I just spent the major part of my Sunday getting Zettlr to work well as a distraction-free[1] writing interface, complete with a monospaced face and appropriate fore-ground-back-ground colours. (#000 and #8a8a8f for now. AND now I am noticing the octothorpes turning into jellyfish-blue tags.) I digress. Suffices to say working around blaming one’s tools takes way more time than coughing up 5K for that sweet single-device iA Writer license. I must say it is time well spent, except that it meant time away from my girls[2]. Conflict. I digress.

At some point in the five years (5!) spent on teaching pilgrimages[3], I realised almost all of the conceptual, nuanced typographic choices can be made with a deliberate extension of gestalt’s principles. Seen in that (to me) new light, the needless—but fun!—debate over ‘rules’ disappeared, and a demonstrable set of checks-and-balances replaced them. I felt an appropriate amount of self-pity at having taken so long to ‘see’ it. I’m trying to convince self the most appropriate penance for something of this magnitude, is to write a book about it. Considering how productive I have been with side-quests recently, it is only wise to use thisbloghere as a way to publicly commit to finishing the thing (including ink, paper, thread, staples, blades, and all) this year.

I have a rough outline in progress, as well as a few to-do checklist items. (Just making them up as I type, really. This is blog-post as performance. It is a potent mess.)

• Must be shorter than Jost Hochuli’s excellent ‘Details in Typography’. Around 50 pages. [4]
• Pages must work like slides. (Not wordy, have illustrated examples.)
• Discuss the principles in detail, referring original texts as much as possible. I have been using the Khan Academy video as a refresher for students all this while.
• Use a typographic problem to discuss a principle. This can be tricky; so not set in stone.
• Talk about lists. Talk about alignment. Talk about letterforms.
• Use Indic examples. Use bilingual examples.
• Use examples from KL11’s work. Some vulnerability there.
• Limit discussion to practise. Not a philosophy book.

Now that we have got that out of the way, here are some ‘asks’ to the 35 (R says; I say 3–5) readers of mine.

• If you have come across specifically gestalt-driven discussions of layout/typesetting problems, please let me know.
• Also tell me what you think of putting another rainforest to pulp for such a thing. Sensible?
• How are you?
• My email ID is abhijith@keyaar.in and I would love to reply to all the emails you can throw at it.

So this, is what I ‘eventually’ want to do: make books. Ink and pixels. It’s also been too long since Dekho and WID and MT.

[1]: Distraction-free implementation takes a while to get right. The right balance between focus and isolation is tricky at best. I see why iA is expensive. Safe to assume Ananthu has been a power user of Zettlr for a while, so I’m going to talk to him about this.
[2]: Chellam turned 2. R bow-tied and scarfed her. Our friendly neighbourhood-ish chicken-stall guy gave us so much extra parts the fridge is having a hard time. We believe she is famous in the town for coming along on all trips.
[3]: There is a link to some of the material at exif/teaching Justincase. ‘Infinite-Gestalt’ is what we had (unanimously in the way dictatorships are run) christened a Typography2 course in 2022.
[4]: Girish introduced us to the book. Short, to-the-point, fresh.

Links

While binge-skipping through Lincoln Lawyer behind an unmanageable large Figma file, came across this beautiful Mattiel Song. Forest has been good company. Such beauty everywhere on the internet. Here is ‘Introducing the Concept of Radical User Friendliness in Web Design.’

Part of the reason[1] I have not started reading Killing Commendatore is an embarrassing failure to get into the required Murakami-reading mood. (And I consider myself a Murakami veteran without a hint of modesty or self deprecation. I know I can do much worse.) It isn’t a hard-to-come-by state of mind; I just need to be a little (on the fence) lost in some song—preferably away with words—on repeat for long enough and have strong black tea on the proverbial tap and an unexplained longing for something that on clearheaded review turns out to be a simple, boring, everyday thing, like a black-capped-box of 2B pencil leads. This is easy when you are on the verge of completing yet another decade around the sun and are living out of a (proverbial) backpack around people (much?) younger than your road-worn self pretending to assume you may be wiser/dumber than what your costume gives away.

I started reading Zen and the Art under an RTO office waiting on R waiting in line for taking a Learner’s License test. This (not the RT office, the book) was the one with the pseudopsychedelic cover and neat typesetting (over cheap paperback pages, so it wasn’t all that bad). It made complete sense as I overheard the to-be-drivers of heavy metal objects talking about machine parts the way art-school-dropouts talk about a seventy course meal. I don’t even know enough art school dropouts and the closest I have come to a three-plus-course meal was by accident and was promptly asked to leave for not wearing the right kind of shoes.[2]

I read the Structure-Culture Document first under a sleepless night-sky sandwiched between the Exhibition- and Product-Design studios in Paldi. The Chocolate-Seeng-Sev-Maska-Bun[3] (I am impervious to that kind of judgement) after the event tasted more chalk-like than chocolatey and no amount of post-allnighter banter—with the screwed up intensity that shows its ugly face after hours of out-kerning otherwise perfectly kerned type—could make a chink in my newfound armour of solitude. I’d read the word of HKV and couldn’t help but look at the manual-kerning proletariat in thinly veiled disdain. My glasses were tinted primary colours and misted over by tea fumes.

It was over an ‘all-chocolate’ Chocolate Tart[4] at Baker’s Inn that I bit into Moveable Feast (finishing it over a bottle of flavoured milk under the ANU’s OpenAirTheatre). The point is that each book demands you reenact its making in some tiny simple significant way even when that means lugging around a tome for six weeks and not opening it the tiniest crack. Sometimes this means holding on to a grab-rail in an otherwise packed bus with one hand with two bags in the other and sometimes it means ignoring mosquito bites under a muddy sky off a dimly lit road across a paddy field. (Wear shorts.) The point is that the book rewards you when the tableau is finally set and the first paragraph turns out to be better, sweeter, less strained than the way you have always imagined it, which it always has a way of turning out to be.

