The Year My Laptop Learned Morse Code (And Other Tales from the Undergrowth)

A windy rewind

2024 was a year, like most other years. It was a collection of 365 days and a series of chapters lived according to a phase. I had a bunch of aha moments and a bunch of oh no moments, and a few realisations along the way -

1. my work is going to dictate everything.

The personal won’t dictate the professional as much as the other way around. My ability to do what I want with the time that I have to myself will be dictated by how much time I have to myself to begin with. What I want to achieve in that time, will necessarily build the person I become, and that will spill into who I am at work. Everything needs to work together somehow, like a rainforest where my work is the biggest tree in the canopy and learning to sing “Good Luck, Babe!” in original key is a mushroom in a fungi network in an irrelevant corner of the tree.

2. learning to appreciate the fungi network

This year, I let myself appreciate the filaments and gills and spores of the little fun guys inside my head. I took my first solo trip to Poombarai and Kodaikanal. If you know me, you know I lean hipster-adjacent—a product of growing up in Goa and a semi-conservative family. My sweet spot is where parental approval overlaps with indie sensibilities. A yoga retreat? Perfect.

So I found myself in a semi-open jeep, travelling the way a pumpkin without feet would, from Kodai to a little south of nowhere. If you follow the filaments closely, you find yourself in a world underground, where the work canopy has a more domino role to play. Here, the bugs dance, the caterpillars dawdle drunkenly and everyone helps each other. It’s all fun and games.

I went for a five-day yoga retreat to Yahnai Kaduh, a sanctuary where they grow a lot of their food, conjure electricity from a river, drum circle in a mystic moonlight and I want the founders to adopt me.

Home for a magical week.

On one of our post-yoga trails to a waterfall, we had to traverse through a mucky, marshy, quagmire of an elephant path, with massive dents below a sheet of grass – created by elephant feet of course. It’s quite zen actually. You know you’re going to get sucked in, you just don’t know when. I had these electric blue fake rubber birkenstocks that got gobbled by the earth, nearly taking half my left leg in the process.

I was barefoot for the rest of the trail, when the muck gave way to a thick forest. Initially, when I saw that the guys here were barefoot from day 1, I was a little taken aback. The word dirty popped up a few times in my head. But here I was, feet caked with mud. There wasn’t anything dirty about this at all. It was freeing, a tiny handshake with the earth. My feet were a gorgeous dark brown for the rest of the trip.

Pro tip: The micros and the micro-micros are far better appreciated when there’s no phone around you.

3. yes, it is the damn phone.

My average screen time for those five days was about 1.5 hours, which is still a considerable time given that I only used it to check Whatsapp and make calls to the family. Technology creeps in on you and settles into your life while you lie unaware of your shrinking attention span, your hyper-consumerist tendencies,

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Apologies, was that interlude of backslashes too abrupt? Did it break the flow? You won’t believe what happened to my electronic devices on the night of 31^st December. My laptop gained phantom abilities. The backslash, probably unamused by the lack of its usage, staged a revolution. The bastard was EVERYWHERE. In my google searches, in my word docs, in my settings search bar where I was frantically typing “keyboard”.

RIP ://

I yanked the key out, layer by layer – and it still wouldn’t stop. I haplessly went to Claude, sputtering backlashes mid-query, typing at a speed of 5 words a minute. Claude was quick to sense my trepidations. He said, “Just nod, don’t speak.” I asked him for better laptop recommendations, and then I continued the conversation on my phone, completely side-stepping the phantom phenomenon. And then my phone stopped working too. Switched the old men off, let them rest. Thought I’d address the issue next year. Which brings me to the most last-minute lesson learned.

4. saala life mein kuchh bhi hota hai.

When I say this, I mean it, cause I have this story you won’t believe.

I got acquainted with Suyash Kamat, a filmmaker, because of a Goa-Calcutta connect. In September 2023, he had tweeted asking if folks could suggest places with views of the Mumbai skyline. Now if you have been a loyal reader, you know what I did next. Of course, my Mahim train view – where the sun rises over Dharavi and BKC and the railway line that diverges into Western and Harbour.

He came over a day or two before Ganesh Chaturthi, with another colleague. They were ADs, working on this movie by a female director – didn’t ask much. They wanted b-roll shots, and this view happened to be what they were looking for, among other things.

Then the trailer released a few months later. This movie, All We Imagine As Light. I text my friends, telling them that they had to watch it when it came out – we all should. You know the history it went on to create.

There’s layers to why AWIAL is incredibly special to me. I’ve written a fair bit about being lonely against the largesse of this city, but it does not come close to just how lonely 2024 was for me. My closest friends left the city and the peripheral friends moved out. Somehow towards the end, I inchingly taught myself to find joy in doing things alone.

It was the first movie I watched alone in a theatre. Usually, I need someone with me to gasp, laugh, or comment during the screening, but this one felt personal. Meditative. The trailer had already hinted at a sense of quiet introspection, and I wanted to sit with that alone. I went in there, sitting and unspooling the threads that bound me to this movie. September 2023 was incidentally the month I moved to Mumbai, and here I was, thinking about how out of breath I was just keeping up with its rhythms back then – and still do.

I saw my name in a jigsaw of other names as a “the Director would also like to thank” credit. Cried a little. Came home to an empty apartment and slept.

It was a year interconnected in ways explainable only in hindsight perhaps, far too entrenched in the undergrowth. Someday, sit your butt down in the garden you have created. Marvel at the unexpectedness of seeing an oyster mushroom – or a mango sapling. Now where did he come from? You won’t know, perhaps a spat-out seed from months ago.