Why are some people calling the contemporary European crisis of migrants & minority faiths taking over as paying for the 'Sins of Colonialism'?

When someone says Europe is “paying for the sins of colonialism,” the phrase lands like a ledger slammed shut on an unsettled past. It promises an accounting: a historical balance sheet in which plundered wealth, imposed borders, extractive economies, and violent episodes of empire are reduced to a single line item that supposedly explains contemporary migration. That shorthand is intellectually enticing and politically potent because it compresses centuries into a tidy moral claim. But historical truth is rarely tidy. The phrase picks out a real causal thread — imperial actions remade economies and polities in ways that continue to matter — and then stretches that thread into an explanatory rope meant to hoist an entire modern phenomenon. The truth lies between: colonial legacies matter, but so do proximate shocks, local elites, climate stress, and the choices made by contemporary states. Before we sign the invoice for “sins,” we should first understand what is being billed, who is allowed to interpret the bill, and what remedies look like in practice.

For the Karwa Chauth Enthusiasts: There Is No Real Karwa Maa/Maata, Right?

When you whisper “Karwa Maa” into the echo chamber of faith, the air doesn’t answer back. There’s only silence — and maybe the faint rattle of a steel sieve on a thali. Because, inconvenient as it sounds, there is no “Karwa Maa” in any known scripture. She never walked out of a Purana, never occupied a temple before recent memory, and never received an official hymn from any rishi. Yet, every year, millions of women across North India fold their hands before an earthen pot, chant her name, and offer water to the moon as though invoking a centuries-old goddess of marital endurance. This paradox — worshipping a deity who doesn’t exist — is not a flaw in the system. It’s how the system was always meant to work.

The Goddess Who Wasn’t There

In classical Hindu texts, every fast has a presiding deity. Ekadashi bows to Vishnu. Shivratri to Shiva. Karwa Chauth, on paper, bows to nothing specific. The word “Karwa” itself simply means a clay vessel — karva, the same pot used to store water or grains. The “Chauth” marks the fourth day after Purnima in the month of Kartik. Combine them, and what you get is a pot and a date — not a goddess. The ritual was originally a symbolic gesture of abundance and community sharing among women — wives of soldiers, they say, who would send these pots filled with food or water to their husbands stationed far away. Over time, a vacuum emerged. Humans dislike ritual without personality. So the imagination supplied one — Karwa Maa, the invisible guardian of faith, fasting, and fragile husbands. She was never canonized, but she didn’t need to be. Devotion gave her birth, and insecurity gave her purpose.

Are there books that talk about how Sikh Sacrifice for protecting the Indian mainland against Islamic invaders & during the Partition aftermath went largely unrecognized?

There are stories in India that live vividly in folklore but faintly in official memory. Among the most persistent of these shadows lies the Sikh story — a lineage of defense, endurance, and disproportionate suffering that protected India’s northern frontiers from Islamic incursions and later bore the violence of Partition’s dismemberment. Across centuries, the Sikh community has stood at the threshold of India’s conflicts: the sword and the shield of the subcontinent’s plains. Yet when the textbooks close, the speeches fade, and national commemorations roll on, the Sikh contribution — monumental in blood and principle — is often reduced to ceremonial nods. This omission is not simply an academic oversight; it is a distortion of national gratitude. To understand how this happened, one must look across three epochs — the age of invasions and empire, the colonial military century, and the chaotic birth of India in 1947 — each linked by a pattern of valor followed by silence.

Why is referring to all folks from southern India as ‘Madraasi’ still unacceptable — despite the growing wave of resentment down under

There’s a stubborn economy of labels in India — cheap linguistic shortcuts that promise quick geographic naming but deliver a lifetime of flattening. “Madraasi” (or “Madrasi”) is one of those shortcuts: easy to say, gratifyingly dismissive, and cruelly reductive. To call a person from Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra, Telangana, or Tamil Nadu “Madraasi” is to smudge a living, complicated identity with a single blunt brush. The term’s etymology is not mysterious: it hearkens to the Madras Presidency, the sprawling British administrative unit whose borders conveniently blurred linguistic, caste, and cultural distinctions for colonial governance. But the harm isn’t merely historical or etymological — it’s social, symbolic, and present. The slur functions as a shorthand that links darker skin tones, non-Hindi accents, non-Sanskritic rituals, and perceived provinciality into an umbrella of denigration; it is a small word with wide violence.

7 Ways in Which Therapy for People with a ‘has-been’ & ‘never-flourished’ Mindset is Different

There’s a subtler sort of suffering that doesn’t arrive with broken bones or panic attacks; it arrives with old yearbooks and classmate timelines, with birthday messages you delete and the quiet clicks of sliding-scale promotions on LinkedIn that feel like doors closing on you again and again. Clients with a has-been or never-flourished mindset do not always come in asking to be “fixed.” They come in asking to have a polite argument with a future that never showed up. Their grief is not always loud; it is domestic and relentless — a long habit of waking up to the tension between an “actual self” and an “ideal self” that never arrived. This category of clinical work sits in the intersection of regret research, existential therapy, narrative repair, and life-review techniques: it borrows from Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning when meaning has been deferred, from Yalom’s existential matrix when the givens of life — freedom, death, responsibility, meaning — look like accusations, and from cognitive science research about counterfactual thinking and self-discrepancy that explain why some people are haunted by “if only.”

