blog – Nithin's Blog

2023 Goals

In this post, I covered my language goals for 2023. But I realized that I have a lot of other goals I want to pursue, so I want to outline them here.

At a high level, here’s what I want to do this year:

Plan better
Identify who I want to be and judge myself by those criteria
Have strong and healthy relationships in my life (of all kinds)
Be healthier (mentally and physically)
Do something constructive towards fighting climate change
Pursue my interests in cities and urban planning
Pursue my interests in languages, linguistics, and related topics
Make progress on a career that fits well for me
Write and publish things – ideally that are helpful to others
Read – and try to read things that expand my worldview

My fascination with North American French

In the winter of 2018, I studied abroad in Paris, France for 6 weeks as part of the CIEE Open Campus Program. It allowed you to live in 3 different cities over the course of a semester, with 6 weeks in each. I studied in Paris, Madrid and Berlin.

When I chose my arrangement of cities, it was actually Madrid and Berlin that I really wanted to go to. Madrid, because it was the only Spanish speaking city, and I had been studying Spanish in school at that point and wanted to practice. Berlin was because I was interested in Cold War and WW2 history (the former was mostly from playing Call of Duty).

RRR Thoughts

I just watched RRR, the Indian epic anti-colonial film that’s now the third highest grossing film in India, and is receiving critical acclaim and attention in the west. (8/18/22 Edit: The movie is also receiving a fair bit of criticism for promoting casteism and Hinduatva)

Indian cinema in the west is usually associated with Hindi-language Bollywood, and tends to ignore regional cinema. RRR is a Telugu language film, and thus is separate from Hindi language Bollywood. Telugu also happens to be the language that my family speaks. It’s directed by S. S. Rajamouli, who has been successful in producing pan-Indian films that are released in multiple languages. Baahubali was another one of his high grossing Telugu films.

A Definition of Love, from bell hooks (and MLK)

“Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco June 30 1964” by geoconklin2001 is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

I picked up all about love: new visions by bell hooks from McNally Jackson in Nolita last weekend. I bought it impulsively, but had known about hooks for a while.

I’m only about 10 pages in, but one passage that sticks with me is one in which hooks defines love. To clarify, it’s not her definition, it’s one she found in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book The Road Less Traveled. He defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

Detroit – Hamtramck Assembly

The Dodge Main, or Chrysler Hamtramck Assembly Plant, as it stood in 1965. Image from the Detroit Historical Society.

In 1980, General Motors convinced the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan to use a newly passed eminent domain law to demolish 1,500 homes, 144 businesses, and 16 churches to build a new auto plant on the Detroit – Hamtramck Border.

At the time, Detroit was in decline, losing population and businesses to the suburbs. Detroit, and its Mayor Coleman Young, wanted to attract new businesses to the struggling city, and agreed. Despite protests, legal challenges, and a visit by Ralph Nader, the Detroit neighborhood of Poletown was demolished and its 4,200 residents relocated (CityLab).

The location of Temple #1

Photo credit: Historic Masjid Wali Muhammad

I’m in the middle of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I’m at the chapter where he moves to Detroit after converting to the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm mentions the NOI’s Temple No #1, citing an address on Frederick St. That wasn’t the Temple’s first address, nor was it the final one. Temple Number 1 now stands at 11529 Linwood Street, in Detroit’s Dexter Linwood neighborhood. Although it’s formally known as Temple Number 1, it is also referred to as Masjid Wali Muhammad [1].

Montréal Reflections

I just finished an 8 day trip to Montréal (with 2 days on either end in Toronto). I had some expectations about this trip that I don’t think were met, but still learned many lessons from it that I’ll share today.

My expecations about this trip

This is my second long solo trip. The first one was when I went to Mexico City in February 2020 for 10 days. I went to explore the city, get out of the cold Michigan winter, and see the Monarch Butterfly Preserve. I also wanted to immerse myself in a Spanish speaking environment, and use Spanish. I ended up speaking a decent amount of Spanish to get around, but ended up speaking mostly English with the other people at the hostel.

My Language Learning Method

Since I’ve been writing about languages for a while, I thought it was time I outline my language learning method, and some reasons why I think this has been successful for me.

For background, I am fluent in Spanish (with a B2 certification from the Instituto Cervantes, and I’ve used it to tutor monolingual Spanish students in a local high school) and am conversational in French (see this post). I previously learned tourist Hebrew when I lived in Israel for the summer. Because of my family, I can also understand and speak some Telugu, though my comprehension decreases the more someone speaks “pure”, rather than English influenced Telugu.

Three Year Plan

Jan 2023: See an update to these goals

I find that having a plan, even if I don’t follow it to a T, helps me feel like I’m moving towards a goal. I also find that publishing a plan makes it feel more concrete. Hence, I’m posting my three year plan. This plan should guide me from now until the end of the 2024 Olympics in Paris (I started thinking about long term planning when I was watching this year’s Olympics).

My plan is divided into two categories – languages, and writing.

Languages

I speak Spanish fluently, and even took a language exam to prove my proficiency. I find languages to be a pretty high reward activity, but one that requires significant delayed gratification. For many years I never thought I would be able to communicate in Spanish fluently, but now I can almost think in Spanish. My Spanish is not perfect, but there’s not a ton of incentive to get to C1 or C2 level unless I started working in Spanish. I can carry out most interactions with Spanish speakers that I encounter in the United States.

Hamilton Bikeway

Contrary to popular perception, Detroit is great place to bike. The city’s roadways are engineered for traffic three times larger than the current population, so there are plenty of wide roadways with few cars. Because Detroit follows a grid, there are also plenty of parallel neighborhood streets that can be used to avoid busy roads. On top of that, the city has been investing in protected bike infrastructure, and is beginning construction on the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27.5 mile biking and walking trail.

You can combine roads with protected bike infrastructure and roads that are naturally ideal for cycling (wide road with little traffic) to produce long routes that are low stress. These routes aren’t often marked on maps, and are usually learned through experience. To make it easier for new cyclists, I’m going to outline one of those routes, which connects downtown Detroit to Ferndale. I call it the Cass / Hamilton / Livernois bike corridor, or the Hamilton Bikeway for short.