The Definitive Infinity beyond All Other Infinities

                                                   The Definitive Infinity beyond All Other Infinities

My first interaction with infinity came very late in my life despite, in my chosen profession I have used the symbol, not infinite number of times, but millions of times.

I was in the tenth standard I think and my cousin who was in IIT Bombay (who was then in his second year and was a show-off, much later) then posed the question, how many particles of sand are there in the expanse of Marina Beach in Madras (now Chennai). I said a large number and he asked how large. I was in 10th standard and I knew what he was getting at, I cried instantaneously and loudly, “INFINITY!” Well, I later learned that that was not the correct answer. 

Once I read how Richard Feynman sort of played with the three or four year old son of Hans Bethe at Cornell University. Feynman asked the toddler to give him the largest number the child knew. Pat came the answer, thousand! Feynman challenged this answer and gave his number 1,001, which even the child acknowledged as larger than 1,000. So, he said, 1,002. Feynman responded, 1,003. This went on for a few series of “I’ve got the highest number” before the kid caught on to the truth that infinity is merely a concept. As an aside, isn’t that a terrific way to teach?

Where does the series of bigger and bigger numbers end? At infinity? No, it appears not. What Feynman showed was only one kind of infinity. There are at least six kinds of infinity.There was a time when I bought many layman books on topics of interest in science, math included. One such book was The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow. I dug in and could understand much in it and was at sea on much other; as it was a book on infinity!

I give here the conclusion of a logical argument given as a brain-teaser: The curious feature of infinity is that it can be put in direct correspondence with a part of itself (Albert of Saxony’s Paradox). This appeared on page 53 of a total of 274 pages (with extensive notes and index) in the book, and I was hooked. I learned that there are at least six different kinds of infinities!

Here, I am going to add one more, the seventh, theological infinity. Hinduism appears not to have a unique and uniform theology; it rather abounds in philosophies, traditions and religions, each espoused through sacerdotal observations that do not accord with each other.

But when Lord Krishna (Vishnu) shows Himself as Infinite to Arjuna in the battlefield, I do not know whether Lord Vishnu was within Himself in as Lord Krishna and Lord Vishnu simultaneously (both ever smaller but equally large) in that revelation, like nested (yes, that is the right word here, the Russian nested dolls!), maybe. 

I say this because, if this was really so, then Hinduism offers clear, non-contradictory explanation to the supposed paradox mentioned above, and this is important, eons before Albert of Saxony did! Each vision of the Lord “can be put in direct correspondence” with a part of itself!

This is well within, indeed endorses Hindus’ claim, “Been there; done that!” Of course it includes plastic surgery (Lord Vigneshwara), and airplane (Ravan abducts Sita Devi on Pushpak Vimana) too, as our much beloved Prime Minster of India said.

But the most revealing and engrossing thing I came across in the book is the following: one infinity can be bigger than another! In fact, “there is no end to the ascending hierarchies of infinities.” So, no infinity is the biggest infinity! We have graduated from integers stopping at an infinity to nonstop infinities themselves.

That is, if Lord Vishnu is an infinity, so are Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, Mahavir Jain, Buddha, and even every one of the 0.33 billion Devas (in the Hindu pantheon) and every other divinity conjured by any number (definitely a large number, yet not quite infinite) of civilizationsindividually an infinity! No wonder religious wars (at least wars fought in the name of religion) are infinite.

If you would like such wars to vanish, I offer you the following: abolish all the religions. This could take infinitely long. I have infinite time on my hand, just being reborn infinite times!

Raghuram Ekambaram

To Know Oneself

To Know Oneself

To know oneself is not like spot welding, choose an instant of time, and presto, you have learned about yourself.  In my humble opinion, it is a continuing process. When the process starts one does not know when it would stop, if ever. This was brought in clear relief in the movie Conclave by the character Cardinal Bellini when he lamented ‘To be this age and still not know yourself’” (The Guardian, Nesrine Malik, September 29, 2025). 

I have searched the Net to find out what was the age of this fictional character in the movie; no success. But, knowing that none of the Cardinals of the Conclave could have aged beyond 80 years, I know I am not too far from that age to regret, a la Cardinal Bellini! I do not want to, though.

I am a candidate, not for the pope-electing Conclave, but for drawing the parallel between my age, my maturity, and when I came to a definitive level of knowing myself.

