Passengers' Dilemma

Many of you may be familiar with the predicaments of a situation popularly known as Prisoners’ Dilemma. What I want to present here is a dilemma with a different set of players in a different setting. I want to call this the ‘Passengers’ Dilemma’. Since it involves passengers travelling to a faraway destination in a train.

Reservations...

I have recently been asking some of my friends about the methods employed to measure social backwardness. Specifically, methods for measuring social backwardness which do not take recourse to educational and economic indicators. My initial assumption was that it would not be possible to measure social backwardness without falling back onto educational and economic indicators.

The purpose of this assumption was to show that, if the assumption is held to be true, although social backwardness is claimed to be a factor in deciding candidates (i mean entire communities as candidates, not individuals) for availing reservations, what we are essentially doing is looking at the educational and economic factors within

Illogical Arguments

Recently, I stayed at my friend's place for a few days. One morning, me and my friend were bored. We played Chess often but we got bored of playing against the same opposition. So my friend asked his father if he was willing to play chess. He said that he didn’t want to play chess. So we asked him if would instead play a game of cards. He said he would. So we set out playing cards in the morning, at 9 am. Now, at this point, for the benefit of those readers who are not familiar with Indian cultural thought (or at least the cultural thought of a significant fraction of it), it is useful to point out that playing cards is considered synonymous with gambling and not generally appreciated. Although this is a huge generalisation because there are many sections of people who would not attach the same kind of stigma to playing cards. At any rate, there is a certain vice-like nature attributed to playing cards, even if it is played in the confines of the home, with family members, and without any bets.

Continuing with my story,

On Plagiarism

When the term ‘Plagiarism’ is stripped of the meanings it has come to represent with recent applications of the word and when the dictionary meaning of the word is considered in isolation, it simply means ‘the act of using another person's words or ideas without giving credit to that person’ (as defined on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary). According to this simple definition there are two criteria for the application of the term ‘plagiarism’ to any sort of work. First, there has to be an instance of a borrowed concept or idea. Second, there should be an absence of acknowledgement of the origins of this borrowed concept or idea. Only when these two criteria are met can one justifiably use the term plagiarism (in its verb form ‘plagiarised’) to describe those sections of work which fulfil these criteria.

Thomas Hobbes: "Justice is what you think it is" Me: "It is Justise"

‘Justice’ and ‘Social Justice’ belong to that category of words which people use frequently and variedly. They have a vague sense of what they are talking about. But when asked to consciously define these words, they fail to articulate properly. ‘Nation’ and ‘luck’ are other such words. So how is a concept like Justice to be understood? Is the understanding similar for all people or is it fundamentally different? Is it constant or does it change with the context, region and time? Similarly, the concept of Social Justice also raises many questions like, is it as simple as understanding ‘social’ literally and then clubbing it together with meaning of Justice? In this essay, an attempt is made to bring about an understanding of Justice and Social Justice by using metaphors (mostly biological) and real-life examples. And I have tried looking at Justice from a

A novel idea to strengthen Panchayat raj institutions

We have a direct democratic system where every citizen votes to elect their representatives to the Parliament. Here's a novel proposal - Let's have the local self-government institutions play a role in electing the MLA’s & MP's. Let the Sarpanches (who are elected directly by the citizens) be the ones who

way of clothing = sexual assualt?

There are people who believe that the way women dress is related to instances of sexual assault on them. Proportion of people belonging to this group of thought is much more outside the debating circles. They say women wearing ‘provocative clothing’ are