Rooms for old words
Seneca’s Letters
All 124 of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, set to be read one at a time, the way they were written.
“my proudest project — the one I’d want to be remembered for”
seneca.ink ↗Small websites, built on evenings and weekends. Each one started as an itch.
Old letters set to be read, Indian data explained, a commonplace book and a record of Bengaluru’s broken footpaths. If one of them is your itch too, come and help.
In numbers
Hope & Despair
Is the world getting better or worse? A living atlas that answers one question at a time with open data, read at two distances: the long arc of the centuries and the year we’re living through.
“both things are true at once — that’s the whole point”
hopeanddespair.world ↗
The street
Let Me Walk
A public index of Bengaluru’s broken, missing and occupied footpaths, photographed by the people who walk on them and kept until each one is fixed.
letmefuckingwalk.com ↗01Rooms for old words
Old letters, speeches and books, set to be readSeneca’s Letters
All 124 of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, set to be read one at a time, the way they were written.
seneca.ink ↗Paper Lanterns
Letters, speeches, essays and lectures from the public domain, from Thoreau on walking to Bacon taking all knowledge for his province.
paperlanterns.ink ↗Collections
Whole books of letters from Paper Lanterns, read in order: Gandhi, Nehru writing to his daughter, Dostoevsky, Tagore.
collections.paperlanterns.ink ↗Akshara
Rare Indian books rescued from bad scans. OCR and language models pull out the text, which is cleaned up and published to be read.
akshara.ink ↗02In numbers
Indian data, explained in plain languageThis Indian Life
How India lives, one number at a time: sourced charts and plain-language answers to big questions about Indian life.
thisindianlife.today ↗Life in India
A slow record of how most Indians live: people and reports seen close up, and the subjects the news passes over, followed over years.
lifeinindia.org ↗Measure of India
What the latest official figures say about prices, growth, factories and jobs, with a plain-language guide to every statistic.
measure.thisindianlife.today ↗Tipsheet
Indian markets at a glance: returns, trends and valuations for every NSE index, sector and theme.
tipsheet.markets ↗Hope & Despair
Is the world getting better or worse? A living atlas that answers one question at a time with open data, read at two distances: the long arc of the centuries and the year we’re living through.
hopeanddespair.world ↗Soochi
A searchable index of the data, tools, organisations and research that people working on public problems actually rely on.
soochi.fyi ↗03What I read
Reading, kept in the openSmallweb
A reading room for the unhurried web: hand-picked essays from independent writers, with nothing ranked, scored or chosen by an algorithm.
smallweb.blog ↗From the Dumpster Fire
An irregular magazine of things worth pulling out of the internet and the archive before they burn.
fromthedumpsterfire.com ↗04The street
Bengaluru, on the recordLet Me Walk
A public index of Bengaluru’s broken, missing and occupied footpaths, photographed by the people who walk on them and kept until each one is fixed.
letmefuckingwalk.com ↗Collaborators wanted
I build all of this alone, on evenings and weekends. Come and build some of it with me.
Every one of these needs more hands than mine. A few places to start:
- Readers of Kannada, Tamil, Hindi or Sanskrit to proof old books
- People who know where rare Indian books and letters are hiding
- Designers and developers who like small, careful websites