In school, I’m often accused of talking back at the teacher. One day, after being annoyed by a seemingly unreasonable question for the nth time, the teacher coldly demanded of me, “Never ask me why.” I thought that was rather dumb so I scoffed and said, “What? Why?” On other occasions, I’ve heard imposing comments…

The TEACHER has written something on the board and all students are “expected” to copy it in their notebooks. STUDENT: [whispers to himself] Where am I ever going to use this in my life? TEACHER: [hears STUDENT] Your final paper depends on you knowing this word-for-word. So get on with writing it now. STUDENT: Yes,…

The “chasing things to get happy” strategy is a meaningless one. Desire always creeps up yet again and you start with another void to fill every time the last thing you filled it with no longer gives you the zeal it did when you first wanted to get it or at the exact moment you…

This post was inspired by a live discussion between Slavoj Žižek (pronounced SLAH-voy zhee-ZHEK) and Yuval Noah Harari on the topic “Nature: friend or foe?”. You can watch their conversation on YouTube here. This post presents the ideas there more concretely and expands on the same. (You don’t need to watch the video first to…

There’s a whole blog post series arguing for why we could presently be living in the “most important century” for humanity ever. This piece is a critique to exactly that fundamental idea of this being the “most important century” of all time. The author is trying to point out that this century will most probably…

Automatically, we associate experience with some concept. “This is good”, “This feels bad”, “I’m happy”, “I love doing this”. However specific our words might be and whatever feeling we get about so-and-so being the perfect word or concept for what we feel, ultimately experience seems to be beyond concepts. You need to feel it. An…

A double-edged sword is anything that can have favorable and unfavorable consequences. I pose a list of fundamental double-edged swords to the human condition below. A double-edged sword doesn’t have to be unfavorable. Making explicit and understanding the nature of these double-edged swords may perhaps help to flavor more of or only the favorable aspect…

After running in my local (but beautiful) national park this Sunday, I made an extremely pleasant observation. Followed by a second but distressing observation of the same thing I felt pleasant about. The final observation I made was an observation of my observations in finding diversity in unity. Let me explain- In the park, I…

It’s been a whole year since I started this blog. And what a long way I’ve come since then. Before starting out, I’d been writing for a book (which is still in the works). Since starting the blog I also started a podcast. I started tweeting significantly. And I developed more than a few meaningful…

This morning Dad was telling Mom how it’s getting difficult for him to see at night while driving on the road. (And also that rains don’t help.) He’d read on the Internet he said, that after forty, it’s normal to have a deteriorating eyesight. The lens of the eye starts to change form and that…