Quarantine Diaries, Day 16

22:30 The dishes are done! Was listening to the recent episode of Peter Attia’s Podcast. No matter which way you slice the numbers, Covid-19 is going to extract a large toll.

21:00 Yesterday we finished watching Giri Haji on Netflix. Worth a watch, especially if you don’t want to commit yourself to a multi-season TV series. Talking of multi-year, multi-season TV series, we are enjoying Better Call Saul episodes that land each Tuesday. I find Vince Gilligan’s lingering pacing very comforting.

19:15 The Government here just announced an extension of the lockdown till 28 Apr.

18:30 Met my book club over a group video chat. We were reading The Box. After about the first three or so chapters, it was a pretty dry read. I couldn’t finish it. The book got too bogged down in the minutiae of Governmental, bureaucratic and corporate maneuvers that hindered and accelerated adoption of containers. Great potential, poor execution.

Marc Levinson - The Box

Our next book is the very topical World War Z.

Even though I draw a lot of solace from reading, it has had to take a backseat. My eyes are too tired after a full day of staring at the laptop screen. Meeting time used to be downtime from looking at the screen. Now that all meetings (including those with friends) are taking place over video, there are just not enough breaks in the day.

11:30 Learned during a conversation with a colleague that a small bakery operating from Westerpark is open for takeaway. Might pay them a visit. After 2+ weeks of sitting at home, thinking of going even that far feels like what planning for a vacation in Japan would have felt like during normal days. I was a bit of a homebody to start with, but still surprised at how quickly my mental perimeter is shrinking.

March 31, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 15

22:16 No desire to do the dishes again. When two adults eat 3 meals at home and drink several cups of tea and coffee, it’s a lot of dishes. Today’s lot fit into the dishwasher. We’ll be sleeping to its sloshing white noise.

19:15 On the way home, an old lady was trying to persuade her ancient mastiff to move. She apologised for blocking the footpath. I told her not to worry about it, stepped onto the street and walked past her.

19:00 Entering a grocery store feels like playing Russian Roulette with your health (if not with your life). Before entering the store, I try to mentally map the items in the grocery list to their shelves so that I can make a quick sweep and get out in no time. Of late, I am being thwarted by depleted stock. Which means looking for substitutes, which means lingering on in the store for longer than I have any desire to.

18:26 People these days move to the other side of the footpath when they see you coming from the opposite site. I’ve begun to do the same. We are all trying to maintain the government prescribed safe social distance of 1.5 meters. Doing this in a dense city like Amsterdam sometimes means stepping off the footpath and onto the street. At any other time it’d seem rude (like the treatment of shudras in ancient India, or Jews under the Third Reich), but these days it’s a gesture of kindness and compassion. It says to the passerby “I mean well. I’ll move aside so I do not accidentally infect you”.

18:15 Stepped out for a walk and grocery run after 36 hours. Thanks to the clock moving forward by an hour, it is beginning to stay bright well past 19:00. It had rained just before I left the house. The sky was still quite dramatic. The streets were quiet and still. Except for an occasional runner or 2 or 3 people walking their dogs, I hardly saw anyone.

Empty Road

Empty Dock

March 30, 2020

Quarantine Diaries, Day 14

23:07 Not sleepy and not feeling like doing the pile of dishes in the sink.

18:30 Woke up from strange dreams. Of late I’ve been dreaming of crowded places and metro commutes.

16:00 We’d usually step out for coffee after lunch but didn’t. We were tired. Besides, no cafés are open outside. And while it was sunny outside, it was also cold (7ºC) and very windy (40 kmph+). Lying down on the couch under a blanket and drifting to sleep while reading Jared Diamond’s Upheaval seemed like the best course of action.

Jared Diamond - Upheaval

14:30 The wife made chickpeas and aubergine for lunch. We wolfed it down with supermarket mini-naans that were heated in the toaster for 8 minutes. Felt like a royal feast.

