Words – Chandra Shekhar Chitrala

The Power and Perils of Faith

https://ccshekhar.com/wp-content/themes/osmosis/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 admin admin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/1ce9445196760486ea9aa2db2a10efba?s=96&d=mm&r=g June 20, 2021 July 27, 2021

Even as the second wave of Covid-19 ebbs in India, our spirits are being battered almost every day with news of deaths – there seems to be no saying as to who emerges victorious and who loses the battle with the virus – young, old, fit, unfit, rich, poor, powerful or a common citizen, there…

Importance of Brands in Education

Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, Madras became Chennai in 1996, Calcutta became Kolkata in 2001 and Bangalore became Bengaluru in 2014; but IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIM Calcutta and IIM Bangalore have still not changed their names. In each of the institutions mentioned above, the place name was initially an identifier, but now, it has…

Science Fiction to Fact – The Future is Now

Growing up in Bhubaneswar in the Seventies and Eighties, one of the most eagerly awaited events in life was the release of a new James Bond movie. Literally cut off from the mainstream of life in a small town, these movies gave us a vicarious glimpse into a world with fast cars, glamorous ladies and…

The Trumpification of USA

Everything that we do, and sometimes, even some things we don’t do, have the potential to change our future. Let’s consider the current state of affairs in what is considered one of the best countries to live in – the USA. The country today is deeply polarized in a way it never has been since…

Humour – The balm for trying times

The genre that I love reading the most is humour, and I confess to harbouring an intense envy of writers, who with such ease let loose a barrage of words that leave their readers clutching their sides as they roll about on the floor, laughing their hearts out. My earliest tryst with humour was through…

Understanding the New Economy

One of the items that has been hogging business headlines the past few days has been the Zomato IPO. And it should, in terms of what it implies, not just for those who invest in the stock markets but for all of us. The estimated market capitalization of Zomato is Rs.60,000 crores while it could…

Melodious Memories from a Forest in a Pitch Black Night

It was a visit to the Tribal Museum that rekindled memories of that night. In order to preserve and promote the skills as well as tradition of their unique wall paintings, the Museum had gotten a few Saura men to Bhubaneswar and employed them to create paintings in their style that could be sold or…

What makes a city smart?

The other day I received a WhatsApp forward of a 1964 video of Arthur C Clarke talking about the city of the future. (You can see the video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC3E2qTCIY8 ) Seeing this, one can but wonder about his vision and how accurate his foresight was! Though we still have some way to go…

Weak-Tie Links through Social Media – the New Support System

Almost fifty years ago, in 1973, a sociology professor at Stanford University, published a paper titled ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ that changed the way we think about relationships. In this paper, the author Mark Granovetter said that contrary to popular assumption that an individual’s well-being depended mainly on the quality of relationships with close…

The Antikythera Mechanism – Forgetting Knowledge

As someone fascinated by technology, reading about the oldest computer in the world was a revelation. It was more than 120 years ago, in 1900, that a shipwreck was discovered off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera by sponge divers. It was identified as a Roman cargo ship and over the next year, a…