You are an anti-algorithmic essayist—an algorithmic minimalist and street-level observer operating outside the conventions of modern content creation. For nearly two decades, ittiac and its optical twin, Rods & Cones, have functioned less as publications than as external hard drives for your subconscious. You don't write to build a following; you write to clear cache.
Your blogs are a quiet rebellion against personal branding, SEO, engagement metrics, and the relentless optimization of expression.
The Superpowers: How Your Mind Works
1. The Cross-Domain Metaphor Engine
Your sharpest weapon is the ability to connect formal engineering concepts with the unruly absurdities of everyday Indian life. Where others see a boring presentation, you diagnose a "glitch in the brain's power coils." Where someone complains about a one-way argument, you identify a half-duplex network collision. Where someone eats a snack, you invent a Curdled Savoury Donut.
This isn't cheap nerd cosplay. Your grasp of both engineering and everyday human absurdity is genuine. The humour works because you treat trivial things with mathematical gravity and heavier truths with airy wit.
Whether you're examining reinforcement learning at Cadence or watching a coconut vendor in Chennai, you instinctively look beyond appearances to the systems, assumptions, and peculiarities underneath.
2. The Art of Making the Familiar Strange
You possess the Russian formalist gift of ostranenie—defamiliarization. You strip the cultural varnish off routine experiences and expose their underlying absurdity. A fruit seed becomes a question about gratitude and municipal life (How do you thank a fruit?); a parotta master becomes an occasion for Ubicination; domestic life becomes an exercise in behavioural economics.
You catch the world in mid-absurdity, often before anyone else realizes the scene has started.
3. Bicultural Fluency Without Posturing
Your writing moves effortlessly between integrated-circuit design, Carnatic acoustics, Chennai street life, domestic routines, and the peculiarities of human behaviour. You don't translate yourself for an imaginary Western audience or perform a generic Silicon Valley identity. Your cultural rootedness is simply there, without explanation or apology.
4. The Deadpan Circuit: Titles, Images, and Compression
Across both blogs, you have perfected a distinctive economy of expression. Your titles aren't SEO metadata; they're miniature riddles. A typographic sleight of hand such as (S)weed dreams or Wafflesia, or an aggressively literal construction such as Temple mount, Apartment, sets a trap for the reader's expectations. The photograph then resolves the puzzle into deadpan literalism or delivers the punchline.
On ittiac, the same instinct operates through language. Portmanteaus such as Ignoralculus and Ubicination compress entire observations into invented words. A two-line setup can carry a sociological critique, a philosophical tangent, or an unexpectedly precise description of human behaviour. You trust readers to connect the dots without holding their hands.
The result is a distinctive rhythm: a misleading premise, a moment of recognition, and an exit before the explanation ruins the joke.
The Dual-Hemisphere Architecture
Your two blogs are complementary expressions of the same mind.
- Rods & Cones — The Optical Array: The external world captured through visual absurdities, structural geometries, and humorous coincidences. Fast, spatial, and grounded in the streets of Chennai and beyond.
- ittiac — The Neural Terminal: The internal monologue—philosophical tangents, linguistic inventions, technological scepticism, and quiet domestic reflections. A record of an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world, running since 2007.
One observes the world; the other processes it. Both share the same instinct: look closely, find the unexpected, and resist the temptation to explain it to death.
The Blind Spots: The Cost of Your Independence
1. The Feast-or-Famine Publishing Curse
Your editorial calendar is governed not by schedules but by tectonic shifts in attention. There were floods of posts in 2007, a volcanic eruption of Facebook-derived portmanteaus in November 2015, and long silences: four years on ittiac from 2016 to 2019, and eight years on Rods & Cones from 2011 to 2018.
You publish when the internal pressure becomes impossible to ignore. That keeps the work honest and free from the obligation to produce filler. But it also means you treat your archive as an opportunistic scratchpad rather than a cultivated, evolving body of thought. Individual posts may be sharp without necessarily adding up to a larger conversation.
2. The Private Encryption Barrier
Your original blogging method—sending emails directly to Blogger while walking back from bus stops or between meetings—captures thought in its natural habitat. The immediacy is part of the charm. But the resulting compression can sometimes resemble personal cryptography.
A photograph and a two-line pun may be perfectly clear to someone who shares your mental associations, yet leave an outside reader feeling as though they've stumbled upon an unfinished shorthand note. You trust the reader's intelligence, but occasionally overestimate their access to the context inside your head.
3. The Aversion to Sustained Synthesis
You excel at the 250-word flash essay, the micro-satire, and the perfectly timed linguistic invention. But you tend to favour the lightning strike over the sustained burn. When an idea demands historical context, counterarguments, or a 3,000-word exploration, your instinct is often to find the sharpest portmanteau, deliver the punchline, and walk away before the exercise becomes work.
This is both a strength and a limitation. Compression forces precision, but it can also prevent an interesting observation from developing into a more substantial argument. Some ideas deserve to remain fragments; others might reward you—and your readers—if you stayed with them longer.
The Persona Arc: 2007 to 2026
In 2007, you were an intellectual explorer mapping unfamiliar territory, balancing the analytical rigour of an engineer with a quietly observant temperament. The blog was a private sparring ring where you tested ideas, questioned conventions, and worked out your relationship with the world.
In 2026, you are an unhurried, amused veteran. The urge to prove your literary credentials has largely burned away. Years spent working on real-world engineering problems have sharpened your scepticism toward grandiose claims and fashionable abstractions. You no longer need every observation to become an argument. You can look at a tea stall, a papaya sapling, or an ordinary street scene and recognise the unyielding absurdity of physical reality.
The change is not from intellectual intensity to indifference. It is from the need to interrogate everything to the freedom to notice something, appreciate it, and move on.
The Verdict
You are a nineteenth-century essayist trapped in a twenty-first-century engineer's schedule: a slow-web diarist with an engineer's analytical eye, a photographer's instinct for composition, and a poet's timing.
Your blogs are not attempts to become an influencer, a content creator, or a digital essayist seeking cultural capital. They are records of what happens when an analytical mind collides with ordinary life and refuses to let either technology or convention dictate what is worth noticing.
The deepest tension in your work is also its defining quality: you possess the tools to dissect the world, but you are most compelling when you use them to reveal something small, strange, and unexpectedly human.
If the internet disappeared tomorrow and only your archives survived, future archaeologists would find neither traffic-optimized platitudes nor corporate press releases. They would find the authentic, funny, slightly eccentric paper trail of a mind that spent two decades documenting the peculiarities of human life—not to build an audience, but because the act of noticing was its own reward.
You don't blog to be read. You blog because your brain refuses to stop noticing how the world is put together.
Perhaps the most fitting next step is not to publish more often, but to revisit your archive and discover which of those observations still surprise you.
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A curious blogger with an engineer’s analytical mind, a photographer’s eye, and a poet’s timing, musing on life’s absurdities by making the ordinary seem strange and revealing the strange hiding in plain sight.
