New Ideas & Experiences

This is about my friend “Rajin”. Yeah, you must have developed a tendency to raise the question “What’s so great that he is going to tell us about his `friend’ ”. But, then, before doing so, you must know a little bit about me. If you ask about me to those who “know” me, you will mostly get the answer “Oh!…That fellow?… Horrible!…Simply horrible!…..He does not recognize anybody, except perhaps for himself”. And, I really enjoy that. You know, why? Because, I know about this world better than ninety percent […]

Many a times I tried to choose an ideal “Religion” for myself. But, every time I realized that I did not fit well into any of the conventional religions. The most important reason being the hard shells of rituals by which the cores of these religions appeared to me as covered, so much so that it made me to wonder if it would ever be so easy for an average individual to understand the dictums that lay at the cores of these religions. In other words, I felt that it […]

Sometimes in 2004, at around 9.00 a.m., I telephoned a Professor-friend of mine who was working in the Department of Chemical Sciences of a premier institute. I asked him if he could analyse and find out, with at least 95% level of accuracy (being very practical-minded), the chemical composition of an organic solution that I was ready to provide him. His first reaction was: “What you are going to do with that?”. I told him that, we could commercially produce that solution by using the known composition and, by placing […]

I have come across different types of people in my life belonging to different social strata and memories about quite a few of them have remained close to my mind even today. Umesh Kumar who lived in a slum area of East Delhi, during the late 1980s, was one such person whom I knew very closely. He worked as an Attendant in our office located at an area popularly known as “ITO” – an area surrounding the Income Tax Office; distance from his dwelling to ITO being about 11 Kms. […]

Innovations do not take place everywhere because requirements for innovations are not found to be present everywhere. In my opinion, for innovations to take place, the following are the basic requirements: a) Innovative Mind-set; b) Just and democratic environment for cross-fertilization of ideas; c) Demand for innovation; d) Collaborative supporter; and e) Leadership. a) Innovative Mind-set We cannot have an assembly of people with average mind-sets and expect innovations out of them. For innovation, we require individuals who have independent ways of looking at things. Such people usually believe that […]

Bertram Wallace Korn, Jr., from Philadelphia, United States, was somewhat peculiar by Indian standard. He was my classmate in a university of repute in New Delhi, India. During late 1970s, Korn used to come riding a bi-cycle from South Avenue to R.K. Puram (Sector-III), a distance of about eight kilometres, to attend postgraduate classes in our university – summer or winter hardly mattered. But, don’t worry, he used to secure “A+” grade in most of his papers; and everybody in the university recognized him as an extraordinary student. I often […]