WHERE TIMES BOWS TO IMPERMANENCE: A Lineage of Faith, Memory, and the Living Dhamma

 

The Buddhist Maha Vihara

(Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur)

Beneath the quiet dignity of the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields, founded in 1894 and now enclosed by the glass, steel, and ceaseless motion of a modern city, time itself appears to pause. The world beyond presses forward with urgency and ambition, yet within these grounds, stillness abides. Perhaps it is so because where the Dhamma is the very purpose of existence, time relinquishes its authority.

This sacred place stands not merely as architecture fashioned of stone and cement, but as a living continuum of faith sustained through intention, sacrifice, and unwavering devotion. My wife, Greeja, traces her lineage to her great-great-grandfather, Mr. Udanis, among the earliest Sinhalese settlers in Malaya, whose efforts helped establish and nourish the early flowering of the Buddha’s Dispensation in this land. What was once a fragile seed, planted with faith and perseverance, has endured through generations, taking firm root and maturing into the thriving Buddhist congregation that exists in Kuala Lumpur today, among whom is the De Silva family, to which Greeja belongs.

Today, however, our presence here is of a more intimate and solemn nature. We have come to offer prayers and merit in remembrance of Greeja’s dearly departed aunt, Madam Lalitha Pathmalata De Silva. In this act of recollection and offering, the temple becomes a mirror, reflecting back to us the fundamental truth proclaimed by the Blessed One:

“All conditioned things are impermanent.”
(Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā)

This truth was not taught by the Buddha as a matter of abstraction but revealed through compassion grounded in wisdom. Once, a woman named Kisā Gotamī, distraught by the death of her only child, approached the Buddha carrying the child’s lifeless body, imploring him for medicine to restore him to life. Seeing her sorrow, the Buddha neither dismissed her anguish nor fed her despair with false hope. Instead, he asked her to bring a mustard seed obtained from a household untouched by death.

With faith in his words, Kisā Gotamī went from door to door. Mustard seeds were readily given, yet in every household she encountered the same truth, a parent lost, a spouse mourned, a child remembered. There was not a single home free from death. Through this quiet pilgrimage, her grief was gradually transformed. What had been borne as a private tragedy was revealed as the universal condition of all beings subject to birth. Returning to the Buddha, she understood that what arises must pass away, and that clinging to what is impermanent is itself the root of suffering.

So too does loss remind us, gently, yet unmistakably, that life is fleeting, that those we love are entrusted to us only for a time, and that all compounded things are in ceaseless change. Yet within this truth there is no call to despair. As the Buddha taught Kisā Gotamī, within impermanence lies the ground for wisdom, restraint, and compassion. The Dhamma does not ask us to deny sorrow, but to see clearly the nature of existence and to live in a way that is blameless, mindful, and generous.

Thus, amid the fragrance of incense and the measured cadence of chanting, surrounded by generations of devotion and the quiet certainty of change, we are reminded why the path matters. Not to stand against impermanence, but to understand it, and not to cling to what must pass, but to cultivate what does not decay. In aligning the heart with the Dhamma, one learns to meet arising and passing away with wisdom, dignity, and peace.

SADHU … SADHU … SADHU

ravivarmmankkanniappan@1540240120263.12786° N, 101.68679° E

©ravivarmmank

“The Neanderthal Paradox” - Outer Progress, Inner Regression

 

AI Generated Image

When Neanderthals shaped stone into knives and spears, they weren’t just making tools, they were externalizing thought. Each strike against stone reflected judgment, foresight, and risk. A poorly made spear meant hunger or death. Tool making, then, was not convenience, it was cognition made visible. That is why early tools marked a genuine progression in human development where they extended imagination without replacing it.

This raises a troubling question today. If stone tools signalled human ascent, does artificial intelligence signal another evolutionary leap or a quiet regression to a new kind of prehistory, where thinking itself is outsourced?

