Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

Riding Away

2018-05-01T13:04:00.001+05:30

A couple of weeks ago, I undertook a gargantuan task: I decided to teach my mother to ride a bicycle. Somehow, during her more youthful years, she never found time to pick up that particular skill, and now she is to rectify this deficiency.

My own bicycle is sized for adult males and as such, it's a little big for Mom. In order to enable her to reach the pedals, I walked down to the nearest pedl.in stand and brought her a smaller bicycle. Pedl.in, for those of you who don't know, is a company run by Zoomcar which lets you rent bicycles for a couple of rupees an hour. It's great, because it spared me having to go around the neighbourhood in search of a bicycle that Mom could use.

Once I brought the bicycle home, the real tribulations began - for Mom, that is. I simply stood on the side of the road and took videos of her travails to contribute to the family albums. I don't know how many of you recall the experience of your first bicycle ride. I remember mine with real clarity, primarily because never before or since have I collected such a large, varied set of bumps and bruises in so short a period.

In spite of not having training wheels to aid her, Mom's feet were able to reach the ground while she sat on the seat, so fortunately, she didn't actually take any tumbles. However, her many attempts to keep the bicycle upright and in motion for more than, say, two pedals at a stretch were quite something to watch. Mom, you see, doesn't go in for very much physical activity, and it wasn't long before she was quite tired. Being the fantastic son that I am, I continued to watch of her attempts as she grew more and more tired, never once envisioning the possibility of coming to her aid.

After about two hours of trying to get the bicycle into constant motion, Mom gave it up as a bad job. She asked me to return the bicycle to the stand so that she could go back inside and do things that didn't require quite as good a sense of balance. I was happy to oblige - I'd had my fun, after all. But you know, writing this post reminds me, I promised Mom that I'd teach her how to actually ride a bicycle. I think I best be getting a move on now, to go pick up another bicycle and dust off the old video camera.

The Game

2018-04-13T20:03:00.001+05:30

I've a bit of a confession to make: I still play Minecraft off and on (I can hear all the hardcore gamers laughing from here). I even quite enjoy playing it.

For those of you who don't know, Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build structures in an infinite, 3D world. Basically, it's a discount LEGO set for computer-literate people. Much like legos, if you play it after you turn twelve, people assume that you're mentally incapable of dealing with anything more complex.

I hate the idea that you become to old to play a certain video game. Unless something involves physical activity that'd be impossible to perform once you cross a certain age, I don't see why it should be age-restricted. I'm seventeen years old, and if I want to spend a night binge-watching Tom and Jerry and consuming obscene quantities of potato chips, that's my god-given right!

I think people tend to assume that Minecraft is a simple game. Once you've built a squattish, squarish dirt house, you've exhausted all that the game has to offer you in terms of intellectual challenges. The fact is, though, it's not. Minecraft is an endlessly creative game. There are, of course, an infinite number of things you can build - I've seen people construct everything from cityscapes to, once, a scale model of the White House. The only limit is your imagination.

For those of us whose brains function best along more logical pathways - myself included - Minecraft also has an item called "redstone". Once you start messing about with redstone, you're permanently hooked to the game. Redstone, you see, is Minecraft's wiring system. It only has a few components, but with them, you can build machines of immense complexity. I've seen massive computers comprising thousands of hours of work built in Minecraft. My own knowledge of computer science comes, in part, from Minecraft - back when I was a noob (newbie), I used to play on a Minecraft server dedicated to building computer-related stuff. I learned how to build an XOR gate, a binary adder and finally an ALU - three of the primary reasons that your computer can, you know, compute.

Redstone and building themselves give hours and hours of gameplay, but the thing that really makes Minecraft amazing is the community. I've been gaming for about as long as I can remember, and I don't think I've ever met a community that's more willing to help you out if your game crashes or give you your items back if you accidentally fall in a pit of lava. What's more, there are tons of community-written "mods" or modifications that add even more content to the game. Some mods change the game so completely that the only remaining recognizable aspect of the game is the art style. Incredible.

Now, with any luck, the preceding 450 words will be enough to get Microsoft to pay me. Free advertisement for Minecraft can't be all that common, can it?

Growing Pains

2018-03-30T16:06:00.001+05:30

First off, I'd like to apologise for my (latest) absence from the blogging scene. Exams, studying and my own laziness have conspired to keep me from writing for nearly a month - but no longer!

Writing this post, in particular, is really painful for me. Not because of the subject matter, or because writing posts requires me to constantly bludgeon my poor, uncooperative brain for ideas - although at least one of those is a factor - but because I just joined the gym again, and my trainer seems to have no intention whatsoever of going easy on me until I get back into the swing of things.

On Monday, I had an arm workout. Today is Friday, and my eyes still well with tears every time I try to stretch my elbows. It's not even a one-time thing. Every time I come home from a workout, some part of my body is incredibly sore. Honestly, sometimes I think the only thing keeping me regular to the gym is some inherent masochistic streak.

The funny thing is that I don't mind it hurting. I go to the gym five days a week, I come back home five days a week about as sore as Humpty Dumpty in the aftermath of his famous fall, but I still go in the following day because it's fun. I enjoy being in the gym, I like the feeling of doing something to get physically fit. Even the pain isn't so bad. After all, if I don't feel at least a little sore, did I really exercise at all?

I don't like working out. In fact, I can barely stand the tedium of running on a treadmill for 20 minutes, or the endless repetition of a single move with a dumbbell. No, if I had to work out merely for the sake of working out, I doubt I'd have visited the gym more than once in my life. What I enjoy - what makes the sweat and the strain and the judgemental looks from the more adonis-esque, muscle-bound members of the gym worth it - is the endorphin rush you get afterwards. I've never yet experienced anything that quite equals the sheer satisfaction of a good workout seen through to the end.

That's probably the biggest thing I've learned about working out, now that I think about it - working out because you want to get in shape, or see past your paunch, or even take your shirt off in public - doesn't really work. Sure, you'll stick with it for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks if you're particularly persistent, but then you'll abandon it, because you won't really see any results. What I've noticed, though, is that you yourself are never going to see the results. The change is so slow, and you look for it so regularly, that you don't really see it occur. You only discover the value of having spent a month planning your life around your gym time and diet when people ask you how you lost so much weight the following month.

Bruschetta

2018-01-25T16:31:00.000+05:30

I don't know if you know this, but I love to cook. Like, love to the point where I'm not allowed in the kitchen during exam season because it's too distracting. I suspect that it's got something to do with the fact that I love to eat, and if you want to eat food that you like, it tends to help if you know how to make it.

The real challenge with cooking isn't really the actual cooking - that's the easy part. No, the hard part is finding something to cook. The problem is that I have a device with internet access, and that means I have access to a virtually infinite recipe pool with recipes of widely varying quality. My solution to all this is to find people - YouTube chefs, Taste.com writers - whose recipes tend to turn out well. Of all the recipes I've pulled off the internet, though, my favourite has to be this one seriously excessive bruschetta recipe from Gennaro Contaldo.

Generic bruschetta for copyright reasons

The recipe is from a video on YouTube, and unfortunately, the actual measures that are used in the video aren't available. There isn't even a text recipe. Naturally, this annoyed me no end, so I sat down with the video and a notes app and transcribed the recipe, eyeballing the amounts when they weren't mentioned. I don't know if it's as good as the original, but here's the way I do it:

Ingredients:

6 slices of sourdough/baguette
12 large basil leaves
1 clove garlic

Roast tomatoes:

200g cherry tomatoes
3 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 chilli, sliced thinly
10-12 leaves fresh oregano, finely diced
1tbsp olive oil
pinch of salt
1/4tsp pepper

Cheese mixture:

25g ricotta
60g fresh buffalo mozzarella
1tbsp buffala liquid
1/8tsp pepper

Sun-dried tomato paste:

75g sun-dried tomatoes
pinch of salt
1/8tsp pepper
1/2 tbsp vinegar
2tbsp olive oil

Method:

Cheese mixture:

1. Cream the buffalo mozzarella and the buffala liquid into a paste.
2. Add the ricotta, and pepper. Mix again.

Roast tomatoes:

1. Take the stems off the cherry tomatoes and spread them evenly on a baking tray.
2. Add the garlic, oregano, chilli, salt and pepper to the tomatoes.
3. Drizzle the tomatoes with olive oil, then put them in an oven at 220C for 5-8 minutes - long enough that the tomatoes become black in places.