I wish to define, for myself, what it is, “to know oneself”.

It is like coming to a fork in one’s life, and take one path without looking back to see if anyone else is taking the other path(s). Is it like the Buddha, coming out from under the Bodhi tree not looking back to see, not only to know whether anyone else is coming after him but also if others are following the other path(s)?

That was “knowing oneself”, with others and their choices not making any dents in his/her choice. Could I say this about Emperor Asoka, after the Kalinga war? I would only imagine so, definitely far from being certain.

For me, the above happened, not once, but many times since I was 27 or 28 years old. Travelling along the path I took at the first fork, I came across, successively, multiple forks each offering different paths to follow. And, I believe I am telling the truth when I say that not once, not along the multiple paths I took, I violated the principle that guided me on that first path. Likewise, upon encountering another fork, I have not violated any of or all the principles, one each at each fork, at which I had already taken a decision.

I have been a staunch non-believer in God and religion; though I have argued vigorously with religious people, I have not assailed them; I have a set of morals and I try my best not to infract them internally; I try to avoid situations in which my personal morals go against community ethics (sometimes by ignoring them or showing superficial agreement); I have not discriminated against anyone on the basis of caste, colour (I am in between fair and brownish), social status; against the rich or poor; against people who act in ways that could rub me the wrong way; any disability including deafness (very difficult to discern) and any other disability. It is not impossible that I am lacking in other things. But, I am confident I would correct myself if I realized it myself or someone showed me.

The above, I feel, is my knowing myself.

Raghuram Ekambaram

I Got into IITM through Reservation

                                                      I Got into IITM through Reservation

It is, of course, true that I secured a rank in IIT JEE that allowed me to get into IITM by scraping the bottom. Then, what am I talking about reservation helping me enter the portals of an IIT? Listen to me patiently.

The trend setter in my family was my paternal grandmother’s younger brother. He became an engineer and was placed in the Madras Municipal Corporation during the years of my father’s childhood. The die was cast. The next one was my mother’s elder brother, the younger of the two, though he studied only for a diploma and not a degree. Yet, he was a true engineer. Then came my generation.

Here it got interesting. My mother’s elder sister’s son became an electrical engineer, much before IITs became the rage among Tamil Brahmins. Then, my father’s elder (younger of the two) brother’s eldest son got into an IIT and became a mechanical engineer. My mother’s elder brother’s (the younger of the two mentioned above) son entered an IIT and became a mechanical engineer. My father’s eldest brother’s son did so, along with me in 1971. So, I had engineer’s blood mixed with IIT blood running in my veins. This tradition was carried on by my youngest male cousin, and it continues in the next generation.

I am a Smartha Brahmin by birth and to be educated beyond high school is the minimum qualification for this community, preferably an engineer or a doctor. My younger brother is an engineer, though not an IITan, but a true hands-on engineer. When I entered IIT through JEE, I came in scraping the bottom, rank of 1493 out of about 25,000 who wrote the exam, top 6%.

This community along with its cohorts like Vaishnavites and others, by their unshakeable understanding that professional education is the definitive pathway to climb the social ladder, had delivered to itself education in and had enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) the fruits of such reservation (to be understood in a comparative sense at the level of being aware) in these fields. I am talking about 1960s and ‘70s. 

The other down market communities were not even aware of such opportunities and/or did not have the wherewithal to invest time, money and energy in higher education of their youngsters, so stringent were the unsaid reservations.

OK, even talking about myself, I have reasons to be proud of entering IIT Madras, reservation or not. My cousins who entered IITs, all of them, attended coaching classes (Agrawal Classes in the then Bombay was perhaps the trend setter; in the then Madras Vivekananda and Jain Colleges were offering evening tutorial classes tuned to cracking JEE). What did I have? A guide that my father gave me money and told me to buy from Madras when we were in Kancheepuram (I was doing my Pre-University Course from Pachaiyappa’sCollege, Kancheepuram), any guide that I found easy to understand. I did and after making the payment (Rs. 60/−, a princely sum for my family), I found a glaring error in it, in ray optics in physics. I almost did not study from it with any seriousness. Still, I entered IIT Madras, but in a down market field, Civil Engineering.

Perhaps my brief history given above muted the benefit of reservation I did enjoy.

