Same and different
Hello from my home in Noida! This is NordLetter #89, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. The twist this week and the next three is that I am in India. There will be a different flavour to these for this time hence.
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Homebound
I had to take a connecting flight from Helsinki through Istanbul and on to Mumbai. The flight to Istanbul arrived late in Helsinki and hence was late to arrive in Istanbul. The gents sitting in the seat behind me were in no hurry to land as their flight had already left Istanbul. There was one person who took out their bag and went to the front of the aircraft even as the flight was taxing. I assume their flight was about to leave. I was fairly relaxed though given the two and a half hour layover. I had a pang of anxiety as I listened to all these people missing their flights and so I rechecked everything in Calendar and on Flighty - an excellent app which shows flight statuses and so on. An app I had heard about in other places but had no use for, till date. I had time. And so, I took my time to get down from the plane.
Istanbul is a huge airport. And I think I saw most of it. My flight landed in the F zone. My connecting flight was from A1 terminal. That meant walking, and walking and then walking some more, going up through the escalators, and then climbing down a different set.
When I had booked this flight, I had thought I would have time to kill at the Istanbul airport. Somebody had suggested I could use the excellent lounge at the airport.
As I reached the A1 terminal, there was already a line of passengers queued up to board the plane. The thought I had on seeing the queue was - leave it to Indigo to pick the cheapest option available. We were shepherded onto buses (reminded me of my earlier travels) and driven to where the Indigo airbus was parked. This was at a fair distance mind you. It felt a bit jarring - international travel is not supposed to be like this.
Anywho. I had the middle seat and was not too happy about it. For the Istanbul leg of the journey, I had requested for and received the aisle seat. For the India leg of the journey there was no such option.
I got lucky.
The person next to me requested me to shift to the aisle seat in the same row, he had wanted to sit with his wife. I was happy to oblige. The persons sitting next to me wanted to swap seats too. That happened toward the end as well.
I could not sleep during either leg of the journeys. I had left home at 09:00 and only 5 hours had passed since. What I did instead was watch movies and read a book and take some notes. I had seen two in the Istanbul leg - Jurassic Park and Sinners. Indigo does not have entertainment options yet. Maybe they will one day. I watched some stuff on my Netflix.
Landing in Mumbai
I was spent and tired when I landed in Mumbai. I had booked a cab in advance. I got to the back seat and slept.
I wrote about the 2025 letters by Zhengdong Wang and Dan Wang earlier. Maybe because of that, I was thinking about the changes to India I may or may not notice.
Mumbai felt the same. I was trying to remember the route we had taken many years back when I had travelled here with my sister. I could not place anything. But that is to be expected. I don’t live in Mumbai. I don’t know Mumbai. Mumbai is not my city.
I was thinking about what I would do once I reached Pune - what would I eat. Eating is the main joy of travelling to India after all. My driver took a break as I was thinking this. Or after some time, I was dozing in and out of sleep at this point. I asked him if they had vada pav here. He said yes. I got myself a vada pav and tea. The pav was fluffy and light - stuff we don’t have in Helsinki and I am not a baker - yet. The vada was OK. I have made better.
Pune
Prerna and Savya arrived the same day from Patna. At the airport, Savya took a little time to place me. But then he held out his arms and I took him in.
It has been a joy since then, listening to him say ‘papa’. He was not speaking with intent earlier. As I write this on a sunday, they have already travelled back to Helsinki. And I miss the words and his smile.
We were in Pune to meet my nephew, two months old now and to celebrate my sister’s birthday. This was on the same night we had travelled.
We cut a cake at 00:00. I was glad that it was not my birthday - so I did not need to dress up. We were all tired. I could feel a massive jet lag coming. My sister joked about cutting the cake at 23:00. We did not of course. Before that we had gone out and got my sister an Apple Watch. I knew the model I wanted to get her - the SE3, which is my recommendation for anyone who is new to the Apple Watch ecosystem. It has all the default features you may need, without the extra bells and whistles, which are not essential to the experience.
We cut the second cake the next (same) day at night. We decorated the home a bit. Prerna had brought some decorations with her. We invited a couple of their friends over. It was nice. Since it was the middle of the week, they could not stay for long.