Sun-dried tomato paste:

1. Put all the ingredients in a blender and blitz until you get a smooth paste

Building the bruschetta:

1. Toast the bread slices on a griddle pan, then rub them with a clove of garlic.
2. Drizzle olive oil on the bread. Spread a teaspoon of sun-dried tomato paste on, then the cheese mixture. Place a couple of basil leaves on top, then the roasted tomatoes.

I know, it seems more than a little excessive. Three types of cheese? Cherry tomatoes? Definitely not worth the effort, right? The funny thing, though, is that it is. For the hour and a half of work this takes to make, you get the most divine bruschetta you'll ever eat. The cherry tomatoes are almost sweet, and the chilli and basil absolutely make it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go convince Mom to let me make dinner...

P.S. For anyone that's interested, here's the original video: https://youtu.be/a0C7E6xE-0o

Exam Fever

2018-01-09T17:54:00.001+05:30

As anyone currently in the twelfth will tell you, with varying levels of dismay, the final exams are right around the corner. Parents everywhere are seizing their children's phones and taking time off from work. Panicked screaming ensues at intervals.

I don't believe there's a person on the planet who genuinely enjoys exam season. Actually, I take that back - there's no one in India who enjoys exam season. Partially, I think this is our own fault. Exams are the most important things in an Indian student's life, so parents seem bent on bottling up all the worry and concern they have about their kid's education and allowing it to spew forth in a torrent of "No more video games!" and "Delete WhatsApp!" commands during the two months surrounding the exams. Small wonder, then, that at 17, I believe the purpose of exams is to seasonally blot the sunshine from otherwise happy lives.

This whole exam fever thing does have some upsides. Okay, one - it has one upside. The fact that Indian kids spend so long studying basically guarantees that we top international exams. Asian kids have the highest average SAT score of any demographic, in spite of being one of the largest test-taking demographics. Apparently, studying for your exams does ensure that you do well in your exams.

The bad news, though, is... well, for starters, there's the fact that having exams ruins lives. As students, we're expected to shut ourselves in our rooms and spend every second that we're not eating or pooping memorizing our textbooks. Internet connections are cancelled, data plans are suspended and requests to meet friends are denied until the exams finish. You know where else they cancel internet and don't let you see your friends? Prison. Maybe I'm being a little over-the-top here - my brain has been addled by several hours of study a day - but in my experience, nose-to-the-grindstone studying just doesn't work for bringing the roses to the cheeks and the tunes to the lips.

Let's say, though, that by some miracle, you survive the tribulations of the exam machine. What then? Well, if you study under most Indian syllabuses, you're probably going to sit in an exam hall and spew what you've memorized over the past three nights of no sleep onto the paper, leave the hall and forget every word of it within an hour. I've never seen a pair of eyes as thoroughly glassed-over as those of a kid leaving an exam hall.

The real travesty, though, is once the results come out. The kid who came second's parents yell at him for not coming first. The kid who came first's parents yell at her for scoring 99.8% instead of 99.9%. Then they enroll the kid's sibling into an IIT coaching class, despite the fact that the poor guy can't even reliably spell 'coaching' yet. Personally, I'm all for a smarter population - anything that reduces the membership of the Shiv Sena and RSS are definitely good for the country in my book - but this is a bit much.

I love learning, and I love going to school, but even today, I fail to see the need for exams. Perhaps someday, someone will do away with the exams and implement a more long-term, less stressful system of testing. Until then, you're only young once - why not spend some of your youth OUTSIDE a tutor's class?

Learning to Learn

2018-01-01T17:30:00.004+05:30

There's an interesting concept that's gotten a lot of traction over the past couple of years called "meta learning". It's a term coined by one Donald B. Maudsley, who defined it as "the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized". Translated from Sciencese, Maudsley is talking about how we figure out ways to become more efficient at learning new information.

HR managers (you know, those overpaid dimwits you complain to about your coworker stealing your lunch?) like to call it "learnability". Most people with real jobs don't call it anything at all. In reality, though, it's an extremely useful thing to understand, together with the techniques you would use to get good at it.

Myself, I'm a decent-ish learner. Mostly, that's because I've had to learn things on my own quite often - I had to teach myself web design, app development, blog management, SEO and a fair number of other arbitrary, esoteric topics. I think that's one of the most important things to having a "high level of meta learning awareness", as Wikipedia puts it - experience. The easiest way to get good at learning things quickly and thoroughly is, oddly enough, to learn a lot of things quickly and thoroughly. However, that doesn't mean you've got to spend hours and hours researching random things on the internet. There are a few things you can do to learn whatever it is that you happen to be studying at the time that much better.

The first, and for me, most effective thing you can do while learning is to use the Feynman Technique. The Feynman Technique was devised by Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate with the fabulous haircut. The easiest way to use this is to get yourself a piece of paper - or, if you have access to technology devised after 1990, a Word document. Then, study the concept you want to learn. Write down an explanation of the concept. It'll be hard at first, and you'll probably want to resort to all manner of technical jargon, but as much as possible, don't. Try and explain it in simple language - Reddit's r/ExplainLikeI'mFive has some fantastic examples of how to do this. When you're done, read up on anything you felt unsure about. If you did end up getting technical at some point, try rewriting that portion of your explanation to be simpler. And that's it! The Feynman Technique will help you learn much faster and retain much more, too.

Another technique I personally use a lot is a little more specific, in that it relates to video courses. Online video courses are all the rage now, from KhanAcademy's math and science to Coursera's programming courses to MasterClass' ridiculously expensive courses on everything from cooking to comedy. Here's the problem, though: nobody's got three hours to sit in front of a computer and watch videos anymore. My solution to this: videos at double speed. Most sites now have a control to set playback speed. I usually keep the speed on the videos I'm watching somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times the original speed, depending on the complexity of the video I'm watching. If your course comes with captions, it usually helps to turn those on, as well. I was able to complete a 4-week course on Coursera in about four hours using this technique.

The other thing that I've found works really well is flashcards, particularly digital ones. This technique is really more applicable to things you have to memorize than complex concepts, but I think it's worth a mention anyway, because it's saved my hide more times than I can count. A flashcard, incidentally, is a piece of paper with a question written on one side and the answer on the other. So, for instance, if you're trying to memorize countries and capitals, you could have, say, "Turkey" written on one side and "Ankara" on the other. Now, personally, I hate cutting paper to size and writing on it, so I'm rather more partial to digitized versions of this. Sites like memorize.com let you create flashcards and memorize them online. There's also a tool called Anki, which I can't vouch for myself have heard great things about, which lets you create flashcards on your cellphone or tablet.

I think the best way to learn something is to learn about it on your own. You'll come across resources that you enjoy learning from, and you'll be able to remember what you learn. As such, I think these techniques are some of the most useful things I have ever learned. At any rate, I have a Coursera course to complete. Ciao.

FEED ME!

2017-12-11T19:53:00.000+05:30

I don't know how many people know this, but I love food. I love food rather more than is healthy, as a matter of fact - I'm far too often guilty of emptying an entire bag of chips over the course of a couple of hours. Because I come from an Iyengari household, where the question "What should we have for dinner?" has only two possible answers - chappati or rice - I've also had to learn to cook. That's okay, though, because I love cooking.

