Ritwik | Ritwik V

How to bypass a Canva PDF text readability bug / issue

The problem

When I exported a PDF of my CV from Canva, I noticed an issue where most of the text was just repetition, even though everything was correct visually. This is not easy to show as screenshots since the text looks right. It’s only when you select and copy paste it elsewhere that you find out you have a problem.

It could probably just be an issue of the exported PDF not recognizing the font (Libre Baskerville, in this case), or a more widespread issue that has been insidiously built into Canva user interface itself. Since I was using the free version of the portal, I won’t put it past the company to use it as a way to get people to subscribe.

Either way, the bottomline was that my CV was not showing any keywords, and as a result, possibly not getting picked up by hiring managers when I applied to jobs.

The workaround

I loved the Canva template I had used for the CV so I wanted to replicate it as closely as possible. I’ve broken down this process into a few steps.

background PNG — The background I nicked from Canva

Step 1: Exporting the image

I exported a PNG of the layout from Canva, without any overlaying text.

Step 2: Creating a PPT

I opened a new Google Presentation file. Then I changed the default 16:9 landscape layout – under File, and then Page Setup – to more conventional dimensions like A4 portrait.

Step 3: Importing your PNG as a background

To set the background, select Background in the menu toolbar or in the Slide dropdown. Doing this steps on Google Docs would have been ideal but there I could only use a colour as a background, unless I was willing to spend a whole afternoon on formatting rather than writing a how-to guide.

Step 4: Adding the text

I created textboxes, and began adding the text.

Step 5: Choosing the font

The font I needed, Libre Baskerville, was available on Google Fonts so it was easy to add.

Alignment guides — My cutting-edge alignment techniques

Step 6: Alignment

Google Presentation’s snap grids are not as intuitive and smooth as Canva’s so aligning your text needs a bit more work. However, with a bit of basic, old school designing, I was able to get it done.

Step 7: Final checks & exporting

Once I was happy with how the CV looked (not counting the state of my career), I exported the file as a PDF.

I’m happy to report that the new file is searchable. Whether I get any interviews is another matter.

Not my usual content this but as an Indian, I believe I was destined to provide IT support, even if no one really asked for it. For more such solutions to specific but not-too-technical digital problems, check out the How-to section of the blog (to be launched soon).

A cyclist riding through downtown Montreal

The learned anxiety of crossing a road

Today, I want to discuss an insight I’ve stumbled upon: Crossing a street, especially a wide road, is fraught with fear. A fear we are conditioned to. Like all insights, it’s something that has always been in front of our eyes so I am likely not the first person to discover it.

Conditioning by cars

Roads have us pedestrians, cyclists and mobility vehicle users in a state of submission. Even on shared streets, we fawn to let cars by. We look out for and warn each other when an automobile is coming, despite the onus lying with the driver (an act of self preservation as we know drivers can and often do get off the hook for running over a pedestrian). We teach our kids early about the dangers of our city roads. We feel embarrassed to occupy space, to take a few extra seconds to cross an intersection without having to make a dash, to inconvenience cars ever so slightly. The only relatively safe space is inside a car. This is automobile hypernormalisation. (Can you tell that I have recently watched a certain documentary?)

How did we get conditioned into thinking of our roads as the Wild West? How did our public spaces end up as arenas of ruthless egotism, where every driver just aspires to cut the other off and get ahead, rather than a collective good like public safety? Did we mould our shared spaces into what capitalism asks of us in other modes of life, namely placing individual progress above everything else?

The running scene from the movie Apocalypto quite correctly pins down the anxiety of crossing a road.

The invention of jaywalking

Our streets were not always so unfair. Before the automobile got so widespread, everyone on a street was on a more or less level footing. Once cars and other larger, faster vehicles came into use, the number of accidents they caused rose dramatically. That’s when the auto industry, faced with looming regulations, convinced us to shift the goalpost. Enter victim blaming.

We began to tell the victims of auto violence that they were themselves responsible for being run over, that they didn’t know how to cross the road. Vox’s 2015 article on the history of jaywalking and the one by Bloomberg before that explain how automakers invented the term “jaywalking” so they wouldn’t be blamed for the deaths caused by their products. Both articles discuss the ideas in Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

In many countries, like India for instance, the concept of jaywalking does not formally exist and most streets can be traversed wherever we want, and not just on a crosswalk. From a Western driver’s perspective, this probably sounds like chaos but being forced to pay more attention or stop often could reduce accidents.

However, as the auto industry develops and demands more of the public realm, we can expect similar laws popping up there too. As with many other things, the American way of doing things will be imitated to great destruction before good sense dawns. Besides, an unfair, supremacy-based system – where a car owner’s space, time, and indeed worth is considered more important than that of a pedestrian or cart puller – fits well within a caste-segregated, hierarchical society that already understands these ideals too well. The road rage and bullying perpetrated by Indian car owners is proof.

Automobile realism and car brain studies

A lot of people can’t seem to fathom a world without cars. I first came across the term ‘automobile realism’, a concept derived from ‘capitalist realism’, in a video by Youtuber Adam Something. In the book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fischer describes the idea as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”.

I also stumbled upon a study from Montreal’s McGill University – Automobility realism: How the auto-dominated present constrains our imagined futures – by Paris Marx who looks into and questions solutions proposed by the tech industry, like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop or electric cars themselves. Marx went on to expand these ideas into the book, ‘Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation’. On a side note, I once worked on an electric car ad campaign at a time in my life when I naively believed that electric cars were a feasible climate solution. That was my car brain era.

