RIFLE RANGE BOY

We are on a journey to nowhere, travelling from womb to tomb, learning on the job as we go on. Along the way, we pick up wisdom from fellow travellers honoured by others as old hens at the job. Their thoughts are immortalised and cast in the stone as life hacks. Call it synchronicity or that the Universe is trying to tell me something. Thiru Valluvar's name got mentioned thrice this week. Maybe there is nothing supernatural about the whole thing; it is just that the algorithm picked up Valluvar's name being mentioned and decided to recommend the same. Whatever the reason, we simply extract the succulent juice and discard the pulp. This shoutout goes to my vegetarian friends and relatives who go under the impression that it is perfectly alright to stir a storm when the vegetarian dish is not up to mark with their palatal desires. And it is worth it to wound the egos and self-respect of fellow human beings as long as animals are protected and a meat-free utopia is created. Valluv...

Ten Powerful Ideas from Ancient India - Wisdom from the Upanishads. Roopa Pai Secular in their content and universal in their appeal, these compositions have life-affirming secrets that contain ideas about life, the universe and everything relevant from the 700BCE to the 21st century. Computer engineer, journalist and children's author, Roopa Pai is the co-founder of Bangalore Walks and the winner of the Crossword Award for "The Gita for Children". She has published over 20 books, including the fantasy-adventure Taranauts.  Easily the best TedTalk in a long time.

Aryabhata (476-550 CE) Mathematician/Astronomer. The first person to say that Earth  is spherical and revolves around  the sun. The first to suggest that  any number divided by 0  gives infinity ∞. (pinterest) Continuing in the quest to make sense of things around me, I stumbled into something quite thought-provoking. It has something to do with our idea of separating knowledge into the sciences and the arts. It is interesting to note that the Ionians, of the Eastern part of the Greek civilisation, and the Hindu culture started learning things about the world we live in entirely independent of each other. It is incredible how quite similar their discoveries were, at least in the initial stages. The pre-Socratic thinkers thought that there was a connection between the Universe and the world immediately around us. Thales tried to say that water is the essence of our existence. Democritus put forward the theory of Void and eternal, indivisible ato...

Indian Deities Worshipped in Japan (Documentary; 2015) Director: Benoy K Behl If we look around us, we will find an unsatiable attempt to divide and sub-divide people. Human beings are often 'boxed-up' to be made seem different. Individuals placed in these 'boxes' feel exclusivity, and members of this association do things that convince themselves that they are indeed unique and their activities are centred around trying to satisfy their internal quagmire. Unfortunately, it does not lead to world peace as nobody wants to neglect their belief to bow to others' domination. Cognitive dissonance comes in the way. Everybody else can see the world tear apart except themselves. Paradoxically, all claim to descend in peace. The Greeks with their Platonic and Aristotelian teachings,  Hindus with their Vedantic leanings and many of the ancient belief systems must have got it right all along. They endeavoured to connect the dots and try to find commonalities betwee...

Image Credit: superhv.com Bruce Lee is famous not only for his martial art skill. He is also renowned for his ability to infuse traditional Confucius wisdom into contemporary modern living. One of his quotations goes as follows ‘A learned man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer’! Shakespeare too mentioned something to that effect. ‘A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool!’   We are always under the impression that wisdom can learn from the books and scriptures and that one can wise just by sitting down and burying himself in the company of books. I disagree. First, let us define ‘wisdom’. Wisdom can be described as the soundness of one’s action based on his application of experience, knowledge and good judgement. Somewhere along the way, there would also be empathy.   True, academic knowledge is necessary for one to gain wisdom. From the books, we can acquire a wealth of knowledge...

"Don't ask too many questions, sometimes it is better to just let go and follow the pack. Follow the people who are experts and know more than us!" At the end of our intellectual discourse on religion, this is the best my friend could tell me. I think that aptly explains the current situation we are in. There was a time in our civilisation, we were all clueless about the things around us. One blind leading another, we all used to grope around making sense of things as we moved around in an environment that never failed to awe us. Initially, simple explanations sufficed to satisfy our curiosity. Answers begot more questions and our thirst for knowledge and desire to know the Truth never got doused. Then a group of self-appointed beholden of the race came to the fore to claim of direct communications with the Maker. They claim to have obtained fresh rolls hot out of the oven! Our answers are answered and that we have reached the zenith of our understanding. That, ...

Genius of the Ancient World (BBC Four) #3. Confucius What has Confucius, Hegel and ISIS/ISIS/IS have in common? Yes, they all look into the past and try to live the glory days of the past. Thankfully, the similarities end there. Unlike the former two who try to extract the good things of the glorious past, ISIS seems content to reliving the tainted past complete with barbarism, ignorances, ancient thinking and prejudices. At the time of Kung Fu Tze (Confucius), Chinese society was in tatters after many internal squabbles involving its many states. Confucius' father was a soldier who married a younger wife after his older wife could not produce him a son to continue his legacy. Confucius was born after a penance at the temples. Unfortunately, his father died when he was three. Being a good learner, he worked at a grain store when he became an adult. The mundaneness of his job must have turned him to an ethnographer who decided to venture from his home state of Lu west...

One of the most significant drawbacks in the manning of a human-crewed mission to Mars is the mental strength (or rather lack of) of astronauts in being able to stay sane over extremely protracted times in solitary confinements. After all, can one stay for 4 years in the company of the same boring company? They say that Man is a social animal and he needs friends and company to live. Deprive him of the ability to interact with his fellow kind and be sure that he would hit the loony bin. They fight, they laugh, they cry together, they loathe each other, but they need each other to survive! So say the scientists. A man needs to compete with each other or emulate each other to come out with a newer protocol for the next generation to improve so that they can continue surviving as the most dominant species on the planet. Perhaps,  they would remain as the only species as they annihilate other 'less' intelligent ones. Once they have done that, they would step into an intra-specia...

The other day, an elderly friend of mine, aged close to being a septuagenarian* was telling me about the financial turmoil that he was facing in his life. The last thing I would want to hear is the sob story of never ending saga of self pity and tear evoking hopelessness. I guess I had enough of listening to these melancholic tales throughout childhood and my present vocation. Not having a choice, I offered a sympathetic ear. ( Don't know what the Almighty has in store for me; cannot be so cocky! ) He had been under the weather with a debilitating  ailment for  almost half a year and had somehow made a miraculous recovery, albeit not a complete one. During his illness, he had used up all his savings as his wife's lone income was insufficient to manage his daily expenses and had been living on his brother's hand-outs. Hence, he had to desperately get back on his feet, get to work and bring the bacon home! Whilst listening through all this sad story, ( No! he did not ask for...