda well-made.

1: Kolupayev was a Mathematician/Bionicist(?) before he started writing SF at the age of 33.

2: The choice of type and the setting positively sucks, if you’re pixel-peeping. I guess the stories and the intent cloud my judgement.

3: Look for Gukova’s foldout books on the website.

No-fluff guide to digital typography. Great books too. Link.