Hello!

This week has been slow - mainly because I've been focussing on eating better, and getting back to my exercise routine.I miss running, and the 2-3 week gap has made it a tougher battle to get back.

I've also been distracted a lot more this week - by a shiny-object syndrome, which has put me in a pickle for productivity.

-Teej

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🥘 Cook-at-Home Challenge

This has been a fun experiment to do. We've cooked and eaten a total of 21 meals this past week, and it has been incredible.Street food still makes my tummy rumble, but I've been able to actively avoid it. Kind of counting the days to when I can eat masalapuri, but I'm assuming we'll end up making it at home.

I started a small accountability group on WhatsApp, where we talk about food we've made at home, and post photos to make sure we don't fall off the bandwagon. Feel free to join in on the fun! :)

💪🏽 Tagda Raho

Gardimane had been hit-or-miss - in terms of learning.The workout was amazing - nothing feels as good as playing in a mud pit, especially as an adult.

I joined Tagda Raho as an alternate a couple of months ago. It has been going great so far! The structured programme is something I enjoy a lot more, though the group isn't as chatty as the gardimane bois.

Looking forward to something that works with both worlds. Maybe.

🍪 Migration to Hardware

The past week I've been bingeing on a lot of hardware content - from schematic design to printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing, and even playing with KiCAD - a tool for designing hardware.

All this feels like from a different lifetime ago when I used to play around with Eagle (a similar software tool) to build custom PCBs for games I envisioned for Technites - the entertainment division of my college's tech festWe built a 400 sqft game board on our department building and played Tetris on it from half a kilometre away. We handled everything from creating the software that was needed to run these games, to the mechanical structure that could handle the winds of the Mangalore coastline after the monsoons. We ran into a hundred problems, but they were all solved by some sheer ingenuity and grit. 😄

All this currently means that my coding projects took a backseat this week.

Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to share my stories with your friends!

😵 The Death of a Language

A conversation between a new friend and my mother-in-law made me think about this topic.

When do we call a language dead? When there's no one to speak it? When there's no written work left? When there's no memory of it being used?

It is said Bangalore has fewer Kannadigas by the day. Understandably enough, given the proximity of non-Kannada-speaking states people would come here looking for opportunities.One Uber driver, a long time ago, was pleasantly surprised that I spoke to him in Kananda when his default language of interaction was Hindi. "Saar, ee cab-alli Kannada maathadi ond vara mele aagbitide (Sir, it's been over a week since anyone spoke Kannada in this cab)".

The conversation mentioned earlier was about how my friend's grandmother stopped speaking Konkani, a language she grew up with after she moved to her husband's home who didn't speak Konkani. With life getting busier, it eventually trickled down into only small phone calls, and neither her kids nor her grandkids (my friend) picked up the language.

Some of you know that I'm a half-gult. My mother's side speaks Telugu, but have been in Bangalore for generations. My father's side speaks Kannada, and that has been the language at home. My school strongly discouraged speaking in local languages and forced English. I think in English and have to translate things mentally when I have to switch to Kannada (though most of it is automatic which isn't the case with Telugu). I don't speak Telugu, apart from the most childish/basic words - mostly because I was never exposed to it, and now I'm too shy 🙈.

I can't even imagine the number of things that are eventually forgotten into oblivion.

🏫 The Museum Around Us

Earlier this week, a screenshot of a tweet (currently called post) that went viral caught my eye.

This got me thinking about how everything around us was someone's brainchild, someone's passion, someone's life's work. And we can either be watchers and coast through this museum of artefacts, or be observers and learn from them to make our things, or be curators and edit things to mean something more (or less) for the next person who comes around, or conservators and maintain things to mean the same as the original artist intended.

A side quest thought of this is what Julian from Baumgartner Restoration often talks about - conservators aren't editors, their job isn't to make something better but to restore the item to being itself.

The next time you step out, I urge you to walk through this museum and interact in a more meaningful way.

Errata / Updates

* The garden is doing well. We harvested lots of basale soppu (Malabar spinach) for one of the lunches earlier. We've also been harvesting bits of mint, and periwinkle flowers.

* No stream this week too - mainly because of a network issue. We've been running on mobile hotspots for almost a year, and we're finally getting a broadband connection. Expect the coming week to be a lot better for code.with.teej

End Note

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I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!Teej

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