The Night mode on iPhone

As the winters begin to set in, the days in Amsterdam get shorter. One doesn’t have to stay up very late to do night photography.

I had first tried long exposure night photography some 15 odd years ago in London. It would involve carrying a tripod, setting up the camera (then a Canon EOS 350D), hitting the shutter release and waiting a few seconds. I lacked experience and the tripod I had then (a hand me down from an uncle) was a little rickety so it’d take a few attempts to get a good shot. But the end results always made it worth it.

The wife recently got an iPhone 11 and I was both sceptical of the recently introduced Night Mode and at the same time very keen to try it. So we went for a walk around the block after dinner and I took a few shots. I was immediately hooked:

Westerdok on a still Nov nightWesterdok on a still Nov night

The night mode turns on automatically and depending on brightness of the scene, picks an exposure of 1 to 3 seconds. You release the shutter” (I use the volume control buttons on the iPhone) and hold your hands steady and that’s about it. Tripod not required.

Since then I pester the wife to borrow her phone regularly. Expect to see more night time photos in the coming days.

Westerdok on a still Dec nightWesterdok on a still Dec night

Around PrinseneilandAround Prinseneiland

Something a little Blade Runner-esqueSomething a little Blade Runner-esque

My only gripe so far is that while the default” iPhone 11 lens supports Night Mode, the ultra-wide does not. Something they have remedied in iPhone 12. I am hoping that if I hold out another year, the zoom lens in the next revision will get it as well.

p.s. The wife pointed out that at a time when a lot of people would be traveling to run away from the cold and rainy Amsterdam weather, last year most people were stranded at home. So probably more than the usual amounts of homes had their lights on. To say nothing of extra Christmas lights. Also note the wide range of warm and cool tones of lighting.

p.p.s. I am also amazed at the dynamic range of the Westerdok shots. Despite many blown highlights, see how much detail of each house’s interiors is visible.

February 6, 2021

Discovering Vilhelm Hammershøi

I was at Munich’s Kusthalle in Sep 2019 to see an exhibition of works by Canadian impressionists. I was carrying a small backpack which wasn’t allowed into the exhibition rooms. I turned back and located the public lockers to leave my bag in. Not only were they all taken, there were already one or two people ahead of me waiting for someone to come back and release one. I eventually located the paid cloakroom where I could drop my bag off. The walls of the cloakroom were plastered in promotional material from past exhibitions. It is here that I first saw a poster from an exhibition from many years ago, titled, Hammershøi - this modern Nordic Vermeer. The poster featured a girl at a piano - probably a hat-tip to Vermeer’s The Music Lesson.

Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and Hammershøi’s Interior With Woman At PianoVermeer’s The Music Lesson and Hammershøi’s Interior With Woman At Piano

I thus discovered Vilhelm Hammershøi whom I now consider as one of my favourite painters.

Of late, I’ve been revisiting his works and have been mesmerised by them. I find his muted color palette and his depiction of shadow and light very soothing. They remind me during these days of being locked down at home, when we’ve all had more than our fair share of looking at doors, walls and windows, that even the banal, if you pay attention, is beautiful.

Interior From Strandgade With Sunlight On The FloorInterior From Strandgade With Sunlight On The Floor

p.s. Talking of Vermeer, there was a documentary a few years ago about someone trying to recreate The Music Lesson. Worth a watch.

p.p.s. I miss traveling, among other reasons, for the serendipitous discoveries one would make along the way.

January 30, 2021

Curfew in the Netherlands

After much deliberation, the parliament here has introduced curfews from 9:00 PM till 4:30 AM for two weeks starting yesterday. Having spent over a month locked down, this feels particularly oppressive.

The number of people you are now allowed to have over at your home (but not during the curfew!) is also down to one.

Worse, AstraZeneca announced yesterday that they’d be able to supply only 40% of the doses they had originally agreed on. Their vaccine, even before European Medicines Agency’s official approval, has been a major part of the Dutch vaccination strategy.

Without widespread vaccination and with more contagious variants of the virus continuing to emerge, I feel that a mix of total or partial lockdowns are going to be a norm till at least the end of this year.

I’d love to be wrong.

To make ourselves feel better, and remind ourselves that we are still allowed to be outside during the day, the wife and I took a couple of days off from work to walk around Amsterdam. We’ve been making most of the improving daylight to explore neighbourhoods both familiar and new. Some pictures from today:

January 24, 2021

A long rant about the second Covid-19 wave in the Netherlands

As October 2020 rolled in and the number of Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations continued to rise, it was quite clear that the Netherlands would have to enter another lockdown. I thought we’d have learnt our lesson from March and it’d be a rapid and total lockdown so perhaps we could open up in a limited way for Christmas.

