Misplaced Exceptionalism, Political Hubris, and Personal Failure

Image Source: Twitter Fabrics of nations have been altered by political hubris. All through human history. I say nations only because kingdoms, where hubris was rife, accepted, and almost indispensable, did not represent its people better. Two hundred or so years since nation-states started dotting the world map, we are still finding ways to substantiate

When Intuition is Our First Resort

Intuition is an innate human ability to understand something instinctively without expending time developing a mental process to do so. Thanks to the pioneering work of Messrs Thaler, Sunstein, Tversky, & Kahnemann among others, cognitive biases that drive human decisions have been documented significantly since the latter part of the 20th century. Our ability to intuit

The Deliberate Route to Mastery

I went back to reading ‘Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World’ by David Epstein last week. The author followed up his first book ‘The Sports Gene’ with this compelling book that suggests pursuing breadth over depth is not a zero-sum game, and can in fact be beneficial in developing well-roundedness. Our suitability to

Returning “Attention” to its Rightful Owners

We live in a world where some of the brightest minds of our generation are expending time and other resources to understand newer ways to leverage technology to hold our attention. We often hear people talk about the efforts that they take to ‘switch off’ or limit ‘screen time’ (to resemble an illusion of our

Inner Perseverance for Outer Order

Humanity has more or less perfected the art of passing down elements unique to specific cultures across generations. The simultaneity of continuity and change is one of the greatest paradoxes that each of us grapples with more or less on a daily basis. Everything that is useful to us is carried forward, and things that

Phantasia

It takes phantasia or imagination to take advantage of the affordances of the environment

The Revolution Is Not On The Internet

Gil Scott-Heron wrote a powerful poem which he later recorded into a song in 1970. The poem and song bear the same title – ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. It went on to become a popular slogan of the Black Power movement. The song contains quite a lot of pop-culture references that offer fascinating