The way I understand reservation may be distinctly different than what it is taken to be in general discussions. Reservation is not about percentages, however measured. It is about what one carries due to historical circumstances/accidents. It is such a way of reckoning reservations, I wrote the above.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Lord Shiva is Confused! We can’t have that, Can We?

Lord Shiva is Confused! We can’t have that, Can We?

Maybe it is true all over India and as I know only about Tamil Brahmin (in particular, the Smartha community), I would address only them.

The picture (sourced from the Net) showsthe crescent of the moon, in the third evening after a New Moon day. I truly envy the photographer who happened to take this picture on an evening with no clouds, no haze in the atmosphere, no human being around to spoil Lord Shiva’s meditation! Typically, you do not get to see Lord Shiva in human form in the Shiva temples in Tamil Nadu. What you see in the sanctum sanctorum is a column (the Siva Lingam) that is circular, hexagonal, octagonal or hexadecagonal (6 + 10 = 16, in simple terms) embedded in a base (it may also be a combination of two shapes).

If for whatever reason you need to fix the cardinal directions at a place you are visiting for the first time, don’t fret. All you need to do is locate the direction the drain leads from the stem of the Siva Lingam in a temple. That direction−as you see from the front or the back−is North. This direction finder never fails in Tamil Nadu and it is a lot easier than getting it from a compass you might be carrying (your smart watch, perhaps).

The drain points to the bottom portion of the right side of the picture and this indicates North.You are facing westward while looking at the idol from the front. The other cardinal directions are fixed, per what you learnt in your UKG!

It is hardly ever you find an anthropomorphic image of Lord Shiva in a Tamil Brahmin house (my parents’, for example). It is considered inauspicious. Yet, in North India, such pictures are galore.

I now come to images of Lord Shiva in some weird human form, with matted hair either in a top knot or free flowing, in a meditative pose or otherwise, offering sometimes a double vision to His devotees. Given below are a number of such pictures, every one of which carries the crescent moon (the third phase after a New Moon; no other phase would have such a sliver of a crescent against a not-dark sky; it is dusk, I can confidently assert).

I had to post quite a number of pictures merely to make the point that the supposed "democratizing" of art in the hands of people with supposedly an artistic bent of mind and not grounded in astronomy and myths of a religion do injustice to astronomy (this is to be condemned) and injustice to myths (you decide what to do with them, condem or congratulate). They confuse Lord Shiva, to boot!

From the images I can come only to the conclusion that the deity shown is lost and confused as in which direction he faces is a mystery, perhaps to Lord Shiva Himself. Even a mariner of the fifteenth century CE would have been confused! 

It is no wonder, then, Hindus are at a loss to make a consistent presentation not only to others but to even themselves about their religion and Gods. 

Freedom lets you go wherever you please, no map or atlas with you.

Such is the pity.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Can Artificial Intelligence Beget Natural Intelligence?

Can Artificial Intelligence Beget Natural Intelligence? 

I know nothing about Artificial Intelligence (AI), how it works and other related questions. Yet, I dare to ask the question in the heading of this post.

Of course, it is indisputable that it was natural intelligence (NI) that begat AI. Is this a reversible process? Do not bring in thermodynamics here! Please note that I have advisedly used the word beget. I am not talking about enhancing the capabilities of NI. Perhaps AI can enhance NI, but I am not venturing there.

Every living thing has intelligence, and if one were to grade species by the level of intelligence it has, humans as a species (Homo sapiens sapiens) will come in very nearly last among eukaryotes. I have to give at least an empirical instance to substantiate the above claim. Cockroaches. Need I say more?

You would, of course, claim that no cockroach has ever invented AI. My answer to that, so what. Roaches survive through their own and without human intelligence! I will tell you that at the level of human evolution, it is almost inevitable that AI can beget NI. So, why do you credit that inevitability? Perhaps, AI is just an accident!

Yet, you could argue that cockroaches would not even know AI. No. By not knowing what AI is, could cockroaches invent AI? Or its derivatives, say, ChatGPT? No. Then the human species indeed is more intelligent than a cockroach! You could say that. Do I give up?

No. You are measuring intelligence on human devised scale, as a measure of mental acquity.Human intelligence is not a unitary measure, though IQ tests designate it so through a reified measure.

