Siddhartha Gauthama

Parikrama I rang the bell and folded my hands into a namaste, trying to calm the excitement. Infront of me stood the idol of he who is said to be omnipresent. I was in a small temple at the foot of the hill, that around which millions walk every year. The stories of their journey made me look forward to this day, when I embark on it myself. The custom says one has to walk around the hill thrice, starting from this temple. After each parikrama, one has to offer his prayers to the god in the temple and prepare for his next. Though I had no experience of how it was going to be, I was confident that I could complete it, and that I would enjoy it. I started my first parikrama and soon the plane turned to an uphill. The steps carved into stone were marked by the wear and tear of travelers over the years. The cool breeze from the trees on either side of the path brought pleasantness to the mind. I took up a song and went on with it. I was surprised when I saw a deer, amazed at a pe...

Today when I woke up and came to the balcony, like all other Delhiites, I was welcomed by smog rather than sun. As I started to think what would clear the air, I realized that the main problem is, the smoke doesn’t affect our smart phones. Seriously!!!! Just imagine what would happen if our smart phones start to switch off, unable to function in the smoke. The government would panic “Why isn’t my WhatsApp propaganda penetrating???” Google and Facebook would go “WHERE IS MY DATA???” People would join in streets and revolt “I invested a lot on this phone, why isn’t this working?? It’s my right to have a working mobile.” It would be an enforced “No Nut November”. There would be no Instagram and people would not know what to do with food. Social media is gone, and people will not know what to do with their lives.   Data doctors (who will shortly be our doctors) would soon diagnose the disease. They will come up with a way to revive the phones, and just in case, th...

Caught between two random events, Moving amongst infinite possibilities, Quantifying things to give them a sense of importance, Probabilizing outcomes to give ourselves a sense of control, How powerless we are! How powerless we are! v

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail - Benjamin franklin. Is it just me or does this quote look dumb to everyone? Does this mean every person who is not searching for the elixir for eternal life, is committing suicide? An intelligent guy used his hard earned skill in mathematical modelling to predict his own future and realised life holds nothing of intrigue. So he planned to jump from the seventh floor. At a different place and different time, another engineer use d his hard earned physics skill along with billions of money to create a weapon of mass destruction, that which his competitors in Germany could not create. All of them planned, but who is it that succeeded and who is it that failed? Who is it that failed by succeeding and who is it that succeeded by failing? When success and failure are categorised by a “faulty by default human brain” what is better? To plan and act or to sit and watch? What if we are the RAAS in a person with heart failure, trying to re...

The warmth inside the sweat shirt, protecting me from the cool breeze around, made me feel at ease. The world moved to the background as the bus lunged forward, and more introspective thoughts came to my mind. "Who are you?" the voice asked. "I'm a doc" I said saccading my gaze from one tree to the next. "No, that's just your profession" it said. "The coffee is acting" I thought to myself and replied,  "I'm a good, intelligent, hard working guy" like a naive four year old. "Let me tell you a story" the voice said. A microbiologist finished his day's (and night's) work and is closing his lab. Little does he know, of the small bacterial inoculum that got stuck to the tip of his right little finger. As he was shutting the door, he inadvertently crushed his finger. "Aaaaahhhhh" he exclaimed violently jerking his hand. The inoculum jumped and sat comfortably on a window sill. The PhD s...

As sun started to peep through the small gaps in the thick canopy, Nishith woke up. Soon, the poking from stones beneath the leaf litter became more and more uncomfortable and he sat up, involuntarily pulling out the lamp from his sack. He sleepily started to rub the lamp, oblivious of the big black ant struggling to find its way through the coarse locks of his wavy black hair. The genie soon emerged, yawning. He is annoyed at Nishith who keeps promising him eight hours of rest everyday but never seems to actually give him that. Even last night they sat together at the river bank late into the night. They sat there, looking at the sunset first, then at the moon and its clear reflection on rippled river water. He is Nishith’s bread winner. And the trouble maker. Entertainer and the bringer of sadness. Nishith loves him for all that he is and all that he can be. The genie took the form of a big black serpent, sneaking onto Nishith, and soon filling his thoughts with deep melanch...

“Human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life.” ― Albert Einstein Mr. Einstein obviously knows what he is talking about, having seen how humans use the power of knowledge. This is one such story, where great insights into the inner workings of human mind, instead of leading to happiness and dignity, led to loss of human life. Though brain is an evolutionarily old structure, human mind is peculiar, at least to our knowledge, in its self-awareness. The consciousness of self, we humans are so proud of, lead us to believe for almost as long as we existed, that humans are rational creatures driven by logic and reason. This belief was questioned, when Sigmund Freud, with his tremendous intuition, has hypothesised that human consciousness only scratches the surface of our mind. He theorised that most of the decision making occurs in the unconscious, that part of the brain driven by emotions and thousands of years old survival instincts. ...