At first glance, the arc of history seems clear. Tools evolved from survival aids to instruments of comfort, then to systems of efficiency. What began as necessity slowly became desire. Discovery was once driven by hunger and danger, but now it is driven by optimization and convenience. Yet this shift has altered not just what we make, but how we think.

To understand this transformation, it helps to briefly align a few thinkers, not as authorities, but as lenses.

Charles Darwin explains the biological groundwork. From his perspective, tool use is an evolutionary advantage, not a moral or historical turning point. Humans who could cooperate, imagine, and manipulate objects survived better. Tools followed intelligence but they did not direct it. Darwin’s account is powerful but limited as it only explains how tool making emerged, not how tools later came to reorganize human life.

Friedrich Engels fills that gap. For him, labour and tool making were not passive outcomes of evolution but active forces shaping the human hand, brain, language, and society. Tools didn’t just help humans survive but they helped create humans as conscious, social beings. Here, tool making is transformative, not merely adaptive.

Karl Marx extends this insight into history. Tools become “means of production,” and whoever controls them controls social life. Technological progress, Marx argues, restructures society and concentrates power. Tools amplify productivity, but under certain systems they also alienate humans from their own creative capacities. Progress outward, impoverishment inward.

Yuval Noah Harari updates this story for the present. What distinguishes modern humanity, he suggests, is not tools alone but shared imagination, which includes myths, money, laws, and now algorithms. Today’s tools are no longer just physical objects but they are systems of belief encoded in software. AI, financial models, and data infrastructures don’t just assist decision-making but they define what counts as a decision.

At this point, a pattern becomes visible. Human development is not driven by biology alone, nor labour alone, nor economics alone, but by their interaction with imagination. Tools once expanded imagination. Now they increasingly replace it.

Ancient traditions sensed this risk intuitively.

In Indian thought, craft (śilpa) was never just mechanical skill. The Śilpa Śāstras treated toolmaking as disciplined knowledge aligned with cosmic order and ethical purpose. Even Vedic metaphors compared crafting an object to crafting a thought where both acts of mindful construction. Action without reflection was never idealized.

Greek philosophy made this distinction explicit through technē. Plato warned that writing, an early cognitive tool, could weaken memory by externalizing it. Aristotle valued technē but insisted it be guided by phronēsis, practical wisdom. Tools were legitimate only when governed by judgment and ethical ends.

In both traditions, tools were subordinate to inner clarity. Thought preceded action. Skill served wisdom.

Modern technological society reverses this order.

Today, tools do not merely help us think but they structure how thinking happens. Recommendation algorithms decide what we read. GPS decides how we navigate. AI copilots draft our emails, summarize our meetings, and increasingly suggest what decisions to make. None of this is coercive. That is precisely the danger. Dependence arrives disguised as ease.

Martin Heidegger foresaw this condition. He warned that modern technology is not neutral, it “enframes” reality, turning everything, including humans, into resources to be optimized. Under this logic, thinking becomes calculative rather than contemplative. We learn how to operate systems fluently while losing the habit of questioning their purpose.

You can see this everywhere. University students rely on AI not to test ideas, but to avoid struggling with them. Professionals follow dashboards and metrics without understanding what is being measured or why. Social media platforms optimize “engagement,” subtly shaping attention spans, desires, and outrage cycles, while users feel more informed than ever. Judgment hasn’t vanished but it has been deferred.

Hannah Arendt helps explain the moral consequence. In her analysis of thoughtlessness, she showed how responsibility dissolves when individuals stop thinking and start merely following processes. Today’s conformity is not enforced by authority but by systems. “The algorithm recommended it.” “The model decided.” Obedience has become procedural.

Herbert Marcuse sharpens the critique. Technological societies, he argued, produce the “one-dimensional” human, highly capable within systems, yet incapable of imagining alternatives. This is not ignorance but it is a narrowing of possibility. A person may optimize workflows flawlessly and still struggle to ask whether the workflow should exist at all.

Ancient wisdom offers a counterpoint. The Thirukkural insists that action must be preceded by reflection:

“எண்ணித் துணிக கருமம்; துணிந்தபின்
எண்ணுவம் என்பது இழுக்கு.” - Kural 467

“Think carefully before acting; once resolved, wavering is weakness.”

