Vipaasana

    Our body is a complex ecosystem which works in mysterious ways to keep us alive. So many functions are beautifully combined to perform a particular task. Damage to any one part leads to malfunction of the body and stress is one which has the capacity to cause serious damage.      The body is made up of bone, flesh and blood. It has its own limitations. If forced over its limit and sustained for a long time, then stress happens. Regular relaxation of body and mind becomes crucial in this ever demanding world. The materialism has led us to ignore our human tenets of limitations and has made us to work like a machine. Stress over a long period of time has the potential to manifest itself into a disease.      In this light we need to see what our media is doing. Constant TRP requirements and tight competition has made our media to target upon the consumers to affix them to their channel. They try to feed the customer with constant breaking news to satisfy the curious nature of the cust

    We humans have a general tendency to give up to our emotions. Its so easy for us to let emotions control our actions rather than facts and logic. In order to come out of this illogical behaviour, we require constant toning and stabilisation of mind.      Recent tensions due to border clashes with China has triggered an emotional response among our people to call for a boycott of Chinese goods. But it is during these times that we have to keep a cool head, think accordingly and act logically.       China's trade with India is around 100 billion dollars, out of which 75 billion dollars are imported to India and only 25 billion dollars are exported to China which signifies a huge trade deficit. India imports more from China than it exports to China. This huge trade imbalance is of course a disadvantage to India. But by boycotting the Chinese goods without first finding an alternative path either through domestic manufacturing or through import from other countries, the mere though

    It is a fact that vulnerability will make a person prone to wrong action. Lone wolfs are individuals in society who are vulnerable and fall easy pray to ideological or religious extremism and commit grave crimes.      We are living in a society which breeds inequality, injustice, exploitation and degradation. All these are considerably visible in the poorer and weaker sections of the society. Some individuals become more vulnerable when they are exposed to this social reality. This vulnerability impacts their mind and finally they end up being radicalised and take extreme unprecedented decisions/actions. These individuals are called lone wolfs.      Today there is a lot of content online enough to influence and radicalise on ideological or religious grounds. The ease of access to these videos to the general public through social media platforms has made radicalisation a mundane activity.  Fake news along with vulnerability combined with online content are enough for an individual t

     We have seen the rise of digital usage of online platforms in the recent months exponentially increasing to a all time high with webinars, online discussions and the like over internet. As they tell that necessity is the mother of invention, the need of the hour to maintain social distancing and remain safe has necessitated almost all of us including L.K.G students to go online and get familiarised with the tools.      In this quest of going online and doing digital, how does the teaching world adjust itself if online becomes the norm. Are students really able to understand what is being taught online? Are they even listening? What is their body language? How can we gauge whether an introvert student is able to understand or not? What happened to the sharing values that were previously being taught to children? Has the pandemic changed the norms and values for our children? Can the old, stereotyped teachers adjust to this online technology norms?       First in the perspective of

     The world has prospered much and inequality reduced to a certain extent by reducing poverty due to globalisation. But today countries are taking to protectionism and if sustained, it might create a vicious cycle of poverty among the masses.      After independence, India adopted a sort of trade protectionism so as to protect the infant domestic industry which was just budding from the unfair competition of foreign companies. It further went on to nationalise the banks and created Public sector undertaking to distribute the benefits  development to everyone and to tackle poverty. But soon, in the 1980's, it slowly came to be realised that there was not much growth that can happen by isolating itself from the world economy. In this light, India went a slew of economic reforms which envisaged liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation popularly termed as LPG. From then onwards, India has been generally liberalising for private investments, globalising by reducing hinderance

Borders are the hotline topic of any nation. There is always a conflict when it comes to border. Which country wishes to shrink its border willingly? In today's modern world, borders are the transition area from one society to another, one culture to another and one economy to another. India shares border with many of its neighbouring countries out of which the longest is with Bangladesh. The border with Pakistan has always been in conflict right from independence. We had a war with our neighbour, China over the Aksai Chin region. In todays post-modern world of advanced technology, there is a need to modernise our borders with state of the art technology so that we are not bullied by our neighbours. This includes barbed electric fence with advanced detection systems and robots and drones to monitor in high altitude difficult weather and terrains. The development of robots and drones to be deployed in border management becomes very crucial. A very small misunderstanding on any one s

