Santosh

A quick trip to Nandi Hills from Bengaluru.

I just ordered the first lot of books this year on my kindle. Most of these books are on Nature, Sustainability and Religion. This is in sync with what I have decided to be the key theme for reading this year. I want to read and explore the relationship between Nature and Religion.

There is no denying that our lifestyle and choices that we make are one of the most critical factors in the way we engage with ‘Nature’. Greed and a lack of compassion are the main reasons behind all the devastation and imbalance we have caused in our ecosystem. Religions and spiritual movements have expounded a lot on the topics of ‘greed’, ‘compassion; and ‘lifestyle’. I am hope to connect the dots and get more insight on how we can be more compassionate and mindful in our lifestyle choices when it comes to dealing with nature.

One of the thing that I really found worth the effort is to maintain an yearly list of books that I read. I have been doing this from 2006 and once in a while I go through the list to find many books that I read and now I have forgotten entirely and I go back to explore the books again. santoshsingh.net/tag/readi…

Auroville Visitor Center #auroville #india #2023

Ameya’s gift for me. A notebook that she picked up from Ramanashram!

The day apple gets its Files app right, I would be able to use iPad as my emergency laptop replacement. Sadly, the File management is the biggest bottleneck on the iOS to be a good replacement of a laptop. Also, iCloud storage while fully baked in but still not the best cloud storage solution. Having just a simple way to mark a folder for offline storage and background sync across all devices will be a great addition. There are workarounds but not as seamless it should be.

Auroville has always been a comforting place for me. It never fails in reminding me of what life can be vs what it is.

Sore throat and body ache are not a great company to welcome new year.

Sore throat and body ache are making sure that my year end is on the bed. :(

It is an early morning on a weekend and I am trying to get my thoughts together to plan for the year end trip to Pondicherry. One of the key decisions is to pick up my favourite books that I want to read during this year-end break. There are books all around my work-desk reminding me that I have been too busy to read this year. Probably the first year in more than two decades that I am not able to read at least 15 books. While I do track how many books I read every year but I am not that much worried about the number of books I read; I am more worried about how my reading is changing.

During the last 2-3 years, my reading has started to changed at its core. I still read but it is not the same. I used to get immersed in the books. Connect with the books and often forge such a bonding that end of a good book used to create a void. But such deep reading is a rarity these days. For me more than what I read, how I read matters more. There is something unique about the process of reading, it is a kind of meditative process that fundamentally changes you. There are scientific studies that confirm this!

While I have maintained the habit of reading before the bed time, but the reading was more to catchup on themes that I work professionally : climate change, development finance and impact investment etc. I read articles, reports and newsletters but could not get back to my reading list that I had planned for this year. Every year, I pick up themes for my reading and I wanted to read “modern fiction classics” but sadly I could not finish even one from the list.

I did buy a lot of books this year. Mostly non-fiction. I have got somewhat clarity about what I read in physical form and what I read on my Kindle. Most of the fiction I read is on my kindle but I buy physical copies of non-fiction and I buy them from my neighbourhood bookshop: Baharisons. While Amazon gives me easy to access to any book that I want to buy but it can never match the cosy and alluring charm of bookshelf full of colourful titles. We need more physical bookshops and that means we need to buy more books in physical form from our neighbourhood stores.

Another picture of Arunachala from the place we stayed for a few days. A new place- [The White Flower Retreat] (https://goo.gl/maps/gqYUr9FnfEAjfhzT9). - which we discovered and really enjoyed the solitude and a great view of [the sacred Arunachala] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachala).

The year end posts are half written and there is a long list of pending things that I will not be able to finish this year.

A visit to Skandaashram and Virupaksha Cave where Maharshi Raman spent most of his life. It was an arduous trek with a seven year old kid, but we managed.

In the foothills of Arunachala

Pondicherry Diary -2

Away from Delhi’s pollution in our favourite town..

Pondichéry

Finally all set for the year end break. Never ever looked more eagerly for this break.

Finally after a long hiatus, I decided to get back to micro.blog. The things that I am looking to build this time (I am not importing my wordpress blog for now) is a) back up for twitter, b) use frontmatter and markdown for my blogs and c) create an alternative to instagram and goodreads.

Testing the new crossposting setup!