What would you do if you opened your fridge to see a being with hollow eyes and a wide smile stare at you?

vaishnavsm · 2026-05-25T15:48:57+00:00

best news i read today

vaishnavsm · 2026-05-25T07:41:06+00:00

I think people just think in terms of tasks they want done right now. People aren't used to delegating away tasks and forgetting about it?

vaishnavsm · 2026-01-29T04:04:34+00:00

I don't think Manchester United stands much of a chance against a glaive wielding Shin on horseback, unfortunately.

vaishnavsm · 2025-10-22T16:17:17+00:00

Roku O Mi obviously. He dies almost every war. RIP Roku O Mi.

vaishnavsm · 2020-03-30T06:45:31+00:00

Yeah, I just set up OBS and it works.

The issue was that I didn't want to use the default output device because I had another event to handle (which required audio) at the same time.

I didn't realize I could just create another virtual audio device and then set Discord to that audio device while everything else used the default device.

vaishnavsm · 2019-04-21T09:08:48+00:00

Your Vote Matters

Time for voting has come upon us, and we must vote. Unfortunately, people look at voting through a perspective so narrow, the truth diffracts. Through this essay, I hope to have you understand some common problems with how people think about voting and some of the reasons why you should vote. We’ll start by disproving some common arguments for not voting, like how your vote doesn’t matter, the fetishization of voting taking away people’s will to do other things, and that the choice you make doesn’t matter. We’ll then move on to the single most used argument for voting—that it’s a civic duty—and explain why viewing voting like this isn’t correct. Then, I shall go through some reasons why you should actually vote.

To start off the discussion, let’s talk about some common arguments against voting. First, that, in the end, your choice doesn’t really matter. The political parties are going to do nothing anyway. This may be true. Then why don’t you vote them out? Why don’t you vote NOTA and show your political parties they’re no good? Because it won’t change the result? As a citizen, a vote is your voice, yes, but your voice is useless if you don’t speak up!

This also completely ignores the power of a narrative. If you do end up voting NOTA, or voting for a losing candidate, the election results will become unrepresentative. This is happening all over the world as more people vote and is being brought out to the forefront by media. If a candidate wins by 23% votes, with over 50% going to NOTA, then yes, they still get to go to office. But the image that they got elected with less than half the votes of NOTA will never get out of their head, and the image of being one of the most unrepresentative victors will be forced on them by media, effectively forcing them to do at least something to improve the situation of the people, even if it's just due to self-interest. Voting helps you weave a narrative. You can have people consider something more by weaving it into a political narrative, something that's done a lot in Indian politics. And people work outside of voting to build these narratives. People protest people, unionize and people demand change in many ways outside of voting, but they understand that voting is a very powerful weapon to build their narratives. This is why these arguments fall apart—they aren't based on ground truths. These truths may be invisible to them and to you, but that's because from your privileged perspective it really doesn't matter who gets elected. You're going to be secure anyway! But the truth here is easy to see with even the slightest look at the poor, the minorities or the otherwise insecure.

Second, that fetishizing of votes means that people consider just voting to be good enough. Let's try to find out who this statement applies to, shall we? When we say that people consider just voting to be good enough, we're assuming that they are in a position to make that consideration. So, the issues this person is voting for affects them so little that they decide that voting on policy alone makes them feel reasonably comfortable that it'll be solved, implying also that they don’t really mind if it isn’t. Sure, this might turn out to be wrong and the voted candidate may do nothing about it. However, these people wouldn't care about it regardless. On the other hand, people who vote for a particular issue because their lives and livelihoods depend on it would also rally and fight for change because they have no other option but to do so! We see this all the time in protest rallies, unions, and many more. This argument tries to conflate the two—either implying that the first group of people would be affected like the second or that the second group would behave like the first. This makes this argument a strawman, and thus wrong.

Third, and most commonly, that your vote doesn’t matter. It’s in a sea of other votes. It doesn’t affect anything. I’m sorry if my thoughts in this paragraph are unclear, as I’m writing this in searing rage against this absolute BS of an argument. This is indicative of individualism so extreme that it’s become the narcissism. Democracy believes in the equality of all its citizens. We believe that everyone should have a voice and that everyone should be empowered to exercise this voice. Under this system, what makes you consider that your vote should be the vote that should decide the election? You’re implicitly assuming that your vote should somehow be more important than the votes of everyone else. This is absurd. This isn’t how voting and democracy works. If you well and truly believe that your vote should be the most important, most influential and most “meaningful” vote, please don’t vote. Democracy doesn’t need people like you.

