Notes of an Overthinker

  “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion” ―  Voltaire Perhaps one of the most famous thought experiment ever devised is the trolley problem. It is said to be the classic representation of the clash between the two schools of thought in the western philosophy  - utilitarianism and deontology. The problem states that a trolley is running down a track and on the track there are five people tied up and unable to move. There is an alternative track on which a single person is tied up. You are standing at a lever that can change the direction of the trolley to the alternate track. Your choices are to either do nothing and let the trolley kill five people or to pull the lever and divert the trolley where it kills one person. The dilemma here is that which is the more ethical option? Upon facing the situation, I assume, many people would choose to pull the lever. I myself might end up doing the same. However, t here are m...

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ―  Thomas Jefferson In the times that we suppose are unprecedented, it is not the ubiquitously luring dangers of the pandemic that scare me the most but it is the news; something that we are more exposed to than the disease itself.  Open any news channel at any time (although maybe when they are actually reporting a piece of news and not discussing celebrity hairstyles or hooking up actresses with cricketers or reporting an Instagram video to be the best thing on the internet today) or read any column of any newspaper and you will find the tone of the report to resound that of someone telling their plight or sharing their joy or venting their anger or ranting their frustration. This may not seem a much of a problem as doing all that is the job of a reporter but it is a huge problem. And that is so because when a news report sounds like a story, it means that the reporter has...