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filed under WordPress
Last week, Faguni, a WordPress contributor from Dhaka, asked if I was writing a post about my experience as an organiser for WordCamp Asia 2026. We were catching up on WordCamp Asia and professional updates. One of my biggest regrets is that Faguni and others couldn’t attend in Mumbai due to visa problems.
This post has been in draft for about three weeks. As a lead of WordCamp Asia, I had a unique perspective. The event ran smoothly, and even a month later, I’m still tagged on various LinkedIn posts about it.
I’ve read hundreds of social media posts sharing their experiences from the event.
I’m unsure how to articulate my takeaways or leadership lessons. Each experience is unique, making much expert advice seem like survivor bias.
But I do like capturing some feelings, thoughts as personal artefacts on this blog.So make a long story short, this is not really a post about leadership and all that jazz around WordCamp Asia. It is more of a personal one!
Day One, Family Photo at WordCamp Asia 2026.
Can you find me? Hint: I am actually smiling!WordCamp Asia in Mumbai!
Last year I visited WordCamp Asia in Manila. Folks from the WordPress community team only weeks before the event had reached out to me and asked about organising WordCamp Asia in India.
My first fears were how people from Pakistan and Bangladesh travel to India, and those fears did materialise. These fears were not unfounded. Finally I do not think anyone from these two countries could manage to get visas to visit the event. It is one of those regrets I have and won’t go away!
But in early 2025, there were no other cities in the fray and the outreach to Mumbai was a bit of a SOS. So I said “YES” and off I was on this wild journey called WordCamp Asia 2026.
One important reason to sign up for this role was I really wanted to see if I could lead and manage something that just had so many moving parts, so many passionate and talented individuals.
Open source work is a bit like getting used to being under the sun. It can sap your energy, can make your feel uncomfortable. But once you are used to life under the sun, a lot of magic will happen.
This edition was happening in Mumbai, the first flagship event ever in India. There was some negativity around it at the beginning. Regardless, the organisers, all 79 of them started the journey off, excited and happy!
The year of organising this event not easy at all. We lost young Zeel Thakker, an organiser from Ahmedabad, we dealt with production delays, with visa issues, operational costs, sponsors pulling out at the last minute, stretching out budgets, and if that was not enough challenge! A freaking war broke out, which reduced participation further, speakers and some sponsors pulling out.
Several times the thought did cross my mind, that this event is jinxed and maybe it just won’t take place.
But it did!
We had one of the highest turnouts (2400+ Attendees) ever at a WordCamp and the largest ever Contributor Day (1600+). I still feel that we could have had a bigger turnout.
One of my main goals I set was to make WordCamp Asia, unapologetically Asian! This meant making editorial and other choices that reflect this. We managed to have the highest number of speakers from Asia, and I think many more in ratio than previous editions. I hope that continues in future versions too.
The energy was high, at least the feedback from attendees was everything from sessions, to the venue to the food to the after party was fantastic.
I am incredibly proud with all of everyone involved in the organising team. Here is a group photo at the Organiser Dinner!
We just looked a bit rowdy here, but we were quite nice actually! Friendships
The one thing that invariably happens at projects like flagship WordCamps, is that you become friends with people from different countries. I now have friends from Uganda to Russia, from Japan to Sri Lanka.
One of them who almost did not make it was Moses (Cursor) Ssebunya. He travelled all the way from Uganda. His visa application for India was rejected twice!
But his positivity, support and friendship is truly infectious. Both of us got on several calls and several more Whatsapp messages, and figured out how to make sure his visa application does not get rejected a third time!
Some extra paperwork, documentation and digitally signed letters later, Moses applied again the third time. I am not the most expressive person but when he got the visa and sent me a text, I punched the air as in victory for about 3 and half times. Then I noticed I was staring at the screen and no one was around. The window was open and some neighbour might have thought I was finally losing it!
Moses and I learned so much about visa applications, I semi-seriously joked that the two of us should become travel consultants! Moses has spent countless hours vetting applications for meetups and WordCamps around the world. People like him are why the community team keeps chugging along!
