Aditya is a left-handed architect who writes better than he can draw, and talks better than he can write. He expended his youth pursuing doctorates in Sanskrit Philology and Cultural Anthropology. Inspired by a vintage clothing store in NoHo that no longer exists, he started the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) as an extended performance art piece. However, CKS was soon hijacked by corporate interests to advance their own capitalist agendas. Having wandered the world for a number of years, he has recently returned to New Delhi, the city of his childhood, where he is currently shacked-up with his girlfriend. Aditya's futile efforts to intellectually comprehend the unyielding abundance of the world provide the pathos and humor characteristic of his writings and reflections on everyday life. Email: [email protected]
by Aditya Dev Sood This standalone piece is part of a special series on Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. Links to earlier articles appear at the end of the article. This past week I led a workshop on building pitchdecks, not only for our own startups but for a wider crew…
by Aditya Dev Sood This is new dispatch from the frontlines of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. Links to earlier dispatches appear at the end of this stand-alone piece. On Saturday we went to see Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party take his oath of office as Chief Minister of…
This piece is part of an on-going series of blogposts from the frontlines of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to check out dispatches one, two, three and four. by Aditya Dev Sood Having commissioned a new suit of armor, the emperor Akbar was now in the process…
by Aditya Dev Sood This is the fourth in a series of brief pieces written from the deep and dark of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to read dispatches one, two, and three. We’re fully in the fog of it now. It’s not only the startups that…
This is the 3rd of a series of brief weekly pieces on the unfolding journey of a new incubator based in New Delhi: www.startuptunnel.com, @StTnL. Checkout earlier pieces in the series: Entering Startup Tunnel and What Makes an Incubator Tick? by Aditya Dev Sood Prashant and Ishita came to see me on Monday afternoon. We’re…
by Aditya Dev Sood It’s been three days and our eight teams are already up, pitching for their lives. Watching them from the front row is a series of mentors we’ve curated, from areas like branding, user interface design, product development, technology, business and investing. There’s a tug between the mentors and the startups underway…
by Aditya Dev Sood I think it was the beginnings of the meltdown, almost three years ago, that I first came upon the City Forest. I was talking into my cellphone with someone, maybe my Dad, about where the economy was going, where it was taking all of our clients. It was about finding ways…
by Aditya Dev Sood One day, I came home from school to a big commotion in the living room. My dad was working with an electrician and a mason, and they were together struggling to figure out how this enormous apparatus was going to work. What is it, I asked? A split-unit air-conditioner, my dad…
by Aditya Dev Sood I’ve been reading Gandhi’s writings off and on for several months now, but just last week I turned to Joseph Lelyveld’s recent book on him. I’d been thinking about the kind of attitude towards the present that Gandhi must have had, in order to undertake social change at such a spectacular…
By Aditya Dev Sood One day the Sultan was looking from a turret window onto the city of Delhi and he no longer liked what he saw. These people were spoiled and unimaginative. Like the residents of every other large and imperial city, they reeked with the parochialism of the metropolis. Even before he became…
By Aditya Dev Sood A man is hurtling towards you from some twenty paces away. He leaps to hurl a projectile at you with all his might. You can duck, you can flinch, or you can swat it away with your blade, stylish, balanced of body and mind, having yet again defended your wicket. There…
by Aditya Dev Sood The plane shudders and groans, forcing me to look up. The rumble of the cabin has passed clear through my body, rattling my stomach. I give up trying to read, or even to think, allowing myself to acknowledge the inchoate signals emanating from deep in my bowels, rising up through layers…
by Aditya Dev Sood When I think of home, when I think of where I am from, what comes into my mind is a large courtyard, hidden above the colonnades of Connaught Circus, where my Grandfather's house was, and in some sense, still is. My cousin Lohash and I duck into a dark recess among…
By Aditya Dev Sood Not many people know where or what Karavali is, I find. Many in the north refer to it vaguely as Mangalore, on account of the large port city located there. With friends from overseas I'm best off describing it as the strip of India south of Goa and north of Kerala.…
by Aditya Dev Sood It was sunny but cool as we drove into Budapest, and I had that kind of new city buzz that you can only get from having been in transit all night. We cut across one of the many bridges over the Danube that interconnect the Buda and Pest sides of the…
By Aditya Dev Sood Brownian motion at a macro-scale. That's what my working week feels like these days. On Monday I flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad, the next day to Bangalore, a couple of days later to Patna via Calcutta. And now, after a tense hour's delay in Patna, while this decrepit Air-India plane was…
by Aditya Dev Sood I was riding the 2/3 to Brooklyn the first couple of days I was back, when I saw this guy in a baggy pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and these kinda shoes I’d never seen before. They wrapped around each toe, exposing the toes basically, through the thin skin of the…
By Aditya Dev Sood At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as 'designer.' We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody…
Aditya Dev Sood Your correspondent has wrangled a place in the first elevated row, just behind the backless futons reserved for buyers. The Three Quarks Daily seat is adjacent to the New Indian Express (Calcutta) and The Man (monthly). Black bleachers cascade all along on either side of the runway. There are bells suspended above…
By Aditya Dev Sood You know, we all have our favorite seasons, our special days in the year. For me that has to be Holi. Today is all color and madness, the world is turned upside down, nothing is wrong, all is forgiven, everything is laughter. These tents in pink and white are looking taut,…