Hi I'm Rishiraj Acharya. I write code, travel the world, and cook yummy dishes. Currently living in Kolkata — the city of joy, festivals like Durga Puja,...
There is a popular saying: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For years, the ruling party in India, the BJP, seemed to operate under the illusion of absolute invincibility. Backed by a vast majority, rural strongholds, and the sheer weight of majoritarian politics, they operated with a glaring absence of accountability. They believed they could get away with anything.…
In most functional democracies, if you are caught on camera accepting a bribe while holding public office, your career is over. You would likely face years behind bars. However, in the complex and often forgiving world of Indian politics, being caught on tape might just be the catalyst for a massive career progression—provided you are willing to switch your ideological allegiance. Few politicians…
Recently there has been a rising frustration in tech writing: “AI writing is soulless. It lacks personality. It lacks the human touch.” It’s an argument we hear every day in the tech and creator communities. But I think this perspective misses a massive, fundamental shift in how we should evaluate the sharing of knowledge. We are conflating writing style with actual substance . Here is the…
Look up at the night sky. If you peer deep enough into the cosmos, you’ll see galaxies rushing away from us in every direction. Extrapolate that motion backward, and you arrive at a moment 13.8 billion years ago when everything we know was compressed into an infinitely dense, infinitely hot point. The Big Bang. But what if the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion outward into an empty void? What if,…
The bedrock of any democracy is the universal adult franchise—the fundamental right of every eligible citizen to cast their vote. However, a deep dive into the recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal paints a deeply concerning statistical picture. Across the state, millions of voters have found their names abruptly deleted or placed in a bureaucratic limbo known…
If you’re training a Large Language Model today, a 4k context window just doesn't cut it anymore. Users want to drop entire codebases into the prompt, analyze massive PDFs, and run complex, multi-turn agentic workflows. We all want our models to handle 128k tokens or more. But as anyone who has actually tried to train a model on long sequences knows, pushing beyond a few thousand tokens breaks…
I was recently at a Google's dinner party in Bali, Indonesia when someone from Pakistan pointed at my plate and whispered, "Wait, aren't you a Hindu? How are you eating chicken?" It is a question I get often. It comes from the same place as the question about my atheism. People like to put Hinduism in a neat little box. But just as I told my father that you can be a Hindu and an atheist, I have to…
My father often asks me, "If you don't believe in God, why do you call yourself a Hindu?" It’s a valid question, but only if you look at the world through a very specific lens. The simple answer is: Yes, you can be a Hindu and still be an atheist. In fact, skepticism has been part of Indian philosophy for thousands of years. The problem isn't with my faith (or lack of it); the problem is with the…
When we talk about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), opinions usually fly from all directions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has famously called it the "world's largest NGO" and praised its discipline and dedication. But if we dig into the archives, look at old cartoons, and read the speeches of India's founding fathers, a very different, and quite dark, picture emerges. Here is a look at the…