Sunday Posts

Many of Jefferson's ideas have a lasting legacy, but perhaps none more so than the pursuit of happiness. That has become the essence of the American dream and the point of middle-class existence worldwide. This, rather than all the men are born equal, have become self-evident.  However, the celebration of the pursuit of happiness obscured complicated questions on how to be happy. We may assume that the answer is straightforward, that happiness comes from the acquisition of more: Bigger houses, cars, clothes, jewellery and the like, along with more and more power over others. But both scientific explanations and our everyday experience point to the opposite. Happiness, we know, comes not from Dopamine, a hormone that gets released when we 'achieve' something, but from Serotonin and Oxytocin, those which get released from making others happy and bonding with them. The kick from buying something bigger only lasts until someone with even bigger something turns up, which...

I remember this awkward dinner conversation. I was with my colleague in Northern Ireland, and a friend of his joined our table. After we were introduced, he wondered at my name and asked me what religion I belong to. I went for the simpler answer and kept my doubts aside: "I am Hindu", I said. That made him even more confused. "What's a Hindu?" he said, "Is that some kind of Muslim?" When I tell this story to my friends in India, they are usually outraged. What an ignorant person, they would say. Particularly treating Hinduism as a branch of Islam, when Hindus love to believe that everyone was originally a Hindu, upsets them. I have also reflected upon this conversation later. It may indeed be that he did not know. He was particularly ignorant, just as ignorant as the lady, who, standing inside the Irish Bar at Mumbai's ITC Grand Central hotel, asked my colleague - the same person as it happened to be - where Ireland was. But the confusion ab...

One can, and often does, read history as a narrative of conflicts. The school-book history is designed as a sequence of wars and winners, its causes and aftermaths. Even when one wants to get away from the history of celebrities, which our stories of Kings, Queens and great men (and some women) usually are, our thematic narratives of Colonialism, Class Struggle, Revolutions and even Scientific Progress are usually built around conflicts - of powers, institutions and ideas - progressing and regressing in some sort of eternal motion.  One may claim that all history, therefore, is history of conflicts. However, it is equally possible to see that our ideas shape conflicts. I have three favourites - the Iron Curtain, the Clash of Civilisations and the Thucydides Trap - ideas that defined our past, the present and possibly the future conflicts. So, when Churchill was speaking at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, he conjured up the Iron Curtain , a dividing line from the 'Fre...