Why Do Some People Hug the Edge While Others Own the Middle? The Psychology of Driving Alignment

The Unspoken Geometry of the Indian Road: Every country has its own dialect of chaos. Ours speaks through horns, swerves, and that mystical choreography only Indian drivers understand. Watch any road long enough, and you’ll notice two kinds of people: those who clutch the edge like their tires are afraid of oxygen, and those who drive like they’ve been granted diplomatic immunity from lanes altogether. The former tremble at the sight of oncoming headlights; the latter treat the road as a chessboard where everyone else is just a pawn. What we call “driving style” is really psychological cartography—an emotional GPS that maps our fears, egos, and neuroses onto asphalt. Whether you hug the side or straddle the center isn’t random. It’s habit, yes, but also personality, trauma, status, and sometimes, just the ghost of your driving instructor whispering, “Beta, left mein hi rakhna.” And while the West has its orderly lanes and 40-minute debates about “lane discipline,” in India, the lane is a philosophical suggestion—optional, flexible, and often existential.

7 Bathroom Horror Niche Movies You Can Avoid [or Try The Horror of Hygiene]

No one really expects to die in the bathroom. It’s the one space left on earth where you’re meant to be alone, unphotographed, unjudged, and fully human. You lock the door not to hide evil, but to keep the world out while you exorcise yesterday’s regrets. Yet somehow, horror filmmakers—those visionaries of the grotesque—looked at the flush handle and thought, “Yes, this could kill someone.” The bathroom, in cinematic logic, is a microcosm of vulnerability: naked bodies, fogged mirrors, dripping taps. If Freud had ever worked in set design, he would have loved the genre. The bathroom is where cleanliness meets carnality, where purity is exposed as illusion, and where plumbing noises become metaphors for dread. Unfortunately, most filmmakers who attempt “bathroom horror” have no Freud in them—only a plunger and poor judgment. Over the decades, this sub-genre has given birth to some of the most unintentionally hilarious, nausea-inducing, and existentially pointless horror ever put on a screen. What follows isn’t a recommendation list. It’s a public service announcement—a disinfectant for your watchlist. These seven films prove that not every horror needs a mirror, not every tub needs blood, and not every toilet deserves a backstory.

11 Things That Indians Don’t Appreciate About UPI Pay

There was a time when money had a face, a texture, and a smell faintly reminiscent of paan and human contact. You handed over a note, made eye contact, said “keep the change,” and felt momentarily generous before regretting it. Then came UPI. Now, India’s social fabric runs on QR codes. You could survive an entire day without uttering a word, just pointing your phone at glowing squares like some techno-priest offering digital prayers. It’s fast, efficient, and faintly depressing. What’s funny—and deeply human—is how little we appreciate what UPI has quietly done to us. It has erased guilt, sterilized gratitude, and mechanized kindness. It has also turned us into obsessive accountants of our own daily lives, refresh-button addicts who equate beeps with belonging. UPI didn’t just revolutionize payments; it rewired Indian psychology. And it’s time we acknowledge what we’ve lost between the pings.

How to Look Gastronomically Educated When You Don’t Know How to Use Chopsticks in a Dumpling House

You’ve agreed to have dim sum with friends. You thought you were in for steamed comfort, not a public coordination test. But now you’re seated in a candlelit dumpling house, surrounded by sleek bamboo décor, and the table is laid out like an exam. No forks in sight. Only chopsticks. Your confidence evaporates faster than the soup inside a xiaolongbao. The others around you—of course—are naturals. They twirl, lift, and gently tap their dumplings into soy sauce with the elegance of a string quartet. You, on the other hand, are performing surgery with broom handles. Every drop of chili oil feels like an audience spotlight. Somewhere, your ancestors sigh into their butter knives. But fear not. You are not alone in this silent humiliation. Millions before you have walked this porcelain-tiled battlefield, fumbling, dropping, and pretending they weren’t hungry anyway. The good news? Looking gastronomically educated is 80% performance, 20% damage control. The trick is to understand the anthropology of the utensil, the psychology of the diner, and the art of surviving with your dignity (and dumplings) intact.

A Germophobic, You Used Bathroom Towels By Mistake – How to Redeem Your Sanitization Now?

You step out of the shower, steam curling around your ears, skin freshly scrubbed and dripping clean. The towel rack hangs nearby, and without thinking, you grab what you assume is your fresh towel. Seconds later, your body stiffens. That wasn’t your towel. That was the one used by someone else, maybe after they washed their face, maybe after they dried their hands from the bathroom sink. A flush of panic spreads. For most people, this might earn a shrug. For someone with germophobia, it sets off alarms as if the sanctity of their entire body has been violated. This is not a trivial overreaction. Germophobia—or contamination-related OCD—rewires the mind to interpret harmless accidents as catastrophic breaches of safety. A towel is no longer fabric; it is a carrier of unseen armies of microbes, imagined threats multiplying in seconds. The question becomes desperate: how do I cleanse myself now? But to understand how to redeem such “contamination” requires more than sanitizer. It requires insight into the psychology of fear, the science of germs, and humanity’s long history of purification rituals. Only then can one calm both skin and psyche.