A Year of Rest and Peace 👾🌻🍃

Things that 2024 ate and digested—most, nicely.

Jan 01, 2025

The Start

2024 started with father’s heath problems. It was difficult to see a person—whom I’ve always known to be strong, the person who saved his colleagues in a fatal road accident when he was my age—crumbling to diseases, to watch him shove away the easiest thing to eat, because he neither had the energy, nor desire to eat it.

The First Steps

When I left my job at the end of 2023, I made a list of goals I wanted to achieve. The wrapping goal was just one—to see if it’s possible to not have to be employed to earn decently to sustain. They were big goals, most of them achievable, some of them really ambitious. I only fulfilled one of them—‘Leaner body, less body fat, no tummy, stronger core.’ I came pretty close to it, definitely walking on the discipline needed to keep going at it. The rest are staring at me right now as I type this.

After father recovered, I got a freelance project to start with—a portfolio website for an artist. Despite being grossly underpaid, I poured more into it than I should have, thinking it would be a good learning experience, which it was, a lot. But I learnt that one should never do this when money’s at stake, especially when that money is what sustenance depends on. Feeling a bit hanging and burnt out, coming out of this project, and not to forget I learnt a ton, I was craving for something different, when Ojas found that Ashoka University, her Alma mater, was opening up a Literature course for anyone online to audit. I enrolled and really enjoyed the course—Is There a Modern Indian Literature.

It was an exciting 12 weeks course and I looked forward to 6pm on Wednesdays eagerly. I read, admired, studied, listened to and watched essays, poems, stories, films and music by many writers, artists, film makers, musicians I hadn’t before—like Rabindra Nath Tagore, A. K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Kipling, Manto, Sontag, Nirmal Verma, Arun Kolatkar, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Rajshekhar Basu, Fernando Pessoa, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Adil Jussawalla, Satyajit Ray, Ustad Amir Khan, and some that I had stumbled upon before—like Buddhadev Bose, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Premchand, Nissim Ezekiel, Kishori Amonkar, etc…

When we were in Delhi, Ojas took me around to the places that she’s come to love growing up there. We also visited Prime Minister’s Museum and Library and NGMA. I saw paintings by Amrita Shergill and Rabindra Nath Tagore, amongst others, in NGMA, and I could see—the analytical abilities to discuss and comment, that I had learnt in the course—appreciate the paintings in a way I wouldn’t have been able to do before.

The Concerts

I was introduced to IndoSoul by my friend and earlier flatmate Siddharth Da. When Ojas found that they were going to perform in Bengaluru, we instantly reserved our seats at Bangalore International Center. In the delightful indoor, sit-down(sighs of relief) concert, Karthik Iyer—the lead singer and violinist—told the audience how Fernando Pessoa had inspired the verse he’d written in Tamil in the song At The Theaters. A small, bad quality captured clip:

Ojas and I ran, re-ran Diljit’s songs in prep for his concert and had a great time singing at the top of our voices and dancing as we cooked. Not to mention that we were thrilled and ecstatic when Diljit swept our hearts with his heart, practice, songs, voice, acts. We also attend The Yellow Diary at the end of the year.

Movies

I watched and read the script of Frances Ha 11 times, in order to write something about it. I didn’t know what at first, so I tried to write whatever came. It became frustrating before I realised I was trying to make the movie my own—as if written by me. I ended up writing a short crisp summary about it for people who have not watched the movie but should.

Another movie that I absolutely loved was Aranyer Din Ratri by Satyajit Ray. The kind of movie that I want to watch again, as I make people I know watch it with me. Riya Roy from

The Nook

wrote a post about it. You can watch it on Youtube.

Meeting My Favourite Writers, More Movies

We attended Bengaluru Literature Festival and met two of my favourite writers: Kiran Desai and Anita Anand. I got to chat with Kiran for a couple of minutes and it was heartening and inspiring—we talked about the importance and inevitability of solitude for a writer. Her upcoming novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is up for release later this year.

Arihant Verma in chat with Kiran Desai — Ojas always takes more photographs than I can ever thank for, especially at special occasions like these 🌻

I read Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize winning The Inheritance of Loss when I’d just shifted to Bengaluru for my first job in 2015. I had found it in my landlord’s cupboard of books he’d kept on the first floor—where five of us lived in 3 rooms. It had kept me company during the transition, especially on weird, sparsely rainy mornings and evenings—when the city felt shrunken, black and muddy.

