It indeed was the best of times and the worst of times when I tried to brush off the dust from ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ when I was just ten years old. But mostly, it was Stage One: The Immature Child. The noble journey had started earlier, when I was eight. Our old and spectacled librarian made us read a book every week. She claimed that she had read all the books on the shelves, and would be able...

My father is a wise man with a round belly. He has been transforming his wisdom to anecdotes for me to process ever since I interpreted language. When my processor became competent to revert back, my incessant query was, “How do you know this brilliant piece of information works, when you really get in there?” And my father would say, “I am a wise man…” One day, we visited his office, where he works an engineer, and saw life-size machines...

I gingerly made my way across the corridor, following the “look left, look right and look left again” rule though I wasn’t crossing a bustling street. I made my way to the entrance, assuming no eyes had caught my presence. I silently nudged the door to avoid its creaking. But the hinges creaked. The door opened. Suddenly, forty eyes had caught my presence. This was the day I had disappeared from class. All eyes demanded an explanation. I didn�...

The Engineer is India’s most abundant species. Its demographics there are interesting. Until Independence, the Engineer, though scarce, enjoyed glory as a rare and regal bird. Post independence, however, an impoverished yet growth-driven India developed a mechanism to synthetically breed more Engineers to earn more out of the precious species. This led to the Great Population Explosion of the Engineers for which the extraordinary capabilities of countless other mammals were tamed and sacrificed. Most Engineers now encounter the hostile...