Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Reduce, reuse... I am not so sure about recycling phone numbers " In the good ol' days, people used to create accounts on various platforms using email addresses. But as smart phones started becoming ubiquitous and as 'Mobile First' approaches became the norm with a million apps cropping up every other day, a paradigm shift happened in the sign up process - Mobile numbers were introduced for registering new accounts. Mobile numbers had a few advantages over email addresses - Creating an email addresses is cheap, and people can quickly create multiple email addresses without much hassle. However, people most likely have only one number, and occasionally, some have two. People are less likely to abuse systems like First time user discount  using mobile phones because it is not possible, unlike emails. Verification using OTP is a lot faster than signing up using emails. And so, signing up using mobile phones started becoming the...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " The higher the moving parts, the higher the chance of failure. Unless you have a process set up " Startled by the shrill sound of my digital alarm, I groped around to hit the snooze button. I thought I had explicitly turned it off, but I was mistaken. Sleep had eluded me for the past few weeks due to the murder case that had kept me awake through several nights at a stretch, and having finally solved it, these few winks of sleep that I had been having were well deserved. As I groggily waved my arms into the darkness trying to reach my clock, I realised by the alternate shimmering of the screen, that it was my phone that had been ringing. Through my heavy eyelids, I tried to concentrate on the name on the screen - It was the Police Commissioner. The sight of that label jolted me upright. I immediately grabbed the phone and answered it. " I'm sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night, Surya, but there has been a development. How...