The phenomenon referred to as “car brain” by livable city advocates is what three researchers from Swansea University, Wales – Ian Walker, Alan Tapp and Adrian Davis – call “motonormativity”. This concept is derived from heteronormativity, and in their popular study, they asked a set of nearly identical questions about behaviour and observed how differently people thought when cars entered the picture. For instance, one of the questions is on leaving objects in public spaces. People were asked if someone were to leave a personal object on the street and it were to get stolen or damaged, who would be responsible for it. Most people said it would be the person’s own fault. Yet, when the object was a car, people suddenly changed their mind. This is how pervasive car culture is.

For example, half were asked if they agreed:
“People shouldn’t drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the car fumes”
and half got:
“People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the cigarette fumes”
4/14
— Ian Walker (@ianwalker) January 17, 2023

Reclaiming our streets

Thankfully, automobile realism is not as bad as capitalist realism as many car-free examples exist. It is liberating to stand in the middle of a street (for as long as you like, and not a barely 15 second interval). In most places, this is something that can now only be done in the dead of the night, during a demonstration or in a lockdown. The monthly Critical Mass ride (Masse Critique in Montreal) is one such space. Riding as a group, we cordon off approaching car traffic giving everyone on bikes and other smaller mobility devices like unicycles total access to the street. When the fear of menacing cars is removed, you slow down and discover the beauty of our town centres and neighbourhoods. You get to reclaim the street.

For pedestrians, demonstrations like the solidarity marches for Palestine provide that feeling. In this case, the police block off the traffic, allowing the procession to move. Whether it’s the chance to meet and form connections with fellow humans or an effect of the endorphins released by cycling, you just feel happier when you have the street without any strings attached.

I urge you to try this out for yourself. Spend an afternoon in the pedestrianised area of your downtown, or even better, show up for a cause like Palestine, climate change or renter’s rights.

I’ll be back with more takes on making our public places more public, and general car culture-bashing soon. Stay tuned.

The Gravel paths to liberation

A few days ago, the beloved children’s author from Montreal, Élise Gravel, was in the news after a local library removed her books from their public shelves following pro-Palestinian posts on her social media account (for more details, here is the news story on the CBC website). The controversy inadvertently brought the old fear of censorship and banning books, (including, ironically, echoes of public book burnings in Nazi Germany,) and ultimately more attention to the Palestinian struggle itself. This article is a quick observation on how a large cause like this finds local acceptance, and gets amplified.

The censorship of Élise Gravel

Gravel has been a well regarded author of children’s books here in Quebec, with several popular titles under her belt, including Le Grand Antonio (The Great Antonio) about a Montreal strongman, and Une Patate a Velo (A Potato on a Bike). She writes in both French and English, and also illustrates her own work.

Ever since the violence escalated in Palestine, she has been consistently vocal about it and has repeatedly used her platform to demand an end to the genocide. Recently, the Center for Israeli and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) took offence to a post, (decided it had had it with her) and labelled her anti-Semitic. Gravel herself has posted about how much hate she had been getting simply for demanding peace.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Elise Gravel 🍉 (@elise_gravel)

It is following this declaration that the Montreal Jewish Public Library decided to move her books from their open shelves to closed stacks (although the library director claims this decision was taken even before he took charge in mid January, in another news article). Arguably, it’s not a case of total censorship as Gravel’s books are still available at the library, but the perception quickly formed among locals, both fans of her work and others, that the library was trying to curtail her freedom of expression. This galvanised more people to the cause, and a support gathering was organised to be held on Sunday, 11 February by a group of pro-Palestine Jews and other individuals.

A hundred-odd people, including several families with children, gathered outside the library premises at noon on an atypically warm winter Sunday, in support of Gravel and to denounce this attack on personal freedom. While the gathering was largely peaceful with slogans calling for a ceasefire, there was also some confrontation with a handful of pro-Israel supporters. Gravel posted about the gathering on her page but didn’t attend it herself.

International struggles and local resonance

This mobilisation was interesting because it is one of the many paths that eventually lead to freedom in Palestine. In the excellent essay ‘Sour Oranges and the Sweet Taste of Freedom’ (included in The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, a collection edited by Andrea Lim), the anti-Apartheid activist and later minister Ronnie Kasrils mentions how in the case of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against South Africa, different strategies worked in different parts of the world. As he points out,

“The AAM (Anti-Apartheid Movement) was able to galvanise this depth and breadth of support because much like the liberation movement it flowed from, it was a broad front, providing a home to those of all colours, creeds and persuasions. All that was required was a commitment to working for apartheid’s demise. It tapped into issues that those on the ground could easily identify with. For example, in Ireland, it drew on the experience of the ravages of British colonialism, while in America it evoked the devastation of slavery and racism. It was also readily able to adapt its campaign methods, ensuring that they were relevant to specific conditions, recognizing that strategies appropriate in one local or national context were not necessarily effective in others.”

Similarly, while many Canadians may be apathetic or yet to take a public stand when it comes to this genocide, an issue like censorship and curtailing of freedoms can generate solidarity and bolster the main cause. Different groups in the country are working on multiple fronts – from blocking truck access to the Port of Vancouver, to protesters dressing up as Santa – in order to get the country to officially call for a ceasefire, and it is imperative to keep up the pressure.

Ask for an immediate ceasefire from your authorities. Speak to a protester rather than basing opinions solely from what you have been exposed to online (including this piece). And as Babasaheb exhorts, “Educate, organise, agitate.”

Sheep grazing grass with trees in the background.

