I’ve been on this planet for almost six decades now, and I’ve been fortunate to see a fair portion of it. I’ve been able to travel widely, not just in the country where I was born but elsewhere, too. My penchant for travelling started early, in childhood itself. My parents took us children on numerous trips during our school vacations. Later, the sort of work that I took up was such that for me it often seemed like a paid holiday—I got to travel widely for a job that I then j

"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."   (The Bible, 2 Corinthians 9:7) Of the incidents from my early childhood that I still vividly recall one relates to my maternal grandmother. This happened when I was little—around half a century or so ago—and so I'm not sure if my account is entirely error-free but maybe it went something like this: My maternal grandparents were returnin

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) Some days ago, I attended a talk by a man who, many years earlier, had joined a cult-like group and had risen to become one of its important figures. He spoke eloquently and had some rather interesting things to say, but one point of his that I just couldn’t get myself to accept had to do a crucial teaching of his cult that is related to the afterlife. According

I was born into a fairly well-off family. We enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, and my father’s salary was enough to afford numerous fulltime home-help or ‘domestic staff’. One of the finest things that I remember from my childhood days about my late mother was her compassionate treatment of our home-help, so that they were, in a sense, an integral part of our family. Within the constraints of a hierarchical employer-employee relationship, she related to them with care and genu