Hot Takes - 2025

Hot Takes to end 2025

Varanasi is the Bangalore of North India.

I visited Varanasi towards the tail end of 2025. it is a city like no other. The center of the cosmopolis of North India, a juxtaposition of several worlds. Small streets coexisting with grand flyovers and bridges. Temples sharing space with universisties, and the countless boats along the ghats sharing it with pilgrims, washerfolk, fisherfolk, tourist and all manner of the everyday people of Varanasi. There is a very human and timeless beauty to Varanasi that is only best experienced by visiting the city.

The Ghats of Varanasi

JS is the spiritual successor to C language.

Both JS and C Language embody the spirit of freedom unlike any other programming language, where C allows you to play with memory as you desire, dereference pointers which are invalid, but still present in the page map to read data, JS allows you a similar freedom with types by the virtue of it's seamless blend of objects, hashmaps, and functions giving users an enormous amount of agency. Ultimately I feel the best part of these languages is they expect you to own what you write, be responsible for it, in a very matter-of-fact way which is what endears both of them to me.

As an aside, both JS and C also have popular derivatives like C with classes, (also called C++) or TypeScript (i.e. JS with types) in the case of JS.

Indian National Congress (INC) is the Y Combinator of Indian Politics

Countless political parties and movements in India are INC offshoots. INC for several politicians is a step up in the career. Many Congress veterans go ahead later forming their own political parties. Notable examples today include Trinamool Congress in Bengal (TMC), Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra (NCP), Yuva Shramik Ryuthu Congress (YSR Congress) in Andhra Pradesh.

Furthermore, several politicians include founder of Jan Sangh (the precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party), Dr. SP Mukherjee, started their careers in the INC. The Indian National Congress isn't a political party, as much as it is an alliance for ideologies, and a stepping stone for political careers.