Many international observers have written about the high level of self-loathing in India. I think this is not true of the general population. Like people from other nations, most Indians are proud, self-confident, honest and resilient and this explains their success at science, business, arts and politics around the world.

Yet, there is a kernel of truth in these reports. India’s Anglophones, who are the ones that interact with international authors are indeed a class that is obsequious and servile to the outsiders while being insufferably shallow and narcissistic amongst its own. So what’s the origin of this self-hate?

To…

Two years ago, Mark Carney, the then governor of the Bank of England warned that pervasive automation and AI are responsible for the current wage stagnation that is like that of the 19th century, which gave birth to communism.

“If you substitute platforms for textile mills, machine learning for steam engines, Twitter for the telegraph, you have exactly the same dynamics as existed 150 years ago when Karl Marx was scribbling The Communist Manifesto”, Carney said.

In reality, the disruptions and the dangers are much more serious now than 170 years ago. The new computer and robot technologies are replacing…

Here’s the layman’s explanation of my theory that physical space is e-dimensional (e = 2.71828…) (for links to the papers, see [1][2]).

It is easy to see that it is a surprising new idea that could lead to new physics, but how can physical dimensions be anything but 3? And the most troubling thing is that it is not even a rational number!

The answer is that three-dimensional view of physical space is merely a convention that we have gotten used to. …

Although China proclaims its desire to have good relations with its neighbors, it is aggressively pursuing unilateral action on the disputes regarding the border with India in the Himalayas, and control of the Paracel and the Spratly islands in the South China Sea. After constructing a string of artificial islands, it is building deep-water ports, military-grade airstrips and strategic infrastructure to the alarm of its neighbors and the United States.

China’s greatest trading partner is the US, so one would imagine that it will generally be sympathetic to the US position in international conflicts. But WikiLeaks shows that whereas China…

For a colonized people, winning political freedom is the easy part; it is much harder to set the mind free.

India’s experience of the British Raj was disastrous in terms of material prosperity. Economists estimate that British occupation cost India $45 trillion dollars of wealth and the destruction of native industry and education systems.

But most of all, the British foisted false narratives of history on India. If you ask me why the minds of many Indians remain colonized, this is it.

The American historian John Henrik Clarke said: “To control a people you must first control what they think…

How do people forget their past? By deliberate suppression going beyond destruction of religious or artistic images; genocide of people and their expulsion, as in the case of the Yazidis in Iraq and Turkey and the Pandits in Kashmir; or it could be people switching to a new language of prestige and then slowly become separated from their history.

The Tarim Basin in Xinjiang was Kashmir’s twin but it has forgotten its past, and so have we.

The entire region was a part of the Sanskritic world for centuries. It was called Uttarakuru (perhaps the origin of the word Uyghur)…

Indians are successful the world over, literally in all fields. So people ask, why is it that they have not done equally well within their own country?

The critics recognize that India is making progress and the GDP in nominal terms has reached number five in the world, but they say that this rise is driven mainly by the very size of Indian population. India has many individuals who have made noteworthy contributions, but as nation, collectively, it hasn’t done as well.

As comparison, they mention China and South Korea, both of which, seventy years ago, were behind India in…

Congratulations to the Class of 2020. This is the time to cast a quick look at what has happened and where we are going.

First, it is clear that we live in a time of unprecedented change.

I am not even talking of the coronavirus and the lockdowns, disruptive though they are and they have messed our plans in so many different ways.

To put this pandemic in perspective, more serious influenza pandemics swept over the world post-Second World War in 1957 and 1968 in each of which a million people died, and nobody remembers them. …