My love for cooking began when I was six or seven years old. I used to spend all my time hanging out with my grandmother, and it's from her that I inherited my love of cooking. I'd follow her everywhere she went, and a large component of "everywhere she went" was the kitchen. I'd follow her there too and chat with her, in my usual garrulous fashion. Aside from the occasional admonishment to stand back when she was lighting the stove or dropping something into oil, she let me stand right next to her while she cooked. It was only natural that I should begin to emulate her, and within a short while, I was cooking up my own "dishes". I place the word in quotes because what I cooked wasn't meant for human consumption, per se - raw chappati dough in chilli powder-flavoured water was a particular favourite of mine, to make if not to eat. At the time, one of the major impediments to my progress in the culinary world was that I was not allowed to use knives or the stove. I soon came up with a way to circumvent this, though: I took up baking.

Until the age of ten, I wasn't even allowed to preheat the oven without supervision. Under my mother's watchful gaze (and with her constant aid), I churned out a succession of sponge cakes, tarts and other baked goods. The first time I chopped vegetables or used a stove by myself was at a baking class I attended. I added to my repertoire, among other things, cookies, bread and casseroles. I was also allowed to use the knives and stove at home, but still only with adult supervision. My ability with a knife was also, as you may expect, somewhat limited. I didn't lose any fingers, but I couldn't do much more than cut anything placed in front of me into, say, quarters at best. It was still a few years before I moved on from baking to actual cooking.

Fast forward a few more years (and a somewhat expanded menu). I had grown tired of pizza and focaccia bread, and I took up cooking food in a pan on a stove. I began with simple stuff, pasta sauces for penne mom boiled for me and such. My mother was still my faithful assistant - meaning that she would do most of the work and give me the credit. Even so, I loved it, and the food we made turned out okay, so everyone was happy.

Cut to the present. I cook a few times a month, usually by myself. I still get mom to boil pasta, because I can never seem to estimate how much pasta a person will eat (rice is another of my little hang-ups). As a rule, though, I can make a full meal on my own, and even get the salt and cooking times approximately right!

Cooking has been a hobby of mine for quite a while, and I certainly hope it will remain one when I have to do it every day. For now, though, I hope you will excuse me. I hear the rustle and crinkle of a chips packet, and I am in need of my daily calorie fix.

The Well-Educated Mind...

2017-12-05T20:43:00.001+05:30

Last week, I wrote a post about education. In it, I mentioned getting a "good education". This week, I figured I'd expand on that theme a little bit.

Myself, I've experienced two education systems: ICSE and A-levels. I studied from first to tenth grade in ICSE and 11th and 12th in A-levels. Now, here's a confession for you: when I was doing ICSE, my grades were terrible. Then, when I switched over to A-levels, they suddenly rose. Why? Not because I suddenly began putting in more effort. No, my grades rose (I suspect) because I switched to a system that was more suited to the way I learn things - a system geared towards understanding rather than memorization.

My ICSE textbooks contained pages upon pages of facts. That's all they were, a set of facts. Chemistry was a set of chemical combinations to study for the exams, Physics was the formulae and definitions we needed to pass the exams. We never discussed why anything was significant, or really delved into the details of our subject matter, beyond what was required for the exams. My take on this whole thing is that facts are great, but at this point, we need people with real skills more than we need people who know the date of every obscure battle in Indian history.

A-levels, in my mind, is more suited to how I learn things. I don't mean to tell you that ICSE and ISC are bad syllabuses, per se - many of the smartest people I know study in ISC. Personally, I think A-levels is more useful in terms of my future - because I'm required to understand rather than memorize, I learned how to go about grasping complex concepts and how to remember what I'd grasped. I like to imagine that this will be more valuable in a professional environment than being able to name all the bones in the vertebral column (unless you go into medicine - God help you if you do).

The big advantage with A-levels is that you have to do a fair amount of understanding on your own, rather than being spoon-fed facts. This means that I can now, on my own time, go out and research anything I'm interested in and learn about it. I could teach myself how to build basic artificial intelligence mainly because I already knew how to go about learning something new. I think that's a hugely valuable thing to have.

There's a Shashi Tharoor speech in which he talks about having a well-formed mind rather than a well-filled one, and I(for once) agree with him. We're the country that gave the world the zero and the decimal system, surely we can give our people a good education?

The Hawaldar's Tale

2017-11-28T07:44:00.002+05:30

Yesterday, I was rejected from Pre-RDC. As I was walking out of camp, a hawaldar I knew asked me where I was going, and I told him I was heading home. His response wasn't the usual hand-holding or the "You'll make it next year" that most people come at you with. Instead, he told me to focus on my education. "I'll probably be a hawaldar for the rest of my life because I joined the army as soon as I finished my 10th. Now that you're out of RDC, go home and study, get a good job." These are sentiments that I've heard echoed many times by other NCOs and JCOs. They also eerily resemble what other people who dropped out before they got a high-school diploma have told me.

The regret for people I've spoken to is that because they dropped out, they lost a great many opportunities that they didn't know they'd even have at 16. It seems like people don't realize that they need a good education - or, come to that, any sort of education - until it's too late. What's worse is that the men and women who guard our borders so that we may sleep at night should have to think along these lines. Honestly, it's sad that anyone should have to think this way. Something struck me, though: these people, because they're aware of what they missed out on, will make sure their own children stay in school. At least for that, we owe it to them to give their kids a good education.

What, though, is a good education?

A few weeks ago, I was at a college interview where my interviewer talked about the importance of "transferable skills". She spoke of a survey of the jobs Harvard alumni have been taking over the past two decades ago. Twenty years ago, the most exciting job Harvard graduates took was "assembly line manager", a job that no longer even exists. Twenty years from today, when we're looking for jobs, who knows how many of the "safe" career paths of today will even exist? The way I see it, we need skills that we can transfer from one job to another more than we need to know how to do one specific job - skills like how to actually go about learning something new, or how to go about problem-solving. Twenty years from now, my meta-learning abilities will probably be more valuable to me than the names of 20 different compounds.

Now, is that an excuse I can give my chemistry teacher, maybe?

The Cadet's Diary

2017-11-15T08:30:00.000+05:30

In many of my posts over the past two years, I have made subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) allusions to my membership in the National Cadet Corps. About a month ago, I embarked on what is known as the "RDC chain", a series of eight camps which culminate with the Republic Day Camp and parade in Delhi. Being, as usual, out of things to write about, I decided to write about the camps.

I was fortunate enough to have been born into an upper-middle-class family. I also happen to have a mother who is more than somewhat compulsive about cleanliness. Let me put that into perspective for you: when I was a kid, all our bathroom breaks on road trips coincided with the appearance of a Coffee Day by the wayside, and not because anyone enjoyed the food (we're all tea drinkers at home, and anyway, you can't really enjoy a soggy, week-old sandwich). We stopped there because Coffee Days have reliably clean toilets. Sixteen years I was raised like this, and then packed off to an NCC camp. It has now been four days since I last saw a western-style toilet. Even by the NCC's (somewhat lax) standards, these toilets are bad. A 3-foot-by-3-foot cubicle of corrugated iron with a hole in the floor that leads directly to a pit underneath. There's no running water in these toilets - you have to carry a bucket in from outside to wash your backside (I don't know what happens if you run out of water before your bum is clean and at this point, I'm too afraid to ask). The pits are far from airtight. There's a word in Kannada, 'suvasane', which means 'divine aroma'. It's not often that I get to be sarcastic in Kannada, but I don't know a more apt term to apply to the smell around those toilets.

