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....
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....
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....
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?...
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....
With the election season in India over, I have a few thoughts. During this election, I observed a few things with myself as well as others. A few things about what kind of people we generally tend to follow, what kind of people influence us, why do we get influenced by the people we do. This election was all about people being either pro Modi or anti Modi. A few people said this is a dictatorship, a few people were completely in love with Prime Minister Narendra Modi....
This is the part 3 of the “You are a hypocrite!” series. In part 1, we understood that every person is a hypocrite. In part 2, we got a bit of insight about the irrational and rational part of our mind. In this part, let’s explore a beautiful way of controlling your mind and using it to your own advantage. I was reading this beautiful book recently called Energize Your Mind by Gaur Gopal Das....
This is the part 2 of the “You are a hypocrite!” series. In part 1, we understood that every person is a hypocrite when it comes to matters that affect their own self. Their behavior in both the cases are very different. In this part, let’s explore why that happens. Let’s consider a scenario where you are watching the iPhone 15 advertisement and your salary is 25000 INR a month, you have just received your 1st salary and you are 22 years old....
All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy. – Peter Wastholm Scene: You are in the office and you see 2 colleagues and your manager talking and laughing at something. “What would they be talking about? Is it about me? Are they talking about the fumble I had in the presentation? OMG yes they are talking about it. Let me get closer to them so I can listen....