-
The Miracle Is in Your Own Hands
Every few years, a new “baba” rises in India. The word means a holy man or spiritual teacher, and some of these men become enormously famous, claiming the power to read minds, heal the sick, and solve any problem through divine grace. Crowds of hundreds of thousands gather at their public gatherings, television channels broadcast…
-
AI, Water and the Future of Farming
Every time we ask an AI a question, a little water disappears. The computers in data centres get hot, and many are cooled with water that evaporates; more water is used at the power plants that make their electricity. Researchers estimate AI could use 4 to 6.6 trillion litres a year by 2027, and the…
-
Unschool Them Now
On average, children spend around 16 years in formal education, learning mostly about things discovered, created, or decided by other people. It is supposed to “prepare” them for the outside world. But I am not sure formal education was ever designed primarily to discover a child’s inner potential or help them become the best version…
-
The Future of Employment May Be “in” Agriculture
No matter how many ways I think about the future of employment, I keep coming back to one answer: agriculture. I have spent 16 years in the software industry. For the last 1.5 years, I haven’t written a single line of code without AI. And I have written a lot of code. The speed and…
-
The Patriotism We Owe Ourselves
What if people showed even half as much patriotism toward their inner world as they do toward the outer world? We spend enormous parts of our lives exploring the world outside ourselves. We learn its history, defend its boundaries, build its institutions, protect its symbols, and attach deep emotions to pieces of land separated by…
-
Food: The Hidden Force That Shaped Human History
We were hunter-gatherers for most of our existence. If the entire history of Homo sapiens were compressed into one hour, agriculture would have appeared only about 3–4 minutes ago. In other words, the way we live today is extremely recent when measured against the span of human existence. Agriculture began roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago and…
-
Simplify, Simplify! How Less Can Lead to More
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a book written after his experiment of living simply in a small cabin near Walden Pond. More than 170 years later, his words still feel remarkably relevant. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” he wrote, before offering his famous advice: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” He was arguing that…
-
The School Bench We Never Had
In 7th grade, we were asked to bring our own mat. Every Wednesday, benches used to come out. It was a celebration when we got to use the benches instead of sitting on the floor. Most of us were not used to such luxury. So, naturally, we ruined it. We would draw lines to partition…
-
Things You Should Quit for a Quieter Life
Noise makes life complicated. Internal noise, digital noise, external noise. It eats up so much of your brain’s capacity that you tend not to realize when you have stopped having time for the important things you care about. People generally complain that they do not have time. It is because they are preoccupied with adhering…
-
Is Following Your Passion Even a Thing?
“Follow your passion.” It is probably one of the most repeated pieces of advice in modern life. It appears in commencement speeches, self-help books, career blogs, and motivational videos. We are told that somewhere inside us lies a passion waiting to be discovered, and that happiness depends on finding it. But is passion actually a…
