Churning out two in a row, today. I am 3 books behind schedule, as of this writing. Today was perhaps the cut-off day for the third day!
Recently, I read this article about Aadhaar and how the core biometric database of a lot of Indians that is now held by UIDAI is secured, and will be handled in the future.
I have been reading a lot of material about Aadhaar, UID, UIDAI lately, and all of it has been pretty grim. With the introduction of things like BHIM Aadhaar Pay which requires the merchant to enter the Aadhaar number, and the customer to use their fingerprint for making a payment, it seems like Aadhaar will be a part of...
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I am now in Chennai. 1 mad dash to the boarding gate later. The fact that boarding gates close 25 minutes before departure totally skipped my mind. I was strolling happily through security when Indigo ground staff called me on my phone and asked me to rush to the gate as the flight was going to leave!
I was the last person on the plane, and as soon as I walked in, they announced on the PA “Boarding Complete”. It was a slightly harrowing experience, but CCU is not a large enough airport and I am fairly familiar with it, so it wasn’t too harrowing.
I safely made the flight to Chennai, and in the past few months although I...
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This is definitely going to be unique. I am writing from an airport. Yeah, typing stuff on a laptop (even if it is gibberish or this) is an experience worth recording somewhere. I am in the Calcutta Airport, waiting to get on a flight to Chennai in about 90 minutes from now.
The shenanigans of gettting to the airport are hard enough, if you live in IIT Kharagpur or studied there. You get on a taxi from the institute to the KGP train station, a train to Howrah (one of Calcutta’s train stations), then get on a taxi from Howrah to the airport. There are so many legs you must go through to do a simple 2 hour flight.
This is one of the posts that I hope to be proud of when I am done with this 100 days of writing marathon.
For a long time, moods and music have been closely connected. I think temperatures are too. Stay with me.
On a hot summer day (hot is about 35-40 degrees celsius, here in India), listening to an Arctic Monkeys song that is racing through is hard. I might listen to it for a bit, but I eventually end up feeling hot. Especially, songs from Favourite Worst Nightmare. The best example is If You Were There, Beware.
The songs starts out slightly less heavier than it gets, which makes it a bit...
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Some more bizarre things happened today, 27th April, 2017. Not so bizarre, now that I know that Internet shutdowns were common. This is definitely the first internet shutdown that I have seen in the papers. Actually noticed. Kashmir now has a block on 21 social networks for the next month. These are the social networks:
I just had to laugh when I saw Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat on that list. Seriously, who is sharing even the anticipated objectionable materials.
More bad news for LastPass’ security team and all users of a password manager that is either Lastpass itself or something else. I have never been comfortable giving anyone access to my passwords. Even...
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Ah, I have been running two days late now. Right now is 27th April, 1733. This post should have been out on 25th April before I slept. I came down with a bad cold and fever yesterday. So, now I have to manufacture two posts in quick succession. I still have one more exam to give tomorrow. Nah, no big deal!
IIT Delhi’s website got attacked, alongwith a lot of other Indian websites. Now, apparently, it wasn’t the website servers themselves that got hacked but the DNS provider, ERNET that got hacked. And after the DNS providers got hacked, they remained in that state for about 12 hours.
Ironically, on the same day, only a few hours before this fiasco,...
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At school and college, there is a laid back approach to exams. 5 exams in a month, in some places. Some study leave before the first exam: in the order of a week to a month for practical exams. Lots and lots of free time. Before the exams begin, before each exam. All of this is wasted time.
Not here. Both the mid term and the end term exam sessions are 7-8 working days. They generally start on a Monday and end the next Tuesday. Sometimes, they start on a Thursday and end the next Friday. There’s no official “study leave”. Professors start to wind up their teaching about a week before the last class if they have planned it...
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Handmaid’s Tale was released as an audiobook. That’s not the best part of the news. The best part: It is narrated by CLAIRE DANES. OH MY!
I found the above excerpts on Audible’s Soundcloud, and they are DOPE!. This audiobook also has some new material, that was added by Margaret Atwood herself!
The TV series of this book is going to premiere on 26th April, in 3 days. The trailer for that series (which is going to be on Hulu) is also stirring. There’s a lot of new material for this book coming out this year. AH, SUCH GREAT TIMES!
I was rather stunned with the Audiobook version that Claire Danes performed. I have...
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Yesterday, a friend shared [this Quora answer]https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-psychological-facts-that-people-dont-know-1/answer/Dorottya-T%C3%B3th) which ended up with it appearing on my news feed.
I read the answer and instantly disliked the contentions made by the author. I was going to let it go, until someone asked me to ellaborate on why I disliked the answer. I had to think about this for just a bit, after which I came up with this extremely long answer:
Ah, thanks for making me think more about it! :D
First of all, if writing was Tom’s true dream, he ought to have done something concrete towards it. But let’s not talk about that, because he probably has a lot of reasons why he can’t do it.
This is going to be a rather short one. There was a suicide in IIT KGP today.
Everything seems trivial for now, it’s become a HORRIBLE DAY and it’s a horrible
thing to happen to someone.
