Personal Essay on Aneesh Sathe

Masks in Redshift

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first month participating in the “IndieWeb Carnival” where the prompt for this month is “Masks, Identities & Cosplay”.

With age we learn to hold memories and thoughts at a distance. As if on a shelf across the room or in some other part of home. Age gives you the luxury of making furniture of history where you can safely stow away parts of your world. On such a shelf I keep my masks.

Nothing Ventured

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 04:51:52 +0000

The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves; but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar.

I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy. In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, impedance matching, DACs, amplifiers, calibration, ARC, fibre, buying, licensing, and streaming in approximate order.

Rejected In Paris

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 05:18:57 +0000

I got told off by The Paris Review today. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but as they say in the, now old, new lingo, I felt attacked. You see, recently, drawing on the well of inspiration that is history I succeeded in writing a poem, but not just any poem. I wrote a ghazal.

Those who know me for any amount of time are made aware of my taste for writing poetry. It’s usually pretty bad but I persist, cause why not. The OG is long gone anyway. The ghazal is an especially ambitious type of poetry to be taken up my someone with my modest talents. To make matters worse, as I learned today, the ghazal is really well suited for the Urdu. For all practical matters, I know only English.