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Violence

  Violence is the choice of the incompetent. We were not born with fangs and claws like animals which need to resort to violence even for their food. We are endowed with a higher-level consciousness, a mind that that can think rationally and find practical and amicable solutions to problems. We are not meant to be violent by our very physical structure and nature. Yet many of us choose to remain at the level of animals by resorting to violence. Human evolution seems to have been one-sided; the brain evolved while the heart remained the ape’s. Our intellectual faculties went on acquiring more and more finesse enabling us to probe the microcosmic world of subatomic particles and the mystifying infinity of the cosmos. We have created technology that can put the old gods to shame. We will achieve a lot more in the days ahead. Our brains will ensure that. But what about our hearts? We are still primitive enough to hunt down other people just because they worship other gods, have diffe

Utopia

  A utopia is an ideal place and who does not want to live in an ideal place? We create paradises and heavens in our myths and religious beliefs without ever giving serious consideration to the possibility of creating a utopia here with the only life we possibly have. How can we create a utopia? First of all, we should admit that people have different worldviews. Each individual has her own notions about what is right and wrong, good and bad, God and life, and so on. A utopia should accept that diversity not merely with an attitude of facile tolerance but with profound understanding. Truth is nobody’s prerogative. There is no individual, state or religion that can claim the possession of absolute truths. What is truth for one person may be a joke for another. Hence a utopia should never aim at imposing on its citizens a single truth in the form of religion or culture or anything at all. Instead a utopia should give freedom to its citizens to explore truth in their own ways. A uto

Tatvamasi

  One of the most profound philosophies of life is Advaita Vedanta. The very word ‘advaita’ which literally means ‘not two’ summarises the entire philosophy succinctly. The Atman (self) and Brahman (God) are not two distinct entities; they are one and the same. Aham Brahmasmi , as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it: I am Brahman. The Chandogya Upanishad repeats the idea many times using the phrase ‘Tatvamasi’ which means ‘You are that’. You are God. The distinction between Brahman and Atman, God and man, peters out as we move from the early Upansihads towards the later ones. As S Radhakrishnan (academic, professor, philosopher, and India’s second President) puts it in his scholarly introduction to the major Upanishads, “God is not merely the transcendent numinous other, but is also the universal spirit which is the basis of human personality and its ever-renewing vitalising power.” God is not an entity lying somewhere in the outer space tinkering with the earth and its creatures

Spirituality

  “Man does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said. “He needs butter too,” the wit added. But even with butter on it, bread will not satisfy the human being for long. His soul hankers after something, something that is not quite of this world. That hankering is what makes the human beings spiritual. It is difficult to speak about the soul or the spirit because science has not been able to identify that part of the human being. The soul is not the mind. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts especially when we come to living organisms and all the more so in the case of human beings. Man is not just the body and the mind put together. There is something more to the person than the body-mind sum. That ‘more’ is the soul or the spirit. It is the soul that makes a person a spiritual being. It is the soul that makes us feel that we are incomplete somehow and consequently puts us on a quest for completion. That quest for completion is what spirituality is essentially about. To com

Rebel

  Anyone who loves life genuinely cannot but be a rebel. You will rebel against the all-pervasive evil that appears in the forms of diseases, natural calamities, and manmade disasters. You will rebel against malevolent bacteria and viruses. Your blood will boil when you see innocent kids dying because of any reason whatever. You won’t be able to accept a fraction of the injustice you see around you. If you love life. As Ivan Karamazov tells his fervently religious brother, “I don’t accept this world of God’s… I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept.” This world is a terrible place where, in the words of the Bard, fair is foul and foul is fair. A lot of great people have tried to change that terrible situation. What else were the Buddha and the Christ and the Prophet and the Mahatma trying to do? And what did we get because of their efforts but more evil in the names of their respective re

Quest

  “A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or that they haven’t talked to each other for at least a century.” Physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote that in his recent book, Reality is not what it seems . “In the morning, the world is a curved space-time where everything is continuous ; in the afternoon, the world is a flat one where discrete quanta of energy leap and interact” [emphasis in original]. Einstein’s physics and quantum mechanics perceive the same reality differently. Yet both hold good in scientific models. Both are true though they are contradictory to each other! “With every experiment and every test,” Rovelli goes on, “nature continues to say ‘you are right’ to general relativity, and continues to say ‘you are right’ to quantum mechanics as well, despite the seemingly opposite assumptions on which the two theories are founded. It

Paradigm Shift

  Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti, 1857.  If we keep doing the same thing, we will keep getting the same result. Albert Einstein is credited with that saying. But Einstein’s genius is not required to say something as obvious as that. Yet, in spite of the backing of Einstein’s genius, we keep doing same things and keep getting same results. Our petty jealousies and violent spirituality, craze for power and race for wealth, idolisation of a Hitler or a Modi in the name of something as evasive as culture or race – nothing has changed over centuries. We need a paradigm shift. Desperately so. We have messed up this world of ours terribly. We need to reshape our earth and our heavens. We need a paradigm shift. One of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20 th century, Thomas Kuhn, introduced the concept of paradigm shift. A paradigm, according to his definition, is a collective set of attitudes, values, procedures, techniques, etc that form the g