Month: May 2025

All of India’s media attention is currently focused on the on-going conflict between India and Pakistan. It began on April 22nd when terrorists backed by the Pakistani government murdered 26 male tourists visiting Pahalgam in Kashmir. The terrorists told their Kashmiri tourist victims to recite the Arabic kalma (the Islamic declaration of faith) and to drop their pants to show that they were circumcised to prove that they were Muslims. When they failed that test, they were shot at point-blank range, murdered in front of their families.

The message was clear: you must die because you are not Muslim.

You die not because of some harm you’ve caused anyone. No. Your unforgivable crime was that you were not a servant of Allah. Allah has commanded that each and every of his faithful has a religious duty to kill you, the non-believer. By killing you the filthy infidel, the obedient Muslim serves Allah’s will, and Allah’s reward for his jihad against you awaits him in heaven: a penis that never bends, 72 perpetual virgins, 18 pretty nubile boys, and rivers of wine. Not much is said about the rewards that female jihadists receive who kill infidels. Continue reading “The Dollar Auction Continues”

The old saw that “you can take the boy out of the country but you cannot take the country out of the boy” holds true for me. Of course, country refers to a rural area and not to a city or a modern nation state. It acknowledges that it is hard to replace one’s mindset with another merely by moving to another setting. 

You carry your conditioning with yourself. We love what we are familiar with, and the most familiar bits are those that we know from our childhood. I was born and brought up in Nagpur but I lived most of my adult life in the United States. For all that, I’m still that boy from Nagpur.

That meditation was motivated by what I was listening to today. I was enjoying Marathi abhangs written by the 15th century saint Eknath. They are devotional songs expressing love and devotion to Vitthala, another name of Bhagwan Vishnu. Though my mother tongue is Bengali, I understand Hindi and Marathi somewhat. I am richer for that. I left my home long ago but carry still within me the love of the music I grew up with. Continue reading “Majhe Maher Pandhari”

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) wrote, “Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.” He must have been invoking his inner Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) who in his poem “An Essay on Criticism” cautioned — 

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Either drink deep, or don’t drink at all. My motto also.

Superficial understanding does lead to unjustified confidence. With deeper understanding we realize the limits of our knowledge. We are not omniscient. That’s not an amazing claim. Our understanding is severely limited because we are limited beings, and therefore ignorant of nearly everything. That must teach us epistemic humility but all too often experts don’t learn that lesson. Continue reading “AI and Jobs”