Are you an atheist
Today, I watched a rather curious video on Facebook, called, The Atheist Delusion. A decent piece of work. Here is a gist of what happens in the video: A person—let us call him ‘Jim’—goes to different people asking them if they were atheists. The people answer in the affirmative. Jim hands them a colour-printed picture book and asks them if the book created itself—if the colours somehow fell from the sky creating those pictures, and then black ink fell from somewhere forming those letters with the capitalisation, punctuation and all.
Can we kill a virus
In the last blog post, I had made a statement about how a living organism works, specifically, propagation. I had equated that with that of the behaviour of a virus. Later I realised that it could lead to some confusion, with some thinking that a virus is a living organism. A virus is not a living organism per se. Listen to this post on your favourite podcast platform. Per se, because a virus does show similarities with living organisms such as possibly contributing to the creation of eukaryotes, or even containing genetic information.
Janata Curfew
Some of us defeated the whole purpose of the Janata Curfew today. At five this evening, we hear the sounds of clapping and the shankh-dhvani and people clanging plates and all of that. We look out of one of our windows and see about ten people fist-bumping, high-fiving and shaking hands. The last part was disappointing. Listen to this post on your favourite podcast platform. The point of the Janata Curfew was not showing your political allegiance to someone or sending forwards, and then coming out on the streets at five to show support.
Panic Buying during hard times
The way the year 2020 started bordered on insane. For those in India, this effect was rather pronounced, starting from Kerala passing a resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, followed by upping of the protests across the country—Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh being the flag ship, to the incidents of dirty politics during the Delhi Elections campaigning, to the novel coronavirus going on claiming thousands of lives. We are in March already, and more and more people are suffering from COVID-19.
Reading the IAST
During my visit to Chennai the last month, I came across a film that was community-funded and community-made without paid professionals. This film was about the life of a Vaishnava guru of the thirteenth century, called Vedanta Desika, or Venkatacharya. The film Choice of script Introduction to the IAST If you know an Indian language My experience and discoveries The film The film is in Tamil. The idea of the film was to reach the story of the guru to common people, “during the times when people are forgetting their roots”.
The CAA is not about throwing out people
Over the last week, I saw protests everywhere. Most groups (not WhatsApp groups) that I am part of had a discussion about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act going. I even surprised some that I was taking the stand I was, given my track record of having ideas contrary to the ruling party’s. I find it difficult to explain to people that having rational thoughts is all I do. Let me get to the point: The CAA is not about throwing people out.
The other side of the Hyderabad encounter
I met a friend of mine today, and heard an interesting perspective. A light discussion began on the Hyderabad killings, from her saying, ‘I have started feeling that they could have been innocent.’ But in no time, one sentence led to another, and we were on the opposite sides—neither of us believing that the four were fully innocent, but at the same time, me standing by the Constitution and her standing by the police.
Were the Hyderabad killings right
The first piece of text I read upon waking up yesterday was that the police had killed the alleged rapists of the veterinarian in Hyderabad1. It took me a moment to let it sink in. This was like the films, where film heroes go about threatening criminals, ‘I will take you down and term it an encounter.’ I am no “liberal community”. This is important. More important is that I respect the Constitution.
Is the JNU protest justified
Despite hating to say it, it started with WhatsApp University. WhatsApp University is a term used for all of those streams of knowledge tidbits that you get from WhatsApp, that replace your beliefs, your thoughts, your rationale with what’s now popular belief. There is a massive engine that drives this, and this engine includes people with the ability to write posts like this on their phones. This is amplified by people who have all the time in the world to forward them to the masses.
How to survive a heart attack when alone
I am part of a family WhatsApp group, and my people are quite active there. This is my door to what is known as WhatsApp University. One of the messages I received there was about surviving a heart attack when alone. The message that followed this was: I have received this msg several times… It has intrigued me. (sic) The message reads (sic): This is from Dr. Geetha Krishnaswamy, Please give your 2min and read this:-