It's a small world after all...

One of the most misunderstood concepts these days is the idea of dharma (and other related terms like karma ). Dharma is variously translated as "duty", "righteousness", "ethics", "divine law", and even "religion"-- all of which, are incorrect definitions.  Dharma is the most fundamental of the four "drivers" or purusharthas of human behaviour: dharma , artha , kama , and moksha . The most accurate translation I can give for these terms respectively, are: sustainability , capability , agency , and liberation .  The term dharma comes from the root dhrt - which means something that sustains or prevails. Dharma refers to the property of a system of being, that remains invariant through the life cycle of the system.  Dharma is what gives us our resilience to prevail across varying, adverse conditions and not be consumed by causal forces.  Dharma is not just a property of "living" beings-- it is a characteristic of all

Continuing in my series of posts about how I see synergy between Eastern and Western thought, I would like to connect one of the most beautiful mathematics of the 20th century with some of the foundations of Indian thought. As mentioned in previous posts, if there is one concept that can encapsulate the cultural paradigm of India and parts of China, East and South-East Asia, it is the concept of " Dharma ". The term is used in so many different contexts, giving it several different translations like "righteousness", "religion", "duty", "ethics" etc. all of which fail to capture its essence. Dharma represents a state of "sustainability" or "invariance". (Here is a paper describing dharma as sustainability or a state of "equilibrium" and here is yet another paper defining Dharma as sustainability). As described by Robert Lingat in his book " The Classical Law of India " Dharma is defined as &

Not too long ago, we had machines of different kinds -- each for a specific purpose. There were the big printing machines to print books, there were typewriters or "compact printing machines", cyclostyle machines for making copies, slide rules for doing calculations, files, ledgers, library "index" shelves, films, photo processing studio... one could go on and on. Most of these have been replaced by one thing -- the computer. Till the mid twentieth century, machines were always custom built for a specific purpose. But sometime in the late 1940s a new notion began to take root -- that of stored program computing . The main idea here is to go "meta" -- build one machine that could do act like several other machines, depending on what it is "told" to do. This was not as novel as it sounds. Mathematicians had already been talking about going meta for several decades by that time. And indeed there were some machines which were "programmable

In an increasingly globalizing world, we often need to interact with people who hold a completely different world view, often diametrically opposed to ours in specific respects. Differences of such nature often lead to misunderstandings and traumatic situations. One such issue is this elusive thing called strength of character . Almost every culture agrees that as people, we need to develop a "strength of character" as part of our growing up. And as the saying goes, "the devil lies in the details" it is only when we get to definitions, there are serious differences. Often these differences are conflicting, but not contradictory to one another. It is hence important to understand such differences and reconcile conflicts in order to develop a better understanding of other cultures and mutual respect. Here are some specific cases where I've seen conflicts emerge because of differing world views in my setting, (which basically is a place where what is termed as