I remember a passage from a book, or perhaps a magazine I read long ago, about a U.S. college student talking about his fellow French interns. The gist of his account was that all of the French interns he encountered seemed to know each other from before, or knew someone in common in the colleges they studied back in France. The U.S. student found this unusual for he felt U.S. …
August 2020
MERIT colleges, national track India, & privilege blindness
In this rather extended essay (~4,500 words), I suggest the term MERIT (Metro-based / Residential, English-speaking, All-India intake, Tough to get into) Colleges as a moniker to replace the IIT / IIM tag we use for elite Indian colleges.
I then use MERIT as a framework to explore facets of privilege in India – national consciousness, rise of subjective merit, and finally blindness to our own privilege.
I tried to …
I appeared on the 100x Entrepreneur podcast.
I recently appeared the the 100x Entrepreneur podcast. It is a well-known one in the Indian startup world.
As you can see in the tweet, …
Podcasting for visiles
I have often puzzled over the relative ‘effort to create’ vs ‘time to consume’ ratios of podcasts vs an essay.
A 1,500-2000 word essay takes me nothing less than 6-8 hrs to create + publish, sometimes more if it needs background research etc. It take the reader 10-15 mins or so to consume it. Let us say, on average it takes 8 hrs to create and 15mins to consume. So …
Work Time, Impact Time, Machine Learning & the Future of Jobs
I recently came across the concepts of clock time and calendar time in an essay by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11 on twitter).
Clock time is the actual time it takes for you to do an action (send a mail, draft an article and hit publish, code a change and set up an A/B test etc.). Calendar time is the period in which the impact / consequences / results of the above …