And here is Moses and I, eating some Dosa in Mumbai
Moses had his first taste of dosa at Mumbai. The dosa was just about okay! But since it was his first one, he seemed to be happy! Another friend I made over the last year was Regan Khadgi from Nepal. It was so good to meet someone who shares the same values and grace about the community.
I had a great time traversing through Colaba and Girgaum in Mumbai in November, with Regan. It was quite interesting to discover Mumbai through a first time visitors eyes.
During WordCamp Asia, he stayed over at my place in Mumbai. It was fun to hang out with him after the event and take him to an extremely crowded Malad station, to eat unhealthy and delicious wada paavs along with jalebis.
I suspect Regan was a bit overwhelmed with just the number of people he saw. I have made him a promise to visit Kathmandu someday and walk through his city with him as my history guide.
The other big influence on me came from Japan! One of the coolest people I know is Junko Nugaka from Japan. She lives on a small island and takes care of a library. I think people who enjoy libraries have an innate sense of internal calm and an appreciation of the commons.
While I have known Junko for several years, I only became friends with her this year. We have spoken often about the project,style of leadership and sometimes even art and culture.
This was in Pune, after the event. Junko struck a pose at the Kelkar Museum. Junko travelled with me to Pune along with her friend Shoko, after the event. I showed her and re-discovered Pune, seeing it through the eyes of a travellor. I think that will be separate post next week.
Mumbai, Pune, Mumbai!
Mumbai
WordCamp Asia is a big deal. We expected a lot of people to visit Mumbai. Mumbai’s WordPress community is one of the oldest in Asia (along with some in Japan). I have known a lot of the WordPress-ers from these two cities and for over a decade now.For the event I got to work with friends from Mumbai starting with Alexander, Meher, Vachan, Saaheel and so many more.
Alex participating was special for me. He has been visiting my house in Mumbai, planning WordCamps in Mumbai, back when both my parents were around. It was pretty cool to hangout with him sometimes and sometimes just being in the moment.
PuneWhen I moved to Pune in 2017, and I made friendships in the city, mostly with people from the WordPress community. Sheeba, Amit, Joel are all folks I have known since forever in Pune. There was also Yogesh, a good friend from Bangalore. Not only were they organisers, I personally felt they were my main support system in a way. Many of them took time out to help me tackle some things often without me needing to ask for help. They were in a way, my main support system.
That I would end up organising this thing with long time friends and collaborators, was something that was something I could imagine happening. I am very thankful and very privileged to have got to do this with them!
What I did not ever imagine happening was to work with my younger sibling Arundhati.
Mumbai
Arundhati knew some of the organisers from Mumbai but she really started to get to know the WordPress community when she attended some of the meetups in 2022.
Arundhati joined the Communications Team for WordCamp Asia last year.
I make websites, she is a therapist. Our paths never really cross professionally. So even though I know her for a good 40 odd years, it was the first time we were working together.
It was really enjoyable and pleasant to see her doing well, holding her own and bringing along her own brand of calmness and creativity to the project. She even designed the official Wappu mascot for WordCamp Asia, called Wapuulika.I am thankful and glad we both were together on this journey!
Arundhati and I – pleased as punch, posing with Kazuko Kaneuchi the creator of Wapuu from Japan. Photo taken by Junko. For me WordPress feels like Mumbai
Mumbai is a city I have lived much of my life. My childhood, my school years were all in this city. My parents have lived and died in this city. The city is changing, sometimes too fast but if I sit still for a moment, I recognise it even now and never feel like a stranger.
I remember a couple of years ago, while writing a letter to a friend, I described Mumbai as a place that feels like a place I could simply never feel lost.
In that sense, over the years WordPress is like Mumbai for me. A place where I never will feel lost, a place I could never really feel like a stranger!
I got to pose at the photo booth.
