Author: manuscrypts

  • Karma meets an iceberg

    A recent event reminded me of a post about karma I had written half a dozen years ago. The idea of the post was thanks to Umair Haque, who had a definition of karma that was different from the garden variety ‘consequences of your actions’.

    Karma isn’t what you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are….. Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.

    Umair Haque
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  • Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

    Kieran Setiya

    A phenomenal coincidence happened as soon as I started reading the book. This book shared an epigraph with the book I had just finished! 

    “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
    And if I am for myself only, what am I?
    And if not now, when?” (attributed to the Talmud) 

    Of all the combinations of books and quotes, what are the chances! 

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  • Ishaara

    Thanks to the traffic nightmare that Bangalore is, it is becoming increasingly difficult to dine out unless you set out from home immediately after lunch. On a relative note, Sunday noon is a safe enough time to venture out. We had seen Ishaara on a recent visit to Phoenix Marketcity, and chose a gloomy, overcast Sunday when we hoped few others would want to get out of the house.

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  • The Fear of Freedom

    Erich Fromm

    This was my favourite book from 2022. Towards the last part of the book, Fromm writes, “The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell“. An insightful remark for today, but here’s the kicker – this book was published in 1941! And though the book seeks an explanation of the psychological-social conditions that led to the rise of Nazism, the historical and psychological constructs it uses ends up answering a lot more. 

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  • Share Values Part 1

    In business, the share price of a company is an abstraction of value – a single number that subsumes every quality and quantity that affects the business. Or, in the succinctly insightful words of Ben Evans, an opinion of the future. This post is not about share prices, it is about sharing. But I felt a connect with both the above ‘definitions’. On the first, given the volume of sharing we now do online, it is no surprise that likes/shares/subscribers/followers are an abstraction of value. In many ways, the commoditisation of an individual. And so on the second, can the answer to ‘why we share’ explain the changing mindset of society at large, and thus shine some light on what this will lead to?

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