Know It All

What is love? Seriously, what is it? A verb? A noun? A universal truth? An ideal? A common thread of all religions? A cult? A neurological phenomenon? There is no shortage of answers, some are all-encompassing. It conquers all. Its all you need. It's all there is. These are all comparisons though, ways of defining it by contrast, by saying it's more important than all other things, but is it? Sure love matters more than your favourite dessert but does it matter more than shelter? Or sanity? No matter what your answer is, you are just ranking it, not defining it. Another challenge to defining love is that we often try to do so while falling into it or out of it. Love is potentially the most intensely thought about thing in all of human history and despite centuries upon centuries of obsession, it still overwhelms us. Some say its a feeling, a magical emotion, a feeling for someone like you have never felt before. But feelings are fluid, not very concrete foundation for a definit...

Romantic love, beautiful and intoxicating,  heartbreaking and soul-crushing, often all at the same time. Why do we choose to put ourselves through its emotional wringer?  Does love make our life meaningful? or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering? Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? Is it all we need? Do we need it at all?  If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet. But over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories.  1. Love makes us whole, again: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. In his "Symposium" he wrote about a dinner party, at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story: Humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. One day, they angered the gods, and Zeus sliced them al...

In ancient Greece, headaches were considered a powerful affliction. Victims prayed for relief from Asclepius, the god of medicine. And if the pain continued, a medical practitioner would perform the best- known remedy, drilling a small hole in the skull to drain supposedly infected blood.  This dire technique called trepanation often replaced the headache with a more permanent condition. Fortunately, doctors, today don't resort to power tools to cure headaches. But we still have a lot to learn about this ancient ailment.  Today we have classified headaches into two camps: 1. Primary headaches 2. Secondary headaches Primary headaches are not symptomatic of an underlying disease, injury, or condition; they are the condition itself. Primary headaches account for 50% of reported cases, we actually know much more about secondary headaches.  Secondary headaches are caused by other health problems with triggers ranging from dehydration and caffeine withdrawal to head and neck i...

 Right now you are probably sitting down to read this blog and staying seated for a few minutes is probably okay but the longer you sit the more agitated your body becomes. It sits there counting down the moments until you stand up again and take it for a walk. That may sound ridiculous because we love to sit right? Not really sitting for brief periods can help us recover from stress but nowadays our lifestyles make us sit much more than we move around and our bodies are simply not built for such a sedentary existence. In fact, just the opposite is true, the human body is built to move and you can see evidence of that in the way it is structured. Inside us are over 36o joints and about 700 skeletal muscles that enable easy, fluid motion. The body's unique physical structure gives the ability to stand straight against the pull of gravity. Our blood depends on us moving around to be able to circulate properly. Our nerve cells benefit from movements and our skin is elastic meaning it ...

 In the 4th   millennium, Asian Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred common dreams and their meanings and in the years since we haven't paused in our question to understand why we dream? So after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancements and persistence we still do not have any definite answer but we have some interesting theories. Lets us look at some of the theories that may answer our question of why do we dream: 1. We dream to fulfil our wishes: In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams including our nightmares are a collection of images from our daily conscious life. They also have symbolic meaning  (like if you see a shoe, in your dream then it is a sign of power, security and strength) which relate to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes. Freud theorized that everything that we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious primitive thoughts, urges a...

 Sleep is perhaps the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset the health of our brain and our body. By understanding a little bit more about what sleep is we can get the chance to improve both the quantity and quality of our sleep.  What is sleep? Well sleep at least in human beings is subdivided into two main types. Non REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep. REM Sleep Non-REM Sleep: Non REM sleep is further subdivided into 4 separate stages: Stage 1: Awake/Light Sleep Stage 2: Light Sleep Stage 3/4: Deep Sleep As we go into the light stages of Non-REM sleep our heart rate starts to decrease, your body temperature starts to drop and your electrical brain wave activity starts to slow down but as we move into deeper Non-REM sleep that is the stages 3 and 4, all of a sudden the brain erupts with these huge big powerful brain waves. The body gets recharged in terms of its immune system, we also get this beautiful overhaul of our cardio-vascular system and u...

 Many of us like to start our day with a cup of coffee and perhaps end the day with a glass of wine or some other kind of alcoholic drinks . But it turns out that these two substances alcohol and caffeine can have surprising impacts on our sleep.  Caffe ine: Let's start with caffeine, Caffeine is a kind of drug that we call the psycho-active stimulu s and everyone knows that caffeine can make you more alert and can wake you up but there are at least two additional hidden features of caffeine that some people may not be aware of. 1. The first is the duration of action of the caffeine. Caffeine for the average adult will have an effect for about 5-6 hours, what that means is that after about 5-6 hours   50% of that caffeine that you had is still circulating in your system. Caffeine has a quarter-life of about 10-12 hours. In other words, let's assume that you had coffee at 2 pm in the evening, it could be possible that almost the quarter of that caffeine is still swirling ...