Double tagging French sheep and other causes of the revolution

A couple of nights ago, my flatmate Em and I were discussing the ongoing farmer protests in France when I heard an anecdote about civil disobedience. Em has been actively following the news about the political climate there, partly because he was planning to travel to the south of the country to escape the winter in Montreal, and partly because of Quebec’s ties to France. There have been a few political movements in the recent past, from the public workers’ strike to the anti-police demonstrations. The latest group to take to the streets is the peasants who are protesting falling produce prices, European free trade laws and environmental regulations.

Our discussion followed a similar (and recurring) theme: When and how the anti-capitalist revolution will come about (I admit thinking about such grand schemes is a failing that needs addressing). We had picked up the topic after watching HyperNormalisation, a BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, that refers to the state where people know they are in a corrupt system but do not see an alternative outside of it. Perhaps more on that some other time. First, the anecdote.

Em’s sheep

A lot of Em’s stories involve sheep. This is not surprising for someone who was a shepherd for a decade. Em worked in market research in Montreal until one fine day in the early 2000s when he decided to drop everything and move to Provence, the south of France, to raise sheep. With no background in animal husbandry or agriculture, he apprenticed, learnt the ropes and became a shepherd. If the whole story sounds cinematic, that is because it is. Em wrote a novel based on his life as a shepherd which became a local bestseller and is now in the final stages of becoming a movie. Anyway, I digress.

In France, if you raise animals, you need to ear tag them. Besides allowing shepherds and ranchers to resolve any ownership issues, these RFID tags allow the state to identify and track animals. My guess is that should a disease outbreak happen, the authorities will be able to get to the source quicker. The general rule is to tag one ear, however at some point, it was decided that this wouldn’t suffice anymore. Owners now needed to double tag. While whether this was a random progression of bureaucratic processes or a more concerted lobbying effort is up for debate, what is true was that there was only one company manufacturing these tags in France and it saw a massive increase in orders, according to Em.

At the time, a tag reportedly cost two euros apiece but if you have a thousand sheep, that can be quite a cost, especially for small farmers. To them, this was another straw on the back of an already straining camel. The effect was that farmers simply stopped adhering to the law en masse. According to Em, the fiercely independent Gaulois spirit of the French and the solidarity from the authorities meant enforcing such a law became difficult.

Our discussion brought us to the issue of small farmers being strong-armed by laws designed for industrial food production and animal rearing, both in Canada and now slowly in France. For instance, if a farmer decides to raise cattle or sheep in Canada, they usually do not have the right to slaughter the animal themselves. Food safety laws require you to transport your animals to a slaughterhouse which can often be far from the farm. This not only increases the cost involved but also stresses the animal due to being taken away from their homes (that then affects the taste of the meat, which is in itself a question of the ethics of consuming animals).

Story idea: Accelerationist lobbying

Our theory was that the tag-making corporation wanted to make more profits, and thus lobbied the government to change its laws. Perhaps it had been indulging in such lobbying for years before things went sideways. We postulated that if such an act of civil disobedience could come about as a result of greedy corporate lobbying, perhaps similar results could be catalysed by a group of leftist lobbyists. Imagine a lobbying firm run by accelerationists: outwardly, the double agents work for corporate interests but deep down are only doing it to bring about the eventual downfall of capitalism. Their objective is to create dubious case studies to convince governments to change rules, and in the process wear out the people enough to revolt.

I could probably turn it into a script.

Other pockets of civil disobedience

In recent years, there have been several instances of civil disobedience in our societies. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a range of disobedience movements, from the occasional flouting of curfews and breaking of bubbles, to the total rejection of vaccines. In less extreme cases, it takes on onerous bureaucratic ordinances. For instance, several North American city municipalities have laws preventing you from replacing a water-guzzling front yard lawn with vegetable plants. Diaspora Indians in Canada and elsewhere would know of tiffin services that deliver a full meal to your place every day, coming to the rescue of young men who have never learnt to cook (because, patriarchy). Such services are home-based enterprises which would almost certainly never be able to abide by health and safety regulations that restaurants and other food production facilities are subjected to. However, they persist because people trust each other, and that’s all it takes to function at that scale. The question really is how much momentum these movements will generate, and whether that will be enough to bring about major changes.

I know, I had promised a quick read and it really is shorter than the last one. Anyway, more on the revolution and other pertinent matters soon. Tata!

Alex biting Marty in the movie Madagascar

Eating animals

I recently finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a compelling look at meat consumption, the rise and dominance of factory farming, and animal cruelty, among other things. This was shortly after completing Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell and Howard Jacobson that talks about the benefits of a whole food, plant-based diet and some of the problems with the science of nutrition as is practised today. So this post is mainly some thoughts, questions and dilemmas I’ve had on the subject of animals as food.

A quick disclaimer: Although I have never been a total vegetarian or vegan (and I am not sure we even need to go into that binary in order to make a difference in the world), I have steered my cooking habits to more plant-based meals over the years.

The planet and efficiency

Eating an animal is inherently inefficient. If I were to turn vegan someday, this would be my top reason. Like walking or cycling to buy a loaf of bread rather than driving a Ford F150, consuming grain and vegetables directly is less energy intensive than consuming animals that consume grain and vegetables. No matter how economical meat and dairy are (and this is something I’ll get into later), the added layer of consumption simply takes more resources from the planet, usually robbing them from people who are not in a position to object. Besides, considering the state of the climate world over, we need to decide whether we want our beef burgers and chicken wings now or a habitable future (a test of short term versus long term gratification).

Cruelty

This is a more nuanced issue that I don’t fully grasp to take a stand on. While on one hand, you can argue that nature has a lot of cruelty and animals rarely die honourable deaths in the wild; on the other, you have factory farms where humans manufacture, kill and package other animals into neat little unrecyclable styrofoam containers with little regard for their rights.

