Today is Vijaydashmi, which is often labelled as the festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil symbolized by the victory of Rama over Ravana. While good and the evil feel so black-and-white in the Ramayana, they're often not. And it's not about choosing sides, but more often than not about the moral dilemma of choices we have to make in our lives. Shri Ram’s story itself is a story of choices - he could have refused to go into vanvas  (exile) in the first place - after all his father had no right to make a commitment on his behalf. Later, when Sita was abducted by Ravan and kept in Lanka, he could have summoned his brother Bharat and the army of Ayodhya, or easier still, sought a treaty with Ravana - perhaps giving away some territory in exchange for Sita’s return. But the story we inherit is not of Rama choosing the easiest settlement.  To me, the significance of that choice is larger than the recovery of Sita alone - after all, as we know from Uttar Kand, Ram sent...

Click the image to zoom-in It was a lazy Saturday-afternoon discussion over coffee with friends, discussing life, its struggles et al, when one of us mentioned about how government documents, especially forms to be filled for various compliances were written in a complicated language, difficult to interpret even for the well educated. Someone remarked that this tendency was probably a remnant of Mughal times when the royal court used Urdu, while the people spoke Hindi in the streets. That one sentence was wrong at so many levels that I felt compelled to intervene to tell him that Urdu and Hindi hadn't even been birthed when the Mughals ruled; nevertheless, the Mughal court operated in Persian, which too was not the language of the masses. He quickly Googled my claim for accuracy, and quietly agreed with me; and then popped up a curious question: Why is it that the Mughal court transacted its business in Persian when the Mughals belonged to Mongolia, and came to India via Turkmenis...

Women were as much into hunting as men in prehistoric society  John Konrad’s tweet  (see below) about men communicating weekend plans like a military operation made me laugh because it was hillariously familiar. John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) on X Once upon a time, I set out to solve one of marriage’s great mysteries. Armed with a notebook, a recorder, and the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was getting into, I began my investigation into… The tweet's summary is:  When a man says: “I am leaving at 7 a.m. Saturday. I will return by noon.” That, according to him, is the complete operational intelligence required by the family.  A woman, on the other hand, apparently responds with a detailed intelligence briefing involving a flower festival, a yoga class, a friend’s child, a possible change of venue, a teacher’s meeting, a grocery list, and the unresolved question of whether there is any cream cheese left in the refrigerator. Somewhere in ...

Over the last two days, the world of AI has been struck by two maelstroms. Both concern ethics, both involve two of the world’s leading AI companies, and both force us to ask whether the institutions directing the development of artificial intelligence are equal to the responsibility they have assumed. Yet they illuminate two quite different dimensions of the problem of Ethics in AI. The first arose from a dispute involving New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, his collaborator Levent Alpöge and OpenAI. Buckmaster and Alpöge had spent about a year working on difficult problems related to the Navier–Stokes equations, using models from OpenAI and Anthropic as research tools. OpenAI subsequently mounted its own large-scale agentic effort after hearing that progress had been made on a Millennium Prize problem. It then announced a result within days, triggering questions about research confidentiality, the use of customer interactions in model training, scientific attributi...