I am in a weirdly reminiscent mood this morning, dunno why. My final five years of schooling was with an institution run by monastic members of a Hindu missionary organization in India. Now, when I can look back rationally and dispassionately at those years - and am able to discern and discount the subtle and overt attempts at religious indoctrination - I am conscious of a few interesting ideas that I had picked up on the way, ideas that seem to have influenced my way of thinking greatly over the years. Even though I am an Atheist, and extremely skeptical of religious ritualistic mumbojumbo, I am not ashamed to declare that some of these ideas came from early Hindu philosophy, dating back to some four thousand odd years ago. Perhaps those were simpler times, perhaps those were indeed wise folks... Those certainly were times way, way before a philosophy was corrupted and subverted into an '-ism', the rabidly irrational and superstition -laden face of Hinduism that gradually took over India, the country as well as popular psyche. Sigh. I am going to share two such ideas, extremely secular despite their religious context, contained in few lines of verses, or as they are known, shlokas.
