• First things first: I’ve reached the end of my sabbatical, and I’m itching to start working again. If you’re looking for an experienced frontend engineer to help you build complex React applications, please reach out to me over email or my Twitter handle!
• Eagle eyed readers will have noticed that I’ve given this website a facelift. This was long overdue, since the previous website had been carelessly slapped together without much concern for readability. I’ve tried to rectify that mistake with this new design. Its large serif fonts, ample whitespace, and reduced visual noise should make it much more pleasant to read. However, since I’m not a designer, there’s certainly something important that I’ve overlooked. If this is the case, I would love to know so I can fix the issue.
• I was sick again last week. Throat infection, from the looks of it. With COVID and the flu and allergies all making the rounds right now, who even knows anymore?
• I’ve always been a slow writer, but only recently have I started to see this as a problem. Writing an 800-word blog post can take me nearly three hours, which is three times slower than my ideal writing pace. At this pace, researching and writing a blog post of 1000-1500 words would take me several days, and a medium-length post of 2000-3000 words post would take me more than a week. I’m not happy with this state of affairs anymore.
• Part of the problem is that I’m out of practice, but the bigger issue is that I just can’t help myself from writing and rewriting the same things over and over again in an attempt to get them just right. To counter this tendency, I’ve made some changes to my writing workflow. I now write with a timer running, setting limits on how long I spend on each part of my writing process. I’ve also started writing from an outline, which means I can do the hard work of putting my thoughts in order much before I start polishing them for public consumption. I’ve already noticed a considerable improvement in my writing speed. I’m hoping to get to a point where I can write a medium-length post in under two hours (assuming my research is in order).
• I finished reading Issue 47 of Uncanny Magazine. Some of the stories it contained were not for me, and some I simply didn’t understand, but the overall package was hugely entertaining. Left to my own devices, I would never have had the chance to read such an eclectic and diverse set of tales. My favorites were Bramblewilde by Jordan Taylor and To Hunger, As With Perfect Faith by Radha Kai Zan. If you enjoy them, I encourage you to purchase the full issue they appear in from Weightless Books.
• I’m now reading Geentajali Shree’s Booker-winning novel रेत समाधि, available in English as Tomb of Sand. I’m also reading Issue 132 of Apex Magazine.

If you want to start using Devanagari QWERTY on your Windows computer right away, visit https://github.com/s3thi/devanagari-qwerty and follow the instructions in the README.

For more context, read on.

My Preferred Keyboard Layout for Typing Devanagari

For nearly a decade, my preferred method for typing Hindi has been a keyboard layout called Devanagari QWERTY. This layout maps each Latin character on a standard QWERTY keyboard to its closest phonetic equivalent in Devanagari.

For example, while using Devanagari QWERTY:

• Pressing the r key produces a र
• Pressing the k key produces a क
• Pressing the m key produces a म

Therefore, if you wish to type the Hindi word रकम, you can press r, k, and m in succession to do so.

Since the sounds made by the English letters r, k, and m correspond roughly to the sounds made by the Devanagari letters र, क, and म, anyone who is bilingual in Hindi and English can guess the series of key presses required to produce रकम without too much trouble.

But that’s not it. Devanagari consists of forty eight letters, whereas the Latin script only consists of twenty six. Since Devanagari doesn’t have letter casing, Devanagari QWERTY makes use of the Shift and Option keys to map a single key to multiple letters. For example:

• Pressing t produces a त
• Pressing Shift + t produces a थ
• Pressing Option + t produces a ट
• Pressing Shift + Option + t produces a ठ

This mapping is designed in such a way that a Hindi speaker can easily guess which letter any given combination of alphabet and modifier keys will produce.

Similar rules exist for typing vowels: diacritics are mapped to un-modified letter keys, and their independent forms can be produced by using Shift and Option in different combinations. A half-letter can be produced by typing the independent form of that letter followed by a halant/virama, which is mapped to the f key.

The scheme is simple, discoverable, and painfully obvious once you’ve seen it in action. If you can type English using a QWERTY keyboard, you’re already halfway to typing Hindi using Devanagari QWERTY.

The Standard Keyboard Layout for Typing Devanagari

Devanagari QWERTY stands in sharp contrast to InScript, the standard keyboard layout for typing Devanagari and eleven other scripts from the Brahmic family. InScript maitains no logial relationship between the English letters printed on the keys of a QWERTY keyboard and the Devanagari letters that they produce.

While using InScript, it’s impossible to guess which letter is mapped to which key. You need to either find a “bilingual” keyboard, put Devanagari stickers on your existing keyboard, or keep a cheat sheet open on your computer at all times. This makes getting started with InScript a slow, frustrating affair.

