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Weeknote 45 2026

Published on: 08/11/2026

Last edited on: 08/11/2026

Langur gym's warmup area

Happy Diwali! ✨🪔

I am back home in Surat. Few sprinkles each of nostalgia, love, laughs, teamwork, chaos, confusion, teasing, relaxation and kalesh. Whisk all of them together and you would find yourself enjoying the family treat :).

Life

Langur gym

On Sunday, climbing group decided to try out the new cool gym in town: Langur Climbing Academy. I find the gym fascinating cause of its foundations. It’s jointly owned by a bunch of former Indian climbing legends with parts owned by current Indian team physio, etc. It’s built by athletes for athletes! As a natural consequence of this, most of the current and upcoming climbing talent representing India trains here.

They have lead, speed, top rope, overhung, slab and spam walls. Lead wall is SO HIGH! Ever since I started climbing, my fear of heights has reduced. But this gym’s walls still sent a shiver down my spine 😭.

They also have a kilter board and a moon board. I believe it’s the first gym in India to make these boards available! Moon board is relatively small in size but makes up for it in difficulty of climbs. Kilter board on the other hand, is much more bigger (size comparison in videos below) and has levels from V0 to the highest (sort of highest). My friends played the wise gandalf role and told me to stay away from moon board for the first time, so kilter board was our ultimate goal!

Except lead and moon board we tried out everything else and it was SUPER DUPER FUN! Only one gripe, I really wish it was closer to Indiranagar, currently it’s 20 km away 🙃. I’d prefer to visit this gym over Equilibrium’s Hoodi gym any day.

Movie night again

After the tiring climbing plus travel, all of us decided to have another movie night. Movie was picked up by a resident cinephile. We watched Shiva Baby. It was decent short watch, I liked how the director made viewer cringe over and over and over.

As this was a short watch and none of us wanted to go home early, we started playing game of charades. I miss playing this game sooooo much! Not that I am any good at it, but this time I enacted hard and long movie names like Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan , The Loranx, etc. Maybe I can call myself an amateur now?

I also learnt an important fact which doubles the fun in your game of charade any day. Give foreign language movie names to people who don’t speak that language. In our case we were giving absolutely atrocious movie names to our non-hindi speaking friends. It was a blast watching them enact 😂.

Travel back

I spent my Tuesday in the train travelling back home. Few of my recent train rides have been super interesting in terms of seating and the amount of things I have explored, but this one was unremarkable. To be frank, I kinda hated this one. Charging socket wasn’t in a good spot, and due to Diwali, lower seat was RAC. I couldn’t use it at all. I was confined in my Side Upper space. That combined with my rice dish getting spoilt, just killed the vibe :(.

Old friend back in town

Vikrant is back in Surat for his bi-yearly visit. He is currently working in Canada, but has spent most of his life here. In fact, we both left our houses around the same time. After he left, I used to get super bored and due to other more important reasons I finally decided to make the move to Bengaluru.

We go back LONG. I first met him in 5th standard and we were best friends till 10th standard. After which I took science and he took commerce. Naturally, we grew apart. Surprisingly, covid which separated the world, caused us to unite. We roamed around the city together for a few years, after which he decided to pursue further studies.

He was back the same day as me and we met the very next evening for a gedi sesh with another friend who is also in town. We had awesome desserts at Uncle Goon’s and yapped while driving all around the city. Rejuvenated :).

Family time

I have spent my whole life fighting with my siblings and even thinking of them as my enemies at times. But as soon as I started living away from them, I realized I enjoy their company so much more. Well, I don’t think I am their best friend yet, but that’s work in progress 🫡.

I have been enjoying some good old family time. We are watching a bunch of movies, doing Diwali cleaning and throwing tantrums at each other over Uno Flip. What a time! I wish this could be locked in time forever.