However, there’s more to cruelty. For instance, as I recently learnt from Eating Animals, in fishing, a large proportion of a catch, called the bycatch, is simply written off as collateral damage. Simply so that you can have your Omega-filled wild salmon.

Another way to look at this could be: If we were to not incentivise factory farming, and subsidise animal protein, would it not be depriving the poor and thereby cruel to them?

The cruelty point is also something I’ve seen vegetarian Indian savarnas (or privileged caste, primarily Hindu folks) using to defend their beliefs. Ironically, these very people still consume milk and dairy products which are derived from keeping cattle lactating for years, which is also a form of slavery.

Keeping animals vs. eating them

The cruelty debate also brings up the dichotomy of pets and what animals we choose to befriend or eat. For instance, you may be okay with getting a Border Collie to keep your furniture company when you’re at work, but not consuming (other) dogs (even Chihuahuas). Foer brings this up in the book as a sliding scale with say dogs on one end of the spectrum (for loving, not eating), and fish on the other (for eating). The cast of creatures on this scale changes for each society. For many savarnas, cows fall somewhere close to dogs, except they (the savarnas) have a free pass when it comes to enslaving/domesticating them and consuming their milk.
Other questions around this dichotomy include: Can you claim to love animals while also eating them or their products? Is it even ethical to keep and raise another animal for food? In fact, is it humane to keep an animal, whether they are meant for food, companionship or security?

The caste connection

In India and other parts of South Asia, meat consumption is closely tied to the caste system. At present, savarnas tend to glorify vegetarianism.

However, this was not the case historically and in fact, it even used to be the other way around: savarnas favoured meat consumption, and animal sacrifice was prevalent in several religious ceremonies. Hence, in many communities, meat consumption is considered anathema (while dairy consumption is not), and people who do – like Muslims, Dalits, etc. – are othered.

However, it’s not black and white, as things change considerably geographically, and with urbanisation and class mobility. Well-off urban savarnas will wax poetic about beef burgers but not include it in their caste-dominated rituals like weddings. The idea of inferior and superior, of pure and impure, that stems from the caste system, lends itself to meat eating. Politically correct casteist savarnas consider meat eaters “impure” but instead of using the caste argument to label them that, will use cruelty and animal rights to defend vegetarianism. This then translates into segregation practices including separate utensils for cooking meat or even reheating food like “veg microwaves”, segregated dining areas, and pressure on restaurants to ensure meat is handled and prepared away from vegetarian dishes (the latter also betrays another Indian deficiency: rationality and scientific temper in everyday life).

For more about caste and veganism/vegetarianism, please check out this article by Bijaya Biswal on the Feminism in India portal.

Economics and nutrition

Some parts of the previous discussion have revolved around moral questions but if you are poor, things often boil down to economics. And in the Western world, eating meat might actually be more affordable. Foer explains in the book that our current policies make meat cheaper than it actually is. The cost also discounts other factors like the pollution caused by the industry, the dangers of animal monocultures, and any cruelty involved in animal husbandry. If meat prices are controlled so that we have cheap animal protein, this brings me to another question: Are we really suffering health problems by not eating adequate amounts of protein? Is the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of protein exaggerated? I am yet to explore the science behind this so please do your due diligence before giving up your brotein cadre membership.

Beyond the binary, and transitioning

For anyone who can afford it, the logical conclusion to this debate is to go vegan. But over the years I have come to understand that our thinking cannot be so binary, and solutions to many issues can be spread out on a spectrum. So too with this debate, perhaps you need not undertake a total modeshift in your eating habits. Maybe you can be vegan for 60 percent of the time, vegetarian for 30, and omnivore for the remaining 10 percent. For my part, I am trying to only cook vegan or vegetarian meals at home, and to leave my meat consumption to when I am eating out, which is once a week or less. The trick, as I tried with intermittent fasting, is finding a sustainable solution. Transitioning at a pace and arriving at a plant-to-meat ratio that works for you ensures you don’t find the lifestyle change to be massive, and revert to your previous eating habits.

Individual choices vs. influencing more people

Finally, you may also have this question: Is my decision going to make any meaningful difference in the world? This is something people the world over and in different epochs have asked (both themselves and bearers of new ideas), for a wide range of matters, and while I don’t have an empirical answer, I feel you must believe that it does and do it. Then, if you feel like doing more, expound your ideas. There is of course the risk of turning into an evangelical vegan who goes around proselytising. Perhaps, here too there is a middle ground, and you can decide whether and how you want to spread the message.

Congrats, you made it to the end. That could not have been a quick read (unless you’re a bot or a search engine spider). Consider rewarding yourself with a cold beer and some fries to undo the damage. I will try and keep the next one short.

The outside of a bike repair shop, with a motorbike parked out front

Cycling in Montreal: The good, the bad, the bumpy

As a new arrival to the city and an old hat at hating car culture, I have wanted to write about cycling (and walking) in Montreal. As my captive audience of one, you have no choice but to read on.

Some background before opinions

I moved to Montreal towards the end of the 2022 summer. That gave me a couple of months to use the BIXI, the local bike-share service (this should be the actual “ride-share” because since when did cars get ridden!?) I wanted to do a post on my initial experiences with the service but never got around to. And now that I’ve bought my own cycle, I can safely push that to my graveyard of unfinished projects.

Anyway, after nearly a full year of experiencing active transport in the city, and because I saw Oh The Urbanity’s latest video on Montreal, I feel it’s time to open up about why I actually moved to this city.

