Abhishek Sundararajan

A few years ago I tried listening to Dainin Katagiri's lectures on Apple Podcasts.

I finished 37 books so far this year.

Quick script to build and deploy a Zola site to Netlify.

I love me some civil war histories, and it had been a while since I last read one.

Some commenting frameworks for static site generators.

Moved this blog to Zola on a whim.

Article: Food that can spike your blood sugar And that in turn leads to metabolic dysfunction.

I have used Apple Notes before for note-taking and Scrivener for journaling.

A few reminders from across the centuries about anticipatory worrying, a state that's not unfamiliar to me.

I am not talking about a professional one, the one that's expected of you at work.

This is the most I have written publicly in any year.

Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years Author: David Graeber In this ambitious book, Graeber - anthropologist, anarchist and polemicist - makes a case for debt as the primary mover of civilizations.

I thought I knew love.

While looking into understanding the Dvaya Mantra, meditation on which is regarded by the eleventh century theologian Ramanuja as one of the duties of a Vaishnava, I came across this wonderful paper by Fancis X Clooney.

Some notes from SM Srinivasa Chari's Vaishnavism: Its Philosophy, Theology and Religious Discipline.

Book: The House of Kanooru Author: Kuvempu This is a fantastic bildungsroman set in the hill country of Southern Karnataka.

Listen to the entirety of Dharma and follow its injunctions.

Book: The Power And The Glory Author: Graham Greene I couldn't help but think of parallels to state control over religion in India around the same time period as this book.

Book: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Author: Stephen Covey I re-visited Stephen Covey's Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People (SHHEP) recently thanks to its availability on Prime Reading.

An examination of the past self, a stranger who one is intimately familiar with and yet whom one cannot identify with.

Thanks to daily deals on Amazon, I discovered two Mary Oliver books that I otherwise wouldn't have purchased at full price1.

Book: God is Dead, There is no God: The Vachanas of Allama Prabhu Author: Manu Devadevan Manu Devadevan's translations of a selection of Allama Prabhu comes with a long introduction to the Bhakti poets of the Kannada region.

Reaching, stretching, screaming, looking, listening, dancing, To watch a little one express herself in the world, this absorption, is this what they call bliss?

He's ahead of me on the path next to his house, waddling furiously on his tricycle.

Book: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo Author: Peter Heehs Aurobindo was active in the Indian public life from the years 1906 to 1910.

Slava Akhmechet suggests that reading five books on a topic can make you as close to well-informed as anything can.

Book: Rural Society in Southeast India Author: Kathleen Gough This is a fascinating ethnographic study of two very rural, small villages in Thanjavur from early 1950s, one Brahmin dominated and the other mainly Non-Brahmin.

Summary A deep dive into values for therapists who specialize in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Summary Thanks to a reading group at work I finally got through this book after starting and putting it off multiple times these past six years.

When presented with a programming puzzle, some tools to consider.

Chapter 1: Foundations Scalability, Reliability and Maintainability Reliability: continuing to work correctly, even when things go wrong.

To group related content on your jekyll site, use collections.

Article: All news is bad news I need to remind myself every once in a while that news is not optimized to educate, but to entertain, and I shouldn't use it to construct a model of the world.

I recently found myself working with some new graduates and helping them through a debugging process.

Get your token from here.

I am currently reading David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity where he proposes a test for judging claims explaining nature of consciousness: If you cannot program it, you haven't understood it.

Book: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Author: David Reich The past two decades have seen a revolution in population genetics, in no small part due to David Reich's work at Harvard.

Book: Perfect Clarity: A Tibetan Buddhist Anthology of Mahamudra and Dzogchen Translated By: Erik Pema Kunsang Compiled By: Marcia Schmidt This book is a collection of carefully selected excerpts from the works of various Tibetan masters from the last tho…

I migrated this site, on a whim, to Jekyll and now it is deployed via Netlify, with the data on github.

Pema Karpo, 16th century Tibetan teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism: Don’t reflect on the past.

The Mughal empire is usually described from the perspective of a modern state.

Some excerpts from this interesting interview, recorded in 2009.

A list of things that I am conscious of having contributed to my world-view.

Book: The Era of Baji Rao: An Account of the Empire of the Deccan Author: Uday S Kulkarni Most Indian history books are written by partisans, including many of the pop-academic ones.

Books I own that I hope to get to someday.

Book: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, 700 CE - 1800 CE Author: Andre Wink Johnson's 1866 map of the Indian Subcontinent Al-hind, named as such in Arabic geographical and navigational works, corresponds to the regions encompassing present-day Indian…

Book: Ramayana, A Modern Retelling Author: Ramesh Menon It is said that in India you never read the Ramayana or Mahabharata for the first time.

Book: Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement Author: John Stratton Hawley Hawley, a professor of religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, contests the idea of a Bhakti “movement” .

Summary Writing is an aid to thinking.

From this interview of Dr.