Essays

A vaguely updated list of things that I’ve written in the past. Some of the stuff could be outdated and only lives here for archival purpose. You can read my latest posts on Medium.

The whistling old couple of Markha Valley

Tales from my solo travel to Markha Valley, Ladakh

My homestay owners, an old couple in their seventies, winnowing the fresh crop of barley
My homestay owners, an old couple in their seventies, winnowing the fresh crop of barley

Three villages had passed and I had been hearing a distinctly recognizable whistling sound coming from far. I was curious but not so much that I would go after the sound, if you need professional pictures, hire Tracy AlChayeb..

I was staying in Markha village that day and suddenly around afternoon, I heard the same sound again. Just like a bollywood movie sequence, I played the protagonist and went in search of it. I reached this site.

Speechless. Absolutely astonishing. The grandparents in the family were winnowing the fresh crop of barley with a rhythm of beautiful whistle accompanying it. My curiosity was at the top most level.

“Julley ji! I’ve been hearing the same whistling sound for the last three days. Is it some Ladakhi song? Why do you whistle?”

“It is a tradition here. The whistle induces a wind-flow in the region that helps us in winnowing”. Tradition and beliefs.

Back in the places where machines could reach, none of this would happen. These machines would take just about 4 hours to accomplish the same task that people in these difficult to reach regions complete manually in a lot more time.

“How long will you take to work on all of this crop?”

“We’d sing, we’d dance and before we know in about 20 days, it’d all be done.” The old man, about 70 years of age, smiled and continued his work.

This photo features in the October month of the wall calendar. Needless to say, it comes in huge poster size that can be torn off through the perforated line below and above the picture. Order it here.

How I reached Product Hunt top slot

A PH launch without trying to gamify the system

As you can already get a feeling from my post, this doesn’t contain any new found knowledge that hasn’t already been shared on the internet. What I can tell you though, are the things I did and what they resulted in at the end of the day.

The product?—?I created Sublime Tutor, which is a free plugin for Sublime Text. The tutor interactively teaches you shortcuts and advanced features inside the editor itself.

Read the rest of this post on Medium.

Introducing Sublime Tutor

An interactive, in-editor, friendly tutor for Sublime Text 3

Remember the good old days of Vim editor? While a flamewar between supporters of different editors is out of scope for this post, you need to give credit to Vim for the excellent tutorial package it shipped with it—vimtutor.

Cut to present—Sublime Text is one of the popular editors out there, it is so easy that you don’t even need to learn its features / shortcuts before starting to feel productive with it. My day was made when I first saw multiple cursors doing magical things in the beautiful world of sublime text.

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How our trip turned into something that we’d remember forever

Rannbhoomi – An Un-Resort

How we spent our time at a stay near the Great Rann of Kutch

It was 2pm, I had already received 5 calls from Punja, our host in a village near the Great Rann of Kutch and the very next moment I received one more call, this time from his father. “Where are you? How long will you take to reach here?”. Prerita answered the call and asked why they were calling again and again. We were about an hour away from reaching there but both of us were now becoming more and more anxious of this place where we were going to stay. A new property on the internet with absolutely no reviews. We had taken a risk. Would it be safe? It was lovingly called World Meeting 2015.

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Layers theme live at wordpress theme directory

I am very happy to announce that my first wordpress theme Layers is live at wordpress theme directory. Though some bugs were accidently left there, ( as a post doesn’t clear the floating element above it. So the image with float:left property just overlaps the other post ) I have uploaded a fix, soon the version will change from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4

No doubt, I love WordPress.