Here, dignity lies in judgment, not execution. When action becomes automated and thought outsourced, efficiency increases, but agency erodes.

This is where the Neanderthal comparison becomes illuminating rather than insulting. Neanderthals lived amid uncertainty. Every tool demanded engagement, improvisation, and risk. Their tools expanded human capability without replacing human responsibility.

Modern humans, surrounded by vastly superior tools, risk becoming cognitively passive. We execute without originating, optimize without imagining, comply without questioning. The regression is not biological, it is existential.

The danger of AI and advanced technology is not that machines will become human like. It is that humans may become machine like, precise, efficient, obedient and inwardly hollow. Civilization advances outward while retreating inward.

True progress is not measured by the intelligence of our tools, but by the vitality of the minds that wield them. When tools assist imagination, humanity advances. When tools replace imagination, humanity regresses, quietly, comfortably, and with great efficiency.

That is the real question before us, where it is not whether AI can think, but whether humans will continue to do so.

Note:

This writing was inspired by my friend Rajender, who poked this question a few days ago.

ravivarmmankkannaiappan@1551110120263.0567° N, 101.5851° E 

©ravivarmman

You Can’t Bomb a Currency: Why the Venezuela Narrative Misreads Power in 2026

 

A story has been circulating, asserted confidently in some quarters, that the United States struck Venezuela on January 3, 2026, seized Nicolás Maduro, and announced plans to “run” the country during a transition. Whether framed as breaking news or treated as fait accompli, the narrative is revealing regardless of its factual status. It exposes how readily we reach for an old explanatory crutch, the petrodollar. The claim goes like this, Washington, fearing de-dollarization, used force to reassert control over oil and thereby defend the dollar’s supremacy.

That reading is seductive. It is also wrong.

To see why, it helps to separate myth from mechanism and to ground the analysis in history, real, documented cases where oil, currency, and U.S. power intersected. When we do, a different picture emerges, one in which spectacle, domestic politics, and performative dominance matter far more than any coherent strategy to “save” the dollar.

Start with the petrodollar mythos itself. Yes, in the mid-1970s the U.S. and Saudi Arabia struck arrangements that entrenched dollar invoicing in global oil trade. And yes, “petrodollar recycling” channelled oil exporters’ surpluses into U.S. Treasuries, helping finance American deficits. But even at its peak, oil pricing was never the sole pillar of dollar dominance. The dollar prevailed because the United States offered what others could not, deep and liquid capital markets, a credible legal system, and unmatched financial infrastructure.

History is instructive here. When Iraq under Saddam Hussein switched some oil sales to euros in 2000, it did not dent the dollar’s reserve status. The euro did not surge, the dollar did not fall. Likewise, when Libya experimented with non-dollar oil transactions in the 2000s, global currency markets barely noticed. These episodes mattered symbolically, not structurally. Currency hegemony is not a light switch you flip by changing the invoicing unit of a few million barrels a day.

Contrast that with moments when the dollar truly wobbled. The Nixon Shock of 1971, ending gold convertibility, was a monetary event, not an oil war. The Volcker shock of the early 1980s, which restored confidence in the dollar through punishing interest rates, had nothing to do with crude supply. More recently, the dollar’s resilience after the 2008 financial crisis rested on the Federal Reserve’s role as global dollar lender of last resort, not on any assertion of control over hydrocarbons. When stress hits, the world runs toward dollar liquidity, not toward oil fields.

Oil itself has also changed position in the hierarchy of power. The 1973 oil embargo could bring advanced economies to their knees, the 2020 pandemic oil crash could not. Electrification, efficiency gains, and diversified energy portfolios have reduced the leverage of any single producer. The United States, now one of the world’s largest oil producers, is less vulnerable to supply shocks than at any point since World War II. If oil were still the master lever of monetary power, the shale revolution would have translated into an unassailable petrodollar renaissance. It didn’t, because the lever no longer works that way.

