Life notes
JWST and the sorites paradox
Where does beauty end and ugliness begin?
Life notes
Life notes
The Higgs boson and I
My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to wrap it up by 9 pm and it was published in the paper the
Life notes
Thoughts on the WordPress.com 'Starter' plan
WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily
Life notes
10 years in journalism
Thinking about the number '10' is hard. It's the number of years I will have soon been a journalist for (as will my ACJ batchmates). Why commemorate it? * In this time, I've seen many of my colleagues and peers in different organisations quit journalism
Life notes
2.5 weeks since WP.com's price revision
WordPress.com squandered the trust of bloggers it had accrued for almost a decade (approx. since the advent of their Calypso editor) with the decision to introduce the Pro plan the way it did. There were many proclamations – direct and indirect – in between, chiefly by Automattic CEO Matt Maullenweg, about
Life notes
What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Be sure to check out the update at the bottom. I recently wrote that I've stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind
Life notes
A nominal milestone
In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I
Culture
Reading books, writing words
It suddenly feels like a lot more people have been reading a lot more books. Or maybe they're talking about it a lot more. I have one friend who went through more books in 2021 than there were weeks. And I've been quite jealous looking at
Life notes
Stream of nothing
I decided to go out this evening. First I went to Bookworm's new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to back, room by room. I picked up the first book I
Life notes
Homo medicatis
With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India's COVID-19 response, soaring across the length of India and plunging into my veins, somewhere in Bangalore. And with
Life notes
Notes on mindful email use
Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is versatile, but most people seem to use it in annoying ways (based on the email traffic in my professional inbox)
Life notes
13 years
I realised some time ago that I completed 13 years of blogging around January or March (archives on this blog go back to March 2012; the older posts are just awful to read today. The month depends on which post I consider to be my first.). Regardless of how bad