Author: Navneet Shukla
Thailand Travel Tips That Nobody Writes About but Everyone Needs
Thailand travel tips that actually matter are not the ones in the guidebooks. Not the ATM fees. Not the fruit boxes. Not the Grab bike at midnight on a wet road in Chiang Mai. It will smile at you, hand you a menu, and let you figure it out. I stayed long enough to figure…
What the Mahabharata Knew About Generational Trauma That Science Is Only Now Confirming
Karna and trauma arrive together in the Mahabharata before the first word of his story is spoken. Karna is sitting at the river’s edge, performing his morning prayers. He does this every day without fail. Through everything the world has done to him, this ritual holds. Kunti finds him there. She is his mother. He…
What I Learnt from a Grab Driver in Bangkok
Bangkok night does not ease you in gently. It arrives all at once. The expressway from the airport is elevated, so you see the city before you are inside it. Lights in every direction. Dense and continuous, like the city never decided where to stop. I had been travelling for roughly fifteen hours. I opened…
Social Facilitation Psychology: Why Being Watched Changes Everything
Social facilitation psychology begins with a cyclist and a stopwatch. In 1898, Norman Triplett noticed something while reviewing official cycling records. Cyclists racing against other riders consistently posted faster times than cyclists racing against the clock alone. He ran a controlled experiment to test it. Children winding fishing reels went faster when another child was…
Dronacharya and Arjuna: Why He Chose a Student over His Own Son
Drona had one son and one student. He loved both completely. He could not serve both equally. The Mahabharata does not pretend otherwise. This is not a story about favouritism in the way the word is usually used. It is a story about the oldest conflict a teacher faces. What you owe the person who…
Fujifilm Instax Mini Review: Beautiful Camera, Terrible Odds
The Fujifilm Instax Mini does something in the first thirty seconds that almost nothing does anymore. It makes you feel something before you have even used it. The box opens cleanly. The camera sits there looking like it was designed by someone who genuinely cared about the details. Small, solid, slightly retro. The kind of…
Solomon Shereshevsky: The Man Who Could Not Forget Anything
Solomon Shereshevsky arrived at Alexander Luria’s office in Moscow sometime in the 1920s as a journalist who had been sent there by his editor. The editor had noticed something strange. Shereshevsky never took notes in morning briefings. Never wrote anything down. Yet he could repeat back every instruction, every name, every figure, without error. The…
Ahamkara: The Ego the Gita Actually Warned You About. It Is Not What You Think
Duryodhana says something in the Mahabharata that most retellings quietly skip. He says: I know what is right. I cannot do it. I know what is wrong. I cannot stop myself. The Gita has a name for the mechanism behind that admission. Ahamkara meaning, in Sanskrit, is literally this: the I-maker. And understanding it changes…
After Twenty Years by O. Henry: The Promise Both of Them Kept
After Twenty Years by O. Henry is told in less than a thousand words. It contains three scenes, two twists, one note, and four words that do more work than most novels manage in three hundred pages. Those four words are: Somehow I couldn’t do it myself. Everything the story is about lives in that…
Eklavya’s Thumb: The Story the Mahabharata Never Defends.
Why did Drona ask for Eklavya’s thumb? It is one of the most searched questions about the Mahabharata and one of the least honestly answered. The short answer is that Arjuna felt threatened and Drona acted on it. The longer answer says something uncomfortable about how institutions handle talent they did not produce and cannot…