For food to leave the body, it must first be ingested. I'm used to three square (until recently, more than square) meals per day. At least once a week, we go out for a meal to relieve the monotony of our consumption. The problem at camp is quite a novel one for me - one of not having quite enough to eat. It's not that they starve us - they just have to cook for 500+ people and somehow consistently underestimate the kind of roaring appetite that doing drill all day gives your average, already-ravenous teenager. The bottom line is that we are all restricted to two chappatis and a single helping of rice per helping, and by the second round, they've always run out of something. This quantity of food falls into the category of "way too much" at home, but into that of "not nearly enough" at camp.

I don't know if you've ever been hit with a stick before. For me, too, this was a novel experience, and I can tell you that it feels exactly like you think it does. The explosion of pain you feel as soon as the stick makes contact rapidly gives way to a burning and soreness that can only be soothed by loving massage, an urge which we, as cadets, cannot satisfy. Partly, this is a question of modesty - we live in a society which, for some reason, discourages spontaneous grasping of the buttocks. More importantly, though, grabbing the aching part is an invitation to the drill instructor for the further application of 'pitai'. We don't call it a bum in camp, we call it 'government property' - it's the only part of the body which has no purpose.

For all that, though, I love the NCC. I love the camaraderie, I love the camps, I love the simplicity of earning respect - if you're good at what you do in the NCC, people respect you for it. At the end of the day, I suppose the NCC wouldn't be the NCC without the stinky toilets and malodorous tents, the running out of food and sneakily pilfered snacks.

Bedtime Blues

2017-10-30T16:35:00.000+05:30

I haven't been home for the past ten days. I've been off at an NCC camp, sleeping on a piece of wood propped up on four steel legs with no mattress and ridden with bedbugs. On top of that, I've been having to remedy my poor general knowledge, and the only time I get to do that is after 10pm. Needless to say, none of this contributes to a comfortable night's respite.

The fact of the matter is, for the past week or so, I've only been getting about four hours of sleep - on average - per night. Now, I'll be honest, for most of my life, the only thing interrupting my sleep cycle has been my mobile phone usage before bedtime. I'm accustomed to a good, solid 8 hours of sleep, and consider it essential to my day-to-day functioning.

Recently, though, I've had to work harder than ever during the day with less sleep than I've ever had. The weird thing is, I've been doing just fine! I still wake up every morning, I'm only marginally grumpier than usual, I'm still able to undergo strenuous physical exertion... Life doesn't seem to be so bad without sleep. It still struck me as odd, though, that for so long, most of us have believed that we need 8 hours of sleep, so I went ahead and Googled it.

It turns out that our bodies need sleep in order to repair tissue and muscle. This is why your injuries seem to reduce so drastically in intensity overnight. Sleep is also critical to memory formation - when you sleep, some of the memories you create during the day are moved from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. This is probably why babies sleep for 11-14 hours a day - they're forming memories (apparently, my youngest cousin isn't just lazy).

There's a lot of information out there about people who manage without much sleep, too. A few weeks ago, I read an article about a guy who spent a full year sleeping only 4.5 hours a night and still managed to acquire, during the course of said year, a PhD from Oxford. Which begs the question: is sleep really that important? Well... From what I've read, on a day-to-day basis? Not really. Unless you're completely avoiding going to sleep for days on end, which can cause hallucinations, anxiety, fatigue and a whole host of other issues, you should be able to function just fine. On a long-term basis, though, lack of sleep can cause lots of problems - increased risk of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression and all kinds of other issues.

A large part of my sleep loss was because I had to stay up late studying. We were either firing rifles or practising drill all day, so there wasn't much other time to focus on the theoretical stuff. The trouble was that I couldn't remember any of the stuff I studied at night, while none of my co-cadets had any problems at all. I guess sleep loss affects separate people differently.

On the whole, if you absolutely have to sleep for less than 7 hours a night, you can probably get away with it, but it's definitely not a good idea. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go take a nap.

Weighing In

2017-10-18T21:14:00.000+05:30

Today, I'm writing about something I'm actually rather proud of. Today, I'm writing about my weight loss. Over the past ten months, I've lost 12 kilos.

Me, last year: 82kg

My parents have been begging me to start exercising since eighth grade. When I was 13, they'd boot me out of the house every day at 5:00PM and make me go running. I hated it. I barely even bothered to run, let alone push myself or stick to a diet. I ate like a trash can, sat in front of the computer all day and did nothing at all about my rapidly swelling pot belly. By the time I'd turned 15, even Dad had given up any dreams of seeing me with a flat stomach. I'd trained myself to stop looking in the mirror, and I stayed out of pictures as much as possible.

Fast-forward to the present day: I weigh 69 kilos. My stomach has all but vanished. Looking in the mirror is a satisfying experience, and I even have some muscle on my arms. I can now fit in medium-size t-shirts, and whenever I wear my old jeans, I look like I'm posing for a gym ad. So what happened?

At some point last year, I got tired of being fat. I got tired of seeing a double chin every time I looked down, I got tired of not being able to see my legs. I decided to do something about it. Initially, I signed up with a gym. It worked - to a point. I was still overeating, so I gained some muscle, but I still had a paunch.

The real differences became visible when I started running. At first, I still hated it - someone who considers running to be the ultimate torment doesn't suddenly take it up as a hobby, after all. What I realised, though, was that the way to enjoy running was to push myself at it. Running further than you've ever run before and then collapsing with the sweat saturating your shirt and your legs burning is, oddly enough, an incredible feeling. There's a sense of achievement, and after you get yourself cleaned up, there's an energy spike that lasts for at least a couple of hours after. Even now, I don't enjoy running in itself - I enjoy the satisfaction that comes afterwards.

Once I started running, I discovered the magic of dieting. I spent a few hours looking at various diets on the internet, and then I looked at the science behind dieting. What I found is that you don't need to do anything desperate like eating only fruits and berries for a month to lose weight. The body works on a very simple principle: calories in vs. calories out. If you burn more calories than you take in, you lose weight and vice versa. Anything else is simply fiddling around on the edges of this equation.

I took that knowledge and applied it to my own diet. Initially, I used an app called MyFitnessPal (they're great, you can check them out here) to track calories. Every food I ate, I logged. I even bought a fitness tracker and tracked every bit of exercise I got in a day. I cut out sodas, cheese, sugar, fried stuff, anything that dripped or oozed or squirted. The easiest way to do this, I found, was to convince myself that all the unhealthy food was genuinely disgusting. I'd look at a burger and think to myself, "What kind of real food glistens in the light? That looks like it's made of plastic! Why would I want to eat that?" It's actually really easy to do.

Several months of that, and I look like this:

Me, now: 69kg

It's not that hard. It seems impossible at first. I remember my first few weeks at the gym, when I'd come home and look at my stomach with a glowering hatred, wondering why it didn't seem to have changed at all. It was at times like those that I realised that it's no good looking for results. Personally, I didn't even recognise the results when they came. I only realised how different I looked when Dad showed me the two pictures I've posted above this evening. In the words of Macklemore: "Work, and don't worry about the praise, my love!"

A Master Without a Masters

2017-09-16T14:36:00.001+05:30

A couple of years ago, I was interning with a startup called Cookifi. Three mornings a week, I'd board a bus bound for HSR Layout to go to the office. One day, the bus simply failed to turn up, and I ended up sharing a cab with one of my stranded co-passengers. His name was Ravitej, and he worked in a software company. He didn't have a Ph.D. in anything, but he taught me more during a one-hour cab ride than some of my computer science teachers have taught me during entire semesters.

A few years before that, I played video games online with a guy named Luke. Luke was 20 years old at the time, and he worked in a hardware store. He didn't have an MIT education or even, come to that, a masters degree. What he did have, however, was an incredible understanding of vector calculus - incredible enough that his explanations even made sense to me at the age of 14. My "highly qualified" 10th-grade math teacher, on the other hand, couldn't suitably teach me basic trigonometry.

