Week 1519 - Grandmother Excuses and A Repeating Day
The weekly rewind
The Concept Explained
Bhavin Jankharia
Audio
Link to click if you don't see the audio below.
Text
On Monday, I started “On Calculation of Volume - I” by Salvej Balle, a book about a woman who wakes up every day on the same date, remembering each single day, while others around her relive the day anew. It is such an interesting concept and so beautifully written. It is a translated work and there are six more volumes of which 2 and 3 are available as translations and 4 will be out next year. Sometimes just a sentence here and there is enough to tell you that the writer is special, “I hear him in the bathroom and I hear a sound from the toilet that can only be made by a man peeing upright.”
On Tuesday, my new wine glasses arrived to replace the one I broke two weeks ago. And this paragraph from “On Calculation of Volume - I”.
Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside of our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or that of even smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it's a chemical reaction, I don't know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other's company. Maybe we are a weather syscondensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.
Wednesday was nondescript.
On Thursday, I figured out a way of fine tuning my dictations even better. I realized I could transcribe the dictations on the phone itself using Whisper for iOS and then just Airdrop the transcribed text to the desktop and then copy it to the appropriate Claude report template and voila…I was shaving off another few seconds per report.
One of our fellows probably found it hard to find a place to stay in Mumbai and disappeared after two days saying that their grandmother was not well. I thought the “grandmother”excuse was typically used by staff (front desk, ward-boys, etc) but to find a doctor/radiologist using it was funny. I told my manager that this person is not going to come back, but somehow the manager had more hope than I had. They did not come back, though I would have been happy to be proven wrong.
And then I lost control of the rest of the days, preparing for and then rehearsing and delivering the “Atmasvasth - The Prevention Playbook” talk at Anantaquest on Saturday. I then re-recorded it on Sunday and posted it on YouTube.
Bhavin Jankharia
On Saturday, the BYD cars came home for a demo. The sedan is lovely to look at and to sit in, but it wasn’t able to clear the speed-breaker on the road between Don Bosco and ICT without the chassis hitting the speed-breaker and that pretty much rules out buying that car. I am still stuck trying to figure out a good electric vehicle…want a sedan, but will now likely go for a hatchback or MPV.
The new Knives Out movie, Wake up Dead Man is far better than Glass Onion and perhaps even better than the first one, perhaps because the spotlight is less on Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) and more on the priest played by Josh O’Connor. The casting is wonderful and the movie, engrossing.
I then managed to view “One Battle After Another” on Sunday without interruptions. Leonardo diCaprio is in his element and supported by a stellar cast, many of whom I had not seen before on screen. Paul Thomas Anderson is a wonderful director and the film hits all the right notes.
This was a good week, except for the grandmother excuse.
Bhavin's Writings Newsletter
Join the newsletter to receive the latest updates in your inbox.