In the book  What is Intelligence, one finds intelligence of eight different kinds, each essay of a different kind among humans; some of them are:”seeing”, “evolutionary”, “infant”, “mathematical”, “traditional music (very particular)” and so on. The essays are compiled from different authors, all academicians and researchers). I read this book nearly thirty years ago.

I also read a science fiction book Ender’s Game, authored by Orson Scott Card in which human kind is endangered by an “insectoid” alien species. The most interesting part of the book, as I understood, was that there was just one mind/brain for the army of these insectoids (one could recall this as parallel to the bees in a hive, their actions coordinated; we do not know yet how they are coordinated and who plans the coordination).

What makes us, human beings, assert that we have superior intelligence as compared to any other species on earth? Arrogance.

I am also able to almost undeniably state that human beings are in a potentially evolutionary a cul-de-sac. To my knowledge no species is capable of exterminating itself, multiple times. No other species have invented an atom bomb, a hydrogen bob, an MIRVs (MultipleIndependently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles) over less than a century. 

Are we intelligent or stupid. I vote for the latter. Occasioned by? Ego/arrogance.

If I take a cue from the above I would be led to concluding that AI could lead to NI, but only of the kind that destructs both AI and NI! So, let alone begetting, AI would lead to extermination of NI, unless we keep that destructive potential of AI beyond the mirage of benefits to human society.

A few unanswered questions I leave you with: 1. Can AI infuse itself into a human brain? In which case the difference between AI and NI becomes trivial! 2. Can development of AI be confined in a bottle? To put it another way, can the profit motive in human brain be totally effaced?

Raghuram Ekambaram

Contagious Diseases of Compassion, Creativity, Ethics and Sustainability

Contagious Diseases of Compassion, Creativity, Ethics and Sustainability

“[S]tudents should blend science and ethics to become global citizens ...” thus spoke a modern Zarathustra! This, (the statement between the quotes) was as reported in a newspaper at a function in a quasi-academic setting, a campus festival. 

I got interested and read through the approximately 14.803 newspaper column inches long (error estimate, plus or minus 0.002 inches! After all, Zarathustra was speaking at a technical education imparting institution) article. So, ethics is important; indeed, students must not have heard this earlier.

He added that technical skills alone (basically coding) in any stream will not be of much use globally. (Tell that to the annual exodus of students from India, including that particular institution hoping to land a coding job after their higher education (MS in Computer Coding!).) Again, something students were hearing for the first time. Add in the mix compassion, creativity, and sustainability. I pitied Zarathustra for the limited wide-angle lens he had used in his slide show!

Innovation must change lives even as it promotes sustainability. Students must have understood this as not to worry about their levels of consumption−howsoever huge it may be, only try reducing it, like throwing your paper cup in the garbage can at the airport. That shows you are committed to sustainability!

I must mention an instance in the 1980s (recurring every year) Zarathustra or his father and cousins of Arab descent (like the Zarathustra referred here) and their retinue flew into Bluegrass Field Airport in Lexington, KY, USA in their plane to bid for yearlings at the world famous auction (where you saw fast women and beautiful horses), as much as the then record of thirteen point something million USD.  

Not flying commercial airlines was their concern for sustainability. Extolling compassion, while recommending whiplashes in the town square for women for committing so-called sins of exposing their forearms is not hypocrisy, of course.

Creativity is where hypocrisy shows up in stark relief. Creativity is on your time and not on company’s time, understand? Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Paige, Sergei Brin (never mind James Watt who helped usher Industrial Revolution, John Fowler’s Firth of Forth Steel Cantilever Bridge, Eiffel, those who developed designs of commercial airplanes ... the list is so long, only to be ignored) all made their mark on their own time, and so should you try to do−the implied message from Zarathustra.

Perhaps the original Zarathustra said many more things but from the newspaper piece and what the modern era Zarathustra is reported to have said, I could take in only the few, and tried answering them with reference to context question in it.

Yes, all the diseases listed in the heading are contagious as these are necessary for human beings to survive civilizational dangers lurking around the corner. Coronavirus Disease 2019, anyone?

