Snow white

“Mirror, mirror on the wall; Who is the fairest of them all?”

I remember these lines from the play performed in our school’s annual function when I was in 6th grade. I didn’t make the cast owing to my skin tone. Two of the fairest girls in our school were chosen to be the the Step mother and Snow white. That was the first time I questioned the story of Snow White. What is the moral of the story? When I first heard the story, I was told the moral of story as “Beauty is not skin deep” apart from the usual “Good triumphs evil”.

As I watched the rehearsals and finally the play (I was, like any 11 year old girl, fascinated by the fairy tale princesses), I realized that they never refer to ‘beauty’. They don’t ask who is the prettiest of all, instead they ask who is the fairest of all. Is fair a synonym of beauty? How the moral of story can be “Beauty is not skin deep” when all they consider is fairness of skin?

The moral “Beauty is not skin deep” would have made sense if Snow white wasn’t the fairest maiden in the land but still was more popular (as she was kind and nice) than her Step mother. This in turn could have made the Step mother jealous and hence the rest of the story.

But then I have a personal issues against the story and hence wants it changed.

Gandhi and Bose

I am a great believer of non-violence and I am a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi. Ever since the school time, I have been mocked for this opinion. And for some unknown reason people simple don’t want to listen my reason. At times I think they have been waiting for someone to say that so that they all can jump on him/her and start telling that person off for such an opinion and declare how great Subhash Chandra Bose was. How did British leave India because of him? And it’s always him as most of others “freedom fighters” as Bhagat Singh or Chandrashekhar Azad died way before India gained independence while Bose mysterious disappearance happened right around that time.

I am not entirely sure if any of them ever opened a history book in their life (at least that’s what I hope). I think it’s more fashionable to admire Bose instead of Gandhi. And please before you start on issue of Gandhi’s affairs or Indian partition, let me state that my admiration of Gandhi is solely based on his political shrewdness and economic sense. I don’t consider him as Mahatama or a spiritual leader of any kind. He was a great politician but he was human and had his own faults. But at least he didn’t make alliances with Nazi unlike Subhash Chandra Bose.

Honestly, all of those people who praise Bose and think that he had the right ideas, do they know that Bose made an alliance with Nazi (as in Hitler) during World War II? Just imagine if the outcome of the war wasn’t the way it turned out to be. Do they really think India would have been independent? Do they remember Hitler? The one who created all those concentration camps and imprisoned men, women and children? Do they really think that he would have treated Indians as equals? Honestly?

Despite all his flaws (including his partiality towards Nehru), at least Gandhi had a brain on his shoulder and a heart that was in right place. I thank my stars (or rather stars of Indian luck or something like that) that Bose’s plane crashed when it did and Germany was defeated as it did.

But who can tell all this to the fanatics who starts jumping up and down every time they hear that someone actually admires Gandhi and believes in non-violence?

Research Quality

IIT professors earn Rs. 50,000 while Harvard professors earn Rs. 5 lakh. So IIT professors have been demanding pay hike and went on one-day token strike.

Hmmm..I like that idea. Let us compare ourselves with leading US universities. But why stop at the Professor’s salary? Let’s offer good fellowships to grad students so that we can retain some good students for the research. After all, aren’t they the ones who do most of the research work which gets turned into research papers? And in their own words:

They point out that abroad, each time a researcher publishes a paper, he is paid for it separately.

And this incentive, say the professors, will be seen in future research work in the country. Already, the attrition rate in various IIT departments is worrying.

So doesn’t it make sense to give the grad students some kind of fellowship? May be then we can convince some IIT graduates to pursue their PhDs in those “globally acclaimed IITs” (note how both the professors mentioned in the article did their PhD in US), though I am still doubtful.

