Durwasa Chakraborty

“Call me Ishmael.” That line opens one of literature’s great sweeping saga: a man, a whale, and the bruising, salt-earning adventure of simply not dying at sea. But the name does something subtle: like a polite knock on the front door of literature. It positions the narrator. In Sanskrit, nāma means exactly that: the thing by which you call someone from afar. The internet insists the English “name” is Germanic. Fine. I will let that slide this time. I’m not here to litigate etymology. But I am here to challenge something we pretend is apolitical. ...

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Voltaire (and also every Spider-Man movie ever) There’s this video of Chad Smith, the drummer from Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s hearing a song for the first time, no prep, no notes, no second take. And yet somehow, he just gets it. He catches the groove like it’s muscle memory, then makes the whole thing sound better.That’s the magic of practice. Not the kind where you count hours, but the kind where you repeat something so many times it becomes your second nature, your reflex. Whether it’s drumming, coding, or explaining your PhD topic to your relatives without crying, the idea’s the same: do it till it’s boring, and then keep doing it till it’s beautiful. ...

“Data races are bad.” — Every systems programming course, ever. But why are they bad? And what exactly are they? Let’s be a little Aristotelian about this—question everything. So here we go: So… What Is a Data Race? A data race occurs when two or more concurrent threads access the same memory location , at least one of them performs a write, and there’s no synchronization mechanism (like a lock or atomic operation) protecting that access. ...

Recently, The Hindu published an article that raised a pertinent question regarding the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF): “Is quantity trumping quality?” As I write from the hallowed halls of one of India’s premier institutions—the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras—I find myself compelled to delve deeper into this issue. Are private institutions genuinely improving, or have they [sic] discovered ways to manipulate research metrics? It is often said that data is the new oil, but just like oil, it needs refinement to be of any use. ...

Introduction For someone who has taken a course in Computer Science, they have probably come across a B+ tree, often used in the context of databases for storing data. A B+ tree schematically looks like this: [ 1003 ] / | \ [1001] [1002] [1004 1005] [1007] / | | | [Naruto] [Sasuke] [Sakura Hinata Kakashi] [Itachi] In a B+ tree, the data always lies in the leaf nodes. ...

Preface: Rishi Durvasa, known for his irascible nature, was infamous for his ability to curse. As mythology suggests, Durvasa visited Kanav Rishi’s ashram, and Shakuntala was lost in her daydreams of Dushyant. Furious, Durvasa cursed Shakuntala, saying that the one she dreamed of would forget her when the time came. This is a modern retelling of that ancient story. The ceiling fans at Kanav Café whirred lazily above, barely stirring the humid afternoon air. Durvasa sat at his usual corner table, nursing a black coffee, his eyes flicking between the window and his notebook. His mind, however, was far from the café, lost in the endless research spiral. He was close—tantalizingly close—to finding a cure for a rare form of Alzheimer’s that had haunted him for years. The disease crept like a thief, stealing memories and identities, stripping people of their past. But Durvasa, with his relentless mind, was determined to stop it. Or, perhaps, rewrite it. ...

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Before you think I’m crowning Lisp as God’s own language after just one blog stint at a coding exercise, hold your horses. I’m not here to bash Object-Oriented Programming or its design patterns. In fact, I believe it’s crucial to know these patterns inside out. Only then can you play the game of ‘Design Pattern or Anti-Pattern?’ with any confidence. Remember, these musings are all from my little corner of the world and don’t reflect the hard work of other developers who’ve been sweating over StarPlat. ...

Am I too comfortable or am I dying from within I wish at the word go I could drop my skin The quotes of the dead do not interest me Nor does the aphorism of the sickened living I am still searching for lost letters and their meaning To go back to the gardens of my uninterrupted musing And every night I hope to find the old you; And every day I hope for a new story to begin. ...

Happy Birthday to Me: Musings on Language and Code Today, I find myself celebrating my birthday in the tranquil confines of a cozy Airbnb in Vancouver. It’s a momentary escape from the pressures of work, a rare breather amidst the ever-present demands of the office. Through the frost-touched window, I watch the Canadian flag battle the icy winds. Below, I can hear the faint murmurs of a French-speaking couple, my neighbors. A little later, the cadence of Mandarin reaches my ears, no doubt my landlord going about his day. And then, the phone rings. It’s my mother, calling from home, so naturally, the conversation begins in Bengali. When my father takes the phone, we switch seamlessly to Hindi. After the call, I set the phone down, open my laptop, and begin composing an email in English. ...

A trainee undergoing military training can disassemble and assemble a machine gun within a minute. At first, this might seem very complex, but everyone in the academy manages to do it. The more pertinent question is not ‘how’ but ‘why’. It’s because their lives depend on it. Similarly, a disciplined programmer learns the vocabulary and syntax of a programming language with utmost sincerity. Every word in the programming language is sacred, and any non-conformance is akin to blasphemy. ...