Spotted on the streets of North Calcutta (Raja Dinendra Street, to be precise): a weird Ma Durga×Mother Teresa hybrid.
Monday, 29 January 2018
Tuesday, 16 January 2018
Calcutta, 5:52 pm
There was a supermoon on 2 January, though this post is so late it's almost new moon time. I was in Calcutta, and my mother and I went up to the roof terrace of our building to watch the Moon rise. For is it not written: "The term 'supermoon' may be mostly hype, but it's as good an excuse as any to go out and look up."
This photo was taken from the same chilchhad – and features the same coconut tree – as the photo of the sunrise taken nearly five years ago.
This photo was taken from the same chilchhad – and features the same coconut tree – as the photo of the sunrise taken nearly five years ago.
Tuesday, 2 January 2018
Leisure Deficit
“I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual,” observes Alan Bennett in his latest collection of diaries, Keeping On Keeping On.I came across this line in a book review I read last week and thought well, this is certainly not something I can say about myself. In 2017 I wrote fewer blogposts than any other year since this blog began.
Since I started my PhD in 2014, I have a little more free time than I did when I worked in a law firm. Funnily enough, this free time seems more 'crowded' than before. For some time I've been pondering why this is so, and I now have a theory which is as follows:
Let's say I have F hours of free time per day. Of that, I tend to spend some part (P) coming up with new projects (say P = F/8). The free time I would need to properly pursue all these projects (F*) is a function of P (say F* = 12P). F* − F is my leisure deficit: the gap between the free time I want and the free time I have. (At this point, you might pause to remark that I have a depressing habit of treating leisure like a resource to be exploited for maximum yield. You would be right.) Anyhow, for the (admittedly speculative and simplistic) values I used above, the leisure deficit turns out to be F/2. Which is to say, the more free time I have, the greater my leisure deficit.
Suppose as a finance lawyer, I had an average of 2 hours of free time on weekdays. Then F* (the free time needed) was 3 hours. Now I may have, say, 4 hours of free time, but F* is 6 hours, and the leisure deficit is 2 hours: twice as much as before. As with anything else, it's easier to see graphically:
In case you're wondering, the parent folder is called Fitness because it started life as a collection of webpages on workouts and fitness plans. Later I subsumed some other folders under Fitness to keep things organised, and on the basis that they too promote a kind of fitness – mental fitness, if you will. The original bookmarks now live in the folder called Actual fitness. Or perhaps I should have called it: Fitness fitness.
Thankfully, some of the projects in the folder are still very much alive, like Knitting, which I learnt to do last month. Others, like this blog, are active, but get less attention than they deserve.
Edit: Since writing this post, I found out that the Swedish economist Staffan Linder also used the phrase 'leisure deficit' though, I believe, in a slightly different context. I will read his book later this month and update this note.
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