Hogwarts in India

 The Hogwarts Express comes to a halt and wizard students get off to start their new school year. They enter the Grand Hall and the dining room, and large quantities of delicious food of different varieties appear on the table magically. In the later years, the students learn that it is the house elves who are toiling hard to prepare the food in an underground, hidden kitchen. Magic! Something that we will never witness in real life. Wrong! It is part of our daily lives in India. Whenever I am visiting New Delhi, I find that things and services are magically made available by just a tap on an app or a phone call - whether you want to have a Bangalore biryani, a Lucknow kachori, a pan as soon as you have finished your meal, or would like someone to pick up a package and deliver it in a day to another city. India is a world of wizards and house elves. The house elves run door-to-door delivering services at breakneck speeds. The wizards are tapping the right apps like charms from their wand.  

Childhood memories wrapped in a research paper

 Last week, my student emailed me a research paper that was relevant to her work. Upon opening the paper, I found that it was written by two professors of IIT Bombay in the late 1980s. It is an elegant paper, so much so that we are finding it useful for the research being done in 2023, and I wondered about the amazing work that these professors did with little resources. But, the research paper also brought back the happy childhood memories - I sitting on the floor of my home in Delhi on a summer day, and wind blowing through the open gallery doors into our drawing room. Some dust on the floor. The coolness of the floor making it a comfortable place to sit. I wondered how important it is for a childhood to be happy. When you encounter something that takes you back to your old memories, and you feel happy, content, and then remember a funny event that happened during those days and you start laughing. 

Kunal Kamra and the Chocolate Factory

On the onset, I would first acknowledge that Kunal Kamra is a winner. No doubt about it. Otherwise, why would I be writing a blog on him. He calls himself a comedian. But he lacks the quintessential quality of being a comedian - humor. How do I know? I recently watched his invective-laden attempt at a stand-up comedy. Did not find him funny at all. Of course, I watched him because of the stunt he pulled off so successfully a few months back. Few months back, nobody knew KK. One day, KK was supposed to be flying to Lucknow. It was just like any other normal day. Little did he know that his flight ticket was bigger than what Charlie had won for the chocolate factory. It was bigger to him than the Peter-Parker-bit-by-spider-turned-into-spiderman event. Edit: "few months" is now a few years. This blog was originally written some years back.