Historical Indian film censorship from 1960s to 1990s
I found decades of the Indian film censor board's cuts buried in old government gazettes on the Internet Archive, covering the 1960s to the 1990s.
Aman Bhargava
Writing, notes, projects, and tracks from aman.bh
Latest posts
Analyzing AI slop designs with basic heuristics
I am pro AI for code, anti-AI for most visual, reader-facing things. A senior engineer might feel the exact opposite; we naturally hate this thing more in the spheres we're good at. I've found AI-...
data storytelling in lowercase - guest talk at Purdue
Thoughts on what it means for me to engage in data storytelling, in lowercase
Querying India's MoSPI Data with Claude and MCP
The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released a new tool for LLM-assisted querying of their survey data. I explore some of it's possibilities.
Mapping The Red Headed League
I used London's 1893 Ordnance Survey maps to trace the routes each character takes in The Red-Headed League. Does the geography hold up in real life?
Mapping the Red-Headed League
I looked at 1893 Ordnance Survey Maps to map how the characters in The Red-Headed League move through London
A4 Paper Stories
> These numbers are etched in my memory like the multiplication table of 1.1. We can keep going further to get A5, A6, etc. We could, in theory, go all the way up to A∞.∞. Hold on, I think I hear som...
Isochrones and responsibility of visualization
Can data-visualization be naive?
Creating Embroidered Charts with R and ImageMagick
Making ggplot charts look like embroidered cloth using ImageMagick and R.
Two Years of Word Games
Two years of data, hundreds of NYT word games, and one custom dashboard later, the results are in and I am the Loser Maximus.
Note from Dec 18, 2025
 I think it is absolutely incredible that I can import vector labels of place names from the 19th century into QGIS. I can barely ge...
Anirudh's stories from Meghalaya
> One failed plan after another, even though I had no plan. I wanted to know who I should blame for all my troubles and of course, it is me. My friend and flatmate recently ditched our flat in Bang...
I want to stop defining by the negative
Our talk at IndiaFoss went well, but one specific slide has been on my mind ever since. A reflection on the easy trap of defining creative work by what it isn't, rather than what it is.
AI-generated text in Indian government documents
Searching for signs of AI-generated text in official Indian government documents
Note from Dec 4, 2025
Here's what I am looking forward to at this [year's BLR Lit Fest](https://bangaloreliteraturefestival.org/year-2025/schedule/): | Day | Date | Time | Venue | Event | Speakers | |-----|------|----...
Note from Dec 4, 2025
> I’ve sometimes fallen into the trap of thinking that complementing a creative person for their work is less sophisticated or desired than discussion or debate about it but very often the best thing ...
Photo from Dec 3, 2025
Surprise surprise, Fall of Civilizations is my top podcast this year. This says around 6.3k minutes listened to on Spotify, but my guesstimate would be at least double that since I switched to [Antenn...
Photo from Nov 24, 2025
Last week for no particular reason, I took a 200 kilometer journey around Bangalore using only BMTC buses. It was quite a lot of fun. I had not planned the trip in any way, I just knew that I just wan...
Bajrangi Bhaijaan in 2025 and Youtube Journalism
Bajrangi Bhaijaan feels distant in 2025, its Youtube journalist Chand Nawab feels closer.
Note from Nov 18, 2025
Which map looks more inviting? One is Google Maps, the other is OpenStreetMaps on OSMAnd. You choose.   > Zohran's visual campaign is so cool. It feels like it could fit in one of the Seinfeld episodes, and at the same time be ...
Note from Nov 2, 2025
> News often treats technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid — but software is a creative work, just as journalism is. We have the expertise, the values, and the imperative. We can...
Photo from Nov 2, 2025
Dosas outside have been reduced to once a week at Gayathri Coffee Kendra. This is my standard order for the last year; one butter khali dosa (with a potato curry _sagu_, that reminds me of Yelli) and ...
I love my new RSS feed
I set up FreshRSS on my server a few days ago and I have been _loving_ the experience. Subscribing to RSS and having an RSS reader always felt like one of those things which I said with a vague sense ...
Note from Oct 20, 2025
> Once more with feeling: The functionality of a city, and of its transport system, arises from the sum of everyone’s choices about how to travel, not just the preferences of elites. When elites mak...