Photo taken by Junko
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I admit I have been lazy with trying out AI tools. Other than some very random, silly experiments with Open AI’s Dall-E 2. The results from my very eccentric prompts were quite enjoyable.
Here are some of the prompts and their results.
“Oil painting of Gandalf the wizard walking with a teddy bear in Paris”
“Oil painting of Gandalf the wizard showing a baby elephant some Instagram reels”
“Oil painting of two elephants drinking a cup of tea and reading a book”
All this was back in late 2022 and early 2023. I have hardly invested time in AI tools, though the idea of some applications around it do fascinate me.
I have recently started a monthly newsletter and I have written a bit about AI things last month. This got me thinking, that I should write down some of my thoughts and usage of AI tools every year.
I will start with 2025.
AI tools I have used
Some AI tools that I have used without really thinking of them as “AI tools” are Jetpack AI tools. Usually on this website you are reading this blog on.
My usage is limited. I use them for different sentences. This helps with my habit of writing very long sentences. Here too, I have to be careful. I do not want to lose my voice, my style for better and shorter sentences.
I do find AI useful for generating better and nicer excerpts for my posts. Sometimes also use it for different titles. Much of these things are more for creative help rather than SEO friendly help.
I have used ChatGPT to frame an email or a proposal. It helps with getting started. I can not still trust AI enough to leave alone to get context better. I use ChatGPT for some design inspirations.But I am not sure we can use the image directly. I generally have had to download it. Then, I move it to some tool like Canva to use it in any relatively good usage. But it is a great tool to create a design mood board that is on steroids.
Claude: The Teaching Assistant and Intellectual Sparring Partner
I have also started using Claude AI a lot these days. Instead of trying to get it to come up with code, I tend to paste code into it. Then, I ask it to explain what the code is doing, why, and where it is used.
More valuable is using Claude AI as an intellectual sparring partner. I habitually ask it to “destroy my ideas.” I do this when developing concepts for writing or even writing a project proposal. This adversarial approach helps me find weak points in my thinking before committing time to flawed directions.
Canva and Claude: Model Context Protocol (MCP)
The Canva integration through MCP (Model Context Protocol) offers an interesting glimpse. It shows how AI can be used with services we are already using.
It was not just a chat-bot to auto-magically do things for me. It felt more like a command-line interface for Canva. Good for organising Canva but not necessarily using it to be creative.
In two years….
The constant for all these things it seems is two years. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might not really be happening and probably not with LLMs anyways. The two year timeline for replacing millions of jobs because of AGI seems more like a marketing or investment pitch. It seems to be less of a realistic threat.
So AI won’t eat all our jobs! Not Yet!
Yes, maybe. But I am not sure anytime soon. It seems a lot of companies are betting big on AI to reduce their need for human beings. They are quite wrong about it.
AI investments or bets are already causing layoffs and massive pivots. But we are not sure pivots to what? What are some good AI driven businesses at scale that break even, let alone turn a profit.
I find that much of the job market and hiring issues are unrelated to AI pressure. They are more connected to bad economics all around the world. Additionally, the refusal of the world’s elite to deal with rising income and wealth inequality plays a role.But AI won’t go anywhere either!
Use AI and interact with it. Find ways it will affect your workflow. This would be the right way to keep up to date as a professional. We are going to see AI integrated and baked into a lot of products and services. More as helpers and sharp tools instead of replacements.
This change will be as big as the internet. It will change everything from commerce to healthcare to art. People who hold out against it will struggle with jobs. Those who dismiss it as a fad will find workflows challenging as years go by.
All this will happen I think, but just not in the next two years!
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filed under WordPress
The first town hall meeting for WordCamp Asia 2026 happened yesterday, and I’m positively buzzing with excitement.
Over 70 organisers gathered virtually to kick off what promises to be an incredible journey.
This journey is toward organising one of the largest WordPress conferences ever held in the world.Coming Together
People from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, Kenya, Russia, Japan, and the Philippines participated. (hope I did not miss out any 😬)
I have been given the opportunity to join the leadership team for this massive undertaking. I join Regan, Meher, and Vachan as a co-lead.
