PoV of a pseudo intellectual half baked liberal feminazi cis male potato.

India did not win the 1971 war. It just stopped fighting in the middle of the war. And as such it was a total failure for India and a long term victory for Pakistan. Pakistan surrendered in Bengal. Not in punjab. We did not even make the return of PoK as a condition of ending the war. We did not impose any economic or military sanctions on West Pakistan as a condition of ending the war. Such conditions are the prerogative of the victor. To ensure that the enemy, in exchange for being spared, has to concede to a number of terms that take away its power to cause trouble for you again. We extracted no such concessions. We could have demanded that the return of PoK, unlimited access for Indian trade to cross Pakistan to Iran and central Asia, opening up of the Pakistani economy to Indian trade, restriction on the Pakistani military in the number of soldiers, officers, tanks and aircraft it could have, disbanding the Pakistani navy permanently and acknowledgement from Pakistan that

60 seconds in a minute, right? Seconds? Why not 60 firsts in a minute? Or 60 thirds? Why seconds? For that you first have to ask "Minute? What's that?" Comes from Latin. The Hour is divided into 60 parts. Called "pars minuta prima". Meaning First Small Part. The first division of the hour is into 60 “minute" parts. The second division of the hour is thus, pars minuta secunda. Tada! The Second! Bet you never connected in your mind that "minute" of time is the same spelling as "minute" of size. Because for size we pronounce it as "my-nyoot" and for time we pronounce it as "minnit". And ofcourse if its Second from secunda, shouldn't the minute be Prime from prima? What's all this confusion anyway? It's about English being a mongrel language. Believe it or not but English is a dehati language, a language of undeveloped, uneducated, uncivilized barbarians. Unlike German, French, Italian, Persian, L

Whenever an incident of rape or sexual harassment triggers widespread public anger and discussion, many men tend to respond in one of two ways: (a) Join in with narrowly focused outrage directed just at the specific perpetrators of the incident, call for extreme punishments such as hanging them or shooting them, often suggesting that the proper judicial process be bypassed. (b) Get into conspiracy theory mode, dig up some small inconsistency or incompleteness with the narrative of the incident being discussed, or dig up some parallel incident where a woman supposedly made a fake accusation, and use this to discredit the entire narrative and suggest that it is all some kind of media/feminist/leftist conspiracy. Note that (a) and (b) are quite contradictory kinds of response. While (b) is ostensibly seeking to resist a rush to judgement, and warn against the dangers of trusting the mainstream narrative, (a) is seeking to promote and intensify such a rush to judgement, and take the m

The one thing about exponentials that many of us would remember from school calculus is that they have the special property of remaining unaltered on differentiation: the derivative of e^x is also e^x. But we may not have fully absorbed the significance of this property for grasping the notion of exponential growth. I certainly hadn't, until very recently. So let's look at it this way. Consider first a quantity n which grows linearly with time. This means that the growth function is n(t) = n0 + at, where n0 is the value of n at t=0, and 'a' is the growth per unit time or the slope of the growth line. The first time derivative of this function is n'(t) = a. And the second time derivative is n''(t) = 0. So, using the analogy with physical motion, one can think of linear growth as having a constant speed (a) and zero acceleration. Sounds pretty unremarkable, right? Now let's think of exponential growth in the same way. Here the growth function is n(t)

The word 'jamaat' in Urdu/Arabic simply means a gathering or congregation, similar to the Hindi 'sabha'. And it's not as if Hindi speakers ought to be unfamiliar with 'jamaat'. We frequently use the cognate 'jama', as in gathered/collected together. Yet, because we have chosen to neglect so much of our linguistic and cultural heritage, because we have somehow made Urdu a 'foreign' language, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the media and public sphere around us into associating 'jamaat' only with certain organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which in turn are associated in our minds with religious fundamentalism/extremism. And it is in this context that the Tablighi Jamaat, which has existed for nearly 100 years but which most non-Muslims (including me) had heard little about until last week, could be so rapidly fit by the media into a certain narrative, and painted, virtually overnight, as some kind of terrorist organ

1. Religion has been a dominant political force for much of human history - particularly till the 15th century. Much of European awakening and the advent of modernity has been made possible because of separation of the church and the state. Will Hindu Rashtra be very different from the Dark Ages of Europe, or the pathetic middle aged kingdoms of India, always divided and fighting over petty issued? I think not. 2. Can there be a single definition of Hinduism? The Hindus of Kerela, Punjab, Bengal and Maharashtra eat different food, have different diety, speak different languages, have different belief systems, celebrate different festivals and so on. Who is to decide what Hindu Rashtra would be for everyone? 3. 'Dharm wo jo Dharan kiya jaye' - Dharma is that which is adopted and lived, this has always been the understanding of religion in India, before the British brought their Christian lens to view Dharma, and force fitted categories like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Isla