Year: 2023
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Gurupurnima at Udhbhavaha
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Udhbhavaha, the alternate learning space in Bangalore, celebrated Gurupurnima today by giving out the first Dr. K.S. Narayanacharya award for writers promoting Bharatiyata. The event was jointly organized by Udhbhavaha and two publishing houses, Sahitya Prakashana and Subbu Publications. The award for this year was given to Sandeep Balakrishna. The function, held at the beautiful…
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Convergent and Divergent Problems
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(Note: The following is a long extract from E.F. Schumacher’s ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ relevant to this blog’s discussion on education.) Take a design problem—say, how to make a two-wheeled, man-powered means of transportation. Various solutions are offered, which gradually and increasingly converge until, finally, a design emerges which is simply ‘the answer’—a bicycle.…
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The Myth of Disenchantment
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‘The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences’ is a 2017 book by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, a professor of religion at Williams college. The book argues that even in the West, the epicentre of the project of modernity, evidence does not support that magic and enchantment have been banished.…
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Svaraj In Ideas
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Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (1875–1949), the author of the essay titled ‘Svaraj In Ideas’ written in 1928, is perhaps the best-known academic philosopher of the colonial period. He held the King George V Chair (now the B. N. Seal Chair) in Philosophy at the University of Calcutta and trained many of the eminent philosophers of the…
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Triprangode Shiva Temple
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Yesterday I went to two very old temples in Kerala. First to the Navamukunda temple at Tirunavaya and then to the Triprangode temple a few kilometers from Thirunavaya. At Triprangode I discovered, to my surprise, that these two old temples are connected together by an old story. You may know the story but not its…
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Fewer Talks
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FEWER TALKS.MORE BREATHE! …said the byline to a large nice-looking hoarding I saw recently. The hoarding was for a real estate company selling apartments. The message that the copywriter wanted to convey, I thought, was that in this apartment complex there was a lot of fresh air so one could ‘More Breathe!’ and at the…
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Thoughts on the Ramayana – Part 2
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(This is part 2 of the reflections inspired by my YouTube conversation on the Ramayana with my friend Pranav. Available here) Nārada muni had confirmed to Vālmiki that it was possible for someone to have the sixteen guṇa-s, and Ram was one such person. After few days, Brahma the sriśṭikartā visited Vālmiki’s ashram. Brahma confirmed…
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Thoughts on the Ramayana – Part 1
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(The following reflections are inspired by the conversation I had with Pranav on the Ramayana. Available here) I am finding the story of Ratnakar, the dacoit transforming to Vālmiki, the poet very interesting. Ratnakar used to loot and kill travelers, and thus support his family. On one such occasion, he caught hold of 7 rishi-s…
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People Like Us!
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There is this need that alternative-type people have of looking for a community of ‘People Like Us’. Maybe this is a need that everyone has but it is more noticeable in the alternative crowd because they are a small minority. Me and my wife were on this search when we, long ago, took our three…
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Ramayana Conversations with Pranav – 1
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I have known Pranav for more than a decade, since our days in CEH at IIIT-Hyderabad. For some time, I have been wanting to have a series of discussions with him on the Rāmāyaṇa. Why Rāmāyaṇa? Like many, I have faint memory of watching Ramanand Sagar’s Rāmāyaṇa serial on Doordarshan. In addition, I have heard…
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Illuminations: Passages for contemplation
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I thought of collecting together some of the short passages that are given in the Illuminations book and creating a blog post around them. If you go through these stand-alone passages, some of them may strike you as meaningful or intriguing. If you have a discussion with another person (or persons) about the meaning of…
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Illuminations Workshop at Bangalore
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Last week I was part of a workshop for parents and teachers of Udhbhavaha school in Bangalore. The methodology (based on A.K. Saran’s ‘Illuminations’) was to read through some short passages, discuss them in small groups and then present it to the other participants. The passages are taken from the works of authors like Ananda…