I also fan-confessed to Anita Anand how much her book Sophia meant to me, and how much I related to Sophia, especially since she came from my ancestry, and because of how breath taking this woman was, who kept finding ways to be of service, after she decided to figure things out differently for herself.

Ojas and I also attended IFFI—International Film Festival of India, Goa—for four days and caught, among others, four beautiful movies.

I, the Song, was the most stunning movie of the year. I’ll cover it in a separate issue sometime later.

Apart from the movies, we also caught bed bugs, a broken scooter in the middle of the road in the night, beautiful empty roads and beaches and very interesting characters. Keep a look out for

Two Smoothies

, a newsletter we both run for interesting characters and adventures like these.

Bhai Milaap

I met my brother after five years, and we caught up non stop about what had been happening in our lives. It felt like he’d left as a child and come back as an adult. This visit also paved way for us to share a lot of things, which even as brothers, we had not been able to talk about with each other. Brought a lot of laughter and it continues to, 🫱🏼🪵, over video calls.

Tech and Attempts At It

I created a collaborative Spotify playlist for all of us close siblings and created an automated email—which collects all the newly added songs and groups them by the sharer and sends them to all of us on Friday morning IST.

I attempted to create a wellness app—primarily for myself—that I will continue to work on this year.

I gave a month long hackathon a try, which I left in the middle, because my apparent inability to break through had started to get to me. It was far too tough for me to attempt to even participate, but I tried my best.

Reading, Writing and At The Theatres

I wrote the most this year, I spent hours, days, weeks, writing—story attempt after story attempt, again and again. I started a story over 13 times. I edited and sharpened old stories endlessly, even rewrote some of them. I got my first pitch rejection.

Ojas and I watched a lot of plays, the most prominent ones that stood out for me were—Love in the Cholera of Time, and the musical—which I’ve been to a couple of times now—Jo Dooba So Paar, and cried every single minute of the second half. Seeing me become one with the example the divine love, made accessible in the musical to the general audience, just like Amir Khusrow did with his lyrics and compositions—she gifted me this beautiful collection of his works:

Books that I read

Health

We cooked the most this year. I got sick the most too, funnily—most virals I’ve ever had—4(covid vaccine immunity effects?) But the rest of the days I felt the healthiest I’ve felt since 2015. I moved and stretched a lot.

Thanks to Ojas’s fit of a moment decision for us to haul our butts and just go to the gym to kill the inertia, we signed up for a year right there and started going regularly. I started weight training. It feels nice to feel stronger and healthier everyday, to feel the body give up after a particular number of reps, to feel the stretch of glutes and hamstrings in Romanian Deadlifts. The more we went, the more we ate healthy, the more we didn’t feel like eating things we wouldn’t have thought twice to gobble down.

Both of us also started doing Sudarshan Kriya and meditating together.

Career and Coding

I applied for a creative coding job with all my might and I got rejected, which I feel proud and happy about.

I also taught (coding, to my brother) a lot, even made a finely (much better than what I had posted before) edited, produced and recorded tech video, which I dedicatedly spent a whole week on.

I quit my job at the start of this year. I’ve been without it since. I freelanced—worked on socially impactful projects that matter, thanks to Ojas’s friend Mrinalini, who brought the projects and taught me freelancing conducts and ethics.

I worried about money too, about living off on savings, not making much, far away from the comfortable tech job salary I earned before. But I was the happiest I’ve been in all my working years, so much so that I didn’t feel guilty, bad or sad about 2024 going away—which I always did for the all the years since 2015. Instead I just felt a smile on my face as I slept into 2025.

Misc and Friends

I finally bought a guitar of my own and started playing and learning again. A lot of Ojas’s beautiful, life sized friends became my friends too, and I loved every minute of hanging out with them.

Surfer Board, Boat, Airplane, Flying Ship

This year steered on the high waves, surfing, because of how Jass(Ojas) kept me motivated, dredged me out of self-blaming, self-doubting spirals, and put so much hope, love, faith and energy in me that I could will to do and dream so much. This year would not have been this year without her 💜.

Expect to hear more from this newsletter this year, for sure, for real.

May your ways be auspicious and may 2025 bring you contentment, peace and happiness. 🌻🪻🌷

Artsy Hugs

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