Tv-Shows

“Whoaaaaaaa”, he yelled, a sound only he could hear. One second he saw the clear blue skies and in the very next, an expansive patch of brown mud and this pattern repeated as he rose into an arc and his ascent slowed to a halt and then he descended in the same topsy-turvy fashion with increasing velocity before crashing onto a rough surface that was immediately engulfed in darkness. He blinked. He could see nothing for what seemed like ages, but heard muffled voices in a tongue he’d come to understand in bits and pieces - some words more familiar than others. He’d learnt a lot of things over the years. He knew his name was what his handlers called “fifty paisa” , but he was always spoken about carelessly, it seemed, with lesser reverence than others of his kind. ...

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. ...

This is a story set in the world of the Subbu Chronicles but doesn’t follow the #A2Z pattern or the chronology of the rest of the stories. This is, quite simply - Subbu Unplugged. Episode 1. “All that is yours is rightfully mine… and mine it will be!”. 10-year old Subbu’s eyes widened in wonder as he gripped the joystick a little tighter and watched The Dark Prince whisper the next few lines and vanish into smoke…so much smoke… the screen had gone black. He waited for a few more seconds before he realised the vanishing had more to do with an external agent than an internal actor. Amma stood by the side of the TV, the disconnected plug in her hand, an expression of impatience on her facing and one foot tapping on the ground with the rhythm of one who has been ignored for a while. “Amma!”, he protested, “I was about to get to an important level!”. “I’ve been calling you for the last ten minutes”, Amma protested in retaliation and with a shriller voice that indicated the victor of this argument even before further sparring could ensue. “Dei! You have your exams in two weeks!”, she continued, “And you’re sitting here playing this useless..this useless..”. “Game”, Subbu completed, a look of resignation and decreasing annoyance on his face, even as he knew the end of the sentence was irrelevant. ...

This article about Facebook’s history of weighing reactions differently overly time culminating in uniformity for all reactions except for the “like” and the “care” reaction was published in October this year, 2021 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/emoji-reactions-cute-addition-facebook-became-headache-rcna3747 I’ve hated the concept of social media while being a grudging yet more-than-active participant in it for years now. And what gnaws on me day in and day out is the fact that this is all very dystopian and unnatural - the concept of assigning points to every little thing we say. every thought we have that we choose to put out there. This is not normal and definitely can’t be healthy. We weigh things in real life in relative terms already. Now for years, we’ve started getting conditioned to weigh every statement we make as well, wanting each to perform better than the last. ...

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 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.. ...