Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
SCIENCE OF LOVE
__________________ SCIENCE OF LOVE: _______________ In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, one researcher likened love at first sight to narcissism, because it turns out what we’re most attracted to is someone who happens to be looking at us. Again, this has evolutionary roots, as we shouldn’t spend time chasing a mate who’s not interested, but it’s narcissistic because the person we tend to look at, of course, looks like us. It’s like falling in love with your own image in the mirror as shown in the figure above. _______ Prologue: Shruti Hassan says that she is my fan. Esha Gupta wants to frustrate me. Is this love? Well, they are playing safe. If you have a reason why you love someone, it is not love. You can’t have a reason for loving someone, it just happens and you know it…..Love is an extremely […]
Economic Development vis-à-vis Environment:
Economic Development vis-à-vis Environment: _ _ Prologue: “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money,” Native American saying. A quote by Richard Wilkinson describes economic development as a development of more intensive ways to exploit the natural environment. We hurt the environment in more ways than you could possibly imagine. Misguided construction, irrigation and mining can deface the natural landscape and disrupt important ecological processes. Aggressive fishing and hunting can deplete entire stocks of species. Human migration can introduce alien competitors to native food chains. Greed can lead to catastrophic accidents and laziness to environmentally destructive practices. Will our children and grandchildren live in a better world, or will economic and social conditions decline? Every culture has worried over this question—often for good reason. One would think that modern man, living amid ever-rising material comforts […]
MIND READING
MIND READING: _ The baby in the figure above is trying to read mind of mother. _ Prologue: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. A controversial comment indeed but everybody wants to read mind of others and prevent others from reading their minds. Most of us have heard the old adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” In other words, keep your negative thoughts to yourself. But what if someone could read your thoughts? Thinking about what’s going on in other people’s heads, is something we do practically all the time. Did your boss like your presentation? Why did the beautiful woman on the bus smile at you? This type of mind reading is so ubiquitous in everyday life. Mind-reader is a […]
FEAR
FEAR: _ _ Prologue: I was watching movie “Jaws” in a theater with friends in Mumbai 30 years ago. In one scene, a deserted wrecked ship is being explored under water by divers and suddenly the shark makes appearance with frightening music and my whole body just jerked for a second. My friends were laughing and said that I am very fearful. Well, now they know that I am not fearful as I took all powerful media & politicians head-on. But that jerk of my body was an instantaneous response to advent of potential threat. That is fear and that is natural. If I were to pinpoint one pervasive emotion in society today, it would be fear. Fear is not a new emotion. Throughout history, it has marked societies and even mobilized them, whether they were facing down plagues or the threat of nuclear annihilation. Since the 1980s, society at […]
SCIENCE AGAINST RACISM
SCIENCE AGAINST RACISM: _ _ Prologue: When Hitler said, “Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes, he based that thought on the Darwinist ideas that man had evolved from apes, for which reason some of them still possessed ape status.” This logic constitutes the starting point of the horrible massacres they carried out against various races such as Gypsies, Slavs, Russians, and especially the Jews, and the horrible insensitivity they displayed while carrying out these horrendous acts. In 1986, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone remarked that the average American intellectual standard is lower than the average Japanese standard because of the blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. Eleven years later, University of Texas Law School Professor Lino Graglia triggered a firestorm of criticism for his remarks that “Blacks and Mexican-Americans are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions. It is the result primarily […]
