Take time to drink your tea
Hello!
Welcome to Chai Masala, my spot for intermittent musings on life and the universe.
We have most likely talked before and you are most likely receiving this because Gmail picked it up in my address book and I added it to my newsletter without your consent. I am sorry, feel free to unsubscribe. There will be no hard feelings.
We are still in the “friends and family” round of this newsletter so unless there are radical changes in the subscriber base (unlikely), I will write with this audience (you!) in mind. Expect to see vestiges of conversations we’ve had and maybe some on-brand snark :)
This first edition will be mostly logistical. Work and life have taught me to set expectations early (and set them low) so I am going to tell you what this is and why I am doing it.
Like us all, I am intermittently plagued by questions big and small — What are we meant to do with our finite lives on this planet? Does anything matter? Who decides? Who decides who decides?1 I am also still at an age where I can delude myself into thinking that these questions are not futile, and while I may never be able to answer them, the ruminations are still worthwhile.
Over the years, I have also built personal intuitions on some topics but not quite figured out how to communicate them. Our inability to empathize with Manhattan’s pigeons is obviously connected to the scourge of late capitalism, I am just not quite sure how to explain it. Through some low-effort writing delivered to your inbox on a yet-to-be-defined schedule, I want to articulate this tacit knowledge, which when left unsaid, forms the gulf between my actions and other’s comprehension of them.
If you’re reading this first edition in your inbox, we’ve probably had some variant of such conversations. Firstly, thank you for helping me along on this journey of worldview building. Secondly, why do I now feel the need to write instead of in addition to conversing? People smarter than me have recommended writing to clarify.2 This is thus an ongoing enterprise in thinking, not the final output of any structured thought. During another doomed blogging exercise (more on that below), I wrote:
Mildly strong opinions, weakly held: I expect to write about things I frankly don’t know much about. I tend to aspire to expertise on topics before feeling comfortable sharing my (tentative) views about them in public fora. Needless to say, I am not an expert (and will likely never be) on much. Since college, I have also begun to admire people who are able to work with uncertainty and continue evolving their beliefs about a range of topics, a skill set that feels more useful for the non-academic world. And so, no post here will be a permanent or completely “true” reflection of my beliefs. It will be a snapshot of my thinking at a point in time and will hopefully continue evolving.
Please share your ponderings too. I am excited to grow with you.
Lastly, treat me kindly. For the longest time, I was deterred from writing publicly despite several false starts. In April 2022, I set up a blog page that referenced an initial impetus from November 2021. Whenever I started I was immediately daunted by the thought that everything I enjoyed or thought about was derivative — You like walking to immerse yourself in the fabric of the city? Nice. Trains and flying are metaphors for life? Cute. Today I am old enough to have accepted that someone, somewhere has already thought my thoughts and shared them more cogently than I ever will. However, I am also jaded enough that feeling derivative isn’t a strong enough deterrent. If you can become an influencer by recycling Reddit posts into TikToks and reposting them on Instagram, I can write some words that have been written before. I hope they are still somewhat exciting to read.
The name
You know me, hence you know I love chai. It is the only form of food I have a discernible palate and strong opinions for. I am also not creative enough to come up with excellent puns like Ink-quilab.
While signing up for this Substack, I tried angling for Masala Chai [dot] substack [dot] com but some kindred soul had already taken it but never made a single post in what I assume was a burst of motivation that petered out like all of our new year’s resolutions have by now. My friend CPB had a brainwave fitting of the English major he was (he wasn’t, please bear with the inside jokes, you’ll all get one), and suggested Chai Masala sounded punchy enough.
It does. Instead of spiced chai, here I offer you the spices that go into it. In a paean to the drink from college, I wrote:
Mass-produced in side shops and transported in six-cup carriers to customers in shops or offices — from fancy multi-nationals encased in glass to Sharma ji’s one-man law firm — chai is the invitation for the client, the guest, to stay a little longer and mull over shared prospects.
Thank you for reading this far. I hope you take time to drink your tea today and hope to see you on these pages a little longer (but truly no hard feelings if you unsubscribe)
Inspired by this lovely calligraphy print by Thich Nhat Hanh (from Blue Cliff Monastery)
Thank you Shoshana Zuboff (and TBB). Here is an Easter Egg book recommendation for people who read footnotes: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
See Holden Karnofsky on Learning by Writing and Ben Kuhn on Why and how to write thing on the Internet
Excited to see where this goes!