Monthly Review: November 2024

I started writing this blog post towards the end of November, and I believe after a long time, this is the one blog post I’m finding hard to write due to procrastination. Usually, I start a document at the beginning of every month for this blog post, but this time, I realized today that I’ve not done that and kept postponing it. Priorities, huh?

Okay, let’s get into the blog post now 🙂

I traveled well this month, starting from the beginning of the month, covering Mantralayam, Bengaluru, and now Pondicherry. We had a family gathering (a naming ceremony for my cousin’s kid) at Mantralayam, and although I was there for just one day, the entire day was fun and lovely. They named the kid “Swarat,” and he is the kid I’m in love with these days. I’ve been calling him “Gundappi,” and he lends his hand to me to dance, too! Kids are indeed gods ❤ I met a few cousins at that naming ceremony event, and we had fun!

We met again in mid-November for another cousin’s wedding in Hyderabad. It was quite an event with lots of fun, meaningful, and sarcastic conversations, playing with kids and impromptu dance moves with them. All the ceremonies at the wedding went well, and all of our cousins bonded well yet again. One of the lovely things this year for me.

And I’m back in Bengaluru for the company offsite with colleagues. It’s in Pondicherry this time, but I was in Bengaluru to have Special Veg Biryani at Meghana Foods, eat Glen’s cupcakes, and work from Paper & Pie. Will be in Pondicherry towards the end of the month for the company offsite, and yeah, looking forward to that! I’ll share my Pondi and offsite experience in the next monthly blog post. Excited to meet my team members there — Kamalini, Meeha, Hemanth, Jishnav, and Sudeep. We are planning to extend our stay and work together! 😀

Health Challenge

Our company conducts offsites twice every year. And just before the offsite, we have these health challenges to motivate folks to focus on their health and fitness and reward people for focusing on their health 😀 There are milestones to it, and every time, it changes. We had several steps milestone once, and number of activities once, and a duration of workout once, and this time it was a little challenging (and fun!):
We need to complete 1000 minutes of total workout duration for four weeks.
We need to show up four days every week for these four weeks.
If these two conditions are met, we are declared finishers of the challenge. ~26 folks completed the health challenge, covering various activities like working out at the gym, running, walking, and playing sports like badminton, cricket, and swimming. It was good seeing people motivating each other and eventually completing the challenge.

And yeah, all of this setup is because yours truly has completed the challenge, too! Here are a few images to showoff 😛

And one Sunday morning, I participated in a run organized by a running club at Durgam Cheruvu, Hyderabad. My friends, Praneeth and Meghana accompanied me (no, they asked me if I was interested in joining. Without them asking, I’d have slept lazily on Sunday). I went there thinking I’d walk through and perhaps try running for some time. But I ran the entire 5k!! This makes my 2nd 5k run in 2024. I finished it sooner than the last time, within 40 minutes. Will try for one more run sometime in December, to make the count to 3. If this goes well, I’ll try running 5k once every month. Let’s see how it goes.

Books and Movies

With all the travel and meeting my folks, reading books and watching movies took a backseat as I couldn’t sit alone and watch/read. I could manage watching two movies at the cinemas — Lucky Bashkar and All We Imagine as Light.

I had little to no expectations of Lucky Bashkar, and it worked big time for me. The screenplay and the choice of actors made the film unpredictable and relatable. Totally recommend it. It is streaming on Netflix now; watch it with your family. And the other movie, All We Imagine as Light, didn’t work for me. After hearing about the movie, I went there, but it didn’t work.

I watched a Malayalam film called “Kishkinda Kaandam” on Hotsta,r and it is surprisingly good, although I felt the movie takes a good amount of time to take you to its core point. It worked for me, and again, I couldn’t stop pondering this question — How come Malayalam cinema is coming up with good content time and again?! “It’s all about writing,” a friend said, and I couldn’t agree more.

Coming to books, I couldn’t complete even one book. I started reading 2 to 3 books, but somewhere in between. Will post more about the books once I finish them, hopefully in December.

And yes, we are towards the end of the blog post. I could not focus on writing in November for multiple reasons, one of which was not prioritizing it. Yeah, it’s totally on me, and I wish I could focus on pursuing writing seriously in December.

Wish you all have a good vacation and a refreshing month! 🤗