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Sukki Sevviyaan (Dry Sweet Vermicelli)

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  My dadiji (paternal grandma) moved from Peshawar to Dehradun in 1947 during the Partition of British India. She used to make sukki (dry) sevviyaan, thus named to distinguish them from the milk drenched version that I did not like as much due to my aversion to milk developed after moving from Canada to India (a story for another time). This was one of my favorite desserts growing up, so I have to write about it. Knead atta (flour) or sooji (semolina) for extra bite into a sturdier variety of firm, non-sticky dough (oddly, there's really no word for dough in Punjabi). Pinch off large-marble-sized pieces from the main dough and roll them between your palms to make 1-2 mm thick imperfect sevviyaan (noodles or vermicelli) about 6-8 inches long.  Break off 1-1.5 inch pieces from each sevviyaan to create these mini-sevviyaan and place them onto a tray to dry. Make a sugar and cardamon chashni (syrup) and boil it until it's thick Drop the sevviyaan into the chashni on medium heat an...
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Parasites of Heaven and My Deep Love for Music

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  Parasites of Heaven by Leonard Cohen I want this blog post to be a placeholder (similar to the previous one on Sneaky Pete) for writing about my favorite music. I hope to return to this page over the years and add to it as I feel inspired.  This is going to be a very special list (the ones in  bold ) while the rest will be acknowledged in  italics  or not at all. I can only speak to my formative influences, which would likely be different from yours. Leonard Cohen.  Poetry has never come easily to me, except when I hear it in the soothing, booming voice of Leonard Cohen. My baba had a copy of Cohen's  Parasites of Heaven  (poems) on his bookshelf. I called my dad baba, the word for dad in Bengali, a touching tribute from him to the language of his professors and colleagues at his alma mater IIT Kharagpur. Had it not been for that, I might never have given Cohen's music the chance it deserved. That's what upbringing can do. My dad also introduced...
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Sneaky Pete and the Terminology Soup

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THIS IS A GREAT SERIES! This short series is totally the kind of content I would watch again, and again. Sort of like the movies Pulp Fiction or Sholay (for Bollywood fans) with their impregnable dialog and theater.  It's kryptonite for a geek like me. The series discusses a whole slew of cons and I can barely keep up. For example, Huckleberry Jones versus the little sister Sadie Jones. What? My goal is to watch and rewatch until I can list most or all of the cons, roles, and metaphors mentioned in the series. Here's a start. I hope to return here many to time to keep updating this list. If you know some that I missed, please add them to the comments. Safe Mr Success The Roll Over Coyote is always hungry The Spanish Prisoner Lady Macbeth Painting houses Justified Captain Whale Mechanic Rope Mark Huckleberry Jones Sadie Jones
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The importance of humility

I grew up in a family where we didn't feel comfortable going to our parents for help . My hope is that I wasn't that kind of father but I'm sure I was, at least to some extent. I can count on one hand the times I reached out to my baba (dad) for help. Perhaps there were more and I just remember the more memorable ones? But overall, I think my dad didn't excel at commiseration. I generally felt like I was being talked down to. One of my vivid memories is going to the living room where my dad used to sit in his standard spot on the couch and asking him to help me with the equation of a line. He certainly helped clear a lot of my doubts and explained what y = mx + b really means.  Not to bore you to death, but briefly, y is the vertical position of any spot on a line and x is the horizontal position of that spot (aka point for math junkies). If you assume m=0 and b=0, you get y = x , which means you get a 45 degree line sloping about half way up like a javelin . From ther...
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Our family's Nintendo journey

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I was reading the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World . One of the chapters talks about the invention of LCD screen-based games at Nintendo.  And I remembered that growing up my brother Harmeet and I had the game Oil Panic , which was part of the "Game and Watch" series (they added a watch to the game console), which I’m sure baba (dad) must have bought for us on one of his trips abroad.  Harmeet was really good at it. Me not so much. Our kids, Ria and Ronak, grew up playing Nintendo Wii and 3DS (among other consoles), but primarily Nintendo. The book really highlights how the gaming company and global trend was fashioned by one engineer's way of thinking that was more generalist (like mine) than specialist. Read the book to find out what I mean.
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DIY MCP Server

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  What Is This About? Since MCP servers (AI agents or Agentic AI) are all the rage, I figured "how hard can it be to build one?" What Is MCP? MCP and the AI Agent Landscape Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic (the makers of Claude.ai) to action the promise of Agentic AI or AI Agents, that are supposed to be the intermediaries between humans and AI to help humans get stuff done. They also help Claude connect to the outside world, like the Web or your filesystem. Give Me More Context Claude's training with public data ended around October 2024. So, when you ask a question, Claude isn't generally aware of late-breaking information. Claude also doesn't automatically carry memories or context of what you discussed in earlier chat sessions. That's where MCP servers come in. They allow Claude to access data it wasn't trained with and use its training to answer our " today " questions using a combination of " traini...
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Timeline of Sikh Affairs & Experiments with AI

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I wrote an AI-assisted Python program to take my Web-based  timeline of Sikh affairs and convert it into a 169-slide PDF for easy viewing.  I started this project as a way to create a more user-friendly way for people to consume the timeline I created years ago based on  many hours of research and analysis over a number of years. My goal was to improve the formatting and add images for a more informative viewing experience . In other words, how to use the content you have and breathe new life into it . The programming effort took a couple of half days and some 500 odd lines of Python code. I used AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) to provide suggested approaches and code, but didn't directly integrate it into my editor. I use Sublime for editing and selectively cut and paste recommended code as needed. The alternative is too intrusive and AI has free reign to make changes to your code wherein you eventually lose track and control over your program and no longer fully u...
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