The upshot of all this is that you don't necessarily have to have good qualifications to be a good teacher. Now, don't get me wrong, if you received a doctorate from Stanford and can explain differential equations to a 10th-grader, I'll be first in line to sign up for your class. The thing is, though, I think it's extremely important that a teacher be able to teach well. To me, where they received their degree should be secondary to that.

As a rule, though, I think receiving a high degree of education tends to make it harder to teach well. The reason I say this is because of how someone actually becomes a "doctor of" this or a "master of" that. People acquire degrees by going to university, right? Now, university, to my mind, works great if you want to design airplanes or build websites, but not so much if you want to go out and educate. Mainly, this is because a university education will usually involve learning a lot of "jargon" - technical terms for the things you're learning about. When you go out and try to teach someone what you know, you're going to use the same jargon, and your students are going to have to learn that jargon, too. Basically, you end up wasting a lot of time explaining terms that you could probably have done just as well without knowing.

The other problem with spending 8 years of your life learning about something is that it takes all the romance out of it. For instance, what 11th-grader is actually going to be engaged if you tell him that you'll be teaching him "differentiation"? What if, instead, you told him what exactly differentiation was? What if you told him that most modern AI uses it to learn, that it's a technique so powerful that Isaac Newton, the man behind the Law of Gravity, invented it and then kept it secret for 20 years? I'd care a lot more for calculus if I'd known any of those things last year, I can promise you that.

A lot of less-qualified teachers tend to know the syllabus they're teaching in great detail and the subject itself only at a general level. Usually, this would be a disadvantage - none of us want a teacher who can't answer our questions, after all. In a school setting, though, I think this is hugely helpful. A teacher who doesn't have an intimate knowledge of subject will tell a student as much as they need to know to be able to make sense of a concept. A teacher who spent a decade of their lives studying something, on the other hand, is more likely to launch into an in-depth explanation, often further confusing the asker. Not all teachers are like this, of course - I'm sure there are plenty of teachers out there who know their subjects inside out but will still tell you exactly enough to make sure you're thorough with your syllabus content.

All I'm trying to say is that whether or not someone has a Ph.D. is no way to judge their teaching ability. Here's hoping fewer schools turn teachers away just because they didn't want to write a research thesis.

5K:) - Done!

2017-08-21T19:03:00.000+05:30

We're done! Nearly 5000 kids, 5 lakh rupees and 143 donors later, I figured I ought to give you guys an update about what actually happened on the big day.

My day began at 6:50 a.m, considerably earlier than my usual waking time on a holiday. My phone's ringtone cut into my slumber. One of the volunteers was calling me to ask for details about their orphanage. Seeing as it was nearly seven, I figured I might as well get dressed and prepare for the day ahead of me.

The deliveries really began around 8:30. I was standing in a spirit-sapping drizzle at our neighbourhood Independence Day celebration, trying, like all the other attendees, to look like I wouldn't prefer to be inside with a hot cup of tea and something satisfyingly deep-fried. As the flag was being hoisted, my phone vibrated in my pocket, and I picked it up. Farooq from McDonald's was calling to let me know that the first delivery was on time. One short, hushed conversation later, I got back to looking suitably grave as the flag reached the pinnacle of its pole.

The first delivery I was actually present at was in Dickenson Road, in the Muslim Orphanage. It was the first Independence Day event I have been present at where India's secularity was praised more than the sacrifices of our freedom fighters, although of course, there was plenty said about that, too. The rain was still a-pourin', but the McDonald's truck still had quite a bit of trouble getting into the place because of the kids who gathered around the vehicle that was bringing what was, for a lot of them, their first-ever burger.

433 smiling kids later, I found myself seated next to the driver of the McDonald's truck, who had very kindly agreed to drop me home. I was looking forward to a nice, hot meal and spending the rest of my day out of the rain, taking calls and coordinating deliveries. After I ate, though, I found myself feeling considerably energised, so I headed off to yet another orphanage in Shivajinagar. The truck driver, an incredibly nice guy, was more than a little surprised to see me at yet another orphanage. We made our next 25 deliveries and got a picture with the kids. It was still fairly early, so I decided to go on a few more deliveries. I climbed into the back of the truck and went with them on the next few deliveries, then headed home.

Now, before I end this post, I want to thank, in alphabetical order, Anirudh Iyengar, Arnav Poddar, Arnav Singh, Atul Mugarimangalam, Impana Halgeri, Jayitha VSS, Shreya Narayan, Susannah Alexander, Ujwal K P and Yashas Murthy, the volunteers. You guys are awesome, and none of this would have been possible without your help. I'd also like to give the guys over at McDonald's a huge shout-out for being incredibly patient and dealing with the million little mistakes we made while planning this. It's been an incredible experience, and I hope everyone else thought this was as awesome as I did.

5K:) - The Process

2017-08-14T19:17:00.002+05:30

Well, here we are. The eve of the delivery. We've raised over ₹5, 00, 000 from people around the world, and by the end of this week, we'll have delivered meals to 5,264 kids. We've placed phone calls to nearly 80 orphanages and racked up positively astounding cell phone bills. Before the delivery, though, I wanted to talk about the actual process behind the initiative.

Like last year, we decided to do this altogether too close to D-day: we wanted to do the deliveries on the 15th of August, and we began work on the 1st of August, only 15 days before. The first thing we had to do was get in touch with McDonald's. We called their head office in Mumbai, where we navigated an electronic answering system that was, apparently, designed to make life as difficult for callers as possible. Several minutes and an angry outburst and later, I was speaking to the operator at McDonald's, who connected me with someone else, who connected me, via a third intermediary, with their operations expert for south India. He's the one who's been coordinating deliveries and dealing with our numerous little errors without complaint.

Once we had McDonald's on board, the next challenge was finding 5000 kids. We already had a 1000 kids in 16 orphanages from last year. We found another 60-odd locations by doing a Google search for "Orphanages in Bangalore" and then copy-pasting the results into a spreadsheet. Then, I recruited another 5 volunteers, and we began calling the orphanages. Over the course of a week, we called all the orphanages and got their blessing for the initiative.

During the same week, we set up a page on Milaap.org, the fundraising platform we used. We brought our Facebook page back to life and began pouring money into Facebook ads in order to have our posts reach more people. We wrote e-mails to even more people, asking for money. I even wrote two blog posts about it! We WhatsApped everyone we knew, telling them what we were doing and asking them to donate.

Finally, with our typing fingers sore and our ears aching from all the phoning we'd been doing, we arrived here, at the day before the deliveries. Tomorrow, we'll each be visiting one of the locations, getting pictures and so on. I'll make another post once it's done, letting you guys know how it went.

5K:) - The Pledge Drive

2017-08-05T08:36:00.000+05:30

It's 8:11am on a Saturday morning and like most people my age, I'd much rather be asleep right now, but fortunately, duty calls. I wanted to give you people an update of sorts about the project. So far, we've raised around 2,40,000 (our donation page shows 3,10,000 because of an error). We're nearing the halfway mark, and I figured I ought to let everyone know what this project actually entails.

There's three big components to this project - children, volunteers and funding. So far, we have around 3,200 meals which need to be delivered. I know our goal was 5,000, and we have enough orphanages to reach that number, but the problem is, as of right now, we have neither the funds nor the volunteers to cover that.

In terms of volunteers, we were hoping to have one at each orphanage. According to our estimates, it'll take around 60 orphanages for us to reach 5000 kids, and we have exactly 15 volunteers. The last date for signing up as a volunteer is the 14th of August, so if you're interested, please sign up right away. Come on, people, time, ride and Happy Meals wait for no one!