I can already tell this is going to be unlike anything I have ever experienced.
There will be hundreds of volunteers, dozens of sponsors and speakers and not to forget thousands of attendees.
The coming together of just so many people from so many different places and backgrounds is pretty humbling. It is also really cool!
The Magic of Open Sourcery
I’m already friends with organizers from several different countries I’ve never visited.
By event day in 2026, I know some of these relationships will blossom. They will become genuine, lasting friendships. We will have learned and grown as professionals, as WordPress-ers and most importantly as human beings.
This is the magic of the open source world. When it gets turbo-charged like this, we find ourselves doing things we never imagined possible.
Wild Ride Ahead
The months ahead will include loads of Zoom calls. virtual documents will be flying around between time zones. There will always be those Slack notifications!
We will engage in problem-solving, passionate discussions and hopefully some cross-cultural meme creation and humour too.
It goes without saying, that when passionate people unite around a common goal, it will be a wild ride.
I’m planning to document my journey right here on this blog throughout the year. I want to capture and note how this is affecting me and changing me. Hopefully for the better.
Extra
For the Townhall meeting, I drummed up this poster for the introduction slide. I used ChatGPT and for aesthetics inspiration I used old Bollywood movie posters from the 1970s.
The main building in the poster is the iconic Asiatic Library Townhall building built in 1833.
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filed under Personal
I was cleaning out some papers, drawings and notes from my desk. I came across a hack for meditating, dealing with anxiety or general intrusive thoughts.
I won’t get into more details on that part. I have not been capable of sitting still, closing my eyes and meditate.
I find doing things meditative or calming. I often drawn or write to help my mind jumping around too much. It works!
Anyways, these are drawings from last year. Most of them inspired by a phase of watching and consuming a lot of Studio Ghibli folklore.
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About a month ago, I traveled to Manila, Philippines. It was to attend WordCamp Asia 2025. I really wanted to meet the cool people that build WordPress. It was also great to catch up with people who I have come to admire.
I generally do not remember to take photos or selfies. Often, when I do remember to take them, I end up taking pictures of things rather than people.
But lately I have started taking photos and turn them to black and white.
Here are some fleeting memories from my first visit to Philippines.
As I checked out of my hotel window, this was outside. The first night I slept not as soundly as I would like. I would sit beside the window and look out. This building was an office space and hundreds were working the night shift.
I was at WordCamp Asia’s Contributor Day. For some reason, I did remember to take a photo of all the bustle.
After a good day of meeting friends, I waited and waited and waited for a Grab taxi. Finally got one and got stuck in traffic. Then for some reason we were really speeding along. I took a photo!
I was in a meeting room, checking out and figuring out some changes to a video. I completed the video. (The video is embedded at the end) Then I looked outside at the city moving along and took a photo.
One of the days, I did take the bus shuttle from one of the venues back to the hotel. I was the last to climb into the bus, which meant I ended up sitting right at the back. Made for nice photo.
With WordCamp Asia in my backpack, I settled for a good brunch with my friend at a restaurant. We finished a good tuck in with some baklava sweet and great tea.
After the brunch, I walked along the sea side and found this. It was a fence with a lot of locks on them.
Video
I went to Manila as an attendee to WordCamp Asia, came back to India as one of the lead organisers! Good luck to me.🤞
Here is the video we showed to announce Mumbai as the host city.
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In 2024, my reading volume was low. But I want to keep the tradition of listing the books I read and enjoyed.
The ones I relished are indicated with a 🫰emoji.
So here goes.
🫰The Body Keeps Score – Bessel van der Kolk
I came across this book while listening to an interview of the Bessel van der Kolk. It has great insights into how trauma can change brain structure to how it affects the body and its responses. If you have dealt with someone with trauma or PTSD, this is a book I would highly recommend reading.
Women in a River Landscape: A Novel in Dialogues and Soliloquies – Heinrich Boll
The book was given to me by a friend on a whim. The writing is a lot of dialogue, almost reads like a play. The story really is about power, moral decay and ethical compromises for wealth, power and social position.