While designed specifically to make typing Indian languages comfortable and efficient, InScript’s theoretical advantages have failed to translate into real-world usefulness. Despite being around since 1986 and supported by every major operating system, it has barely seen any adoption.

Using Devanagari QWERTY on Windows 11

A few months ago, when I started using Windows 11 on a secondary computer, I discovered that it only ships with two input methods for typing Hindi: InScript, and a transliteration keyboard called Hindi Phonetic.

I made do with Hindi Phonetic for months, but I’ve never been a fan of transliteration keyboards. My irritation with this input method got the better of me last week, and I was compelled to look for something more reasonable. My search led me to the download page for Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, a creaky old program that lets you customize and create keyboard layouts for Windows. Bingo!

Using MSKLC, I was able to create a keyboard layout for Windows that was identical to the macOS version of Devanagari QWERTY. Creating, testing, and packaging it took me about half a day, a large part of which was spent restarting Windows. When I was done, I put the files on GitHub in the hopes that they might be useful to somebody else.

At the time of writing this entry, I’ve been using my port of Devanagari QWERTY for Windows inside Telegram, Firefox, Evernote, File Explorer, and Microsoft Word for nearly a week. Despite my initial misgivings, it appears to work perfectly across all the apps I use regularly.

You can download Devanagari QWERTY for Windows from its GitHub page here: https://github.com/s3thi/devanagari-qwerty. If you run into bugs, please feel free to open an issue or write me an email. If you enjoy using the layout, I’d love to hear from you over email or Twitter.

हैप्पी टाईपिंग!

I’m too exhausted to write today. Staring at this document for three hours hasn’t helped, so I’m going to give up and go to bed. See y’all next week.

In the meantime, please enjoy this song about gators who like to party.

• Life advice: if the product is called “family-sized papaya”, it might be a bit too large for you to consume by yourself.
• A mysterious illness forced me to be housebound for the entire week. I perpetually felt like I was on the cusp of coming down with a terrible fever, but despite the exhaustion and body ache, my temperature refused to stray from 98.6F. If it had gone up by a single degree, I could have taken my rotting carcass to a doctor; if the body aches had disappeared, I could have gone about squandering my life as usual. But nothing happened, and all I could do was stay home and rest until I felt better.
• What eats at me in times of illness, more than whatever affliction might be plaguing me at the time, is that feeling of soul-deep dissatisfaction brought on by my inability to do productive work. I need lessons in how to be properly sick without losing my mind.
• Thanks to Weightless Books, my Kindle now holds the latest issues of Uncanny, Apex, Nightmare, and Lightspeed magazines. This is the first time I’m reading a fiction magazine, so I’m excited to dig in!
• I received an invite to try out Arc, a new Chromium-based browser by The Browser Company. When I installed it, I expected to see yet another Chromium clone with a few extra features bolted on. Instead, the UI I was greeted with made me question the fundamental design choices mainstream browsers have made over the last two decades. I’m already finding it hard to go back to Firefox, Edge, or Safari without feeling irritated by their UIs, which are entirely antithetical to how humans use the Web in 2022.

“For concentration,” I said, “you need a cat. Do you happen to have a cat?”

So I passed him some very good advice that if you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp. The light from the lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concetration is remarkable, very mysterious.

— Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

• Last week I noticed that my local fruit shop had fresh blueberries for sale. I’d only eaten frozen ones before so, in the spirit of inquiry, I purchased a very tiny box that cost me an eye-watering ₹300. For some reason, I expected blueberries to taste kind of like jamuns. Instead, they were like a cross between grapes and phalsas. Did I enjoy them? Considerably. Did I ₹300 enjoy them? I don’t think so.
• A character in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find is described as having a face that is “as broad and innocent as a cabbage”. This phrase tickled me so much that I feel compelled to share it here. Can we please start using it more often?
• If I spend too much time reading text on my Windows laptop, I inevitably develop a terrible headache. On high DPI displays—like the one on my ThinkPad—ClearType forces the fonts to be far too thin and sharp for comfort. Increasing the global font size to 125% breaks several apps, so I’m forced to instead bump up display scaling from my preferred 250% to 300%. Doing this gives me the same screen real estate as a 1080p display, which makes me feel like I’m stuck in an elevator. It’s a shame that neither Windows nor Linux can correctly handle high DPI displays in 2022, whereas macOS has been doing it without fuss for a decade now.
• I went on a date!
• The review scores for Cloud Atlas on IMDB either sit at a full ten stars or just one, with very few that lie in between. I personally think it’s a perfect adaptation of a perfect book that, despite its deviations from the source material, retains all the beauty, power, and awe the text inspires. For me, Cloud Atlas remains the most ambitious and important story of the times we live in.
• It’s Independence Day today, so I feel obliged to write something about it here. I will spare you the thesis and say only this: the overwhelming feeling I have when I think about India is concern. I’m concerned that the current stewards of this country will continue to subvert the ideals it was founded on and lead us ever onward into the darkness. I do have a flea of hope, though. And fleas ain’t easy to get rid of.

