Week 3: Sleep & work schedules, embracing public speaking, insecurity & rejection

Funny how it would happen in the winters, but after a year of fitful starts I have found a good sleep and work rhythm. Without fail and an alarm, I am up everyday by 6:30–7:00 am, even though the sun is just about rising and temperatures are at their coldest. I can get to my work desk well before 8:00 am, and there is no better feeling than being done with the day’s work by late afternoon or early evening and then turning in early. This daily work schedule would be perfect, but because I work remotely with two teams with members across the globe, I have three meetings a fortnight that happen late in the day. So there is no way to have an early start to work and also an early finish everyday. On those three days, my waking hours gets sandwiched by work and I end up feeling that I do nothing else but that. I have been trying to find a workaround — a way to get work completely out my head for a few hours in the middle and do other things – read, cook dinner, do some embroidery, whatever – and then get back to work again. Unfortunately, I am not quite there yet.

My Dad is an amazing public speaker. He has natural charisma, a brain bubbling with knowledge and ideas, and an infinite capacity to make interesting and meaningful connections. Give him an audience — slides and microphone are optional — and he can just hold their attention. I am not like him. This is not to say I am terrible at speaking to crowds, but I have not inherited his effortlessness.

Last Saturday, I spoke about type walks at Codesign’s Show & Tell. The setting for the event was pretty perfect – about two dozen people, lots of curiousity and bonhomie, and interesting conversations. Just the kind of design event I like to attend. I had known for two weeks that I was expected to speak for about 30-45 minutes. But apart from some soul searching I did at Ahmedabad airport a week before the talk, I couldn’t get myself to prepare. I blame the end of the year for my listlessness. I had been really looking forward to a few quiet days, but they had quickly become filled with social gatherings that are so characteristic of winters in Delhi. By Thursday, I was beating myself up for agreeing to participate in the event in the first place, especially since it was on a weekend and in Gurgaon, almost 50 km away. I delayed preparing as much I possibly could have. The wheels in my brain finally started turning on Friday evening, and after hitting the sack early, I got up bright and fresh on Saturday morning to write myself pretty detailed notes and make a deck of slides. Ultimately, the talk went well, even if I say so myself. My jokes landed, and at one point the whole room burst out in laughter in unison (mission accomplished!). A bunch of people came up to me afterwards and were generous enough to compliment me. But most important of all – I got asked some pertinent questions.

Public speaking has been on my mind a lot in the last year, and I was grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with others. After dilly-dallying about it a bit, I decided to talk rather candidly about the process of preparing for a type walk. For so long, I have seen myself in the shadow of my Dad when it comes to public speaking. In the mean time, I have completely ignored the fact that with some preparation, I can run type walks and speak at conferences, small or large, without any paralysing nervousness and with some success. It is about time I embraced that.

I received a rejection email today. And to my surprise, I immediately took it in my stride. That’s the second time this has happened this year. I seem to be getting better at embracing rejection instead of feeling miserable and inadequate. I remember having a full-blown meltdown in 2016 when a project I had started didn’t pan out. I was terribly insecure, and it was a straight line from one failure to thinking that I cannot do a single thing right. I have been trying to think about how I got here, and I am beginning to wonder if it has something to do with the freelance life. There is an uncertainty that comes with freelancing that can really undermine one’s mental peace and confidence. Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but I have been in a much better place since I started working with organizations long-term.

Week 2: Domestic Partnership, Talking to Journalists, Unfinished Projects

I took a mini-vacation with my partner this past weekend, and read Michelle Obama’s memoir in those two days. It has been weeks — maybe months — since I read a book from cover to cover, and it was nice to do that. This had little to do with the book itself. It was nice enough, but a little too feel-good for my liking. Still, there is one thought from the book that has stuck with me. The mismatch between how Obama and her husband’s (see what I did there?) understand time. When he would say “almost home” or “on my way,” it would not be “a geo-locator but that rather a state of mind.” That is the story of our home.

A domestic partnership between two ambitious people is not simple. We both like to believe that we are less ambitious than we were, say, a decade ago. And perhaps that is true. But there is still enough ambition going around to make things tricky. Sometimes I see couples who work together and feel a twinge of envy. I know this is a case of grass is greener on the other side, but it feels simpler that way – you can travel for conferences together; late nights, when they happen, are a collaboration; and you can help each other out. All the problems we face seem magically solved. Type design and public policy are not obvious, or easy, bedfellows. The simple differences in our personalities and work, which enrich our everyday lives, sometimes also feel like exasperating obstacles in eating a home-cooked meal together at the end of a day of hard work.

