Whokies

Abhijit Mahida's personal blog

Be a kid, Abhijit

As they say, nostalgia is a very powerful drug, and most of us get carried away by the memories of our childhood, longing to go in the past and live like a child again.

I found myself doing the same and hence, this post is a dissection of what I talk about when I talk about living like a child. An analysis of what kids do.

I can do anything

Recently, I caught my friend telling “But I don’t play football”. This is a very telling difference between a kid and an adult. For a child, everything is possible and anything is doable. School + Singing classes + 2 hours of cricket under the sun + doing homework after coming home can all be done in one single day.

October 2021 review

The month of Gandhiji’s birthday came and went really quickly. It seems like here I was, making plans for the 2nd Oct long weekend and here I am, on the last long weekend of October.

Anyway, before going into the specifics, let me go through the overall numbers

watch clock with nohands take time

It’s going to take time buddy

Piyush Pandey, arguably the best advertising mind India has ever produced, took more than 10 years to put out this first iconic ad(the Cadbury cricket one).


Khsuhwant Singh, one of India’s most prolific writers and journalists, wrote a Hindustan Times column for 50 years, straight. Yup, a column every week for 50 years! He also wrote every day from 4 Am to 5 Am, every day.


Casey Neistat shot videos and made films every day for more than 10 years, after which he started his daily vlogging that catapulted his fame.

I wanna thank me snoop dog gifting myself

Gifting myself


I work in advertising but ironically, I am pretty anti-consumerism. The most I gift anyone are books and hence when it comes to gifting myself, I make myself feel guilty.


But this habit of mine started in 2019. Specifically, the Diwali of 2019, when during the Amazon sale, I bought myself a Kindle. None of my friends had it, I had never seen it physically, and 6k at that time was a big amount for me to spend on a luxury item. But, I went ahead and bought it, and that made way to my Diwali gift to myself of 2020.


But before, let me tell you how the Kindle changed me — I read almost 2x the books than usual after I bought it. And the biggest reason for me to buy it was the fact that I change houses so often, carrying books and their weight becomes a nightmare. But with a Kindle, I was carrying literally 100 books in my pocket, during my solo trips to Pondicherry or my New Year trip to Gokarna or during the lockdown, where book deliveries were not happening. And a few books that I would have never ordered on a whim physically, I got them on Kindle, 2 of them being on fitness.

Those 2 fitness books, one my Murakami and another by Dr Rangan Chatterjee paved the way for my Diwali gift of 2020 — A pair of running shoes. Boy oh boy. I had seen Casey Neistat run 40 km every day of sorts in his vlogs and I thought it must have been a child’s play. I was very wrong. And lockdown forcing everyone to stay home, everyone consumed a lot more calories and did a lot less exercising which resulted in weight gain. My story was the same too. In a year, I went from 78 kg to 91 kg, with my stomach out and stretchmarks all over.

It was a wake-up call and that Diwali gift to myself was very needed. Last Diwali, I ran properly for the first time in my adult life, and it was a full 200 mts. Yeah, I could not even run for 60 secs straight, had to walk and run through my first 1Km. Wondering how much impact those running shoes had? Yesterday I ran 3.54 km, straight, without walking in between.

Diwali is coming in 2 weeks, so what will be this year’s gift? For the longest time, I didn’t think I needed anything(read the guilt part of buying in para 1 again). Eventually, I thought I’ll buy wireless earphones for the sake of it, to keep the habit going. But now I have figured out what I really need and can buy without guilt.

But I’ll keep it to myself for now, will probably update in a few months and tell you how that gift is helping me.

nostalgia stories matter

Nostalgia, WTF!

The first time I encountered the word “Nostalgia” was while watching TV, switching through the magical portal called a remote control and coming across ESPN. They had a show called “Nostalgia India”. I did not know what the word meant but it had a nice ring to it, it rhymed. And as Vir Das said, we Indians like anything that rhymes. Although it is more of a human trait.


Coming to human traits, how about visiting the most travelled place in the world — the past. It certainly is my favourite place to visit.

unforgiving-covid-disease

The disease that was unforgiving

In 2007, my grandmother passed away. I was in 7th standard, around 12 years old. While I have faint memories of it, some things really stood out — I remember I was giving an exam when the invigilator asked my class supervisor to let me end the exam early. I didn’t get what was happening. I was rushed to the hospital where I saw more than 100 people gathered around an ambulance. My grandmother didn’t even live at my place, so these were just the ones who knew her through my parents. Those people accompanied the ambulance to Surat, where another 100-200 people joined, and many of them came to Tapi river, where she was cremated.

June 2021 review

A monthly review as a way of accountability has been on my mind since a long time. I do maintain a journal that I try to fill every night however, hope this monthly review on a public site will give me a better birds-eye view.

Metrics:

Workout – 14 times
Cardio – 7 times
Mediated – 4 times
Worked on my side hustle(more info below) – 11 days
Writing – 6 days

A man falling through sky

4 years of going nowhere – My journey with CAT

In the past couple of months, I’ve dabbled with a lot of stuff to do on weekends. Standup comedy, Improv, going to Toastmasters, meeting old friends here in Bangalore, going through pickup books and videos, trying to write on my blog, etc. And to be honest I am struggling on all of them. This was not the case until December. My weekends were quite sorted then.

For the uninitiated or any foreign audiences (Yeah, I am optimistic), Common Aptitude test or CAT is an exam conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management(IIM’s) to select students for their PGDM(or MBA) programmes. They are conducting this exam since 1950 but I’ve been giving this exam since 2015. It’s 2019 now.

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