God was in my world, the farthest I look into my past. My parents were not fastidious about religion. I do not remember they ever talked to me about religious doctrines. They were not aware of these in their own religion. Their religion centred around celebrating major festivals as a cultural event. On these days house was cleaned more assiduously. My mother prepared special dishes, specific for each festival. I eagerly awaited them. On some of these days she told us parables. I heard them year after year and knew every word. But I still looked forward to the evening when she would wear a special sari meant for these occasions, dress us up, sit with us on the floor, savouries arrayed around as offerings to the gods, and narrate the story. My mother had her hands full with household chores. A little spare time she salvaged from these cares she spent with books. She prayed only on the days of festivals. We had some framed pictures of gods arranged on a shelf. My father would light a la...

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham The Eternal Story Apart from the freedom to say truthfully that grey in your hair bespeaks your experience, age brings many compensations. Not the least of these is the ability to contemplate past calmly and indulge once again in certain innocent exploits that gave one much joy in the past. For past now looms large in life where future seems to be shrinking fast. I now find indescribable pleasure in books that I read many years back, and whose memory, I would hate to part with.   I first read  Of Human Bondage  about three decades back. I had discovered Maugham recently and had fallen headlong for his books . Until my memory is swayed by the lure of nostalgia, I can claim that I found it ravishing. I read it again last year and once again relished every word. Of Human Bondage  was published in 1915, when Maugham was forty. In preface to an early edition of the book, Maugham tells us how the book ‘came to be written’. He wrot...

In a world not simple by any reckoning, time is the weirdest phenomenon. It is universally felt and effortlessly perceived. But it treads so softly that one doesn’t notice its passage in the daily grind. Nearer sixty than fifty, it is inexcusable to maintain an illusion of youth. But I remember and experience my past so vividly and with such force that the day I joined college, was married, my children were born, do not feel to belong to last millennium. Aged visage of a college mate whom I haven’t met in decades, occasionally viewed on a social-media platform, remind me of the incessant flow of time; so do events that highlight adulthood of my children. Mirror then speaks the truth for a little while.   An obstetrics resident, friend of my wife who was studying pathology in the same college, held her in a tray resting on her extended forearms, as she exited the operating theatre to show me my daughter. ‘Oh! She is so small, is she fine!’ was the thought that came to my mind ...

  I suffer a disability of cognition. I cannot remember directions. In past when I commuted in city buses, I spent many frustrating moments on a road trying to figure out the direction of the place I was heading to. Bus number 72 plied in both the directions. I would often board the wrong bus and learn the error only when the bus halted at its last stop. Today, if a traffic jam or any obstacle forces me to take a new route, I cannot reach home without getting lost in the maze of crisscrossing streets. Recently, on a foggy winter day, I was forced on to an unfamiliar street as I pulled my cycle with a  punctured tyre. The new route might be shorter, I reasoned. A right turn here and a left there and I was lost. I spotted a lonely walker and stopped him to ask the way to my apartment. He seemed dazed and stared hard at me for a few seconds, as if I had asked him the solution to the Fermat’s Last Theorem. He repeated the name of my apartment building slowly. Had he heard me cor...

The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham The Mind of an Artist Genius is defined as a very great ability or skill in a particular subject or activity. It is tempting to speculate that a talent that is exceedingly rare must be inborn. This lends an ethereal remoteness to the facility and enhances its appeal. An ability that can be improved by diligence appears too worldly to be called extraordinary. A closer look at the acclaimed geniuses reveals the truth of the cliched adage that genius is more hard work, i.e., perspiration, and only a little gift, i.e., inspiration. Michaelangelo, Newton, Beethoven and innumerable others, all undisputed prodigies in their fields, practiced their metier for decades to sharpen their skills. World saw the finished goods and marvelled at the unworldly nature of its beauty. Word genius immediately conjures image of Einstein in our minds. His theory of General Relativity is celebrated as one of the most elegant conceptions in modern science. Ein...

For long psychologists denied human nature. Human behaviour, they believed, is the result of nurture, i.e., conditioned response to environmental stimuli. Pecking pigeons of Skinner and salivating dogs of Pavlov held the clue to the riddle of human behaviour, they opined. Growth of evolutionary psychology brought a tectonic shift in this understanding. Behaviour of an individual is a manifestation of their biology. Biology is shaped by evolution and endows a species with nature. Behaviour, the expression of this nature, emerges from interaction of nature with nurture, i.e., environment of the individual. We Homo Sapiens, the modern humans, evolved about two hundred thousand years ago. We have been hunter-gatherers for most of our history. Agriculture was invented only about ten thousand years back. With it came settled lifestyle. For 95% of our time on earth we were wanderers. I often wonder. Is our wanderlust rooted in our genes? Akin to the fear of our species for heights and lov...