2,40,000 is enough to pay for, at the estimated rate or 100 per burger, 2,400 people. That's less than half our goal. Needless to say, if we don't make our goal of 5,00,000 over the course of the next five days, we'll still be doing the deliveries to however many kids we can, but it'd be something of a shame if we couldn't make 5K:) a reality. If you'd like to donate, this is our page on Milaap.org. On the other hand, though, we're five days into a ten-day fundraiser, and we're halfway to our goal!

I'll post updates on my blog here as regularly as possible, but if you want more regular updates, you can check out our Facebook page or out donation page, where we also post occasional updates. You can find more details about what this project is actually about in this blog post. Again, please give generously, we're almost halfway there, both in terms of money and time.

5K:) - 2017

2017-07-30T11:04:00.000+05:30

If you've been following my blog for a while - since the end of 2015-beginning of 2016 - you'll probably remember a post I did last year about the Thousand Smiling Faces project (I also wrote another post about it immediately after). For those of you who are too lazy to click through those links, the Thousand Smiling Faces project was a bunch of us teenagers getting McDonald's Happy Meals for 1000 kids in orphanages.

I was planning to this again on New Year's Day 2017, but couldn't get it to work out. However, Independence Day is coming up, and we're going to do it again, but this time, we've gone a little crazy - instead of working with 1000 kids, we're aiming to deliver 5000 meals! That's roughly ₹5,00,000's worth of Happy Meals, a lot of burgers by anyone's standards.

We've also got another twist to the thing this year. Seeing as we're doing it on the 15th of August, which is India's Independence Day, and seeing as how McDonald's is just a faceless multinational corporation, we're going to ask every orphanage we visit to raise the Indian flag.

5000 meals means that we're going to have around 50 orphanages, so I'm currently working really hard to get some volunteers. There will have to be at least 50 of us if we want to be able to get pictures at all the orphanages, and so far I have a grand total of 6 people - including myself - signed up. The five of us - Impana Halgeri, Anirudh Iyengar, Arnav Poddar, Jayitha VSS and I - are calling the orphanages and getting this project started. If you're under the age of 18 (Sorry, adult readers) and want to volunteer, you can sign up here.

The other big way in which you can help is by donating to the event. We've set up a page with Milaap.org, the fundraising platform we used last year. Please give generously, because ₹5,00,000 is not a small sum. We will get burgers for the kids using however much money we manage to raise, irrespective of the ₹5,00,000 goal, but it'd still be amazing to feed 5000 kids, even if it's only for one meal.

To use a (slightly modified) cheesy advertising tagline from last year - This Independence Day, let's put a smile on 5000 faces!

The New Socializers

2017-07-18T19:43:00.000+05:30

Note: This post was actually my essay for my English exam this morning. All credit for the topic (How my generation socializes differently from my parents') and the title of this post go to my teacher, Mrs. Shobha K.

Millennial introduction: Hello, fellow millennial! How is your suffering?
Baby boomer introduction: Greetings, O almighty reader!
I know, sounds weird, right? Not least because people don't actually greet each other that way. They never have. It does, however, highlight something that I really want to talk about: that millennials and baby boomers socialize in very different ways.

Myself, I'm a millennial. For those of you that don't know, that means that I invest poorly and can't buy property because I spend all my money on avocado toast. At least, that's what the Gen X millionaires would have you believe. A lot of Gen X-ers would also have you believe that Gen Y does not know how to socialize, does not know how to converse. I'd like to respond to those allegations in a typically angsty, millennial fashion: "You baby boomers just don't understand us!"

The thing is, we do know how to socialize. We haven't "forgotten how to have a conversation." We just don't socialize the same way you guys did. One of the most common explanations baby boomers have about why we don't talk to each other is that we're always on our phones. The thing is, though, a lot of the time that we're on our phones, we're doing exactly that - talking to each other! WhatsApp, Snapchat and DMs are where we have our conversations.

Another form of millennial socialization that seems to elude baby-boomer understanding is video games. "Get off the computer and go outside! Make friends!" They say, completely failing to account for the fact that there is no one outside to make friends with, because everyone is inside playing video games. They're busy mashing the buttons on their controller, watching themselves be repeatedly beaten by some guy out of Korea or Russia. If not to make friends, then at least for the sake of our country's honour, let us play Call of Duty in peace! Also, please stop asking us to pause our games when we're playing online. Pausing Battlefield 3 during a co-op match doesn't mean that the game stops, it means that your team is being decimated because you're too busy taking out the trash to provide them with the sniper support they need to win.

I get where you baby boomers are coming from, though, I really do. When I see five teenagers at a table in a restaurant and all of them are looking at Facebook on their respective smartphones instead of talking to each other, it annoys me at least as much as it annoys you. All I'm asking is that the next time your teen pulls out her phone when she's laying the table, please don't assume she's just wasting time. Also, for goodness' sake, stop blaming all our problems on avocado toast.

Marketing Tactics

2017-07-10T18:47:00.000+05:30

I like to think I've had a moderately non-sheltered upbringing. I may not know how to get to anywhere that's more than, say, 2km from my house, but that's mainly because I rely on Google Maps rather than putting in the effort to figure out my city. I've seen people sleeping at bus stations, I've travailed on second-class non-AC trains, I've dealt firsthand with goat droppings. Until my last NCC camp, though, I had never been to a Bangalorean mandi.

This post is one I've been meaning to write for a while, so needless to say, I haven't even tried until nearly a month after. Needless to say, I now find myself unable to recall the precise details of the outing. What I do remember, though, is being roused from my slumber at 4:00am, a full half-hour before the NCC usually expects cadets to wake up, and being told to go downstairs because we had to go to the market. I got dressed and went downstairs to wait in the chilly darkness with nine other cadets for an instructor to join us. After about fifteen minutes, one of the instructors came downstairs. To our misfortune, he wasn't the one who was supposed to be taking us to the market. Not that it stopped him from having us move all the 20-liter water containers that we'd unloaded the night before, of course.

Our bodies nicely warmed from the exertion involved in transporting 30 heavy containers of water, we bundled our aching selves into the canter. For those of you who don't know, "canter" is the accepted NCC term for a large truck, which is the preferred mode of transportation for NCC cadets during a camp. They're invariably old, green army vehicles with shock absorbers so rusted they actually amplify each bump on the road. Taking a ride in a canter is rather like being thrown into a low-velocity car crash - you leave with an assortment of bruises, a strange ache in your back and the belief that your bones will never stop vibrating. In other words, first-class travel arrangements, courtesy of the Corps.

I didn't really know what to expect in terms of the mandi itself, not least because I didn't know it was a mandi at the time. I'd been told that we were going to the market, so I was picturing something along the lines of an outdoor grocery store. Well, we stepped out of the vehicle into what seemed to be the aftermath of the Tomatina festival. For the first quarter kilometer or so, all we saw were tomato sellers on both sides of the road, jostling for cart space. The putrid odour of tomatoes in various stages of degradation pervaded the air. I'd bought new shoes to take to the camp, and I don't imagine I'll ever be able to get all the tomato skin out of the crevices in the sole.

After the tomato area, the mandi stopped resembling the rest of the city. The short, one-storey cement buildings with signs over the door were replaced by sprawling brick megastructures. Most of them were two or three storeys tall, but they were incredibly long, stretching all the way to the horizon on both sides of the street. The bricks had been blackened by soot and dirt, and strewn all over the ground were vegetables in which I am positive the CDC, should they happen across them, would take a keen interest. The sickly-sweet of the putrid tomatoes was joined by about 5000 other kinds of sickly vegetative aromas, together with a stench of sweat, beedi smoke and hard-driven bargains.

