Just another blog!

The past week has seemed so unreal. For those of you reading this in the future when all history has been destroyed, let me fill you in. The United States of America elected into the office of the President an orangutan troll, and a bunch of truth-denying spineless gits into their Congress. So the only thing that seems sane right now is to binge watch ‘The West Wing’, the amazing, uplifting Sorkin drama filled with good men, hope, and optimistic dialogue. ‘The West Wing’ ran from 1999–2006 on NBC, in the time when people were tired of Bill Clinton and elected into office George W. Bush, a president so wildly mocked that everyone thought that the US had hit rock bottom with its choice of president. Yet, like a battered woman who only can ever date abusive boyfriends, the US broke off its last healthy relationship and chose to get into a four year relationship with a bully. The West Wing was a great show because it made politics – a field reviled so m...

I’m on a process to break away from the distractions of social media, primarily Facebook, and spend the time to pursue other interests. This is an interesting experiment, and it has required significant dedication and effort on my part. At the end, though, I’m not certain if I’ll be successful. I realised that I had a problem when Facebook became the most visited sites in my browser. I should have been working, not scrolling through Facebook like a, well, you know what Jerry Seinfeld has to say. I further noticed that I would tend to log on to Facebook every time I was stuck at work, so that my capacity to tackle problems was reduced to only those that involved cracking a walnut shell. Anything more complex, and I would procrastinate and end up on Facebook. What I needed was a swift kick in the arse to get off Facebook and into the real world. It came through the means of my latest project which required all my attention. At this time, I logged out of Facebook from m...

I turned 25 last year, which in the highly mathematical and calculating eyes of the US insurance industry meant that I had suddenly matured into a much more responsible driver than I was at 24 years and 364 days of age. As a result, I expected my insurance rates to go down. Imagine my surprise when my insurance renewal notice from GEICO actually quoted a $50 increase in my insurance rates. To me, this was a clear signal that it was time to switch companies. Typically, I score really high on brand loyalty. I tend to stick with a brand for as long as possible, unless they really mess up. This qualified as a major mess up. As a result, I started shopping for insurance quotes. Two companies that quoted me significantly lower rates (30%–40% lower) were Progressive and Allstate. Both had an optional programme that could give me further discounts based on my consenting to the companies tracking my driving habits. Now, I am a careful driver – I hardly ever accelerate hard. I hate...

I’m bored. Now, Neil Gaiman would probably claim that I should be at my peak creativity because boredom, according to him, causes the mind to think in ways it would not ordinarily think . This, however, is not the case. I think I’m getting stupider as time goes by and I blame the internet and the always-connected nature of our life for this. Now, I no longer am just bored – I’m bored and stupid. Just ten years ago, I did not have even a mobile phone, let alone a “smart” phone. Ten years ago, I had to carry around every single fact, figure, and detail in my head if I had to carry on a conversation. Now, I just tend to look things up on my phone or on the internet, so I don’t have to remember anything any more. Some may say that it is a great thing, that this frees up my mind to perform other more important tasks. This is a lie – my mind has simply become conditioned to not remember things; any cognitively challenging task is simply brush...

I’ve been reading Harper Lee’s book ‘Go Set a Watchman’, and I’ve only recently put it down. I’ve been really conflicted about this book, and even as I write this post, I’m not sure if I like it or not. The trouble with Watchman is that it uses the same characters as Lee’s earlier work, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and while the characters are more-or-less the same, the narrator has changed, from the child Scout to the adult Jean-Louise. This issue is further exacerbated by people wanting to look at Watchman as a sequel to Mockingbird. However, looking at Watchman as a sequel introduces some retcon issues. Watchman has a total of four paragraphs that narrate approximately the story in Mockingbird. However, in Watchman, the accused is a relation to Calpurnia, and Atticus successfully acquits him; which is very different from the Mockingbird version of Tom, who ends up being convicted, and ultimately killed. Because of this retco...

According to this article on the Verge , the FBI basically wants Apple to create a system that allows them to make an unlimited number of guesses, at speeds of 80 ms per guess. On a 4-digit passcode, this means that the pass-code is cracked in just under 14 minutes. With a 6-digit pass-code, it will be cracked in just about 22 hours. However, if Apple allowed creation of pass-codes of unlimited length, and someone chose a 10-digit pass-code (if you think that is hard to remember, keep in mind that most people memorise multiple 10-digit phone numbers), then the time required to crack it is around 25 years. However, the FBI or anyone cracking the pass-code also needs to know the length, so they will have to try all the way from 1-digit pass-codes to 10-digit pass-codes. 9-digit pass-codes will take around two and a half years, while 8-digit pass-codes will take 3 months. So while I do appreciate and support Apple's resistance to the FBI, I think that they will be much better off ...

This is a question that is on almost everyone’s mind following the horrific attacks on Paris last weekend. It’s a question that most people can’t answer, and neither can I. I will, however, try to make the best sense of what happened. Some gunmen attacked Paris, and left over 150 dead and over 300 wounded. I remember the sense of horror and confusion that I felt at the time of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Yet, during the time of the attacks, I was over two hundred kilometres away from Mumbai, safe in the city of Nashik. With any terrorist attack, there is always the spectacle , the theatrics that are the scariest. Ten people with guns caught an entire country off-guard for three days. Three days of not knowing how many people were responsible, or why we were attacked. And so, I can empathise with the people in Paris. I may be speaking from a position of privilege here, and I really don’t know how it feels to be a person who has lost a loved one to a senseless...