All of us have heard statements like “love marriage is better than arranged marriage”, or “living in Europe is better than living in India”, or “X religion is better than Y religion”, or “science is better than religion” and vice versa. We also know a lot of people who strongly believe these statements. These are blanket statements. These are generalizations that people believe in. I have some thoughts on these. ...

In my old blog, “The dream you took for granted”, I gave an example of myself. I said that I am living the dream life of my 19-20 year old self, and yet, I don’t feel that great. Many people have a similar situation as mine. As a solution, I had mentioned that we should practice gratitude (check out the blog for more details). We should be thankful for everything that has went our way. Few of my friends questioned this, and they had a very valid point. If we are always satisfied of where we are, how will be put in the effort for growth? We will forever stay stuck where we are. The negative emotions that we get in our current position lead us to work towards a better future. In this blog, I will hopefully be able to provide an answer to this question. ...

Imagine this, you are living in a time where slavery is very common, let’s say sometime between 15th to 17th century. You see that a lot of people believe that slaves are a different “species” of sorts and they deserve the treatment they are getting. You see that a lot of people treat slaves inhumanely. What do you think your reaction will be? Will you believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery? Will you believe that slaves are so dumb that they themselves can’t find any other job and so they deserve to be slaves and their masters are actually helping them by doing that? ...

Judgement is a skill that is very necessary to have in certain situations in life. Our judgements affect a lot of things in our life. There are three levels on which we judge people. As you might have already guessed from the title, they are - action, intent and context. In today’s blog, let’s explore how we use these incorrectly and how we should actually use them to correctly judge people (and ourselves). ...

I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong. -Bertrand Russell There are almost no certainties in life. Almost every conclusion we reach, every decision we make, every thought that occurs to us and every word we speak is a leap of faith to some extent. I can’t even say that the table that is in front of me right now exists or not. I may say that if I assume that there is a physical table present in front of me, then through my perception (i.e. my eyes, retina, and brain), or through the sense data that I receive, I see the brown colour of the table. The brown color of the table is a combination of the actual physical object (if there is any) and my senses and not the sole property of the actual physical object. So me saying that “the table exists” or “the table is brown in colour” are also leaps of faith. ...

The phrase “my life, my rules” has been very popular. People just randomly throw this phrase around these days. Let’s dissect this today. When somebody says “my life, my rules”, they usually mean, “I own myself, I can do whatever I want with myself”. This reaction is usually triggered when they are stopped from doing something, their freedom is hampered. For example, if an orthodox father tells his daughter to come back home early and not wear short clothes, this is the reaction the daughter will have. We can all see where this reaction comes from. The daughter feels that her father is restricting her and that she has the freedom to wear whatever she wants and go out with anyone she wants, she owns herself. ...

If you found the title strange, you are not alone. You might never have heard a person making such a claim. Nobody can be an atheist by birth. When a person grows up and starts understanding their environment, and starts observing the various religious practices, they begin to feel that there is something wrong here. They dig deeper and find out that so many things that religions claim are straight up rubbish. And then they decide to be an atheist. They are not born in an atheist household to be an atheist by birth (or on paper). ...

There are many vegetarian people I know, who don’t hesitate to kill mosquitoes or cockroaches. Isn’t that strange? Vegetarianism is all about not killing other living beings. And they have no problem killing mosquitoes or cockroaches? I am not here to discuss whether it is right or wrong to kill insects, that is a separate debate and I don’t want to get into it in this article. I am more interested in this behaviour where, in a person’s subjective morality, doing something is bad; but they themselves do it in some other way, or in some other context, and have no regret about it? In fact some people even encourage other people to do it. I have seen people totally panicking on the sight of a cockroach, jumping around and telling everyone to just get rid of it. I was intrigued by this behaviour and decided to think a little on it. Here’s my opinion. ...

Today’s topic is controversial and it is something I have been thinking about lately. Can you achieve freedom by restricting yourself? Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Let me explain. Long back, our ancestors, the hunter gatherers, had a lot of freedom. They used to wander around in forests to collect food. They did not stay at one place for long. Then time passed by, we learned agriculture and we had to restrict ourselves to one location. We lost freedom of continuously moving from one location to another because our lifestyle demanded that we stay in one location. We restricted ourselves to a single location and we freed ourselves from the worry of “will I have to stay hungry tonight?”. You might be starting to get the point here. ...

We all have heard quotes like “you should work hard and your life will become easier” at least a million times by now. But I haven’t always found this to be helpful. Working hard is important, there is no debating that. But I have a problem with how the whole self help industry, philosophers and motivational speakers portray it, and how we feel about it. This might be a little controversial. Allow me to explain. ...