The most powerful man in the world is an average moron. Considering that average Americans voted him into office — not once but twice — tells you that the average American is a moron. So how does the US economy do so well if the majority are stupid, you may wonder. They do so well because the minority are so bloody bright that they create stuff of such great value that in the aggregate, despite the stupidity of the majority, it is positive.

I am continuing to read E. O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and recently I quoted from it. Today I continue to quote some more.
The best of science doesn’t consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of though, wherein the hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patters of thought, which …

The world of technology is magical. There are not enough hours in the day to even begin to scratch the surface of what amazing things that exist today, leave alone what is going to come down the technology cornucopia which is beyond imagination. You do get brief glimpses of tomorrow, occasionally. For instance, check out this Crazy Multi-input Touch Screen video clip. (Wait, don’t click on the link before you read the entire entry.)

The great entomologist E O Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (Harvard University Press, 1992) should be required reading for all who care to understand the complex web of life that we all are part of.
What is urgently needed is knowledge and a practical ethic based on a time scale longer than we are accustomed to apply. An ideal ethic is a set of rules invented to address problems so complex or stretching so far into the future as to place their solution beyond ordinary discourse. …

Many years ago I had read a book by Mark Epstein called Thoughts Without a Thinker, which is about psychotherapy from a Buddist perspective. I enjoyed the book immensely of course, but there is something in the first chapter that I cannot resist quoting in full.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” — George Bernard Shaw
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a commercial jetliner cruising at 500 knots 37,000 feet above …

I expressed the idea that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is not a supreme being endowed with the power of the Almighty God in my article titled “Is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar a Con Man?” I concluded that he is doing very useful work and as evidence I pointed out that he has very large numbers of followers who are willing to pay good deals of money for his guidance. But that rubs his worshippers the wrong way. Fortunately, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a Hindu and therefore his followers are …

In my last post, we met the Uttar Pradesh Minister of State for Haj, Mr Muhammad Yaqoob Qureshi, who has announced a $11.5 million reward for the murder of Danish cartoonists and has asked the Indian government to server dipolomatic ties with the US. Here is how his brain works.

I am not surprised. Indian Minister Offers Bounty reports the website Arab News.
NEW DELHI, 19 February 2006 — A minister in India’s Uttar Pradesh state government has offered a reward of $11.5 million to anyone who would kill any of the cartoonists who drew the images of the Prophet Muhammad …
Muhammad Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of state for Haj and Minorities Welfare in the Uttar Pradesh government, told a rally in Meerut, 65 km east of New Delhi, after Friday prayers that he would give “the avenger” 510 million rupees …

The prime directive that the Buddha gave to humanity was as simple as it was wise: First do no harm; then try to do good. Easy enough to state but it is astonishingly hard to follow for the average human being. Granted that the average human has occasional flashes of genius, but those are rare and therefore shine brightly against a backdrop of all-pervasive darkness of the general stupidity of humanity at large. No one, present company included, is quite exempt from moments of supreme stupidity and random acts of …

Wonders will never cease. Just yesterday I commented on the fact that THEY have decided to do away with discriminatory pricing for foreign nationals in India. Now I am happy to report that another of the millions of asinine rules has finally been reversed. For background, read my previous post on India’s picture-perfect bureaucracy from more than a year ago. It is about India’s anti-photography fetish. You just cannot take pictures of practically any place in India. There will be a battered sign which will forbid photography.
Last week on my …

It is a tradition, hoary and venerated, of dividing the people of India along myriad dimensions depending on the motives of those doing the dividing. Taking a cue from the British, past masters of the “Divide and Rule” strategy, the Congress party — Neo-colonialists — greedily embraced the D&R for the same purpose. With a vengeance, they classified and tagged people into various castes and creeds.

So it would appear that wisdom is slowly dawning on the idiots that make policy in India. Last week I read that the powers that be have finally come to realize that it is not a good idea to rip off foreign tourists by charging foreigners more for services compared to Indian nationals. (When this discriminatory pricing scheme will be dismantled is of course anybody’s guess given the glacial pace of change in matters bureaucratic.)

Nearly five years ago in April 2001, TIME magazine did a feature titled The Power of Yoga.
A path to enlightenment that winds back 5,000 years in its native India, yoga has suddenly become so hot, so cool, so very this minute. It’s the exercise cum meditation for the new millennium, one that doesn’t so much pump you up as bliss you out.
The article feels like an “infomercial” on yoga but is worth a quick glance. (While you are there, don’t miss the brief photo essay on some yoga postures.) …

As it happens, I am off to Singapore for a few days. Blogging, therefore, will be suspended. Yeah, yeah, I know that I am not the most prolific of bloggers and stopping for extended periods of time is par for the course. Yet, courtesy demands that I alert you about this hiatus.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
PS: If you want to visit the archives, may I suggest this one on the privatization of public sector units and the followup posts on “Wrong-headed policies condemn millions …

“CAESAR: Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
–George Bernard Shaw in “Caesar and Cleopatra”
I titled my two previous pieces exploring the freedom of expression as “The Freedom to be Offended” deliberately. Everyone is free to take offense, which is the flip side of the individual right to free speech. If the speech of one has to be restricted because someone else is offended, then taken to its logical conclusion we would arrive at the absurd …

Just for the record, I will be traveling to Hyderabad for the next couple of days and will not have the opportunity to write and respond to the comments on my recent posts.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

In a comment on my previous post, Nath declares that the “tough part is choosing where exactly to draw the line between legal and illegal.”
It is tough only if that line is arbitrarily drawn according to the whims and fancies of mobs. In most societies, it is drawn after due consideration and enshrined in some institution often called the constitution.

“If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too.”
- W. Somerset Maugham
The story is pretty simple. A Danish newspaper, Jylland-Posten, published in September 2005 a dozen cartoons depicting Muhammad after a writer complained that nobody dared illustrate a book he was writing on Muhammad. The newspaper pointed out “that the drawings illustrated an article on the self-censorship which rules large parts of …

Denmark in Troubled Waters.
I am waiting to read reports of people rioting in India any day now. A bunch of innocents will get killed. An already poor India will slide epsilon-degree closer to chaos.