As far as I am concerned, I would pursue my Ph.D. in India (of course hypothetically speaking. I have no intention of going through this hell again. EVER) if they get rid of some of the office politics (actually I will prefer all but I am being reasonable). While at it, they can change their examination method to understanding-based instead of memory-based, just like MIT and Harvard. And then they can attempt some collaboration with R&D labs of major companies and get some real problems to work on instead of purely academic, again just like MIT and Harvard. And above all, they can stop using their grad students as their personal servants (an average PhD scholar in our dearest “globally renowned IITs” is expected to get groceries, vegetable, milk for the professor’s household on daily basis). Then may be students like us will consider getting a Ph.D. in India and the quality of research might improve. Giving a raise to Professors ain’t gonna do it.

While I am at it, let me clear a few more things. The main reason IITs are so well known is due to the bright students graduating from there and not because of the quality of research done there. And the reason the students are so bright is due to the immense competition in India (Of the 384,977 candidates who appeared in the examination conducted on April 12, 2009, 10,035 candidates have been declared qualified to seek admission in IITs: from Wikipedia). The only way to succeed in India is to be the best. It makes Indian teenager very hard working and goal-oriented as opposed to an average US teenager. The pressure from the parents, family and society adds on to that goal orientation and hard work. BTW, did you know that India has the highest teen suicide rates in the world (read this and this)? But I digress.

The point of the post: let’s give the credit where it belongs. Give better fellowship to the poor Indian grad student and stop treating them like servants. May be it will attract better students to pursue Ph.D. in IIT and hence, improve the research quality.

P.S.: I didn’t even consider the ridiculousness of comparing Indian and US salaries without considering the cost of living in the countries. You need to deflate/ inflate one of them by respective cost of living! Being an IIT professor and all that, this should have been obvious to them.

In the name of culture

“The arranged marriages are successful. Look at the divorce rates in India.”

I am not sure how many times have I heard this statement. It’s given as an argument whenever some westerner wonder aloud about the arranged marriages. The only thing we always forget to mention: divorce is not an option in India especially for women. So the marriages like these are also considered “successful” :

- Married for 35 years. Husband and wife never got along so they live separately. Husband visit wife twice a month and even then they fight. They have three kids.

- Married for 26 years. Husband have a mistress. Wife knows. They celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary by marrying again. The couple have two children.

- Married for 20 years. Husband was caught in house of a widow late night. The affair was exposed. Husband beat up the wife for being angry on him. They have two kids.

- Married for fifteen years. Husband owns a factory and the family is well-off. Husband beats up wife for dowry every now and then. Never gives her a penny to spend as she is supposed to get money from “her family”. They have three kids.

These all are real cases. I happen to know all these families. I feel I haven’t done justice to the sufferings of wives by giving these synopsis. I can go on about how depressed those faces were, how fake those smiles and how deliberate were the prying eyes of so-called well-wishers (don’t get me started on the way we rejoice in other people’s miseries). And these were a few of the extreme cases I know. If you ask me, most of those so-called happily married couples simply tolerate each other rather than being happy in their marriages. But then in India, marriage is not about being happy, is it? It’s about making society (namely neighbors and relatives) happy and having kids. Who cares whether you are happy or not?

Reality shows

The other day my room-mate and I were discussing the reality shows. We wondered how the participants of reality shows get so many days off from their work in order to participate in these absurd shows (neither of us had any idea!).

Anyway, today I found this gem:

[In response to the question: "Have you ever seen 'American Idol'?"]
“No, I have never watched it. But I’m thankful we’re living in a world where we can actually afford to waste your time. What a great thing that is.”

— Arlo Guthrie, “Questions for Arlo Guthrie,” The New York Times Magazine

Caste System

I am a movie buff. I have always been. I like watching movies. In theaters. In nice theaters actually. Not the ones we have in our town (I have watched movies even there). I also admit that I have stop following Bollywood for past four years but I haven't stop going to theaters to watch movies. I watch Hollywood instead. But I digress.

For past few years, I have had opportunity to interact with people from different states and culture which included Bongs (a lot of them actually), Assamese, Tamils, Mallus, Gults and Oriya. Most of them had the same story. They weren't allowed to watch the Hindi movies, listen to Hindi songs as kids. Somehow, they were bad influence. (Forget about Hindi literature, even hindi speaking populace of India avoid that for some reason.).

