Arijit's Special Newsletter

Ramblings & essays

Taste

Dear L, There was a time when a McDonald's burger was good enough for me. One would be hard-pressed to convince me there could be a better burger. And then I ate a better one — a much better one. It was a burger chain in San Francisco, called…

Scale

Dear L, A few weeks ago, a motor home appeared next to my apartment building. It looked like it has been in disarray for months. I didn’t think of it much, until I noticed the man who owned it; Lean, in his late sixties, rocking an old-timey rugged moustache.…

Intelligence

Dear L, Our general notion of human intelligence is a fairly narrow one. It’s not very different from the off-the-shelf variant of intelligence that Oxford describes as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It disregards one deeply rooted aspect of human intelligence; most of our intelligence…

Tools

Dear L, During college, I used to occupy a corner room in our house which was ostensibly my workshop & lab. I used to build things there, mostly electronics, sometimes run experiments etc. I liked this place much more than the workshops in our college. It was my fun little…

Procrastination

Dear L, Once, on a walk with my Father, he mused about a question that I never managed to forget. How high a kilometre is, he had asked. The question wasn’t meant to poke at the international body of standards and measurements — what had struck me the most was…