It's a small world after all...

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit several locations in rural Malawi in southern Africa, to study different initiatives towards financial inclusion. This was part of my collaboration with a UK based organization called Rural Inclusion , and its implementation partner, CADECOM ( Caritas Malawi ). This activity was supported by a grant from the Frontiers Programme of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering.  Rural Inclusion, as an organization, works with several Community Based Organizations (CBO) in multiple countries to provide training on financial literacy through their platform named Ostrii. The CBOs in turn work with several communities to impart this training as well as assess impact on the ground.  As part of our visit, we interacted with several communities in the Dedza region, and the Ntchisi region of Malawi. Communities in these places had organized themselves to create informal banking systems called VSLA (Village Savings and Lending Association), where community member

In order to truly understand the core of Indian thought, it is important to understand the ontological difference between "Nothing" and "No-thing".  The idea of a "no-thing" is unique to Indian worldview, and to the best of my knowledge, is found nowhere else in philosophies across the world.  The "no-thing" refers to the core of our subjective experience, or pure awareness, or consciousness. To understand this better, we need to start with the notion of inquiry-- where, a subject or the inquirer is inquiring about an object , or the inquired .  All entities that can be objects of inquiry, are " things " and the absence of a thing becomes " nothing ". Conventional science today, regards everything as objects, and considers a subject or inquirer, to be just an object when viewed from the vantage point of some other subject.  However, Indian thought argues that what we see about other inquirers are just some objective shell in

The way we approach our inquiry into the universe is called hermeneutics . Hermeneutics refers to the way of thinking, and the underlying approach we use to make sense of what we experience.  Our hermeneutics is so deeply ingrained within us that we are often unaware of its existence and the way it biases our thinking. As the saying by the physicist Werner Heisenberg goes:  What we observe is not the universe itself-- but the universe that is exposed to our method of inquiry   We get answers based on the kinds of questions we ask-- and while we are so obsessed with the answers, we often forget to inquire into our method of questioning itself.  Let me illustrate with an example. This video called "A tale of two brains" by Mark Gungor is quite popular on the Internet:  According to this theory, men's brain are characteristically different from women's brain. Men's brain categorises the universe into neat little boxes , and thinks only within that box. It puts back o

Judea Pearl, one of the prominent researchers in the logic of causality, argues that current-day mathematics and logic does not have mechanisms to represent causality. And this has caused great confusions in several instances.  Let us consider how causality is represented in current day mathematics and logic.  One of the most common situations where we interpret causality, is in a mathematical equation. An equation of the form  y = f(x) is often interpreted as the value of f(x) causes y to get a given value. This is the interpretation used in several programming languages for example. In a language like C or python, when we say:  a = b it means that the value of b causes the variable a to attain a given value. It is not the value of a that changes b, but the value of b that changes a.  But mathematically, the sign "=" simply means equality. In mathematics, a = b is the same as saying b = a.  This overloading of the "=" symbol causes complications in programming, wh

Almost everyday as I drive to work, I witness this episode. In one of the traffic signals on the way to work, there would inevitably be this one guy, dressed as Hanuman, and begging for alms from the vehicles that have stopped at the signal.  I have witnessed this for the past several years, and it is quite clear that the aim of his activity is to get some money for himself or the racket that he is part of (unless of course, he is some kind of an undercover agent pretending to be a beggar).  But why is he dressed like Hanuman? Why is he not begging as himself?  Actually, such a practice (of asking for alms being dressed as a deity) has a long history. In earlier times, people used to sometimes undertake long, arduous journeys to pilgrimage centres that would have taken several months or years to complete. Such arduous journeys would be made once in a lifetime, and some of them of course, would never return. And not everyone had the means to fund such a long journey. In order to raise f

When we study logic, we first study the definition of a proposition or assertion : A statement that can be assigned a true or false value. For instance, a statement like "It is raining" is an assertion-- it could be either true that it is indeed raining, or false. But a sentence like, "Come here" is an imperative statement that is calling for an action, and not an assertion-- there is no truth or false value we can assign to it.  Assertions can be strung together using several logical operators like "and", "or", "not", "if-then" and so on. Hence for instance if we have two assertions: "It is raining" and "Our basement is flooded", then a statement of the form: "If it is raining then our basement is flooded" is also an assertion. Verifying the truth or falsity of this assertion often proceeds by an attempt at falsification. For instance, if we observe that it is indeed raining, and our basement is