The other day I was talking to a Greek friend of mine when I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there exist people in this world who actually use symbols like , etc. to communicate! I was so completely overwhelmed by this realization that I ended up spending the next half [...]
Author Archives: Ankit
A mid-journey report from the Ulysses
Joyce's Ulysses. How should I describe it? The book is too great to be spoken of in words bound within the sorry perimeters of rationality. It's turbulence itself. It's the ravings of a supremely eloquent madman, a continuous fear of falling from a cliff as you tread carefully a ridge infinitely high and extremely thin. [...]
Taos, Santa Fe, NM
I have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the whole last week to attend the 'Phononics and Metamaterials 2011' conference. Professor Nemat-Nasser was giving the principal lecture of the conference and he asked Ali and me to attend it in order to learn what the other groups have been up to. It has been [...]
Pendulums, springs, and natural frequencies
I remember while preparing for the JEE I came across a simple spring mass system and was quite surprised by the fact that it should have a natural frequency at which it must vibrate when left to its own devices. An analogous but more intuitive system is a regular clock pendulum. The pendulum completes one [...]
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Recursion
Today I was thinking about recursion and came across this famous painting by Escher,
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India wins!
28 years a nation in waiting, almost 20 years since I personally have been, a whole generation which went through the heartbreak every four years for more than 2 decades, and today it happened. And just like that, silently and subconsciously, the world cup was dedicated to the one man who has singlehandedly shouldered the [...]
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Rain
I'm sitting here, near my window, and the heavy sky is throbbing above in deep grunting discolored voices, threatening the pane with ominous liquid possibilities. I quite like the word liquid. It's terse, handsome and upright. If I were to bestow upon it the vestiges of a human form, I would imagine it to be [...]
In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way
I have often wondered why is it that English translations of Russian authors seem to be much more widely available and read than writers from other languages. We have all heard of the great triad of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol and have come across the names of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorki, Nabokov and more but our [...]
Posted in Book review Tagged Book review, in search of lost time, marcel, marcel proust, proust 2 Comments
Abhiman
In this vast sea of human interactions, upon whose surface emotions, both tragic and comic, poignant and trivial, ebb and flow, gather momentum and break, and mix in a turbulent confusion, every so often there comes along a little line, a piece of poetry, a thought at once both supremely elegant and precisely striking, even [...]
The fourth wall
I know this will be irrelevant soon. And it'll be lost if you're seeing this in the feed.