India has a littering problem. That’s no secret. Is the situation salvageable? A couple of policy proposals that could make an impact. Introduction Before his descent into MAGA madness, Mayor Rudy Giuliani led New York City, most famously, perhaps, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Even…

When I was a boy, I used to love to visit my mother’s workplace. As a teenager and a man in my twenties, that love changed into wariness. …

Why I made my own blog platform because I hated WordPress, Ghost, Markdown, Hugo, Jekyll, Netlify, and everything else out there — I like blogging. I absolutely hate setting up a blog. Let me backtrack. I like blogging but I used to absolutely hate setting up a blog. I have since built something to make me enjoy blogging again.

I’m Indian. Born a Hindu though I don’t practice much. I now live in India after a dozen plus years abroad. I’m saying this to establish my bona-fides as an Indian Indian uniquely positioned to comment on Indian ways of doing things seen through a global lens. What pisses me off I find insufferable…

There are websites out there which aren’t ready for the primitive browsing ChatGPT affords ChatGPT plugins are how GPT-4, the LLM backing ChatGPT, pulls in information from the real world into its inferences. If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you should have a special plugin which browses urls you…

How AI can very easily, with just what GPT has delivered so far, replace an entire service We have all been there. We are steaming mad about something or in a tearing hurry to get somewhere and… we run up against The Customer Service Rep (CSR for future reference). CSRs…

The LA Times Crossword is exactly right for someone getting into doing Crosswords. Here’s how to get better at doing them. — A bit of background The LA Times crossword is published seven days a week here. The toughest puzzles appear on Saturday. Mondays are the easiest. Sundays are roughly as difficult as the average Thursday puzzle but twice the size. The LA Times Crossword is American style meaning black squares make up a much smaller…

The meaning behind the lyrics — (My personal sense is that Indian writing about Bollywood does disservice to the depth of feeling behind some its songs and stories. In posts like these, I want to add a more nuanced read of Bollywood content.) Gully Boy was made in 2018 and came out in 2019. Jingostan, just…

A critique of the man behind the adulatory stories — By now, most people in the startup world know of Zoho and its productivity suite. At last count, they have 45 or so products supporting everything a business could need — from email to CRM. Famously, Vembu operates out of a small town in Southern India called Tenkasi, or the…