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Story so far: Part 1 A recent article about Indo Anglians was doing the rounds on my FB feed. This piece, in turn, references an older piece about First World Yoga Names. I needed little else to be inspired to poke around with the DoE dataset which lists roughly 78,000 unique individuals of the 2013-2015 year of birth cohort (I could tell you h...

It’s admission season here in Delhi and kiddo is in the fray. The DOE does a pretty neat job of putting up registered applicants school wise here which is great if you’re querying by school but sucks if you’re querying by student name. I wrote a little scraper + data reorganizer for my personal use last weekend. I’ve tried wrapping it into a Go...

In 1999 I had the privilege of attending the KRMO (Karnataka Regional Maths Olympiad) camp at IISc. While it didn’t do much to improve my math capabilities, it taught me a lot about how to preserve self-esteem when in the presence of materially smarter, sharper & more capable folks. One of the quaint bits of math that I did learn was the Ch...

In terms of firsts, the earliest memory I have of a book that I self-read is this combo of “Whiskers for a Cat and Bilderoo is coming”. When I extend the same question to poetry there is nothing that comes to mind. Until today. Thanks to kiddo I rediscovered Eleanor Farjeon and Cats which we read and re-read until one of us had had enough. The...

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the IIMA Alumnus Feb 2017 issue. In Robert Pirsig’s seminal work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a student of the protagonist Phaedrus who is looking to write a five hundred word essay on the United States, finds herself at a loss for words, not knowing where to begin. Trying to describe...

Hastily written, please excuse typos. First of all I would like to thank everyone who took the time to take this poll on Facebook. You guys are fantastic people for having taken the time to do this frivolous poll and I hope it was fun. Polling has been a topic of interest for a while and it has only been exacerbated by how wrong polls have bee...

This month marks the late Michael Crichton’s 74th birth anniversary and it got me reminiscing about Jurassic Park. Released in 1993, the film made box office history led to many other Crichton stories being filmed (Disclosure, Rising Sun, Congo, Sphere, Eaters of the Dead and of course Lost World). I have read a significant chunk of what Cricht...

Scanner Darkly (the movie) directed by the brilliant Richard Linklater came out in July 2006. The movie has so many things to talk about including the war on drugs (and why it cannot be won), PKD’s own creativity being fuelled by his substance abuse, how scramble suits could be the way to end racism etc. Instead, I’ve decided to pick form over ...