Culture & Society

So, to my well-wishers, I get why you salute him pain’s a powerful badge. But don’t polish him into what he wasn’t. Freedom wasn’t his gift

Sarve jano means all no exceptions. So how do we bridge that? Maybe it’s less preaching and more doing clean water, a fair wage, a school ..

My dog became a mirror for the poor, the voiceless, the ones who eat what’s shoveled onto their plates because they have no choice. My wife, unwittingly, played the role of authority—well-intentioned perhaps, but blind to the cost of her actions. And as I sat with this thought, I couldn’t help but see parallels in the world around us, especially in places like India and beyond, where inequality tightens its grip and forces the vulnerable to swallow more than they can bear.

In India, the Charvaka school (~600 BCE) rejected Vedic rituals and blind faith in the supernatural, emphasizing sensory evidence over dogma

Dig into the dirt, and it’s murky. Ayodhya’s ancient excavations show settlements from 2000 BCE, per the Archaeological Survey of India

Young kids are naturally curious—psychologists like Jean Piaget have shown they question everything as part of cognitive development.

Kangana Ranaut, seriously? You open your mouth and out comes this gem: India’s freedom in 1947 was “bheekh” alms, a handout and the “real”

There’s no way the Manusmriti can be accepted today. It’s outdated, rigid, and honestly, it doesn’t fit with how we operate.

Then there’s the driver I knew. He hung a lemon-chili thread on his car, trusting it to shield him on Mysore’s chaotic roads. I warned him, “No ritual’s saving you if you don’t drive right—rules, focus, caution, that’s what counts.” Days later, he crashed. The thread dangled uselessly; the accident broke his faith. I wasn’t smug—I was sad. Sad that it took a wreck to show him what I’ve always believed: superstition’s a flimsy shield against reality.

Big mistake. Her eyes narrow. “You always dismiss my feelings with your ‘science says’ nonsense!”

My uncles and their friends despised the Congress government, cursed Nehru and the Gandhis, cheered the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

Nagesh, they said, had once placed a stone snake god beside an eagle god in the village temple—a blind act of faith, if he’d done it at all.

“How much do you earn?” one asked. “What if you worked elsewhere?” the other breathed, soft as a secret.

Ear piercing struck me as a holdover from ancient tribes—maybe a way to tell Hindu kids from non-Hindu ones, or just a custom that stuck.

I’ll admit it, watching my kids fail wasn’t easy. A bad grade stings, and the parent-teacher meeting that follows isn’t a picnic.

We live in a world where I can ask an AI like Grok to unravel life’s mysteries, where satellites hum above and cards sometimes fail below. Yet we still look for signs in the first sale or the shoes by the door. Maybe that’s not a flaw, but a charm—a reminder we’re human, searching for patterns in a universe that’s too big to care.

Each time we utter "faith," it becomes a mirror reflecting a belief tied to our identity. Isn’t that remarkable?

Slap. The sound hit before the pain did. A sharp crack, then a sting blooming across my right cheek. Shock froze me—eyes wide

The BJP and its Sangh Parivar allies have created a culture of fear. Their foot soldiers—whether it’s cow vigilantes lynching Muslims or hit squads targeting intellectuals—operate with impunity.

I stood guard with a .303 rifle slung over my shoulder, boots polished, posture rigid, watching over officers’ quarters, the stadium, even a burial ground.