total timepass...

Let me start with what's top of my mind about this book, it's not easy to read. Its quite a philosophical and "big words" book, that makes reading it strenuous and needs your full attention. So it's definitely not your typical read-to-relax book. Its a book which takes a look at a very difficult question and tries to share all the philosophies available on the topic to help you decide for yourself what you believe in. And gives you loads of examples on the way to understand the drawbacks of these existing philosophies. The basic question the author is trying to answer is - What is justice? What is the right thing to do? As simple as this sounds, its one of the toughest questions to answer in an airtight manner. Lets start with a very simple example - you are the driver on a train and you see three workers working on the tracks. You have the option to divert to another track where there is only one worker working. You will end up killing the workers and can...

Recently on Facebook, I read one of those 'You know you are from xyz if...' articles. It was about belonging to the Indian middle class of the 80s and the 90s. One of the statements stuck in my mind -'You know you belong to the Indian middle class if you still save plastic bags for future use'. And the surprising part is, even though I have been out of India for so long, I can still never throw away plastic bags from a trip to the grocery store. They are stored away for future use, always! So I definitely am still middle class:). But reading that article made me think about a lot of other things I do which are very alien to the western world I live in. I always always switch off extra lights in the house, only the one in my room is the one on. I save wrapping paper for future use:). And so on.. All this is middle class too, right? We all grew up in the times of Doordarshan where social ads dominated TV time and talked about conserving energy and water. I remember...