The positives

Separated bikes lanes

This has got to be one of the best things a city can do to get more people on bikes. A protected bike lane eliminates the stress around engaging with cars and increasingly monster trucks. In fact, my very first blog post on this site was wishing for more protected bike lanes while I was back in New Zealand. I often use the Réseau Express Vélo (REV), a fully separated, one-way bike lane on Saint Denis Street, and whose network will be expanded in the future. And this is not the only one; there are also many other separated bike paths on Île de Montréal (Island of Montreal) which form a great network that helps people of all ages to have more active transport.

BIXI

As mentioned earlier, Bixi is the city’s bike share service. You can unlock a bike or ebike from one of hundreds of stations in the city, ride it to the station closest to your destination and dock it there. You buy a monthly or season pass, or single fares, and unlock the bike via the app. Going by the number of people I see using it everyday, it seems incredibly popular.

Pedestrian priority streets

Another step in the right direction is turning streets over to pedestrians. Montreal does this in summers with many streets becoming closed off to cars. This encourages businesses to put up outdoor seating, people putting up little pop-up stores with vintage things, and plenty of open air ice cream gobbling! (Actually, the next time a city needs sponsors or support for pedestrian-only streets, it should go to local ice cream shops.) Bikes are allowed on these streets but it’s recommended to walk your bike if it’s crowded.

A vibrant cycling culture for all ages

Perhaps a direct consequence of separated bike paths and pedestrian-priority streets is the reclaiming of freedom by kids, old people and those with differently abled bodies. It is quite common to see families with small children, all biking, or a parent riding a small cargo bike with the little ones in the front or back.

Fewer trucks and SUVs

Unlike the car-dominated hellscapes that are many cities of Ontario, Montreal seems to have fewer monster vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs. Disclosure: This is something that I have observed, not something I can back up with car sales numbers. Rosemont La Petite Patrie, one of the neighbourhoods, recently introduced a street parking fee based on vehicle weight, just another example of the resistance that exists here against ego inflating hunks of metal.

Riding without helmets

Another consequence of protected bike infrastructure is helmets becoming redundant. There are a number of bike advocates who say that helmets, like hi-vis vests, are just a way of shifting blame (“safety-washing”?), even suggesting that they might be counterproductive. It is clear that if you have fewer interaction points with disproportionately heavier road users (a.k.a. cars), you really don’t need helmets. Legally though, the city probably still needs cyclists to wear them but interestingly BIXI users are exempted.

Winter snow clearing

The moment I tell friends or family that I’ve bought a bike, I get one of the following reactions/questions:

“What about winters?”
“The most you can use your bike for is five months.”

Snowfall and extreme cold are not everyday events even in winter so while these extrapolations are not fully logical, I do get the concern. You need more confidence biking in winters than in summers. Thankfully, Montreal is very good at keeping its bike lanes clear of snow, and besides you can get studded tires if you want some additional safety, and this is why you can find plenty of people biking throughout the year. In fact, this year onwards, the city will also do a trial of the BIXI in winter.

The negatives

Pedestrian priority streets not year round

The pedestrian only streets mentioned earlier are only a summer feature. However, some of these streets, like Avenue Mont Royal, have so many pedestrians throughout the year that it would be great to make them more pedestrian focused during other parts of the year.

Bumpy roads

The roads in this city are pretty worn down, and riding a bike is a good way to experience their state. While larger automobiles are usually the culprits behind them, it is the smaller road users that end up paying the price for it. One can only hope that by the time a street needs resurfacing, it’ll be redesigned to include more active transport, like they do in the Netherlands. This will slowly upgrade the bike lane network which requires much less resurfacing as compared to the main street.

On-street parking

They say if you want to know how vile people of a place are, give them free street parking and then take it away! Like many North American cities, Montreal too has a tonne of street parking that stems from the worship of the automobile.

Avenue Mont Royal, one of the pedestrian streets I mentioned earlier, even when not pedestrianised, has so much foot traffic that you have to jostle people on footpaths. And yet, this street gives away street parking. Hopefully, with road resurfacing or other projects, we’ll be able to take away street parking in many more streets. Anyway, if I didn’t make it amply clear, I have a lot of beef with the idea of storing private furniture on a public road but I’ll elaborate that in a separate blog in the future.

You made it to the end. For more Montreal urban fabric fanboying, and to develop a healthy distaste of car dependency, pedal your way back to this blog.

ChatGPT: Writer’s friend or archnemesis?

If you have been on the internet in the past month or so, you will have heard of ChatGPT. Everyone, from Twitter to bosses to LinkedIn to flatmates, seems to be talking about it. A revolution is coming, and like many other professionals, commercial content writers are on the cusp of this sea change. So here are my unsolicited two cents.

Resistance is futile

We are not the only people who are or will be affected with this technology so first things first: It is at times pointless standing in front of the wheels of change as they march forward. For millennials like me, several such industry-upending changes have occurred within our own lifetimes. We have lived through the age of floppies and CDs (remember the burning software Nero?), pirating music, going from an analog camera to digital to smartphones, and ironically even this, blogging. Things that were once central to our lives, we look back on with nostalgia now.

The anxiety

As a content writer for small businesses, I am at the frontline of this upheaval. So, like any big change, these are mentally taxing times. As the portal catches on, a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, will find it more economical to get their content written by artificial intelligence than paying a human to do something slightly better. This will render many unskilled writers – and as a profession with an imperceptible entry barrier, we have a fair share of them – jobless. In fact, this will become the entry barrier and the writers who want to survive will have to hone their craft and develop a voice that does much better than the computer programme.

Infusing personality

However, if you have a business, you also know it’s important to differentiate yourself. Hence, if you are considering using ChatGPT for your branding, you would know that while it can give you plain vanilla but SEO optimised content to populate your website, you will still need to layer it with your brand’s personality. ChatGPT content should act as template, not the end-product itself. Writers should also embrace it as such; rather than thinking of AI as a direct competitor, we should use it as an efficient research resource.

