Intellectual Pursuit is the Best Luxury Product
Once, I was in a bus with a former nun. She had recently quit a convent. Now nobody could stop her from having fun, even in a bus. She started clapping and singing, and tried to get everyone else on the bus to join her. She also yelled at passersby on the road. This is […]
Is There Magic?
Philosophy might be a question asked too early in the life of a science. But some questions, even though they are yet to be settled by science, have become too simple. And an odd quality of the Western intellectual world is that its giants take such dim questions seriously. It is as though the social […]
Why Good Things Happen
Sam Pitroda was one of the most famous men in India in the 1980s. As the seer of Indian telecom, he was responsible for millions of long-distance calls by Indians getting through. With that French beard and words that a man with a French beard is expected to say, he looked like a man who […]
The Low-Stakes Compassion of College Students
Hamas has the most sophisticated defence system. It uses Palestinian civilians as shield. It wants many of them to die. David Brooks, in his column in the New York Times, wrote, “Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion.” This was always the strategy of Hamas. If terrorists have powerful uses for […]
Indian Parents are Raising Rahuls, not Modis
From what I gather, Rahul Gandhi is a good man. There is something banal about his good nature, which is exactly how goodness resides in most sane people. As a decent man, he is aware of his luck. Seven years ago he said: “My father was in politics. My grandmother and great-grandfather were in politics. So, it was easy for me to […]
‘Neuroscientists’ Don’t Know the Mind at all
If a guy has ‘neuro’ in his bio, he can say just about anything about the mind, as though he knows what it is. Andrew Huberman is a beneficiary. He is also from Stanford, so conditions were perfect for him to begin a podcast about that thing people hyphenate with confidence: ‘mind-body.’ He used expressions […]
Who Applies to be an Indian Nuclear Scientist
The fuss around the film ‘Oppenheimer’ gives me a chance to recount what happened when I set out, in 2006, to find out who exactly is an Indian nuclear scientist. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai is a sprawling reservoir of India’s nuclear programme that stands on the edge of a creek, shrouded by mangroves and […]
The Democratization of Thinness
Across the world, a wonder drug is helping the rich lose weight without the inconvenience of putting in an effort. As a result, Semaglutide, a string of amino acids created by a Danish pharma giant to reduce blood sugar, is democratizing thinness. What was once possible only for people with resolve, lovers of fitness, austere-eaters, […]
The Future of Friendships in the Age of Opinions
I used to be friends with people who had a moral compass, but I lost many of them after they started reading my column. I still know a few, like a young journalist named Nidhi Suresh, even though she has been thinking of getting rid of some friends. It is the times. She was in […]
Now That the Hindus Have Won
In the days leading up to January 22, I could not sense any genuine mass euphoria among temple-going Hindus over the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. There was a sense of importance attached to the day, like an approaching festivity, and few had any quarrel with the government for goading them to observe […]