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My unblemished self

There is a presumed purity about when you enter this world. Not marked by the world and its inclemency, you are “born”– a fresh chapter on a brand-new page of life. The beginning, miles to go and so on. We do forget that we are marked by the genes of our parents, the executional biology […]

My day at bangalore literature festival

Continuing the annual tradition, yesterday I attended the 12th edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival #blrlitfest. Scouring the website before going to Lalit Ashok, I found that while there weren’t many celebrities (apart from the usual suspects of mainstream authors and Huma Qureshi), there were a lot many sessions being conducted – in fact the […]

James Bond chalisa: who does it better – me or chatgpt?

So I have been thinking: Will ChatGPT kill my moribund / non-existent writing career? How does it fare if I give it the same writing prompts that I had to work with? I have been tinkering with the prompts and ChatGPT’s responses, and have been getting some interesting results. First impressions though: ChatGPT seems to […]

Beauty is NOT in the eye of the beholder!

Contempt. Zipping her lips, she forced air inside her barrel-like nostrils, to push down the bile rising at the back of her throat. Use ‘contempt’ in a sentence: Rabdi Zeek was feeling contemptuous of her body. Her cheeks felt like the moon – cratered and dry. Beautiful, only if you view from a million miles […]

The Song of Democracy

“If I have to take police protection in my own country from my own people, then there is something wrong with me, I’m fighting within the framework of the Indian constitution and it is not against anyone, but for everyone.”[1] -Narendra Dabholkar On August 20th 2013, Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead while out on […]

My lady, you have no free will!

The next time you are laughing, remember you have absolutely no control over it. You may try to rationalize as to why you elicited that embarrassing snort that drew unneeded attention from all the quarters, but then your conscious mind has known how to delude yourself. All these post-hoc attributions to reasons for your laughter […]

Why all Happiness is Not Equal?

‘A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.’[1] – a Fremen Quote, Dune E.M. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints says, ‘A chain is as strong as its weakest link’[2] or ‘any system is limited in its pursuit of achieving more of its objectives by a small set of constraints’. For the […]

Addicted

This is not a piece. It’s a note, for me to remember in future. Why are all the forms of Entertainment, so addictive? What do we find so pleasurable in Whatsapp chats? Why are we so hooked to our Tablets/PCs as we once were to our T.V.s? Why also do we constantly groan and lament […]

A viable business model for Space Exploration

Space, the final frontier. We wax lyrical about the immense possibilities of space: Martian Colonies, Base Camp on the Moon, the wonders of the Titan, Asteroid Mining, and what lies beyond the realms of this Solar System. Our strong and unassailable faith in human endeavour has brought us so far ahead…

Why Alienman?

I clammed up. There, you see me, my neck craned over my cell phone, oblivious to what’s happening around me. That’s me trying to be inconspicuous. I am an anachronism, and people don’t like to be reminded of that fact. The group is polite enough, not to ridicule me. I have had worse. I don’t […]