What we got instead was a dithering, half-hearted thing - as if the way Covid-19 spreads was still shrouded in some deep cosmic mystery. Restaurants were the first ones to shut down. However, restaurants attached to hotels were allowed to stay open. Not only did some of those subvert the rules by charging a small fee to check in” the customers into the hotel, a couple of these attached restaurants we walked past, weren’t observing any social distancing1. Offices were closed but museums, cinema halls and schools remained open. You couldn’t have more than two people over at your house in a day, but you could go pray together with whatever number of people your place of worship allowed2. As if the virus cared.

By November-end it was clear that harsher measures would be needed and on 14th December we were placed under a hard lockdown till 19th January 2021. Given the impending threat of the more readily transmissible variants doing rounds in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, the lockdown was recently extended till at least 9th February 2021.

All restaurants (including those attached to hotels), shops, schools, museums, cinema halls etc. are closed. Thankfully, restaurants are open for delivery. Essential shops such as grocery stores and pharmacies are open. It was unseemly to see a couple of chains try and push the bounds of essential” to stay open. In the end, the government intervened and put a stop to these shenanigans.

Sadly, the vaccinations here have been off to a slow start and have been beset with controversies around who is included in the first wave and when exactly they could expect a shot. To say nothing of supply shortages, reckless talk of delaying the second booster shot, or worse, mixing up different vaccines. Makes you wonder why they bother going through clinical trials and a lengthy approval process. At least they have a plan. But with the cabinet here having resigned (due to another scandal unrelated to Covid) and elections due in March, I have little faith in our ability to stick to it.

NL Vaccine StrategyNL Vaccine Strategy

Meanwhile, like elsewhere, there is some societal unrest here too. Yesterday there was a demonstration at Museumplein that was ended by mounted police and a water canon. Over a hundred people were arrested. There is now talk of a curfew from 8:00 PM till 4:00 AM3.

On the brighter side (literally), the days are getting longer. Yesterday, after many weeks of slinking away early, the sun set at 5:00 PM. Today, it went down at 5:02 PM. Every minute helps. A couple of days ago, we got a little bit of snow that made the city look like it was right out of a fairy tale. On those rare days when the sun is out, we can hear bird song and even see birds make a short stop at our balcony. We better get some outdoor furniture for the balcony because it looks like we’ll be spending a lot of time there…


  1. Seeing all those people huddled together at a table in their finery you’d think you had walked into a parallel time line where Covid-19 never happened.↩︎

  2. Usually in double or triple digits.↩︎

  3. France is already at it from 6:00 in the evening till 6:00 in the morning.↩︎

January 18, 2021

2020: My year in music

Music is one of the biggest joys of my life. In 2020 it was also a source of profound comfort and, in addition to whatever little I managed to read, also a way to travel the world.

Talking of travel, I often discover new music in cafes and restaurants, especially when in other countries. With restaurants closed in Amsterdam for most part of 20201 and no travel since Feb, that source dried up2. Music from books and TV shows filled in some of that void.

My annual ritual of making a playlist of music that brought me joy that year turns five. Despite finalising the playlist a month early, I’ve just not been able to muster the energy for the hours-long endeavour that is compiling liner notes that go with it. Perhaps I’ll do it retroactively…

Nonetheless, I hope you’ll enjoy the music!

The 2020 playlist on Spotify


  1. And when they were open briefly during summer, we were sitting outdoors in music-less settings. Even if we would have been indoors, I think we would be too busy relishing the experience of eating outside our home to pay attention to music.↩︎

  2. With one exception - I distinctly remember Shazam-ing Long Way by The Californian Honeydrops in the lobby of a boutique hotel in San Francisco when visiting in Jan-Feb 2020; a song you will find in the 2020 playlist. Looking at my Shazam playlist, there is also a song by Drop Out Orchestra from their album Aeroplane In Flight Entertainment, prophetically titled - It Will Never Be The Same Again. I should pay more attention to what I Shazam.↩︎

January 1, 2021

The story of my integration tests (Inburgeringsexamen)

Wij melden fraude altijd bij de politie
We always report fraud to the police

Warned a notice stuck to one of the pillars in the waiting area of my exam center. I read the Dutch word fraude” as the German word for joy - freude” and in my head translated the sentence to:

We always report joy to the police

Clearly not a promising start for someone there to prove his proficiency of the Dutch language. While the notice was meant to deter the would-be identity fraudsters, looking at the doleful, anxious faces in that room, you would think that my interpretation might have been the truer one.

