Hello, Hugo

My blogs have been built with static site generators for a long time now. When I first got this domain and configured my WordPress blog to use it, a friend told me about Jekyll, the most popular static site generator. Static site generators are known for their uncomplicated nature, load speed and security. How? This is something any piece of writing that introduces you to static site generators will tell you—when you open a blog post on Medium or WordPress or Tumblr, the Medium, WordPress or Tumblr server takes in your request to serve a page, generates a page just for you and serves it. That page is personalised based on your interests, your past interactions with the provider (Tumblr or Medium) and other such factors. A more apparent example is Facebook—your news feed is personal to you even though you and a billion others access the same URL.

Prevent COVID-19

Unlock 1.0 sounded like a great move. No doubt, a necessary move. The lockdown had made our economy plunge, stranded the poor and the needy across the country, and the new normal started to prove detrimental to us as a system. Of course, some of our cities handled the situation better than the others. Bangalore was one of them. Starting from the healthcare workers to the regular citizens, everybody who could, contributed to alleviating each other’s troubles in their own ways.

How to take on China

My previous post gives a gist of what it would take to boycott goods of Chinese origin. Meanwhile, as tensions mount at the border, the national sentiment in our country is touching new levels every day. I even saw videos showing people throw away products of Chinese origin that they own. My brother was quick to point out—as usual—the folly in the act: ‘What’s the point? They’d already paid for the product; China has their money anyway.’

Can we be free of Chinese goods

Ever since Prime Minister Modi made his speech on the 12th of May 2020, Aatmanirbhar started trending. My Facebook newsfeed showed countless memes and what not, about boycotting Chinese products. Some even questioned my bravery to be able to say no to Made in China.

Are you an atheist

Today, I watched a rather curious video on Facebook, called, The Atheist Delusion. A decent piece of work. Here is a gist of what happens in the video: A person—let us call him ‘Jim’—goes to different people asking them if they were atheists. The people answer in the affirmative.

Can we kill a virus

In the last blog post, I had made a statement about how a living organism works, specifically, propagation. I had equated that with that of the behaviour of a virus. Later I realised that it could lead to some confusion, with some thinking that a virus is a living organism.

Janata Curfew

Some of us defeated the whole purpose of the Janata Curfew today. At five this evening, we hear the sounds of clapping and the shankh-dhvani and people clanging plates and all of that. We look out of one of our windows and see about ten people fist-bumping, high-fiving and shaking hands. The last part was disappointing.

Panic Buying during hard times

The way the year 2020 started bordered on insane. For those in India, this effect was rather pronounced, starting from Kerala passing a resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, followed by upping of the protests across the country—Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh being the flag ship, to the incidents of dirty politics during the Delhi Elections campaigning, to the novel coronavirus going on claiming thousands of lives.

Reading the IAST

During my visit to Chennai the last month, I came across a film that was community-funded and community-made without paid professionals. This film was about the life of a Vaishnava guru of the thirteenth century, called Vedanta Desika, or Venkatacharya.

The film

The film is in Tamil. The idea of the film was to reach the story of the guru to common people, “during the times when people are forgetting their roots”. The jibe aside, and irrespective of that I do not support religions, I believe that we must expose people to the different philosophies, but at the same time, allow them the freedom to choose what they feel is right for them. This approach is at the core of Hinduism. I did my part of offering to write the subtitles, so that we expand the audience by lowering the language barrier a little.

The CAA is not about throwing out people

Over the last week, I saw protests everywhere. Most groups (not WhatsApp groups) that I am part of had a discussion about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act going. I even surprised some that I was taking the stand I was, given my track record of having ideas contrary to the ruling party’s. I find it difficult to explain to people that having rational thoughts is all I do.