Number of words: 6,464 On a list of ten things that matter in terms of how you look at the world, satisficing would be number one, along with the whole business of decision making under uncertainty. This opens up the idea that something which may seem at first glance to be completely irrational may in … Read more
Number of words: 587 The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely once found himself chatting to a locksmith with a curious problem. The better he became at replacing locks, the less he got paid. In the early days, he explained, he might wrestle for hours with a jammed lock, but because his inexperience made his job look … Read more
Number of words: 1,207 One of the many aspects of Uber which often surprises people is that not only does the passenger rate the driver, but the driver also rates the passenger. Recently, I was surprised to learn from an Uber driver that my own current passenger rating (4.9 out of 5) is, in the … Read more
Number of words: 588 Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. Has anybody stayed there? It’s the lift, it’s a series of buttons in the lift. Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. It starts with garage at … Read more
Number of words: 1.112 So the power of reframing things cannot be overstated. What we have is exactly the same thing, the same activity, but one of them makes you feel great and the other one, with just a small change of posture, makes you feel terrible. And I think one of the problems with … Read more
Number of words: 370 If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don’t like. Or you can live in a world where … Read more
Number of words: 625 Domingo Paes, a Portuguese traveller who visited Vijayanagara in the early 16 century wrote, ‘The size of the city was as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight. The people are countless in number, so much that I do not wish to write it down for fear it should be … Read more
Number of words: 415 The rock cut cave temples of Badami were sculpted at a time when women were first incorporated into temple service, at the beginning of the bhakti movement. Bhakti has been called the Tamil renaissance and a bloodless revolution, but it is perhaps best described as a religious movement which ultimately transformed … Read more
Number of words: 436 Devadasis have graced the halls of Indian temples for over a thousand years. Although commonly called temple prostitutes, they played a far more important role in society than this label admits. Dedicated to the service of a deity before the age of 9, girls received rigorous training in a wide variety … Read more
Number of words: 2,440 Like all good Anglophiles, I went to one of India’s best schools in Bombay. Among the many things they taught me was that the epics—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—were mythologies. And I believed this till, one day, I decided to read Valmiki’s Ramayana in Sanskrit. And there I read that, as … Read more
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