Books on Aman Aniket

I am a Liberal

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:12:37 +0530

Yeah, I’m a liberal. I’m a nationalist and by association of the republic of India being a liberal democracy, I become a liberal. But wait, I was born a Hindu and India being a admittedly secular country, I inherited the religion.

I’m many more nouns if I keep on thinking about it which raises the question, what indeed is religion? Why do we unquestionably follow a religion? Some of us have no second thoughts about how the creation of the universe played out owing to our dogmas derived from religious texts, but a lot of others indeed have a part of us questioning constantly about the gaps in our understanding. The scientific revolution has supported us with a lot of rational tools to answer some of the existential questions, or at least take a stab at them. This is what my latest read talked about in detail.

Religion

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 16:04:46 +0530

All of us are born into a religion. A lot of us spend our whole lives defending a dogma that was associated to us just by a matter of consequence. Come to think of it, I had myself not tried seeing the bigger picture and had largely procrastinated investigating the central idea of religion. The question was posed while going through Sapiens which is a de-facto outer view of the history of human existence. Understanding the idea of religion from a historical perspective gives you invaluable insights.

Book review: Thinking, Fast And Slow

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:33:49 +0530

Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow is a renowned psychologist and a Nobel laureate in Economics. Through this book, he talks about his broader contribution to behavioral psychology and the science of decision-making including this Nobel winning work Prospect Theory.

During the course of our day-to-day functioning, we take innumerous decisions. A majority of these decisions come naturally to us guided by our intuition, often at the risk of fleeting assumptions and systematic errors in judgement. This book deals with understanding those behavioral patterns through an engaging narrative filled with interesting experiments. What I particularly appreciated about the book was it’s constant endeavor to stick to facts and not be preachy. Think of it as a bunch of information that is supposed to nudge you towards making the right call in everyday decisions. Gets a tad informational in the middle but ends with the science of happiness which was a pleasure to read. Overall it’s a great read if you are a person who deals in stats and facts rather than opinions.