The Philosophers

India has been the birth place of Philosophy and some of the greatest philosophers of all times. Philosophy is the rational investigation of questions about existence, knowledge and ethics and the learning’s are applicable in all fields equally (including mathematics, computer science, particle physics and so on – hope the Large Hadron Collider experiment currently underway at CERN will throw more light on the philosophy of the universe!)

Off all the great philosophers whose body of work I have been able to touch upon, three stand out for their original thinking. The first is Lord Krishna – his work Bhaghwad Gita is arguably the most influential and impactful philosophical work ever written so far. For centuries philosophers of all ilks have tried to interpret it completely but everyone had only partial success. The second person is Swami Vivekananda, whose body of work is quite extensive and had an influence far and wide. The third person in the list is Osho Rajanish, who is one of the great original and one of the most controversial thinkers of our times. I am yet to find a person who has read his work and has come out in-impressed. However, I have found a lot of people who hate him without even read a single book written by him. Though I do not agree with all that he has written but the originality and relevance of perspective is great (in fact, had I agreed with him, I would have failed him as his core teaching is ‘think for yourself’!) Apart from these three, I have read at least a dozen more philosophers but all of them lacked originality though some of them were brilliant in their explanations.