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.

Have You Seen Dog Meat Market Videos – Why Do These Dogs Usually Look So Docile?

Scroll through social media long enough and you may stumble upon one of the most unsettling sights: dogs crammed into cages in an open-air meat market, their eyes vacant, their bodies strangely still. What startles many viewers is not the expected chaos of barking and biting, but the eerie calm—the dogs look docile, even passive, as if resigned to their fate. It is an image that confuses as much as it horrifies. Why, in the face of imminent violence, do these animals not rebel, not snarl, not scratch? The answer lies less in the idea of “docility” and more in psychology—animal and human alike. What looks like calm is often the silence of collapse, the physiology of fear, and the conditioned hopelessness of captivity. Add to this the cultural lens through which different societies interpret dogs—companion in one, livestock in another—and the unsettling picture becomes layered. This is not just about dogs in faraway markets. It is about the biology of fear, the psychology of trauma, the cultural politics of empathy, and the ethical double standards by which we decide which suffering counts and which suffering we ignore.

Why Do Some Indians Often Talk About OTT Content Being 'Too Black' for Their Comfort?

On a late evening in Delhi, a group of friends browses Netflix, searching for something new to watch. Titles roll by: Dear White People, Top Boy, Supacell, Queen Sono. Someone frowns. “It looks too Black,” they remark casually. The room shifts—others nod, half-embarrassed, half-honest. No one intends harm, but the sentiment lingers in the air. What does “too Black” even mean? For many Indian audiences, it signals a discomfort with representation they are not accustomed to seeing: casts dominated by Black actors, stories centered on Black life, narratives unconcerned with catering to white or Asian gaze. This reaction, though awkward, isn’t rare. Across WhatsApp groups, office banter, and even Bollywood gossip, some Indians express unease with international OTT series led predominantly by Black actors. They may dismiss them as “not relatable,” “too gritty,” or “too much.” Yet behind these offhand remarks lies a tangle of history, psychology, and cultural conditioning: India’s long entanglement with colonial colorism, Bollywood’s obsession with fair-skinned beauty, and the cognitive shock of encountering global diversity unfiltered. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video are reshaping global entertainment. They amplify Black voices long sidelined by Hollywood. But in doing so, they also confront Indian viewers with their own inherited biases. To understand why some Indians talk about OTT content being “too Black,” we need to trace the interplay of history, cinema, and psychology—where personal discomfort meets global representation.

7 Things People Trying to Understand Anxiety Symptoms Should Know

Anxiety has become one of those words people use casually, almost like a throwaway line in a WhatsApp chat. “I have such anxiety about this meeting,” someone says, when what they mean is nervousness. “That traffic jam gave me anxiety,” another remarks, when what they felt was irritation. In popular language, anxiety has blurred into an all-purpose synonym for stress, tension, or nerves. But clinical and lived anxiety disorders are far more layered, often misunderstood not just by those who experience them but also by family, friends, colleagues, and society at large. Unlike a fever or a fractured limb, anxiety doesn’t present itself as an obvious, singular symptom. It can surface hours after an event has passed. It can mimic stomach upset, headaches, or dizziness before it ever announces itself as mental unease. It can hide beneath culturally coded words like ghabrahat in India, taijin kyofusho in Japan, or “burnout” in the West. Sometimes it appears to be avoidance, rituals, over-preparation, or irritability—behaviors often mistaken for quirks rather than distress signals.