🫰Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive Science and Technology – Prabir Purkayastha
This is a collection of writings by Prabir Purkayastha. He is an engineer by training. But, he became a journalist who writes a lot about technology in India.
His main hypothesis, which I agree with, is that technology or science has become controlled by a large capitalist system. In this system, common people have become more users of technology than creators of it. The book has some great insights into licensing and funding of science and technology and how this affects India (or for that matter the global south)
Mind Master: Winning Lessons from a Champion’s Life – Viswanathan Anand
I really loved reading this book. I picked it up while tracking the Candidates tournament earlier in 2024. Anand is very open about his struggles and his journey as a Grandmaster and a five time World Champion.
Thankfully, the book is very accessible and you do not need knowledge of chess theory.
This is Amiko, Do You Copy? – Natsuko Immamura
This was slightly disturbing to read. The story really is about isolation and obsession with perception. Mainly it has great insights into how people are often feeling invisible in society.
🫰🫰Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima – Keiji Nakazawa
This was a manga comic book. It tracks the story of Gen and his family. They struggle through extreme wartime conditions in Hiroshima. The book is a strong anti-war message, which war and nuclear disaster seen through the eyes of a child.
Tags: List of Books
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filed under Personal
Recently, I wrote about Prefect Days. Movies never really change my outlook too much, that usually books end up doing.
Like the main character, I often find myself watching shards of sunlight. It comes gently through the leaves of a large tree. I was delighted that there is word for this. It is called Komorebi 木漏れ日, a Japanese word.
On reading more about Komorebi, I came across this nice article on Chicago Botanical Garden.
Oddly enough, I looked up some of my travels on Google Photos. I discovered that I have been taking photos of sunlight passing through the leaves of a tree for many years. That was a nice surprise. This one I am sharing in this post is from Cambodia in 2019.
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filed under Ruminations
Often the period when the year ends, tends to have a familiar aesthetic. Mostly laced with catching a Australian Test match in the mornings, finding the weather quite and pleasant. Sometimes cold in the wee hours of the morning.
The winter sets in but the trees do not really shed their leaves. The sun can beat down but not too harshly. Traveling around, moving through the city is easier and nicer. Taking a long walk is more pleasant than usual.
I like the month of December for its moderate aesthetics.
Everything is in moderation it seems. It’s a good time to put on your shoes. Sit idly in public transit systems. Read a book or listen to a song.
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filed under TV and Movies
It has been a while since I wrote about a movie. I came across “Perfect Days” on my MUBI subscription with Amazon Prime Video. The first time around, I managed to see only 10 minutes of the film. There was something arresting about the film so I did not abandon watching it altogether.
A week later, I started the film from the beginning, and I was not disappointed.
Image taken from a scene. Taken of the Perfect Days website. The story starts with the main character “Hirayama” played by Kōji Yakusho, waking up in his small apartment. He goes about his day diligently. He cleans public toilets for The Tokyo Toilet . I admit for the first 20 minutes or so, I questioned if this film would explore a voyeuristic journey. It seemed to celebrate the perceived ordinary life of an ordinary person.
Hirayama lives in solitude and his days seems to be on repeat. But each day is slightly different from the other and in that difference, appears Hirayama’s outlook towards life.
He smiles at the sky and enjoys the sun when he steps out of his house. He looks knowingly at trees and photographs them as a quirky hobby. A deeper sense of Hirayama’s goodness, his happiness emerge out of the mundane.
Hirayama has unique quirks. He takes a small tiny sapling from a public garden. He photographs ordinary things around him and the light through the trees. Obviously, he enjoys playing music from the 70s in his automobile van’s cassette player. One scene has someone tell him about Spotify and he asks if this it is a shop. Throughout the repetitive days, these quirky habits bring him interactions with people. At times, they just give him a happy moment.
