Author: Navneet Shukla
Gamsutl Village: The Last Man Who Refused to Leave
Gamsutl village has no road. There used to be one. It collapsed decades ago and nobody rebuilt it. Now the only way in is a two-hour hike up a mountain path that the original residents carved out for moving cattle. The village sits at an altitude of 1,418 metres above sea level in the Gunibsky…
The Morphine Addict Who Accidentally Invented the World’s Most Consumed Drug
John Pemberton Coca Cola was never meant to be a drink. It was meant to be a cure. He set out to stop being in pain. In April 1865, at the Battle of Columbus in Georgia, Pemberton suffered a saber wound to the chest. Like most wounded veterans of that era, he became dependent on…
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…
Why Memes Replace Feelings. and Why That Should Worry You
The relationship between memes and feelings seems obvious until you look at it directly. You feel something. Someone else made a meme about something close to it. You forward it. The feeling seems shared. But something in that exchange is not quite what it appears to be. You learned the word pointing at the same…
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…
Why Daylight Saving Time Still Exists, Nobody Voted for It
Daylight saving time Europe has been trying to end itself since 2018. It has not managed it yet. The European Commission asked 4.6 million people a simple question. Should we stop changing the clocks? Eighty-four percent said yes. The Parliament voted to end it in 2019. The deadline was set for 2021. It is now…
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…
