Parlez vous anglais? :)

I wonder what I could write about traveling through France that hasn’t already been written about before. And since I’m harbouring the delusion that long-form travel reads are still a thing, I have to try…

Ruki and I took a long-awaited trip to France earlier this month, and it turned out to be an experience of a lifetime. We haven’t travelled a lot together in the short time that we’ve been married, and this was my first time outside the subcontinent for reasons other than work. But we were very clear from the start that we wanted to explore the world, one country at a time, and not really travel the way our parents did – covering multiple countries in a fortnight or less, constantly on the move with barely any time to soak anything in.

Billion Dollar Loser: A Short Book Review

Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser is the story of Adam Neumann and his startup WeWork. As I write this review, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son – the false prophet of the venture capital world who bamboozles his way into industries with his Vision Fund, and one of WeWork’s biggest investors – has reported a $23B loss. Incidentally, it also comes as Ruki and I are finishing The Dropout, a series on Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos and one of Adam Neumann’s contemporaries.

Stolen Focus: A Short Book Review

As I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel from his work to what I’ve been experiencing over the last few months. I’ve lost sight of the things that matter, and I’m starting to operate in a state of extreme and perpetual chaos. I’m distracted from the things I should be doing – like reading, working out – and instead, I’m filling my day with mundane and pointless activities. I’m unable to read for long stretches without picking up my phone, without switching over to tasks that don’t need doing; the fact that I spend close to four hours a day on average on my phone – without any social media apps on it – is an indication of how frenzied my existence has become. I’m unable to find joy in the things that made me happy, and the only moment of clarity I experience is when I’m watering the plants on the terrace. Through all of this, I kept blaming myself. That something in my head had shifted and I was probably going through a phase, not too dissimilar to ones I’ve experienced in the past. Johann’s book gave me something else to ruminate on… Something that has changed drastically over the last two years of the pandemic. My environment.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Short Book Review

I still can’t believe that I finished a biographical account of someone who decided to raise bees for a year, and actually enjoyed it. Helen Jukes’ A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is an eccentric record of her first steps as a beekeeper. Weird, warm and wonderfully but predictably woven, her writing floats and flits between the hive and her personal life, which keep feeding off each other. Never lingering and never still. Almost like a bee.