Keeping AI on its toes

Ultimately though, AI will be able to write in a very specific tone of voice too (what with people even training them to write songs and movie scripts like a particular creative). This is especially the case if you consider your brand’s personality as something static and constantly put out content in a single tone of voice. Because like the imperfect humans who created them, brands can’t be static or perfect, and their language needs to keep evolving.

For instance, if you define your clothing brand’s personality as “quirky but sustainable”, and keep that aspect central to your communications over a long period of time, AI will eventually learn and codify your brand language and be able to produce copy in that unchanging tone. And eventually, your customers will be bored with the sameness of the content.

Temporary relief

A silver lining to this dark cloud is the fact that writing is catered to actual people. Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century says that algorithms like those on search engines are getting more powerful and we are producing things to appease them, and not really people (looking at you, SEO writing).

However, the jobs that cater to humans – like nursing, the care of children and the elderly, philosophers and ethicists – are likely to be the ones that will still be needed, he feels. Commercial writing, like advertising copywriting, is still targeted at people’s desires and insecurities. As long as we make such human decisions as buying jewellery or donating to charity, writers will still wield some power.

My takeaway

AI will take over writing a lot of the generic content that appears on the internet while human writing will need to go back to its roots of writing for people, rather than solely for algorithms (time to up your game, SEO writers). This will help businesses pick out good writers who can infuse the brand’s personality in their content.

For more such anxious reflections on everyday things, and to watch the process of a writer experiencing an identity crisis in real-time, keep reading this blog.

No robots were harmed during this thought exercise.

A young man eating ice cream in a watermelon near Auckland

5 years of Intermittent Fasting and how I do it

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Intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, though not a novel concept, is now definitely more commonplace. A lot of people I’ve met have tried or at least heard of it, in many cases as a weight loss tool. So here, in today’s unsolicited picks, is my journey with intermittent fasting.

Inter what?

The central tenet of intermittent fasting or time restricted eating is fairly simple: To limit the time window of eating food. This gives the body enough time to process and use your existing reserves (mainly stored fat) more efficiently by a process called ketosis.

There are different styles of practising this, depending on how long you want to make the feeding / fasting window. The important thing is you don’t change much about your diet (although as we’ll later see, you may end up doing so in a different way), and can eat practically the same things as earlier, as long as you are sticking to your time window.

What I do

Since I started formally doing it in 2017, I have been practising one of IF’s most popular formats – the 16/8. This involves 16 hours of fasting (actual no food time) followed by an eight-hour window where I can eat. So my first meal of the day, my breakfast (or lunch, depending on how you look at it) is at half past noon or 1 PM, while my last meal ends before 8.30 or 9 PM. This is similar to the dawn to dusk fast that many Muslims observe for Ramzan, except that I drink water (lots of it) and eat during the day.

“16 hours of deprivation?” Exactly.

If a 16-hour fast looks excessive, here’s another way to look at it. If you get the standard eight hours of sleep, and don’t eat anything for an hour or two before bed or after getting up, you are already fasting for about 12 hours every day. Congratulations, you are a convert, and you didn’t even know it!

Getting started

Going from 12 hours to 16 is not too difficult either. Do it gradually. Incrementally. Like all new habits. If you are used to making yourself a large tumbler of coffee or tea right when you wake up (or to wake up), consider switching to black tea or coffee (no milk or sugar). If you think only psychopaths drink black coffee, do something even better. Just postpone it. Tangential idea: the best time to have a coffee is not until later in the morning anyway (excellent explainer by I Love Coffee and The Oatmeal here).

Starting out, you may find your stomach protesting at this stage. It’s not used to being ignored. Try drinking warm water (your new best friend) to deceive the monster. If you have your first coffee or tea at 7.30 AM, move it to 8, then 8.30 and so on. At least not until you have one of the most successful mass delusions of all time: the breakfast.

The war on breakfast

What’s wrong with breakfast, I hear you asking. If you are like the millions of people who have breakfast every morning, in addition to two other meals, you will have heard and probably parroted the Kellogg’s catchphrase – “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

“Has my childhood been a lie?” Yes and no.

Did you have cereal in milk for breakfast when you were young, or still do? If so, Kellogs has you right where it wants. Yes, it was the cornflakes giant that was behind the idea of popularising breakfast, for obvious reasons. As an advertising student, I am in awe of it. As a human, it’s insidious. Which is why, while we’ve been fed on that idea for a long time, it’s important to understand that its origins lie in marketing and its motives are dubious.

Your goal is to postpone breakfast until it falls into your feeding window. Remember, the longer you can leave your body in ketosis and have it use its stored energy reserves, the better. (Please note that I am not a medical professional so if you have underlying conditions or are facing issues in your IF journey, stop and speak to your doctor first.)

Optimising

The next step is to further finetune your feeding window. Once you’ve pushed out your first meal of the day, you may find yourself eating your last meal later than usual or raiding your fridge in the dead of the night. This is why you need to stick to your feeding schedule. In my case, it’s nothing before 1 PM and nothing after 9 in the night.

Even when I stick to this schedule, there are times when I find myself getting extremely hungry, usually as I wake up in the morning. This is because generally I have had high carbohydrate food the night before, like a burger from McDonald’s, loosely termed junk food or empty calories. If you are used to eating a lot of carbs, you should consider adding some good fats. For instance, mix ghee to rice, top up your toast with avocados (embrace millennialism wholly), and unprocessed cheese to pasta.

