Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
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 […]
ELECTRICITY
ELECTRICITY: _ The picture above shows how a barber cuts hair during recent power failure in India. _ Prologue: Electric crematoria were snuffed out with bodies inside, New Delhi’s Metro shut down and hundreds of coal miners were trapped underground after three Indian electric grids collapsed in a cascade on 30th and 31st July 2012, cutting power to 620 million people in India. The blackout engulfed as many as 19 of India’s 28 states on July 31, with more than 100 intercity trains stranded and traffic lights went out in busy roads, causing widespread jams. Without question, it was the largest blackout in world history. Hospitals, factories and the airports switched automatically to their diesel generators during the hours-long cut across half of India. Many homes relied on backup systems of invertors with batteries. On the other hand, millions of India’s poorest had no electricity to lose. Of the […]
SUPERSTITIONS
SUPERSTITIONS: _ _ Prologue: I was traveling from Yanbu to Jeddah by plane and it was my first experience with Saudi Airline. Just before takeoff, as plane was standstill, I heard “Allāhu Akbar (الل أكبر)” [god is greatest] thrice and then plane took off. I never heard similar thing in Indian airlines planes praying Hindu Gods. Is Indian Airlines plane less safe than Saudi Airlines plane simply because a prayer is not recited before takeoff? Has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Did you know that insects could be tried for criminal acts in pre-industrial Europe, that the dead could be executed, that statues could be subjected to public humiliation, or that it was widely accepted that corpses could return to life? What made reasonable educated men and women behave in ways that seem utterly nonsensical to us today? Strange histories present a serious account of some of the most […]
