Weekly Notes - Week 2 - From Bhat to Bradbury
Travel is great but being back home is greater.
Your own coffee, mug, sofa, potty, and bed.
Your favorite dosa, overly fried samosa, and scoop of whey.
Your doggie called frog, who lives down the road, and rushes at you even though he sees your every single day.
Its good to be back home.
This month, I am currently drinking 'Jumping Ant' coffee from Black Baza. True to their description, fruity notes play the leading role in every sip, followed by occasional cameos by some floral notes; these beans have beaten Blue Tokai's Attikan Estate to become my favorite coffee at the moment.
I just finished reading my first book of 2026, which was 'Watership Down' by Richard Adams - its a lovely novel from the point of view of a bunch of rabbits who leave their burrow for a better life. I've been reading books that are told from the POV of animals for the last few months, and the experience has been delicious. I could not recommend it more. Take a break from human POVs and please go read 'Watership down' by Richard Adams or 'Fifteen Dogs' by Andre Alexis, both were absolutely brilliant.
I want to read more books in 2026, and I want to read these books with friends, old and new, and so I am starting 'Easy mode', which will be a book club that only reads novellas (Novellas average 100 pages, instead of novels which are usually around 350 pages). This way, even those of you with the weakest attention span and the faintest hint of ambition will find easy motivation to read 12 books with me this year. Email me at kjb.akash@gmail.com for the link, to join, with the subject "Easy mode', and I'll send you the sign up form.
In addition to running this book club, I also will try to follow Ray Bradbury's method. He inspired a unique reading resolution on cultivating a "delightful life", where the core idea is to fill your mind with diverse ideas, likening it to a "popcorn machine" where ideas constantly pop up. How? Read one poem, one short story, and one essay per day. I'm going to try to do this at least 3 times a week, for the next 3 weeks. Wish me luck? And drop me an email if you're attempting it too, I will add you to my WhatsApp group filled with aspiring (but lazy) writers.
And do you remember that novella I was working on? Well, it has finally started coming out of me. Will keep you posted on how that goes - good luck to me :) Until next week, my friends.
PS: I did enjoy True Black's cafe in HiTech City Hyderabad a little too much. They served me the best cold brew I have ever had, an exquisite opera cake, in a space featuring lovely, cold brutalist architecture. Oh, and the view from their balcony seats looked like it was ripped out straight from Nolan's 'Inception'. My best cafe experience in a very long time - please, please visit when you go to Hyderabad next.