Cheating

I do not fall into the camp of people who think one day of cheating – with regards to such lifestyle habits – resets your sobriety (if fasting can even be equated to sobriety, that is). So while I am pretty consistent with my eating times during the weekdays, at other times, say on a weekend, while travelling or attending a party, I stretch my feeding window. However, this may not be the case with you. If you find yourself cheating more and more after a lapse, perhaps it would be better to stick to a stricter regimen.

Applications

No, I am not talking about using an app for intermittent fasting, although if you are doing the 5:2 format – five days of regular meals and two days of low calorie food – you might need some way to measure your calories. What I am referring to is the use of the fasting principle in other aspects of life, mainly as a way to control dopamine release aka dopamine fasting. But that will need a whole separate post.

Like I say when I look at the clock at 9 PM, “That’s been my time.” Keep coming back for more. Or take a break and do some digital fasting. Do whatever is best for you.

A from inside a hostel window in Quebec CIty, Canada, with a guitar, a water bottle and several country flags

Hostels and the sense of enough

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I have been backpacking in Canada for a couple of months now. While not all of it has been in these institutions, I have rediscovered my love for hostels, and more importantly the feeling of liberation that comes with living out of a backpack.

What hostels get right

via GIPHY

Most hostels don’t have a tonne of facilities – a bunk bed in a dorm room, a locker to stow your valuables, Wi-Fi and a Lonely Planet if you’re lucky, and a bunch of shared spaces like a kitchen, fridge and bathrooms – so you are forced to be minimal. This is not easy for a lot of people, especially those who are very used to having their own space and doing things their way, as you have to be respectful of fellow hostellers and not treat spaces as if you own them.

The other thing about hostels, and in my view at least this is probably one of the best things, is that they catalyse cross cultural interactions. The number of interesting people you meet in a very small span of time is incredible. As you interact with people from very different parts of the world, you get exposed to so many cultures, learn about personal motivations and philosophies, and get to know about places you could travel to next. Of course, this is a two-way street so you give back as much by telling them about your own life. There is immense learning potential plus the chance to form lifelong friendships, often internationally.

Everything comes with a con

via GIPHY

One of the most obvious drawbacks is the lack of personal space. While you can have a private room in a hostel, most budget conscious travellers stay in dorms. Sometimes this can be quite frustrating, like when you can’t fall asleep despite the symphony of snoring in the dorm, or you are homesick and want to sink into your own bed.

There is also a lack of responsibilities, as you would expect in other low-end accommodation places like hotels. Since no one is bound to keep areas clean, you can at times find that the shared spaces are not the best. You may find utensils with bits of food still stuck, or bathrooms littered with toilet paper and paper napkins. However, most places do have some form of housekeeping that takes care of this. And you’ll find the whole spectrum – from well managed hostels part of a chain, and independent ones struggling to get staff – all priced similarly. Even then the freedom from doing chores around a shared space, like you would if you were living in a flat, means no one is really responsible for anything.

The literal weight of things

via GIPHY

The biggest revelation for me about living in hostels was how little I could do with. Over the years, I have flirted with the idea of owning less, sometimes more successfully than others. Backpacking forces you to distil down to the very essential things. Every new thing you add to your belonging literally weighs you down.

Those bestsellers you picked up last year and never touched? Yeah nah, those can’t come. The extra towel? No need. The six pack of garlic bread you bought? Someone else can enjoy it. Just what you need, nothing more.

To travel lean, you also learn to keep giving things away. So at every hostel, you will find a free food shelf to which departing travellers have donated leftover food. The constant re-evaluation of what you need is definitely painful in the short term but the inability to stow things away indefinitely in storage spaces forces you to prioritise and live on less. This is why I want to make backpacking into a life principle, which brings me to the final point.

Finding enough

I recently started reading Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin, a book that pioneered the idea of financial independence and a precursor to the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement. One of the central ideas of this book is finding or determining your personal definition of enough.

The convergence of backpacking and reading this book has prompted me to think more about my definition. Currently my enough includes most of the stuff in my two backpacks. I say most because I could probably still take out some things, and some will change depending on the season. Plus, it allows me to keep my environmental impact low.

I am sure I will accumulate some possessions once I get an apartment but the challenge would be to know where to draw the line.

That’s it from me for now. Keep travelling to this space for more such life updates.

A man sitting and working on a laptop, and eating a banana

6 Pros and Cons of Working Remotely for an Overseas Company

Remote work, the by-product of the current digital age and more recently the pandemic, often means you work for not only companies in other cities but also often other parts of the world. Faraway parts that are several hours ahead or behind you. I am now one such worker.

Firstly, a bit of context.

I recently moved to Canada from New Zealand. When you tell people that you’re moving to Canada, the traditional assumption is that you will land there and immediately start looking for a job. But times have changed. So when I tell people that I’ll be working remotely for my current NZ company, I am usually met with awe. Well, is it all fun and games? Let’s find out.

And, a note.

When I began composing this list, I barely had a pro or two. Eventually, I realised some of these things can be classified as both or as I am going to call it, ‘It Is What It Is’ (IIWII).

Pro #1

The (slightly clichéd) digital nomad lifestyle

No remote working listicle can start without invoking the patron saint of millennials – the tanned, margarita-sipping, backpack-toting digital nomad. However, even though a lot of people work from home these days, not all of them cross over to the work-from-anywhere side.

In my case, since I don’t have a flurry of video calls and meetings to do everyday, I can embrace this lifestyle reasonably easily. No more waking up, showering and commuting to work for me (side note: I do miss my bike commute in Auckland though). Your workplace is wherever there’s a steady WiFi connection – a friend’s basement in Montreal works as well as a cute hostel in a nondescript small town. Just hook up and go!

