Vinay Kumaran

I took a road test for a Driver's License for the 6th time today (24th June, 2017). I passed. It has been an unhappy series of events. My first driver's test was when I was in college. I must have been about 19. I had taken a series of lessons from a driving school in Munirka. I had also been driving the family car under my mother's supervision. My father had stopped driving by then. The driving school had not done much by way of actually teaching me to drive but they would set up the logistics of taking the test. The test would be at a place called 'Majnu Ka Tila' in the far north of Delhi. A driver was engaged for the day to take me there. The car to be used for the test would be provided by the driving school. Their people would be there to organize things and presumably to persuade the examiner to be nice to their students. The first few students went through the test uneventfully. It was a fairly basic test. They just wanted to make sure you we could drive...

Where do morals and ethics come from and is there a difference between them? If you ask a religious person they will say that morals come from religious books and represent a kind of code of conduct handed to us by God. They use the Bible or the Quran or the Upanishads or the Torah or whatever their religion prescribes as their moral compass. Whatever is written in the Holy Book is God's message to humans and should be followed without question as a matter of faith. This can be corrupted and has often been used to justify Crusades or Jihad. Killing someone who belonged to a different faith became 'moral'. Religious people are deeply distrustful of atheists. They think that since we do not accept the 'word of God' as given in the 'Holy Book', we must be immoral people. They seem to think that without religion (fear of God) there is nothing to prevent humans from killing, raping, stealing and the various other crimes that their 'Holy Book' proscri...

A child is riding a tricycle wearing a helmet with a disgustingly smug expression on her face. She looks across at the road and sees a woman (presumably her mother) driving a car. They progress side by side for a while. A boy riding a skateboard gets out of the way of the tricycle. The car pulls into the driveway outside the garage. The tricycle also reaches the spot and spills a bucket of paint. How is this supposed to make someone more likely to buy that model car? Why are advertisements in the US so bad?