11:00 We’ve put our cleaner on paid leave so the wife and I cleaned the house. Last week I naively forgot to wear the protective gloves. With all the hand washing I doubt the skin on my hands would’ve taken to all the cleaning supplies too kindly this time.

09:00 Daylight Savings Time has kicked in. With us working from home for the foreseeable future, it has never mattered less. There were plans in the EU to ditch this biannual temporal fiddling starting 2021. Given the raging pandemic, like most other things, it’ll have to take a backseat.

March 29, 2020

The old cassette player

Illustration: the old cassette player

The mono cassette player at our home was one of the earliest pieces of electronic gadgetry we were allowed to handle as children. Probably a hand-me-down from our grandparents, it was already years old¹ when I formed my first memories of it. It sounded muddy and muffled, of worn cassettes and dusty innards. Its biggest allure was therefore not the musical enjoyment it provided, but its ability to record our voices. Lazy Sunday afternoons would be spent before it attentively reciting a song or a poem we had learnt at school. Sometimes mom would join in and hum a favourite Hindi oldie or two. The record button had to be depressed together with the play button for the recording to begin. As I write this, I can even recall its tight tactile feel.

Video cassette players and recorders weren’t a reality yet² so we’d occasionally deploy the audio cassette recorder to record an episode or two of our favourite TV shows. We’d have to sit quietly and mom or dad would sometimes get up and pause the recording during ad breaks. The blank cassettes, especially the Sony variety my aunt would send from the US, were quite coveted and the space had to be used judiciously. For all the effort we put in, we must have heard these recordings only once or twice. After all, the original content hadn’t been produced for radio and didn’t translate well to a medium without video. Still, I wish we had somehow preserved those recordings.

The cassette player eventually fell into disuse when we bought a lighter “two-in-one”. A black, light, boxy thing called thus because it could play cassettes and also tune into radio³. And as we grew older, the family ritual of recording our voices lost its charm as well. There comes a point in the life of an electronic gadget when it’s cheaper to buy a newer one than getting the older one repaired. I don’t know what became of the old cassette player. It was probably given away to someone in the hope that they could get it repaired and continue to use it.

I wonder if years from now, we’ll look back at our phones and our laptops with the same fondness.

January 16, 2020

2019: My year in music

This is the fourth year I am sharing my selection of 50 or so tracks that I really enjoyed that year. Like years before, and unlike most mainstream media countdowns, these tracks were not necessarily released in 2019, I just happened to discover them last year. While in previous years’ playlists I’d leave the tracks in more or less the same order in which I discovered them, this year I spent some time arranging them so that overall playlist has a bit more “flow”¹.

I had switched to Apple Music last year. This year Spotify launched their service in India. While I live in the Netherlands, their India launch led to them expanding their catalog of music from India offered here to a point where I felt I wasn’t missing what I wanted to listen to. So I switched back. Not only do I find usability/responsiveness of Spotify’s apps better, their recommendations are better too. So yes, if two services offer the exact same content, they can still differentiate themselves on experience.

While Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations played a big role in helping me discover new music in 2019, I Shazam-ed a lot of them during my travels. Then there were other curated playlists, such as the one that Ryuchi Sakamoto made for an NYC restaurant and World Music Network’s monthly charts, that provided both new material and inspiration for this annual playlist ritual of mine.

Here’s my 2019 musical retrospective.

January 1, 2020

A day trip to Capri

Two days into our vacation in Naples, on a relatively sunny November day, we took a day trip to Capri. It was a 40 minute walk from our hotel to the port from where hydrofoils depart for Capri several times each day. This being off season, only a few ticket windows were open and it took us some time to locate the right one. Multiple companies operate on this route and your ticket is not transferable across vessels operated by different companies. It was about an hour to our departure. We stood at the harbour and gawked at the cruise ships and the blue water. The wind was nippy, and soon the smell of burnt diesel from the boats and hydrofoils began to irritate my lungs. There were a couple of cafes near by that served sfogliatella¹ and fresh coffee. We picked one with a covered outdoor terrace and enjoyed the wares:

Espresso, sfogliatella and lightly sparkling water

Our hydrofoil arrived and nimbly executed a 180º turn to let us board.