What has changed, and where real pressure on U.S. financial power exists, is payments architecture. This is where de-dollarization actually lives. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) has grown steadily as a renminbi clearing layer. The BIS-backed mBridge project has demonstrated real-time, atomic settlement across central bank digital currencies. These systems don’t require oil, coups, or airstrikes. They require code, coordination, and patient institutional buy in. History again offers a parallel, SWIFT did not become dominant because NATO bombed Brussels, it became dominant because banks voluntarily joined the most efficient network available.

Venezuela’s role in this landscape is often overstated. It does hold vast reserves. over 300 billion barrels by common estimates, and it has talked loudly about escaping the dollar, pricing oil in yuan, and aligning with BRICS-adjacent initiatives. But talk is not transformation. Venezuela’s production capacity has been crippled for years by mismanagement and sanctions. Even at full tilt, Venezuelan crude cannot anchor a new monetary order. If controlling barrels were sufficient, Russia, one of the world’s top energy exporters, would not feel pressure to build alternative payment rails, oil wealth alone has not insulated it from financial sanctions.

This is where the rhetoric attributed to U.S. officials in the circulating story matters more than the mechanics. The emphasis was not on balance of payments stability or reserve composition. It was on “getting the oil flowing,” “capturing” a leader, and “running” a country. That language echoes past interventions driven less by systemic necessity than by political theatre.

Consider Panama in 1989. Manuel Noriega was removed under the banner of drug enforcement and democracy, but the operation also served as a dramatic assertion of U.S. dominance at the end of the Cold War. It was fast, overwhelming, and symbolic. It did not secure a currency regime or an economic doctrine, it secured a moment. Or look at Iraq in 2003. The war was sold on weapons of mass destruction, later reframed around democracy, and endlessly speculated about oil. Yet two decades on, the invasion weakened U.S. legitimacy, destabilized a region, and did nothing to fortify dollar hegemony. If anything, it accelerated global scepticism about American stewardship.

Even the narcotics pretext, often invoked in Latin American interventions, has a thin empirical record. In the 1980s, drug rhetoric justified militarization from Colombia to Panama without reducing U.S. demand or overdose deaths. Today, the opioid crisis is driven primarily by synthetic drugs produced and trafficked through networks far removed from Venezuelan territory. History shows that “drug wars” abroad are politically useful narratives at home, not effective strategies.

Seen through this lens, the Venezuela story, real or rumoured, fits a familiar pattern. Oil becomes a prop. Currency becomes a post-hoc justification. The underlying logic is exhibitionist, demonstrate power, punish defiance, create a made for television victory. That is politics of spectacle, not monetary statecraft.

And the irony is sharp. If the lesson absorbed by the rest of the world is that challenging U.S. financial dominance invites coercion, the rational response is not submission, it is diversification. After the freezing of Russian reserves in 2022, central banks openly discussed reducing exposure to dollar assets. That debate did not require bombs, it required precedent. Force, far from preserving hegemony, can hasten the search for exits.

The dollar remains dominant because it is useful, liquid, and embedded in institutions people trust. Those qualities cannot be enforced at gunpoint. They can only be maintained by law, openness, and predictability. History tells us that when empires confuse spectacle for strategy, they win headlines and lose foundations.

If the goal were truly to defend the dollar, the battlefield would be regulatory standards, financial plumbing, and digital rails, not Caracas. You can seize a refinery. You can even topple a government. But you cannot bomb a payment protocol.

Cheers.

ravivarmmankkanniappan@12520501263.1491° N, 101.6534° E

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A World Too Certain to Be Human

 

A World Too Certain to Be Human

Have you noticed how much we try to control life these days? From planning every detail of a wedding to predicting the gender of a baby before birth, we seem obsessed with certainty. We track, test, forecast, and optimize everything, as if life were a spreadsheet waiting to be perfected. We want guarantees, about careers, relationships, children, success, and even happiness. But when everything becomes predictable, when uncertainty is treated as a flaw rather than a feature, do we lose the magic of living itself?