1: The other part of the reason is that I’m lazy and reading pocket-penguins marathon-style to put off reading the M till I get back to the hardback. The other other part of the reason is that M is—because I am gullible to cathartic hero-identification—unputdownable and would interfere with the guiding of the already somewhat lost generation of 4th year students I am supposedly helping out of their design education.

2: I consider that a major league affront as a person not used to wearing any kind of shoes till then. But then it turned out to be a life lesson in disguise (the Clark-kent kind, not the MI-X kind), waiting for some (…) hours in a bus shelter along Africa Avenue (near Connaught Place, not Capetown) in peak winter. I know what you are thinking. Winter. No shoes. Yet, the bus shelter was obviously not the coldest thing I encountered that night. Had no book for company either.

3: The ChocolateSeengSevMaska-Bun is a cultural artefact the way Kathakali or a ShajiKailas-Mohanlal movie is. It is the simplest way to describe a microculture, which is a shamefully shallow way of shying away from saying it is a major statement about a bigger demographic unit. It is unapologetic in its diversity and calorific value. In other words, it is the metric unit for measuring unadulterated jouissance. A chocolate tart is a solid 3 CSSMBs. The Baker’s Inn version is 0.4 CSSMBs at its crest.

4: This one had a piece of cake taking up the bulk of the tart. It was more like 10% of the tart, but I get to exaggerate. A 60-rupee tart has no business hiding a piece of bread (brown kek) to save on artificial chocolate. I consider dishing out a longwinded piece of advice on brand values and honesty and optimum fake chocolate amounts to the lady behind the counter in the sweetest way possible inside of a bakery. Then I remember the staff had thus far been unnecessarily nice to me and had not thrown me out even after badly timed chuckles from behind cheap-looking paperbacks and dried-up coffee cups. Then I smile a polite thankyou smile and quietly crawl back behind the coffee cups. I have a feeling they all knew about the bread-in-tart situation and were instructed to be nice to people ordering it anyway.

Come morning, we draw our drinking water from the well next to the old kitchen. Most mallu concrete homes have an extended, appended second kitchen since the one inside, in a bit of cement-tinted fate, starts—right after the paalukaachal—leaving the entire house smelling like roasted chillies after half an hour of frantic cooking. Some say that is a good thing. Our entire extended family disagreed and built the second kitchen in an act of misguided conformity anyway.

It is not that the water pump refuses to run off an absence of electricity. Mallu kids are trained to not trust tap water from a very young age. (Some of our bedtime stories were actually tales of horror from Bolivia. In terror, we would hold tight to our party membership cards pinned to our diapers.) But we would drink off the copper taps at the school or from the heavy, galvanised iron ones that poke a hole through their milestone bases on the road, along the paddy fields we appropriated as playgrounds during the two-three dull months after harvest. At home, we draw water in used rubber-tube-buckets tied to ropes, looped around well oiled wooden rollers, hung from hooks above the wells in various states of disarray. The ropes, yellow plastic ones peppered in ambiguous red markers, twisted and untwisted as our mothers and fathers and feisty grandmothers drew bucket after bucket, craning their necks to see if the clothesline is in any danger of getting soaked in the impending rain.

Drawing from the well is easy during the monsoon months; the water comes up to meet the bucket less than halfway down its usual plight. The rope is tied short and the extra length coiled into a heap on the net that covers the well. Re-purposed mosquito net stocking-s the well, put in place after both of us boys graduated from our hostels with our mosquito nets intact. The water is crystal clear too. On days when all the nocturnal typing leaves me waking up past everybody else and missing the water-drawing deadline, I try hiding my shame commenting on this clarity, obsessively chopping tender elephant-leaf leaves into some semblance of order, for lunch. The misdirection never works; my mother’s notion of the ‘irresponsible elder child’ is too insurmountable a summit that early in the morning. Underslept and out of topics of diversion, I drown her complaints instead in the only radio station that makes sense that side of seven.

As I peer down the well, I am reminded of Lakshadweep-getaway photos behind postcards other people bring home from vacations in other places far from the Dweeps. In the well, the water is a bluish green. The level has climbed up, and is about to breach that one step where snakes shed their skin come summer. The last two summers, we had to remove at least four of those. The year before my grandfather was bedridden, he used freshly upturned soil around our piece of land for one of his tapioca plantation adventures. The oversized rats that year took care of the crop, and laid the underground tunnel system these snakes so readily borrow on their way to the well. We were very calm about the whole plantation business though, since the last one had turned sour, after the local drinking fraternity uprooted fresh stems-along the main road-and stuck them back in, upside down. Tapioca refuses to grow well that way. The alcoholically inclined were protesting his objection to drunken brawls near the bus-stop across the road, refusing to let go of their party membership cards and the diapers. (There is no easy way of telling when the tapioca stems are inverted. During planting, they are marked, or aligned a specific way to make sure they go into the earth the way they came out.) Grandfather was very nice and forgave them their subversion with a smile. He never went back to criticising their ways in public. The snakes were happier last summer.

Early mornings at KL11; light rain, schoolkids hanging onto their umbrellas and their auto drivers. Silence off the lampposts.

Graduating again in a few days. This is what I have learnt in two years. That, and sneaking V for Vendetta references into thesis reports is fun. (Also, that barring my typewriter and the book about typewriters, all life's essentials can fit into a 35L backpack.)

From afar, places are things.