7 Tips for an Anxious Traveler Stuck in a Claustrophobic Hotel Room

Business trips in Gurgaon, pilgrimages in Haridwar, capsule hotels in Tokyo, layovers in Dubai: for modern travelers, the hotel room is often the midpoint between motion and arrival. Yet for some, that midpoint becomes a mental trap. An unfamiliar ceiling, the low thrum of an AC vent, curtains that hide a city you don’t know—suddenly, the mind begins its spiral. Claustrophobia does not always announce itself with dramatic panic attacks. Sometimes it’s subtler: a quickened breath, a racing thought that “the air feels stale,” a sudden itch to throw open a window that doesn’t open. For the anxious traveler, small rooms magnify unease. And if you’ve crossed time zones, battled jet lag, or carry a predisposition for anxiety, the box begins to feel like a cell. The problem is ancient. Vedic hymns praise the dawn sky as liberation; Biblical stories equate wilderness with freedom; Buddhist imagery paints boundless space as enlightenment itself. By contrast, confinement has always symbolized punishment—from medieval dungeons to solitary asylums. To find yourself in a modern business hotel and feel trapped is not weakness—it is a human inheritance. But humans have also always fought back with ritual, imagination, and rhythm. Below are seven expansive, culturally resonant, scientifically informed tips to help any anxious traveler manage the tight squeeze of a claustrophobic hotel room.

Between Tradition and Tease: Why South Indian Films Celebrate the Navel—and Delhi Notices

Air-conditioned traffic pauses at a Delhi signal. Behind the windshield, a music video streams on a phone: a Telugu song sequence where the camera lingers on a heroine’s midriff, a tradition so familiar to southern audiences that it hardly registers as scandal. A friend leans over. “South movies are obsessed with the navel,” he jokes. It is a remark many North Indians share—half-teasing, half marveling—at a style they associate with Hyderabad or Chennai, not Mumbai. But the idea that southern cinema invented or uniquely celebrates the female navel ignores a much older Indian vocabulary of art, dance, and myth. To understand why a director like K. Raghavendra Rao once made entire hit songs around a heroine’s waist, we need to look well beyond film—to temple sculpture, classical dance, colonial law, and the psychology of the cinematic gaze.

Are They Helpless or Hustling? The Uncomfortable Truth of Urban Begging in India

 

Air-conditioned air holds differently at a red light. From behind tempered glass, the city appears in slow motion: a child with a box of tissues; a man with a gauze-wrapped stump; a woman carrying a sleeping toddler whose head lolls with a suspicious stillness you don’t want to believe; a knock on the window—polite first, then insistent. You look ahead, counting down the signal, bargaining with your conscience. Maybe this person is gaming you. Maybe there’s a “racket.” Maybe it’s safer to do nothing. Yet the hand on the glass is a mirror; it reflects the unease of a country where modern prosperity idles inches from profound precarity. This essay traces the fault line that runs between the driver’s doubt and the beggar’s plea: the law that criminalised and then partly decriminalised begging; the religious traditions that sanctified alms; the economics of India’s informal city; and the psychology that makes strangers’ suffering feel negotiable. What emerges is neither a defense of every outstretched palm nor a condemnation of every refusal, but an attempt to look squarely at how a society chooses to see—or not see—its poor.

Do inherently vengeful, judgmental & hateful people make good psychiatrists, counselors, or psychologists?

Psychiatry, counseling, and psychology are professions built on trust, listening, and empathy. They demand neutrality, patience, and the capacity to hold another person’s pain without judgment. Yet history and real life tell us that the people who step into these professions are not saints; they carry their own flaws, biases, and sometimes even darker traits. This raises an unsettling question: what happens when someone inherently vengeful, judgmental, or hateful chooses to become a healer of minds? Is their practice doomed by temperament, or can the scaffolding of training, ethics, and professional codes create a safe container in which flawed humans still do meaningful work? To answer this, we must look to history, psychology, ethics, and culture — tracing how temperament and morality intersect with the vocation of healing minds.

Is Navratri also about Intermittent Fasting & Rebooting Your Metabolism or is it just deep-level religious faith?

Navratri, at its simplest, is a deep call to discipline. Over nine nights and days, devotees observe fasts, prayers, dance, and ritual observance in honor of Goddess Durga. But the fast is not just an act of abstinence — it is a symbolic undoing of excess, a turning away from the habitual, and a realignment with inner resolve. In classical Hindu practice, ritual fasting is a means for tapasya (austerity), purification, and inner discipline. The body becomes a tool of devotion, and the hunger pangs echo longing. For generations, the question was never metabolic reboot, but spiritual re-orientation: subdue the senses, awaken the inward fire, beseech the Goddess’s grace.

