Three Gates, One Kingdom
Choose the arc that matches your current brain, not your ego.
The Kingdom of Chintan is split into three narrative arcs: the Gurukul of first patterns, the Court of Chintan where trade-offs are judged, and the Legendary Crises where everything is on fire.
- Gurukul — you want foundations through gentle tales.
- Court — you know basics, but struggle with strategy.
- Crises — you want to stress-test your thinking under pressure.
Think of each arc as a difficulty lane with its own mood. Gurukul is the quiet training ground. The Court is where arguments and trade-offs matter. Legendary Crises are boss fights: the same ideas, but stacked and stressed.
Arrays, two-pointers, greedy choices, recursion, trees, priority queues, backtracking — all introduced as stories of Arjun stumbling through forest markets, echo caverns, royal halls, and puzzles.
Enter the Gurukul ↗Here, merchants, generals, and advisors argue over which approach to deploy. You’ll see the same patterns as Gurukul, but in messier, more ambiguous situations with multiple “okay” answers.
Attend the Court ↗Fire in the bazaar, invasions at the border, collapsing trade-routes. These tales combine multiple patterns at once: graphs + DP, trees + heaps, backtracking + pruning, and more.
Face the Crises ↗You don’t have to finish one arc before touching the next. But the arcs are designed as a ladder of thinking styles: from “what is this pattern?” to “which trade-off fits this crisis?”.
Learn to recognize recurring shapes: intervals, windows, trees, graphs, recursion, backtracking. The goal is to stop reinventing the wheel and start saying “this smells like X”.
Once you see patterns, the challenge is choosing between them. Here you practice comparing complexity, failure modes, and implementation cost like a royal advisor.
Finally, you deal with stacked constraints and hostile conditions: limited time, broken guarantees, changing inputs. This is where you learn to stay calm when everything hits at once.
Story First, Scroll After
Each episode has two halves: the tale and the scripture. The arc tells you how harsh the tale will be, not how smart you’re allowed to feel. It’s normal to feel lost in advanced stories — that’s what the explanation scroll is for.
- If you’re new to DSA: live in Gurukul, dip into Court when curious.
- If you’re interview-prepping: mix Gurukul refreshers with Court and occasional Crises.
- If you’re senior / lead: Court & Crises will feel more like architecture debates than puzzles.
- At any level: re-read arcs with different characters in mind (King vs Trickster vs Oracle) to change the lens.
Follow the arcs as the kingdom grows.
New episodes unlock across all three arcs — sometimes a quiet Gurukul lesson, sometimes a full-blown crisis. Join the scroll to get the next tale (and its algorithm breakdown) without hunting for it.