Rumi Nations

When I happened to be hospitalized six months back, I got to experience firsthand all the aspects of privatized healthcare. I opted for one of those premium hospitals to avoid having to wrestle with the long lines and the general all-round madhouse atmosphere of a government hospital in India. I experienced the enormous cost of private healthcare which would surely be un-affordable for a vast majority of Indian families. I experienced the tricks of health insurance -- I had 2 or 3 policies but had to pay the entire cost out of pocket [in advance]. Very clever of profit-minded insurers. An example: I happened to be in the hospital for only one day and that was the deductible for one of the policies I was holding. Clearly I was not sick enough. But those are specific problems of the healthcare industry. What struck me was a personal experience which I feel I can extend and generalize.

Do I need to explain how or why? OK. I will. DC is the latest beneficiary of the fascination that people in the West have with the mysterious East. The fact that he was able to persuade a few Hollywood celebrities has clearly helped his cause immensely as well. He is a trained medical doctor and PhD too as he will readily inform you. The essence of his philosophy is intricate and intriguing. Well, that's really the secret to being a New Age guru . A SUCCESSFUL one, that is. You take the latest from modern science ... medicine/physiology/genetics, nuclear physics/quantum physics and general relativity and whatever else you can put in the mix without appearing too wacko. You correlate this ' latest ' scientific stuff with some ' ancient ' wisdom . And you say that all this was already known to the ancient wizards living and meditating in the jungles. And then you've to do a very effective presentation about the 'new' insights you've gained into these...

The Tevatron is going to close. The Superconducting Supercollider never came to fruition. Remember the scare when the LHC began running — all that talk about how black holes might get created at the LHC that might accidentally devour the planet. It’s commonplace to hear all and sundry pontificating about the benefits and harms of science to society. Religious people somehow feel automatically qualified to interpret god’s intentions and talk casually about the universe. Scientists however are a different species. They like to be humble and polite and mostly profess ignorance about much of the world and indeed, much of the broad tapestry of science. This is quite admirable of course and in tune with the spirit of science. But this creates a vacuum. And that vacuum is more often than not filled by opportunistic egomaniacs. It’s in this context that one must look at the lives of a few exceptional scientists. A few names stand out easily: Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Steven...

It was amazing to see Sagan touch upon such a vast array of topics and present it all with his exquisite and unique poetic touch. This episode is all about the large scale structure of the universe. Sagan talks about the types of galaxies and the origin and fate of the universe. Sagan tries to explain the possibility of the existence of a forth dimension. He wonders if there might be enough matter in the universe to stop the present expansion of the universe. Oddly enough, he seamlessly weaves Hindu philosophical stuff into this story of modern scientific cosmology. He talks about how only the timescales mentioned in Hindu mythology come anywhere close to the timescales revealed by modern cosmology. It was wonderful to see Sagan visit South India and talk about the Pongal harvest festival in the same episode that he talks about the Very Large Array in New Mexico. And he visits both South India as well as the VLA. He gives eloquent voice to the speculations about whether our universe mi...

The other day, my boss referenced a speech by Prince Charles wherein he talked about 'cabuncles.' That was a speech the Prince had made in 1984 - as I later found out. I didn't know about that speech. I have fascination for the decade of the sixties. The reason for that being that the 60s were a tumultuous decade. That decade saw a lot of turbulence but turbulence is often the fountainhead for human creativity. People need to have tumult in their lives for them to question conventinal wisdom and accepted truths. Every generation should try to 'reinvent the wheel'; indeed, think of it as a sacred duty to do that. I am thinking of the values of life or what is handed down to us as revealed truth. In the India that we live in today, there's too little of the kind of questioning that took place in the United States during the decade of the sixties. So, we see this younger generation of Indians so at ease with their cellphones clinging on to some very old and meaning...

I am amazed at the amount of hold that 'tradition' has on people's mindsets and behavior. Consider the case of rituals associated with Hindu marriages . . . These archaic and moribund activities that go on for many days originated perhaps more than a hundred years ago . . . now, we need to pause and reflect about the quality of the people and the quality of life of the people who lived in those times . . . It would be helpful if you travel to the villages of India today . . . in the 21st century . . . and then try and extrapolate how life must have been like in those villages a hundred years ago and more . . . I am sure it would be unbearable for us to live in those villages in those distant days filled with ignorance and poverty and generally backward conditions. And yet, when it comes to rituals that go on even today, people are uncritical followers of traditions created by these same folks who probably — indeed, not probably, but did think — thought that rainfall was cau...

Time to ride my hobby horse ... Nothing perplexes me more than people's extraordinary level of faith in the almighty ... or, should that be Almighty? I always wonder what are people's motivations for holding on to such an archaic structure ... Anybody with a modicum of common sense and a rudimentary knowledge about the history of the world would appreciate that all of these major world religions were 'invented' about 2,000 years ago ... Christianity and Islam were founded by prophets belonging to small settlements or kingdoms in what is now known as the Middle East while Hinduism and Buddhism were started in the region that was home to what is broadly known as the Indus Valley civilization ... Why were no religions invented elsewhere? Well, the answer to that is simple — couple of millenia ago, planet Earth wasn't home to 6 billion humans ... or a billion humans. The Americas were probably entirely dominated by wildlife ... Some might ponder as to why it is that all...