In the year 1929, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture to women students in Cambridge that is still widely quoted. Here, Woolf highlighted the dominance of male writers in the history of English literature, which she attributed to gender biases, not in artistic merit, but in how society had thus far been organized. She argued that for [...]
On 6th August 2019, I was having coffee with a group of colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. We were discussing the abrogation, the previous day, of the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. One of the younger members at the table, a computer scientist, remarked: ‘What we have now is not Modi [...]
I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association, and I live down the road from the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Yet when the opening game of this year’s Indian Premier League was played there last week, I was at home, not watching the action on television, but reading a recently published book on cricket, albeit about [...]
Those seeking religious or spiritual instruction may need a guru, who teaches and even orders them toward what he considers the correct path. The shishya is asked to follow the guru implicitly and even blindly. However, those who wish to become scholars would be ill-advised to look for a guru. Critical enquiry and original research require [...]