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Dawn Story
As part of the cultural extravaganza season, I attended early morning concerts over the past few days. This is, by any reasonable definition, out of character. I am not a morning person. I wake up well after sunrise. Much after sunrise. In my younger years, this used to be a source of constant self-criticism. What kind… Continue reading
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The season to be creative
Margazhi is upon us. It is that season where creativity bursts out of the pavement in my little slice of heaven, armed with rice flour and unreasonable optimism. This year, Margazhi has come with a bonus assignment. The better half has been asked (read: gently pestered, repeatedly) to write music season reviews for a vernacular newspaper. Which… Continue reading
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Between Tongues
When I was younger, I read only English fiction by English writers, with R. K. Narayan as the sole, slightly token, exception. This was partly the result of studying in a convent school run by Anglo-Indian (or perhaps Franco-Indian) nuns, and partly because there simply weren’t too many Indian writers in English then—at least not… Continue reading
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The Dragon Awakens
I used to be a voracious reader as a child. Somewhere along the line, though, I changed. This was well before the internet (don’t count), so I can’t even blame social media for corrupting me. No, this decline was entirely home-grown, crafted from a blend of hormones and the general erosion of attention span that… Continue reading
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Capital Vacation
The better half and I finally took a long-overdue vacation last week. To the capital of the country, no less. We had technically “been” there once before, but only as a transit stop for a few hours, heading elsewhere. The few hours involved sprinting past a few postcard-worthy ‘Patel spots’, pausing just long enough to… Continue reading
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AI Sarcasm
My ChatGPT has developed my sense of sarcasn. In the course of editing a highly jargon-infested paper, I could not understand a never-ending sentence and asked chatGPT to explain it to me. (I may have said “what the hell does this even mean?” I am becoming one of those people who have conversations with the… Continue reading
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Evolution
If someone had told 25-year-old me that one day I’d be juggling research proposals, science explainers, video scripts, slide decks, blogs, and people… I would’ve thought they were patronising me. After grad school, life greeted me with the soft, warm (actually, hot) hug of a recession. Within the pharma industry, I managed an impressive hat-trick:… Continue reading
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Whither Pride?
As a tech reviewer for a few journals, I’ve started noticing a new trend in manuscript submissions. More and more authors are using AI tools to help write their papers. Personally, I don’t mind that at all. In fact, I think it’s a good thing. Writing a scientific paper is hard enough; if AI can… Continue reading
