Hello!

I'm sorry for going AWOL again. A bunch of you reached out asking if everything is well, and I'm truly touched ❤️

Things were hectic with interviews and festivals two weeks ago. We were in the middle of Shravana - the season for all festivals. We celebrated the arrival monsoons with nagapanchami (mostly to make people aware of snakes in the rain I suppose), we also had a sense of renewal with the upakarma and spent a lot of time with family with raksha bandan and varamahalakskhmi puja.The month has put a lot of emphasis on spending time with my loved ones, and eating a lot!

And the last week, because of all the food and the rain, I fell unwell. My resetting flu, as a friend called it. 3 days of fever, cough, syrups, and antibiotics. I'm a lot better now. But I truly miss the deep podcaster voice from last week. 😹

-Teej

🎉 Festivals

We started the hiatus with naga panchami on the Friday.It's a paganistic festival celebrating the start of the monsoon, and the snake deities who usually symbolise fertility. As the rains flood snake holes the festival also makes people wary about our slithering friends. We try not to cook with a hotplate/girdle as our ancestors believed this would hurt snakes seeking refuge in the clutter of the kitchen. A sweet made of raw rice and jaggery is distributed too.

Went to a cousin's wedding reception on Saturday and ate peanut curd for the first time. The food was lavish, and the relationship "cousin" is used very loosely here. I have a lot of relatives, and my parents are very keen on adding more people to the family tree - so much so that they've made contact with branches of the tree that are around 7-9 generations away. I honestly adore their effort, but I lose track of how we're all related (though I was instrumental in making a map of the tree a while ago).

We observed manglagowri vrata on Tuesday. We kept this low-key this year. An arishina gowri (cone-shaped mound using turmeric paste) is made and worshipped. Though we don't observe the fast at home, we do celebrate the shakti which represents prosperity and fertility. The vrata has stories that are narrated as part of the ritual, and usually talk about the benefits of observing the vrata.

I had a family get-together on Thursday. My paternal uncle opened a commercial building, and many met up for some havan and food. It was refreshing to meet this side of my cousins after a while.

Went to my parent's house for varamahalakshmi puja on Friday. This is more of a cultural event than a religious one at my home. We don't use a kalasha at home but celebrate the festival with an old brass idol of Goddess Lakshmi that my grandmother used. The festival is to seek prosperity and abundance from the goddesses (like most of the other festivals in this season). Neighbours were called and tamboola were exchanged - making this a more community-growing event.

V had a performance on Sunday. She performs veena fairly regularly, for seemantha (Indian baby shower), and other events. We ended up going to a rayara mutta with another artist friend and ate a heavy but simple meal.

Sunday was another large family get-together. I was down with fever for the week, and luckily recovered enough to engage with people for a couple of hours. Met more cousins, and had a lot of fun with this event!

For those of you who don't know, my partner is a GSB Konkani. Her community's guru has come to a samaja near our home (after 45 years I must add). We spent some time at the samaja during gokulashtami. This is a bigger festival for V than me, we spent some time making sweets and went to the samaja at night to celebrate Krishna's birthday.

How was your Shravana? What festivals do you celebrate?

🍅 Garden

The WhatsApp group for gardening has been thriving because of the Thindi Capital community.

I found out that we had tomatoes growing out of the pot, and they had a calcium deficiency - Blossom End Rot. Someone in the group asked me to treat the soil with some slaked lime water. I finally got around to doing it, but most likely the damage is already done.

Our cute little fiddle-leaf fig decided to shed all but one leaf. Looks hilarious, but I feel a little sad. This also reminds me to change the pot this weekend!

I did change the pots for our mint and basil. They're taking root, and their own time to grow. They look a lot lot healthier than what they seemed like in their previous pots.

The basalesoppu has thrived! We have multiple shoots creeping up some string trellis, and we've harvested them a couple of times for making some delicious tambli!

🚧 Side-projects

What started as an amazing impulse of uploads with code.with.teej, suddenly stopped.There are some good ideas in the pipeline - enabling better search, showing notations for songs, and my idea of curating events. Let's work on this in the coming week.

On the sidelines, I've been redeveloping my website to shift from logseq to obsidian backed. I got most of the things working, except for the deployment on SST. The issue I'm facing is that in production, the files aren't available to process. I should perhaps look at alternates - in either how I handle deployments, or set up a pipeline for data extraction. I'm inclined to the latter - not because I know it's easy, but because I think it's easy.

I was also rebuilding my talapettige project to use Faust Programming Language instead of the current tone.js. I believe this DSP-based approach will have a cleaner sound, and make things better concerning the timing etc.I can also work on a hardware device to use this DSP output on a later date (could be a S2 in code.with.teej)

🤾🏼‍♂️ Sports as a Signal of Progress

1 silver, and 5 bronze. That's the number of medals we've won at the Olympics 2024.India is a "young" country when you measure how recently we've gained independence. But we often hide behind this and don't talk about how the most populous country sends a delegation of 150 people to the largest sporting confluence.

There are 3 major events we can look at in the world of sports - the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Cup, and the Olympics. Each has a larger pool of participation and a relativistic decrease in what India brings home.The only time India bagged a major success was when we hosted the first-ever Commonwealth Games and grossly overrepresented the country.

All this is to show some hard evidence of a John Adams quote I once came across - "I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.". Though India claims to be a young country, we've always been a collection of princely states that indulged in arts and sports. Somewhere along the way of being dominated we lost that knack and slipped off the global table.

Progress here means a lot of things. Someone can pursue a dream of being an athlete, and the infrastructure can support such dreams. It's the choice given with enough financial security for someone to perform at their peak consistently. It's also time for an audience to seek out and encourage talent.The dot-com boom of the 90s essentially rewrote what is considered lucrative to pursue as a career. This is the same in the startup boom of the 2000s, and the rise of the gig economy in the 2010s.All this sidelines taking up a sport at a professional level - because people either don't have the grit, time, or money. Sure there are budgets set aside by the government, but how much of that ends up in a sportsperson's wallet or at the grassroots to encourage fresh talent is anyone's guess.

Things aren't all that bleak though - the last 2 decades have seen immense progress, and things are picking up. My only tussle is that we're over 75 years old, and have the largest talent pool, and yet we're unable to foster sportspeople as well as we should.

Tell me what you think!

End Note

If you've liked this post, I'd love it if you could share it with a friend. You can get them to subscribe here

I do my best to have 5 "fun" things I've been working on every week hopefully on Thursdays. I'm stoked you're here on my journey and would love to read/hear about what you think. If you think there are other things we can look at, do them my way!

Thanks for being here, and reading all this. See you soon!Teej

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit teejofalltrades.substack.com

34.11 - Shravana

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