Uppi2 is easily the best movie I’ve watched in recent times. Across languages. And I’m not joking. It’s a bloody good movie, and breaks all kind of stereotypes. Having watched the movie, I have half a mind to log on to IMDB and add one more perfect 10 rating. I have an unusual way of … Continue reading “Uppi2 Review”
Some three years or so back I got diagnosed with ADHD, and put on a course of Methylphenidate. The drug worked, made me feel significantly better and more productive, and I was happy that a problem that should have been diagnosed at least a decade earlier had finally been diagnosed. Yet, there were people telling … Continue reading “Discrete and continuous diseases”
Last evening I attended Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s New India Foundation lecture on the role of religion in politics in Modern India. It was a rather complex topic, with a lot of philosophical underpinnings, and as it happened, I soon lost track, and consequently interest, and so I ended up writing this blogpost as I sat … Continue reading “On using slides for a lecture”
In the semester of January-May 2004, I took a course on Indian Fiction in English. This was in order to satisfy the quota for “humanities” credits at IIT Madras. The course was mostly good, and taught well, and we got a glimpse of how Indian writing in English developed, and the motifs that have been … Continue reading “Reading fiction”
One of those terms that periodically bubbles up to the top of people’s imagination is “life hacking”. The phrase by itself may or may not make sense – actually looked at the right way, it might. However, the problem with such catchphrases is that they tend to get much abused and people start using them … Continue reading “Hacking life”
So I was at this resort near Nandi Hills for a day-long workshop on Saturday (actually it was a three-day workshop but my session was only on Saturday so I went there only for one day). One of my colleagues and fellow-teachers had brought along an air gun and at a time when students were … Continue reading “Zen and the art of shooting”
It’s been over six months since I got off my medication for depression (venlafaxine) and ADHD (methylphenidate), so I thought I should just provide an update. The immediate trigger for this post is that I’m reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, in which among other things he rants against excess medication, and explicitly picks on medication for … Continue reading “Mental Health: Update”
I’m writing this in the context of the Right to Education Act coming into force this year. The reason I use a musical example upfront is that music is the only thing I’ve tried to learn formally in recent times. While I use the example to illustrate the problem with the traditional Indian learning system, … Continue reading “Push and Pull Teaching”
The Yatre (journey) took us through four different worlds. All at the same time. We kept flipping from one world to another. Each of us were going through the worlds independently, yet we seemed to meet in one of the worlds (let’s call this one “reality”) once in a while. Time moved extremely slowly. It … Continue reading “Teerth Yatre”
Ok so this post has nothing to do with macroeconomics, though it borrows its concepts from there. As the more perceptive of you might have figured out by now (ha, i love that line!) I was diagnosed with clinical depression about a year back. Actually that was the second time I had been diagnosed with … Continue reading “Depression and Stimulus”