Rishi was born in Colombo, and grew up in Bangalore before going to college in Massachusetts, where he had a suitably unfocused liberal arts education. Afterwards, he drifted about India, and briefly worked as a journalist for a paper in Calcutta, interviewing local celebrities and struggling artists. He is now working towards a Phd in Applied Mathematics at Yale. In the meanwhile, he tries desperately to keep his literary and scientific interests away from each other, and to shield his worldview from the tentacles of modern science. Email: rishidev.chaudhuri@yale.edu
by Rishidev Chaudhuri If there were a canonical essay topic for the Hindi classes that I struggled through as a child, “The arrival of the monsoon” would be a leading candidate. So typical a topic that it almost constituted its own form and mode of cultural practice, it was assigned to us several times a…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri I As I grow older and worldlier, and as the world itself grows more worldly, an increasingly wide range of ingredients and techniques and flavors take up residence in my kitchen. The flavors of my childhood were primarily those of the subcontinent, dominated by the Indian Ocean cities of Calcutta, Colombo and…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Fish stews occupy a wonderful middle ground between delicacy and robustness, suggesting sun and warmth and brine, and yet also being mouth-filling and meaty and deeply flavorful. They’re happy at simple weeknight dinners and at parties, and can be dressed up with more varied sets of ingredients (crabs, mussels and clams, shrimp/prawn).…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri At first (and at second, and third) glance, the use of spices in the cuisines of the subcontinent is a subtle and mysterious art, full of musty cupboards staffed by aging apothecaries (and grandmothers) and intertwined with theories of humor-balancing and our particular relationship to the gods. Recipes and spice blends are…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri I It's impossible for me to leave a place well. I used to think that I was merely bad at logistics and planning (and I am), but I manage to conspire against myself with such sinister competence that this explanation no longer seems viable. As the time to leave approaches my consciousness…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri The Great North American Lime Shortage of 2014 has people panicked. As the heat of the summer looms, the national media is running frenzied articles, families are being ripped apart, bartenders are at each other's throats and lime hoarding is rampant. The causes of this terrible situation read like a list of…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Perhaps a reasonable proxy for wisdom is the ability to stop thinking when you want, to interrupt the tortured spiraling progression of thoughts that serve no function and lead nowhere, the symbolic productions of a machine gone mad. Like much else, this can (and, I think, should) be approached as a skill…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri One of the main aims of modern science is finding mathematical expressions to describe the relationships between observed quantities. For example, Newton's law of gravitation tells us that the force of gravity between two bodies depends in a certain way on their masses and the distance between them; thermodynamics tells us that…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri There is undeniably something troubling about the way we use pepper. Pepper is among the most classical of spices, with a history of trade and culinary use that dates back several thousand years. And this history is laden with vast sums of money, world-spanning trade routes, once great empires and much culinary…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri The disciplined practice of being aware of bodily sensations is common to a number of meditative and psychological techniques, ranging from mindfulness meditation to the various species of humanistic psychology (especially those influenced by Wilhem Reich). Here's an example from Perls, Hefferline and Goodman's book “Gestalt Therapy”: Concentrate on your `body' sensation…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Like some nervous Gnostic, I’m oppressed by matter, and I’m never as aware of it when I move. Then, more than ever, I seem to exist in a whirl of paper and clothes and small objects of no apparent purpose that all conspire to cloud my existence and subvert the clear paths…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri To my mind, the most fascinating biological systems lie in the uncanny interstices between the physical and the intentional, between systems that can be understood as purely material objects, in the mould of physics or chemistry, and those that seem to require some notion of self (and other) or intentionality or that…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri In much of modern casual cooking the separation between animal and vegetable is excessively rigid: meat dishes are big slabs of flesh, and vegetable dishes lack any trace of meat. But there are many reasons to trouble this distinction, especially if you want to eat more vegetables and less meat (for ethical,…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri A recent study on the relationship between positive emotions, social connectedness and a measure of heart health has been getting a lot of attention in the popular media. 1 It's an interesting addition to the emerging scientific literature on the uses and effects of meditative practices and on the mechanism of the…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri In many ways, Jung has aged worse than Papa Freud. His world now seems quaint and naïve in its lack of suspicion and irony, in its insistence on treating symbols as universal, in its belief that all peoples are telling the same stories and meaning much the same things, albeit with slightly…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri I have a child's affection for color, for broad swathes of bright saturated colors, for unapologetic reds and greens and blues and yellows. And yet this strong visceral and emotional reaction often feels immature and undifferentiated. I never really learned the names of the colors properly. This is partly from an artist…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri A dynamical system is a mathematical description of how some particular system evolves through time. These are often physical or biological systems, and dynamical systems are used to model everything from how the planets move around the sun and how earthquakes propagate to how neurons fire and how economies evolve over time.…
By Rishidev Chaudhuri I He was the masseur of persimmons, and he attached himself to that statement with as much precision as he could. It would be so easy, ever so easy, to let go, to slip away, to fade into one of those reddish, tannic, slightly yielding fruit. Every morning, every hour, every lunch…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri It's strange how little I think about marbles now, since marbles, the objects themselves and the game we played with them, were a crucial part of my childhood. It's odd to think back on these colorful little metonyms of youth, mostly forgotten except when I stumble across one in some hidden drawer…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Like some eccentric prominent family, whose genius shades easily into the occult, the evil and the mad, Solanaceae, the family of the nightshade (so often prefixed by “deadly”), both contains several of our most ubiquitous food plants (typically of New World origin) and many of the multifarious toxins and deliriants beloved of…