The Sonance Behind My Silence

     Don't get me wrong, I'm neither a fanatic, nor an atheist, and definitely not agnostic. I just have a very liberal view towards religion, at least I like to think that I do. Have I read The Shrimad Bhagavad Gita? In detail. The Holy Bible and The Holy Quran? A few excerpts, yes. What I have understood out of each of these holy books, is that they communicate the same things, probably in different ways. One of these things they all abide by is 'There is only one God of this Universe'. You may have heard this being true in the case of Christianity and Islam. But Hinduism? Don't we have a lot of deities? 33 to be precise?      Contrary to the '33 crore' misconception, in reality, the term ‘trayastrimsati koti’ as quoted in the Atharva Veda, Yajur Veda, and Satapatha-brahmana, is often misunderstood as 33 Crore. However, 'koti' in Sanskrit has two meanings - ‘supreme’ and 'crore'. Hence the basic fact that Hinduism has 33 Supreme Gods a...

     My Facebook timeline these days is currently full of these things: 1. Hilarious animal videos/memes of fake Godmen getting ripped apart 2. People my age getting engaged/married 3. ___ *aeroplane emoticon* is travelling to ____, United States from  Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Terminal T2 - Mumbai . - feeling excited *happy face emoticon*     The third type of posts is usually accompanied by pictures of their family and friends coming to see them off, as they go off across the oceans, to live the American Dream. But 4-5 months later these very people land up on my timeline frolicking at a local pub in Khar or Andheri. 4-5 months away from home? It does not seem too different from when I was studying engineering in Pune.       I'm not going to argue how bright Indian minds should stay in the country and utilise the opportunities here, or how the very 'dream countries' they are dying to go to wi...

     A professor once announced to his students that he was taking a surprise test.  As they waited for the test to begin, he handed out the question paper, with the side with text facing down as usual.  After handing them all out, he asked the students to turn the page and begin.  To everyone's surprise, there were no questions, just a black dot in the center of the page.  Noticing the surprise on everyone's face, the professor said, "I want you to write what you see there."      The perplexed students began working on the bizarre task. Once they were done, the professor took all the answer papers and began reading each one of them aloud to the whole class.  Every student described the black dot, trying to explain its position in the middle of the sheet, etc. After reading it all, the professor said to the quiet class: "I am not going to grade on you this, I just wanted to gi...

     Innovation, Technology, Making The World A Better Place. 'Google' stands for all of these. The word, which had no meaning whatsoever about 17 years ago save for its phonetic similarity to the word 'googol' (10 to the power 100) which it was originally going to be called, is now a near inseparable part of our lives. With its numerous products to assist our daily activities, this brainchild of  Larry Page and Sergey Brin has earned its place among the greatest organizations in the world.      In a recent turn of events, the company announced that it is no longer going to be called Google. WHAT?!      Please excuse the dramatics, what I meant was that it is now creating a new publicly traded parent company called Alphabet Inc. to house all of its disparate businesses. This conglomerate will have Google as its largest subsidiary, and here's where we Indians have a second of pride, the executive who will replace La...