I bought two books on Jun 27, using a Champaca gift voucher that was about to expire. I didn’t need the books, but it was …there. So I ordered “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger and “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport. Now, the latter, I was really looking forward to because it’s ongoing and eventual goal to successfully subscribe to and practice the “philosophies” of digital minimalism - a topic highly relevant today and definitely more so, tomorrow. ...
This page will be updated as and when information is relevantly obtained. The following contact numbers and post is obtained from Ranjith Rajan’s Facebook post. Super Urgent!! KeralaFlood2019 Be alert, but do not panic!! Most of you are now aware, if not closely monitoring the rains at various parts of India, especially Kerala from last night.. For Kerala region, we have made a list of database from various sources. This should be helpful for some of them, kindly share!! In case you have any more numbers to be added, please comment on this post and I shall add it to the post! ...
Subbu walked out of the classroom having just completed his last paper of the unit-test-series. His hatred for biology was second only to his hatred for geography, which had however gone fairly smoothly, thanks to the additional day he’d got for preparation. Biology on the other hand, had not. So it was no wonder that his face was filled with dismay and apprehension as he walked to the school bus that would take him home. His friend Murali spotted him on the way despite his efforts to get away unnoticed and called out - “Dei Subbu!! Wait da!”. Subbu tried walking faster, but Murali caught up with him and Subbu had to pretend that he was happy to see him. “Heyy Murali, didn’t see you there.”, he said. “Hey, what value did you get for the seventh question?”, Murali asked. Subbu froze. “Wasn’t this the Biology paper?”, he asked, shocked, “What value are you talking about?”. Murali’s face broke into a grin. An unamused Subbu punched him playfully on the arm and continued walking towards the bus accompanied by Murali, who still wore a proud expression having successfully pranked his friend. Subbu couldn’t be bothered to entertain anymore nonsense from anyone. He had more important things on his mind. Like how he would deal with Appa. A grim face floated lazily to the surface of Subbu’s mind - “Do well today, Subbu”, he had said. Despite the laconic tone, Subbu knew each of those words weighed a ton. He frowned. First of all, it was unfair for a Maths professor’s son to be expected to do well in a subject like Biology. Isn’t that what genes were all about? He had, despite his general disinterest in the subject, written a short para on whatever he could remember about genes in the test (the question was “Describe the different types of human chromosomes [10 marks]”) and felt qualified to assess the situation objectively. ...
A friend recently asked me what he should use if his usecase is that he just wants to pen down some thoughts on the Internet. I thought I’d list all the different ways I host my different websites that I have for different usecases. Maybe one of these will help someone else stumbling across this page as well - I initially started off with Static Site Generators and later adopted Medium, Wordpress and Substack over time. I’ve abandoned Medium now. ...
Anyone can tell a story if a day’s been interesting. Now, if the day’s been boring, ah, now That, is a challenge. But what is a boring day? Can days even be boring anymore with all the technology and virtual worlds we hold at our fingertips? I remember a time when there would be powercuts for hours together at night and I would, after our initial scampering and hunting for a candle that would be lit, sit for hours together around the flame, occasionally brushing a finger or two across the flame, as if to tempt it to burn me. I would stare at the candle for the duration of the powercut, letting my mind wander to lands where people could do things with fire that in reality would not and ideally, should not happen in a controlled environment. But, in the confines of your mind, you are the creator and the destroyer and if the mind concocted a man who could summon flames from his fingertips and walked around helping and harming as he so fit, with his arsonic abilities, so be it. ...
Let’s assume I die tomorrow. Alright, let’s not be quite so morbid to start off. Let’s assume I die the day before this website is to be renewed. They will probably give me a warning of a deferred payment for 30 days. Perhaps 60. Then the website is deactivated. And after another 60 days, this website will have been deleted. I haven’t put this on an auto-renewal plan. There will be no one paying for the website if I don’t do it. ...
We like to think we know what we’re doing. For the most part, we have ourselves convinced that we are “masters of our domain”, not quite in the Seinfeld-ian way, but in terms of how we spend our time everyday, what we work on, who we talk to, what we eat - basically everything we do on a daily basis. A few months ago, I had myself convinced that I was conducting a qualitative experiment on Twitter. I was gauging responses to a post I’d made and subsequently to a couple of polls I conducted. Here my assumption was that I am the experimenter and the people who were participating were, as they were going about their day, unwitting participants of said social experiment. At the end of it, as I mused the responses, it struck me that I had “conducted” this experiment on a platform where I myself, am a subject of an production-ready experiment. A social experiment where I am one of, as of 2020, 186 Million test subjects. ...