It was past one when I gave up pretending I might sleep. Saturday had emptied out the way Saturdays do once the city finally goes quiet, and there I was, wide awake and somehow exhausted at the same time, the kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with the body. I cracked open a…

The bathroom light has never been kind, but lately it has turned into something closer to an interrogation. I lean in to do whatever it is a man my age does at a mirror, and there he is. The temple has crept back another quarter inch. The grey that started as one stubborn strand by…

It was a Wednesday evening, somewhere on Outer Ring Road, and my Ola hadn’t moved in seventeen minutes. The driver had given up on conversation. The AC was working at maybe forty percent capacity. Behind us, a BMTC bus was attempting a lane change that violated several laws of physics. I had Charles Bukowski’s collected…

I was sitting on my balcony the other evening, watching a sunset that had no business being that perfect. Purples bleeding into oranges, the kind of sky that makes you forget your phone for a minute. And then, like it always does, it faded. The colors dulled. The streetlights took over. Show’s over. And I…

There is an old joke in software engineering. It goes: there are only two hard problems in computer science. Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. You laugh. Then you sit with it for a second. The one I want to talk about is the middle one. Cache invalidation. It is a problem so fundamental,…

A few weeks ago I read a LinkedIn post by someone I vaguely know. It was lovely. The kind of writing that makes you sit up a little. Sentences that turned at the right places. A metaphor that did some real work. I read it twice, which is rare for that platform. Then I scrolled…

There is a particular kind of vertigo that arrives when you hear your own voice in a recording. For half a second, you do not recognise it. The mouth that has been speaking your sentences for decades suddenly belongs to a stranger. You think, surely that is not how I sound. But it is. Everyone…

I have been thinking about AI a lot lately. Not in the way most people seem to, where it is either the greatest invention since fire or the beginning of the end. My thoughts are messier than that, more tangled, and I suspect more honest because of it. Let me start with the question everyone…