Hello reader, and welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. Just like Mumbai’s unpredictable unseasonal rains, Kat’s Kable is feeling a bit out of place and out of rhythm, mostly a reflection of how my life has been hectic! And stressful! And just so busy of late. So here I am with both a delayed and abbreviated version of the newsletter as I am wont to do when I just do not have the bandwidth. What is grounding, though, is the realization that writing and curating this newsletter always feels like an extension of myself, and also reminds me that I am good at this. Better than Chat-GPT. For now.

I also want to tell you about a pet peeve. I dislike Substack now! Especially when I subscribe to a newsletter and receive previews of locked newsletters asking me to pay and subscribe. Or when I subscribe to a newsletter, Substack recommends five more, then tells me to spread the word by tweeting, etc. Ridiculous. And finally, if I read a Substack newsletter on my browser and I haven’t subscribed, there’s an annoying pop-up asking me to subscribe. I understand Substack has made it easier for people to run their own newsletters, but it is morphing into the thing that people were annoyed with in the first place. Meh.

That’s all for now. I have a busy and (literally) eventful week coming up ahead, so I may be tardy with the next issue of the Kable too. But wish me luck. I have been very tired and preoccupied but I’ve handled myself pretty well so far, and I hope it continues that way.

If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser. This works if the website has a “soft” paywall. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether. Another, slightly involved, method is to try to disable JavaScript and reload the page. This works on some websites for me.

1. What Happened When My Wife Died (The New Yorker):

Wow, devastating personal essay from Charles Bock about his wife passing away due to cancer and how he coped especially with raising their young daughter. It is heart-wrenching, of course, so read if you have the bandwidth.

2. The ‘76ers: Viv, Kev and a year of living dangerously (Cricket Australia):

I enjoyed this write-up about a few Tasmanian cricketers going up against the legendary Vivian Richards.

3. Growing up Bengali in Bengaluru: Language is contentious terrain but chauvinism gets us nowhere (The Scroll):

This is a nice personal essay from Prithwiraj Mukherjee. I like it when people can write about a topic like this without making sweeping generalizations.

4. I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory (Wired, soft paywalled):

This article has been doing the rounds, for good reason! I just read it and I highly recommend it. I don’t know if most of us just quite realize how much of our lives depend on silicon and how amazing we are at manipulating it.

5. Towards Growing Peaches Online (Claire Evans’ Substack):

An essay about the late architect Christopher Alexander, software patterns, and Parisian peach orchards, what’s not to love.

6. Good conversations have lots of doorknobs (Experimental History, a Substack publication):

“Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.”

This also reminds me of a wonderful excerpt from Brenda Ueland’s Tell Me More: On The Fine Art Of Listening.

7. Notes on Giving Criticism (Charles Schifano’s Substack):

I liked this, and it’s not the first thing I’ve shared from Schifano’s Substack.

8. Where the Sidewalk Ends (Lux Magazine):

“Meet the Rednecks running a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama”. Written by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, it’s a very fun article! About something quite improbable.

9. Writers on Reading. Part Twenty One, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm (Soup Magazine):

I enjoyed this interview of writer Tejaswini Apte-Rahm.

I would also be wary of trying to set a story in a place where I don’t fully understand the people, language and culture—it would feel too superficial an undertaking, and so I often tend to focus on people and the human dramas that play out between them. I like to observe people very closely, especially the rhythms of their speech, the group dynamics in a conversation, or thinking about where a thought or phrase is coming from in terms of their political and personal history. I find this endlessly engrossing. My husband is constantly pulling me up for staring at other people, especially in restaurants! It can make me a rather silent dinner companion.