The most incredible thing about the mandi, though, is the sheer volume of humanity contained with it. Everywhere you looked, there were people. There were more people per square foot of land than some countries have per square mile. It was a sight to behold, I must admit, particularly at the incredibly early hour of 5am. The snails and larks were still fast asleep, yet humanity marched on.

Of the entire group - 10 cadets plus two instructors - I seemed to be the only one who did not know how to shop at a mandi. One of the instructors held a list of all the vegetables we needed to buy, together with their prices the last time we bought them. The other one appeared to have memorized the price of everything being sold in the place already. It was quite incredible to watch, actually. We'd walk up to a stall, the instructor with the list would demand the price of some vegetable, and the other one would be steering him to the next stall along before he even had a chance to remove the list from his pocket. The instructor was even able to quote the prices of vegetables we pointed to - vegetables none of us could so much as name - to us, and he'd very rarely be off by more than, say three rupees.

Finally, after nearly an hour of shopping, we began the laborious task of moving the vegetables onto the canter. The canter couldn't come into the mandi, you see - the roads were far too narrow. All of us were about a kilometer inside of the mandi. Now, I don't know if you've ever had to carry a 40-kilo sack of potatoes for a kilometer, but let me tell you, it's not an experience I'll be recommending to anyone in a hurry. The sacks themselves, which seemed to be made from a particularly abrasive material - in case you felt that you had a little too much skin on your hands - didn't help much either. There were holes in the sides of them, and every few steps, a potato would fall out. The guy behind you, who was carrying an equally heavy bag of some other vegetable, would be forced to stoop down, pick it up, and thread it carefully back into the sack via the same hole. You'd be forced to do the same for the guy in front of you, too. For some reason, though, the holes only seemed to allow vegetables to fall out - putting them back in was a task which required considerable finesse.

At long last, we climbed back into the canter, aching from the physical strain of it all. Then, we pulled a few oranges out of the fruit bags to chew on while we headed back to camp and comforted ourselves with the knowledge we wouldn't have to march that morning. Personally, I think that's a fantastic reason to put yourself through that much strain.

Straying from the Path

2017-07-03T06:10:00.000+05:30

Forgive me if this blog post seems a little disjointed, I didn't get too much sleep last night on account of the stray dogs yelling outside. We've all been there, particularly in Bangalore, haven't we? Bunch of strays fighting and barking, denying us our precious sleep... Not my idea of fun at all. They even take all the fun out of walking, too. Fifteen stray dogs coming at you at a rate of mph with a shared goal of finding out the taste of your tender, tender flesh really ruins the walking experience for me, somehow.

Our house is in an absolutely awful position because we have some neighbours, a delightful elderly couple who leave food out for the dogs at night. They dump the food on street corners and leave the dogs to tear into each other to actually get at it. The dogs come out to eat, and the two packs that rule our area get into a fight. By 12am, the fight reaches its cacophonous peak, and everyone wakes up and wishes they could load up a shotgun and blow the dogs away. I wish I was exaggerating.

We called in the dog catchers once, to at least move some of the strays. Before they could do any catching, though, the same elderly couple stopped them and explained to them how they were doing the area a "service". In the most complimentary manner possible, they explained that they were doing society a favour by feeding ravenous stray dogs food at odd times of day. Now, irrespective of whether or not they were really improving our lives by setting strays on us, the bottom line is that the pound didn't manage to catch any dogs, and the problem is as bad as ever.

It's not even just our home turf that is overrun with strays. My friends all over this grand old city, indeed, all over the country have the same problem. It's one thing to have to surrender the streets to the dogs post-5pm, but an altogether different one to be losing sleep on their account. Indian laws actually go so far as to protect the strays. It's illegal, in India, to chase a stray dog away.

Now, if you, hypothetically, had a stray dog problem, and you needed a way to get rid of the dogs, you could hypothetically put some vinegar in a spray bottle and spray the dogs. The unfamiliar smell will get rid of most of the dogs. You can't chase street dogs away in India, though, so you didn't hear that from me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I here a dog barking outside. I need to re-enter that hypothetical vinegar situation...

Burn The House Down

2017-06-25T10:29:00.000+05:30

So I've been alone at home for the past few weeks. Well, not alone, my grandmother's still here.
Leaving me alone in a house for longer than a few hours essentially means that you'll come home to a smoldering pile of rubble and the majority of your city's fire department. But alone in the sense that there's really no one walking in at 7:30 in the evening and demanding that I do my chores. I don't have to fetch a glass of juice for anyone but myself, I don't have to worry about keeping the living room tidy, nothing. I just have to turn on the alarm at night and supervise the occasional repair man, and in return, I get to do exactly what I want to during the day.

Since my parents left, there have been some modifications to my daily routine. It used to be that I'd get home, go out and get some exercise, get some studying done and then, once my parents got home, be at their constant beck and call. It's not that they gave me much to do, of course - carry their laptop bags up, get them a glass of water, that sort of thing - but there's something incredibly relaxing about looking at the clock, realising that it's 7:30 in the evening and being able to continue to do what I'm doing completely unconcerned. There's no gate that's going to open, no rush to go downstairs and open the door for anyone. Once we finish dinner, I'm essentially free. I can sit in my room and watch cartoons until bedtime and no one says anything. I don't have to help Mom clean up the TV room in the evening because there's no one at home right now who cares about the state the TV room is in. It's absolutely fantastic.

Really, though, it's the little things that give me most satisfaction. I can play my music without wearing my headphones without worrying about bothering anyone. I can sing in the shower without traumatizing anyone in the vicinity. I can sit and mess about on the computer all evening without anyone telling me that they need the machine for work. I know it seems strange, but there's something incredibly liberating about being able to play "Back in Black" without having to plug my ears.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. I do rather miss having my parents here, and - Oh, who am I kidding? It's been great! I'm 16 and have even fewer responsibilities than the rest of my grade! It's every kid's dream! It is, however, a little difficult to remember to lock all the doors at night, and I miss quite terribly movie night with my parents - back when they were paying for dinner and the money was draining from their bank accounts rather than mine...

On balance, though, it's not bad. I've had my fun, in spite of the people showing up at 10am on Sunday morning and demanding that you tell them about the bore well at home. All good things, however, must come to an end, and my parents will be back home pretty soon. Now, before that happens, I need to see what our dining room looks like when decorated festively with three different colours of yarn. I'll have to get back to you on this one.

Talking Trouble

2017-06-18T10:03:00.000+05:30

I want to begin this post by saying that I don't volunteer to speak. I'm not one of those guys who's always MCing this or giving a speech about that. I speak in public only if I have no other choice, and those situations come by rarely enough that I've had very little experience actually being on stage and talking.

Last week, though, I was at an NCC camp, and the PI (Permanent Instructor, for you non-NCC folk) staff decided that I should host an event on account of I spoke decent English. Normally, I would refuse, but in the NCC, if they ask you to jump over a cliff, you need to have been over that cliff five minutes ago. You don't get to ask why you're jumping off of a cliff, you just jump. So it was that three days into the camp, I found myself on stage with a co-MC I didn't really know, in a uniform that I had lost the knack of wearing and holding a mic that caught, oh, about 50% of the words you spoke into it.

At first, I was incredibly nervous. The previous time I had been the MC at an NCC event had been a bit of a disaster. I didn't read the programme out correctly, I kept stumbling over my lines, I couldn't stop stammering and saying "Uh" while I spoke... I daresay I had reason to be worried. Standing on stage with my shoulders hunched, I desperately hoped that by some miracle, I'd do a decent job this time round.

