Articles by Ritvik Mandyam

Last February, Marvel destroyed all their carefully set precedents by making a movie that the fans actually wanted to see: Deadpool. Deadpool was one of those movies that you had to be 18 to watch but 16 to fully appreciate. It features, to quote the makers, "God's perfect idiot, A hot chick, A British villain, The comic relief, A moody teen, A CGI character, A gratuitous cameo," and, if I might add, absolutely zero reverence for anything at all, ever. Deadpool is one of those quintessential teenage flicks - those movies where the theaters are packed with 16-year-olds with popcorn…

I've been writing code for a while now. I first learned to program at age nine, and can now write an entire app on my own. The thing I've noticed, though, is that a lot of my friends seem to have a bit of a phobia of writing code.  The US may be pushing code in a big way, but in India, computer science still seems to be the realm of precious few. I take computer science in school, and there are only 7 others taking it out of a class of 40. There isn't a single girl in our…

Around five months ago, I started working out in an attempt to look less like a non-green version of Shrek from the movies. I stopped eating cheese, butter, sugar, chips, fries and everything else that makes life worth living, gastronomically speaking. I went out running every day, and grew obsessive about hydration, as everyone on their first moderately serious health kick becomes. I turned my life from a dietician's nightmare into a cow's dream - I cut processed foods almost in entirety, I abandoned my favourite, but unfortunately fattening, misti doi in favour of the less flavourful but 90-calories-a-pack Greek…

I've been thinking about our education system a lot (again) lately. Mainly, I've been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that I dislike about it. After much introspection (read: "Ten minutes of trying to come up with something to write about"), I decided that it was, mainly, the fact that we have subjects. While subjects are great for breaking everything down into bite-sized pieces and allowing you to pass your exams, they don't really give you an appreciation for what you're learning. For instance, if I were to learn in Physics about Young's Double Slit Experiment, I'll be…

On Friday evening, I went with my parents to watch Dangal, the new Aamir Khan movie. There have been a lot of videos floating around Facebook lately of Aamir Khan's "transformation" for the movie - how he gained weight and body fat and then lost all of it (Raging Bull-style). The movie isn't really about him, though - it's about his daughters, Geeta and Babita. It's a biographical movie about Mahavir Singh Phogat, a Haryanvi ex-wrestler, now... ah... heavyweight? I mean, Aamir Khan was over 30% body fat when he played him in the movie, so he's certainly no featherweight,…

Here's an interesting story: in 1849, under the treaty of Lahore, a certain diamond was taken from India and moved to England. The diamond, originally known as the 'Samantik Mani', is still quite legendary. It is known to the world as the 'Kohinoor diamond', a name bestowed upon it by Nadir Shah when he first glimpsed it. The man responsible for its removal from its home state was none other than Lord Dalhousie, the wonderful gentleman responsible for everyone's favourite expansionist policy, the Doctrine of Lapse. The Kohinoor isn't the only Indian artifact that the Brits took during their occupation…

A few months ago, on my other blog, I wrote a post about Donald Trump, making less-than-gentle fun of the man. At the time, he didn't seem like much of a threat. I was fairly confident that Donald Trump had about as much chance of becoming president as a lemur had of learning to fly an aeroplane. It looks, however, as though it may be time to invent seatbelts for lemurs, though, because The Donald is looking like a serious presidential candidate. After several years of threats, Donald Trump has finally decided to run for presidential election. I don't know…

I'm sure all of us have read a fair number of posts about the negative effects of gaming (it promotes violence and a desire to drag people out of their cars and beat them up, apparently. We kids have brains too, you know! And if you say otherwise, I'll shoot you! I saw it in a videogame!). People quite entirely ignore the positive effects of gaming in these posts. So, to counterbalance all the flak gaming's been getting, here's a little bit about the good side of gaming.  Now, I'm sure all of us have heard of this one before,…

Hello, all. I apologize for my long absence (I vanish way too regularly, don't I?). I've been a bit busy with things like my board exams. However, I am now back, although my skills (as they are) are a little rusty, and I may have a little trouble stringing together grammatically accurate sentences ("I type new blog" is a grammatically sound sentence, is it not?). Anyway, to the blog. A week or two ago, I got an internship with a startup called cookifi (http:///cookifi.com if you want to check them out). Which is great and all, but it comes with…

I don't know how many of you have ever had to switch schools in tenth grade and/or have kids who switched schools in tenth grade. If you have, I think you'll agree with me when I say that it is, in the truest sense of the word, an ordeal. For the past ten years, my academic career (OK, it's not exactly academic... let's call it my schooling) has taken place in Vidya Niketan School of Kempapura, Hebbal in Bangalore. This year, though, for reasons we need not go into, we decided that I was to switch schools. We began by…