Category Archives: Uncategorized
Salute to Vienna
We went to the Orchestra Hall Symphony Center in Chicago on December 30, 2012 to enjoy some joyous Viennese music that often lights up the season in many parts of the world. Situated right across the Arts Institute, the Symphony Center is a beautiful hall with lovely chandeliers. It was good to see the hall …
On Good and Evil
Up there in the skies are bright and twinkling stars. There is peace and calm in the celestial world. Up there in the depths of space there is also unceasing turbulence in the core of stars, continuous annihilation of matter, and restless rush of galaxies. There is chaos of matter and energy in their unstoppable …
Geriatric Musings
Following many ahead of me while others are following my chronological footsteps, by calendrical reckoning I am now an octogenarian: a stage I never consciously contemplated being in or worked towards reaching. This is no personal achievement, but the result of fortunate circumstances that have shaped my physical and mental states. I don’t regret this …
1. Bhagavad Gita: Cross-Culural Reflections
dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāś caiva kim akurvata sañjaya 1.1 In the field of dharma, in the field of Kurus, gathered and eager to fight, My own men and the Pandavas, what are they doing, Oh Sañjaya? The Gita appears in the epic Mahabharata which recounts many events and episodes from Indic sacred history. …
Iowa (Republican) Caucus: 2012
Since the whole country, if not the whole world, has been talking about the Iowa Caucus, and I happened to be in Ames, IA, my wife and I decided to visit one of the gatherings. We went to the Bethesda Lutheran Church on 1517 Northwestern Avenue. The parking lot was over flowing. Not being from …
Reflections on Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different
Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism is a scholarly book from the keyboard of Mr. Rajiv Malhotra. Malhotra has had an unusually rich and influential career: With a background in science and after a successful business venture, he turned his interests to culture, history, and the power of knowledge manipulation in the politics …
Ghazals
Poetic forms know no cultural or linguistic barriers. Thus there are not only rhymes and meters, but also odes and sonnets, elegies and story-poems in English and French, in German and Italian and more. Likewise, one can find ghazals in many languages: not just in Arabic and Persian where they originated, but in Turkish and …
God in the Hindu framework
Here is an NPR program on Hindu Gods which you may like to listen to: http://interfaithradio.org/node/1626
Judith P. Zinsser: Men, women, and the birthing of modern science (2005)
In any book on the history of science, ancient or modern, the majority of names are males. Yet from Hypatia of Alexandria and Lopamudra of Vedic India to a good many in current times, women have contributed to human knowledge and culture, often unobtrusively and under hindering restrictions. Nevertheless, in the 17th and 18th centuries, …
Manifestation of the Divine as an Evolutionary Metaphor
One of the most ancient expressions of the notion of evolution in the sense of a gradual development towards a more sophisticated state may be found in a Hindu mythic vision. In this framework, the cosmic principle that sustains the universe is referred to as Vishnu. Vishnu, the divine, incarnated periodically in ages past, often …
