Weekly Notes 28/2023
I am disappointed by my generation (or maybe just by myself) of Indian engineers. We got the best opportunities, with the world opening to us in the 90s, and we made the most of it. Yet we watched riots, communalization, discriminating laws, and inequality; grow daily, as though it's a fictional series running on TV. We did nothing substantial to stop it or slow it down. Sometimes I can't imagine where we will be in the next 20 years. I hope we won't be an utter failure. I am generally a naive optimist, and now you can see how much this thought hurts me.
- I updated Bangalore's Miltary Hotels map. Now a geojson file is also available for download if you want to access it offline or on your favorite map app.
- I added a Prompt page showing a random prompt for my nephew and niece to do things. Anyone can use it to do fun somethings when they have free time. There is no upper age limit. It was just a list of writing prompts before. Now it's writing, reading, watching, doing, or making prompts with details like age and category. The prompts project page is here, which shows like I said, a random prompt to work on. It should work on mobile too.
- Surveillance in Bengaluru has picked up speed again. I wrote a blog post about getting the list of actual contributors. It might be fun to have a leaderboard at some point, but I am not sure yet.
- The Public Archives of news articles that were source material for building the #covid19India lockdown/non-virus deaths database in India is live now. You can browse the reports now. It's hosted on render.com using their free tier. It's deployed from Github datameet/covid19_stories_archive repo. The archive itself was built using the ArchiveBox project.
- I met college friends after a long time at District 6, returning to District 6 after more than five years. Then we went to Geist.
- All transfers to NMG/2023 Grantees are done. If you are one of them, congratulations and all the very best.
I share some of your despair that the educated community in general is doing less in India. I read your thoughts that engineers should read the Constitution. I believe that Engineers should be exposed to arts and humanities – otherwise, riots will remain a fictional movie that they watch from behind glass buildings. What other things do you think should engineers do to change this?
Arts and humanities should be part of every branch of education, just like the Constitution should be part of every branch. I can speak more about engineering because I am one.
History, in general, philosophy, and logic are the other things that we would need. Otherwise, we will end up doing it.
Here is the previous conversation that might help.