Card Train

When I was small my grand farther would make card trains. He use to used my father's old visiting cards to make a train. This card train does not work using electricity. It does not need a train track too. Now I know how to make them. You make it by folding cards so that it looks like this:

To make your train you should keep many cards in a line making sure the distance between 2 cards is less than the length of the card. You should do this so that when you push the last card, to start the train it should be close enough to push the card in front. Here is a small video of the train my I made:

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Plan A, Plan B. And Plan C?

I wrote this in May 2026 and then left it sitting in my drafts for six weeks. Partly because it feels more personal than what I usually put online. Partly because writing honestly about uncertainty is uncomfortable when most of us are busy performing certainty. And partly because I wasn’t entirely sure I believed all of it yet. I’m still not sure. But perhaps that’s the point. So, here goes. ----- May 2026 Two years ago, I moved back to India. I hadn't planned on it. In fact, if you'd told me in 2020, when I packed my bags and left Bangalore for France, that I'd be back in four years, I'd have laughed it off as a failure of imagination. The plan had always been to stay abroad and build a career in Europe. The universe, well, had other plans. Four years abroad had been, by most measures, a good run. Two years in France at Sciences Po, a well-paid summer internship in Paris, the youngest funded researcher on a research project between Princeton, Columbi...

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Sanjith Rao

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