Skip to main content

A walk down memory lane - celebrating the 150th blog post

I began blogging in January 2010. I do not recall how exactly I started, but I remember that my parents were the reason. They prompted me to start blogging after I showed an interest in writing and web design (although admittedly, blogging involves minimal amounts of design skills). Over the last 10 years, I have been writing on and off, with my longest break lasting over a year. I have been quite regular over the last 3-4 years, and have been writing with an increased frequency in the last month because of the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.

This post is special because it is the 150th post to be published on my blog, so I decided to explain how and why I started, and what the course of the blog has been.

For the first 6-7 years, I called myself 'Little Mairpady', because I despised the fact that my parents had omitted the ever-so-cool name 'Mairpady' from my surname (my Dad's full name is Rakesh Rao Mairpady Chandrashekhar). It was my way of expressing my identity - Sanjith Rao MAIRPADY. However, that phase did not last too long, and I am now content with the name that was given to me at birth.

In 2016 or 2017, I decided to rename my blog to 'Reviews with Rao', as the 'Mairpady' phase had long disappeared, and I was no longer 'Little'. In 2018, I decided to purchase my blog's domain name and the URL to my website changed from https://littlemairpady.blogspot.com to just https://sanjithrao.com.
Frequent visitors to my blog are aware of its contents - I am politically active but do not limit myself to it. I write a fair bit about my life, investments, technology, and various other things I find interesting. I do not know how many of my readers today were also keeping up with my blog back in 2010 and in the subsequent years, so I decided to pick some of my favourite articles from the last 10 years and provide links to them for you to enjoy and celebrate the 150th!


1. Microlight - November 2011

A day I remember and speak about to this day. The first time I sat in a two-seater plane and got an aerial-view of Bangalore, listen in on ATC conversations and also co-pilot a plane!

2. IMS (Inventory Management System) - July 2012

An article on a program my Dad wrote for me to maintain an inventory of the books we had by giving each book a code that would let us know about the quality of the book, whether it was with us or lent (to a friend) etc.

3. My Favourite Restaurant - Habanero - Review - August, 2013

It used to be my favourite restaurant until they sadly closed a few years ago. My love for food has always existed!

4. Build a Toilet Project - February 2015

A project for which I raised funds via door-to-door campaigns to address the hygiene issue created by the lack of toilets in slum-dwellings, mainly in the outskirts of Bangalore.

5. Why shows like Shark Tank are extremely misleading - December 2017

An article about Shark Tank, a popular show in which entrepreneurs make a funding-pitch to investors, and how it misleads a majority of their viewers - the young, innocent and naive!

6. Unsettling Signs of Fascism - India - October 2018

An article that initially drew a lot of flak, even from people I knew personally, but something that many people agree with today, not even 2 years on.

7. The Death Penalty in the 21st Century - March 2020

An article that attracted double the page views, and thrice the engagement I usually get after publishing is my personal favourite of 2020. It was published immediately after the hanging of the Nirbhaya convicts in which I provided an argument for and against the death penalty but concluded by saying that it should not exist.

BONUS: One (out of 3) of the times I got covered in the press - an article about me in  the Times of India.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Rakesh Rao25 April 2020 at 08:49

    Very nicely written summary capturing the key moments (and the posts) in your blog.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
6 comments
Read more

My story

I have typed a story. Here you can read my story: The Boy Who Lied And Other Stories. Once upon a time there lived a boy named Arjun. Arjun was not very intelligent. His mother sent him for tuitions. He used to go for Maths, English, Science, Hindi and Kannada tuitions. He did not like studies but loved sports. He sometimes lied and told his friends that if he did a sum wrong in his tuition class he had to stay back and write it 100 times. But this was not true. Everybody used to believe him. He went to school the next day. In school his first period was maths. In maths his teacher taught them multiplication. He was not listening to his teacher. He was busy fiddling with his new ink-pen. His teacher did not know that he was fiddling with his ink-pen. Then, his teacher asked him to do a sum on the board he came near the board and stared at the teacher. The teacher again asked him to do the sum. Then the teacher asked why he did not listen? He told his teacher that she did not explai...
4 comments
Read more

