philosophy (7)

Count Them

Start with the number, because the number does not care about your feelings. Fewer than sixty thousand people control three times the wealth of the poorer half of humanity. You could seat all of them in one stadium on a match day and leave the…

Nothing Higher to Find - Bharat Singh Bhadwal an essay on ranking views and philosophy

Nothing Higher to Find

There's a spot above the village where the ridge falls away on three sides at once. The valley drops in the kind of scale that is supposed to make ranking irrelevant: forest, then terraced fields, then a river you can hear before you can see…

The Grade Doesn't Lie - Bharat Singh Bhadwal

The Grade Doesn't Lie

People ask, sooner or later, why I do these climbs on a bicycle when there is a perfectly good motorcycle in the shed and a jeep road that covers the same distance in a third of the time. I used to answer with the honest…

A Church Unstressed

The road to St. John's in the Wilderness leaves the highway the way a good secret leaves a conversation -Β without announcing itself. No signboard worth trusting, just a give in the tar and a gap in the deodars where the noise of the town starts…

The Same Fire

The priest's hands keep finding the same four shapes in the smoke β€” thumb to two fingers, flat to the chest, open toward the flame, and back again β€” a sequence that means something to him and nothing to the dozen of us sitting cross-legged…