He walked slowly, pushing his cycle that carried his means of livelihood. As he passed every second house, he’d announce his presence, making sure to advertise his offerings as lip-smacking & delicious as in possible. Onions, carrots, groundnuts and more. He took particular care to slow down in front of his regular patrons’ houses & call out a little extra loudly. He stopped at the door of the local iron-wallah, one of the regulars, and cried - ...
I think one of the biggest differences between someone who embodies a educator-mindset and someone who isn’t there yet but wants to be is - An educator or teacher doesn’t think anything they’re teaching is beneath them or is too easy to beg teaching. I started thinking about this when I saw time and again, experienced Python developers who I respect and have learnt a lot from talk and write publicly about topics that would be among the first ten things someone learning Python would be expected to have learnt. But this can be said for any other technical concept/subject/domain as well. ...
There’s something satisfying about the “Rule of three”. When you want to explain something it’s helpful to break it up into three steps or points because - 1 - It gives you the time to set up a premise. 2 - It gives you the space to build up anticipation without an abrupt halt. And 3 - Of course you read this, because you wanted closure. And that’s what point 3 is supposed to do. Provide closure. Complete the picture. Descend from that proverbial peak of anticipation gracefully. This process is employed very well in many movies. E.g The Prestige. ...
I do a lot of stupid things. And more often than not, they end up with acceptable, pleasant and sometimes even desirable results*. The most recent one was today, in getting a 600 page textbook printed** online but, forgetfully, not spiral bound as intended. So when the courier arrived with a cover enclosing a sheaf of 600 sheets, unbound and loose (but thankfully in order), I was puzzled and indignant, initially at the printers and then upon realization, at myself. The next 20 or so minutes were spent in wondering how best to collate the sheets. ...
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. ...
I started reading at an early age,initially beginning with Grimm’s Fairy Tales (ages 5-7) and then moving on to the then-popular Amar Chitra Katha series. And people ask me why I’m so into mythology. Pfft. Every weekend, my mum would take me to the library and we would both read. She would dive into the likes of Shakespeare and such (books I could not comprehend at the time) and I would skip on to the children’s section to pick up an Enid Blyton or R.L.Stine (a 10-year old’s Stephen King :P ) . To me, that was just..bliss.. ...
We are all writers in a sense - coders write code, digital marketers write Facebook and E-Mail posts and an advocate writes legal proposals or notices. But this article aims to address those who write long form text in order to inform or educate or entertain - either by way of journalistic reports, enthusiastic essays or even casual book or movie reviews. Both the segments have something to sell - some form of an idea, translated into its end forms. But the latter segment, I’ve found, needs more persistence if they are to be successful in their endeavor. We’ve all heard of “Writer’s block”, that excuse most authors offer up as an excuse to explain their laziness and/or procrastination. And there are a lot of articles on how to overcome this (imaginary) affliction. But relatively less is spoken about how writers end their works. There are some, of course, but the phenomenon is experienced more than it is spoken about. Let’s assume therefore that the writer; a writer, is all gung-ho about what he’s writing and has a solid start and an idea in place; a solid premise with which to begin his work. And he continues putting on paper, so to speak, the words that are taking shape in his mind as he takes context into account of what he has already written. And at some point, when the facts have been laid out and he has said what he has had to say, the crux of the idea, atleast, he pauses. He hasn’t really thought this through. He scratches his head and looks around for inspiration. Maybe some object in his surrounding can be incorporated in his work that will bring him closer to a conclusion. He retraces his steps and reads what he’s already written. Did he miss some logical threads? Did he jump the gun at some point to an unobvious inference? He hasn’t. In the meantime he’s received a ping on his cellphone that prompts him to check on a tweet he’s posted earlier in the day. It’s a response cheering him on. He’s boasted promisingly about how he means to write something concrete by the end of the day. He guiltily slinks back to the minimized document and rests his hand on the keyboard, by now having forgotten where his thoughts wandered off and he rereads the last line. He tries thinking about the original premise again. Should he add an alternate angle to the pot? Will this help him round off the whole thing nicely by stating that all perspectives having been looked at, this is the logical end of the topic in question? Perhaps. He thinks about all the authors he’s read. How did they conclude their works? The last arrow in his quiver - imitation. But even drawing inspiration from that seems laborious. His eyes droop. He yawns. He’s exhausted..his brain cells are slowly shutting down, having thought so much about something that should, ideally, not be so tough to do now that he’s managed to convey his original idea pretty cogently. But, as easy as it should be, the end is, in fact, a very important part of the article. But the writer is tired and he makes up a lazy half-assed conclusion and hits “Publish”. He’s victorious. He has completed his work, hasn’t he? He’s too tired to feel guilty, to acknowledge the gnawing voice in his head that’s telling him he hasn’t done complete justice to what he set out to do. ...