Climbing

Front of Langur gym

Let’s talk about climbing details of langur gym. After warming up, we first tried slabs. Most of us sent everything till level 5 with relative ease. But everything above that grade looked like a nightmare, so we happily skipped them :P. Next up was the slight overhung section plus general walls. This continuous section of wall was divided into two sections. One recently set, blindfold grades, and other with concrete grading associated with them.

Langur gym has a super interesting rule for newly set routes. They don’t grade them for the first week. This is to encourage people to not get scared of grades and try all the routes! The reason this is even necessary is cause a lot of climbers work with a concretely set mentality and associate difficulty ladder to grades. While difficulty ladder is one of the reasons for grading routes, it is not the ONLY one. Each climb has it’s own style and climbers do get surprised from time to time that they can do certain routes in a higher grade. But, if you bound yourselves with grades, you would never try routes of higher grades. That’s not a good mentality to have.

With all that said, just a personal note. I still take grades too seriously. I do try everything in the gym, but if I see a climb is of higher grade and a bit tough, I skip it immediately. Something I should improve upon 🙈.

In the blindfold graded routes, we sent almost all of them except a level 7-8 and a level 6. We next moved on to the graded section where we sent a couple of level 4 and 5s, nothing fancy, just regular climbing.

Now, is a good time to talk about grading. Some gyms are sandbagged ( difficult routes are graded less ) and some are grandbagged ( guess what that means?? ). We had been repeatedly told that this gym is sandbagged, but my group’s experience was: it was appropriately graded. All of us have spent enough time climbing in Equilibrium to know when they set an easy set and grandbag vs when they set a hard one and sandbag. At the equilibrium (pun intended xD) of these two methodologies, grades are exactly representative. Langur seemed in that equilibrium zone.

Next up, we moved on to the section I was most excited about. KILTER BOARD!! We mostly tried level 3 and 4s. This was sad cause we could have totally projected much higher grades on it by not climbing as much earlier 🙃. I was also the last man standing cause everyone’s fingers had given up. This is where my finger training finally showed it’s results, I could climb and project in level 3-4 range much longer than everyone else!

Next up, we headed onto top-rope section. This one was surprisingly easy…We did level 5 and 6 directly and both me and Rohan flashed both of them. There was no time to complain though. It was already evening and we had to leave for Indirangar. It took a long tiring hour to reach back.

Food

Chung’s Pavilion

I had written about how I liked this place in an earlier weeknote. Well, that was vegetarian recommendation. But this time I can give one for non-vegetarians. My climbing friends have given it a solid 3.5/5.

Sweets

I visited Sri Venkateshwara Sweetmeat stall to surprise my family with the best Mysore Pak in Bengaluru. A small tasting piece itself made me go mmmmmmmmm. I was acting like the girls in Cadbury shots ads 🤤. Must try for everyone!

Mixed fruit rabadi

I also tried their famous Mixed fruit rabadi. This was one eh…It was just fruit salad, but a bit more thick and sweeter due it being in rabadi. Not sure what else I was expecting.

Uncle Goon’s

Firstly, who tf named this shop 👴💦. What is up with this whack-ass name. Well whatever, it’s one of the current “hyped” shops in Surat and hence me and my friends decided to give it a try.

We ordered:

And all of them were okay-ish? Cookies and brownie could have been better. Vikrant and others liked it a lot so maybe I am wrong, or maybe I am just a spoilt Bengaluru kid now xD.

Tech

Public advisory: If you work with worktree and agents on a Rust codebase, install kache RIGHT NOW!! It’s a Rust build focused caching service which works with C and C++ builds in CI/local/remote, etc. All the imaginable setups are baked in. My machine had started lagging due to super large database builds and was also struggling on the space front. Thanks to it, both of them are in bearable ranges now :).

Rant of this week: What is up with slack nowadays?? This week they decided to insert a persistent annoying menu bar item. Worse, it’s literally useless. There is no functionality of it which I want. Thankfully, reddit still exists to help me get rid of this nuisance: https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1xhwthi/remove_slack_icon_from_macos_menu_bar/. This thread has solutions for Tahoe and sequoia both.