Weeknotes - 2025-W24
Boxes and Bobby - A love story
A dear friend had come over for a sleepover last Sunday. We had a wonderful time catching up over life stuff and went out for a chaat dinner at Shree Mithai. Its really wonderful to have friends come over and stay at your house. Most recommended for a wholesome feeling.
From my time training with Ashwini, one of the many takeaways was to not take a break at the start of the week. It just pays off in SO many ways to start a week with a strong workout. Try it!
And it has been my mantra ever since. I almost never start a week without a good workout and this week was one of that.
On the same lines, this week I benched 32.5KG. Something I have never done before in my life. I know this is a small thing for seasoned folks, but its such a wonderful thing to be able to have a body that is capable of lifting that weight. More than a sense of pride, what I feel is a sense of gratefulness towards the body.
Made some minor changes to the website. Edited the home page to make it more relevant to me now and edited the blog page to exclude the Weeknotes that I write since that has its own page here. It should be more clean now.
I really love this platform and am very glad I switched to it. David (the one who runs it) is super patient and kind with all my requests.
I don’t know how many people know this about me, but in a different decade, I was a professional photographer and was one among the initial set of people in Chennai to shoot candid photos at weddings. A dear friend and I continued to do this in Bangalore and we’ve shot some wonderful moments together.
This week, a fellow photographer who I used to go on shoots with, pinged me and said that he mentioned me on a podcast he was on. He credited me, for being the one that took him out on the initial shoots that got him many opportunities thereon. It felt so nice that he thought such things about me, such people are rare.
Its also so humbling that just across two weeks, I’ve heard from 2 different people that I’ve had some kind of an impact on their lives. I just feel so warm and soft.
Got my usual 1.5h badminton this week at a new venue — this is pretty good and we’re going again this Wednesday. It is well placed for all of us so I hope it works out every week.
I played with too many jumps this time and ended up straining my lower back. The great part about working with a coach who understands this, is that the next day at the gym, I was able to modify the movements keeping this in mind with his help and it ended up fixing the catch also.
This weekend, I’ve been working on writing a critique of the recent move by the Ministry of Railways to bring in an Aadhaar authentication layer into the Tatkal booking process (relevant article). I want to submit this as an op-ed into some newspapers, so let’s see 🤷🏾. A friend from my GCPP course and I are working on this together.
I still struggle with lengthy writing about public policy. I should do much more of it, so that I can develop a rhythm of words flowing from my mind onto paper.
I’ve finished the draft of this, I will sleep on it, iron it out, and hopefully can start sending it out this week.
It was father’s day this Sunday. And its the first one for Prasanna, without her father. He was one of those people that didn’t like these “X day” / “Y day” culture. I think somewhere deep down, he truly lived the fact that he had to be a father every day.
I’ve had the privilege of listening to him talk about his daughter in a very candid manner over our drink sessions where I used to sit in rapture listening to him. Whenever the topic drifted there, I would be all ears and he’d always have a tear building up in his eye. In the stories he narrated about him and his daughter, there was always a tinge of I could’ve done X better or Y better and I always took the opportunity to tell him that it didn’t matter now because everything else that he had done, gave his daughter (and my partner), the permission to be the badass that she is. Little did I know that these conversations with him will end so soon.
Just last year, they had a conversation about the influence he had on her and this year, suddenly he isn’t around. She has written about this over on her instagram so please go ahead and give that a read.
Allright then, 20 minutes before cut off. Given that I had to work on the article, not bad I’d say. Now to go wash my cats’ dinner bowls and head to bed. A mandatory workout awaits tomorrow morning!