Blogs

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

Synopsis or summary of the episode
Story structure
Character analysis
Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Today we are going to be discussing Where No Man Has Gone Before.

This is essentially the second pilot of Star Trek that was submitted to NBC. And in this episode, we find the Enterprise heading towards the edges of the galaxy, where they pick up a very strange distress signal from a ship that they thought had disappeared in this ship had disappeared 200 years ago.

As they begin to investigate the distress signals from the ship they managed to take into the Enterprise, the disaster recorder of that ship, which is called the SS Valiant . When they go through the recordings, they find that that ship was in turmoil. They were going through some very weird occurrences. They were at the edge of the galaxy. They had crossed the edge of the galaxy and they were looking into some events involving ESP extra sensory perception. While the Enterprise is looking through these recordings, the Enterprise itself goes through the edge of the galaxy.

They face a magnetic storm, they hit a peculiar barrier and then two crew members are affected by a strange energy field. And because of that, the two crew members, they start acting very peculiar. One of the crew members starts having God like powers, and then he becomes a threat to the entire human race.

This is the summary of the episode.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Ask the Design Thinking Doc - Be an idea Ninja

in Teaching

2022-10-12

Creativity is elusive when you want it the most. When we asked in a classroom “Who is the most creative person that you know?”. None of them said it was themselves. Because all of us think we don’t have in us what it takes to be creative. So, how does one become more creative? Even better, how does one become a Ninja in creativity? I wake you up in the middle of your sleep and still you are able to generate ideas just like that. How is this possible?

Design Thinking, as a skill, can be learnt by practicing the methodology on real world problems. I run an online course on Design Thinking on a Govt. of India platform called SWAYAM where close to 40,000 learners have learnt Design Thinking already.

What I have got in return (apart from lots of love 😍) is the variety of questions that have been asked by so many curious learners. This Ask the DT Doc series can be helpful to anyone – a beginner, intermediate or advanced learner of Design Thinking. (Also checkout https://dt.balaramadurai.net for the book on Design Thinking)

This post will cover the question “Genrich Altsheller’s 40 inventive principles and 76 stan[d]ard solutions”

Podcast Enterprise: S1E03: Charlie X

in Writing

2022-10-05

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

Synopsis or summary of the episode
Story structure
Character analysis
Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: The USS enterprise, it makes a rendezvous with a cargo ship that calls itself, the Antares.

And they’re going to take a board, a young man from that ship. So right from the very beginning, you see that the captain and the first officer of the Antares that is Captain Ramart and Tom Nellis, they are quite nervous, a little bit fidgety and not quite there when they bring this child aboard.

He’s 17 years old, his name is Charlie Evans. And then as this episode progress, as you realize that Charlie has had a very unusual childhood, he essentially raised himself on a planet, that had an alien civilization that’s supposedly gone extinct because there are only legends about the civilization.

And then Charlie essentially raised himself. As I said, he’s got these weird powers. He’s very needy. He’s very possessive. He’s socially extremely awkward. And he’s also extremely intelligent. And eventually it turns out that the aliens they’re not extinct, they found Charlie alone and they gave him certain powers.

Charlie misuses these powers because he doesn’t really know what to do with them. And as a story progresses, you realize that the aliens, even though they allowed Thetas, they’re called you realize that even though they gave these powers for Charlie to survive, they did not give him any. Affection, which is essentially what drives this character to certain violent and weird and possessive acts.

He cannot adjust to human society and he has to leave. So that’s a short summary of this episode.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Solving the assignment vs learning problem - A design thinking case

By bodi in Teaching

2022-09-28

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Sowmya Rajendran and her team worked on an interesting and pressing problem with the students. I invited her to write a guest post on the topic - Assignment vs Learning.

Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Analyze

By rajib in Teaching

2022-09-21

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Empathize

By rajib in Teaching

2022-09-14

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

Decontamination of water - A design thinking case

By rajib in Teaching

2022-09-07

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

How to manage your personal finances

in Learning

2022-08-31

Money doesn’t make the world go around, (gravity, stars, other planets, and all that other stuff is responsible) but managing the money in your pocket can help you go around the world.

How does one manage one’s money?

About a decade ago, one of my colleagues wanted to go on a European holiday, however, she confessed that she had no idea if she had enough money to go on this holiday or not.

“Bala, I am really poor at money management, besides when you buy a house, all your money, time and attention goes into that,” she said.

I told her “Anything that you measure, can be managed.” So start with measuring.

How to write a novel-Step-2-Write the main story arc

in Writing

2022-08-24

So, you want to write a novel?

In this series, I’ll detail out my process of writing a novel. How I converted a simple idea into 70,000 (Scrabble Queen) and 80,000 (Penniless) word manuscripts?

I will use my latest writing project Bhumiyin Kathai (Bhumi’s story) as an example, so that it can serve as an inspiration for you. (Totally selfish reasons, while trying to explain stuff to you, I am getting the motivation to complete outlining the story 😁)

I am writing this story (eventually as a screenplay) to serve as a backdrop and an interest creator for this course - https://onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in/course_pages/BSCMG3001.html

Right, back to novel writing.

What after the one line story?

Step 2: Write the main story arc.

For Bhumiyin Kathai:

Bhumi is outright broke, but wants to go to college (Hook)

Bhumi runs away from home and ends up in Hassan Arts College because of helping Okano (Plot Turn 1)

Bhumi enrolls in a computer course on Okano’s insistence (Plot turn 1)

Bhumi topped the first English exam ahead of Param, Param’s schoolmate and friend plants evidence of Bhumi cheating and the teacher voids her marks (Pinch 1)

Bhumi wants to make amends, she pleads with the HOD and she grants her one chance - to present to her teacher

Bhumi makes a presentation, but teacher ends up failing her

Bhumi trains hard in computer science (app dev), presentation skills, webpage development (Mid-point)

Bhumi decides that she has to help her sisters and brother out

Okano finds out Bhumi had been lying about her mom (Pinch 2)

Bhumi gets to know of a hackathon and enrolls as a team (Plot Turn 2)

Her alpha version of the app bombs (FailTry1)

Her beta version of the app also bombs (FailTry2)

She ends up intercepting Okano’s email (FailTry3)

Bhumi wins the hackathon and uses the prize money to give scholarship to girl students from Jaanathur (Resolution)

The four stages of Karmic Design Thinking - A handout

in Teaching

2022-08-17

If you have attended any of my workshops, you are probably one of those people who felt that it would be nice to have some way in which you could recall the concepts easily.

Of course, my standard answer has always been -

Hey, please refer to my book - Karmic Design Thinking 😁

But now, I have a handout you can download and use without needing to refer to the book every time. You can use this to recall any concept that you may have want to refresh after attending the Karmic Design Thinking workshop.