(Content by Aishwarya. Edited and moderated by me. )     Unfortunately, today we are in a situation where Goddess forms are worshipped on one hand and a child is raped on the other. Is this the kind of society that we wish for our progeny? Is this what our culture has taught us? The amount of work done by a women in domestic sphere is not just taken into account while calculating the GDP of our country. Just imagine what if everything that a women does in the house gets monetised. Women become empowered when all women have freedom to enjoy all the fundamental rights, are allowed to perform all the duties and take responsibilities in an environment which guarantees physical, mental and emotional safety.       Women undergo a lot of social pressure domestically as well as professionally. Considering the pain during menstrual cycles, compromises in marriage, child bearing years, sacrifices in motherhood and menopause pain; women have been quite successful in various fields inspite of livi

The United Nations(UN) is an international organisation to act as a watchdog of development and peace of the world which was formed after the Second World War as a successor to the League of Nations which clearly failed to maintain peace after the First World War is hypocritically non representative of the present scenario. The UN consists of many organisations within it including the General assembly, Security council, etc. Out of all these, the most powerful is the United Nations Security Council(UNSC) as it has an exclusive mandate to maintain peace in the world. It is endowed with many powers such as imposing economic sanctions on nations, military interventions, peace keeping missions, imposing a ban on terrorist financing and activities, terrorist organisations and restricting their movements and the like. This institution which has wide range of powers is not truly representative. It has in total 15 members out of which 5 are permanent members. The five members are USA, UK, Fran

What would be the state of affairs if we were immortal? Human beings like every other being perish after some time. The amount of degradation caused by a human in his/her lifetime to the environment is just insurmountable. We can only imagine the extent of damage done to the environment and the moral degradation that humans will undergo if there were no timelines for our lives by a phenomenon of death. Recent discoveries in the field of medicine have been quite successful in extending the lives of humans. The discovery of medicinal drugs, patient specific treatments and targeted delivery of medicine to a diseased part of the body has aided this process. The research in Stem cells and other totipotent cells has helped in recovery and sometimes even replacement of damaged organs. The manipulation of DNA for acquiring specific characters are on the way. We already have cloning and designer babies causing serious ethical concerns. Overall, when humans acquire power and control over the nat

China has been silently deceiving the world in many number of ways. China declared itself to be a free market economy in the WTO to sanctify its hidden agenda of economic imperialism. Trade with China for most of the countries is unbalanced and heavily in favour of China. China has huge trade surpluses with its trading nations. A surplus trade means that exports are greater than imports. Hence it has a huge foreign exchange reserve. So China is aiming for a world consumer market to supply its goods. Even in the online sector, China has its own google, amazon, Facebook, etc. which are duplicated versions of the original social media. China is an expert in plagiarising others by stealing from them the technology and depriving them of their intellectual property rights.  China has been extensively involved in hacking internet and media to collect private information about individuals of other countries. Recent issues with Tik-Tok, Zoom and other apps have highlighted the privacy concerns

The recent aggression of China towards India in border areas makes us wonder why the Chinese are trying to provoke India and what their real intensions are. The Chinese have been quite aggressive with its neighbours. Now with the 'One belt one road initiative'(OBOR) and 'The string of Pearls'(SOP), they want to capture the market for the future. India and China have had some turbulent history in 1960's, and slowly it started stabilising with both sides realising the damages of the war and the benefits of peaceful friendly neighbourhood. Although with some border clashes, the relationship has been some what cordial. The Chinese economy has expanded humongously since then becoming a major manufacturing hub. In 21st century, China has become one of the big powers in Asia rivalling the United States in the west. China has even advanced technologically and most products today come with a tag of 'Made in China'. Initially, there were negative opinion about Chinese

The vastness and the diversity of nature cannot be explained by way of words. From millions of years ago, we have been continuously working to explore the secrets of nature. We have discovered some and still many are hidden deep. And yet we think we can control nature and manipulate it without consequences. Nature as a whole is a larger consciousness. Our individual consciousness has taken birth from this larger consciousness. So we are all children of the nature. Hence we have that rebelling nature against our parent. Our parent has been existing from a long time right from when the Big Bang happened and has been continuously evolving to nurture different kinds of species/children and has a very complex system of maintaining a balance within the eco system. Fortunately, our species of children have evolved slightly differently from others and have developed intellect. But unfortunately the same intellect has formed in us an ego, a sense of false pride as a superior species and hence e