Con #1

Money, taxes and other fun admin stuff

The getting paid aspect of the job, usually one of the best parts, can get a bit complicated when you operate across countries and sometimes, continents. You come face-to-face with concepts like invoicing, double taxation avoidance treaties, Stripe v/s PayPal v/s something else, and so on.

In my case, while I ideally need to get paid directly into a Canadian account, unfortunately we have yet to cross that bridge. This means I keep getting post-tax salary into my Kiwi bank account, which I then transfer to Canada as needed (not a product plug but Wise is amazing for this). So technically I am still getting taxed in New Zealand, and at the same time, not able to contribute to income tax here in Canada. Not an ideal situation.

However, this should change soon as I become a contractor for my company, and a sole proprietorship for tax purposes in Canada. (More on this once I meet a good accountant and sort out my first tax returns.)

IIWII #1

Timezones and work hours

Your work timings are going to make or break your digital nomad dreams. It’s no fun waking up at midnight to start your work day. Besides smashing your circadian clock to pulp, you will also not be able to have the sunlight hours to see and travel.

As someone who works in a timezone 16 hours ahead, I am reasonably fortunate in that I still get to have something of a life that doesn’t revolve around my workday. In fact, Canada and New Zealand being so far apart works in my favour.

When a weary work week begins in Auckland at 8.30 AM on Monday, it is 4.30 PM on a Sunday here in Canada. While this means my day only finishes at 1 AM, at least I get some time in the morning to do things like writing such listicles, running errands and exploring bits of the city I am in. So while an overall pro in my case or that of someone working remotely for US companies from Canada, it could have gone either way.

Pro #2

Travel

Seeing the world is usually one of the top reasons to shun wordly pleasures and possessions like buying a house, having a child, etc., and embrace the digital nomad lifestyle. Travelling to new places while simultaneously working and making an income is the stuff millennial dreams are made of.

Like I’ve mentioned earlier here, if you have a job that lets your work exclusively online and in a timezone that doesn’t go Zakir Hussain on your circadian rhythm, you might be able to explore quite a few places. This is especially true if you love exploring cities and going for a sonder.

On a good day, if I’ve gone to bed by 3.30 AM, I try and wake up by 11. Then, one of three scenarios play out. The first is, if I am in the mood to splurge, I head out immediately, grabbing coffees and food on my walks, and coming back home around 8 or 9 in the evening (when it’s lunch hour in Auckland). The second is, if I am trying to save money, I make easily transportable lunches like tuna sandwiches that I can have in a park or city square. The last scenario is when either the weather is bad, I have a very hectic day ahead or am just being lazy, and I just stay in.

Although I am yet to take leave to travel, I will at some point, if say, I want to go on a full day hike or spend a day at a beach (after all, isn’t that what’s most people think millennials want to do by retiring early).

Con #2

No team events

As most of us discovered over the course of the pandemic, working exclusively remotely can get old pretty quick. Even if you are travelling through it, the inability to do everyday office things – like clinking beer bottles at 4 PM on a Friday, sitting with your team for lunch and discussing the difference between couscous and khus-khus (quick tidbit you may possibly never need: the latter being related to poppy is banned in UAE while the former is not), and attending parties like Christmas get-togethers and sausage sizzles – can be hard and lonely for remote workers. (This compounds if you are already far away from friends and family.) Even meeting up every once in a while would be good for morale but in my case, even that is not possible.

IIWII #2

Public holidays

Barring a few big ones like Christmas and New Year’s, your country of work and that of residence/travel may not share a lot of common public holidays. So usually you’d end up working when the rest of the people are enjoying, or the other way around.

So, say if you were to work from India for a company overseas, you’d barely get any of zillion public holidays in a year. Here in Canada too, the overlap with Aotearoa is minimal, despite both being Commonwealth countries. But because I also work differently – starting my week on a Sunday and ending on a Thursday – this has only been a slight inconvenience so far.

For more such useless lists and random trivia, tune into this space every week. Okay, realistically, every fortnight.

The problem

The workaround

Step 1: Exporting the image

Step 2: Creating a PPT

Step 3: Importing your PNG as a background

Step 4: Adding the text

Step 5: Choosing the font

Step 6: Alignment

Step 7: Final checks & exporting

Conditioning by cars

The invention of jaywalking

Automobile realism and car brain studies

Reclaiming our streets

The censorship of Élise Gravel

International struggles and local resonance

Em’s sheep

Story idea: Accelerationist lobbying

Other pockets of civil disobedience

The planet and efficiency

Cruelty

Keeping animals vs. eating them

The caste connection

Economics and nutrition

Beyond the binary, and transitioning

Individual choices vs. influencing more people

Some background before opinions

The positives

Separated bikes lanes

BIXI

Pedestrian priority streets

A vibrant cycling culture for all ages

Fewer trucks and SUVs

Riding without helmets

Winter snow clearing

The negatives

Pedestrian priority streets not year round

Bumpy roads

On-street parking

Resistance is futile

The anxiety

Infusing personality

Keeping AI on its toes

Temporary relief

My takeaway

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Inter what?

What I do

“16 hours of deprivation?” Exactly.

Getting started

The war on breakfast

“Has my childhood been a lie?” Yes and no.

Optimising

Cheating

Applications

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What hostels get right

Everything comes with a con

The literal weight of things

Finding enough

Firstly, a bit of context.

And, a note.

Pro #1

The (slightly clichéd) digital nomad lifestyle

Con #1

Money, taxes and other fun admin stuff

IIWII #1

Timezones and work hours

Pro #2

Travel

Con #2

No team events

IIWII #2

Public holidays

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