Good morning! There’s something about January. It starts intimidatingly (“a whole year ahead, I’m so unprepared”), progresses to calming (“ah, what beautiful days!”), but finally ends with some reflection (“a whole month over, just eleven left?” or “that wasn’t so bad”).

An appropriate word for our moods in January is “apricity”: the warmth of the sun in winter. I love the word, but it doesn’t have the same magical ring to it as, say, “petrichor”. Perhaps because I was unfamiliar with it.

In Bengaluru, we speedrun from winter to near-summer in January. The skies are blue, the trees are starting to bloom even as our lakes are starting to retreat from their banks. Of course, we have the time to admire all of these as we’re stuck in traffic. Dug up roads and metro-line constructions compete with new Japanese-designed traffic signals that use AI to sense traffic and synchronize signals between themselves.

A big thanks to reader Amit Gupta who wrote in to point out that I’d incorrectly identified the tree with the drooping red kidney-shaped fruits/pods as silk cotton. Actually, it was the Java Olive or Wild almond (Sterculia Foetida). Thanks Amit!

We don’t have a books section this week because our books editor Hari has come down with a bug, but here’s everything else we have for you: 

1. WIP: “Working in public”
2. Ancient, Medieval, Modern 📸
3. Two by Two: Zomato, Swiggy, and the rise of the 10-minute “dark” cafe 🎙️

“If it is not on a public Slack channel, then does it even exist?”

This is an inside joke at The Ken. A joke on me. 

It’s because I am quite militant when it comes to my colleagues preferring to discuss matters related to their work via private channels or direct messages. Our thriving, open, fun, collaborative culture took many steps back during the two years of the pandemic when we were largely remote. “DM culture”—colleagues preferring to communicate almost always through 1-1 private messages—took root

The thing with cultural changes is that it’s hard to observe the effects in real time, good or bad.