Essays on The Field Blog

App defaults in my privacy-torn world

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:52:00 +0530

There is a version of me that uses Proton for everything. That version of me has made the clean break, pays the money for it, and sleeps a little better knowing his data is not being quietly turned into something useful for someone else.

That version of me does not yet fully exist.

What does exist: a ThinkPad running Bluefin, a Pixel 8A on Android 17 Beta, a Kobo e-reader and a family storage plan on Google that makes the math on leaving genuinely hard to argue with. The privacy case is airtight. The financial case keeps winning anyway.

My favourite comment on YouTube

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:54:00 +0530

Under Jonny Mozza’s video “You’re way more interesting than you think you are”, Jacob Motl wrote:

I’m a composer, visual artist, game developer, and writer, all of which encompass my career. My day job is frying chicken at a deli. Amongst the composers, I’m not the best composer but I may be the best at frying chicken. Amongst the deli workers, I’m not the best at frying chicken but I may be the best composer. Yet in each arena, I have plenty to learn from others.

Who is actually fighting climate change and who is throwing a tantrum in the corner

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:24:00 +0530

There is a map I keep returning to in my head. It is my mental picture of who is actually doing what about climate change, and who is busy dismantling the little that was built in the last few decades.

It is roughly this: Europe writes the rules. China makes the technology cheap enough for everyone to use. India and other developing nations adopt those technologies, adapt them, and build their own ambitions around them. And the United States, at least under both of Donald Trump’s terms, sits in the corner, arms crossed, rejecting the science, the treaties, the regulations, and occasionally the basic premise that there is a problem at all.

Poke around and find out (addendum)

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:29:00 +0530

The Nextcloud setup went well. That felt strange to write. I have been scared to do this for as many years as it has been since I first heard about Nextcloud.

A file server, calendar, contacts, notes, music server, tasks, RSS, podcasts, bookmarks, all running on the laptop, syncing to the phone over the home network. And over the internet through Tailscale when need be. The kind of thing that sounds like a weekend of breakage. It was a single fun day, and everything worked out at the end.

Poke around and find out

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:03:00 +0530

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes just before things go wrong. It is a confidence like that of someone eager to skip to the interesting part, without reading what comes before.

I tried installing Omarchy inside a Distrobox container. Seemed reasonable enough, or at least I had not done enough digging to know it was not. The installer reached outside the container and overwrote home directory configuration files, messing up my Bluefin install. The fun stuff layered on top by default, especially the dinosaurs in my terminal, was gone.

Love leaks slowly and fades away

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:20:00 +0530

Nobody tells you it can happen this quietly. No argument, no betrayal, no clean break to point at. Just a slow thinning, like the way a song you loved gets played one too many times and you stop noticing it.

You still do the things. You show up, you eat dinner together, and you ask how their day went. But the warmth that used to sit underneath the habit is now missing. The words are all still there. The feeling that made them worth saying is not.

The quiet Linux spread

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:31:00 +0530

I did not set out to convert anyone. I just helped a friend install Linux, the way you’d help someone move furniture. You are there, you do the thing, you go home.

Then his cousins wanted to see it. Then a friend of his asked questions. Then someone who had been about to buy a MacBook started doing the maths on giving their laptop a renewed life with Linux Mint instead (it is free, you save all the money!).

If you need the website, it is not public art

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:30:00 +0530

I have been working on several web-based projects recently. Thinking about how the web shapes access, who it serves, who it leaves out, and also building some things of my own. So when I find myself asking whether a sculpture needs a website to justify its existence, the question feels less like art criticism and more like something I have been circling for a while now.

I wrote some time back about how the Gibbs Farm collection, with massive sculptures set amid rolling green hills, is open to the public a few times a year. It is a generous project, and I genuinely admire it. But something has been nagging at me recently, some of the sculptures in public spaces do not make sense unless you have already read about them.

AI is for the stuff around the stuff

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:54:00 +0530

I spent a late night last week getting Noto Sans to load correctly across 16 languages in a Rails app. Not the most interesting part of the app I am working on, but just font subsetting and an efficient asset and resource pipeline config. Hours on a thing that has nothing to do with why the project exists.

That is when it hit me – every job has a core motion. The thing underneath the job title that actually makes the work work. For me, it has always been about sitting with ambiguity until it turns into something coherent. Reading a situation, finding the frame. Whether it was designing through the UX process or structuring a policy report now, the skill was the same. That part, I want to keep doing by hand.

Climate grief is not dramatic, it is Tuesday

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:44:00 +0530

There is a specific kind of scroll that I have started recognising. You are on your phone, half-awake, not really looking for anything, and then there it is. A forest somewhere. A coastline. A number that did not use to be that high. You keep scrolling. That is it. No gasp. No crisis. Just a small, quiet lowering of something inside you, and then you keep scrolling.

