Choices and hypothesis

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...

In my years and years of growing up I have encountered a curious habit among the people I have interacted with. They have always functioned in a mental framework incorporating their abstract take on the world around them. And all of us in some way do that. These metrics give a sense of rationality to the individual. Now to what degree the rationality holds is altogether a different discussion. But the basic hypothesis still holds: Each one of has a scale. There is another curious observation further on these lines: these metrics often tend to be one dimensional. My parents, my teachers, my friends and even the Bollywood stories around me followed this pattern. For the early years of my life I struggled to put things in this format. As my world got bigger I discovered a vast majority of crowd also religiously follow some version of this model either consciously or sub consciously while interacting or making sense of themselves, the people within and outside their communities, objects an...