12th May, 2026

What am I working on?

Tried making a Lego for the first time and it was such a fun experience. We did this as a date night activity and assembled 'The Flying Machine'. This is how it looks

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYNM1yeO1Vd/?hl=en

What am I reading?

I am currently reading The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere. More about this in the next blog.

I read Conversations with Friends with Sally Rooney. It follows Frances, the narrator, as she navigates a complicated web of relationships with her ex-lover/best friend and Nick, a married man she meets through his wife. Rooney’s writing is descriptive and flowing with emotions, showing how the characters’ feelings and behaviors shift over time. At its core, the novel is about adultery, but Rooney avoids clear judgments. No one is simply right or wrong; instead, everyone is flawed and tangled in messy relationships. Couple of interesting things I noticed in this novel was the omission of quotation marks in dialogue, making the conversations feel blurred with Frances’s inner thoughts and spoken words. Virtual communication, characters communicating through texts, messaging and email, was present throughout the book. Probably symbolic of the gaps in their communication leading to misinterpretations sometimes.

By the end, her characters remain toxic, conflicted, and entangled in patterns they cannot escape. It is this refusal to offer a neat closure that makes the novel both frustrating and realistic like a mirror showing the complexities of real human relationships.

What am I watching/watched recently?

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is Studio Ghibli’s most remarkable and my most favourite film. Taking eight years to create, the story begins with Sanuki, a bamboo cutter, who discovers a glowing, Thumbelina-like princess inside a stalk of bamboo. She transforms into a baby, and he and his wife raise her in their rural home. Later, the miraculous appearances of gold and fine fabrics convince Sanuki that she deserves a grander life, so he moves her to the capital to find a noble husband.

The film is about the emptiness of wealth and status and the deeper value of love and simple joys. Princess Kaguya longs not for riches or titles, but for the beauty of nature and the happiness found in ordinary human experiences.

Visually, it is stunning—its hand-drawn, crayon-like illustrations give it a delicate, ephemeral feel that matches the emotional depth of the story. Everytime I watch this movie, I cannot help but think of how little we need to live happily and how much we crave for more each time.

The best scene from the movie here:

Princess Kaguya enjoying the cherry blossom away from her palace.

New thing I learnt lately?

I got to know some interesting principles of design:

• Progressive Disclosure: It aims at reducing upfront cognitive load and enhances usability by displaying only essential information initially, revealing advanced or secondary features only upon user request. It is not only on applications, but can also be seen in physical setup like a mall or airport.

• Desire lines: These are patterns of behavior where users create their own, often unintended, paths to complete tasks. It is used for highlighting gaps between planned design and actual user needs. Think of this as a well trodden path vs a unexplored path.