Raghuram Ekambaram

The Supreme Court of India Appears to have Woken Up

The Supreme Court of India Appears to have Woken Up

The Supreme Court of India “confirmed an ‘all-pervasive ban on the sale, production and manufacture of firecrackers in Delhi and National Capital Regions (NCR) in April 2025.” It was a drastic step that was “absolutely necessary” to protect citizen’s right to clean air.

I had asked quite some time ago, within myself and possibly in a letter to the editor, why such differential−indeed, deferential−treatment of citizens of Delhi and NCR. I also indicated that the “managementese” stake-holders−manufacturers, trucking, distributors and sales people−seem not to have appeared or to have been consulted.

Well, today, I realize that the thought I espoused quite a while ago has reached non-plebeiancorridors in New Delhi, including livelihood of some plebeians. The Supreme Court of India is seen to have taken cognizance of the issues. Of course, if there are further issues that have been flagged but not addressed, the court could say that their duty is merely to respond to the queries that come before them. True, but hasn’t it ever gone beyond? I don’t know, but I suspect it has.

Two issues were highlighted. One, “a complete ban cannot be implemented,” as that would be an open invitation to the firecracker mafia, a la mining mafia that moved in when, “total ban” was imposed on mining in Bihar. The other issue highlighted the possible arbitrariness/ special considerations that came to play when firecrackers were banned in Delhi and NCR and not elsewhere in the country. Also, about depriving “thousands of workers.” In my opinion it should have been tens of thousands of workers, considering the ubiquity of the celebrations in this vast land, and the distribution and sales ends at every street corner.  Why all this is so, asked the current CJI.

I distinctly remember I raised a cultural issue. It is customary that people celebrate Diwali/Deepavali with firecrackers (and so also at the end of Navratri, as enthroning of Lord Rama). This cannot be abolished by anyone, be they ever so high. That is akin to nihilism, offering no alternative. No, no, in a democracy. This was not mentioned per the newspaper report.   That was a big swing-and-a-miss (an American baseball term, I am most intent on reducing the traffic to my space). Two senior advocates argued against the ban; one, on the misconception that polluted air affects the elite who are perched on their exclusive aeries. The truth is the poor on the streets are the true victims. This cannot but be made any more explicit. The elites want everything!

The other point is that some licenses expire three years hence were being withdrawn. The implied question is where goes the legitimacy of a license.

One may hope that the judgment that would come in the next few days, as Vijaya Dasami(Lord Ram vanquishing Ravan and his cohorts) is upon us in a week, and Diwali/Deepavalifollows, giving no respite for the firecracker industry; the industry enjoys this busyness in their business. Please, do not take away their enjoyment!

Please wake up. It is the season to wake up like Kumbakarna, who was awakened from his regular deep sleep merely to be killed.

Raghuram Ekambaram     

To be Prepared for Monsoon, Be Prepared Everyday

                                                  To be Prepared for Monsoon, Be Prepared Everyday

In this post I intend to show that I had thought ahead of the monsoon; indeed I had thought ahead of those who think about the monsoon! I am doubly ahead, so to say.

In today’s newspaper (The Hindu of 2025-09-25), I read an opinion post entitled, Follow the rains, not the calendar, to fight floods. I liked the piece. It has neither the tone of “preaching to the converted” nor that of “You know nothing.” It is not shrill, but loud enough to be heard in urban areas. It mentions the efforts taken by the bodies of governance in Vijayawada, Thane and Mumbai, certified urban areas along the sea coasts (Vijayawada might be not quite on the shore, yet the authorities of that city have been proactive, per the article; good for the city).

Even so, that is where the problem lies. The article does not mention floods, landslides along the road routes to the four supposedly sacred places, Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath. There are hardly any places that one would call urban spaces. And, frequently we hear about cloud bursts, torrential rains (as distinct from cloud bursts, but just about the same), landslides, floods and so on. Every single one of them we had failed to predict and in which we lost people, and for those who survived, livelihoods, education, markets, and for them the worst, their places of religious importance (remember the Kedarnath shrine some years ago).

It is time government authorities in India did a triage of disaster events and planned their activities accordingly. To be explicit about it, none of the Char Dhams are easily reachable; at least not as easily so as the urban spaces almost anywhere in India, even along the banks of River Ganga. 

