Blog

All the great scientists have been deeply spiritual, and I consider Albert Einstein to be the last of that lot. He imagined time and space sitting in his 1 BHK flat in Bern, Switzerland. After him, science became a big enterprise and was also declared secular…

I learned about Joseph Conrad in the context of Nobel Laureate author Sir V.S. Naipaul, who is said to have written in his style. As I loved reading Sir Naipaul’s novels and tried vainly to make him my role model as a writer, I was naturally intrigued by how Conrad would have written…

Since last month, I have been reading a rather scholarly book, The Book of Why, written by Israeli-American computer scientist Judea Pearl with Dana Mackenzie. The book deals with the often elusive relationship between cause and effect…

Is there an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events? In ancient Greece, Pythagoras propagated the idea that reality at the deepest level is essentially mathematical. He and many after him believed that a system of principles existed behind numbers…

I was born in 1955 in independent India. When I look back today, without hesitation, the best moment in public life I witnessed is the construction of a grand temple and the consecration of the idol of Shri Rama Lalla in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024…

The Tower of Babel is mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 11:1-9). The prideful ancient Babylonians wanted to build a mighty city and a tower with its top in the heavens. The work remained incomplete after they were cursed to speak different languages…

The New Year 2024 begins on a positive note. The Indian economy is doing well, and people generally enjoy good times, if not great. There is no distress or despair in the air except for some intransigent pessimists who are perhaps blind to everything good…

One of my cherished childhood memories is singing before the image of Mother Durga created on the wall using cow dung, called Sanjhi, in our home every year during Navratri. This was not done in every house in our locality and many children would…

I recently met Mr. Chandu Thota, Vice President at Google, when he was here in Hyderabad, where he studied at Osmania Engineering College. Chandu played a pioneering role in the development of digital mapping. He worked at Microsoft from 2002 to 2007 on maps and later established his own company…

Meeting people gives meaning to life. I consider myself profusely blessed to have met some of the finest people and learned from them. Chandu Thota, Vice President and Head of Engineering at Google Headquarters in Silicon Valley , is one such person whom I met rather late, but except for a wish that we could have met earlier and worked together…