Samarth's Notes

Today, I have hit a personal milestone: cult.fit app informs me I have been regular with my workouts for 52 weeks in a row — meaning, over the last year, I exercised every single week without exception. From being a high school student who preferred to bunk the sports period to go study in the library, I have come a long way. Yes, there were bad weeks where my intensity was low or I could pack in just one session. But they were few in number. I don't have the exact stats, but I estimate my hit...

I have finally started what I had been thinking of doing for at least two years now: relearning statistics. I am a freelance journalist/programmer, and I control the volume of work I want to hold at any point. To make time for this academic pursuit, I consciously reduced my workload—it's a struggle to say no to exciting journalism assignments, but I try. I am six weeks into this learning endeavour and it's truly rewarding: I am having a lot of fun diving into mathematical theory and solving pro...

I wrote this note in my journal on the morning of 16, February 2021, recalling the events of the previous day. A young environmental activist was arrested, and it triggered a series of thoughts laying bare the inner conflicts I often deal with. I don’t have any meaningful way to resolve them, but confronting them is perhaps a good starting point. This is a slightly edited version of the original note in my diary.  Yesterday was weird. I started the day with a run; went to work; posted an Inst...

Totally lost my cool yesterday evening. The trigger: a story published in the Washington Post. I posted an impulsive update on Instagram.   This morning: I could not sleep well. One of those days when I woke up feeling a bit anxious, thinking about all the easy, comfortable and privileged choices I have made in a deeply unequal, unfair and unjust world.  So I got off the bed, went for a quick run, hit the gym and lifted weights. The hour-long workout, as always, helped me get rid of anxiety an...

Tweets by an international pop star—five words, one hashtag, a linked article—and a teenage climate activist on India's farmer protests have rattled thin-skinned Indians. What an irony: A citizenry perennially subjected to state-sponsored propaganda is tweeting #IndiaAgainstPropaganda.  Liberal critics, unsurprisingly, are outraged at this mass reaction and calling out, among other things, Indian celebrities for "towing the line", asking them to "show some spine" instead of participating in thi...

"Facts come in the way of beautiful prose," a colleague at the Wall Street Journal told me during my 2018 fellowship at the newspaper.  It stayed with me. Every time I ponder over the limitations of journalistic methods to understand the world, I think about it. Especially in the last two years as I switched gears to work on more ambitious stories (relative to what I was doing earlier) with no easy answers. Even after tenaciously chasing all possible sources of information (data, documents, int...

"There is a lot of uncertainty in figuring out how this will work out," reads the seventh point in my journal entry titled "On Quitting", dated 13th January 2019—the day I resigned from my full-time job at the Hindustan Times.  After two excellent years at HT—where I got the chance to learn from and collaborate with a bunch of talented and hardworking journalists, where editors gave me the opportunity to hone my craft, space to write meaningful stories and nominated me for an amazing fellowship...

Most contemporary discussions on press freedom begin with some sort of rankings: X country slipped Y positions on Z index—that’s evidence something wrong is happening. This makes headlines every year in India, as we continue to slip down in these indices. Criminal defamation cases are filed against journalists for merely doing their jobs and reporting stories. Organized disinformation campaigns and troll armies delegitimize the institution of journalism and individual reporters to evade ...

Today, I complete five years in journalism: one year at The Hindu (my first job, straight out of university), two years at the Hindustan Times—which overlapped with a five-month fellowship at the Wall Street Journal—and two years as a freelancer. "Data journalist" was my official job description in full-time roles. But I find that term redundant and I don't like to use it anymore: all journalism should be data-informed and evidence-based. I prefer calling myself just a "reporter". In part, thi...

In 2020, I significantly reduced the proportion of daily news consumption in my information diet. And I strongly recommend the same to others: less of news and more of books. There are many reasons why, and I will list them in a future post. Here is one compelling argument from the book Thinking in Systems (by Donella H. Meadows) about the fundamental limitation of incremental news stories: Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events....

To share: Notes, thoughts and ideas about new things I am learning Perspective on how I look at the world Nuggets from my reporting which did not make it to published articles Links to interesting things on the web—articles, research papers, videos, podcasts—and what I learnt from it To think in public. I will write about the uncertainties I battle with and the missing parts in my understanding. ...