Category: Musings
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The Color Sanguine
This week I have been hard at work plumbing the depths. I sifted through years of correspondence, pored over pictures, marinated in memories from over three decades ago. Some of what I found startled me. I hold grudges. That one evening in Feb 2001 when I stood at the intersection of MG Road and Brigade…
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The Long Count
Nithya Raman is closing the gap one counted ballot at a time. On the slow, invisible labor of the women still waiting to be seen, and the work that outlasts the wait.
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The Refusal to Translate
A response to the argument that every major Indian writer lives abroad and writes from memory. The real variable isn’t geography. It’s whether the publishing chain between you and the reader lets you keep the sentence intact.
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Nithya Raman, Okra, and the Brown Woman’s Second Act
I wrote about Rini Sampath in April. Nithya Raman is the next part of the question. The first act has a script. The second act has none.
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On Sōseki, K-Dramas, and Twenty-Five Years
After dinner I walk to the window and look up. Tsuki ga kirei desu ne: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it. Sōseki’s translation of I love you, the K-drama that revived it, and twenty-five years of pointing at the moon.
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The Morning I Downloaded VS Code
Six in the morning. The study. The Instant Pot was set for rice. Saathi was at tennis. The girls were somewhere in the house with their coffees and their phones, each of them in a different room. The coffee giving out wisps of steam. On Threads, for about a week, people had been talking about…
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Two Hours on a Monday Morning
Two days before, my morning briefing arrived in the format it had been taking all week. A plain text summary in my inbox at seven in the morning, generated by an automation I built in Claude Code earlier this month. The part I want you to see, verbatim, looked like this: 📤 PUBLISHING TODAY No…
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Nine Point Six Percent
I was browsing the settings menu in Claude Desktop. Not hunting. Just opening drawers, like you would in a kitchen looking for scissors. Under a customize option, tucked into a plugin panel, there was a Marketing section. The other plugins I had already set up sat out in the open. This one was behind a…
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The Librarian and the Historian
I had twenty-six thousand emails in my inbox. I was an early adopter of gmail. With it came decades of accumulated digital debris. The number came up the first time I connected my inbox to Claude. The connection was the smallest move I had made yet in this whole experiment. A few clicks. A consent…
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What the Dashboard Doesn’t Count
Two weeks ago, I published an essay on this site called My First AI Boo Boo. It was about a website migration that had gone wrong. A consolidation of my Substack archive onto WordPress, run by an AI assistant, that had produced thirty-seven fabricated essays under my name and published them live to my site…