Author Archives: Ankit
Excerpts from the diary of the first bipedal
Following are some excerpts taken from the diary of the Australopithecus primate who is now widely considered to be the first to make bipedalism fashionable. His diary incidentally happens to be the first known written work in history as all his ancestors who walked on four feet could never handle paper and pen and those [...]
A little stopmotion
I was watching Coraline the other day and decided to do a bit of stopmotion animation myself. This is where you take a lot of photos, moving things little by little, and after a hell lot of time and a severe backache, run them quickly one after each other and watch your 3 hours getting [...]
Oh Wilde!
I figure that lately I have been reading far too much literature which makes little sense to my limited understanding. Joyce's 'Portrait of the artist as a young man' and Woolf's 'To the lighthouse' left me fumbling for coherence and made me wish for sentences to be shorter, intentions to be clearer, and flights of [...]
Excerpts from Heisenberg's 'Science and Religion'
It's instructive to see how nuanced the thinking of some of the greatest minds at the turn of the last century was. There is no incriminating bashing of religion (except by Dirac perhaps), no overconfidence in science, none of the polemic which is so much a part of modern day evangelists of atheism like Dr. [...]
तीर पर कैसे रुकूँ मैं
तीर पर कैसे रुकू मैं आज लहरों में निमंत्रण! रात का अंतिम प्रहर है, झिलमिलतें हैं सितारे वक्ष पर युग बाहु बाँधे, मैं खड़ा सागर किनारे, वेग से बहता प्रभंजन केश पट मेरा उड़ाता, शून्य में भरता उदधि-उर की रहस्यमयी पुकारें; इन पुकरों की प्रतिध्वनि हो रही मेरे ह्रदय में, है प्रतिच्छायित जहाँ पर सिंधू [...]
Genealogy
I have been wanting to trace my family history for a long long time now. The reason for this is as follows: I am perfectly aware that there is no such thing as the golden age of humanity, and neither was there ever an innocent generation devoid of all malice and hardship. Human struggle and [...]
to Be or Not to Be
? That is the question - as Hamlet soliloquizes in one of the deepest, most biting reflections on the absurdity of life. His father has been murdered, his mother is married to the killer - which is the slain king's own brother, and Hamlet, writhing under the agony of inaction and helplessness, ponders lyrically over [...]
Haircut et. al.
Haircut is one of those things which never seems to have been done well. It's like a photograph which inadvertently makes you wonder what the reason was for your dumb expression. You always feel that something in the photo is not quite right and things could have been a whole lot better if only you [...]
Steppenwolf
I read the book Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse over the weekend and here is an effort to glean some coherence out of its brilliantly ambitious and seemingly inchoate mass of ideas. I am glad to say that despite the back cover of the book containing phrases like 'blend of eastern mysticism and western culture', 'soul's [...]