The advisory that one should take part in food in moderation (mitha) has very few takers. Eating for delight and not complying with the age-old diktat is a human frailty not observed in any species other than human beings. Birds, beasts, insects and aquatic creatures are speechless role models of assuaging their hunger without over-indulging…

India’s profile, and equally so the profile of its masses at large, is currently witnessing a change causing disenchantment to the seniors among the land’s citizenry. The subcontinent has been bestowed adoration in the past, often sounding poetic, by its scholarly writers as well as chroniclers coming from distant shores. Rulers in different regions of…

Idioms and proverbs that express a gospel truth in a concise manner are usually author-less. The caption for today’s column is traced to a collection of proverbs by John Ray (1627-1705), British Botanist and an accomplished naturalist, apart from being a philosopher and theologian. While many stories have drawn from the famed statement to signify…

Ancient scriptures of the land, particularly the voluminous texts of Sanskrit verses, much of which script is not attributed to any identified author, have come to later successive generations as a legacy through the process of passing on verbally, according to scholars. The four vedas figure prominently in that class of India’s ancient literature which…

Reports in both dailies and television channels highlighting corruption and cases of functionaries in the administration found, read discovered, with wealth in cash and kind disproportionate to their known sources of earnings having emerged on tsunami-like scale seem to have driven the people at large to the point of accepting the features as mere fait…

The land’s dailies of all hues may have run far short of their column space informing their readers about the cacophony generated by both netas and their chelas in a free-for-all game of everyone of them trying to outwit everyone else, leaving some sections of society in a state of disgust and the rest amused…

The land’s legendary monk Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) is regularly cited for his inspirational prescription to the youth in particular and the world in general with the words, “Arise, awake; stop not until the goal is reached.” Two other quotes attributed to him may be appropriate for this column’s topic: “Every thing is easy, when you…

A regular tendency or practice that is hard to give up, briefly defining the term habit, invariably either draws people close to one another or drives them apart. People of different countries and also those of different regions within a country, such as in India, are not only marked by but also stereotyped on the…

The time-honoured distinction between urban and rural profiles of a given geographical area such as India appears to be getting hazy on many counts, except the lifestyle of their residents and also their density for now. Given the steadily changing ratio between the populations of these two territories, we may witness the 50:50 point sooner…

Indian democracy has tended to gravitate to a five-years-once expectations of its masses and disappointments as mirrored by the current goings on across the land, Karnataka figuring along with other States. The eligibility to seek votes as part of the process of getting elected before wearing the badge of the country’s ruling class, with or…