1/ A different way to think about life.

Our lives are all too often governed by living up to other people's opinion of us. We have this fear of appearing foolish, fear of being seen as unsophisticated, fear of missing out on things, fear of losing face.

Prestige is a trap.

2/ Prestige is a trap we set for ourselves. Those are the worst kind of traps.

Liberation is getting out of those traps.

We get a sense of security from those traps. It is a false security.

After all, who amongst us is 100% certain of surviving the pandemic?

3/ In reality this very life itself is uncertain and could be snatched from us at any moment.

Deeply understanding that is liberation.

Once we achieve that liberation, we quit seeking that false security that mental traps provide.

Our actions are now untainted by fear or ego.

4/ That liberation is itself the biggest gift life can bestow us.

We don't seek the liberation to be able to achieve wealth or prestige or status. They may come to us and they may not. In a true sense, we are not slaves to those. We become masters of ourselves.

5/ we can make it easier on ourselves to achieve that liberation.

One time honored way, as religious saints have shown us, is to physically move ourselves out of the grasp of those traps.

Cities are full of prestige and ego traps. Moving ourselves *may* help with liberation.

1/ One of the psychological and spiritual effects of concentration of talent (which is what large scale urbanization ultimately is about) is the "rat race".

Large urban areas don't give us space - the sheer physical room, and young children acutely perceive that lack of space.

2/ If you are talented and caught in that rat race, moving to a smaller community may cure it. You will simply stop caring about many of the "prestige traps" that afflict our minds - what brands of clothes, shoes, phones, cars and so on and on. That is profoundly liberating!

3/ From that personal transformation comes other good things. Your talent has a much better "return on psychic effort" in a village because these places have suffered from decades of talent erosion (I call it top soil erosion). Your talent can make a big a difference there.

4/ Over-concentration of this top soil of talent in very large urban centres turns it toxic as well.

The future of civilization may depend on us reversing the top soil erosion, both the physical top soil that helps grow our food and the metaphorical top soil of talent.

5/ Currently fashionable economic doctrines celebrate large scale urbanization as the ultimate good. The spiritual and psychological consequences are not part of the model. Alienation and rat race are subjects for sociologists to study and prestigious economists won't touch them.

1/ I want to put the social media abuse in perspective. I live and work in villages and I visit many villages in Tamil Nadu, particularly very poor areas as part of our school initiative. I see only love and affection and absolutely no hostility of any kind.

2/ I have received enormous outpouring of love via email and via direct messages. I have never once received the kind of hate you encounter on media like Twitter.

The people who are doing this on Twitter are not causing me damage, but create a distorted image of Tamil Nadu.

3/ I have strong philosophical and political convictions but I would not make it personal abuse. These attacks only strengthen my resolve and don't weaken it.

My only concern is that good people may see these attacks and become afraid. Do not be afraid!

4/ Social media is quite far from reality on the ground and may be bringing out the worst in people.

Adopt a motto of service with a smile and people respond extremely positively. Do not be afraid to do good things! 🙏

1/ We just concluded our #ZohoDay2021 online event for industry analysts, with record participation.🙏

We hosted this on Zoho's own event platform with our home grown audio-video framework, a combination of @ZohoBackstage, @ZohoShowTime and @zohomeeting.

I will explain this.

2/ One year ago, our audio-video frameworks were not ready. As the pandemic struck, we realized we were behind in AV tech.

In March 2020, we redoubled our R&D efforts. I told our engineers we will invest in this however long it takes and produce a world-class platform.

3/ We transferred engineers from other projects to the AV teams. At first the progress was frustratingly slow, as it often happens in R&D, with frequent setbacks. I told our engineers to persist.

We used our own products and diligently reported issues encountered to engineers.

4/ Then by Oct 2020, we started to improve and we could see visible progress. Yet, running an online event entirely on our platform was a dream.

Today, we have concluded a successful event, due to painstaking efforts from our engineers and our events team who stood by them.🙏

5/ This is a classic example of R&D that I often mention. We need a lot more of this across the industrial landscape in India. The private sector must get into R&D with passion and religious devotion.

Company leadership must patiently stand by engineers so they can excel.

1/ This is a thread on America, based on my thirty years being a student and permanent resident before returning home in 2019.

I have lived longer in America than India. I have a lot of friends and family in America.

This thread is based on my close and personal observation.

2/ America is the most open and friendly society to immigrants in the world, of every race, religion or creed. America is truly the land of immigrants.

Yet America is also convulsed by race, with a substantial part of the population believing it to be a deeply racist society.

3/ This seeming contradiction between being the most open society in the world and the self image on the part of so many of its people of being a racist nation cries out for explanation.

In agricultural terminology, I believe America suffers from "top soil depletion".

4/ What does top soil depletion mean here? It is the tendency of America to use up its people and replace them with new people.

This creates a perpetual need for migrants, leading to a positive feedback loop: top soil depletion and being open to immigrants drive each other.

5/ When you understand top soil depletion, the tendency of modern America to use up its own people, you begin to understand the extraordinary angst about race in what is a very open society.

Black Americans ask "Why does America reward immigrants more than she cares about us?"

1/ An important part of woke indoctrination in elite universities as it pertains to India is to understand that India's very existence poses a challenge to the Marxist/materialist world-view that sees itself as the One True Way.

India is a weird pagan relic in this view.

2/ As long as India stayed poor - first due to colonialism and later due to socialism - it was only a charity case ("basket case"), to be rescued with money and evangelism. Crucially Indians could not have intellectual or moral agency.

Well, India is no longer a basket case.

3/ That poses a serious intellectual problem for both the Marxist/materialists and the "civilize the savages" crowd.

How can this pagan relic, worshipping elephants and monkeys and snakes and other weird forms, produce first rate thought?

Consider the issue of gay marriage.

4/ India's live and let live culture, pagan to the core, always recognized diversity in all its forms. So when gay marriage was formally legalized, there was no opposition from any quarter in India.

The Marxist/materialist ideology sees that as a challenge to the One True Way.

5/ This challenge cannot stand. India must be intellectually subordinated to the One True Way.

That is what "South Asian Studies" are all about - alienating Indian students from their own extraordinarily diverse and rich intellectual and philosophical heritage ...