Month: August 2025

  • Burma Burma

    The last time we tried to get into Burma Burma on a Saturday night, we ended up going to Lucky Chan because of the wait time. They don’t take reservations on Saturday night. This time, we were prepared, and lurking around when they opened for dinner. That meant very few tables were occupied, and we got one that we liked. I have to confess, despite my disdain for vegetarian fare, I have been to this (Indiranagar) outlet multiple times, enjoyed the food, and also been to the Church Street one. I had no moral grounds really when D expressed her desire to have dinner here.

    Burma Burma
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  • The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

    Andy Clark

    The subtitle of The Experience Machine is “How our minds predict and shape reality”, and that’s what the book is about. The conventional notion of cognition, at least to me, is that it begins with sense organs perceiving and providing inputs from what we experience, and the brain quickly piecing it all together to present me a coherent picture of what is, and what I should do next. But if we go by the “predictive brain” thesis, the brain doesn’t just passively interpret the world but is constantly predicting, shaping, and refining our reality based on sensory inputs.

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  • Three shades of freedom

    At large

    It is freedom weekend in this part of the world. We make an impromptu lunch plan, and use the metro. Then go to a mall for bubble tea, our new comfort drink. There is something metaphorical about that – our bubble inside a messy reality. I noticed that at the restaurant, on the roads, in the mall, there weren’t a lot of smiling people. I reflect that maybe it’s a sign of the times. After all, if you go by social media, everyone else is doing better.

    And it isn’t just online, it’s a reality too.I think specifically about the service staff in the restaurant, security guards at the metro station. They are working on a day when everyone else has the day off. Waking up early, going back late. They are living lives of precarity, something I read in Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had.

    “…depending on the will or pleasure of another was the original meaning of precarious, and that it comes from the Latin for prayer. Precarity is everywhere, it seems. Maybe it is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, the condition of our time. It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat. 

    Illness or disability can force somebody into the precariat as can divorce, war, or natural disaster. The precariat is composed of migrant workers and temp workers and contract workers, and part-time workers. People who work unstable jobs that offer “no sense of career.” There are few opportunities to advance in these jobs, and no way to bargain for better terms.

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  • Notes from A Psalm for the Wild-Built

    As with many other excellent books, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built too came via the better half – a book that one of her colleagues mentioned as his favourite. Since solarpunk fell in the larger ambit of speculative fiction, of which I am an enthusiast, I promptly added it to my list. I rarely write a review for fiction these days, because I think each book speaks to a person differently, and sometimes even to the same person differently across time. This book is no different, so no review here. But for me, this book came at a very opportune time – it raised the same questions I had, but with a far more positive outlook. It even managed to reinforce an answer. Hence, sharing a few lines by Becky Chambers that really spoke to me.

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  • Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

    Annie Jacobsen

    It was in a show called Hunters that I first heard about Operation Paperclip. Even before WW 2 ended, and though there were common organisations among Allies, the race was on between the would-be victors to get Nazi science and tech to their own countries. This expanded to the Nazis who were working on such projects. Originally called Operation Overcast, the then rechristened Operation Paperclip was the US version, which ran between 1945 and 1959, and as a part of which more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the U.S. and more often than not, given government employment. The American Dream!

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