Missal madness
I had McAloo tikki and Pizaa McPuff the day I had reached Pune. They should make McAloo tikki universal. Make it everywhere! It tastes way better than the soya based veggie burgers we get in Helsinki.
The next day we went and had missal pav. There are three varieties in Pune, based on the spice levels. We had the spiciest one at Jogeshwari. The next day we had planned to get something else, but ended up trying out missal at Someshwar. I liked the vibes and presentation at Someshwar but the food was better at Jogeshwari.
In the end, food quality and taste wins. And I guess we like spicy food.
I felt Pune was the same I had remembered from the last time. The same shops - the McDonald’s, Burger King, Dominos, at the ground floor in the same apartment complex. The car parking my sister has moved from the basement to the ground floor. A shop had closed and was occupied by a different shop (different name, same everything else). But not much else had changed.
But I don’t live in Pune either. I don’t know it.
Cities are different though. There are things that tell you where you are. You of course need to have lived at the place for some time. Because to recognise the changes, you need time and familiarity. A two day stopover is not living at the place.
From Pune, we travelled to Bangalore for a day before stopping at Noida. It was an incredibly hectic week. Today, after I woke up after Prerna and Savya had left I had some time to stop and think.
You need the silence to reflect. Without the stillness you can’t keep your mind quiet enough.
Most things remain the same though. That was my thesis after having travelled through three different states in a week.
The pollution is stifling. I could feel it burning my lungs in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Delhi. It rained after we arrived in Noida, lowering the AQI to mid 300s - what a relief.
In some places there is cleanliness, in most there isn’t. There is beauty everywhere though. And I kept feeling the same thing - we do not have pride in ourselves and our country. We lack civic sense. Things are changing, and I am hopeful. India is beautiful - we just need to clean it up. This lack of cleanliness hurts.
The incessant honking and noise is weird, coming from Helsinki.
I guess we get used to these things, but none of these are great things.
The food is awesome though. Anywhere I go and eat, I will have better food than if I tried to research and find a restaurant in Helsinki. It’s just next level. I am of course talking about the food we eat.
And that is all, folks!
/five things to share
1. Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots
Like every generation of students, there are good students, bad students and very brilliant students. It will always be the case, people evolve (I was, myself, not a very good student). Chatbots don’t change anything regarding that. Like every new technology, smart young people are very critical and, by defintion, smart about how they use it.
Interesting read.
2. Spotify is testing a feature that syncs audiobooks with paper editions by Jess Weatherbed
Using Page Match will require users to unlock or purchase the audiobook on Spotify, and own either the paper or ebook version of the same book. The feature works by scanning the page you’re currently reading with your device camera, using optical character recognition (OCR) to identify passages that are then matched to specific timestamps in the audiobook.
I wrote about a similar idea in mixed format books. It would be good to see it out in the world.
3. If the future of e-readers is getting weird, I’m here for it by
If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.
I was similarly looking at this device. I had seen it somewhere on threads and thought this looked cool.
But then I looked at the feature set and given that most of my reading is happening via the e-library app. It did not make sense.
4. Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s
The agencies recommend that children under the age of 13 should not have smartphones of their own or be allowed to use social media. The recommendations cover youngsters’ free time, not homework or other school-related tasks.
For younger kids, no screen time at all is recommended for children aged under the age of two, with a maximum of one hour of screen time daily for those aged 2–10, rising to two hours for kids aged 11–13.
After reading this I was not sure if this is a done deal or it’s just a recommendation like the dietary guidelines?
I think it’s the latter.
5. 🌻 claude code psychosis by Jasmine Sun
It will soon cost near-nothing to have whatever app you want. Vibecoding is already shifting the build vs. buy calculus: maybe we’ll all spend less money on SaaS (and more on Claude credits instead). And because it’s economical to build custom tools for narrow personal, small business, and community use cases, exiting enshittification is easier than ever before.
And then this.
The second-order effect of Claude Code was realizing how many of my problems are not software-shaped. Having these new tools did not make me more productive; on the contrary, Claudecrastination probably delayed this post by a week.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a software developer everything looks like a software problem.
It’s not.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.