Almost fifty years ago (the Buddha Purnima day in 1977) nearly a dozen of us cycled from IIT Kanpur to the banks of the river through a hamlet with a steep slope to the river bank, hired a boatman, disembarked and had a bath in the river and picnicked under the full moon (no romance in all these, and no panic either) and survived. But, if today’s scenarios were probable realities then, would we have embarked on that trip? Definitely not. I am not even sure whether that hamlet had survived at all, and if it had, as a hamlet or something larger, a village.

Climate is very fickle. I had made this point in a post in this very blog space entitled The climate does not know what it is doing, on December 09, 2018 (seven years ago, almost). The thrust in that piece, if global warming is indeed true (and we may not be able to hope for the best), then we should prepare ourselves for it, not in the way that the opinion piece in The Hindu focuses on urban spaces, but all across the nation, and the best option is to be prepared for everyday to be a pre-monsoon, monsoon, post monsoon, monsoon on the horizon, monsoon under the hot Sun, no day of the calendar left unprepared.

Do we have the resources for it? Perhaps not. But, it is the responsibility of the government to accumulate the capital of whatever kind needed without any delay, going beyond some bureaucratic authority answerable to the government. The government has to loosen its strings. No excuses, please

There is no point breast-beating after the fact.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Non-believers (in God, religion ...) Always Pull-back from the Brink. Why?

                                    Non-believers (in God, religion ...) Always Pull-back from the Brink. Why?

I fancy myself a non-believer. And, I cannot get myself to claim there is no God (the upper case G indicates a special whatever). I may try to explain.

The fountainhead of my thinking is what I read on David Hume, the Scottish philosopher. The simplest understanding of Hume’s position appears to be that all inputs that can cause any idea, partially or fully formed, in one’s mind about an object must be only through our senses such as hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting; these give rise to perceptions, the only occupants of the mind, which houses something “antecedently present to the mind”.(I am skipping a step here, what are present in the mind are ideas and not perceptions. But, you would allow me the leeway as I am not a philosopher.)

What did I hear? What did I see? This “What did I...” does not give the sense of existence of what I saw, touched etc. unless something like it is already present in the mind. This is how I understood the “antecedently.”

I would now jump from Hume to Kaladi Sankara, the Indian philosopher of later part of the first millennium of the Common Era. He said that if in the dark you see something that looks like a snake, you would flee, only to find out later that it was a twig. Sankara assumes that your mind already has ideas about snake and its characteristics, antecedent to that experience.   

Yet, Hume was sceptical about relying on one’s senses, as proof of existence of something! Therefore, any notion of a world of permanently existing objects independent of our perception is problematic to him. He does not intend to deny the existence of the body independently of our perceptions. His position is strange yet not unreasonable: We are unable to prove that body exists; yet, a sceptic cannot help assenting to that proposition. “Nature has not left this to his (the sceptic’s) choice.” One way I see the above argument is this lack of choice is where the “God of the gaps” exists!

So, where does that leave me? If I were to discuss about God with a believer, I must first let her tell me her conception of God. This conception which is not anything material as she readily admits, must have caused a perception which in turn must have given rise to some version of an idea in her mind that is already in it. So, I ask what was in her mind before she thought of God. She has no answer, not even nothing because there was, she asserts,something! Read Antony Flew on this, please

I bring in Hume. We have discovered something in the natural world, say, an elephant. What is known concerning it, agrees with itself; and what is unknown, we must be contented to leave so. Here is my poser to her. Someone has told her Lord Indra rides a White Elephant, Airavata. She has not seen such an elephant in calendar art (which is where one may catch a glimpse).

So, a white elephant exists in her mind only as an idea. Yet, if I posit a white elephant as something distinctly different in shape, size and other characteristics of an elephant, could hermind make any connection between the common elephant and my white elephant. Both the everyday elephant and the white elephant exist as distinct ideas in her mind and the twain shall never meet!

We have known in the natural world that one can balance on one finger nothing more complicated than an umbrella. Then, you, schooled in the leelas of Lord Krishna, know that He lifted up Govardhan Giri. But a devout Christian sees this and goes Eh... You two fight on these irreconcilable ideas.

Something like the above happens between Jews and Christians, between Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus (Sri Lanka) and so on.

If this were the situation between believers, imagine what it would be between a believer and a non-believer! And, I would not want to be in such a fracas; it would not stay one for long.

Hence, I pull back myself from the brink!

Raghuram Ekambaram