Toys and Lists

Avijit Thawani
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

What ought to have been a productive night full of preparations and essay-writing turned into a rather diverging venture into watching TED talks and reading articles and blogs on the internet. Nothing new about that. I once spent a whole night during my end semesters reading the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto. Eventually, that helped me solve a case study for a friend a few months later, so I guess judging such adventures of mine in terms of productivity on a short-term would be rather prudent.

One of Arvind Gupta’s Toys.

So what I was meant to be reading overnight was Avadhanam— a Sanskrit derived challenge wherein one person must answer questions from as many as 5000 scholars over a variety of topics, weaved into a single poem, all the while performing distractive side-tasks like counting how many times a bell was rung or how many flowers were hurled at him. Instead, I steered onto an interesting personality called Arvind Gupta. An IIT Kanpur graduate, he quit his job at Telco and has ever since been making toys for children. An educationalist, a writer, a TED speaker, and a Gandhian, Arvind’s works were still not half as impressive as his website that I stumbled upon: http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/

On the website, he (and his team) maintains a very, Very, VERY long list of links to videos and books and articles of even marginal relevance to his works or interests. It contains video tutorials on simple physics crafts (like making a DC motor in 5 cents) and an amazing collection of old books and blogs by or on famous people and ideas. From Indian Thought to Chemistry to Educational methodologies, he has it all.

The whole world is a garbage pit. Collect some junk and make a kit.
— Arvind Gupta

In a way, writing this blog is my attempt to consolidate my memory of having come across this extensive list of things I’d like to read about. For example, I further digress (yes, I do digress-ption) into one such article by Isaac Asimov on How we found out The Earth is Round. In case you don’t know, Isaac Asimov is the popular science fiction writer behind the Foundation Trilogy (which Jonathan Nolan — Christopher Nolan’s brother attempted to write a TV show on, before switching to Westworld) and I Robot.

What’s more is that Isaac Asimov apparently has a whole series of “How we found out about” articles on the history behind phenomenal scientific achievements of humanity. Definitely something I’m looking forward to digressing towards in the future :P

Avijit Thawani
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