I used to think grief was supposed to feel like something. Like you would know when it arrived. But this thing that has been accumulating but not announcing itself. It just settles.

Jeremy Wade showed up eight years late

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:11:00 +0530

I think some parts of the Indian population finally fell into a digital rabbit hole that possibly no one expected in 2026: Jeremy Wade talking about actual river monsters (humans) in the Ganga River in his Might Rivers series. The episode originally aired in 2018, but it was recently uploaded for free viewing on YouTube.

After the full episode went live on YouTube, there has been a barrage of Shorts and Reels that show and remind people of how they have affected the river and the effects of a changing climate on ecosystems.

before the sun shines

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0530

There is a sacred moment between night and day when I can meditate in solitude while being present in the natural world. There is no human interference at that time, as most people are still sleeping. No one is up except for the early rising birds who can now sing without being diluted by the traffic, machines or just humans talking over each other. Even though this peace is temporary and I will soon live through my chaos among the human society, there is profound beauty in feeling one with the self without having to act or impose the expectations others have of me. I yearn for this moment and look forward to it when I go to sleep every night.

Choosing humane is not hard

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0530

I have been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about being kind. Or ethical. Or whatever word feels right to you when you are questioned about your activities that affect your fellow humans and the earth. And everyone makes it sound like it is a massive task and that it would not bring any change to this world overnight. And honestly? I think that is nonsense. We are just making things harder than they need to be.

Age verification is not privacy-preserving

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0530

Governments and regulators, even those who have long supported and encouraged better privacy for digital users, are now pushing for online age verification. In a world that has given businesses an open hand for decades in targeting minors for advertising, they now want to protect them from adult content, gambling, and other content they deem restricted. Who controls such restrictions is itself concerning. Regardless, any age verification (online or offline) cannot be privacy-preserving.

Inspiring a new generation of astronauts

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0530

Growing up in the early 2000s, the stories of astronauts Rakesh Sharma, Kalpana Chawla, and Sunita Williams (an American astronaut of Indian origin) were woven into my childhood textbooks. Later, as a teenager, I discovered Ravish Malhotra, another pioneer whose name deserved wider recognition but never received it. After these icons, there has been a long gap. An entire generation of children grew up without any Indian launching into space. The sense of scientific pride associated with human spaceflight faded over the years, even as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) achieved remarkable success in uncrewed missions, placing satellites and equipment into orbit.

Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0530

In April 2003, Iraqi civilians toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square, Baghdad. It was one of the many statues around Iraq that were getting destroyed after the fall of Hussein’s 23-year rule. Erected only a year before, in 2002, to celebrate Hussein’s birthday, the statue was just one of the thousands of portraits that reflected his personality cult. Even the Iraqi currency featured his face at the time. United States government officials and journalists claimed the statue’s fall symbolised victory for the US.

Circling back to the echo of emptiness

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0530

As has been done multiple times, I have circled back again lately. Not in a literal sense, but emotionally. I have had some incredible new experiences in the recent months and years – moments that should have filled me to the brim. And yet, there is this familiar ache, this kind of hollow space that just… persists.

It is a feeling when you are supposed to be soaring, but you still feel a bit grounded and stuck. And then, you still push through, try new things, meet new people, and open yourself up to different perspectives, and believe it will be different this time, but it is not. Even with all these amazing new puzzle pieces, the overall picture still feels incomplete.

When expectations arrive before I do

Mon, 26 May 2025 10:00:00 +0530

The moment I start to think about doing something new (and mostly important) – a whole squad of expectations bursts onto the scene (like Micah Richards did many times), setting up camp in my head before I have even taken a single step. My brain hitches a ride on a time machine, races into the future, designs the “perfect” outcome and then presents it to me as the only acceptable reality.

The comfort of a postponed problem

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0530

There are always big and scary things on the horizon that I do not want to deal with, but you should not be shocked when I say I am really good at that. Like, award-winningly good. And sometimes, it just feels so comfy, like pulling a warm blanket over my head on a chilly winter morning.

Deep down, I know that the thing is not going to magically disappear. It definitely is not going to fix itself, either. Yet, I push it down, and there is this lovely sense of peace for a little while. When the time is right, I will face what I need to face. The world will not end if I take an extra day (or month) to figure things out.

The weight of an unspoken thank you

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0530

My head says, “Hey, you should really say thank you for that.” And then… I do not. Soon enough, the moment passes, and now it will be awkward to even say it. And this count of unspoken thank-yous keeps growing, outnumbering the ones I have actually said.

When someone goes out of their way to help me with something, it is a big deal for me—sometimes even life-changing. But they do not even know how much it means because I have not properly thanked them. And every now and then, that little memory pops up, and I feel the weight of regret. Not a huge, earth-shattering sadness, but a quiet one that lingers longer than expected.