In Lighter Whine

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…

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…

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…

This week, I intend to have a stab at one of the most difficult tasks known to mankind: persuading an adult to part with a sum of money. Not a very large sum, but a sum nonetheless. This New Year's Day, I want to buy burgers, fries and a drink from McDonald's, for 1000 kids in orphanages around the city. And that, unfortunately, costs money. The first thing you'd wonder is probably, "Why McDonald's burgers?" Well, the thing is, I've worked at an orphanage before, and I remember that the kids at the orphanage really loved the burgers. I, like…

When you saw a teenager glued to a video game, did you think, "That kid is going to make seven million bucks!" That's what people like Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) and Sean McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye) are making today. They play video games all day and then upload videos of themselves playing to the internet. And you thought playing video games was a waste of time, didn't you? What these guys do isn't easy, by the way - getting subscribers is probably the hardest thing on earth. Editing eight-minute-videos to make them fun to watch for us—the average attention span is probably about…

What will it take to accept people for who they are? Image Courtesy: www.facebook.com/TRRAIN Have you ever noticed how we Indians tend to accuse everyone else of being racist while conveniently ignoring our very own narrow-mindedness? As a true-blue Kannadiga, the most obvious form of racism that I see, is in the insult, “Ay, AK nan magane!”, where AK is short for 'Adi-Kannadiga'. Adi-Kannadigas, for those of you not in the know, are the original inhabitants of this state. Thanks to the urbanisation of the other castes, they are considered less sophisticated. Hence, the insult. We begin with the TV…