Halloween: The Silent Killer
An evidence based exploration of how harmful Halloween is to our environment as well as to the mental health of children, and why we must outright ban Halloween in India.
Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay
Artificial Intelligence: Boon or Threat?
Artificial Intelligence is a topic which evokes mixed reactions among people. Some consider AI to be a technological revolution which will solve all our problems and transform our planet into a veritable paradise. Others equate AI with robots courtesy of Hollywood movies; not good robots but rather exceedingly intelligent but evil and villainous robots with nefarious plans to wipe out the entire human civilization.
Mallelujah!
One of the biggest casualties of the current pandemic has been insaaniyat, which is often loosely translated as humanity. Strictly speaking such an equivalence will not be considered a halal interpretation by most purists. Even if we were to use an English equivalent, we should use the term humanism and not humanity. The loss of insaaniyat we are seeing all around today…
Migrant Workers and Breaking India Politics
Genuine humanitarian crisis Migrant worker crisis is the latest divisive narrative being peddled by Indian mainstream media. A genuine issue about the plight of out of work laborers, on account of the coronavirus lockdown in India has been turned into a migrant versus native debate. For the last month or so, TV screens and social media platforms have been replete with…
History needs to be History ! .. We need an Alternative To History
Author: Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay. History as it is In Indian history curriculum, Emperor Ashoka is an important figure, being the only other emperor in India apart from Akbar to have received the honorific “Great”. The following is an excerpt on Ashoka from a typical NCERT history text book used in Indian schools. …
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Unleashing Bharat’s Innate Entrepreneurial Spirit
Global Models The Mumbai-centric RBI believes in the “global” model of lower interest rates. Lower interest rates they say drives growth. The idea is that when interest rates are low, companies will borrow more at lower rates and expand their businesses. More employment will be generated. At lower rates, people will borrow more to buy electronic gadgets, houses, cars and go on foreign…
China Must Pay… and so must the World
China’s crimes and cover-up China must pay for sure. There is no question about that. They exported a deadly virus from Wuhan. They downplayed the danger. They silenced the whistleblowers. If China had taken action 3-weeks earlier, infected cases could have
Coronajihad: Fake News or Real Threat?
Islam and Jihad Muslims freely use terms like Kafir (infidel) and jihad (warfare against infidels), but Hindus are hesitant to use such words lest they be termed Islamophobic and accused of spreading communal divisiveness. So Hindus either avoid using the term
China Coronavirus Panic: A “Western Universalism” Case Study
From China’s Problem to Global Crisis For days people ignored #ChinaCoronaVirus – it was at best a footnote in most discussions. In early days people referred to it as the Wuhan Coronavirus and most thought that it would remain localized to China – so let
Religion is Adharma – 2: Understanding Dharma
In the previous part, we had delved into the concept known popularly as religion. We had analyzed the characteristics of God, Prophets and Holy Books. We had then shown some of the common features of Islam and Christianity, and we had provided a generic
Religion is Adharma – 1: Understanding Religion
Author: Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay. The word dharma is often translated as religion. But as scholars like Rajiv Malhotra have pointed out, dharma is a Sanskrit non-translatable and cannot be translated as religion[i]. Let us first try to understand what religion is. The Oxford Dictionary defines religion as [ii]: The belief in …
Soul Is Anitya, Atma Is Not
According to Cambridge dictionary, soul is “the spiritual part of a person that some people believe continues to exist in some form after their body has died”. The word is classified under the category “Souls, spirits & ghosts” and some of the common synonyms and related words associated with soul are: astral plane[i], aura, ectoplasm