Author: Navneet Shukla
Who Are You When Everything Changes?
The psychology of identity tells us that the self is not fixed. But nobody warns you what it actually feels like when it starts to shift. It is not a breakdown. It is not a crisis in the clinical sense. It is the quiet, persistent unsettledness of a person who no longer quite recognises the…
The Drug That Works Like Magic Mushrooms but Keeps You in the Room
Psilocybin without hallucinations has been the goal of psychedelic medicine for most of the last decade. This week, for the first time, something that looks credibly like an answer arrived. On March 7, researchers published a study in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry describing a chemically modified version of psilocin, the active compound your body…
Kama Is Not What You Think: Desire as a Sacred Goal
Kama is the most misunderstood word in all of Hindu philosophy. Say it to most people and they think of one thing. The Kama Sutra. Dimly lit book covers. A manual for sexual acrobatics that someone’s aunt had hidden on a shelf. That is not what Kama means. It never was. Kama is the third…
Why Costa Rica Has No Army and What 77 Years without One Actually Looks Like
The question of why Costa Rica has no army is worth asking this week more than most. The world is currently spending $2.4 trillion a year on defence. That is the highest figure ever recorded in human history, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Governments across Europe and Asia are revising their military…
What Is Moksha: Why Liberation Is the Aim Nobody Talks About
Moksha is the fourth and final aim of Purushartha, and it is the one modern life has the least language for. Dharma, we understand, at least conceptually. Do the right thing. Live with integrity. Artha we understand extremely well. Earn, build, accumulate. Kama we understand in our bones. Want, pursue, enjoy. But Moksha, the aim…
Adult Adhd : Are We Disordered, or Just Paying Attention to the Wrong Things?
Adult ADHD has become one of the defining medical conversations of the 2020s. A 2024 meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry puts the global figure at 366.3 million adults. In the US alone, 15.5 million have been diagnosed, roughly half of them in adulthood rather than childhood. Online searches for ADHD grew by 270 percent across…
Proto-Writing Stone Age: The 40,000-Year-Old Marks That Rewrote History
Proto-writing Stone Age artifacts are forcing a rewrite of one of humanity’s oldest assumptions. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 24, 2026 analysed more than 3,000 geometric signs carved into 260 objects from cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a mountain range in southwestern Germany. The objects…
Artha Meaning: Why Getting Rich Is a Spiritual Duty, Not a Sin
To understand this properly, we first need to clarify Artha meaning in Hindu philosophy. In the Purusharth framework, Artha is one of the four aims of human life. The word Artha is usually translated as wealth, but that translation is too narrow. Artha refers to material well-being, economic security, power, influence, and the practical means…
Why South Asian Parents Don’t Say I Love You
Why South Asian parents don’t say I love you is one of those questions that gets asked in hushed tones, usually between friends who grew up in the same kind of house, usually after a few drinks, usually with a laugh that has something else underneath it. You know the house. The one where love…
Attention Economy News Cycle: When Apple’s Big Week Met the World’s Worst One
Attention economy news cycle reached a kind of peak absurdity this week. On Monday morning, Tim Cook posted a short video to his social media accounts. Colourful Apple logo. The hashtag #AppleLaunch. A teaser for what he called a big week ahead, with at least five new products rolling out across three days, culminating in…
