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

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations There are moments in our lives when this avowed disdain for such “self-centred” prayers unravels and sounds like mere intellectual flimflam. This is when reason either deserts us or enervates us with its passionless logic. Entrance to Naiku, Inner Shrine (Shinto), Ise Jingu, Japan (Credit: Author) t Teresa of Avila once explained the various levels of prayer she undertook on her way to divine union. From the bottom level of prayers of devotion and supplication she moved to the next one where her mind gave “a simple consent to become the prisoner of God.” At a higher level, the saint was “drunk with love” and concerned only with the thoughts of God. At the last stage, the saint achieves mystical union with God. In other words, we may begin with prayers for “selfish” reasons and mundane worldly concerns. As we grow spiritually, we lose this obsession with the self and in the end achieve oneness with th

This was originally posted on   LinkedIn Pulse  on January 17, 2016. The most important lesson we can learn from observing these insects is that we need to know the mosquito better before we can build a better mosquito trap - and this applies perhaps to all our challenges. I am convinced that even if there is only one mosquito left in the world, it is sure to come and get me. Because of this dread, I have always grudgingly admired the single-mindedness and efficiency with which genus anopheles unfailingly zooms in on someone like me. It is perhaps this curiosity which piqued my interest in a recent report  in the The Atlantic magazine about the quest to find a better mosquito repellent. This article not only explained to me why mozzies think of me as their Lord Voldemort. But after reading it I felt also that there may be a few lessons too for the corporate world apparent from the life and times of the humble mosquito. Know your customers, the marketplace Lesli

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations A lot of us take a pragmatic stance and are happy to use the fruits of science and technology, to better our understanding of the world, including nature, around us. A scientific understanding of nature, moreover, may even improve our respect or reverence for nature. Image Credit: CCO Public Domain via Pixabay n his excellent essay Gene Tracy mentions how anthropologists would point out that there is no clear line between a story and a testable theory of the world. Another anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss distinguished between a “functional” and “statistical” and model of societies. An example of the former is the way human societies operate. Each individual assumes certain responsibilities which, as Ilya Prigogine explains, “translate at each level different aspects of the society as a whole.”  An example of the latter model is a termite colony where there is no “global mastermind” at work. The

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations One day science will identify the neural correlates of joy. But, I do hope that the rainbow will not be unwoven so completely. Until then - or even after that - the delicious mystery of how we relate to music will never fade away. Salvador Dali, Dream of Venus (1939), Hiroshima Prefectural Art Gallery. Photo by Author ystery will remain in this world for the simple reason that our understanding of reality is limited - below are some reasons for it - and may forever remain so. And we will continue to be curious about this world around us because that is what made us human in the first place. The nature of reality : Angles in Science, Credit: IGIT (Own work)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 Reality is much more than physical objects. We have abstract objects and structures that we cannot touch and feel directly. These include mathematics (which Colin McGinn felt formed a “third

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cultures and mythologies too. A n excessive preoccupation, in modern societies, with this “manufactured quantity” - along with an acute segmentation of time - can make us too obsessed with the moment. We begin to think in terms of drops and bucketsful of water rather than seeing the river itself.   A cardinal tenet of the mythology of the Australian aboriginals is “The Dreaming” also referred to as the Eternal Dream Time. This dreamtime is the sacred abode of the ancestors who taught humans the skills needed for life. Although the dreamtime has echoes of a past heroic age, it cannot be fixed in time. As anthropologist W.E.H. Skinner pointed out, “It was, and is, everywhen.” This mythology reflects an endless succession of events symbolised by the cycle of the seasons. This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cu