Hi everyone. So I wanted to talk about agnostics. Because we do encounter agnostics a lot. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this is because there is a whole lot of kind of misguided enthusiasm for soft religiosity going on. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. Think about what agnostics mean when they say that they're agnostic about the existence of God. You can be agnostic about many things, by the way, if you're undecided about something you're agnostic about it. But agnosticism in general in the philosophic sense means not knowing whether God exists or not. So when someone s ..read more

Have you noticed something interesting about how people who try to defend culture often complain about culture getting lost or destroyed? On the one hand, it is actually impossible for culture to get destroyed because culture is continuously evolving and new cultural elements are being created with every passing second. So culture itself is not going anywhere, but people complain about culture getting destroyed quite often, and religions in. Are always saying that we are under attack. Why is this? Have you ever wondered in any society I. Religions occupy a position of power and the people who ..read more

An attempt to push back against the narrative that the body is profane or less important than the spirit or the soul ..read more

One of the dominant strains of skepticim in the subcontinent is rationalism. It involves going after superstitions and irrationality wherever they may raise their heads. But many in India hesitate to engage with religion. This episode is about why it is important to resist religion. Perhaps more important than any individual bit of irrationality ..read more

Storytelling has been the backbone of human civilisation for a long time. It has given rise to tales that have changed the world and influenced generations of human beings and their nations. This is perhaps why we often mistake them for history - the actual past. This episode is about disambiguation ..read more

Believers seem to have a great amount of difficulty adjusting to the reality that they are looking at the universe through a human-coloured lens. This is perhaps why they ask "who created everything?" without often considering that the question might as well be "how did everything come into being?" or "what caused it all?". In this episode, I point out that this line of argument should be stopped right at the first word - the "who" part. Alsom I am using a synthetic version of my own voice in this episode. This is just an experiment. My normal voice will return from the next episode onwards.&n ..read more

The human condition is something philosophers have wrestled with since long. It occurred to me that perhaps I should get in the ring as well. And when I did, I found that our existence is framed by two unforgiving constants - the love that we need to have to make society work, and the need to kill in order to survive ..read more

The question about identity is something that has obsessed people for ages. Are we humans? Are we Indians? Are we Canadian-Indians? Are we men or women or bipeds or life forms? Are we Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Atheists? Perhaps we are all of these things. Is there any clear answer to this at all? I am not saying I have an answer. But what I can do is break the question down ..read more

Atheism is a rejection of god. But what happens when even religious people shrug their shoulders and say "that's okay". This is quite common in India, and yet, there are aspects of Hinduism which do correspond with what we understand to be atheism. This episode is an attempt at disambiguation ..read more

This podcast is meant to be a closer look at atheism in India and the various dynamics that control its perception, spread, and even its definitions.  ..read more