Musings on the Human Condition

Bajaj Scooter Models Some people buy yachts and go space traveling. I have more modest dreams and prefer simpler adventures. Owning a "Vespa" was my unrequited dream. I grew up riding borrowed "Vespas". Actually, the brand in India is called Bajaj. The history is that Bajaj started off as a builder of scooters based on licensed Vespa/Piaggio designs. Specifically, the Bajaj Chetak was very similar to the Vespa Sprint. Sort of like a white labeled Vespa. Once the license from Vespa/Piaggio expired, Bajaj started rolling out their own models including Priya and Super, which were still fairly similar to their 150cc 2-stroke Vespa-like predecessor. My dad had a sky blue (if I remember correctly) Bajaj for a short period of time. Not sure why he got rid of it but he never let me ride it, perhaps rightly so since I didn't have a license. So, I grew up facing a combination of envy for classmates and friends who rode scooters. I occasionally got my fix by borrowing thei...

Caption: Zebra Finch My daughter bought me a Birdbuddy for Christmas 2025. We aren't Christians, but any excuse to celebrate and get the family together, right? The Birdbuddy is an excellent idea. It's a bird feeder with a solar panel and a built in camera that takes up to 2k resolution videos (of up to 60 seconds at a time) when it detects that a bird has landed on the feeder.  Over the years, I've had other less ambitious feeders. Prior to installing feeders I did a lot of birding and have photographed many of the species that visit New England. I've also tried to pursue the hobby when I've traveled, e.g. to Orlando, Florida and Provo, Utah. The first feeder I installed was unabatedly ransacked by Gray Squirrels. After many failed attempts I finally hung it between two tree trunks that were about 10-12 feet apart. So the midpoint was about 5-6 feet from either side. And I have video of the squirrels jumping 5-6 feet from tree trunks onto the feeder. So, that idea...

  Andrej Karpathy, during his podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel. October 17, 2025. Hype. In the midst of all the hype around how AI is going to take all our jobs and Elon Musk telling us to give up on the idea of humans producing code in 2027, it's refreshing to hear saner voices making more nuanced statements and predictions about AI and our future.  Andrej (pronounced Andre) Karpathy is one such voice. I will talk more about him a bit later in this post. While AI has produced some incredible results, there have also been plenty of failed predictions. Geoffrey Hinton (considered the godfather of AI)  predicted  in 2016 that AI will completely replace radiologists by 2021. Here we are in 2026 and radiologists are flourishing like never before! We live in a world that is undergoing disruption by AI just as it was once turned topsy-turvy by the inventions of printing, electricity, personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and CRISPR. Each time hype-mongers to...

Modern School Vasant Vihar (MSVV), New Delhi, 1983-1984 The picture above is me , likely in grade 11 . Or, as Americans would say, during my high school junior year. Not only do I not remember posing for this picture, I also don't recall looking like this. This picture was taken on  school  premises, as evidenced by the red brick half wall. But the occasion escapes me. Most likely someone brought in a camera (a rarity in those days) and offered to take a picture. I had just acquired an Agfa Click III (or similar) camera in those days (probably as a birthday present) but I doubt my parents would have let me take it to school without making a huge fuss. It took me a while to believe that it was indeed me. I know I occasionally wore glasses . I despised wearing them but did so because my mom's incessant warnings had sunk deep into my psyche, "Your eyesight will get worse if you strain your eyes trying to read without your glasses!" But I definitely don't remember hav...

  Photo by yours truly in front of our house garage. A bounding track describes the gait (how the animal moves), not the foot. In a bound , the animal moves in little “launch and land” jumps: It pushes off with its back legs. The front feet land first . Then the hind feet swing forward and land ahead of the front feet (often side-by-side). That landing order makes the classic “bounding” track pattern seen in the photograph above: two prints in front (hind feet) and one or two behind (front feet, often overlapping). Animals that commonly leave bounding tracks: rabbits/hares, squirrels, weasels/stoats, mink, otter —basically critters that hop or lope rather than walk with evenly spaced alternating footsteps. The above picture, taken today while shoveling fresh snow in front of my garage, is most likely that of a rabbit. What you’re seeing: The two longer prints side-by-side in front = the hind feet landing ahead of the body. The single rounder print behind ...

Most of us grew up reading some samples of what was considered good literature as part of our prescribed syllabus at school. Tom Brown's School Days was one of the books I recall from that list. I believe Charles Dickens was also on the list. Thankfully Shakespeare was not. At the time, I despised history because it seemed like an exercise in memorizing weird names and meaningless dates. But that changed later in life. During weekends and summer holidays, I occasionally had the option to choose what to read. I mostly dabbled in what I could grab from my father's bookshelves. I was primarily attracted to non-fiction. For example, books on chess and The Way Things Work , which I would endlessly page through and must have read many times over. No teenager can resist going through raunchy titles like Tropic of Cancer , which I borrowed from father's bookshelves for the sole purpose of finding hot passages. When I actually read the book la...

  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...

  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...

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

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 for a straight 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 deg...

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.

  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...

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...

  Further to my previous post on Claude AI , since most of the GenAI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) present their default results in markdown, I have been looking for a reliable way to render the markdown.  Additionally, I want to be able to highlight, annotate and save the results for future reference. I reviewed a number of PDF tools. Adobe Acrobat (too expensive) Foxit PDFExpert (doesn't handle PDFs generated from markdown too well; while trying to highlight, it keeps selecting two lines instead of one) PDFGear (great for structuring if you want to add bookmarks like I did for Saurabh Mahapatra's thesis on Adobe Experience Platform's Data Distiller, but not much else) Skim , the most unpretentious on the tools on the list. But it handles highlighting on PDFs generated from markdown just fine. But more importantly, it refreshes when I update the PDF from markdown. My choice of Skim requires further elaboration. When I am researching a topic on Claude, I am constantly upd...

  I spent the Saturday assembling a cedar planter, catching up with a college friend from IIT Roorkee, and exploring Anthropic's new model context protocol for their AI tool Claude.  Yup, that's how I roll! Claude now has richest set of MCP servers  that can be integrated into Claude to augment its capabilities to, for example, search the web (think of it as a sort of RAG), search your filesystem, search your Google Drive, and best of all, save memories about your preferences that Claude can recall and leverage in future exchanges. Think of MCP servers as Anthropic's open-source framework aimed providing a bridge for AI agents or agentic AI to access real world data . In large language models (LLMs), "context" refers to the information the model can "remember" during a single interaction — typically the prompt, any system instructions, and previous exchanges. This is often measured in tokens . One more thing, unless you're running a quantum ...