Rumi Nations

Einstein was so unlucky. He never saw Koffee With Karan. Or the wonderful strokemaking by the Sehwags, Tendulkars and Yuvrajs. But we are all lucky. We have spent countless hours and hundreds of hours watching celebrities and cricket on television. I suspect our interest in these activities wanes as our age (and waistline) increases. May be we realize that these are futile, time-wasting activities — or, may be we encumber ourselves with various responsibilities such as kids and we get busy making a living and buying groceries, masalas and vegetables and do not find time in our long commutes to watch celebrity talk shows. Some people — say, Feynman, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs — perhaps get lucky and never spend time watching TV shows or cricket. But everybody cannot be geniuses like them. Every new generation in India reliably grows to become cricket aficionados and becomes celebrity-crazed. Is there a cure for this? Is there a way to wean adolescents from adolescent-like activiti...

The Hindus have more than trebled in numbers in the past 50 years. Going by the comments below, these Hindus are nincompoops. Without exception. They contribute nothing in terms of innovation or in inventions. Merely keep braying about some mythical ancient glory. And lack common sense. If I were to share personal anecdote (while acknowledging that anecdote is not evidence): My grandparents generation had 13 (living) siblings. Each of them produced 6 or 7 kids on average. My parents' generation had 3 kids each on average. Thankfully, the 'young generation' seems to have got the message and usually tends to have one kid — usually a son. [I guess we will have a lot of homosexuality in the manner of the English boarding schools that Hitchens mentioned.] There is unfortunately too much ignorance or illiteracy around. Which is why absolute fossils of the BJP/VHP/RSS are able to suggest in all seriousness that Hindus should have 4 or 5 or 10 kids each. ...

Humans across religious, cultural and national differences all have names. At least all modern humans have this. I wonder if the lost tribes in the Amazon jungle or the tribes who live in the Nicobar Islands cut off from civilization since the last many thousands of years have a similar naming convention as the rest of us humans do. And we humans often choose to have system of naming that consists of a first name and a last name. the last name often indicates a person’s or a family’s occupation and remains the same from generation to generation. All the offspring of one family get the same last name as the parents — usually the last name of the father. In some cultures, the first names can be the same as that of the father too. In some cultures, the name of the village, and other names too get added to the child’s name and it grows rather long. But consider for a moment how it all would have started and taken hold among humans in deep antiquity. Humans would have acquired...

The idea of cryopreservation is fascinating and the cryonicists of today are far from crazy. They certainly cannot be compared to the medieval people whose faith consists of a smorgasbord of silly religions, myths, gods and so on. It would be correct to shake our head at the extreme and undue optimism of the cryonics pioneers of today but then all pioneers appear crazy in their lifetime. Giordano Bruno paid with his life for his soaring imagination. Carl Sagan cautioned about the danger of nuclear Armageddon and Richard Feynman in his youth was extremely pessimistic in the immediate aftermath of the success of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Can we be so sure today that we have once and for all avoided the fate of nuclear Armageddon for our species? I am not so sure. Nobody would survive if the fears of Sagan and Feynman come true at some point in the future. The techno-utopians — which is a perfectly normal way to describe t...