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For some reason or the other, various adversaries keep targeting me for attacks. Narendra Maharaja is one such person. He has a reason to hate me. In one of his interviews he had mentioned, Eradication of superstition is not the task of the likes of Narendra Dabholkar and ND Patil and their foreign Continue reading Dr. Narendra Achyut Dabholkar (1945-2013) is a well-known social activist and writer from Maharashtra who was gunned down on August 20, 2013, during his morning walk in Pune. It is obvious that he was killed because of his incessant efforts at fighting inhuman superstitious practices and spreading a scientific temper among people. His Continue reading In his essay A Defence of Detective Stories, GK Chesterton had daringly proclaimed that civilisation itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions, and that the agent of social justice is the original and poetic figure; while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy Continue reading Does Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (ANiS) Oppose Only the Hindu Religion? This question is asked with the deliberate intention of discouraging ANiS activists and spawning prejudice in the minds of people. Across India, rationalist movements are confronted with the same question with respect to their role in eradicating superstitious belief. ANiSs activities Continue reading History is replete with instances of social and moral critics paying with their lives for militating against the status quo. India lost four of them between 2013 and 2017. The targeted killings of three elderly men (Dabholkar, 67, Pansare, 81, and Kalburgi, 77) and a middle-aged woman (Gauri Lankesh, 55) by shadowy Hindutva Continue reading The term scientific outlook can be defined simply as understanding the causeeffect relationship of any incident or examining the cause effect relationship between two incidents. Going by this simple definition, it must be said that Indian society has continued to remain unscientific even in the age of science. To develop a scientific outlook, Continue reading
The Hindutva leaders in Kerala must be daft or gifted with a wickedly brilliant sense of humour. Why else would they protest against the Supreme Court’s order to allow the entry of all women, including those in the menstruating age of 10 to 50 years, into the Sabarimala temple of Lord Continue reading How can I get a divine intervention for my career?Thats the question Ravi Ganne, a young investment banker in Bangalore, typed into Google seven years ago. His search results led him to the website of a new company calledePuja. For about $15 (Rs 1050 approx.), the start-up would have apuja, a Hindu devotional-prayer Continue reading The recent outreach by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi seems to have succeeded in its principal objective: an image makeover for a niche audience. Thanks to an obsequious media and a commentary at ever willing to suspend disbelief, the event has yielded the soft, liberal gloss the RSS Continue reading You have probably never heard of William Kingdon Clifford. He is not in the pantheon of great philosophers perhaps because his life was cut short at the age of 33 but I cannot think of anyone whose ideas are more relevant for our interconnected, AI-driven, digital age. This might seem strange given that Continue reading By rationality, I normally mean what the Less Wrong people mean, the notion of having a picture in our minds, a map, a model, that matches up fairly well with reality. Having “a map that matches the territory” is what this is all about. This is referred to by psychologists as “epistemic rationality”. Continue reading In 1801 the English poetSamuel Taylor Coleridgecalculated the impact ratio of scientists to poets thusly: the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton. Defending his 1820 poem Lamia, Coleridges contemporary poetJohn Keatsgrowled thatIsaac Newtonhad destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing Continue reading |