Choices and hypothesis

You murder a random guy in the street. You are charged with a 2nd degree murder. Then your diary is found where you had written a murder plan. Now you are charged with 1st degree murder. Accidents and murders are treated differently. And, one is accountable for one's thoughts/ intentions . Ouch. Suppose you, a Hindu, finds out that the victim, a Muslim, is sleeping with your wife. You are now motivated to plan and execute the above murder. Let's change the context. You, a Hindu extremist, plan and murder a Muslim guy out of hatred. Now do the contexts matter, should the punishments be different as well? How to apply this new found wisdom? Low probability of capture will encourage crime, so the state should be efficient. Low penalty will also encourage crime, so the state should not go easy on crimes . Ouch. Also your personal value for committing a crime can be unusually high. And consider the state, its  efficiency  is constant/ equal for all citizens.

But we either believe in democracy or we don't. If we do, then, we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from the any democratic processes, other than by the ordinary law of the land, should be allowed... If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought, and no excuse, whether of security, should allow a government to be deterred from doing what it knows to be right, and what it must know to be right... -  Legislative Assembly Debates, April 27, 1955 We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don't do that, the country would be in ruins - 1986 I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens.

I am not sure about my fellow citizens, but I believe to have been raised with flawed morals and values. Let me reflect on my growing up memories, which I have realized to have an above average level of recall. My intentions is to hope that my reader, even if bad at acknowledgement or articulation herself/himself, can better understand the shaping of one's ethics/values. Growing up, "justice" played an important role in my everyday life. It may be fights with fellow kids, understanding some mythological stories, making sense of complex Bollywood stories, or a situation arising in kindergarten. Once "justice" is given, I found it unquestionable, accepting it to be the fairest of all.  There were some interesting aspects also, based from the emotional memories of my nursery times (It was in 1994-95, Jamshedpur. We stayed there for 10 months and I have some visual clear memories of few incidents. My younger brother was yet to make his entry, so I had less

Prelude I spend a lot of time thinking. I don’t brag or bore people around me, but that’s how I function. Some people want to hold to a 9 to 5 job to feel alive, I prefer thinking. Or rather bombarding myself with boundary questions and exploring answers. I prefer no company and often find myself sufficient to dialogue with. It’s more efficient, got no diplomacy to maintain and much of my time is saved from explaining the basic rules and ethics every time. But then one always faces some version of thinker’s block.   To deal with it, I try to ping a random friend or engage in some public commenting on Facebook. Apart from keeping me grounded, it provides me some very vital components to help me come up with tiny structures that help me write articles, as this one. Recently I finished reading a book by Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? It had been on my bucket list since few years but like many of my books I had deliberately postponed it. It is one of the few

In the past 5 years I have put a lot of efforts to avoid writing. Not that I was a great writer and my decision has put the whole world at loss, but I consciously never gave it a shot. I even avoided posting things on Facebook and engaged in lots of 1-on-1 chats on topics of my concerns with a handful of close friends of mine. I discovered a few people in my friend list also have taken this route. Then things changed slightly when I recently started posting posts related to the socio-politics of my country. I didn’t attract that lot of attention but something funny happened. Few friends pinged me to mention this change of my trend, and few friends and strangers who never were in touch with me tried engaging with longer discussions. Overall I don’t mind it but then it made me leisurely analyze a few things and articulate my hypothesis and choices around this cross disciplinary topic. I will try to structure the rest of my article in 3 sections: 1: The burden of talents 2

Shared first on Facebook, 13 April: Whoever is reading this long post, I hope I do justice to your time. In the light of the ongoing socio-political crisis India had steadily sunk into, especially since last 3 years or so, I would like to share one of my thoughts on Hinduism. A decade ago I was a strong believer. I was raised in essentially a Hindu family (but I wasn't exposed to its dark sides until recently in a small town of Rajasthan (another story)) and during few difficult times I guess faith had helped us tremendously. During college one of the things which plunged me into a phase of depression was exploring my religious nature. I transitioned into an agnostic, then to anti theist and finally, while India was still being ran by an economist, I identified myself as an atheist with a liberal view towards others. I think the whole point should be to let people live peacefully, protect them and empathize with them regardless of their personal beliefs. But then when I loo