This blog has been on my to-do list for a while now. It has been a month since I went to IndiaFOSS, and I could finally finish it thanks to my retreat at the Isha Foundation in Coimbatore, and to two days of an Instagram-free life that let me collect all my thoughts and put them into a document in less than a day.
Writing invariants gets treated as an art form, which is a polite way of saying nobody can explain how they do it. “Art is long and life is short,” said Hippocrates, a man who never had to read a 2,000-word post on formal methods. So I’ve tried to keep this one short.
Lahore, 1929. Image courtesy of British Pathé.
There is a photograph that should hang in every classroom in this country: the funeral procession of Jatindra Nath Dasreference for Jatindra Nath DasJatindra Nath Dasen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatindra_Nath_Das, 1929, winding through the streets of Calcutta. Six hundred thousand people walking behind the body of a twenty-four-year-old who had starved himself for sixty-three days in Lahore Central Jail. He was not demanding independence that day; he was demanding that an Indian prisoner be fed and treated like a European one. He died for the dignity of the jailed, and a nation that was not yet born carried him on its shoulders. Let me say that again: sixty-three days! That is two months of hunger strike and, of course, the beatings, the jail, the pain, the suffering.
As someone with a standing interest in languages, I find myself perpetually on the lookout for the features that belong to one language alone. Every language has its flagship concepts - words that resist translation, and that frequently cannot be mapped one-to-one onto any other.
“You start problem-solving with mathematical thinking. To obtain a solution, you extend it to computational thinking. But to actually implement it on the computer, you need algorithmic thinking” Prof. CPR
A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Bangalore for a hackathon at the Indian Institute of Science, organised by Prof. Siddharth Gadgilreference for Prof. Siddharth GadgilProf. Siddharth Gadgilmath.iisc.ac.in/~gadgil and Emergence AI. The structure of the hackathon was: spend the first couple of days getting taught Lean4reference for Lean4Lean4lean-lang.org by Prof. Siddharth Gadgil and Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.reference for Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.krea.edu.in/sias/dr-t-v-h-prathamesh, then disappear into a cave for a weekreference for cave for a weekcave for a weekyoutube.com/watch and emerge with a project. The judges were Anand Rao Tadipatrireference for Anand Rao TadipatriAnand Rao Tadipatridl.acm.org/profile/99661086046 and Sidharth Bhatreference for Sidharth BhatSidharth Bhatgrosser.science/team/bhat; both PhD students in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
“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.
“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.