Ephemeral Reflections

The most imperative thing here is the reason why I started reading this book. Because this defines the context in which I saw its content. It has been some years since I started wondering what the cause of violence by religious people is. Violence is part of human nature. But if we blame certain religious beliefs incite violence then why, why Buddhist majority countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka persecuted their minorities. If religion does grant you peace then why another majorly Buddhist country, japan, turned out to be one the worst offenders of war crimes in world war II. Do their beliefs not create an inherent conflict? Where nationalism triumphs religion? And where religion directs nationalism. Most of the Tibetan protests have been non-violent. But at the same time, can you ignore the firebrand Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka? I wanted to know how such deeply religious people could live a life that is in complete contrast to the ​​original teachings of their dharma. Although this b...

I wonder how surfing internet sometimes become like falling down a rabbit hole. I was once looking up something for a friend during when I came across the 'standard essential patents'. This somehow lead me to gene patents. This term revived a distant memory. When I was in B.Sc., one of my friend told me that  the biotech industry stocks suffered a huge loss in single day when president Bill Clinton declared human genome sequences should be available freely ( see  Clinton - Blair Statement ). Of course, this was quite far from the day when their supreme court declared genes are not patent-able after long legal tussle (this I learned now, not then). So I have decided to simply collect the status of gene patents in India and abroad. I present a summary of what I learned and thoughts over here.  A little bit of history for the most famous gene patent litigation. BRCA1 and 2 are quite infamous genes. These genes are involved in DNA double stran...

 Now a union minister states ( in All India vaidic sammelan, no less) that Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong because none of historic texts mention sightings of ape turning into man.  ‎The idiocracy.  Okay, everybody is entitled to have their own view but not on the cost of playing with facts. Do our ancient texts mention dinosaurs and woolly mammoths ? But they sure did exist. Look at frozen carcass of woolly mammoths dug out from Siberia or partial dinosaur skeleton in our own India (Rajasaurus narmadensis) . Hey, but those are not mentioned in our ancient texts. So , here they go out of windows. Texts do not mention them as they were written by humans. Humans ( Homo sapiens , to be specific) date back to 195,000 years at max, while those poor chaps existed in completed different era (230-65 million years). Woolly mammoth went extinct 9-5000 years ago.   Prima facie , it appears that he has not studied the very theory he is advocating to remove  from...