Another general trend in all the non-hindi speaking (= Hindi not first language) is that if you talk about Bollywood with them, they have a tendency to point out the actor/actresses/singers/music directors that belong to their particular region. They do acknowledge other actors/singers but the best one is always from their region. That celebrity will be their favorite too.

Few years back, I never thought about an actor as a south Indian or Bengali or anything. I simply liked them or disliked them. I liked Kajol as she is a great actress. I liked Rekha for her grace. I liked Sushmita for her personality. I don't understand why they are defined as a bong or southie? Does it even matter? All these people who feel so proud of these celebrities being associated with their region, do they think that if they went to these celebrities and told them that they belong to same region as them, these celebrities will treat them differently? If not, then whats the point of showing off?

I know people who actually followed Saurav Ganguly in Ranji trophy matches just because he is a bong or told me that Kishore Kumar is better than Mohammad Rafi because Kishore Kumar is a Bengali (though I am not sure that Kishore Kumar ever wanted to be known as one). It didn't have anything to do with his ability as a singer but the family he was born in. How is that fair? And then obviously, they have so much superior knowledge of music and such fine arts than poor us (Hindi-speaking population) that we should take their word for it, even though they have been listening to Bollywood music for only 4-5 years while we virtualy grew up on it. I am not sure what offends me more: the arrogance or the unfairness.

Unfortunately, these are the people who had chance to receive highest form of education but some how the education part of their studies skipped them. They are supposed to be more cultured than us (and thus their arrogance) but they forgot to learn about manners, decorum, honor and justice. They boast their unfairness instead of being ashamed of that. I simply can't comprehend which culture accepts that and how is that superior?

P.S.: I didn't mean to judge any community in this post. I am just rambling. I have some very good friends in each of these communities and I still don't like judging people based on the community they belong to. I strongly believe that every individual is different and whether I will get along with him/her depends on our compatibility rather than their place or family of birth.

Thanksgiving

As badly as it started, this year Thanksgiving was far more fun than previous year. Graduate student council (GSC) at Stanford sponsors thanksgiving dinner (actually it should be called Thanksgiving meal as you can't serve a dinner at 12 noon, 2PM or 4 PM(the shifts they divided the meal serving)) for students (I have never attended this event before for various reasons) and I was offered to photograph the event on behalf of GSC (read: I will be paid for the deal). So I spent four hours photographing different people, OFFICIALLY. The term makes whole lot of difference in my approach towards people though it didn't make me any better photographer. I need to post at least one of the photos, so here it is (officially, I am not supposed to share these with anyone, not yet at least):

Anyway, the most interesting part of the day started after that event. I was invited to dinner by one of the friend. Her daughter, Amy is very fond of India and is making a career out of it. And I don't mean it in any crooked way. She is very serious about going to India and work there. She speaks pretty good hindi, watches bollywood movies and is taking classes of hindi literature. Thats not all, she is learning how to read and write Urdu! But thats the academic side of it. She knows and understands Indian culture and history very well too, better than quiet a lot of Indians. Its just great talking to her. But today she startled me by asking me about my last name in respect of my caste, like an average Indian. Can you imagine that? She has picked up the nasty Indian habits! She actually understand difference between Varna (वर्ण) and Jati (जाती).

Anyway, the discussions were pretty interesting. Amy's brother, a political science major, made the statement of the evening:

Indians in America are the new whites.

He compared Indians in America today to the Jews immigration during late nineteenth century and the way they got assimilated in American society. He compared Indians with other Asians and said that Indians are more easily assimilated in American society than Chinese, for example. Obviously we all disagreed at first, as Indians love to be in their well knitted society even in foreign land and inter-racial marriages aren't welcomed by the families. But, as he pointed out, the Indians are different from other ethnic groups in the way that they can easily get accustomed to/mingle with an American group as friends, if not necessarily get married. They have better language skills (read: Good in English). Their technical superiority is being acknowledged, making them a respected and desirable member in any educated society. Well those were good points and we didn't have arguments against them. No matter how we, Indians, view foreigners; those goras and kallus (at least the educated ones) are recognizing us as a welcomed member of society, just like Jews in America in late nineteenth century. I am not sure how long will we Indians take to recognize these changes and welcome them back.