Most cinema is about chasing a dream, being ambitious and finding validation and happiness in being success. In many ways “Perfect Days” is the exact opposite. It suggests that to be happy, we need to find happiness in being present each day.
The official website for Perfect Days is a work of art! I highly recommend traversing through it on https://www.perfectdays-movie.jp/en/ after you have seen the film. I love when a website becomes a medium of art in itself.
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filed under WordPress
The view outside the WordCamp Kerala 2024 conference in Kozhikode. I started writing this post while on a hopping flight from Kozhikode to Bangalore to Pune. The night time layover hours in Bangalore allowed me to write down some thoughts about the WordPress community and some things going on in the project.
I have mostly not commented about the WordPress situation over the past two months. This is partly because I have not been keeping well for almost a month. Additionally, I dislike reading or adding to hot takes on social media. These often do not stand the test of time.
I currently contribute efforts to the WordPress Community Team as a Program Manager and along with being a member of the Incident Response Team.
Locally in Pune, I am leading WordCamp Pune 2025. This is a very experimental event with only workshops. Each workshop has several facilitators. The focus is that all attendees should learn or teach something to each other. This will help each attendee to hopefully interact with the WordPress software from the next day onward.
I work on these things self-sponsored. This means no one pays me for doing this. Not since the year 2020.
A week ago, at WordCamp Kerala, Sheeba Abraham and I had the opportunity to conduct a hands-on workshop on building a block theme using the Create Block Theme plugin.
There were some WIFI issues to begin with but getting dozens of new WordPress people to start building a block based page was great to experience. I personally find the Create Block Theme plugin a better onboarding experience for the block editor than any other theme out there. But that topic is for another day.
Back to the WordPress situation. I prefer the word “situation” and dislike the word “drama”.
The WordPress Situation
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and also ultimate lead of the project, is also the CEO of Automattic, a company that runs the hosting service WordPress.com, WPVIP, WooCommerce, Tumblr and many other things.
The owner of the WordPress trademark is an entity called WordPress Foundation. Automattic holds the commercial rights to the WordPress trademarks. This means they can monetise the trademarks or even sub-license it to other entities.
WP Engine (WPE) is a hosting company that was criticised by the WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2024 for being inadequate contributors to the open source project.
He also suggested that WPE is misusing the WordPress trademark, for which only Automattic holds the commercial license to use and sub-licence it.
WPEngine has gone to court. Automattic and Matt Mullenweg have also responded and all parties have lawyered up.
I am not a lawyer, so I won’t comment on the trademark and licensing dispute between Automattic, WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, and WP Engine.
Some community members disagree with Matt’s position and have left the project. Some have paused contributing. There have been heated discussions on several Slack groups, forums and of course Twitter/X on topics, such as Matt Mullenweg’s leadership to the direction of WordPress.
Who do I think is right?
Since the days I started organising WordCamps in Mumbai about 10 years ago, I have had some very successful names in WordPress tell me that their sponsorship to an event was more or less like charity.
Some claim that their success in selling their WordPress theme or plugin to several thousands of paying customers was contribution enough.
It is like some person who becomes rich and buys a lot of cars and a private jet and says they contribute to society by simply being rich and spending money. This is obviously absurd. Those roads, electricity network, waste collection, public parks are the commons that benefit society and all of comes from taxes. We all have to contribute to the commons and if you are richer, you need to contribute more.
Taking advantage of the commons with a taker-like approach, often called an example of the “tragedy of commons” has and will always be a concern for any open source project or open system.
I am not suggesting that we have a tax collection system in WordPress. That wouldn’t really work well. But if a company is making hundreds of millions of USD in revenues and sponsors only one or two individuals on the WordPress project, then at the very least, the leader of the open-source project, by all means has the right to call out this “taker – like” approach.
Freedom to take from the commons without giving back might exist in open-source. But that freedom doesn’t mean one cannot be called out for the “taker-like” approach by leaders of the project. In many ways, I think it is a primary duty of the caretakers and leaders of the project to call out this practice.
In that sense, I do think Matt Mullenweg is right!