Texts of Devotion: How Ancient Literature Framed the Fast

When we look back to older texts — Puranas, medieval devotional works, and Bhakti poetry — fasting is described as a gateway, not merely deprivation. The fast is a vow, a surrender, a sacred contract between mortal and divine. In that framing, Navratri’s fast carries no secular logic. It is devotion incarnate. Yet, devotion doesn’t mean the body and metabolism stand outside its influence. As we will see, these ancient practices often turned out to have physiological consequences — accidental or intentional.

The Science Behind SwiftQuakes

When tens of thousands of fans gather for a Taylor Swift concert, they expect to hear chart-topping hits, sing along, and dance with friends. What they may not expect is to literally shake the earth beneath their feet. Yet in recent years, seismometers from Seattle to Dublin have detected unusual vibrations—nicknamed SwiftQuakes—during Swift's Eras Tour shows. So, what’s happening here? Are these true earthquakes or just clever headlines?

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What Is a SwiftQuake?

A SwiftQuake refers to seismic activity picked up during Taylor Swift concerts, caused by tens of thousands of fans dancing, stomping, and jumping in sync. Unlike natural earthquakes, these tremors are human-induced ground vibrations, but sensitive instruments can measure them in surprisingly clear detail. The first widely reported SwiftQuake came from Swift’s Seattle shows in 2023, where local seismologists recorded vibrations equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. Similar phenomena have since been noted in cities such as Dublin, where researchers set up portable seismometers near the venue.

Trying To Talk Yourself Out of Depression Does Not Always Work

The actual professionals and the self-acclaimed psychology experts have embedded an idea via articles, blogs, and social media posts that talking about mental health issues, particularly depression, is perhaps the first and many times, the last, step to reclaiming a life without feeling the daily blues. However, the truth couldn't be any different. For starters, people suffering from depression are often in jobs and family roles where they have to speak throughout the day. Many people with depression have a rather well-established circle of friends with whom they converse every day. People visiting the family psychologist might continue to have long conversations about redemption, loss, and unhappiness and still, might feel that the therapy is not really making an impact. People need to realize that you cannot talk your way out of depression, at least not in most situations. For way too long, the role of counseling sessions has been given the maximum importance as a way to treat someone suffering from clinical depression. However, counseling and confessions are more important to address the problem and to make someone realize that it is okay to feel like not waking up, eating, exercising, going to school, or being regular at the office. However, the same approach does not help if the goal is to overcome depression. Many people fail to realize this assuming that therapy and treatment are the same and the more people talk about depression, the easier it will be to defeat the problem. Talking about depression can make the person more conscious about the underlying problem but therapy is rather different and it might not include a lot of communication.

How to manage overhead lighting in your workspace so that your eyes are not strained?

Overhead lighting shapes both the ambiance and functionality of a workspace. Yet when it’s poorly designed or uncontrolled, it becomes one of the leading causes of eye strain, fatigue, and declining productivity. In a world where knowledge workers spend hours in front of screens, understanding how to manage lighting—especially when fixtures aren’t within your control—is more than an aesthetic concern. It’s a matter of health and efficiency.

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The Hidden Costs of Bad Overhead Lighting

Eye strain, known medically as asthenopia, is a growing occupational hazard. Symptoms include dryness, blurred vision, headaches, and difficulty focusing. Overhead lighting can trigger or worsen these issues in several ways:

• Glare: Direct glare forces eyes to overcompensate, exhausting visual focus.

• Uneven Illumination: Pockets of darkness or overly bright zones create constant readjustment, leading to fatigue.

• Color Temperature: Harsh, bluish light often heightens strain, while warmer tones mimic natural daylight and feel easier on the eyes.

Studies from the American Academy of Ophthalmology link prolonged exposure to harsh lighting with cumulative stress on the visual system, especially in office workers tethered to screens for long hours. I have personally experienced a higher level of uneasiness