Posts on Anachronistic Monk

On Shooting in Black and White (An Entropy Argument)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:37:48 +0530

There’s a question I get asked often enough that I’ve started collecting answers for it: why do you shoot everything in black and white?

The Place of Honorifics in Modern Society Part A :: Academia

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 03:38:30 +0530

“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.

How Agentic LLMs ~Almost~ Destroyed My Academic Career

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 02:54:45 +0530

“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

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 18:50:32 +0530

“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:

Is Quantity Trumping Quality in University Rankings? A Closer Look at NIRF and Beyond

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 17:15:27 +0530

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?

How B+ Trees Optimize SQL Queries: A Primer

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 12:54:54 +0530

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:

Echoes of a Timeless Curse

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:56:26 +0530

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.

Major Mode El

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 18:08:54 +0530

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.

The Circle of Incompleteness

Tue, 30 May 2023 01:02:10 +0530

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

Language Semantics

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:07:52 +0530

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.

The 00 Estate: What Happens When the Government Dictates How to Write Code?

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0530

In the House of Commons of Great Britain, Edmund Burke once stated, “There were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than them all.” As the 21st century dawned, we observed media houses displaying biases towards their respective lobbies. The ’truth,’ which should be absolute, now has shades of well-crafted absolution. “Whose truth is the truth?” is a question I often ask myself while reading news articles on the internet. With the government in power controlling the first three estates, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Orwell’s “1984” no longer seems like fiction. This blog explores the hypothetical “00 Estate” that encompasses all estates and dictates the terms for writing code.

STR: A Disciplined Programmer

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0530

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.

The Glass Wall

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0530

An extraordinary year comes to an end, just like many others, yet I distinctly remember that one year when a remarkable entourage of human beings gathered around me. I had hoped our story would have a happy ending, but sometimes wishes don’t come true. Now, staring at the glass wall, I see only myself, alone, burdened with a heavy bag of despair and endless remorse. The seeds I had sown were now bearing their bitter fruit. But my story wasn’t always like this.