aroonwithaview

  • Add wise

    I recently read a blog post of an interview with Arunava Sen, a Professor at ISI and one of my Master’s advisors. I also happened to stumble upon the chapter he wrote in the book published in his Princeton advisor’s honour, which was released at a conference in his name on his 65th birthday. This…

  • The Devil’s workshop

    For the Greeks, idleness and repose were the highest aspirations. Only in states of inaction, free from the needs and workings of the body, could the mind be free to reflect and introspect on life and one’s surroundings. In marked contrast, modern life frowns upon those that do not have a full set of pursuits…

  • To mask or not to mask

    Tocqueville’s Democracy in America famously anticipates the suppression of minority interests and individual liberties by the “tyranny of the majority”, but a delectable subtlety of his diagnosis of American democracy was his fear that the majority may in fact tyrannize society into an individualist and selfish culture. He recognized that associations, which reminds citizens of…

  • Mathemagics

    Someone claimed quite grandiosely on Twitter that “mathematical sense is normal human sense” and that “fear of mathematics is always the teacher’s fault”. Is it though? I’ve always done well at math and had regular crises driven by an intense fear of mathematics; this has led me to believe for a long time that the…

  • Casting pods

    I’ve found another reason to believe that later generations are cooler at the same stage than older ones – some IIT juniors of mine have started a podcast. I’d been invited on, and the episode is available on Spotify, iTunes, and Google Podcasts.