SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 Leaders are not necessarily authors or originals who have created something of value and thereby earned the allegiance of followers. In most modern systems, leaders are elected, appointed, or seize power through various mechanisms, and once installed, they enjoy authority, privilege, and the instruments of state power. This raises a fundamental question: when those who hold power are simultaneously empowered to make the very policies that govern society, can we expect them to act against their own interests? Would they craft rules that might diminish their authority or challenge their privilege? The evidence from authoritarian governments across the globe—regimes that have extended their terms, eliminated opposition, and reshaped constitutions to perpetuate their rule—suggests a troubling answer: power seeks to preserve and expand itself. There exists a fundamental incompatibility between holding executive power and making policy. Leaders who simultaneously wield authority and wri...

 Who can lay claim to be not on the same boat as sinners. This truth is uncomfortable, yet deeply human. Some of us are seen doing wrong; others do the same in secret. What one person does with pride in the light of day, another does with shame in the silence of night. The difference is often not the act itself, but the exposure. We are quick to judge what is visible. We condemn the scandal, the public failure, the open wrongdoing. Yet we rarely examine the hidden movements of our own hearts. We measure morality by appearance. But integrity is not about what is seen. It is about what remains true when no one is watching. There is a tendency within us to divide humanity into two groups: the righteous and the sinful. We imagine ourselves on the better side, simply because our faults are less visible. But this division is fragile. It rests on illusion. If all secrets were made public, if every hidden motive were brought into the light, the lines between “us” and “them” would disapp...

  Cleaning and tidying, repenting and returning, and renewal, rebirth and resurrection are all profound human needs. It happens in every realm of human life, like, physical, financial, social, and of course, in moral and spiritual realms. There is something irreducibly human about the desire to start over. We feel it in the urge to throw open windows on the first mild morning of spring, to settle old debts, to write a letter of apology long overdue. Across every domain of life — financial, relational, physical, moral — we are creatures who reach, again and again, for the possibility of renewal. We are not content to remain in our accumulated disorder. Something within us insists that things can be otherwise. Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday , gives liturgical form to this insistence. It is the Church's great annual act of honesty: a forty-day acknowledgement that we have wandered, that we are not who we meant to be, and that the distance between where we stand and where God calls...

 Across cultures, religions, and centuries, virginity has been elevated from a biological state to a moral category, transformed from a neutral fact about a person's experience into a marker of worth, honour, and social belonging. The preoccupation with virginity is not a moral or spiritual concern at its root, but a mechanism of social control—one that disproportionately burdens women, reinforces patriarchal power structures , and severs individuals from their own bodies and autonomy. Virginity: Control Dressed as Virtue The language surrounding virginity is invariably the language of value. Girls are told they are "pure," "precious," or "unspoiled"—and implicitly, that to lose virginity outside sanctioned contexts is to become contaminated, devalued, ruined. This framing reveals the ideological function virginity serves: it is moral currency, a commodity assigned to women's bodies by social and religious institutions that profit from it. This cur...

 For Fyodor Dostoevsky , suffering was not a glitch in the human machine; it was the engine of its soul. To understand his philosophy, we have to look past the grim reputation of his novels and see suffering as he did: as the primary tool for spiritual awakening and the ultimate defence of human freedom. Suffering as the Proof of Freedom: In Notes from Underground , Dostoevsky argues against the " rationalists " of his time who believed that if society were perfectly organised and all needs were met, suffering would vanish. Dostoevsky disagreed vehemently. He believed that if you gave a human being everything they wanted—food, sleep, and comfort—they would eventually smash it all just to prove they are not piano keys being played by logic or biology. We choose to suffer, sometimes, simply to assert our "capricious" free will . Suffering is often a manifestation of our refusal to be a mere "statistic." It is a declaration of our individuality. The Sole Ori...

  Viktor Frankl found meaning in Auschwitz. Marcus Aurelius found wisdom during a plague. Dostoevsky discovered consciousness in a Siberian labour camp. Not because their sufferings were noble—but because they chose to transform it. Epictetus , who was a slave and crippled, wrote: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Here’s the hard part: you can’t choose whether or not you suffer. Life will break you regardless. The question is: will you break open or break apart? The tragedy isn’t that we suffer. It’s that we suffer meaninglessly. Suffering is the universal constant of the human experience, yet it is rarely uniform. From the biological pangs of our evolutionary ancestors to the existential dread of the modern urbanite, the weights we carry differ in both origin and purpose. To live a life of meaning is not to avoid suffering—an impossible feat—but to develop the discernment to know which kind of suffering is a hollow cage and which is a necessa...

 In an interview, The Evolution of Belief , Ethiran Kathiravan explores the origins of faith through the lens of evolutionary biology and sociology . He argues that faith is not a divine gift but a survival mechanism that emerged early in human history. Faith originated from the need to predict and survive natural phenomena. For example, early humans interpreted the rustling of grass as a potential predator. Or a cat that fell in a hot water, believes that any water could be hot water. This "belief" in unseen dangers helped them survive. Faith evolved as a cognitive adaptation to an unpredictable world. In our primitive state, the ability to believe in the unseen—whether it was a hidden predator or the cyclical nature of the seasons—provided a survival advantage. It allowed early humans to navigate a dangerous environment by imposing a sense of order on chaos. Common faith creates s ocial cohesion. As humans formed tribes, faith became a tool to unify groups. It created...

