Kāntārā the Kannadā movie is right now making waves in India. After hearing glowing reviews about it, I decided to watch it on the big screen (hadn't gone to a theatre in more than a decade!). This piece is not a movie review but just my own attempts at understanding the theme of this movie,…
The mechanics of an alcohol economy and whether it makes sense to try to come out of its deathly grip
This is an anecdote from many years ago, when Bill Gates was the Lord of the Tech World and the darling of the markets (before Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk et al). A conference of industry leaders was taking place somewhere with industry titans from IT, Automotive, Healthcare and other sectors participating. Bill Gates, in his…
This blog was sadly inspired by the tragic mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques in Christchurch (15th March, 2019) which killed 50 people (as of the date of writing) and injured many others. This was not the first in recent times (Sandy Hook, Parkland, Las Vegas, Peshawar, Garissa, being the more recent ones in…
This write-up was triggered by a recent article in the National Geographic magazine on “Big Brother and Surveillance society, et al”. Central question of the article is…is it a necessary evil, the new Orwellian world that may in fact be good for society (unlike George O’s bleak and frightening outlook) and where and how do…
Introduction Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’ is considered by many as a literary classic, widely acclaimed for revealing to the West some really intricate philosophies of the Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. In terms of his background, Hermann Hesse came from a family of German Christian missionaries with links to India and grew…
Varanasi (or Kashi, Benaras) is considered the epicentre of the Hindu Sanatan Dharma, a city founded by Lord Siva, the Vedic deity worshipped by Hindus as the Lord of Destruction. It is said to have been continuously inhabited, for nearly 5,000 years. Situated between the Varuna river in the north and Assi river in the…
My urge to write on this topic arose from a small story going around in social media nowadays. The story goes like this… “…father and his little daughter go to a temple, the little kid looks at the stone lions in the temple facade and gets scared. Father says they are just stones, so don’t…
My Personal observations about prayer & its efficacy Introduction Prayer and faith are two sides of a coin, in the realms of the soul…each sustaining & nourishing the other. Questions and experiments are the realm of the physical world, limited by the boundaries of human intellect and causal parameters. Never the twain shall meet…or do…
Blogs by Pratyush 