Life slice #3: What an eventful month June has been

June was an incredibly productive and good month for me.

• I taught my parents how to do some basic things on a laptop I gifted them. It’s their first laptop. It runs Android so they can easily adapt their familiar touchscreen interactions from their phones over to a touchpad & keyboard paradigm. My Mom is learning how to use a computer, which I’m happy about. And for my Dad, who already uses Windows at work, I’m hoping a laptop will lead him to start blogging. He writes beautiful things in Gujarati, which can become nice web posts which add his voice to the Internet collective.

• On the work front, I’m satisfied with having completed my 5-part series on India’s rocket launch crisis. The set has taken me about a year of work to research and publish. Even though the writing is critical of ISRO, in a journalistic manner, the reception from readers has been really good. The research for the same also made me realize the true gravity of the situation, which I thought I understood before but vastly underestimated. This kind of work, which reveals new ground truths about space, is something I enjoy being immersed in.
• I created a special page for anyone to deep dive into India’s Chandrayaan Moon missions to understand its scientific, technological, and geopolitical outcomes from one place. You can probably spend hours on this if the subject intrigues you. Click for curiosity.
• The Bangalore International Center hosted a talk & panel on the geopolitical contest between spacefaring nations around the near future use of space resources, which would start with the Moon. I was happy to be a part of the discussion alongside Professor S. Chandrasekhar of ex-ISRO.

• I visited ISRO’s Headquarters for work, part of which involved helping the think tank Spaceport SARABHAI record a monologue of the former ISRO Chief S. Somanath. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. While at ISRO HQ, it was also interesting to learn how their library system for ISRO employees works.
• Blogging: Ankur, Tanvi, and Abhinav had asked me if I’d like to conduct and moderate a discussion meet of IndieWebClub BLR, based on my proposal of sharing challenges non-tech folks face in being part of the independent Web. We did that, and I’m happy that many people actively participated, shared lots of anecdotes, and also blogged based on related prompts I gave. Ankit blogged his overview of the event. Aeishna wrote on all three prompts. Some shared their IndieWeb failures while some stories of their blog’s origin. Some started to blog after the session. To me, the highlight from the discussion was hearing about ⁨Abhigyan⁩’s grandfather’s blog prembrij.in. It’s so wonderful. During the session, we all agreed on the difficulty of deciding on and getting a custom domain, which someone said is like “getting a permanent tattoo”. I really enjoyed hosting and moderating the meet. A big thanks to Ankur, Tanvi, and Abhinav for their help.
• I’ve also been reading interesting things during the month, which I shared on Linkteresting #1. And based on conversations with Anik and some other reader friends, I added many interesting sounding books to my reading list even though I know I won’t get to many of them. Our “Want to read” lists should really just be called “Known Universe”.
• Something liberating happened in June that I’m so happy about.
• I also identified issues in my diet that need work which I’m addressing.
• I re-started going to parks to read under open skies, the morning Sun, and chirping trees. 🌳