Viraj Kulkarni's Blog
February 7, 2017
We need a little madness
I have a question and I am struggling to answer it! It’s about structure and chaos. ‘Structure is good and chaos is bad’ is a belief I upheld for most of my life until I realized that the relationship between structure and chaos, the Yin and Yang of our minds, is much more complex. Since childhood […]
January 19, 2017
What should you do when your three brains don’t get along?
How often do we end up doing things we consciously want to avoid? Why do we do things we know are harmful? Did you eat that pastry? Snoozed the alarm clock when you knew you had to get up? Let anger get the better of you when you should have kept your cool? That’s what […]
December 18, 2016
The most important project you will ever work on is yourself
You have been doing projects ever since you remember. Be it school or workplace, business or fun, you will have done and will do innumerable projects in your lifetime. Your career is a project. Education is a project. Your friends, family and social relationships are all projects. Projects depend on other projects for their success. […]
December 2, 2016
Renounce and rejoice
The Isha Upanishad is one of the shortest and sweetest of all Upanishads. Mahatma Gandhi had said that if all Upanishads and all other scriptures were suddenly reduced to ashes and only the first verse in the Isha Upanishad survived, the heart of Hindu philosophy would still live for ever! This first verse which he spoke […]
December 1, 2016
Can you afford to be angry with the whole universe?
Why do you get angry at people? Do you also get angry at objects? If you are walking on the road and accidentally trip over a brick, will you get angry at the brick? Why not? Because the brick has no mind of its own? Because the brick did not choose to do anything and […]
November 30, 2016
The wise man grieves neither for the living nor for the dead
Mighty armies were arrayed, facing each other, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Valiant heroes whom even the Gods feared stood at attention awaiting the beginning of the epic war of Mahabharata. Commanders on both sides surveyed the formations and.. my thoughts were disturbed by a knock on the door. It was one of the darkest […]
December 26, 2013
Will you drown if you swim after eating ice-cream?
It is said that advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise. And yet, everyday we are flooded with advice that reaches us through newspapers, television, magazines, Facebook feeds, blogs and even marketing pamphlets! We are not only bombarded by unsolicited advice, but we also actively seek it from the web and […]
December 6, 2013
Don’t trade your individuality for an extra slice of zebra
We like to believe that we have individual opinions that are not easily influenced by others, but we know we get influenced not only too often but also too much! Why are we so willing to calibrate our beliefs to match those of others around us? Everybody wants to be liked and it has its […]
May 30, 2012
Will humans turn into robots or robots into humans?
Recently, I attended a talk by Steve Cousins on Open Source Robotics at Berkeley. Steve is the founder and CEO of Willow Garage, a robotics research lab known for its Robot Operating System (ROS) and PR-2 robots. Willow Garage focuses on realizing something we all dream of – a personal robot! As the 1980s saw […]
