In worship of “I”

The Times of India asks “Is the first person pronoun sacred? Or should it be in the lower case, as it has appeared on our editorial page for the past few months?” and prints an article titled “Me, Myself and I“
“Why do we capitalise the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so… (some uninteresting [...]

Philosophy is difficult – Applied Philosophy – 1

Background – I recently started a technical blog. It has just 4 posts so far, 3 of which are about WPF1. I have not actively tried to promote it. Yet it gets some steady traffic mostly from search engines, something that has started to happen with this blog after 30 posts, despite the fact that 2 of [...]

Applied Philosophy – Series

This is an introduction to a series where I intend to put my thoughts on several loosely related topics and finally tie them together.
1. My tech blog gets much more traffic than this blog with no active effort to promote it.
2. Some comments on the article Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid
3. Some comments on the [...]

Culture

What is a culture? What is its role in man’s life? Can a culture be good or bad?
The concept culture refers to shared beliefs, practices, tastes, values, attitudes etc. A culture plays many important roles in man’s life
Cognitive:
As a child grows, he learns by observing the world around him. An important part of this learning [...]

Patriotism

The concept of patriotism (atleast from what I remember of my school education) is presented as a self-evident virtue requiring no justification. It is presented as a virtue by merely describing it with positive (and often hyperbolic) adjectives and by associating it with the concept of sacrifice (which is also presented in the same way). In [...]

A Confession of Collectivism

In a guest article in The Times of India, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes1
“The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality … You can [...]

Today’s Cultural Vacuum

This post began as a reply to a comment on my previous post that said “We must do something about it otherwise it will be too late.” but I decided it was worthy of posting as an entry by itself1. So here goes.
Indeed now is the time to do something about improving our culture. The [...]

Abortion, Female Foeticide and Rights

The fundamental issue in the abotion debate is (or should be) “Does a fetus have rights?”. Answering this question requires an understanding of the question of rights.
What are rights? Why are they necessary? Where do they come from? Is it possible to protect everyones rights? If not whose rights get precedence? Who decides? By what [...]

The Times’ Response to the Mehta Abortion Case

In the space of the two days after their initial response (which I labeled Intellectual Cowardice), The Times of India has come out with some articles whose substance helps explain their initial response. There could have been two principled stands to take.
a) A woman has an absolute right to her body and no one else may [...]

The Mehta Case and Intellectual Cowardice

In all the detailed coverage that The Times of India gave to the case of the Mehta Couple’s rejected abortion plea, this is what the newspaper had to show as its view:
“Times View:For the Mehtas, this is a very difficult time, and our heart goes out to them. It’ll be everyone’s prayer that the child [...]