Last Tuesday, there was an article about unconventional walking tours in Delhi in the Times of India, and my typography walks were included in the list it carried. In the last few years, I have started to feel a real dread when a journalist writes to me with a request to speak to me or cover my work. It wasn’t always like this. I remember feeling quite thrilled the first few times it happened. I was younger, easily excitable, and seeking more validation from the world than I do now. The excitement and delight has now been replaced with the anxiety of talking to a stranger; the effort that I have to make to feel prepared to talk about my work coherently; the anguish of clearing my schedule for this preparation and the conversation at short notice, while fervently hoping that the person I am about to speak to is punctual; and finally, the fear that the resulting story will be botched up in some way, particularly that they will fail to include the name of a collaborator. Thankfully, this story turned out ok, even though I am already unhappy about how I put forward a particular point. I recognize that a lot of this is my own neurosis, but some of it, I believe, stems from a desire for things, whether it is my work or words written about them, to be more meticulous, exacting and useful.

There are times when it feels like I spend my days under the overwhelming weight of unfinished self-initiated projects. This sense of un-productivity, especially with regard to them, is always acute at the end of the year. To make things worse this time around, a few months ago I decided that I would use my days off around Christmas and New Year to finish a self-initiated project that I had started way back in 2011.

Now that the last week of 2018 is almost upon us, I cannot help but feel a bit lethargic as well as at least a little too distracted by other similarly unfinished self-initiated projects. From the outside, it looks like I am rather good at this sort of thing. Two years ago, I resolved to read hundred books in 365 days, and did it. The year after that I drew the Devanagari letter “ka” in a different style every week. This year I launched an online archive of street lettering from India, finished the 36 Days of Type challenge, and ran four editions of two different type walks. Whenever someone asks me how I manage to do so many things apart from work, I always find myself at a bit of a loss. I might look like a success to them, but by my standards I am always behind.

In an interview I gave over the summer, I was asked the same question. My answer, if I recall correctly, was two part. One that finishing projects, especially self-initiated ones, requires a great deal of discipline, planning and sticking to schedules. Two that it is ok to realize that a project you started a while ago is no longer of interest to you – not all projects need to be finished. Both good ideas, just difficult to implement.

Week 1: walking & talking, the teaching dilemma, meticulous tasks

Inspired by Ankur, I have decided to write short notes about my work every week. I still have misgivings about doing this (publicly), but no more squandering away my time wallowing in doubt. Instead, I am jumping in headfirst.

Among the many reasons I love leading type walks (I did one this past weekend) is that it takes me out of my comfort zone. There is a physicality to it, a sense of performance, that I both enjoy and dread. I find it hard enough to navigate crowded public spaces alone, doing it with a group of people, ranging from a dozen to three, needs a lot more spatial awareness than I’m used to having. I am still not very good at very gathering people at strategic spots so I can show them things and talk in the most effective way. Paharganj, where I have been doing walks for a year, is so overwhelming and ever-changing that no amount of planning leads to what I want to do. At Nicholson Cemetery, I think I was so happy at the amount of open space and quiet we had, that I became lax about positioning myself properly within the group and projecting my voice. These type walks have been a steep learning curve, and I find myself needing to learn skills I have never paid much attention to.

This year I took a conscious break from teaching. Last year I taught different versions of the same short, basic type design course at three different design schools, and by the end of it all I was incredibly exhausted. I also needed a bit of time to introspect and think about what I had been teaching, why and how. The only teaching-related thing I have done is be a part of a jury to give feedback to first-year social design students. I was pretty nervous about it – it was my first time – and arguably I prepared more for this jury than I did for some juries when I was a student. I had hoped that being in that space would help me make my mind up about when and how I want to get back to teaching, or at least nudge me in the right direction. It didn’t. Anyway, I met Rasagy yesterday. We got talking about our experiences with teaching, and how confused we feel about it. It made me realize that I haven’t given the subject half as much thought as I should if I want to make any kind of decision soon.

I love doing a few different kinds of work at any time because I think it makes me both more happy and productive. The option of going back and forth between different scales of thinking, drawing type and writing, screen-time and anything else is what makes the work week interesting. Unfortunately, last week was an unholy mixture of meticulous kerning, typesetting and testing that left me very irritable and feeling overworked. I expect this week to be only slightly better. How can the year-end holidays not be here yet?