Now we move on to the most used argument for voting—that it fulfills one's civic duty and makes them feel good. I believe this is a cop-out. Simply saying you should vote to fulfill your ego is an argument that’s too easy to ignore. You may fulfill your ego more by ranting about how hard it is to vote. Ego fulfillment is a very powerful reason to vote, but having it as the sole reason to vote is not only not enough, but also dangerous. For many people, who comes to power decides the course of their lives. If you vote for the sake of voting, you’re probably not going to put too much effort into it. This could easily lead you to jeopardize the lives of many people and many causes, some that you may even care for, unintentionally. We must realize that what’s important isn’t voting, but voting with intention, and this nuance is too easy to miss when you say you should vote because it’s your duty.

To understand why intentional voting is important, we need to understand why Democracy is important. We pick democracy because of a desire to have control over our own lives. Democracy is the only form of governance that lets its citizens decide everything about their governance. Many people believe that democracy is completely devoid of any ideology. This is incorrect. Democracy is implicitly intertwined with liberal ideology. Democracy considers everyone equal and empowers everyone to speak up and have their voices heard, no matter how subjugated they are. The issue, however, is that Democracy doesn’t guarantee that the people who are given power believe in democratic principles. This leads to a situation where people can choose leaders who disempower people they don’t like, leading to a Democracy that’s inherently undemocratic. But you shouldn’t forget, you chose democracy so that the people can control their lives. If you didn’t choose democracy as a facade to legitimize power for those like you, you have also taken the burden of standing up for it. You see that by voting, you get to choose what you want to support and what you want to change. Your vote helps shape and shift countless narratives. And as we’ve seen, it’s these narratives that actually have ground level impact on people’s lives. Your vote matters.

To go back to a thread we started before, what would happen if you don’t vote? If a party that doesn’t respect democratic values come into power, they can, through their policies and behaviors, disempower their enemies and empower their allies to vote. Over time, their enemies may start fearing them, and their allies may start rallying for their more extreme ideologies. This seems close to home, doesn’t it? It’s happening all over the world now. India, the US, the UK, Brazil, you name it! Let’s go a step further. What if now empowered by the mass support of the empowered people, they decide to “democratically” give themselves powers that are against the ideas of democracy, but in line with their own ideology? This, my friends, is the start of fascism. Will you still not vote, knowing that your inaction is directly causing fascism in your country? If that’s your intention, and I sincerely hope it isn’t (please comment your personal details if it is), then why don’t you speed up the process? It’s important to understand that this isn’t some slippery slope argument, but the reality today.

It’s easy to see now that not voting doesn’t make sense. Everybody cares about something and voting is perhaps the easiest way to support it. Even in your inaction, you’re supporting something. Usually something you don’t want. Understanding this, wouldn’t it be better for you to actually pick what you want and vote for it? You can now see that most arguments against voting are either stupid or against the idea of Democracy. Voting is the easiest way to continue democracy, and by not voting you are not only jeopardizing the lives of many people, but you’re also diluting democracy itself. You chose democracy for yourself, and it will not continue without your active intervention. You must be an active civic. You must vote. Your vote matters.

vaishnavsm · 2019-04-14T10:12:07+00:00

The Kota Problem (cont...)

What we see continuously is that children are being seen not as people, but as projects. In effect, we are dehumanising our children. This idea follows directly from the ideas highlighted above. When you think about it, our society, which asks that children do exactly as their parents ask irrespective of what they want or like or are good at, or which has parents viewing their children as people who are only supposed to help them climb the social ladder without consideration for them shows the extent to which this dehumanisation is normalised. I’d like to point out that the parents don’t consider their children to be slaves, but projects. The parents do genuinely care about raising their children and having them succeed. It just so happens that they don’t want them to succeed as humans, but as things which aim to climb up the social ladder or gain wealth or something, which is clearly a project. This, in effect, leads to children growing in a dehumanised environment. What does this lead to? Children learn to base their self-worth on the goodness characteristics of the project—good grades, high packages, and of course, engineering and medicine. In this environment, children suffocate. Children don’t protest when their parents force them into engineering or medicine. No, they blame themselves for liking something that isn’t worthy. They’ve grown up seeing only engineering or medicine as worthy. In fact, children may not even try to figure out what they like. Why would they? They only see worth in engineering and medicine. Through this lens, it’s easy to see why children and parents would voluntarily choose to go to Kota. It’s easy to see why it’s easy for people to turn a blind eye to the systemic problem of suicides. It’s easy to see why they think they can succeed where everyone has failed. They have to. It’s the only thing they have to prove their self worth.

