Posts
Essays and notes hosted here, primarily long-form pieces. Some entries link to newspaper articles. My substack id is suryabv.
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Review of The Sirens of September | The Wire
A dreadful siege shadows a dazzling Hyderabad in Zeenath Khan's debut.
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Kaikini's Mumbai
A visual homage to Jayanth Kaikini's stories.
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Review of The Deccan Sun | The News Minute
Zeenath Sajida, a forgotten Deccan icon, revisited through careful translation.
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Review of The Hyderabadis | Scroll
Displacement, broken geographies, and evolving identities in the city's history.
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Mangli Kanduri?
A first attempt at tracing the origins of a Masjid's name.
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Production World: Part 2
Touring the trade-offs and joys of Avanti's tech deployments.
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Notes on Research Taste
Rough notes on research that excites me. Written to help me discover my taste in research.
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Production World: Part 1
Journey of Avanti's Quiz Engine from local dev to production.
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Ethics in Technology
Exploring skepticism around corporate ethics programs through Metcalf et al.'s lens.
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Constructing Prestige and Elaborating the Professional
Paper review of Llerena Guiu Searle on prestige construction in NCR real-estate.
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Hierarchical Dirichlet Process
Explainer on Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes and why they suit clustered datasets.
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Black-Box Variational Inference
An intuitive explanation of Ranganath et. al.'s Black-Box Variational Inference approach, and how it helps us get over tedious inference calculations. Inference.
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Are mobile phones changing social networks?
Reviewing how mobile phones reshaped core social networks in Kerala.
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Social Media in South India
Notes on Venkatraman's ethnography of social media practices in South India.
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Influencers on Social Media
Why influencer labour meshes neatly with post-Fordist narratives and precarity.
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Self-Surveillance and the Wayback Machine
Considering self-surveillance and memory-keeping via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
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Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse
Applying Davis & Chouinard's Affordance Theory to Twitter's thread feature.