Just finished reading Vonnegut’s famous Slaughterhouse Five. New York Times, in their original review of the book, said something to the effect that you’d either love it or push it aside as a science fiction book. I suppose great works have that capability of sharply dividing public opinion but I just found the book… listless [...]
Category Archives: Philosophy
Chicken…
…or Buffalo wings, as they are called in the country for which the rest of the world is an appendix, refers to the uncooked lump of meat skewered over the top of two drumsticks. Sure it has two eyes, a nose, and two ears but these are details not worth the time of anyone except [...]
God and Russian literature
We all understand that it’s all a theater, don’t we? That the world as we know it is just a cosmic afterthought, a mere divine joke in which a lot of people take their parts far too seriously and the rest of them have a hearty laugh about it. It’s like a friendly banter over [...]
Let there be humans…
I was talking to MV about evolution and he recommended a Nat-Geo documentary titled ‘The human family tree’ for me to watch. To anyone who is interested in knowing about the origins of us humans in a lucid and interesting way, I would also recommend this highly engrossing documentary. I have an intense peeve against [...]
Elementary, Dr. Ankit
So now that I’m allowed to officially add the prefix of Dr. in front of my name, it would be interesting to look back and evaluate the 4 years which culminated in this title. Because we do not do it often, stages of our lives which are like liquids of different densities often merge into [...]
Dissertation woes
Oh blast! This thesis writing business is really beginning to rile me up now. Because, you see, it’s a whole lot of charade to begin with. Like any sort of bookkeeping, because that’s what it really is, it’s one daunting, limitless ocean of morbidity that is wetting my feet as I take my first steps [...]
Division by zero
…and it would be a crazy happy world. Truth would only be a matter of one’s imagination. Fallacies would be the only consistencies and no professor would be smug. People would be generally confused and disoriented and no one would bat an eyelid when sold 5 oranges after paying for 6. It would be a [...]
In support of voyeurism
I sometimes get this weird idea that voyeurism should not be seen as the evil that it is often seen as. I often get such ideas when I am sitting in a dimly lit balcony looking at the apartments in the front or when I am walking on the street and the dark night is [...]
GEB
After days of diligent pouring, I have finally waded across 750 pages of paradoxes, logic, philosophy, mathematics, painting, music, and computation and crossed the checkered flag signaling the end of Hofstadter’s ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.’ Why, you might ask, is this important? Well, in the field of ‘intelligent, thought provoking books’, GEB [...]