A chidhood memory and how not to raise your kids

 My cousin came running towards me, "I got 90% in the my exams!", he exclaimed. "For the next set of exams, we will provide a medical certificate, and so my percentage of these exams will carry forward". My cousin was in grade 2, I was in grade 6. This was a few decades back in India. I congratulated him and asked him again about the medical certificate thing. Yeap, the plan was to get a false medical certificate so that the exam percentage is carried forward. I was aghast to hear this. Luckily, my parents never cared much about my grades in elementary and middle school. Even in high school, they were not too focused on them. They would never think of devising such strategies to pull me out of exams. I was on my own to navigate through them. That's the time when your brain is developing the most. You learn by struggling yourself, not only the course material, but also the principles by which you live your life. I am sure my cousin topped his class in grade 2. I never topped my class. The closest I came was rank 2 in grade 10th, when one student who always used to score better than me got conjectivitis, and skipped an exam. 

I got a wonderful and happy childhood, thanks to my parents who never pressured me to study. They did not pressure me to do any extracurricular activities as well. I had the freedom to choose what I do with my time. A happy and carefree childhood is the best gift that parents can give to their children. They get to explore nature, human behavior that way, and have the time to brood over everything around them. 

Ask your doctor what stress does to your vitals. As an adult, if you get a few seconds of anger 30 minutes before a medical check-up, you will register high glucose levels in your blood. Imagine what constant stress would do to a young kid. Imagine what moral standards a kid will grow up with if you tell them that it is okay to fake a medical certificate. 

P.S. I have decided to not use AI to polish my writings on this blog. I want my writings to be my own. 

Karaoke Therapy

I had terrible nasal congestion and knew it was going to be a difficult night. But it was also our last night in Singapore, and I had been really looking forward to going out for karaoke. Despite not being in the best of health, I convinced my wife that we should go anyway.

We took a pleasant 20-minute walk from our hotel to the nearest karaoke bar. The next 50 minutes were spent singing and dancing to our favorite songs, after which we walked back to the hotel, nicely rounding off our Singapore trip.

To my surprise, by the time we returned, my nasal congestion was completely gone. No medicine I know of could have worked that fast. Singing and dancing made us happy—and when we are happy, our bodies respond. Hormones are released, biochemical changes occur, and somehow everything starts working better than any pill.

I’m sharing this experience in case anyone suffering from nasal congestion wants to try what I now call karaoke therapy. Of course, pharmaceutical companies would never recommend it—they’d lose business. And no doctor would suggest it either. Imagine going to a clinic with nasal congestion and being told, “Go sing and dance at a karaoke bar.” You’d probably think the doctor was a quack.

When medicine doesn’t work, we go back to the doctor for a new treatment. But imagine karaoke didn’t work for you. Would you go back to the doctor? And would the doctor ask, “Did you sing joyfully? Did you dance? Were you happy?” These, after all, would be the prerequisites for getting better. If you didn’t do them properly, you’d be told to go back and try again. Of course, no doctor would ever say this.

A karaoke bar wouldn’t fund a clinical study either. There’s a classic free-rider problem: why would one bar spend a million dollars on research when every karaoke bar would benefit for free?

So this blog post may be the only way to spread this newly discovered knowledge.

India vs England 2025

Just a few days ago, I was glowing with joy. After five grueling days, eight hours a day of rollercoaster cricket, India had somehow managed to draw the Test match against England. Yes, draw. And I was thrilled. Because on Day 4, it looked like England was going to hand us a good beating. 

This entire month, my morning routine has been to wake up, not before dreaming a few times about checking scores and finding an Indian batting order collapse, and then half awake, telling myself that dreams don't matter, and sleeping some more to wash away that dreadful dream, only to get another one. To break this cycle, and to finally face the realities of the responsibility of earning bread by working on a much less thrilling job than a cricket field, I would wake up, and then actually check the score. Get ready, and in the bathroom, refresh ESPNCricinfo every half a second, and then head to work, and keep thinking about the score while half-listening to a student update me on their week's research progress.  

Today I woke up to find that India had beaten England. By 6 runs! The day before, I was fantasizing about Siraj’s hat-trick. It didn’t happen. But we won, and as every cricket fan says after a near-cardiac experience: “It’s the result that matters, not my blood pressure.”

Now, two days ago. Saturday morning, I was up early again. I just wanted to watch India’s second innings. My family, noticing I was awake wondered if I was worried about something that I am not revealing to them. Nope. No therapy needed. Just cricket. Just Test cricket, the world’s most agonizingly slow, beautifully painful form of emotional self-harm.

I told them later: it’s just the game. And they nodded, clearly not understanding a thing.

Genie in the bottle

 I have a Genie who is everywhere in my room. But when I call upon the Genie, it collapses to a single location, and stays at that location before diffusing back to fill the entire room. Just one call, and it collapses to a point, no matter how large the room is. Is it possible? How can a person educated in science say such non-sensical things? But replace Genie with "electron" and this idea forms the basic tenet of quantum mechanics. This is called collapse of the wavefunction. It has been estabished as the truth through numerous experiments. It defies our common experience of the macroscopic world. 

I have two Genies now - one on Mars and one on Venus. They have equal probability of being red or blue. But, if I look at the Genie on Mars and it turns out as red, the Genie on Venus will also turn out red - without doubt. How is it possible?  Of course, I am talking about entanglement. It's a pretty mind-boggling concept. Now, entanglement has become the basis of quantum computers. The world around us is more strange than our perception of it. What else is out there? I believe a lot - because these ideas have been recently discovered, and these are sprouts of a few genius minds. There may be concepts that our little minds can never fanthom. 

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.