Good night sleep is incredibly crucial for our health, it is as important as eating healthy and exercising.  Let us first consider some of the points to understand why sleep is that important for us. Poor sleep can link to higher body weight. In fact, short sleep duration is associated with an increased risk of weight gain and obesity in both children and adult.   Poor sleep affects hormones that regulate appetite. Those who get adequate sleep tend to eat fewer calories than those who don't.  Good sleep can maximize problem-solving skills and enhance memories. Poor sleep has been shown to impair brain function. Long sleep has been shown to improve many aspects of athletic and physical performance. Sleeping less than 7-8 hours per night is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Sleep deprivation can cause prediabetes in healthy adults in as little as 6 days. Many studies show a strong link between short sleep duration and type 2 diabetes. Poor sleepi...

 How many schools do we have in India? We have 1.5 million schools in our country, yes 15 lakh schools and China just has 2.5 lakh. A country which is more populous than ours and is about three times our size China has only 1/6th of our schools. And when it comes to learning, Chinese kids are among the top 5 globally and Indian kids, unfortunately, they are in the bottom 5. More than 50% kids in India cannot read fluently and cannot do basic addition.  As a country we have one of the largest footprints of schools and one of the deepest learning crisis. Experts say that our learning crisis is linked to our footprints and so India needs to shut down half of its government schools. If we want to improve education in India, not for a few but for all of our kids we really need to shut down 5 lakh government schools in the country.  The picture above shows exactly what a government school looks like in the rural India, it has 45-50 kids and perhaps 2 classrooms, electricity and...

  Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist whose work has exposed government corruption and human rights violations, and over the years she got used to trolls and controversies around her work but none of them have prepared her for what she faced in April 2018. She was sitting in a cafe when she saw it for the first time, a two minute twenty second video of her engaged in a sex act. She could not believe on her eyes because she never made a sex video but unfortunately thousands and thousands of people believed it was her. Ayyub said that sex is so often used to demean and shame women especially minority women who dare to challenge the powerful men, which she had done in her work. The fake sex video went viral in just 48 hours, all of her online accounts were flooded with screenshots of the video, with graphic rape and death rates, and lots and lots of abusive messages. An another online post suggested that she was available for sex and her home address and cell phone number was spread ac...

Time Travel  has been one of the most exciting topics for the Science Fiction movies since decades. In such movies we see that people sit in some sort of vehicles and they travel into time and reach to the past or future, full of adventures. But is this really possible? Can we travel into time? According to most of the scientists it is not possible with the best of physics or technological knowledge but some still believe that is possible.  What is time? According to Einstein's Theory of relativity time is relative, it is an illusion, it can vary for different observers depending on their speed through space and not constant as it is believed by many of us. Einstein theory of special relativity says that time slows or speeds up depending on how fast or slow we move relative to something else. This theory also explains the Twin Paradox, that says if one of the twins travels through space with the speed of light while the other twin being on earth, then the one who traveled spac...

We all live  in a world that is full of mysteries, many a times we do not have any scientific explanation to the things that are happening around. We encounter incidents that make us believe in some supernatural powers even if we do not want to. Parallel Life, Parallel Universe, Time travel and many more are some of the phenomena that the world has encountered in real and have evidences but it is still hard to believe in these and we do not have any scientific explanation to them, these are beyond our science. Parallel life is one of them and many of us may or may not have heard about it. Parallel life actually means that an individual lives exactly the same life that was lived in the past by some other individual after his death. They have the same qualities, same attitude and even same kind of death. This is really shocking and most of us may not believe in this but it is true. There are many evidences to prove this, so let us look at some of these: 1. Abraham Lincoln and John ...

65 % of Indian population is under 35 and we have more than 50 % of people under 25, that means we are an amazingly young country. If we just take the age group from 10 to 19 then we find that there are 226 million Indians that are going through their school and are ready for higher education. Now this is something very amazing because it is happening at a time when the rest of the world is aging. The average age in India today is 27, and by 2030 the average age in Japan is going to be 47, in China it's going to be 43, Europe 46 and the youthful US 40 and India's average age is going to be 31. So we potentially have the people who are youthful, productive, dynamic and ready to work and transform the world. The kind of role that China played in the last generation could be ours in the next.  The International Labor Organization has estimated that by 2025 we will have 116 million people in the age group of 20-24 and China will have only 96 million. We in India have the people but...