Making Sense of Superstitions

Today, our everyday lives are fraught with some kind of larger intellectual conflict. This comes to the fore especially when youngsters are forced to take part in a ritual, say like a Shraadha, or a pooja. Aren’t these superstitions which any educated person should shed? Why are we being forced to perform these outdated traditions which are irrational and have no scientific basis? While it was alright to hold on to these practice two centuries…

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The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…

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