Whatever happened to love...

Ok, before I start, I must confess that I have always been skeptical when it comes to the concept of Love. And let me be clear, by Love I mean the romantic inclinations and not the affections of parents, family and friends. As you must have guessed it, I have had quiet a few heated discussions with my friends about this topic. Anyways, thats not the topic of this post though the idea was conceived during one of those discussions with one of my friend.

The discussion made me recapitulate few confessions/reasons that my friends have given me over the years to be in a particular relationship. It was surprising to realize that that reason wasn't what it should be: Love. The various reasons I have come across are (in no particular order, first come first serve from my memory)...

1. Habit: I have been forever with him/her. He/she has become part of my daily habit. I am sure I love him/her. (I have one word for these people: Variety).

2. Obligation: He/she waited to be with me for so long, I don't have heart to say no now. He/she isn't bad either. I think I like him/her. (So keep asking a person out..he/she will finally cave in).

3. Need: I don't know how to cook/to take care of myself and she/he can. Its a perfect match. (Yeah for you, what about the other person?).

4. Greed: She is successful and earn well. We will have ample money to spend (Believe me, I have heard this one more than once).

5. Trophy Spouse: He/she is so good looking/popular. It makes me look cool. (Well they exactly didn't say the last sentence but thats what they meant..)

6. Reflection: Because he/she loves me so much. He/she is so obsessed with me. (Actually this is a modification of trophy spouse..these people actually like to show off how much their spouse loves them. I guess this is the closest I came to Love, at least one of them was in love).

7. Whatever: (This is my favorite). Because he/she asked me out and I wasn't going out with anyone at that time so we started going out. (Give me a break).

8. Convenience: We work together and this way I don't have to quit my job and settle down somewhere else. (I think they are in love with their job instead of that person).

9. Revolt: Because my parents have been pressurizing for the marriage and I didn't want to go for arranged marriage. (well isn't this a new type of arranged marriage when we arrange it instead of our parents? Isn't this just a revolt against parents/tradition?).

10. Help: This one is very popular among Indian students. He/she has good network and can get previous course notes/assignments. That way I can get good grades.(Very professional, I say).

11. Lonely: Last but not least, is being alone. I have to have someone in my life, no matter who. I can't cope with loneliness. (Well, so far this is one reason I can somewhat live with).

May be being in love is fashionable and thats why these people are in those relationships (so that they have a boyfriend/girlfriend to make their fashion statement). Or may be I don't know the definition of love. Will someone care to explain it to me?

Bhagat Singh and Atheism

Ok, I am not a big fan of writing about something that some other blogger has already posted about but this one is opinion-changing post so here it is. India Uncut has a link to a wonderful article by Bhagat Singh titled, "Why am I an atheist?".

My close friends know that I am a big fan of Gandhi and always had an aversion towards the violent freedom struggle. In fact, Gandhi is my second favorite character from the history, the first being Chanakya/Kautaliya. And let me be clear, I admire both these figures for the same thing: their cunningness and their political/financial understandings that actually made India strong at two different time periods in history. But I digress. Coming back to the article in discussion, I never expected Bhagat Singh to be an atheist, let alone have such a deep understanding about religious beliefs. As Amit Verma puts it, the article makes you want to learn more about Bhagat Singh as a person.