The Great Omani Coastal Route

Route 15 : Muscat-Nizwa The parents, seemingly forever, had been planning a trip to Oman. Why Oman? Well, that’s a question I asked myself too. My dad, in the 90s, spent close to a decade in the UAE but barring a work trip, had never visited Oman. Fast forward to the 21 st   century, countless Oman Air flights from India to Europe later, he found himself stranded in Muscat. A ‘technical difficulty’ they said. He visited the Sultan Qaboos Mosque but didn’t get to see much more – it was only a 24-hour layover. However, the constant propaganda he was subjected to via the in-flight entertainment, and the cabin crew he made conversation with, convinced him that the country has a lot to offer. A friend from the UAE, who spoke highly of Oman, apparently also played a role.     The parents had their mind set on Oman. The stars aligned and clubbing together a bunch of bank holidays in India, they decided on visiting in April. Unfortunately, or fortunately (the jury is still out), ...
1 comment
Read more

Why I am not writing my remaining ISC 2020 Exam, and you probably shouldn't too

Updates as of last editing this blog: The Supreme Court has asked CBSE to consider scrapping exams. CISCE has issued a press release making exams optional. The petitioner in the Bombay HC, represented by Adv. Arvind Tiwari raised concerns about the transparency of the formula based marking process. They have stressed on the need to be fair and transparent. The methodology to assess one's marks will be finalised, hopefully by Saturday (21st June, 2020), and shared with schools on Saturday. The same will be heard in court on Monday (23rd June, 2020). A communication regarding the extension of dates will be sent to all Principals today. ------------------ It's been almost 3 months. 3 long months since the Council for Indian Secondary Education (CISCE) abruptly postponed all remaining ICSE and ISC exams indefinitely. Barely 3 hours before the commencement of my  last  ever school exam, CISCE saw it fit to postpone our exams indefinitely and provided no clarity ...
8 comments
Read more

Life during the COVID-19 lockdown

The past three weeks have impacted people around India in different ways. The migrant labourers and daily wage workers have unarguably been affected the worst. It has been an interesting three weeks in which the concept of privilege was spoken about vastly in the media. Even though the salaried middle class is also affected, their lives have been phenomenally better than, for example, those they employ to clean their houses or wash their dishes. It is at times such as these that I realise how lucky a majority of my friends and I are. While most of the country is suffering (suffering in the real sense of not being able to afford and procure three square meals a day and NOT because a shop ran out of imported cheese) in lockdown, my parents could work from home, without intruding into each other’s personal space and could carry out some, if not most of their work from the comfort of their house, unlike the majority of the country. I have been reading articles about the shortfalls of in...
10 comments
Read more

The Road to Sciences Po - Application to Acceptance to Admitted Students' Day

Sciences Po has been my dream college since tenth grade. I made a radical shift in the first half of tenth grade and decided to drop culinary arts as my career choice and focus on politics and international relations. Sciences Po was the obvious choice.  What made Sciences Po lucrative in the eyes of an Indian (international) student like me? Their interdisciplinary program that does not restrict you to just Politics/ IR/ Economics/ Sociology etc. I have to choose my major in my third semester which gives me time to experience the different fields and make a suitable choice, Their teaching methodologies (seminars/ lectures, civic projects, small-sized classrooms for discussions etc.) All English courses - I must specify this because not all universities In France/ Europe teach in English. Even in Sciences Po, only 3 out of their seven regional campuses teach in English at the UG level. The mandatory third year abroad at one of their 470 odd partner universities wh...
9 comments
Read more

Living life out of a suitcase

  December 2022 As I sit on my fourteenth flight for the year, with two more scheduled before the curtains are drawn on 2022 (god bless my carbon footprint), laptop open, a glass of wine and a blank word document, I begin to ponder over my journey over the last few months. Penning it down and (at the risk of sounding philosophical) ‘reflecting’ on this journey seems imperative.  --- May 2022   After two wonderful years of ups and downs in Le Havre (thank you, COVID-19!), I said my good-byes, packed my bags and was on the train to Paris. But that was not my final destination – for now at least. After spending two nights at a friend’s, dropping my baggage off at a relative’s, catching the French Open and a round of golf in the middle, and a train to Beauvais (an hour north of Paris), I was on a flight to Barcelona. Checked in to my hostel, met my friend, went for 3 days of the Barcelona Formula 1 Grand Prix together, watched a Redbull 1-2 finish, celebrated with beer, sangr...
1 comment
Read more