Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, “certain though he was of finding the Great Khan – and of the role he would play in the liberation of Jerusalem.” Not to spread enlightenment, as Yuval Noah Harari would have us believe in Sapiens, but on a religious mission to defeat Muslims and claim wealth for Christian Europe.

This single quote from Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Road captures exactly what frustrated me so deeply about Sapiens. Where Harari spins a neat story about European exploration driven by academic curiosity and enlightenment values, Frankopan provides the messy, complicated, properly researched truth: Columbus was a religious zealot seeking the Great Khan to fight a holy war.

We are anchored towards are own idols when solving the problem. Recently oil nations wanted to focus on clean up of plastic. Rather than reducing the use of plastic, this is because their idol is money, and each one of the involved nations was trying to make the most money for themselves.

Had the cause been anchored in the future of the planet there would have been a totally different approach to tackling the issue. Even if there are different views on the matter.

All of creation is in submission it is humans that have agency to submit or not. But what does this submission mean? Is it just mechanical obeying of some commands? If this is so then the authenticity of commands comes into question. That would mean all commands are objective and cannot(or should not) have other interpretations.

Another way to understand the idea of submission is to look at what it goes on with other creations and how they are in submission. According to my understanding we have animals that model one type of creation that are more instinctive. Static nature in the world like trees mountains and all which have another way of submission more static waiting for commands from God. And then we have angels that encompass the working of everything in the physical (seen and unseen) world. For me angels are also the little biological proteins that are constantly working in our bodies to get it functioning to every small thing in the universe, which we are yet to discover. Anything the works mechanically to keep the world and up functioning without issue are angels.

I recently saw a caterpillar in the garden and it got me thinking of its lifecycle. All it does since its birth is to eat. Eat as much as it can. And one fine day it just builds a cocoon for itself and undergoes a transformation. Out comes a butterfly. Does this caterpillar know about the existence of the butterfly?

Our life is not very different from that of the caterpillar. Here were are eating and preparing for the next. We don’t know when comes next. We just need to prepare for death. There are some hints from spiritual and religious traditions. But all we can do with that knowledge is reflect on it. Even thought it hardly makes sense to us. Just like the caterpillar.

‘Tis the season of exam grading!

Due to the pandemic, we moved all teaching online. This included exams as well. Previously, students handed in physical copies of their exams for grading. However, this year things are different, and they end up uploading a single PDF containing their solutions. I ended with 40 PDFs to sift through.

I recently found this comic here.

And now I feel called out. The following is one such classic post.

For the last five years now, I have been involved in teaching the bachelor course on Industrial Automation. The course focuses on discrete and logical control. Apart from the lectures, the course contains two projects, one based on low-level PLC programming. The other focuses on modeling high-level discrete control programmed in Java. At the end of the course, the students integrate the Java and PLC parts of the project to have an end-to-end automated system.

Over the last five years, I have been improving and tweaking the Java part to automate most technical administration. I have integrated the checking of assignments into a Continuous Testing framework using GitHub classrooms and Travis to reduce my load of correcting them. This post is intended to document that process.

Recently, I read William Dalrymple’s Age of Kali, and one particular section caught my attention.

The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than twenty-three thousand miles of railway in all. It was the biggest, and most costly, construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.

I use overleaf for all my academic and collaborative writing. However, I am not a big fan of cloud services. I would always want to have control over my data and not be dependent on external services and access to the internet for my day to day activities. Overleaf provides a good set of features for collaborative writing. And I see no easy way of avoiding it in my workflow.

An alternative way is to leverage the Git feature of overleaf to maintain and work on a local copy of the document. Additionally, this can be used to back-up the data on a Git server such as Github, Gitlab, or self-hosted Git service. The following is the guide I use to create and sync my work between GitHub and overleaf.

This was a fascinating read.

The book is a series of short essays in which Dalrymple shares his experience as he travels across India as a journalist. Sort of like a Behind-The-Scenes of journalism. The underlying theme of all the essays points towards society’s decadence.

Having been a child of the ’90s and reading this book in 2020 was like looking at a snapshot of life back then and allowing me cognizance of the language and symbols referenced in the book. Furthermore, taking the book as a reference and looking at the present, one can undoubtedly see “the age of Kali” all around us.

I declare Dot Emacs Bankruptcy.

Over the last few years, I have moved my complete digital life into plaintext. The idea is to store all data as simple text that can be accessed and edited by any text editor. This plaintext data can then be used with other analysis/rendering tools.

Malcolm was a man of his time, shaped by the society he lived in. What is most remarkable about him is his eagerness to evolve himself. When in prison, he read everything he could lay his hand on developing his beliefs and philosophies. After prison, he spent the next 12 years in dedicating his life to the Nation of Islam, towards transforming the lives of his Afro-American brothers using the philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, as it had once transformed him. During this time, he fought and blamed all Whites for the current condition of the Black community. When he finally broke away from the Nation of Islam and traveled the world, he soon came to see beyond racial lines and then became a staunch human rights activist.

In a world plagued with misinformation, alternate facts, and whitewashed histories, William Dalrymple has done a fantastic job presenting a much needed nuanced picture of history/politics in the 18th century India. Today, the colonization of India is either glorified as a blessing or spoken as evil, depending on whom one talks to, while the Mughal rule is looked upon as evil. In this book, Dalrymple presents a nuanced history of the time, showing the politics that were played out, eventually giving rise to the British colonial project in India.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind/ by Yuval Noah Harari, aims to “..explore[s] the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be ‘human.’” A rather ambitious goal to fit in less than 500 pages.

As of this day, it has been almost six years since I left India to Sweden. A lot has happened in these years.

I accomplished what I came here for – obtained a Masters degree; started a Ph.D. in automation in which I have crossed the halfway mark and successfully defended my licentiate; started a relationship and upgraded it to a marriage – with a wonderful person and not my thesis!. More importantly, these years in Sweden have transformed me, at a very basic level, in more ways than I can imagine. I find it hard to locate one or more English words in my vocabulary to even express the extent to what has changed in me. If I am allowed to borrow a word from Urdu, I would say it is my ‘adaab’¹ that has changed or rather evolved.

The following essay was written as part of a course I took up. The course was titled “Sustainable Development: Values, Technology in Society, and the Researcher”. It broadly gave an overview on the ethical and sustainable framework that has been developed over the last few years and the debates present within. The participants to the course came from different research fields and hence the course too was kept as broad as possible. I can be certain that the following essay is not completely accurate and only presents my views and reflections that were a result of this 3 day course.

Currently, I am reading the book India: A history by John Keay. Some may argue the book must be called South Asia: A history, but by the end of this post I believe you will realize why India is more apt a name 😀 . To describe its contents in one line: 5000 years of rich Indian history compressed into 700 pages of well researched, authoritative narrative tracing the evolution of its culture, religions, and peoples.

Its always fun to learn and implement new technologies. Travis-CI a FOSS for continuous integration and deployment, is one such tool I always wanted to learn. Finally, today, I did get some motivation to get started with Travis to auto build and deploy a paper I am currently writing in LaTex.

The code is hosted on Github within a private repository, Travis pro provides access to build, test and deploy from private repositories.

Installing Travis

Run the following commands to install and setup Travis-cli which will help auto-generation of configuration file .travis.yml. This file can also be created without the tool, auto generation always makes life easy.

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, an excellent piece of research into the time that, in many ways gave birth to the nationalist movement in India. The book recreates the one of the largest mutinies of the modern word, the 1857 uprising. Starting from the events that led to the uprising, the book covers in detail, both sides of the story. Using both European as well as Indian sources, translating the mutiny papers for almost the first time.