My Blog | Catharsis

Dec 12, 2019
4 min

Forrest Gump As My Spiritual Guru

The lines “Run, Forrest, run!” are etched in public memory as one of the most memorable scenes of cinema history, when young Forrest Gump, upon being chased by bullies in a car, runs a ‘Roger Bannister mile’ breaking him free from his prosthetic leg. He never stops running as the movie would follow. And that’s perhaps one of the greatest lessons for a human being. The character looks, to a mere observer, as a low IQ level individual who made it big everywhere by mere flukes.

Jun 4, 2019
5 min

At Least they Didn’t Discuss the Weather

Whenever a philosophical and academic furor becomes the object of public attention, opprobrium and excitement, it is the duty of the critic to isolate, criticize, and work out the ideological stakes that make the debate relevant outside the fixed scholastic boundaries to which the form is limited. Moreover, as one begins this work, one tends to discover that the real implications of the positions assumed by debating parties exist elsewhere than in the terms of the debate, Ziz

May 29, 2019
3 min

How To Actually Change the World

If there has been a political figure with a legacy so untouched and untarnished, it has to be Mahatma Gandhi. Orwell wrote of Gandhi, a year after he was assassinated, “compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!” Such appreciation from a scathing critic of everything, speaks volumes about what Gandhi was able to achieve and how he won and how he enabled millions of Indians to win. Of course, to what extent

Mar 23, 2019
6 min

Cārvāka: The Atheist-Materialist School of Indian Philosophy

Cārvāka is an unorthodox school in Indian Philosophy which deals with epistemological questions like – How far can we know reality? How does knowledge originate and develop? What are the different sources of knowledge? And further subscribes to atheism and hedonistic part of living. The article discusses the school’s main ideas, influence on Indian Philosophy narrative, comparison with Positivism, and future scope of the field. Cārvāka is an unorthodox school in Indian philos

Mar 18, 2019
8 min

The Greg Restall Interview: For as long as I could remember, I liked asking the question “why?”

Greg Restall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Queensland in 1994, and has held positions at the Australian National University and Macquarie University, before moving to Melbourne in 2002. His research focuses on formal logic, philosophy of logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, and even some philosophy of religion. He has published over 80

Jan 29, 2019
9 min

The War Against Truth

The official newspaper of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union was called Pravda (translated to ‘truth’) because it engaged in disseminating anything but the truth. But what is more interesting is how there are already pre-existing different types of truths in the Russian language itself – Pravda being man’s truth, Istina being God’s truth and Nepravda being untruth. This indicates two things: firstly that just like a language must be spoken within the strictures of the alp

Jan 29, 2019
7 min

The Philosophy of LGBTQ+

LGBTQ+ ideas and thought have a historical relationship in the philosophical discourse. From the ancient Greeks to ancient India. The areas of topics include – gender and sexual identity, being, historicism, epistemology, love etc. to a name a few. With interlinking elements from feminism, existentialism, phenomenology etc., what is LGBTQ+ in the philosophical discourse and what are some of its main questions? A preliminary effort is performed in this article to address them.

Jan 28, 2019
45 min

The Philosopher as an Intellectual

I Without going too much into the conceptions of the intellectual, let me just state that in my view, in a contemporary democratic society (since that is what I assume we are concerned about), an intellectual is anyone who thinks on behalf of others about public affairs and issues of common or collective interest, and/or helps others engage in such thinking themselves. In what follows I shall essentially elaborate on the different elements and tacit assumptions of this loosel

Oct 12, 2018
6 min

Greek Antiquity & Early Vedanta Philosophy

It is not hard to find similarities between philosophers across times. This article however, does not seek to establish a definite connection and exchange of ideas between ancient India and Greece, though such a connection might exist. Instead it discusses some key similarities between early Greek philosophy until Platonic Idealism and Advaita Vedanta philosophy. Homer and Hesiod formalized ancient Greek mythology around 700 B.C. by writing it down for the first time. This al

Oct 12, 2018
5 min

The Selfish Nature of Altruism

When people consider altruism, they refer to acts of selfless compassion. To be altruistic is to go beyond the opportunistic nature of rationality. Instead, we tell ourselves to pursue the noble route of empathy. Many argue that the reason altruism is such a grand gesture is because it involves foregoing your own personal pleasure for the benefit of others. Acts of charity and philanthropy are lauded by society because they involve sacrifice. Through acts of altruism, we aren

Oct 12, 2018
8 min

Netflix & the Choicelessness of Choice

With the advent of ‘modernity’, it has become crucial that we, as human beings, choose, and even more important aspect of it is that we have ‘enough’ choices to choose from. For example, having a Netflix account gives one access to thousands of movies, shows, etc. With so many choices available, life should have been “entertaining” for me to say the least. But every time I open up Netflix, it is so difficult to choose a programme that I end up wasting my time going through th

May 17, 2018
4 min

Review: Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America’ | Divanshu Sethi

Rarely do we we get to see such visual representation of reality from the mainstream medium of music as in the recent single released by Donald Glover a.k.a Childish Gambino – This is America. The video has already been making news around the world with more than 50 million views in less than 3 days. The Rolling Stones – “a vivid illustration of the Faustian bargain facing black America” The Guardian – “Childish Gambino captures the grim surrealism of being black in America”