• Reflections on my OS – 3

    Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!

    The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.

    One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.

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  • Bobanum Mollyum

    The first tee I made for myself. You have to be Malayalese to get it.

    Bobanum Mollyum

  • The Names

    Florence Knapp

    I have a thing for what-if scenarios, and that’s one of the reasons I loved The Names. I remember at least two occasions when they happened in a literary work – the first was a Hardy Boys + Nancy Drew book that asked you to turn to a particular page depending on the option you chose from the possible outcomes, and the second was a Jeffrey Archer short story (One Man’s Meat) which had Rare, Burnt, Overdone, and À Point endings!

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  • The D&G way to Hindu Rashtra

    I think this angst really hit me at the beginning of the decade when a colleague F, in a sombre moment far removed from his otherwise jovial, chill nature, confessed that he was moving abroad because he feared staying here.

    Since that time, real life comments by friends and acquaintances referring to the ‘others’ have bothered me, and I have questioned them on that. More recently, when I read Anjum Hasan’s “History’s Angel”, I despaired what the life of a Muslim in India is.

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  • Christchurch

    To keep it 100, Christchurch was an afterthought, mostly thanks to the ticket prices arbitrage. That said, we did have a good time there, and it worked as a good landing for the holiday.

    Where to stay in Christchurch

    Hotel Give, formerly YMCA (we think) was a very well located place at a reasonable rate. Our little research showed a paucity of such placess in Christchurch.

    Hotel Give Christchurch
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