There are many actions I might disagree around WordPress.org — but that is the nature of open-source. As long as I have the space to disagree and commit, I do not feel any disagreement should lead down to the road of disengagement.
That said, I do miss my comrades who have left the project or paused their contributions. I don’t necessarily think they were wrong in their choices. Choices are hard, complicated and nuanced and I respect their choices and them as people.
Harking back to the Community of the old!
In the background of this situation, some in the WordPress community have complained about how the community is not the same anymore. I hear them out, but I also feel that it is important for them to listen to this feedback.
I might not be articulating this as well as I would like but I have some thoughts on this.
I am very wary of people who think they understand the size, scope and impact of WordPress, and the vastness and diversity of its ecosystem. Most people who are confident in estimating WordPress remind me of the story of the blind men and the elephant.
The community was not always welcoming. I am from India (South Asia) and many of us from South Asia have ignored slights and small micro-aggressions from time to time.
To share an example, I have been told plenty of times by someone from North America/ Europe that my name “Aditya” sounds wonderful or fantastic. I am guessing this is their way of making the sole South Asian person on a call feel welcomed.
But exotifying my name or ethnicity to make me feel comfortable is irritating. People like me will mostly ignore such experiences along and collaborate.
The community is by no means perfect, nor was it ever perfect for many. But a lot of us have always chosen to stay in the project and get things moving. Mainly because we got to learn things, teach them to others and enjoy our time.
Yes, the WordPress community is for all. And we all should strive to keep it that way. But it was always a “work in progress” and continues to be so. We should always be mindful of this.
In conclusion
Sheeba and I at the workshop. I think I was messing around with the “Color Palette” there. As I started this post with WordCamp Kerala, I want to end it on that note. Sheeba and I were conducting a workshop on building an FSE block theme for people new to WordPress.
The time given to us was a bit condensed and we were finding it difficult to help 40 -odd attendees configure Playground and download the CBT plugin and get started.
I noticed Hardeep and Saurabh, both WordPress stalwarts, were in the audience. They offered to help out and I recruited them on the fly.
Now we were four instead of two and covered a lot more people and a lot faster. It felt like a bunch of random jazz musicians trying to help each other with our familiarity and WordPress being the music I guess.
While our concert was not perfect by any means, we knew each other enough to collaborate and pick up from each other. I was down with high fever and on medication while the workshop was taking place. Despite that, it was the most fun I seemed to have had in months!
Soon we were seeing questions being asked. Some moved around a few blocks on the homepage and raised their eyebrows and gave that look. That look of surprise that they just figured out something cool and started building things. ♥️
What’s there to not love about this?
So yes, I am not going anywhere and I will continue contributing to the WordPress project in various ways, as far as I can see.
Long live and prosper WordPress! 🖖
Credits: Trickle down economics meme suggested by Hari Shanker R
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filed under Ruminations
Recently on a trip to Bangalore I visited Cafe Saanchi. I ended up visiting it twice over 5 days with different friends. The owner was a cheerful Paarsi or Farsi. (I am not sure I heard him correctly) He had a handlebar mustache. He offered to help us discover what all they had on offer. The cafe is above a antique furniture shop and the antique part is pretty much all around the cafe too.
The food is good and if you ever visit, don’t forget to try the tea there. Especially the saffron tea.
I have come to the conclusion that franchise food joints, while great for scale and uniformity — are really with no personality. The quirkiness of the owner telling us, why would we be interested in ordering too much food? Or a small paper notice put up on a cupboard claiming that the charges for opening a laptop here are ₹500 (an obviously silly thing)
Franchise establishments do try to bring the fun element in some synthetic repetitive manner. A checklist that does everything but leaves out something. There is something lost, some say personal touch, some call it ownership. I will simply say quirkiness that is delightful.
I think this Quirky Authenticity vs Happy Syntheticity is true for people too. I rather meet people who are delightfully forgetful, thoughtful and flawed than ones who hit a nice regular and familiar cadence in their personality.
