2022 is almost coming to an end. It has been an eventful year for me, and as we close out the year, I wanted to take a moment and reflect on some of the major highlights of this year.
While I and my wife moved to a new and bigger apartment in Bangalore in January, little did we know that our long-awaited plans were almost on the verge of becoming a reality! I finally received admission for a master's degree in Germany and we didn't leave any stone unturned to make it happen - the education loan, the VISA process, and staying away from my wife and my cats for a few months - all seemed a bit too much and overwhelming, but, we did it together.
We even sold the car; I left my music keyboard and my home studio setup back in India; and I, finally, took a sabbatical from my full-time career after working for 7+ years and moved to Münster, Germany, to pursue my second master's degree - MA in Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices.
After moving to Germany, I made some awesome friends here as a student at WWU Münster and learned the basics of German, and have been conversing in German on a daily basis with people here in Münster. I am getting a chance to learn a lot about culture, filming culture, visual anthropology, and media anthropology, and even thanks to the program, I am getting better at analyzing movies and even writing self-reflexive posts like this! 🤭
I am glad that the program and the professors have been pushing us already to prepare for our first module term/research paper, and I have picked up a topic that is very close to my heart, about vlogs and how they can be seen as autobiographic works that initiate self-reflexivity.
On the sidelines, I also created a Pexels page to share my landscape and cityscape photographs, and some of my work was approved by Adobe for their stock photo and footage library. Recently, a couple of weeks back, I started a YouTube channel where I have been publishing walking videos documenting the cities, landscapes, and people as I travel here in Germany. I even started an Instagram handle to supplement this new YouTube channel.
With all this going on, 2022 feels like it vanished in a blink of an eye, and there's just so much more to do! My to-do lists are just growing with more and more ideas than ever before. I am definitely looking forward to 2023 where I can get to do more, study more and explore more!