blog@Yantrajaal

Gangani is an unusually picturesque place on the banks of the Shilabati River, near Garhbeta, West Midnapur, West Bengal. Here erosion by water has created strange earth and rock formations on the banks of the river and the red colour of the soil gives the place an eerie look. The following slide show will help explain what we are talking about. Some people refer to this place as the Grand Canyon of Bengal but of course in terms of size, the place is miniscule compared to the original in the US. This is what the place looks like in Wikimapia

Students today are trapped in a strange dilemma precipitated by disturbing trends. One hand we have the devaluation of the college degree as more and more employers are demanding college degrees for jobs that essentially call for high schools ( see New York Times ) and on the other we have colleges rising exponentially and leading to a second debt crisis. ( See Time ) This may be a new phenomenon affecting the United States but has been a well known problem in the dismal economic scenario in poorer parts of the world. In India we have had the tragedy of graduate and even post graduate students fighting over janitorial opportunities in the arid job market while thousands of students never have the wherewithal to continue their studies beyond high school ( Class XII) or even middle school (Class X) In the gloom that is gathering over the global economy it is the student and the education system that is finding itself trapped in a cul-de-sac that seems to be leading nowhere in general ...

Followers of the Sanatan Dharma, or "Hindus", in general and those who believe in the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as propounded by Sankaracharya, see the world as illusion ("Maya") that hides an underlying unity of universal consciousness or Brahman. This concept has been explored in greater detail in The Road to pSingularity but one of the key ideas is that there exists a central consciousness and all individual sentient entities ( or people) are a part of this central consciousness. The linkage between the central ("Brahman") and the individual ("Atman") is something that gets lost because of the illusion of "Maya" and only the true adept, after significant effort, realises the existence of the link and in doing so, succeeds in uniting his individual Atman with the universal Brahman through the process of Yoga or union. This post is not about trying to establish the authenticity of this point of view. Instead we explore how t...