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What is the value of your Facebook profile? It is a question I have been thinking about for a while now. Time for some napkin Math: Facebook is a company with some perceived dollar value. It makes its money from all the users that are active on its site at any given time. So if we…

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash We are well over seven months into a work from home setup across multiple countries across the world. During the same time, predictably, economies have cratered and have since started a slow, careful march back to some form of normalcy. Given that the pandemic has impacted economies with such uniformity,…

Why I deleted my Facebook phone app, and life ever since. I loved Facebook! I was an avid user of Facebook. I used to rant a lot on the social media platform. This comprised of long posts on my “wall”, long commentaries and endless debates on “comment threads”. I “liked”, and “shared”, a lot. Photo by…

Protecting people is a secondary, *intended* effect Problems presented by a disease such as COVID19 are not medical in nature. Instead, I posit, they are problems of logistics and physical infrastructure. My rationale for such a claim is perhaps best encapsulated in the fact that COVID19 spreads fast, with a relatively low fatality rate — relative to…

A short review of the first Batman comic (WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead.) With the lockdown in place, I have started to read comics a lot more. So, of course I went back to reading Batman comics. And obviously I went back to the beginnings. This is a little known fact, but Batman as a comic series…

May 9, 2020. It is a lovely morning in the Bay area, California. Let me look back in time for a moment. I was walking back home from the CalTrain station when I got a New York Times alert on my phone about the first COVID-19 case in San Mateo County here in California. My…

And the underlying attitudes at play. Naming something that brings pain, misery and death — like a disease — will always invite controversy. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and its naming have certainly caused consternation, across the world. I decided to explore and understand why the names “Chinese Virus” or “Wuhan Virus” have gained popularity with many folks around the world…

With dust, smoke, and filth. I am back in India, and more importantly back in Delhi after a long time, since 2012. The simple fact is that I spent the bittersweet years of my high school in this city; I would always come back to Delhi to visit my parents while on break from engineering…

With all the discussions and largely one-sided debate about the (semi-)recent video by Vogue India that spoke about choice and empowerment, there seems to be an important point that people are overlooking, and perhaps a great lesson for the feminist movement in India (and probably even the world). The video that i am referring to,…