It's a small world after all...

Purva paksha:   When we study Advaita Vedanta, we learn about the impermanent and transient nature of existential reality that is called Maya. Our daily experience of reality comprising of matter and interactions among them are in a continuous state of flux. Vedanta posits that the underlying substrate of all of our experience is an unchanging reality (that is called Brahman), that is the only reality that exists. This substrate is existence itself-- and forms the "is-ness" of everything that is.  An example that is oft quoted is that of a clay pot. A clay pot is just clay and nothing else. There is nothing called a pot if we remove the clay from a clay pot. The cause of a clay pot is the clay, and the clay itself appears as a pot. The name, form and function that forms a pot is not at the same level of reality as the clay. The clay can exist without the pot, but the pot cannot exist without the clay.  The transactional reality of our universe comprising of laws of physics an

In an episode of Young Sheldon, young Sheldon who is supposedly a genius and a budding scientist, is listening to the live broadcast of the Nobel prize ceremony live from Stockholm. He had invited several of his friends to listen to this live broadcast, even tried to engage in debates with them on who ought to be winning the Nobel this year, and also arranged for snacks for them to have a listen-party-- but no one turns up. The next scene shows him lamenting that he may end up dying all alone, at this rate. The scene then shows other future BBT protagonists as kids, and what they are doing at that time. Young Howard is tinkering with some machine, Young Raj is looking at the stars, Young Leonard is reading something, Young Penny is sleeping, and so on. None of them had invited anyone else to listen to the live broadcast from Stockholm and were lamenting about no one turning up.  It appears from this, that the real budding scientists were Young Sheldon's friends. Young Sheldon only

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