I am just returning home from a concert by my favouritest female singer, Sissel Kyrkjebø . Am completely, hopelessly starstruck.
Mirza Ghalib often returns from the grave to tug at my heartstrings. Always at opportune moments. I’ve often discovered specific ghazals which seem to apply in their entirety to the situation I find myself in. Perhaps this is another illustration of the principal, “The more personal it is, the more...
It is hard to dislike a place where you’ve been laughing every five minutes. And eating good food. And having great conversations with random strangers. And making new friends. Where good natured ribbing, flamboyance, art, tradition and culture blend smoothly into the potpourri of life. In short, it is hard to dislike...
The last few days in Italy were a blur of activity.
To begin with, the summer school activities became more and more exciting. Two teachers from Barcelona delivered a crash course on control and realtime scheduling. They were young, funny and I wished I had them as my first control teachers. The day brought a very...
Here is a video of the Amazing Ball I worked on at the ARTIST summer school in Pisa. We modified the existing setup so that the setpoint in dynamically generated. This enabled moving the ball along a desired trajectory.
This one is dedicated to all those people who believe that I had nothing but fun in Pisa....
4 hours of sleep is not the specification I was designed for. Consequently, when the dual alarms from my mobile phones started a clamour around my head, the only thought was a faint “whhaaatt?” Half an hour later, it pierced through my foggy brain that I needed to wake up, wake up fast, and wake up now. Grumpily I fell out of bed, and silently congratulated myself for setting the alarms half an hour before I needed them.
Greetings from Pisa, Italy. I am back in the country I love so much and nothing has changed. It is still as crazy as ever and it took me all of 2 minutes to realize it.
I landed at the Galileo Galilei International Airport half an hour before midnight, walked past the baggage carousel and was out! Did I mention the airport was small? At the exit, I looked for the information service, which I found so quickly that I was pleasantly surprised. It was closed. I was not surprised.
I have stayed away from ghazals for a while now. But a jumble of recent events had me listening to “Ab ke hum bichde” by the unimitable Ahmed Faraaz. The poet knows how to pluck the right strings to trigger a silent sigh that grows into a thunderstorm of pent up sorrow. Here comes the text and a free...
When I was young, my Grandpa’s brother would always bring story books when he came a-visiting. Today many things have been forgotten and he is no more, but he stays stuck in my head as a memory: the “cool” person who’d always bring me books.