For thousands of years, people have spoken about equality. From the wisdom of the Vedas to Greek philosophers and Renaissance thinkers, the idea of fairness between men and women has never been absent from human thought. Yet when we look around today, the world still does not feel fully equal. Beneath modern language, progressive laws, and polished speeches, old preferences and power structures quietly persist. One of the clearest examples appears in how societies celebrate birth. Many families still hope for “at least one boy.” This is not just a private wish, but researchers have documented it across cultures and continents. Inheritance laws, family lineage, social security in old age, and long-standing customs have shaped this mindset for centuries, making it feel natural even when it is deeply biased.

Ancient Tamil wisdom cuts through this obsession with remarkable clarity. Thiruvalluvar never speaks of sons or daughters when he speaks of wealth. “Of all the wealth a man can earn, none is greater than having wise children,” he says. And in another couplet, he writes, “Sweeter than nectar is the porridge stirred by your child’s tiny hands.” The joy he describes is universal, untouched by gender. What matters is character, affection, and wisdom, not chromosomes. Yet in our age of gender reveals, prenatal predictions, and social pressure, we often forget this simple truth and reduce life to checklists rather than relationships.

The lives of Kadambini Ganguly and Anandibai Joshi remind us how powerful uncertainty can be when met with courage. In the late nineteenth century, when women in India were barely encouraged to read, these two women dared to imagine something almost unthinkable, becoming doctors trained in Western medicine. Their journeys were filled with uncertainty, ridicule, resistance, and isolation. Anandibai Joshi traveled across oceans to study medicine at a time when crossing the seas was considered taboo, especially for women. She faced illness, cultural alienation, and constant scrutiny, yet she persisted. Kadambini Ganguly fought not only patriarchal norms but also colonial prejudice, enduring public attacks on her character simply because she stepped into a profession reserved for men. Neither woman could predict success. There were no role models to follow, no assurance of acceptance. And yet, precisely because they embraced uncertainty, they transformed history. Their triumph was not merely personal, it expanded what society believed was possible for women.

Steve Jobs’ life offers a powerful modern echo of this idea. He was adopted at birth, unwanted by his biological parents, and raised without knowing where his life would lead. By today’s standards, his beginnings were uncertain, even imperfect. Yet that uncertainty shaped him in profound ways. Had his life been “optimized” from the start, had every variable been controlled and predicted, the world might never have seen Apple. Jobs himself famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” His story reminds us that unpredictability is not a flaw in life, but it is its fuel.

Jobs’ journey was filled with detours that no life plan would have approved. He dropped out of college, wandered into a calligraphy class out of pure curiosity, and later admitted that it seemed useless at the time. Yet that single, unplanned decision shaped the typography of the Macintosh and changed digital design forever. He was fired from the very company he founded, a public humiliation that felt like failure. But that loss led him to new ventures, new insights, and ultimately to a return that redefined Apple. None of this could have been scripted. Creativity, innovation, and meaning emerged not from control, but from openness to the unknown.

History repeatedly warns us what happens when humans try to control life too tightly. China’s one child policy, designed to engineer economic stability and population control, left behind an aging society and deeply imbalanced gender ratios. The attempt to regulate birth through policy ignored the cultural realities beneath it, producing long-term consequences that continue to haunt the nation. Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn program sought to manufacture a “perfect race,” reducing human beings to biological experiments in the name of ideology. Both arose from the same dangerous belief, that life can be designed without moral consequence. When humans play god, the cost is always paid by future generations.

Tamil literature captures this danger through moral storytelling rather than statistics. In Silappathikaram, Kannagi’s quiet strength turns into righteous fire when justice is denied. Her husband is wrongfully punished, and her anguish burns Madurai. not out of blind rage, but out of moral clarity. Her story reminds us that a society without fairness, without ethical grounding, will eventually collapse no matter how powerful it appears. Control without justice becomes destruction, and authority without compassion leads only to ruin.