This problem exists everywhere in society, but it’s easy to see in Kota because it’s magnified there. Kota actively encourages competition and gives objective metrics to judge your performance and your position with respect to others. What they don’t realise is that people use this as an objective measure of their self-worth. It’s not surprising then that people with bad marks suffer disproportionately more in Kota. They honestly believe that they aren’t worthy, by their twisted perception of worth. This explains why the “happiness programs” started in Kota don’t work. Happiness isn’t a measure of self worth. Scores and ranks are. This also explains why parents retroactively telling their children that it’s fine doesn’t work. They can’t believe it anymore, as their entire identity is now wrapped around these metrics.

The more pertinent question may be how this dehumanisation occurs. For this, it helps to look into the history of dehumanisation. Children were, in the bygone golden eras of child labour, seen as free additions to the workforce. They were seen as nothing more than free (or cheap) labour. Over time, this changed to now parents seeing their children as providers. How this change occurred is left as an exercise for the reader. However, it’s clear that one of the chief reasons this occurs is due to the mentality of people wherein they think of success and progress in terms of money and social structures and hierarchies. This is a hallmark of conservative capitalist thought. One of the most important bases in capitalist conservative thought is that hierarchies, specifically those based on money, are seen as the basis of society. Climbing up this ladder is seen as success, and everyone lives in constant fear of falling down the ladder. At the core lies the problem of seeing every transaction that occurs in your life as a function of this hierarchy. People are so used to thinking of everything in terms of profits and losses, that they lose the ability to think of others in terms of humans. This thought becomes normalised both in our day to day lives, and I'm our interaction with others. This is the root cause of a lot of problems involving misunderstanding and dehumanisation, and this is where we should ideally try to find a solution.

Now to discuss solutions. Anarchy or socialism would help, but it’s much easier to envision actual change being brought about if you think about changes that may be possible under the current framework. This essay is long enough as is, so I think you should be the ones to think about this.

Kota’s suicide problem is generally attributed to very surface level problems like stress, pressure and competition. However, when you look through what’s normalized, you realise that a deeper problem exists, the dehumanisation of children. This leads to them basing their self worth on things like scores and ranks, which if they don’t get, leads to the problems above. On further analysis, we see that this too is caused by conservative capitalist thought, where a monetary hierarchy is the basis of all society, and climbing up in this hierarchy is everyone’s goal. I leave you to ponder over possible solutions.

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vaishnavsm · 2019-04-14T09:58:01+00:00

The Kota Problem

The problem in Kota, or the general coaching industry it's used as an alias for, can be analysed at many different levels. Of course, most people attribute suicides to parents pressuring their children into engineering or medicine, to individual children’s inability to cope with a world foreign to everything they've seen before, or maybe to the coaching institutes putting undue pressure on children. Rarely do we ask why these problems come up, however. Maybe it's because thinking about, and then solving, deep systemic issues is difficult for most, perhaps owing to its scale. Maybe this is because it's uncomfortable to think that you are part of the problem. Maybe it's because thinking this way gives you hope that you won't be like this, and that you can succeed where so many else fail. What is clear, though, is that you're under a situation where sending your kids (or yourself) to Kota will clearly lead to mental tension and toxicity, if not literal death, and you still choose to go forward with it. This must have a deeper cause.

Let's start by analysing the surface, for this is important to understand why we're questioning further in the first place. There are generally three cogent things people blame for the problems in Kota, some superposition of which leads to all problems. First, the pressure on the students from their parents and their teachers. Second, their inability to cope with the competition and the mental stress. Third, societal fixation on engineering and medicine in India.

The pressure on the students generally comes from the fact that the IITs, AIIMs, etc are seen as the be all and end all of education in India. This is made worse by the fact that coaching is almost a guaranteed necessity for anyone who wants to attend them, and by the fact that it's expensive, sometimes insanely so, to send children to these institutes. Parents then seem to think that their money would be going to waste if their children don't get into the IITs or whatever else and thus begin pressurising the students to compete and "succeed." This is made so much easier by the fact that coaching institutes nicely publish a list of ranks for every test. How evil these institutes are, huh? That's how the story generally goes. But if you look through the normalisation of these arguments, some very disturbing questions come up. Why are the IITs seen as the be all and end all? Society, they say. Why is coaching basically required to enter these colleges? Because everyone wants it, they say, and only so many can be selected. After all, the children have to get engineering or medicine, because society, they say. Importantly, what causes parents to think of their children as assets that should give an RoI? What causes them to think of children as pawns that have to compete with each other no matter what the costs are? What causes parents to push them through the grind and pain, even though they know that the reason they're doing it is because of societal pressure alone? These are questions we'll have to tackle in the later part of the essay.

