Edition 172 - what to believe, BLR water, Federer, Samba, Huberman & an old scandal I didn't know of
The last week has been stressful, mind-opening, cheery and bizarre by turns. I was reading something about sleep online and chanced upon Alexey Guzey’s take on Matt Walker’s popular book on sleep. It isn’t uncommon for authors to use edited versions of their own research and findings and apparently people have defended Walker already on why he may have done so for simplicity’s sake. One of my takeaways is that it is hard to know what to believe and one must never let go of being a sceptic even if it is about something that is widely accepted as true.
Then, there is this cool interview with Roger Federer in his post-tennis life. There are so many threads in there which are thought provoking. Here are some I pondered
“Training” even to be comfortable in formalwear/fashionHis response to the Kapadia documentary
Underplaying his career to his kids while also nudging them to play some tennis at least
His response to the summoning greatness question
Single handed backhand
His change in response to the beautiful tennis comment
Some of the stress in the last few days was because my elder son was sick. So I ended up spending a little more time with him than is usual, now that he spends a big part of his day at school. During one such interaction, I learnt about a son of Krishna, called Samba. I can’t believe there isn’t a bigger treatment of this subject in Indian writing (If you are aware, I am happy to correct myself). I used to have quite a decent knowledge of Indian myth when I was younger. So to discover this was quite a pleasant surprise. The fact that it was about a father-son relationship, which I discovered with my son makes it particularly memorable.
Unless you are a non-internet person and has no interest in health & fitness news, what a blow-up, the Huberman ‘affair’ has turned out to be! I am not linking since scandal is not the point of this newsletter but I have spent a non-trivial no of hours listening to his podcast and occasionally squirmed when he has supported supplements or admitted to using protocols which are still not widely proven/tested. So found it bizarre and bewildering. But then again, we are humans.
I also discovered a documentary filmmaker named Vikram Jayanti (VJ) whose father Teja was embroiled in scandal over 50 years ago. VJ is behind multiple interesting documentaries as a result of which he was on my favourite audio program in the last year (The Museum of Curiosity).
Have a great weekend (we have a 3 day weekend here in India)