Category: Opinion
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The Connection Between Curiosity and Knowledge
Last week, 7½ years after Aaron Swartz death, I was thinking about what made Aaron smart. There is this quote: “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” Curiosity. It keeps popping up here and there. I was read Anand Philip‘s blog today. The “about” page is…
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Is Feminism Brahmanism?
This post is an analysis on the points made in the transcript of a talk titled “Feminism is Brahmanism” (FiB) and the counter-points raised to it. I know that it is difficult to separate points made by a person from that person themselves. It is difficult to separate generalizations and personal attacks from solid arguments.…
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How Not Having a Computer Science Degree Makes Me a Good Programmer
I didn’t go to an engineering college. Looking back, I’m very glad that I didn’t. If I had gone to an engineering college in India, I would probably have dropped out very quickly. This post is not about how engineering colleges waste 880,350 years of India’s youth every year. But if anyone teaching in an…
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Do You Think All Human Beings Are Equal?
At the end of Srimathi Gopalakrishnan’s post titled “Sexism in Medicine : The Eternal Confusion and The Innocent Mistake” there is a link that goes to areyouafeminist.com *SPOILER ALERT*: Take the test, if you want to. There are only two questions on that site which tests whether you are a feminist. 1. Do you think…
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How Many Genders Are There In Our Languages?
I stumbled on Trans 101 website today. The videos in there are literally the best I have seen in the past few weeks. I’m embedding the first video, but there are 6. Head over to the Trans 101 website for the rest. I learned a lot of things while watching the videos. Reading them all…
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Understanding Socialism
A few days ago one of my colleagues had expressed the idea of decreasing the pay gap between the highest paid employee and the lowest paid employee in our organization. I didn’t give a lot of thought to that at that moment. Yesterday morning YouTube showed me a video of Sunil P Ilayidom in which…
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Good Riddance, WhatsApp!
I took the jump. Deleted my WhatsApp account. Yes, I know. There are too many important groups. There are people who can’t use email or other means of communication. Coordination of so many things will become difficult. What harm is there in keeping the account, and not using it? What if there is an emergency?…
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Fixing the World is Whose Responsibility?
This week I attended a session on quality improvement in healthcare practice. The definition of quality is subjective. What may appear to be “high-quality” to me, may not stand up to external scrutiny. There could always be room for improvement. But this is not a big problem. Some level of objectivity can be attained in…
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How to Travel In Bangalore – Get A BMTC Bus Pass
I've now spent more than an year using the public transport in Bangalore and made the best investment only this month. That is the BMTC bus pass. Previously my commute was fully reliant on metro, but recently I joined MetaString foundation where I have to take the road to reach. There is a direct airport…
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Permanent Record (Book Review)
You could call it an autobiography of Edward Snowden or you could call it a manifesto for democratic citizenship. You would be right either way. This book is a how-to guide for becoming a hacker (in the realest sense of the word), a good parent, and a good lover. A fair bit of caution…