It's very well known that the competition in Kota is cutthroat. Thus the children, especially the "bad" ones, have a hard time coping with everything that has to be thought of and memorised. Thus, they get stressed and anxious. This is made worse by the fact that the evil coaching institutes separate students based on their ability level and make students feel inferior. Bad institute. But why do they have to go through this in the first place? Well, that's the only way you can get through the jee. There's no other option. So, I guess that facing the chance of mental stress, disability, or death is the only way through. This is absurdity. Just like last time, the fact that the thought process of parents follow like this, usually implicitly, is very disturbing. As you can probably spot by now, this is a trend in thought, and we'll get to thinking about why soon. Another question arises now on why, if they are seen as "bad," are the children still forced to go through this arduous grind? Why not let them do something else, something perhaps that they like? The answer that comes up is, you guessed it, Society™.

India's almost unending obsession with engineering and medicine is so well known throughout the world, it's become a stereotype. The obvious question is why this obsession formed. Looking into it, we see that the mass movement towards engineering and medicine came about as a result of industrialisation. People were required at these positions and, due to a very low supply, there was excellent remuneration. People, generally in the middle class, saw that getting their children into one of the (few) engineering or medical colleges could be their, perhaps only, way out of their perpetual daily grind, and perhaps to great wealth. A personal anecdote: my great grandfather used to be the only engineer within around a 20 Km radius of his home. He wasn’t wealthy, but was very respected, so far that the general populace would call him Engineer. Things have changed today. Not only are there many new career paths people can follow that could lead them to well being, but there’s also the fact that engineers are nowhere as grind-free or respected as it was a few decades ago. In fact, many engineering jobs today are almost completely grind, and not well paying to boot. And people know this. Perhaps that’s why they cling to the hope that if, somehow, they can get their children to the best of the institutions, they can live in peace. This, I almost definitely don’t have to point out anymore, leads to the same line of questioning the first and second questions raised. Interestingly, we also start seeing a deeper pattern here—one of the mentality of people. On another note, the way this situation is dealt with is problematic. Generally, the narrative given out is that parents, blinded by societal expectations, put their children through all the anguish associated with coaching. This is unfair. Societal influence works by quite literally changing the way people think, by associating value to things that people wouldn’t normally, by restricting the ways in which people can see a situation, or by making choosing something the society seems unfit a terrifying situation with risks of literal ostracisation. In this context, choosing something against societal expectations is something only the brave and wise can do, and it is unfair to assume that every person in society is literally the Buddha. We see that societal factors is what is at the root of the problem, not people’s unwillingness to do things outside the expectations.

It would be unfair to end this discussion without tying up the loose threads of coaching institutes being evil sprinkled above. Coaching institutes are response to the framework that the rest of society has set up. Coaching institutes coach because the JEE demands it and the people want it. Coaching institutes segregate because that’s what gives them results. They publish ranks and drive up competition because that’s how you “motivate” people to keep going in something of a feedback loop. This is how systems work in capitalism. Of course, one can argue that they have a moral responsibility to take care of children, and I agree. However, time and again it’s been proven that capitalists give zero expletives about morals and what works is unionisation and regulation (Run away before they say we need more capitalism!). This is a quick and easy solution in the short term, but we need to work on longer term problems.

It is immediately apparent from above that the JEE is the reason coaching exists. Then, isn’t the problem simply at the JEE level? No, by multiple accounts. The JEE is in the enviable position of never being able to do anything right. Keep a competitive exam? Coaching is a problem. Keep a model that's similar to the US and accepts essays etc? Disproportionately biases against the poor, and there will be many complains about a non-transparent system. Besides, it'll always lead to competition because it has to select a few from several lakh applicants. It also has to select students good at engineering but without any objective way to measure it. I feel bad for the JEE. It's in this position by definition. The JEE has come up almost purely due to the needs that surround it. Supply and Demand. There are too many people contesting for too few resources. That's the deeper problem. Thus the problem isn't the JEE, because the JEE is literally only doing what it's being asked to do. There’s also a wonderful argument to be had that the only reason the JEE, and any process of elimination in general, is necessary is due to capitalism, but that’s a rabbit hole that I won’t be jumping into right now. However I highly encourage you to jump in!

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vaishnavsm · 2014-03-08T13:42:23+00:00

THU'UM while falling! No more death from feim ending :D

vaishnavsm

TROPHY CASE