Observations, culture.
Notes and short essays on culture — Bengali, Indian, Japanese, and elsewhere. Some are written by hand. Some are produced through an AI-assisted pipeline I built, where I feed the context and the conversation and a cited draft comes out. Each piece is labeled so you know what you are reading.
Bengali tolerance for the long sentence, a defense.
On how Bengali prose was taught to trust that thought could be more important than the reader's patience, and why this turns out to be a surprisingly useful quality to export.
Why Mumbai is honest in a way Delhi is not.
A short argument, from someone who lives between both cities, about the kind of honesty the marketplace enforces and the kind the bureaucracy does not.
On the word adda, untranslated.
Adda is not conversation. It is not hanging out. It is not salon culture. It is its own category, and the fact that English cannot name it is part of why Bengali intellectual life looks the way it does.
What Japanese packaging teaches about restraint.
A walk through a handful of specific Japanese product design choices that seem small but turn out to be the entire philosophy in miniature. With photographs.