or: how to celebrate an idea when you don’t know — Republic Day is a public holiday in India. The country marks and celebrates the date on which the Constitution of India came into effect on 26 January 1950. India’s Constitution, created under a Constituent Assembly and a Drafting Committee masterfully chaired by Bhimrao Ambedkar, is a truly remarkable, enlightened, and…

(living the wonders of humanity’s arts and crafts) — Getting the feel of a culture has been an essential part of my relocation history ever since I started wandering about on Mother Earth. When I say that it’s about getting the feel of a culture, you might wonder what culture actually is and what are its constituent elements —…

(Lessons taken from Balkrishna Doshi and the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation) Here is a quick note on a few of the life lessons that I learned from my conversations with the work of Balkrishna V Doshi (1927–2023), arguably one of the defining figures of modern Indian design, design philosophy, and architecture. one…

(How to find meaning in life through the practice of compassion) The present story is a brief, personal rendering of the 36 Practices for a More Meaningful Life by Exercising Compassion by Lama Gyalsé Tokmé Zangpo (official spelling: Thogs med bzang po), a mystic, philosopher, and epistemologist who taught in…

(twelve Medium stories that nobody wanted to read) In case you have missed them, I have posted a list of my 12 most successful Medium stories on a previous occasion: A reader’s digest of my 2022 writings (twelve samples — in case you’ve missed them)francis-laleman.medium.com But offering you a list of my successes doesn’t mean that all went well in 2022. There were other stories…

(twelve samples — in case you’ve missed them) Here is a quick 12-step journey through my most successful Medium stories of 2022, in case you’ve missed them.

(a letter to my readers) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield…

(a brief note in memory of Maxwell Fraser, 1957–2022) There is this thing about someone passing just on or before Xmas. We have a tendency to remember things that happen at Xmastide much more. Take the fall of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania in 1989. And I will never forget…

(and what can it mean for us in these turbulent times) — I have written about Daoism before (for samples, see here and here), but more often as an excursion from my thoughts on Buddhist practice and phenomenology than as a subject of its own. Perhaps it is time to reconsider this. Perhaps I must be more precise and pay my respects…