Over the past decade, I’ve managed to read 80-100 books every year. Being someone who always felt that reading was just an interesting way of wasting time, I never felt the pull to write, share, discuss, explain or debate the content that I came across.
During the pandemic, I discovered the geeky world of digital note-taking. For those of you who don’t know, capturing all your notes on digital platforms is a thing on the internet and the difference from traditional note taking is that digital notes can help you identify links between your various notes. (I’ll blog on this separately someday). For three years, I ended up as a compulsive note taker building my second brain using a platform called TiddlyWiki (an open source obscure platform unlike its illustrious peers such as Roam Research, Notion, Evernote or Obsidian).
One of the tenets of note taking is that its ultimate purpose should be to ‘express’ ideas. Over a period of time, with a vast amount of information floating around in my cloud, the pull to write, share, discuss and explain ideas was just too strong to ignore. If I hadn’t heeded to it, my note-taking would have looked like a mania.
Since I’m no maniac, twelve months later, here I am. With 54 posts, I guess I’ve crossed the threshold to now safely call this a ‘habit’. Most of my posts over the year have been book summaries. What earlier used to go into my notes, is now a published piece on the internet. The effort to distill ideas from a book has not been friction-free but the joy of seeing something published makes the effort worthwhile. Writing has also sharpened my own thinking on various issues, and I’m convinced that it’s the best way to make ideas stick. For 2024, I’m planning to experiment a bit and the plan is to also post shorter posts, excerpts, journal-like entries, quotes etc. Lets see how that goes.
Some of my most-viewed posts of 2023 have been:
- Helicopter Parenting
- Feline Encounters of 2023
- Once Upon a Time in Bengal
- Falconry and the Arabs
- The Life as Narrative motif
- Discovering Penang
- A Conflict of Visions
- The Underbelly of the EV Revolution
- On Rituals
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Thank you for reading and wish you a Happy New Year!
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Manish,
You are a voracious reader. I knew that. I didn’t know the consolidating impact pandemic had on this ability you possess and call waste of time. Tku for this bridge post between the year gone by and to usher in the new year with new expectations. Look forward to reading them.
Reading your blogs energised me to the same extent as watching young Sheldon on Netflix. Got selected as one of the five memorable activities during 2023.
Many best wishes for a fulfilling 2024.
Veena
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