Agua

When Cristiano Ronaldo famously set aside the cans of soft drinks and replaced them with a bottle of water, I daresay he didn't mean this. At a global conference tangentially related to the environment, canned water was hardly an inspiring sight. As per the manufacturer, the use of recyclable cans and sustainably sourced water made it a much greener choice compared to the plastic PET bottle competition. But I suppose the simple choice of a water cooler and a few paper glasses would have left the water budget for the event severely underutilized.

21st July, 2024

Replicate

26th August 2024, Asan Barrage

A-Frame houses more suitable for the Swiss Alps find themselves far from home. There is of course the cursory connection of mountain cultures binding high living folks from Europe to those of Asia. To me, it is just a photogenic photo opportunity but the urge to design a barrage-side tourist lodge on the lines of Swiss chalets is beyond my understanding. Along the edges of the Asan Barrage where thousands of winged European tourists congregate, I have always found this tourist lodge devoid of tourists of any sort. While the chai and pakoda continue to be good each year, I can see the disuse creep in slowly but surely. In the lap of the Himalayas, an attempt to become a tourist magnet seems to have gone wrong. One suspects that originality of solution was not the priority here but it was blind replication.

Slop and AI Slop

Much of the past year has been spent in experimentation with AI. As an early adopter of publicly available AI, I have seen it go from powerful to muted and to powerful again. As many YouTube videos also insist calling it Intelligence only because it produces seemingly intelligent output is misplaced. Predicting is not the same as creating and as of now the code is doing the former, albeit very well.

Calum Lewis/Unsplash

In many ways, AI does with content what I do when I am cooking. I know the ingredients and the order they should go in. I know the time splits for each of those components to be heated, fried or boiled. What I produce looks a reasonable approximation of what the final output should look like. But since I am doing the task mechanically, you can always taste the difference - that final quality of the end product from a real person invested in the process as opposed to me.

Background

Kolkata Airport (CCU), 24th December 2022

I am obsessed with observing street and wall-art created exclusively for public consumption. Metro pillars, underpass walls and sides of urban buildings are now decorated with art of wildly varying quality around the world and I don't let any of that work pass by me ignored. I can't help wondering about the artist(s) who came together to set up this brush of everyday people with the good, the bad and the ugly of the principles of colour, perspective and culture. I want to imagine that they take a deeper joy in presenting their art to the world in places that are definitely not galleries but consequentially feature in most people's lives prominently even as they rush by to their next task. As a background, they might live until rain, sunshine and politics put paid to their existence but as projections of freed imaginations into the banal routines of their spectators' lives, they offer an inestimable value.

Self-Sabotage

This happens to be a rant about something so commonplace that it firmly establishes me amongst the minority of minorities. But I have never been able to integrate myself with the idea of taking selfies. Yes, that ubiquitous posing into a camera that you yourself are holding. That, to me, borders on the farthest spectrum of narcissism and yet it is a viral infection of a scale that even cinematic zombie infestations can't hold a candle to.

Indian Express, 14th July 2025

How important is it really to be documented at a place you are visiting, an occasion that you are attending or to establish that you brush your teeth by posing with your toothbrush? And aside from the last occasion, how difficult is it to ask someone else in attendance to take that picture of you? I agree with Sudha Murty when she says that she had long stopped travelling with a camera as it interfered with her experience of a place. Serial selfie-takers take up that disconnection one level higher by filling their digital and mental galleries with infinite photos of themselves.

Travels Grimm

Once upon a time, I had a lot of Amazon shopping rewards balance left and in the upcoming change of countries, I would lose access to it. This meant that I had to spend the amount fast. Naturally, I defaulted to stocking up on books on my Kindle and given my flavour of that season, they turned out to be a bunch of travel books. V S Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer ruled the roost as I bought their entire travelogue catalogues electronically.

It would be more than a decade later that I would actually get around to reading them and in their respective formulae, one was particularly disturbing. Pico Iyer was comfort food, displaced across multiple cultures but finding peace and joy in almost every one of them. V S Naipaul may seem more aligned to the title of the post as his unique mix of precise prose and incredible self-hatred shone through. But for Travels Grimm, I refer to Theroux's span of work in particular.

8th January, 2023

Wherever he goes, he finds only terror and deformity, stink and decay until all of a sudden, he comes across something incongruously beautiful - an experience, a person, a thought. An incredibly effective formula for his developed world readers, most of whom would anyway never leave that reading chair to venture into the badlands being written about. In horror movie parlance, this was jump scare inverse but with a series of jump scares bookended with a aesthetic moment of redemption.

Now I don't mean to judge one of the most well known travel authors of all time, but it does seem that despite his travels, he carted around his privileged first-world understanding of how life should be. Any deviation, as per him, was nothing short of hell itself. That perhaps is a result of not knowing that people are happy in most circumstances. They find many ways to be. This is not to cloak the grinding pain of poverty and dysfunctional systems but to understand that a little more engagement with his subjects would have made his travels a little less grim.

King of Kings

As a diehard member of the reading-over-anything-else community, I cannot claim any neutrality in the manner that I watched the first part of "Ponniyin Selvan".  It is not unusual for a filmmaker to let an author down. Even if the filmmaker is of the calibre of Mani Ratnam. So even as I watched the film, I kept hearing this voice in my head saying that the book(s) must be so much better.

10th November, 2022

As indeed, they were. Here I was, reading a relatively recent translation into English of Kalki's Tamil original. A fantastic fictionalized take on the life and times of the Chola movers and shakers of the 9th-10th century including that of Arulmozhi Varman or Rajaraja I, the king of kings. In 2024, I could sense the buzz that each part of the serialized story must have generated in the years immediately post Indian independence. While English was the only way I could partake of this new (to me) universe of impulsive kings, intelligent princesses and sorceress fisherwomen under the spell of the sea and the comet, there too rose another voice. The Tamil original must be so much better.