Kahneman and Tversky once rigged a wheel of fortune so that it stopped only at numbers 10 and 65. Students in an experiment were asked to rotate the wheel and write down the number on which the wheel stopped. They were then asked two questions. Is the percentage of African nations among UN members larger or smaller than the number you just wrote? What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in UN? Spin of the wheel gives no clue to the answer of the second question. But students who saw 10 and 65 answered 25% and 45% respectively – clustered around the number they got in the wheel of fortune. Our estimates for an unknown quantity remain close to the first piece of information offered. This is  anchoring effect.  It has been incontrovertibly proved in many psychology experiments. Salesmen exploit it to boost profits. People bought 7 cans of soup when a nearby sign read, ‘LIMIT OF 12 PER PERSON.’ Sales dropped to half when the sign read, ‘NO LIMIT PER PERS...

‘What is the purpose of life?’ This query has occupied thinkers for ages. They have focussed their intellects on a species of bipedal ape with swollen brains. This narrow-framing – choosing one species among extant millions and many more extinct – has misled them splendidly. Unity of life in its vastly numerous forms, though hidden from unsuspecting eyes, is indisputable. Proteins are essential for life. Amino acids, the basic molecules of proteins, are coded by a DNA sequence. This code is unique for each of the twenty amino acids and is same in all forms of life on earth - viruses, bacteria, yeasts, plants or animals. So are the cellular processes to produce energy from various types of food. Life originated on earth only once. It diversified over eons into millions of forms. Like the branches of a tree, all the species of living organism trace their origin from the trunk, i.e., the earliest living forms, a virus, a bacterium or just a strand of a replicating chemical. Meaning of lif...

History was an endlessly boring subject in school. We crammed sacksful of dates that related to distant events, none of which made any sense. Textbooks listed – never discussed – causes of these allegedly momentous events. They enumerated attributes of various civilisations, empires, and dynasties, not unlike properties of elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table - only more lifelessly. We were to consign these to memory and pour them out in examinations. History was a matter of dates, names of rulers and their kingdoms; not a narrative or an endeavour to understand past. History and story come from the same Greek word historia , meaning enquiry, i.e., knowledge acquired by investigation. Many languages, like French and Italian, have the same word for both story and history. I am not suggesting that story, as is used in common parlance, is indistinguishable from history. I only stress that story had been missing from the history I read in school. This left the subject as dry as dust....

There was never such a threat to the integrity of our nation as now. Desh-drohis are planning rebellion in every street, every mohalla of the country. Urban centres are teeming with Naxalites , scheming to upend the social-democratic structure of our society. State enemies have gang ed up and want to blow the country in tukade-tukade . India-bashers and Indian-haters, stooges of western ideology, the highbrow crowd of Lutyens’s Delhi and Khan Market , preach their seditious ideas with impunity. Harward trained pseudo-intellectuals spread calumnies about the hardworking , desh- sewaks . Descendants of nomadic invaders, a barbaric race, foreign to our culture, want to disrupt the harmony that characterises our diverse nation. Bob Dylan sang ‘times they are a-changin ` ’. And these times that ‘are a-changin ` ’ demand new interpretations of old concepts. Definition of patriotism has thus been revised. To sincerely work at your job all your life, to pay your taxes honestly and t...