Naturalization in the Netherlands requires you to take the dreaded integration” tests. Your ability to listen, speak, read and write the Dutch language is evaluated. You are also tested on your knowledge of the Dutch society1. You could stagger these tests across different dates, but in wanting to yank the proverbial band-aid in one go, I scheduled all of them on the same day.

If there is one thing the education system in the Indian subcontinent prepares you well for, it is the taking of exams. A colleague from Bangladesh, upon learning that I was preparing for my integration tests, had sagely reminded me to master the exam and not the content. Still, that exam-cracking muscle had atrophied after not having sat for a test in two decades2.

The wife had already been through this rigmarole so I could self-study from course material she had accumulated. A few weeks before our exam date, she, I and a colleague had enrolled in a batch of 10 personalised classes to brush up on our grammar and to improve our conversational fluency. This was about as ready as I was going to be.

As I am cartographically challenged, it felt prudent to familiarize myself with the route to the exam center a week in advance. To reach the building, a stone’s throw from the tram stop, you’d walk along a park that had a towering statue of a bemused, grizzly bear holding a pillow3. While it made for a memorable landmark, it also captured the menace of the upcoming exams perfectly.

The statue of a Grizzly Bear on the way to the exam centerThe statue of a Grizzly Bear on the way to the exam center

As I absent-mindedly flossed my teeth the night before the exams, I braced myself for a rough night of assorted nightmares. They would all revolve around the theme of time running out before I had finished writing my test. I added to that repository of bad dreams by going a little too hard on a tooth and dislodging an ancient root-canal filling from it. Fortunately the tooth, now sans its filling, didn’t hurt or require immediate medical attention. As expected, I slept fitfully.

People from all walks of life had come to give the integration exams. With my employer sponsored knowledge-migrant4 visa, I and the wife could live and work here as long as the employer would sponsor my visa. Other classes5 of visas mandatorily require you to integrate” within 3 years.

All languages are hard when you are past 30. However, getting to the A2 level Dutch proficiency required for these tests wasn’t particularly challenging6. I also grew up speaking Hindi and English so I was quite accepting of all the idiosyncrasies of Dutch - all languages are made up and you shouldn’t label the rules of one language as irrational based on other languages you know. Moreover, Dutch uses the latin alphabet and after mastering a handful of phonological rules, I could start reading and building my vocabulary. As widespread as the latin alphabet is, neither it nor literacy are universal. I wondered how many people in the exam hall had to first overcome the additional handicap of learning to read the Latin alphabet.

I did well on the reading and the knowledge of the Dutch society tests, a little less well on the listening and the speaking tests and only barely passed the writing test. While all exams were on the computer, the writing proficiency exam was (naturally) of the pen and paper variety7. I would think in long, complex English sentences rich in metaphor and idiom and then realize that my Dutch vocabulary and grammar is too pitiful to allow a translation. Also, some of the questions that involved writing long-ish passages were quite contrived and I would’ve struggled regardless of the language8.

Still, clearing all exams in a single attempt felt good. However, unlike this clichéd illustration from one of our adult study books, I still haven’t felt the urge to put on the clogs, roll down on a wheel of cheese and scatter tulips along the way all the while daintily holding, what surely must be, that precious inburgering (integration) diploma.

Count the clichésCount the clichés


  1. Covering a bit of history, geography, socio-cultural norms and other miscellanies required to be a somewhat functional member of the Dutch society.↩︎

  2. Job interviews come close, but they conjure a different texture of dread.↩︎

  3. A killer bear that could always stifle you with its pillow if the claws failed to do the job?↩︎

  4. For all the hard work and long hours I’ve put in to get here, I sometimes can’t help but feel guilty at my privilege. With a culture that is focused on work-life balance, strong labor laws, a high standard of life and partial tax break for initial years of my stay here, it’s been a red carpet welcome.↩︎

  5. While the Dutch society is perhaps one of the most egalitarian society that I’ve encountered, like most societies, it does make a distinction between a migrant and an expat. What are these classes of visas - each with its own set of restrictions and exemptions - if not another class system.↩︎

  6. There is talk of raising the bar to B1 now. This would’ve probably required me to put in another 3 months of work.↩︎

  7. Writing on paper is a more widespread skill than typing so to have people type up their answers under time constraints would definitely have been unfair to many.↩︎

  8. For example, one of the sample tests asks you to contribute a passage for your neighbourhood newspaper outlining which clothes you like to wear the most, what do they look like and when do you wear the said clothes.↩︎

August 23, 2020