Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse on April 16, 2016. The corporate t-shirt tells the employees that they have been accepted into the “clan” and that they belong (so long as they play by the rules). But then all honeymoons come to an end. Along with this change in our work status, the corporate t-shirt also goes from riches to rags and gets relegated to being worn for doing the occasional backyard chore. American Indian Totem (CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay) When I mow the backyard (which is not very often) I usually wear a t-shirt that I got from a company I worked for some years ago. That corporate t-shirt is one of a few similar ones I have kept aside to wear for such hot and sweaty jobs. When I mow is also the time when I tend to lapse into faux-intellectual reveries about various life-changing questions (as giving the grass a haircut is not in itself a mind-boggling exercise anyway.) Recently, during one of these Eureka moments, I concluded that these corpo

Below is my "Question of the Month" response which was published in  Philosophy Now , April/May 2016  (see subscriber only link) (I was awarded a random book for my response.) What’s Your Best Advice or Wisdom? Mars Rover (By NASA/JPL/Cornell University, Maas Digital LLC [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) Imagine if Alice hadn’t followed the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. She would then not have drunk the potion (or was it ate the forbidden fruit?) and met the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. My best piece of wisdom is therefore for us  not to lose our sense of wonder about the world around us . If not for our inquisitiveness, we would still be living with the Flintstones. Evolution did not have in mind a Buddha or a Beethoven; we nevertheless went on to discover fire, invent the wheel, and to write Hamlet. An inquiring mind led us also to relativity, quantum physics and all the natural laws. If we had not uncovered them, we would still be conflating