I like to think myself as an agnostic and not an atheist. I don't have courage to discard the existence of a supernatural power and not because I am scared of an Almighty and his wrath but because its a psychological need that I have come to accept. As I wrote earlier, I am a hypocrite when it comes to concept of God. I believe in him when the pressure/stress around becomes too much for me to bear. If I am in a stressful situation, the only way I can relax is by believing that He exists and will be responsible for the consequences of my actions/decisions (As we say it, aage uski marzi (All is in God's hands now)). I don't have enough strength to take responsibility of all my actions and I have a ready made concept/person to blame, then why not use it (I say, When going gets tough, believe in God)? But I do so in full knowledge that I am using the concept of God for my advantage and ultimately its me who has to change in order to succeed (it just gives me a brief respite). Having said that, I completely agree with the views of Bhagat Singh. I wish I had enough courage and emotional strength to become a full-fledged atheist.

The article makes me wonder that how many of the atheists in the world were brought up as an atheist? Most of atheist I know(including me), have come from families of firm believers and thought their way to Atheism. As Bhagat Singh puts it:

According to me, any man who has got some reasoning power at his command always tries to reason out his environments. Where direct proofs are lacking philosophy occupies the important place. As I have already stated, a certain revolutionary friend used to say that philosophy is the outcome of human weakness. When our ancestors had leisure enough to try to solve out the mystery of this world, its past, present and the future, its whys and wherefores, they having been terribly short of direct proofs, everybody tried to solve the problem in his own way. Hence we find the wide differences in the fundamentals of various religious creeds, which sometimes assume very antagonistic and conflicting shapes. Not only the Oriental and Occidental philosophies differ, there are differences even amongst various schools of thought in each hemisphere...
...All these creeds differ from each other on the fundamental question; and everybody considers himself to be on the right. There lies the misfortune. Instead of using the experiments and expressions of the ancient Savants and thinkers as a basis for our future struggle against ignorance and to try to find out a solution to this mysterious problem, we, lethargical as we have proved to be, raise the hue and cry of faith, unflinching and unwavering faith to their versions and thus are guilty of stagnation in human progress....

But above all, I like the underlying question of the article:

Is it due to vanity that I do not believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God?

I think, all the atheist, agnostic people reached to their conclusions by only one reason: Common Sense.

Desism Vs. Racism- Reloaded

Thanks to Aditi (the author of the article "The Desism in Racism" ), I now have the link to the original article. All of you ,who liked or was piqued by the post Desism Vs. Racism, will find this article highly insightful. I strongly recommend you to read the entire article. Now without any further delay, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you :

The Desism in Racism by Aditi Nadkarni

Enjoy...

Publicizing the Privacy

As our hindi teacher in high school often reiterated, Man is a social animal (In her terms: मनुष्य एक सामाजिक प्राणी है। (Ooh.. I love this multilingual feature of Google's)). I think that's the best way to describe the issue in hand. We, humans, by nature live in society. We need certain amount of socializing in order to survive and still we need some amount of privacy from people around us. A contrasting requirement. We have invented so many ways to increase our communications. From the earliest method of communication developed by humans, i.e., development of a language, followed by writing skills to some kind of postal system, we did quiet a lot to communicate and socialize. And now we have telephones, cell-phones, pagers and above all, internet. We email, blog, become members of social internet networks and still we want to live in our own private world. The question is where does socializing ends and where does the privacy begins? For example, are friends part of socializing and end of privacy or are they part of our private world?

Sharing thoughts is communication, sharing with whom makes it private or public. But now-a-days the means of communications decides the audience and hence deciding about it being private or public. Still that doesn't deter us from putting our most private thoughts on a public platform. At times, under an assumed name. The question being: Are the personal thoughts communicated on a public platform under an assumed name private or public?

Take me, for instance (no I am not using any assumed names), I like to blog (as should be evident by the frequency of posts on this blog) but only very few of my friends know about this blog. None of my campus friends have this url (which is ironic as the blog is titled Grad Life). I don't want any one and everyone, who knows me personally, to know about my personal thoughts but somehow strangers reading these posts doesn't bother me. Does that make me a hypocrite? I want to connect with a world beyond the one I am living in but I don't want to open up in the world I am already living in. And somehow this is an issue of privacy for me. Strange, isn't it? I guess this brings us back to the initial question: where does the privacy begin? What is privacy? May be, being a social animal we can't live in a private world, we will communicate and reach out to someone, not necessarily our friends, somehow, not necessarily by a private communication. Thats our instinct.

