A forest temple that has thousands of years of mythological and tribal history, customs and belief is in the centre of a storm. The storm unleashed by the believers and devotees of Swami Ayyappan on one side, and the freedom fighters for gender equality on the other. Now is this truly and exclusively a gender…
Author: Sangeetha Menon
Selfishness, Self-centeredness and Self-satisfaction
Writing this piece itself is a self-oriented activity – but then is it selfish, self-centered or self-satisfying? We all juggle with the overwhelming presence of self in each one of our lives. At times we are forced to be aware of it through the joys, sorrows or extreme states of mind it brings in. At…
Justice – the comedian
Yesterday midnight I had a TMJ dislocation … . Being prone to the disorder since childhood … always feared the dis-configuration it results in what I feel and see … but this time it was real bad. With timely intervention all was set back to normalcy by the expert god-sent physician. But then the harrowing…
The Unknown
Can we think of the unknown? Or even better, can we know the unknown? To ask what is the unknown itself at times is a question that baffles our ability to know. We see, We smell, We touch, We hear, We feel… Yes, Feeling is the ultimate marker for our knowledge. What we know is…
“You are spiritual, aren’t you?”
Perhaps one of the most sought after experiential paradigm, as well as a mocked word, for the 21st century is “spirituality”. While many disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and religious studies academically approach the subject with professionalism, at least some of the so called academic social critiques, use the word as if it means nothing…
Self – Thy Name is Unknowable Superficiality !!!
An evening of poetry reading… And as the poet said “a performance”, spiced up by jokes in prose and sarcasm… The performance of the poetry … of the poet … of the poet’ self … of the audience’s self … of whose self … what self … which self … of that self whose self…
Are You Certain about Uncertainty?
“What do you want to do now? What do we do now? I don’t know. I guess we just keep going”. These are the end lines from the 2008 thriller movie “Uncertainty” which captures the uncertain ways human actions are led to with a scenario as simple as the flipping of a coin. Uncertainty, to…
Our deadly ambition to self-preserve for eternity
The other day, I happen to read a very interesting article on the foibles of information theory to understand brain in terms of computers. brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer And it brought back my impressions on the Sci-Fi movie Transcendence. Transcendence is a recent movie that presents easy transference of human identity and self to a machine like system and…
The Eye and the “i” in the Body
Few weeks back, from nowhere, my right leg got a muscle spasm … Since I ignored it in the beginning, as if to gain my complete attention, the spasm soon got bad making even walking and moving the leg a herculean task… It was similar to … in the loudest voice you call someone standing…
What is it to be human? Are we just problem-solving entities?
My long term worry has been with the definition of intelligence itself as “finding a solution to a problem”. What is human, according to me is much much deeper and complex, than a set of problem solving abilities. In fact what we are most of the times is not “logical” but illogical, due to our…