These hydrofoils look very futuristic but make for a very choppy ride. I felt undulation of each wave the hydrofoil negotiated. Sometimes you are jolted awake by the sensation of falling inside a dream - the entire 40-minute ride felt like one such dream. I thought I was going to be sick - it must be a common occurence on this route since a member of the crew stood ready in the aisle with a stash of polythene bags. On a row of seats next to ours, someone in a black hoodie lay slumped in a foetal position clutching tightly to their bag. I lay back, put on my headphones and closed my eyes. The song that came on (Émigré by Alela Diane) was situationally relevant but wasn’t very reassuring:

I can feel the fear hang heavy on the water
Glinting sharply with the pale moonlight
Mothers hold on tightly to your children
The waves are breaking violently tonight

I was relieved when we finally docked at Capri’s small harbour. Given my recent obsession with the tiling patterns of bricks in Amsterdam, one of the first things I noticed upon setting foot on the land was the Voronoi tessellation engraved on the floor tiles at the harbour:

Voronoi tessellation engraved on concrete tiles

Across the road from the harbour was Capri’s funicular station. The sun was to set well before 5 PM and it was already well past noon. Wanting to maximise sightseeing in the daylight, we decided to take the funicular instead of walking uphill. The ride was short and the station on the hill had a terrace that offered a beautiful view.

This being off season, most restaurants were closed. The ones open offered beautiful views (if you could land a seat by the window) but charged a premium. We weren’t particularly hungry so we decided to walk to Anacapri - a small commune² to the west of Capri. We came across parking lots that surely must be some of the most picturesque parking lots in the world:

We must’ve walked for about 10 minutes along the highway and couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were doing something wrong. Soon we spotted a set of rocky stairs (Scala Fenicia) cut into the hills to our left. We gladly took them to get off the highway. Despite the long and moderately exhausting climb the view of the azure sea, the clear skies and the slight nip in the air kept us feeling light and happy.

Walking along the highway

The view from the stairs

Most shops in Anacapri were closed too. Some restaurants had even put up notices telling visitors that won’t be open before the start the of the season in April next year. Others deployed complicated looking signs to educate patrons about their opening times:

For some reasons a few shops selling clothes were open - most of their merchandise in shades of blue that mimicked the colour of the sky and sea here. Either they still had local customers coming in or since they weren’t dealing in perishable raw materials, they could stay open despite low off season sales.

One of the shops selling clothes that was open

We finally found a restaurant that’d feed us some sandwiches, pizza and sparkling wine. The pizza, unlike what was shown on the menu, turned out to be a large bruschetta with some cheese and tomato on it, but we were far too hungry by now to complain (and to be fair, they gave us a 2€ discount over the list price).

We wandered aimlessly through the warren of small streets soaking in the quiet and the occasional view of the distant sea.

A street in Anacapri

A street in Anacapri

The views on the way down were stunning. The skies had turned dramatic. We could see rain falling in the distance and feel it drifting towards us with the wind.

The wife kept a count of stairs on the way down (1000+). Once back in Capri, we spent some time walking around the beach and the harbour at Capri…

Stone steps

…and eventually settled down at a cafe next to the harbour to wait for our hydrofoil back. It docked some 30 minutes before its scheduled departure and since it was getting a bit chilly, were only too happy to go settle inside sooner. The evening sea was a lot calmer and quite possibly our choice of seats in the middle of the boat a tad wiser - the ride back wasn’t has choppy in the morning. Still, the ride left our stomachs riled enough that we didn’t mind waiting for over 30 minutes for our turn at the famous and perenially crowded L’Antica Pizzeria de Michele in Napoli!

December 6, 2019