As you know, I use the date of 26th of every month to report the fate of the three portfolios I’m running as an experiment. However, as has happened in the past, the post gets delayed when the 26th is a weekday and I can’t find time. That’s what happened this month. As I…
I started watching Coolie expecting Rajinikanth. That alone should tell you how the evening was supposed to go. A dose of charisma, a few gravity-defying stunts, and the rapture of watching a man who can turn a cigarette flick into an epiphany. I was ready for Rajini. I also knew Nagarjuna was in the…
It had been years since I last visited Harry Hole. The Redbreast was a memory, vague and yellowed like a dog-eared page. I had a few more Nesbø books tucked away somewhere, but as often happens, they waited patiently while life unfolded elsewhere. Then one idle moment, standing next to a bookshelf, I picked…
For much of my life, I treated sleep like loose change. Nice to have, but easy to misplace. Four hours on a good day, six if the world was kind. I wore sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. “I can function on four,” I would say, a little smugly. As if survival were…
Once bitten, twice shy—that’s the mood as I sit down to write this month’s update. In my post on the fifth month of this experiment, I was feeling bullish. Mr. Market was showing bullishness, but then the sixth month happened and I said what goes up must come down. Well this month, the markets…
By the time I finished reading Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno, I no longer felt as though I were reading Western philosophy. It felt like something else—something older, quieter, more solemn. Like stepping into a forgotten ashram. A lineage severed. A thread that once shimmered with truth, now frayed at the edge of memory. These…
This is a continuation of an earlier reflection—on the early Greeks not as textbook thinkers, but as seekers. In the first part, I wrote about Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. Men who stood beside rivers and caves and tried to listen to what the world was saying. This next set of figures came later,…
This year, I began a slow, deliberate journey into Western philosophy. It had long been on my list of things to do. I had a general familiarity with the Western thought, but a systematic study is something that I wanted to do. After all, I call myself a philosopher. I decided to begin with…
Michael Crichton’s Eruption, co-authored with James Patterson, is the kind of science thriller that makes you nostalgic for Crichton’s heyday. After finishing Dan Brown’s The Secret of the Secrets, which flirted with metaphysics and brushed past science fiction, I found myself aching for something tighter, colder, more precise. I missed Crichton’s rigor. His thrillers…
After a break of a few days, I returned to Teixcalaan—because it felt like unfinished business. A Desolation Called Peace is the second and final book in Arkady Martine’s duology, and I’d left it unread. That’s not good form when you choose a series precisely because the story arc spans only two books. Not…