Talking about nothing but ultimately everything

With the progress in data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics etc. our focus has shifted to Industrial Revolution 4.0. However much work of previous generations of the Industrial Revolution especially on the policy front has been pending, more so for the Internet. The Internet has touched almost every sector of our lives and countries of the world, including India, are found to be inadequately prepared in many of these sectors and regulations are either absent or nascent. Governments grappling with the Internet ecosystem Take for example the role of the internet in employment. The Internet has led to a whole new variety of job opportunities like gig and platform workers, freelancers etc. among others. These new jobs are outside the traditional employee-employer relation and as a result, they fall through the cracks of existing labour laws and benefits. India, with the recent Code on Social Security 2020, and Britain’s Supreme Court recent verdict of entitlement to labour right...

 Happiness is the most sought after feeling. But, it still remains an enigma. An enigma in the sense that it is very hard to define and characterise even after centuries of work by philosophers and thinkers on it. Hardly anyone can say what would exactly make a person happy in future. The reason at the core of this puzzle is that - "Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination." Happiness can't be studied objectively and assigned reason to it. Our happiness is influenced by many factors. Our family, friends, colleagues, our health and the larger environment and society in which we live all play an important role in our being happy or lack of it. But in addition to it, there is a subjective element to it as well - our perception. Our perception of all the influencing factors and their actions. For it is our predefined mental maps, which in itself is influenced and shaped by our years of learnings and experiences, that interpret and assign meanings to the events....

 Love and compassion are the two foundational values. They are foundational in the sense that once a person has it other moral values like empathy, selflessness, honesty etc. automatically follow. It is impossible for a person to not be empathetic to others if he/she is compassionate. Also if you love someone you can't be selfish to them. In fact, in many situations, our moral values are perfected by the presence of love and compassion. Empathy, for example, which is the ability to not just acknowledge other's emotions but also feel them, can be misused by a sociopath, who lacks compassion to cause maximum pain. It is when values like empathy and selfishness are integrated with love and compassion that we get a feeling of fraternity and togetherness.  It was this love and compassion for people which kept Mahatma Gandhi resilient on his focus on  "Sarvodaya" - upliftment of all. Mahatma Gandhi was moved by the plight of Dalits and women which motivated him to work tire...

 The story goes something like this. Satyabhama, the wife of Lord Krishna, expressed a strong desire to have the Parijat tree. As seldom things happen without twists, so was the case with the Parijat tree. It was a celestial plant, and it was only found in the Indralok. Indra considered keeping the celestial plant, which came out of Samudra Manthan, as his duty. The plant was something that was not to be shared with anyone especially earthlings. In the past, Indra had declined a similar request from Lord Shiva. Add to the complexity of this situation, Krishna had saved Indra from Narkasur, the asura king, and hence, Indra owed a favour to Krishna. The situation which Indra faced is a classic case of an ethical dilemma a person faces - Returning a favour versus upholding your principles, especially when the person asking for favour is someone whom you admire and adore. Indra made his intentions clear and said that Krishna can have gold, precious stones, and all riches of the Indralo...

Japan, the small island country, is devoid of any major natural resource. It is frequently impacted by disasters like Tsunami and Earthquake. Still, it is the third-largest GDP of the world in nominal terms, after the USA and China. While, the Democratic Republic Of Congo, the African country, endowed with rich resource deposit does not feature even in the top 50 GDP of the world. In fact, it is currently at the 88th position. Similarly, Jharkhand, the most mineral-rich state of India, also lags on the development parameter. The answer to this dichotomy lies at the heart of the understanding of growth and development. The human capital of a region is contributed by the people of the region and their standard of living. The Standard of living is an overarching concept that cuts across many domains. It has been appositely captured in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the United Nations in 2015. It includes poverty reduction, zero hunger, quality education as well as n...

Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, was put under house arrest by the church for stating the fact, which was not conforming to their belief. The fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He paid the price for someone else's ignorance. Since then till now, we have unshackled many beliefs and learned a lot of lessons. The primary of them is - education is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance. As light exposes cracks in the building, education too, in a similar manner, exposes our ignorance. Our shortcomings are presented before us to look into and rectify them. However, sometimes it is the curiosity of knowing things that removes ignorance. It was the curiosity of Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist, that he sought to find the relation between the chemical elements. He was curious to know how Sodium is similar to Potassium, or how Chlorine is different from Argon. Mendeleev's quest for solving the puzzle led to the first modern Periodic Table of chemi...