Slava Akhmechet suggests that reading five books on a topic can make you as close to well-informed as anything can. Reading just one book doesn't cut … ...more

Book: Rural Society in Southeast India Author: Kathleen Gough This is a fascinating ethnographic study of two very rural, small villages in Thanjavu… ...more

Summary A deep dive into values for therapists who specialize in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). I am not a therapist, and I picked up the bo… ...more

Summary Thanks to a reading group at work I finally got through this book after starting and putting it off multiple times these past six years. The f… ...more

Article: All news is bad news I need to remind myself every once in a while that news is not optimized to educate, but to entertain, and I shouldn't u… ...more

I recently found myself working with some new graduates and helping them through a debugging process. They took their time with the code, and it was a… ...more

I am currently reading David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity where he proposes a test for judging claims explaining nature of consciousness: If you c… ...more

Book: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Author: David Reich The past two decades have seen a revoluti… ...more

Book: Perfect Clarity: A Tibetan Buddhist Anthology of Mahamudra and Dzogchen Translated By: Erik Pema Kunsang Compiled By: Marcia Schmidt This book… ...more

I migrated this site, on a whim, to Jekyll and now it is deployed via Netlify, with the data on github. I am glad I did it, though it has taken longer… ...more

Pema Karpo, 16th century Tibetan teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism: Don’t reflect on the past. Don’t imagine the future. Don’t meditate with deliberate c… ...more

The Mughal empire is usually described from the perspective of a modern state. The accepted tenet in Indian scholarship is that it was more or less a … ...more

Excerpts from an interview. ...more

Book: The Era of Baji Rao: An Account of the Empire of the Deccan Author: Uday S Kulkarni Most Indian history books are written by partisans, includi… ...more

Notes from Andre Wink's Al-Hind ...more

Book: Ramayana, A Modern Retelling Author: Ramesh Menon It is said that in India you never read the Ramayana or Mahabharata for the first time. As a … ...more

Book: Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement Author: John Stratton Hawley Hawley, a professor of religion at Barnard College of Co… ...more

Summary Writing is an aid to thinking. By forcing oneself to put things on paper, one forces oneself to think and reason clearly. Good writing is lots… ...more

Book: Infinite Vision Author: Pavithra Mehta Looking back on my years in India, I realized a while ago that I didn't have many examples of excellence… ...more

From this interview of Dr. Srinivasan from Aravind Eye Hospitals: Q: What lessons have you learned that explain Aravind's success? Dr. Srinivasan: Per… ...more

Some questions stop me in my tracks and force me to examine my assumptions about the world. As mental models, I think they are very valuable tools in … ...more

Book: The Fruits of Our Desiring: An Enquiry Into the Ethics of the Bhagavadgītā for Our Times Author: Multiple A wonderful collection of essays fro… ...more

I really like books by old folks looking back on a life well-lived. This is one of those. Below are some of my thoughts on the book. LKY chose to orga… ...more

SEBASTIAN THURN The thing that worked best for me is to be relentlessly driven by the desire to solve problems I really care about, and to be open to … ...more

Corruption (specifically, graft1) in public offices has a really bad name - erodes public trust, offsets growth, destabilizes institutions. It’s also … ...more