The Ethical Act of Voting

It is the duty of having to act not for individual benefit, but for the benefit of the larger society. There is a puzzling trait that is pervasive and human. It is that we often judge others with a different yardstick than with which we judge ourselves. When I visit an organisation, there is always somebody who complains that their colleagues do not work at all. Ironically, the colleagues also say the same thing about others in the organisation. Our self-perception is often at odds with the way others see us. This is also part of a deeper human malaise: we think others are wrong and we are right in our beliefs and opinions. Elections exemplify these tendencies very well

Dalit Experience and Theory

Do those with no lived in experience have the right to theorise? Analysing the elements that constitute lived in experience, this essay brings out the views of Gopal Guru and Habermas – two opposite approaches to the relation between theory and experience

Ancient India and mathematics

One way to approach this very broad topic is to list all that the ancient Indian Mathematics did and they did do an enormous amount of mathematics

The sociality of science

Science is inherently and essentially social. While the image of a solitary scientist, an individual of genius, continues to be a powerful one in science, it is an image that is not true of modern scientific practice. This practice has become so inherently social that science is now primarily seen as a collaborative activity, both at the individual level as well as that of institutions and nations. Not only have co-authored papers become the norm today, but there is also an increasing number of co-authors in a paper, with some instances of more than one thousand authors

Phenomenology of Untouchability

This paper explores the philosophical foundations of untouchability through an analysis of the phenomenology of “touc

Science and the ethics of curiosity

It is commonly believed that the capacity for curiosity is essential for doing science. Curiosity is also the one notion that allows science to keep ethics at bay. While there have been efforts to develop an ethics of science, they have largely been directed to ‘applied’ sciences. But the fundamental ethical problem is about curiosity itself. Should curiosity be restrained? The concept of curiosity has a long and interesting history, and the birth of modern science is concurrent with attempts to modify the meaning of curiosity. This paper discusses how the scientific community rehabilitated curiosity in order to negate ethical challenges to the practice of science and also suggests ways to inquire into the ethics of curiosity

Mathematics, Language and Translation

The mathematical discourse is not possible without a fertile use of natural language. Its symbols, first and foremost, refer to natural language terms. Its texts are a combination of symbols, natural language, diagrams and so on. To coherently read these texts is to be involved in the activity of translation. Applied mathematics, as in physics, constantly shifts from one language (and culture) to another and, therefore, is best understood within the ambit of translation studies

Revisiting the 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics

Although the phrase 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics is widely used, it is not clear what it means. To understand this phrase critically, we first need to understand the meaning of mathematics and what it means to use it in the sciences. This paper begins by considering the different views on the nature of mathematics,the diversity of which points to the difficulty in understanding what mathematics really is, a difficulty which adds to the mysteriousness of the applicability of mathematics. It is also not clear as to what is applied when we apply mathematics. What is clear however is that mathematics cannot be applied to the world but only to some descriptions of the world. This description occurs through the medium of language and models, thus leading us to consider the role of mathematics as language. The use of a language like English to describe the world is itself unreasonably effective and the puzzle with mathematics is just one reflection of this larger mystery of the relation between language and the world. The concluding parts of this paper argue how the view of mathematics as language can help us understand the mechanisms for its effective applicability

When a city dies

Remembering what a city used to be like is nostalgia. With nostalgia, at least you have a vision of what can be. But now even that future is gone. These are the ways by which a city dies. People on vehicles, one behind the other, for long stretches on end. Standing up on the bike or leaning out of the car trying to find a way out of the mess. Somebody cuts in front of you, gobbles up the little space that you had for a second. A car aggressively from the side road almost scraping the paint off your breath. Another car decides to do a U-turn in a place where even a crow will have to hop and skip. Cars and buses parked on the one-lane road, indifferent. And we are all waiting, miles behind, waiting, waiting. Cities die. When a red signal light means Go. For those who are impatient or who don’t care. Who will also not care what happens to those vehicles and people who have to avoid crashing into them. It is no longer the lawbreakers, the history-sheeters. It is you and it is me, in fancy cars or fancier bikes or women with children in front, in their dainty Scooty. Cities die. When anger begins in traffic jams knowing that all it needs is just a simple solution. It stares at all of us in our faces but we are tired. We know what to do and will mutter inside the car but all that we will do is to nudge an inch here and steal a foot there

Moving bus movies

When we talk of films, we often exclusively focus on the projected image and not on the spectators and the act of seeing. So it was a pleasure to come across a new book, House Full by Lakshmi Srinivas, an anthropologist teaching in the U.S., which focuses on the movie-going experience. This book exhibits the multiple avenues that go intothe production and creation of a film and engages deeply with the lived experience of ‘going to the movies’. Reading her book, I was reminded of repeated replays of bus journeys watching films. Recently, I travelled by a private bus from Bengaluru to Tiruchi. It was like many such journeys in an AC bus with tinted windows, pink satin curtains, unwashed seats and a surly attendant. It is impossible to travel in Tamil Nadu, or increasingly elsewhere, without being assailed, assaulted and submerged by movies or film songs. Travel is no longer a journey of introspection and exploration but of entering in the middle of one movie and exiting in the middle of a song