Writings
A reading room for essays, fiction, healthcare systems, science, technology, society, and ordinary life in Calcutta. The work is personal and analytical, sometimes comic, sometimes dark, and intentionally human.
Recent writing
Search the complete archive →On the late-September rain that dropped the temperature enough in Calcutta that I could turn off the fan and the geriatric AC, and hear my own tinnitus think.
For my mother, born in Rajasthan in 1947, who lost a father, crossed a country into marriage, and spent a lifetime giving until almost nothing remained but love.
Meta's new agent AI succeeds not by being brilliant, but by being cheap on your behalf. A meditation on agency, commerce, and the coming war for your wallet.
A bipolar Bengali in Calcutta contemplates power cuts, the etymology of electricity, and the loadshedding that is a life.
On the narrow, holy, unhygienic gap between consciousness and oblivion, where the mind drops its props and the self finally stops narrating.
A satirical first-person essay on how low self-esteem mutates in middle age, when failure stops being an event and starts impersonating an identity.
Major shelves
Ten of the largest published catalogues, plus the interactive Games and Visualizations shelves. The complete archive currently contains 82 categories.
Visualizations
32 posts- The Meaning & Connection Map: A Visual Encyclopedia of Ideas
- The Profile That Knows Almost Nothing About You
- Human + AI ICU Prediction Laboratory
Games
4 posts- Ludo & Saap-Ludo
- The Healthcare IT Crossword: Systems Rounds
- Kagojer Dana: A Paper Plane Through Calcutta
Personal Essay
130 posts- What Is Left Is Love
- The Cow Who Crossed The Sea
- Entropy and the Thermodynamics of Lonely Bastards
Short Fiction
111 posts- While You Were Holding
- The City’s AI Has Depression
- The Examination That Predicts When You Die
Essay
50 posts- The Other Loadshedding
- The Tenant Upstairs Finally Unplugs
- Low Self-Esteem in Middle Age
Healthcare IT
30 posts- The Odyssey of OHDSI: How a Common Language is Rewriting the Story of Human Health
- The AI Scribe, the False Mushroom, and the Rural Clinic
- ChatGPT Enters Healthcare, and Compliance Is the Easy Part
Society
26 posts- The Horoscope That Fits Everybody
- Slow Poisoning Republic
- The Great Indian Fence-Sitter
Artificial Intelligence
23 posts- The Flock Above Howrah Bridge
- The Magnificent Plumbing Department of Artificial Intelligence
- The Cartography of Blind Spots: An Epistemological Field Guide to the Eight Buckets of AI Future Forecasting
Personal
20 posts- Containment Breach: A Protocol for Intermittent Filial Contact and the Architecture of Refusal
- The Miasma of Mistakes
- The Small Republic of No One
Mental Health
19 posts- Terrace Tea Manic Depression
- The Baroque Minutiae
- A Mediocre Manifesto of Managed Mediocrity
Satire
17 posts- Gobhir Joler Machh
- The Extrovert Economy Gets a Jetpack
- Craggy Intelligence and Other Apocalypses
Technology
16 posts- Muse and the Coupon
- The AI Sermon and the Wet Knot
- The Robot Begins as a Loose Wire