Eid al-Adha is meant to be a festival of sacrifice. For it to remain truly so, it has to be a festival of love and compassion, and should not be tarnished with the blood of innocent animals. To thus celebrate Eid would be a truly noble way to observe the festival of sacrifice. In one […]
Religion, Personal Laws and Common Civil Code
The constitution defines India to be a secular nation, and recognizes equality before law as one of the fundamental rights of all citizens. However, when it comes to a category of laws called personal laws, how you are treated by law will depend on which religion you are born into. The roots of this practice can be […]
A Defiant Letter to the Principal and an Invaluable Lesson for Life
It was a long time ago, in my school days, that I wrote a defiant letter to the principal of our school. I was in the eleventh or twelfth standard, and our school had just got a new principal. The school had been in a state of confusion after the retirement of our previous principal and students […]
Associative Learning and the Root of Stereotypes and Prejudices
A few weeks back, I was showing “Avatar – the Last Airbender” series to my daughter. It took only a little more than a week for us to cover all three seasons (or Books, as they’re called). In addition to cultivating in her a refined taste for high-quality cartoons, I hoped that it would help her […]
Exposing the Institutionalized Injustice of Caste-based Reservation
I saw this image doing the rounds on Facebook (without my own comment in that clumsily crafted star, of course). Though it is a rather stupid argument being made, and takes very less to expose, unfortunately there are many who buy this nonsense without caring to make even that minimum exercise of their brain. Even […]
Titiksha – The Defining Spirit of a Martial Artist
The injury that I got while sparring in the class turned out to be a calf bone fracture, and my leg has been in a plaster cast for over a week. This has made difficult many of the things that I had taken for granted – walking, driving, bathing, even turning over in the bed. Martial arts training has been completely […]
Redress of Historical Wrongs and India’s right to the Koh-i-Noor
Discussion on India’s right to the Kohinoor were recently in the news after the Government of India told the Supreme Court that the diamond was gifted to be British and not stolen by them. This led to further debates on whether Government’s position was factually correct, whether we are the rightful owners of the diamond, and if we should strive […]
Traditional Wisdom for Investors and Entrepreneurs
Much of the wealth of knowledge passed down from an age when writing had yet to be popular is in the form of terse sentences (or phrases) that hold condensed drops of wisdom, referred to as sutras (which which roughly translates to aphorisms in English). One such sutra, which embodies a key aspect of traditional wisdom for investors […]
Relevance and Significance of National Symbols
The recent controversy around someone refusing to shout “Bharat Mata ki Jai” reminded me of an incident sometime back, when a family was reportedly harassed in a theater because they did not stand up for the national anthem. It is bad enough to have a legal requirement to play the national anthem at every screening, and it is absolutely outrageous for […]
Is Tamil older than Malayalam?
Which is the oldest South Indian language? Is Tamil older than Malayalam? These are some questions that often come up during discussion of Dravidian languages and their history. It is a matter of pride among many Tamilians that their language is the oldest, and Tamil was also the first Indian language to be declared a […]