Sometimes it feels like that the only thing that is helping me keep time these days is writing notes every week, because I feel like the days are just slipping by. I’ve been terrible at doing my part of the household responsibilities lately — cooking feels like an unbearable drag even though I hate not being able to eat the food I like, my home studio is a mess and I’ve been avoiding it and working in the living room instead, and my winter clothes are still hanging around even though the weather to wear them is long gone. I battled a bad migraine attack on Monday, and spent the next few days hoping that it doesn’t return, especially with an online class super early in the morning.
WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING
1.
Amber and I spent Wednesday afternoon at Harshay’s to have lunch with him and Purneetha. It was nice to have a quiet day with them, talking about what life might bring us in the coming months. Harshay helped me print a couple of my photographs, and I was very excited to see them come to life.
2.
We’ve been taking every opportunity we can find to go on long walks in the neighbourhood park, or just around, if we don’t make it there. The weather is just perfect for it, and where we live, that is a rare thing. On our last walk in the park, we saw a bird with a bluish colour that we couldn’t identify. I am beginning to think it may have been a female Oriental Magpie Robin that looked that way because of the light, but the mystery, I suppose, will remain unsolved.
3.
After updating my iPad last week, I set up Adobe Illustrator on it for a work project. Despite its clunkiness, I feel like it was just the tool that I was looking for, not just for that particular project, but otherwise as well. Being able to draw using the Apple Pencil and then exporting those drawings as vectors feels like a gamechanger. I’ve already used it to make a small piece of lettering to announce something fun I’ll be doing with my friends over at Ajaibghar.
4.
I had my talk at BLAG Meet on Saturday. Even though I felt I was bit rushed with my delivery and could have included some more slides with photographs, I think it went well overall. Several people sent me kind messages after the talk, so I must have done something right.
The event was late in the evening, so we were also able to squeeze in an afternoon of errands with my parents. I had hoped to find a couple of small items for my wardrobe, but nothing I wanted to see and try on was in stock.
5.
On Sunday, I met Thejaswi. He was my colleague at Champaca Books, but I worked from Delhi and then there was the pandemic, so we never met while I worked at the bookstore. Despite that, he has always been very kind to me. It was wonderful to finally meet him IRL. I brought him one of the prints I had made at Harshay’s as a small thank you, and knowing my love of letters, he brought me a copy of Gail Anderson and Steven Heller’s American Typeplay. There aren’t a lot of people in my life who gift me books — that’s usually my role in theirs — so it was particularly nice to receive a book from Thejaswi. And speaking of gifted books, Prateek sent me a lovely Punjabi book called Radio. I’m going to have to brush up my Punjabi to read it though.
The weather was rather beautiful, so afterwards I headed to lunch at Triveni Terrace Café. I hadn’t been there in many moons, and the homely food was a welcome change from how we have been eating lately.
6.
Super early in the morning today, I attended my first class of the Provoking Type course. It seems like we’re a nice bunch, though it is so hard to get to know people over Zoom, and Schessa was a kind facilitator. One of the ideas that has stayed with me from class is that if we all have the same positionality, we will produce similar solutions. It segued beautifully with today’s focus on creative ancestors, and who we choose to carry forward with us. I think the question brought up a lot of vulnerability. It is a tough ask that makes you wonder how aligned your intended influences are with the actual work you produce. It also makes you reckon with influences that aren’t wholly, or at all, positive, or that you have transformed into something valuable through the process of unlearning.
On a lighter note, some of us got into a side conversation about pigeons during class, and I have come away with what looks like an excellent and very fun book recommendation — A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching.
P. S. In hindsight, my notes from last week were so brief. I wrote them in a rush and totally failed to record that I had an excellent conversation with Aadarsh. We had never really talked at length before, but that seemed to fade away once we began discussing cricket, and the vulnerabilities and pitfalls we face living in the big, bad world of type design.