Your thoughts?

Heart or Brain

Blood is such a vital component in our social life. The bloodline of a person can define who he is, where he came from (for some people)? My flesh and blood..defines your family. Blood-traitor is a person in the family who betrays the family. The temperature(hot or cold), color(red or white) and thickness of blood can tell you about someone's personality. And to think that the organ that pumps all this blood in you is your Heart. So when you give someone your heart, you give away a very vital organ which is not only necessary for your survival but also defines you. You can't survive once heart stops working..

On the other hand, you can be brain-dead and still be breathing. A vegetative survival, but technically alive. Vegetative because, the brain controls everything you are and not everything that defines you. Your emotions, your feelings, your memories, your experiences, your cognitive thinking...everything that is you. Giving someone your brain will be same as giving yourself. But we prefer to give our hearts, that is our life but not ourselves. hmmm..interesting, no?

Quotation

A wonderful quote heard first handedly today at a symposium on "Documentary Photography in Digital Age":

It doesn't matter what's inside their (photographer's) camera but what's inside their head. - Danny Lyon.

Desism Vs. Racism

I guess its a quotation day. This time its from magazine India-Currents. Aditi Nadkarni wrote a wonderful article "The Racism in Desism". Unfortunately, I couldn't find the link for the article so I took liberty of typing out the excerpts:

We Indians love labels, don't we? And I don't mean Guccis and Pradas. I mean labels for people, of both Indian and non-Indian origin...

We are desis in foreign country. India-Americans raised in the United States are promptly tagged ABCDs (American Born Confused Desis). And for a certain populations of desis, the chinese become "Chinkis", African-American become "Kallus", and white people become "Goras". We see nothing wrong in making casual use of these names. We permit ourselves to do the very thing that would likely offend us if we were on the receiving end. If one were to ever refer to us as "brownies" or, even more disturbingly, as "rag heads", we would be screaming "racism!" from the rooftops.

Racism is ill defined within the Indian community. I have come across people who think that only the discrimination on part of white people is racist. Their own discrimination behavior, however, is permissible.

...Then there is the even more disturbing regional bias among Indian themselves....(The) groups of Indians not only stuck together due to language and cultural commonalities, but also at times claimed superiority based on their regional backgrounds. A friend once joked that the "unity-in-diversity" attribute of India was likely preserved not because of tolerance, but because selective communal groups allowed one ample opportunity to avoid the miscellany and stick to one's pack.

It is quite insightful article. I wish I could find the link to original article.

Pastafarian

Of all the social networking sites I am member of (and believe me its a lot), I like Facebook the best. It gives a lot of freedom compared to the other sites. But its not as popular as orkut in Indian community, hence I am currently bullying my friends to join the Facebook. I had a very interesting discussion with one such friend about my religious belief I have put on Facebook. Unlike Orkut, you can actually type your belief in Facebook so instead of Agnostic (which I have put on Orkut), I have put Pastafarian. Here are few interesting mails we exchanged about this topic...

Gayathri Chakravarthy (5:47am July 3rd):

Isn't it something to do with a parody religion ! Wow, US did this to you, isn't it !

I too have several questions on the very basis of religion..but am part of no cult yet..not yet ! ;)

Richa (7:52am July 3rd):

Hey I am not a part of a cult...its just a joke. A way of mocking religion. And its not US..I already had doubts before coming here.

I just found Pastafarian funny so added it as my religion instead of saying that I am agnostic which is plain boring...

Gayathri Chakravarthy (8:21am July 3rd):

Wow..this facebook is awesome ! The convenience of a mailbox with the versatility of a forum..opens quite some doors I should say :).. This is technically referred to as Portal building and I have tried it some years ago..but the site designing is sensibly great !