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

See also: Pawns of Some Scripted Fate

• Bangalore is wet and cold and overcast. I’m consuming chai by the barrelful to keep myself warm. The cats are on their best behavior, in the hopes that I’ll let them snuggle up to me when I ensconce myself in approximately eighty thousand blankets at bedtime. My favorite time of the year is here!
• As I make my way through Flannery O’Connor’s collected short fiction—one story each morning, taken with a cup of hot filter coffee—I find myself turning each grotesque, sardonic tale over in my mind for hours after I’ve finished reading it. I’ve always struggled to understand the appeal of short stories, but O’Connor’s work is helping me learn to appreciate the form.
• Cloud Atlas is as good as I remember. Will I outgrow it in the same way I’ve outgrown so many of my other favorites? Come back in ten years to find out.
• It has become clear to me that my writing skills have atrophied after years of disuse. Sentences that would spontaneously take shape in my mind now require hours of labor to produce. My working vocabulary has shrunk. Putting my thoughts in order feels like grabbing Jell-O with chopsticks. Just writing these weeknotes takes me half a day sometimes. I’m frustrated, but there’s nothing I can do besides writing every day until my writing muscles regain their strength.
• In an unexpected turn of events, I’ve discovered that I enjoy eating fruit. Who knew?

• This weeknote was going to be longer, but I just can’t English today.
• I’ve recently had an urge to revisit books that I’ve enjoyed in the past. So far, I’ve finished Catch-22 and This is How You Lose the Time War. Next up is Cloud Atlas, which I’m hoping to crack open this evening. In anticipation of the release of Nona the Ninth on 13th September, I also plan to pick up Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth later in the month.
• It’s interesting to note which books still touch me deeply on a second read-through and which ones have lost their lustre with time. For example, Catch-22 feels as poignant as ever, but The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy doesn’t quite make me feel the way it did when I first read it as a teenager.
• I’m in the process of writing a post describing the effects of digital distractions on my emotional well-being, but I keep having to scrap the entire thing and start from scratch over and over again. Even after three rewrites, I’ve been unable to get to the heart of what I want to say. Is this what “writing is rewriting” means?
• TypeScript is a hecking good idea.
• MDX, too, is a hecking good idea.

• My main concern over the last week has been getting through the day without falling asleep in my chair. Post-COVID exhaustion, coupled with a depressive episode earlier this year, put me in the habit of sleeping for ten hours or more each day. It’s a habit that I’m now trying to break.
• Caffeine, that most dependable of allies in the war against daytime sleepiness, has been no help at all in my quest for wakefulness. The medication my doctor prescribed to keep me awake just about does its job, leaving me dizzy, nauseous, and nursing a headache by mid-afternoon. The Internet tells me it takes between ten days to two weeks to get used to a new sleep schedule. With luck, I will return next week with good news and eyes that open all the way.
• Sleeping for a normal amount of time has freed up several extra hours in my schedule, so I’ve been writing for about ninety minutes every morning. I’m a slow writer, and recent health issues have done nothing to improve the situation. Thankfully, my goal is not to produce a large volume of writing or chase a deadline. For the moment, I’m reveling in the sense of satisfaction that comes from filling up the blank screen with words.
• My favorite music festival in India is back after a two year hiatus, and I bought tickets!
• One of my goals for last week was to dig into concurrent React, but I got distracted by all the shiny new features in NextJS. I may or may not have started a new side-project to take them for a spin. Whoops.
• WeWork has been more fun than I anticipated. I’ve met more new people in the last five days than I met in the last two years combined. My people skills have atrophied from disuse, but my hunger for human contact eclipses my fear of social embarrassment. I keep phasing out during conversations, getting confused when too many people are talking at the same time, or lapsing into uncomfortable silences when having a one-on-one conversation with somebody. A few times I’ve even managed to forget my own name. But despite feeling like I’m three raccoons in a trench-coat pretending to be a person, I’m happy to have this bit of social interaction back in my life.
• To be loved by cats is such a privilege.

Currently reading: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone