Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

I've a bit of a confession to make: I still play Minecraft off and on (I can hear all the hardcore gamers laughing from here). I even quite enjoy playing it. For those of you who don't know, Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build structures in an infinite, 3D world. Basically, it's a discount LEGO set for computer-literate people. Much like legos, if you play it after you turn twelve, people assume that you're mentally incapable of dealing with anything more complex. I hate the idea that you become to old to play a certain video game. Unless something involves physical activity that'd be impossible to perform once you cross a certain age, I don't see why it should be age-restricted. I'm seventeen years old, and if I want to spend a night binge-watching Tom and Jerry and consuming obscene quantities of potato chips, that's my god-given right! I think people tend to assume that Minecraft is a simple game. Once you've built a squattish,

First off, I'd like to apologise for my (latest) absence from the blogging scene. Exams, studying and my own laziness have conspired to keep me from writing for nearly a month - but no longer! Writing this post, in particular, is really painful for me. Not because of the subject matter, or because writing posts requires me to constantly bludgeon my poor, uncooperative brain for ideas - although at least one of those is a factor - but because I just joined the gym again, and my trainer seems to have no intention whatsoever of going easy on me until I get back into the swing of things. On Monday, I had an arm workout. Today is Friday, and my eyes still well with tears every time I try to stretch my elbows. It's not even a one-time thing. Every time I come home from a workout, some part of my body is incredibly sore. Honestly, sometimes I think the only thing keeping me regular to the gym is some inherent masochistic streak. The funny thing is that I don't mind it hurtin

I don't know if you know this, but I love to cook. Like, love to the point where I'm not allowed in the kitchen during exam season because it's too distracting. I suspect that it's got something to do with the fact that I love to eat, and if you want to eat food that you like, it tends to help if you know how to make it. The real challenge with cooking isn't really the actual cooking - that's the easy part. No, the hard part is finding something to cook. The problem is that I have a device with internet access, and that means I have access to a virtually infinite recipe pool with recipes of widely varying quality. My solution to all this is to find people - YouTube chefs, Taste.com writers - whose recipes tend to turn out well. Of all the recipes I've pulled off the internet, though, my favourite has to be this one seriously excessive bruschetta recipe from Gennaro Contaldo. Generic bruschetta for copyright reasons The recipe is from a video on You

As anyone currently in the twelfth will tell you, with varying levels of dismay, the final exams are right around the corner. Parents everywhere are seizing their children's phones and taking time off from work. Panicked screaming ensues at intervals. I don't believe there's a person on the planet who genuinely enjoys exam season. Actually, I take that back - there's no one in India  who enjoys exam season. Partially, I think this is our own fault. Exams are the most important things in an Indian student's life, so parents seem bent on bottling up all the worry and concern they have about their kid's education and allowing it to spew forth in a torrent of "No more video games!" and "Delete WhatsApp!" commands during the two months surrounding the exams. Small wonder, then, that at 17, I believe the purpose of exams is to seasonally blot the sunshine from otherwise happy lives. This whole exam fever thing does have some upsides. Okay,

There's an interesting concept that's gotten a lot of traction over the past couple of years called "meta learning".  It's a term coined by one Donald B. Maudsley, who defined it as "the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized". Translated from Sciencese, Maudsley is talking about how we figure out ways to become more efficient at learning new information. HR managers (you know, those overpaid dimwits you complain to about your coworker stealing your lunch?) like to call it "learnability". Most people with real jobs don't call it anything at all. In reality, though, it's an extremely useful thing to understand, together with the techniques you would use to get good at it. Myself, I'm a decent-ish learner. Mostly, that's because I've had to learn things on my own quite often - I had to teach myself web design,

I don't know how many people know this, but I love food. I love food rather more than is healthy, as a matter of fact - I'm far too often guilty of emptying an entire bag of chips over the course of a couple of hours. Because I come from an Iyengari household, where the question "What should we have for dinner?" has only two possible answers - chappati or rice - I've also had to learn to cook. That's okay, though, because I love cooking. My love for cooking began when I was six or seven years old. I used to spend all my time hanging out with my grandmother, and it's from her that I inherited my love of cooking. I'd follow her everywhere she went, and a large component of "everywhere she went" was the kitchen. I'd follow her there too and chat with her, in my usual garrulous fashion. Aside from the occasional admonishment to stand back when she was lighting the stove or dropping something into oil, she let me stand right next to her whil