Giving Space Often Brings Us Closer

A very good friend of mine is deeply religious.

Nei­ther his reli­gion, nor my athe­ism came in between our friendship.

Another close friend and rel­a­tive is deeply spiritual.

Despite my mate­ri­al­is­tic world­view, we under­stand each other bet­ter than most oth­ers do.

Iron­i­cal though it may sound, often, the space we give each other to be dif­fer­ent from us, brings us closer.

It isn’t affin­ity of ide­ol­ogy, but the free­dom to be our­selves, that often leads to inti­mate friendships.


Assertive vs. Aggressive: Why It Matters

This is in response to Atul’s An Aggres­sive Asser­tion, in which he delves into the pos­si­ble dif­fer­ences between the two. As always, his post is beau­ti­fully writ­ten, but goes off in such a tan­gent to my frame of ref­er­ence, that I decided to write here in response.
My inter­pre­ta­tion of what Atul is try­ing to say


Victor Frankl, Seven Habits, and REBT

Between stim­u­lus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our free­dom.”
– Vic­tor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Mean­ing
As a Holo­caust sur­vivor, Vic­tor Frankl went through some of the most hor­rific expe­ri­ences ever known to man. Yet, from within the


A Quieter Mind

This blog has been so neglected that I am not even sure if any­one will read this post.
Six months have elapsed since I wrote about the chal­lenges for 2010. It is painfully obvi­ous that blog­ging is tak­ing a back seat to social net­work­ing. How­ever, that is not the com­plete story.
Time and again, I have men­tioned that for


Road From Democracy to Fascism

The recent storm cre­ated by the Shiv Sena in Maha­rash­tra is indica­tive of a resur­gent Fas­cism as cor­rectly noted by Soli Sorab­jee. This rot in Maha­rash­tra is elo­quently ana­lyzed by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, which you must read to get a grasp of the sit­u­a­tion.
What dis­tresses me to a cer­tain extent is the debate I observe


The Real Tablet Revolution

This is the slate I used grow­ing up as a school kid. There was sib­ling rivalry over whose was shinier or had a larger “screen size”.

They are still used by some school chil­dren in India. Mil­lions of them go to school today like this (image credit):

With heavy bur­dens on their back, no won­der


The Avatar (2009) Potpourri: Medium Is Not The Message

Avatar (2009) needs no intro­duc­tion. The most expen­sive movie ever made is a tes­ta­ment to James Cameron’s coura­geous vision of an immer­sive cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence to out-Lucas the Star Wars leg­end – an ambi­tion he har­bored since he watched it in 1977 as a truck-driver.
Cameron has uplifted the bench­mark for Hol­ly­wood block­busters and cre­ated a


Blogging Highlights of 2009, Challenges & Thoughts for 2010

This is a good time to look at the high­lights of 2009, and share some thoughts about the future.
High­lights Of 2009
This has been a busy year. 75 posts on An Unquiet Mind in 2009 with about 1,500 com­ments! 46 posts at MakeUseOf.com and 30 on my newly started tech blog, Skep­tic Geek, both of which involve


In Remembrance of 26/11 and Thanksgiving to the Heroes

Warn­ing: A post with­out struc­ture, theme or com­po­si­tion. Sense­less unedited out­pour­ing. Read at your own risk.
Blood, bul­lets, and deaths. Bru­tal vio­lence. Screams. Help­less­ness. Despair. Pain. Courage.
A nation of a bil­lion aspir­ing to be on the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil brought to its knees by just ten armed ter­ror­ists.
Hun­dreds died. Thou­sands wept. Mil­lions pan­icked. A bil­lion were ter­ror­ized.
The


A Personal Milestone

I am now an edi­tor at Tech­meme.
Some online friends con­nected with me on social net­works like Twit­ter and Face­book already know this, but I was wait­ing for an offi­cial announce­ment before I wrote about it here. You can also read TechCrunch’s cov­er­age here.
If you’re not in the tech field, you’ve prob­a­bly not heard of