 There's something profoundly unsettling about how easy evil is. There is a glossary of evil  in Mark 7: 14-23 —immorality, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly —these aren't achievements. They're defaults. These are the lowest forms of desires. It is cheap. You don't have to work for it. You just sit lazy and idle somewhere, and these thoughts, desires, and feelings overtake us. They require no training, no discipline, and no journey. These vices demand nothing of us except that we stop resisting, stop climbing, stop reaching. They are gravity pulling us downward into our smallest, pettiest selves. We at times even rationalise and justify them, as they are human; as if our humanity were defined by its worst impulses rather than its highest possibilities. Calling something natural doesn't make it noble. Now consider the Queen of Sheba ( 1 Kings 10:1-10 )—a woman who traveled over a thousand miles through desert and danger to sit at the ...

 We all live uneventful ordinary lives; and this perfectly okay. We navigate our days through familiar rhythms—commutes to work, does daily responsibilities, and are happy with the comforting predictability of routine. Jesus spent decades in Nazareth as a carpenter's son. Peter, Andrew, James, and John rose each morning to mend their nets and cast them into the Sea of Galilee, as fishermen had done for generations. There is profound beauty in the ordinary, in lives woven from the threads of daily work and quiet faithfulness. Yet here lies the essential paradox of Christian existence: as one must be simultaneously rooted in the ordinary be also must be perpetually prepared to abandon it. The day those Galilean fishermen encountered Jesus marked not merely a career change but a fundamental reorientation of their lives (Matthew 4: 12-23). They returned home that evening not as fishermen but as fishers of people—to the bewilderment, perhaps even embarrassment, of their families and co...

 There's something deeply unsettling about the persistence of religious middlemen in a faith founded on their very abolition. When Jesus repeatedly declared, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," he wasn't offering a mild suggestion for liturgical reform. He was dismantling an entire economy of spiritual brokerage that had inserted itself between the divine and the human. Consider the strangeness of it all. God, who counts the hairs on our heads and notes the fall of every sparrow, apparently needs someone to explain our needs to him. God, who knows our thoughts before we think them and our needs before we voice them, requires elaborate rituals and institutional procedures to be moved to compassion. Jesus addressed this directly when he said that the Father knows what we need before we ask. This wasn't poetic flourish. It was a radical statement about the nature of divine awareness and the needlessness of human mediation. If God already knows, then what precisely is th...

  The title "Lamb of God" (introduced in John 1: 29) carries immense theological weight because it synthesises multiple foundational themes from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), acting as the culmination of God's redemptive plan. It signifies Jesus as the ultimate, voluntary, and perfect substitute whose death atones for sin and brings liberation. The theological weightage rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures are manifold. The Lamb Provided by God: When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son; he stated to the curious Isaac, "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:8). God substituted a ram caught in a thicket for Isaac, establishing the concept of substitutionary atonement. Jesus is seen as the "Lamb of God," the divine provision that replaces the need for human sacrifice, acting as a substitute for humanity.  The Passover Lamb:  The Israelites were saved from the plague on the firstborn by applying the blood of an unblem...

 Here is a story from the margins of the infancy narrative (Luke 2: 36-40). Prophetess Anna appears at the threshold where the Christmas story fades and the chronicle of the adult Jesus begins, positioned after the presentation at the temple and before the boy lost amongst the scholars. From the tribe of Asher—a lineage barely whispered in scripture—she emerges: a woman, a widow, advanced in years. Anna had kept her hopes alive; she looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. Jesus is brought to the temple for the rite of purification and presentation. Anna recognised him at once and began to speak of him to everyone around; she was perhaps the first proclaimer of the gospel in the temple. This passage acknowledges a great truth: people from the margins of society—the poor, the widowed, and the outsider—are often the first and fastest to recognise and speak aloud the truth. The people at the centre are busy maintaining the status quo, and defend their space, rituals, doctr...

 Freedom and privilege may appear similar on the surface—both grant us the ability to act—but they diverge fundamentally in their nature and consequences. Freedom is progressive. When we exercise true freedom, we take a step forward into possibility. We move beyond our circumstances without requiring someone else to step back. Freedom expands the circle of human dignity; it creates space where there was none before. The formerly oppressed person who gains freedom and uses it to build, create, and flourish exemplifies this principle. Their advancement doesn't demand another's diminishment. Privilege, however, operates through a different logic—one rooted in hierarchy and reciprocity of harm. Privilege isn't simply having advantages; it becomes problematic when it functions as permission to replicate the very dynamics that once hurt us. This is where privilege reveals its manipulative character: it positions someone at the receiving end of actions they cannot refuse or esca...

  Israel , and the Jewish people were proud of their temple, Jerusalem city, and even the city wall. While singing hosanna to Jesus, who was making his meek entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, they must have also sung of the magnificent temple, and expected triumphant victory. Some even asks Jesus to ask them to be silent, lest the Romans get provoked. Their priorities were all over the place. Jesus looks on the city Jerusalem and wept over it ( Luke 19: 41-44 ). Jesus does not see their achievements and success as real victory and success—and that is a painful reality. Our successes are not successes in the sight of God is a subtle reality that we conveniently don't see or acknowledge. His tears fell because of what the city had failed to become. As its name suggests, Jerusalem is ‘the city of peace’—and it was given all the opportunities to be—prophets, the temple, a fortified city etc. But it made a mockery of it all. And gradually it would even kill its Saviour. Some had support...