Ramadan ended, I had one of the most social Eid days in almost a decade; met and talked to people I haven’t met in a long time; and ate variations of familiar and new delicacies at homes I’ve never been in.

Eid Mubarak!

There is a local ritual in our neighbourhood, specifically on our street, where on Eid, a bunch of neighbours who have known each other for many years (and some new ones) would band-up and go from house to house, to each member’s place and spend a little bit of time, taste the Eid dishes, before moving on to the next.

Sheer Khurma, kababs, chholay, dahi bhalle, qiwami sewai, and many others ‘adorn the dining cloth’, as they say in Urdu.

My father has been part of this band since I was in middle school, but since his knee didn’t allow him climbing many stairs this year, I decided to represent him instead. I got to experience both the different tastes at each house, as well as see different choices/styles of interiors. It was a first of a kind of experience. I was bursting full by the end of the 9th house, but once a year may be fine and I liked the community building nature of this little ritual.

However, I do hope the cooking, cleaning, table-setting/presentation and other arduous tasks are not relegated to the women alone, and that men do their part well.

I know that across the world, with almost all festivals, women never get any rest. I hope you and I help to change this.

Anyway, let’s go to recommended reads of this week.

Interesting reads

1. Google is now replacing human written Headlines with AI generated ones
   I’ve limited my google search usage significantly over the years with duckduckgo and ecosia. Maybe it is time to switch a 100%.

2. https://standardebooks.org/collections/le-mondes-100-books-of-the-century
   Not a single, but a repository of good reads

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
   Another fascinating Ant tidbit

4. Three pillars of JS bloat
   Technical but easy to follow, and actioanable piece of information. Maybe it helps shave off some bloat from your app

A project I discovered

An OpenStreetMap-based project for creating a map of the world's railway infrastructure

You can access the source code and API from github: https://github.com/openrailwaymap/OpenRailwayMap

A photo I took

I saw a live Dangal (a tournament of Kushti) for the first time in my life today.

See you next week, I have a tech related topic on my mind that I want to write about.