The twentieth century gave the world another towering lesson in the power of uncertainty through Nelson Mandela’s life. Mandela entered politics knowing full well that the path ahead offered no guarantees. When he chose resistance against apartheid, he did not know whether he would live to see freedom, or whether his struggle would succeed at all. He spent twenty seven years in prison, cut off from family, stripped of freedom, and subjected to profound isolation. At any point, he could have chosen bitterness or surrender. Instead, he embraced an inner uncertainty, uncertain about outcomes, but certain about principles.

Mandela’s greatest triumph was not merely the end of apartheid, but the moral imagination he displayed afterward. When he emerged from prison, he surprised the world by choosing reconciliation over revenge. Many expected anger, retaliation, and bloodshed. Instead, Mandela chose forgiveness, a path far riskier than vengeance. There was no assurance that forgiveness would work, no data to guarantee peace. Yet that willingness to step into the unknown saved South Africa from civil war and offered the world a rare example of moral courage. Mandela’s life teaches us that uncertainty is not weakness, it is often the birthplace of ethical greatness.

Today, science once again tempts us with control. Gene editing, embryo screening, and the idea of “designer babies” promise a future where disease is eliminated and traits are selected. While medical advances can and should reduce suffering, the dream of choosing intelligence, creativity, or personality remains largely science fiction. More importantly, it raises a deeper question, even if we could choose everything, should we? Intelligence without empathy, strength without humility, and perfection without struggle risk creating hollow lives. The stories that inspire us, Mandela’s endurance, Anandibai’s courage, Kannagi’s justice, Jobs’ creativity, are powerful precisely because they were uncertain.

Thiruvalluvar reminds us that knowledge without ethics is empty, “Learning is worthless if it does not shape conduct.” He also says, “Compassion enlarges the heart.” These lines speak directly to our age of technology. Innovation without humanity becomes tyranny. Progress without empathy becomes oppression. Steve Jobs understood this balance instinctively. He believed technology should serve human intuition and beauty, not dominate it. That is why Apple products were not just functional but emotional, imperfect yet deeply human.

Some voices today claim men are in crisis, pointing to higher suicide rates among men. This is a serious issue that demands compassion, mental health support, and cultural change, but not a return to rigid gender hierarchies or nostalgic dominance. Panic driven narratives help no one. Similarly, sensational headlines about the Y chromosome disappearing ignore scientific reality. Fear thrives where understanding is absent, and fear often pushes societies toward greater control rather than deeper care.

The deeper issue beneath all these debates is our discomfort with uncertainty. We want guarantees, about gender, success, happiness, identity, and meaning. But life has never worked that way. Mandela did not know he would become a symbol of freedom rather than a forgotten prisoner. Kadambini Ganguly did not know she would open doors for generations of women. Anandibai Joshi did not live long enough to see the full impact of her courage. Jobs did not know he would be fired from his own company or that the setback would lead him back stronger. Kannagi did not know her silence would become legend. Thiruvalluvar did not prescribe formulas, he offered values.

When we remove surprise from life, we remove wonder. We lose the unexpected laugh, the unplanned question, the sudden turn that reshapes everything. A world where every child is designed, every path preselected, and every outcome predicted may be efficient, but it would be lifeless. The human spirit grows through friction, uncertainty, and risk. Equality itself has always advanced not through certainty, but through brave individuals willing to step into the unknown.

Life’s beauty lies in its unpredictability. When we try to control every detail, gender, genetics, destiny, we risk losing the very essence of being human. As Thiruvalluvar reminds us, the joy of a child’s touch is sweeter than nectar, and as Kannagi shows, justice and virtue matter more than power or perfection. Nelson Mandela teaches us that forgiveness can be stronger than revenge, Kadambini Ganguly and Anandibai Joshi show us that courage can rewrite social limits, and Steve Jobs proves that creativity flourishes where certainty ends.

Perhaps the wisest thing we can do is loosen our grip, trust life a little more, and allow its surprises to shape us into something better than we ever planned to be.

CHEERS.

ravivarmmankkanniappan@1427030120263.0567° N, 101.5851° E