You can speak the truth with the intention to deceive and succeed in deceiving. It is an old lawyer’s dodge. I don’t want to flog a dead horse. I have already written many articles about my being victimised and its aftereffects. I am getting tired of it myself. But this is another aspect of my […]
Category Archives: Self Help
Do This to avoid Disaster
What do we need to do avoid disaster? We need to avoid error. I’ll start with a quote from Voltaire which sums up the point I want to make better than anything I could say myself. Twenty years are required to bring man from the state of a plant, in which he exists in the […]
On Prudishness – Some Comments
India has a notoriously prudish attitude towards sex. When I was young I thought that this was completely flawed and mistaken. I believed in openness regarding sex education and (being influenced by Bertrand Russell) freedom of choice for the young regarding whether they should have sex relations or not. But here I am at age […]
Do this before criticizing
I am – and I think almost all of us are – a man of fixed and settled opinions. I have a view of myself and of the world that is clearly defined and which has helped me deal with the world and survive. So if someone tells me something that is opposed to my […]
On Living with Women
I have six articles already written out and I thought today that I would publish one of them. But in the meantime I read a few pages of Lin Yutang’s classic book – The Importance of Living. And I came across a passage that is so relevant and meaningful that I decided to make that […]
The Advantages Of Being Useless
I have been fascinated by Chinese philosophy ever since I read Lin Yu Tang and Bertrand Russell in my early twenties. The Chinese were isolated from Europe and the rest of the world for many centuries and thus they had to and did come up with independent responses to the challenges of human life. Theirs […]
Advice to all 20 Year Olds
Having survived and reached the age of almost 60 years (more by luck than by judgment and by the unfailing generosity of my family) I am in a good position to know what mistakes I made and what I would tell a 20 year old version of myself. The life lessons (not in any particular […]
I almost got my hand chopped off
In the 1990s, for various reasons, I wanted desperately to go and work in the Gulf countries. My career was not going too well in India and I was not enjoying my work. In addition, I had offended powerful people in Mumbai who wanted me out of the city. I had been diagnosed with a […]
What we can learn from Diogenes
Everybody knows who Diogenes was. There is a famous anecdote regarding him and Alexander the Great that is related in Plutarch’s Lives: … While Alexander stayed here many public ministers and philosophers came from all parts to visit him and congratulated him on his election, but contrary to his expectation, Diogenes of Sinope, who then […]
Don’t Judge Scoundrels Harshly
I have admitted in various articles in my blog that I am cunning and devious and also tell lies and am not a man of my word. I don’t have integrity. I am also arrogant. I want – in this article – to make the case that people like me should not be dealt with […]