Heads I win, tails I don’t loseVishy KurugantiOctober 05, 20193 mins“Racing is a true experience. Only the conditions are artificial. My entire self is engaged in a genuine struggle against time and distance and those around me. All my strengths, physical and…
Quitting in the age of vapingVishy KurugantiJuly 18, 20194 minsIf vaping was a thing back in the early ’90’s, I seriously doubt I’d have quit smoking when I did. Not that it was easy. It took a year of umpteen failed attempts with quit streaks ranging from days…
Unlocking a superpowerVishy KurugantiMay 04, 20195 minsDecades ago, I went to bed with a raging headache. For the next 10 minutes, I performed a sequence somewhat like this – took my attention away from my forehead, imagined myself floating in the ether…
Mind is deeply blowingVishy KurugantiFebruary 16, 20196 mins[Title is a hat tip to the recent Bollywood masala flick where the character Simbba turns a perfectly legit American phrase into the endearingly Hinglish “mind is blowing”.] There’s much to say in…
The crowdsourced traffic lightVishy KurugantiDecember 09, 20182 minsI’ve been wanting to write this post since 2009. Really. Exhibit A : Year in Bangalore – the Unwritten Posts. When we moved to Bangalore 10 years ago, good reason prevailed to not get immediately…
Eating pork chops while petting your Golden RetrieverVishy KurugantiOctober 20, 20185 minsFifteen years ago, as we sat in a Singapore tour bus, we heard the story of how the Singapore zoo came to be. An entire generation of kids had grown up knowing chicken only as a packet of shrink…
Adventures in buffet optimizationVishy KurugantiJune 10, 20186 minsMathematically speaking, a buffet function could be expressed thus: Buffet f(x) = sigma (dish1(a1 ->n1)) + sigma(dish2(a2->n2) +… + sigma(dish N(aN->nN) (Turns out there is a WordPress LaTeX plugin…
A Sunday in JakartaVishy KurugantiApril 08, 20181 minsThe best part of spending a Sunday in Jakarta is their car-free zone on Sudirman Road. A nearly 8km stretch of Sudirman Road (General Sudirman was the first commander-in-chief of Indonesian Armed…
A summer vacation in 1955Vishy KurugantiMarch 31, 20189 mins[Editor’s Note: My mother, a late adopter of the Internet, used to write the loveliest of letters to her children pre-Internet era. The letters stopped after I returned to India. In the past few years…
Of quadrants and boring race reportsVishy KurugantiFebruary 16, 20186 minsIt’s written that while progress could be happening linearly, results come only in cycles. The Bhagawat Geeta says one should act without thinking of results. Of course I buy this aphorism but…
