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Does Mr. Modi deserve Credit for Mobile Phones and UPI? It gets on my nerves when ill-informed people credit Narendra Modi for the spread of mobile phones and the UPI payment system in India. Mobile Phones The mobile revolution in India began long before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. In 2005, Dayanidhi Maran, then Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, helped…

When at a loss for arguments, the religious fanatics bring in the name of Hitler, Stalin and history’s villains and mass killers. Stalin was educated in an Orthodox Christian Seminary. Mao Tse-Dong had often mentioned god in his writings and poetry. Carl Marx’s dialectical materialism theory does point towards atheism, but his version of Marxism was did predict or hope for a revolution  by the…

Zeno of Elea, born in South Italy (490-430) BC was a pre-Socrates Greek philosopher who posed this paradox for the world to solve. Interpreting Zeno’s argument in a modern setting relevant to our times, Imagine, for the purpose of a fanciful Formula 2, a  Ferrari that runs at twice the speed of its next competitor,  Mercedes.  The latter is given a handicap timing of, say, half hour. So, Ferrari…

Shashi Tharoor is a man of remarkable intelligence. Yet it was his gift of the gab that persuaded Mr. Modi to give him the leadership of a team touring the world to explain India’s standpoint on the how and why of Operation Sindoor, where India nearly brought the subcontinent close to war. Even the Hindutva parade paused its abuse of Tharoor long enough to praise him. Continue reading SHASHI…

1. HINDU SOUL Rebirth for restitution A young woman I knew delivered a baby. It cried the moment it was born. Normally, the babies were picked up and slapped on the buttocks to make them cry for their first intake of life breath . This child was thought to be a miracle, a god’s child who knew its ways from the moment it ws born. He cried during suckling through the corners of his mouth,…

The situation would be funny if it were not dangerous. In Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, during an Eid Milad-un Nabi procession, some Muslims installed a banner reading “I Love Muhammad”. A group of Hindus objected. This led to a near-riot not only in Kanpur, but in a few other places. Police arrested a few men – whether the placard erectors or rioters is not clear. You and I can hazard a guess as to…

The Story of a Civil Servant The pretty young thing walked towards me with a smile, gracefully swinging her hip,  and bowed. She placed a tray of steaming coffee cups and biscuits on the small table. I half-raised my posterior and said Good Morning. “No, no no, screamed  Mrs.  Chawla, who sat in a high chair.  “She eez survant. Not our class. No need for good morning, bad morning.” “Civil…

One reason for the scream for banning  of a book on the history of Hinduism by Sanskrit Scholar Wendy Dungier was that it mentions some stanzas of Valmiki, the original author of Ramayana, that the “Hindu” critics haven’t heard of. To “hear of” the contents of an epic, one has to read it. I will here just present a few stanzas from the original Valmiki Ramayan. Those who “heard of” Laxman Rekha,…

There will be twenty, thirty or forty small parties, local and provincial parties, caste parties and communal parties, they-didn’t-give-me-ticket parties, winning an occasional seat here and there in Indian Election 2014. Taken together, they will be a substantial lot. Taken separately, they can be bought for a ministerial position or for money. You don’t have to be a Stephen Hawking to put your…

It happened to a conniving national upstart in Europe during the late 1930s to mid-1940s. In the beginning, he only claimed to be setting right the injustices done to his nation by the victors of the previous world war. But between 1938 and 1940, he had his nation in the palm of his hand. He annexed Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Bohemian lands, part of Lithuania, western Poland, Alsace-Lorraine…

Alan Turing Test IN the Genesis myth, God shaped man from dust and breathed life into him. From man’s rib, he made woman. But when man reached for the fruit of knowledge, God feared he might become his equal. As a second rung of precaution, He barred man from the tree of eternal life. ALAN TURING TEST God’s legacy need not rest on man; today, he plays creator, and AI is his creation. Like the…

How the last two among us interacted, with Einstein’s mind in the background, on a Sunday night and came up with some fantastic discoveries On last Sunday night, I was invited to try out Gemini, Google’s AI platform with DeepMind for its Large Language Model (LLM) . What followed was a long discussion that began with DeepMind asserting that Pattern recognition along with trained and derived…

Every month, I receive a copy of Rasna, a Sanskrit magazine published in Palakkad. It is an incredible effort by a few enthusiasts to keep alive a language that is no longer in common use. The magazine reaches me through Prof. Gangadharan Nair, a retired professor of Sanskrit from the ŚrĪ Śankarācārya University of Sanskrit, Kalady.. A chapter of the Rāmāyaṇa by Professor Manthosh Bhattacharya…