Hmmm, yeah to mention one is agnostic sounds a cliche I suppose and Pastafarian is open mocking as compared to the subtle claims of being agnostic !

Ah, I could go on forever about religion.. ! Have you read Angels & Demons ~ makes worthwhile reading as does Da Vinci Code ! I did know about the numerous ways adopted by the Church to propogate religion but never realized it assumed such hideous propensity.. More prominent examples from our own are the Manusmriti and such like..

Bottomline ~ I believe religion formed the basis of identity among fellowmen, taught discipline to an otherwise Barbaric clan..But, do we still need one as it seems to be dividing rather than Unite ??

Also ~ my question to you ~ Is it religion you doubt or GOD ? Agreeably God is different from what man makes man believe about Him.. what say you ??

Richa (9:03am July 3rd):

Well as far as God is concerned I am agnostic but for religion I am a non-believer.

I don't know whether God exist or not but I know why each and every culture has developed its own concept of God..Its a psychological need. Taking responsibility of all the consequences of your action is really hard, given the uncertainty of those results.You can't think of all the possible outcome of ur action and hence you need someone else to blame or take that responsibility. That someone is God in most cases.

I am a hypocrite when it comes to God. I believe in him when the pressure/stress around me becomes too much for me to bear..I give all the responsibility to him. More like if I am too much worried about something, the only way I can relax is by believing that He exists. But I do so in full knowledge that I am using the concept of God for my advantage...

But I certainly don't believe in Religion..religion is a way by which someone assumes an authority on God and tells other how and where to communicate with God. But as I believe everyone can have his or her concept of God. How can anyone else be an expert about your concept of God and tell you how to communicate with him? It just doesn't make any sense to me, so I despise everyone who tell others how to pray to God or his/her God is better than the other person's God (which honestly I find childish)...

I love Facebook too just the Indian community isn't aware of its existence yet so I don't find many friends here.

Gayathri Chakravarthy (12:11pm July 3rd):

Wooh..multitude of emotions ~ anger, curiosity, acceptance, confession and questioning, I sense it all !

I am agnostic too ! :) Don't think have grown enuf(or ever will) so as to understand Him..in fact at times think we should refrain from discussing Him(or His existence thereof), we are in no qualified to debate him..never..ever !

Ah..spoken like a true science student :o) ! Sorry, couldn't pass up the chance to make this comment ! :p ! See, this is what tears me apart at times..the conflict between the heart and mind.. The teeny weeny bit of intelligence in me asks to follow science which would rationally explain(or attempt to rather) an event but my heart asks I accept the mysteries that surround me unquestioningly and oblige them as miracles.. My family blames me an atheist when I launch an explanation but hope you are able to understand my manner of speech.. I have always felt upset am misunderstood so !

RELIGION ?? I am nothing but skeptic about it with all due respect to the religious fanatics out there.. Religion has not served it's own purpose but also is leading to the downfall of humanity.. What started as a cohesive factor is wreaking havoc all around..and we see the proof in paper every single day. Once again many think am an atheist since I disown my religion - it gives me no pleasure to call myself a Brahmin / Hindu ! :(

Who wrote the holy books / epics and how Holy was he ?? How can I see the world thru anyone else's eyes other than mine ! Agreed you need a code of conduct for a civilized society, coming from where we do - apes ! But who is anyone to dictate my actions ?? I see shades of chauvinism in every one of these doctrines which defeats the very root of their cause - equality. The Manusmriti dictates a shocking code - woman having lost her husband has nothing to look forward to in this world and therefore should even refrain from tasting / touching anything sweet ! How more gross can anything get ??

So let me end with a quote from my friend - Well am agnostic but for religion I am a non-believer :)))

There was an article about facebook in the paper today ! :o) Looks like it's attracting people by the droves..was pleased to read the article and think I knew about facebook already ! ;)

The discussion isn't over yet, just discontinued at the moment due to multitude of reason. Some day we will pick it up again. Meanwhile, if anyone else wants to put their two cents in, you are welcome to do so.