Category: General musings
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Contextual humanity
As a teen, I was used to seeing the Israel-Palestine conflict regularly going in and out of prominence. Being restricted to news from actual papers of news (and that too, early on, mostly ToI, which did not carry the “ToI-let” moniker lightly), and also being restricted to what can only…
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Beaten, Black and Blue
In a cruel twist of irony, I received a marketing call from an agency that wanted me to “voice support for our brave men in blue” the same day that five police officers in Memphis were charged with murdering a black man after a traffic stop. The videos of the…
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Big P Progress
As Americans exercise their rights in an increasingly strained democratic process, I celebrated this festival of democracy by reading Team of Rivals and watching Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln. Steeped in the hot political issues of today, traveling back to those times was a surreal experience. For one, it is…
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Xi Xi P
In an ideal world, all ideas, even the bad ones, can be fairly evaluated. Their merits and demerits can be debated, and they can be experimentally analyzed (maybe in a nice randomized trial). But in practice, some ideas may have a hard time being given a fair chance, especially in…
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Look West policy
In an increasingly interconnected world, it is hard to be ignorant of international news. But news from the West, especially the United States, seems to have a prepotence over people around the world, especially the youth. A stark reminder of this effect came recently in the form of the Roe…
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Ask what your country can do for you
One of the things that used to fascinate me early on in the pandemic was how officials could track down how someone contracted the virus, and create a chain of transmission events, literally like an infection network. Admittedly there is uncertainty in this model and events are probabilistic rather than…
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In dependence
Independence day evokes memories of outsized displays of patriotic fervour for me, from loudspeakers blasting a medley of songs centred around watan, desh, and bharat, to the upright posture of bodies staring at a flag fluttering happily, oblivious to the demand for stationarity. Dignitaries ranging from the Prime Minister (on…
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Permagram
Having always felt technologically out of place for a number of years now, I realized recently that my technological preferences may indeed be antiquated. About a decade ago, or “in my time”, the purpose of social media and the internet used to be to establish and preserve – connections, memories,…
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Playing the fiddle
Thousands of miles away from home as it endures one of its worst humanitarian crises in recent times, I cannot but wonder how things were allowed to get so bad, especially since I know a close relative in Australia who has been living a fairly normal life for most of…
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Academic shackles
I remember that a survey found a few years ago that a plurality of children in the US aspire to be YouTube stars more than anything else. Loud lamentations and comparisons ensued, since it was also found that children in China wanted to be astronauts, and commentators wondered why kids…
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