When there is a continuous dilemma of whom or what to believe, we generally start losing trust. The case of social media has been one such. The amount of fake news that's surfacing is just too overwhelming to ignore that there is a moral crisis. Social media are the tools of information at the disposal of a citizen. They give crucial information in this fast paced ever changing world. Since they serve the citizen and the general public by creating awareness, they are one of the pillars of our democracy. Being said that, they are expected to have high moral principles and ethics in their working. Transparency and accountability cannot be divorced from its basic tenets. Today, we are facing one of the worst crisis where the social media is compromised because of vested interests and unwarranted bias and  influence. The integrity is compromised and the morals just thrown away into the bin as if it never existed in the first place. The chain of fake news are increasing day by day and w

     Mind is a powerful tool which, if left uncontrolled can become devastating. Almost all of us have gone through a rough phase of depression whether we are aware of it or not. Its a state where the mind gets clogged with a set of repeating cycle of thoughts endlessly in a loop and causes distress by keeping the person under a spell of mental quarantine!      Before we dig deep, we need to understand feelings. Feelings can be happy, angry, sad, anxiety, etc. These feelings can be triggered either due to external or internal stimuli with something that we have attached or associated ourselves. When the feelings intensify, it becomes an emotion. All emotions are a state of mind. For example happiness is a state of mind. Each emotion evokes a physical as well as psychological response. The response or our reaction gets combined with our conscience and elicits further emotions.      Now when the mind is in a sad state, it will be very vulnerable to external or internal stimulus. This vul

     Its all intriguing to talk about the mind and its complex system of thought process. The decision making happens as a result of multitude of factors. The thought process has become so complex that often we are less aware of why we did what we did.      The mind has a certain degree of uncertainty. It keeps on fluttering and fluctuating into different patterns of thought and different levels of awareness. The conscious state of mind is supposed to help us keep in the present. But since we know that there is a lot of neurological activity in the brain going on simultaneously, is it possible to have interference among the thoughts itself and lead to a complete new thought? Lets say that a person wants to concentrate on a ball as just an object without any characteristics except that it is round. Now after a few seconds or minutes depending on the concentrating ability of the individual, the person automatically becomes aware of the colour, the groves, marks, etc. and at one point of

     Traditionally when differentiation and privatisation of property was taking place, there were only two classes i.e. the bourgeoisie and proletariat (haves and have nots). Gradually capitalism took root along with industrialisation and increased the gap of separation aggravating the inequality. Slowly there was a need for a middle class in order to bridge the gap between the haves and have nots.       This group includes a vast number of people from diverse backgrounds ranging from teachers, doctors, scientists, managers, engineers, etc. to name a few. This class of people earned through their power of intellect. Today the numbers of the middle class have increased manifold times and includes a vast amount of population wherein again further differentiation has occurred and given rise to lower and upper middle class. Education has helped people to transit from the working class to the middle class. This transition has been smooth for some and rough for others.      Now let's lo

     It has been a natural tendency of humans to dominate the earth since we started evolving. Manifested in a different form of this tendency was the imperialism. At that time, imperialism was considered to be brave, heroic and even superior. But as we know, time can change the the values that we hold today as true. An action done in the past might not be seen as correct now because of changed values and norms.        Imperialism was used by countries to subjugate nations into colonies and extract and suck blood and sweat out of it. The trend was to be an imperialist and to dominate. Charles Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest was used as a plausible explanation for this. But today we faithfully condemn imperialistic attitudes to be less ethical and of low moral standards to just simply assume superiority based on prejudice. But there is far to it that we must know that there is always a tendency that history can repeat itself and Neo - imperialism is a residue of the ol

     We have seen a myriad of changes in this year, 2020. By this time, all of us have realised the importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene. But there is a tendency of the people to slip back to the previous ways of behaviour. After a certain period of time, a persisting problem such as the pandemic is considered to be “OK” by the people to confront. The mind gets acclimatised that the problem is going to persist for a considerable long time and hence people feel that normal ways of behaviour and communication is necessary to have a healthy psychological life. What is normal post COVID? There is a general assumption that behaving in ways considered to be “Normal” will ward off the fear of the pandemic by creating a positive environment. That by telling ourselves “ All is well”, we are going to get rid of the pandemic. Business and institutions want to tell themselves that it is business as usual. But what is the ground reality? Suppose there is a single outbreak in an insti