At first, I went by the speech that my co-anchor and I had come up with that morning. We decided that we were far better off safe than sorry and came up with an extremely formal, extremely boring speech. "Good evening and a warm welcome to all the dignitaries seated on the dais and my co-cadets," that sort of thing. About ten minutes in, I made a mistake - I asked the dignitaries to move off the stage when they were supposed to remain onstage until the next act was finished. It was at that point that I had my epiphany: reading from the prepared script wasn't going to work for me, because that's just not how people speak. From that point on, I only used the script to figure out what the next act was, and then made up an introduction on the fly. The funny thing was, the more acts I introduced, the more confident I got.

At the end of the show, our camp commandant himself told me that I'd done a good job. They had me MC three other events at that camp alone. I suppose that's one thing I can say the NCC has done for me - they helped me overcome my stage fright.

Divine Guidance

2017-05-29T09:35:00.000+05:30

As you may have noticed if you've been a follower of my blog for any considerable amount of time, I'm not much of a believer in God. Not that I have anything against religion, or God, I'm just far, far too lazy to believe. I don't have the sheer dedication required to go to a temple every week and sit through a pooja, or go to a church and sit through a sermon, or say my prayers five times a day, or any of that. Forget the dedication, I'd probably do it one week and forget it the following week if I tried!

However, that doesn't mean I'm atheist - at least, not necessarily. My policy is more, "I don't know if there's a God and frankly, I don't care." I've not believed in God for over half my life now and I've been quite alright, so it's really just easier to carry on as I am than to suddenly invest in large quantities of jaggery or wine to satisfy the divine. However, if, upon my death, I find myself standing in front of a set of gates or, as is more likely, subject to eternal torment, I shall immediately rescind my claims and take up religion. Until such time as it is resoundingly proven to me that God is, indeed, real, I'll stick to the option that gives me the least commuting-between-home-and-shrine, thank you very much.

Recently, though, religion has been taking quite a bit of flak. ISIS is driven primarily by religion, and people are understandably upset. "Islam is a religion of war," they cry, and rally behind any leader who agrees with them. It's a mark of how bad the situation is that people are willing to put their faith in, even elect into power a man whose primary goals are the propagation of racism and, if his pictures are anything to go by, using way too much spray tan. Apparently, they've forgotten the crusades and the numerous little wars the Hindu kingdoms fought with each other and the fact that people have been persecuting each other in the name of one religion or the other for thousands of years.

But I think maybe we ought to give religion the credit it's due. People have achieved amazing things in the name of religion. Buddha revolutionised the country in the name of religion. Agnostic I may be, but I think religion has the capacity to unite people at least as much as it's able to rip them apart. People meet at temples, get to know each other, start performing poojas together... All because of religion. Religion is what allows my 80-year-old grandmother to climb Tirupati once a year. Believing that they will be held responsible by some higher power allows people to accomplish things that they might not have had the mental strength to achieve otherwise. And let's face it, what better way is there to bond with your family than to go out rioting and killing people every once in a while?

Run This Town

2017-05-21T10:44:00.001+05:30

A couple of weeks ago, I took up running as a hobby. For an hour every day, I go outside and run, praying that I don't keel over in a dead faint and am able to make it home. When I began, I was barely able to do one and a half kilometers. Now I run 10km.

I've been trying to get into running for a long time - years, really. My parents pushed me to run back when I was only 12 or 13 - when I first began getting fat. Back then, I hated it. I never pushed myself, and I tried to run as little as I possibly could, walking for large parts of the track. Now, I have this odd, love-hate relationship with running. I hate it right before I head out - "I don't want to go running today, it's tiring and I'll get blisters on my feet," I think to myself. Then I go out and run because honestly, what's life if your soles remain un-blistered? After an hour of doing the bare minimum that can be considered running, I come home soaked in sweat and giving off an odour that would have a wet dog wrinkling its nose.

The thing is, though, by the time I get home, I'm glad I went running. I'm usually incredibly tired, and I can only just about carry myself up the stairs into the bathroom to take a shower, but mixed in with the tiredness is a strange pride - pride that I managed to run the distance yet again. I know my feet will blister, and I know that by the following morning, my calves will ache so much that amputation at the knees seems like a more attractive alternative, but it will be worth it.

The tiredness lasts for about an hour for me. After that, the endorphins kick in and I get incredibly energetic. The boost in happiness is incredible, and all of a sudden, I'm not tired - I have energy to spare. I may have gotten four hours of sleep the previous night and spent the day dragging my feet to all my appointments, but one hour after my run, you'd think I caught fifty of my allotted forty winks.

The other really big attraction for me in terms of running is that it lets me prove to myself that I can - that I can run 10km when I thought I could only run 8 and that I can run 12km when I though I could run 10. It's an incredible feeling, being proved wrong by yourself. It's a friendly reminder of how much you can achieve with two legs and a strange fondness for being unable to walk in the morning. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think my thighs have healed from the last bit of exercise I put them through, and the streets are a-callin' my name.

Aiming To Be The Best

2017-05-07T14:19:00.001+05:30

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a Civilian Rifle Training Course at the SAI (Sports Authority of India) Shooting Range in Bangalore. Assuming you're under 18, for 2600 rupees and 8 classes, you can learn to shoot a pistol and a rifle and, if you happen to be good enough, get a membership to the Karanataka State Rifle Association. With one of those, you can walk into the range any time you want, pick up a 9mm from the armourer and pepper a target with holes.

Why would a peace-loving 16-year-old want to be trained in the use of firearms, you ask? Well, I've begun to read news again lately and I've decided that I no longer want to be involved with our nation's administration, so I need some way to deal with tax collectors and census men without having to make the effort of going out to stab them. I'm joking, of course (I can hear the Modi government's sighs of relief all the way in Bangalore). I signed up for the CRTC because I'm in the NCC and I need to be good with a rifle if I ever hope to be a part of the Republic Day parade in Delhi. What better way to learn to be good with a rifle than to go and shoot one once a week?

The 25-metre firing range at SAI

They start you out with air rifles, which are the same size as a regular rifle but have pellets propelled by compressed air rather than gunpowder. They aren't exactly harmless - a piece of metal propelled by compressed air can do some pretty serious damage at close range - but they aren't usually lethal, either. Then, they move you up to .22 rifles - the kind they use for sports. After that, they teach you to use air pistols, .22 pistols and then, just in case you ever need to leave a large, well-placed hole in someone's skull, .32 pistols.

I'm not really been one for sports - for as long as I can remember, I've had a hand-eye coordination that can be described as mediocre at best. Firing, though, doesn't feel like a sport in the traditional sense. You aren't sprinting after a ball, and I have a feeling that its fans are rather less likely to kill each other than, say, a Chelsea fan and an Arsenal fan, should they happen to meet in the streets. Firing is a much more sedentary sport, in the sense that you aren't really running around. Firing is more about standing in one place and trying to keep your hands from shaking for long enough to fire a shot. Then, you feel abject disappointment wash over you as you realize that it hit the target next to the one you're supposed to be aiming at. Doesn't sound like the most fulfilling way to spend a morning, I know, but in a strange way, it's fun.

A .22 rifle, some bullets and targets

One of the most incredible things I've seen since I signed up for the CRTC, though, are the people who shoot in national and international competitions. SAI has, as far as I know, the best shooting ranges in the city, and a lot of India's shooters train there. I can barely keep a rifle barrel straight for the seven seconds it takes to fire a shot, but these guys appear to have arms made of titanium, because once they have their guns pointed at the targets, they don't move so much as a muscle, save for their fingers. It's amazing to watch.

I never imagined that my passions would ever come to include unloading a firearm at a sheet of paper, but the truth is, I've come to rather enjoy it. While it'll be quite a while before I get to be as accurate as Deadshot in the Batman comics or, come to that, even as the clones in the Star Wars movies, I can now hit a 30cm target from 25 metres fairly reliably, so I suppose it's a start. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear the census men knocking, and I can't seem to remember where I left my ammo...