Factory of The Mind

Once the basic needs were satisfied, I, like many fellow humans, started thinking about questions and subjects, which can be referred to as ‘philosophical’. Words like social justice, governance, balance, ego, paradigm, consciousness, truth, myth, etc. started featuring in thoughts, discussions and reading material. Gradually, realization dawned that these were not definitive in nature like mathematics or physics and could not be taken to logical conclusions one way or the other. I learnt to abort discussions saying that each person has and is entitled to his own perspective. Recently, while reading about Socrates, Plato, Aristrotle, I understood that these abstract subjects have been in consideration for over 2500 years. As I thought more, these were being spoken of during the times of Mahabharat as well, which is supposed to be dated about 5000 years ago. All religious texts primarily appear to be dealing with these subjects. Finally, I concluded that there is some substance in the c...

Sometime during my college days, I’d come across a definition that economics is the study of human behavior in conditions of unlimited wants and limited resources. The meaning would perhaps remain the same if I say that it is the study of human behavior in conditions where resources are lesser than required to satisfy wants. I think economics is also the study of human behavior in conditions where resources are more than required to satisfy wants. We are living in times, where this condition is not utopian. There are umpteen examples of people, who have more resources than what they need to satisfy their wants. I’m not getting into the distinction between need and want, but considering all that a person wants as his need. Also, ‘unlimited wants’ is a misleading notion because the capacity of a person to consume is finite. Therefore the term ‘want’ needs to be defined with more precision. But I’ll leave that for later. In economics, a lot of emphasis is laid on the assumptions or emphas...

When I quit my job, I thought that it is futile to spend so much time commuting to and fro and in office to earn a living. As it is, the job is getting me more money than I need to live a simple life. Why not release some bandwidth, even if it means earning less. It is so elementary to look at work as a means of livelihood. One works to earn a living. But is the converse true? If one doesn’t need to earn for a living, doesn’t he need to work? For this discussion, let is consider work as professional work, not personal. When I tried to establish relationships, I wasn’t able to establish a logical relationship between work and earning! Let’s take a farmer or a doctor. Both of them provide a service (growing food and curing illness). Let’s say there is a consumer who is incapable of doing either of it himself and has to depend upon them to fulfill his need. How does he arrive at their fee? If life is precious, both are invaluable, if it isn’t, both are worthless. From the perspective of t...