University was great for intellectual stimulation, because there were always interesting people around, and interesting discussions.

I haven't seen anything similar in the real world (which excepts online.)

Online still hasn't trumped university for me. In university it's practically impossible to not meet people that are very different from yourself, from completely different backgrounds, with polar opposite views from yours.

On the internet, simply because of the nature of similar people congregating, it's hard to avoid groupthink and meet people who are wildly different than you.

Just to be clear: I didn't say online trumps university.

The formatting is hell to read and Googling for a better one goes back to that copy. But it's worth it!

Some URL fiddling produces http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style...

A little easier, but I'm not up to the masochism required to go any further. :)

I much prefer this version, combined with Readability or some other tool (Safari Reader here). I would like to see the original URL changed to this (not sure if that’s possible).

The original URL + Readability work fine for me.

It's not just poor formatting, the person who wrote this simply doesn't speak English well. For example:

And this majority has never been able to fathom or accept the loner a mentally sound individual with non-aligned sensibilities,who,for reasons genetic and/or nurtured,simply views the world differently,and correspondingly resides in it unlike the rest.Know man is an island,too.

It's unnecessarily convoluted but correct, eg "accept the loner [as] a mentally sound individual" is a legitimate construction and "[K]now man" is a pun.

Philosophers tend to write this way. It's just that it's not punchy and to-the-point, like business writing or advertising.

Know man is obviously a pun but there should be an as or a comma after loner. I'm a philosophy minor so I understand flowery language but I don't accept it when it confuses the point. Hume managed to be quite intelligible despite living hundreds of years ago.

That's a nice little pun on "No man is an island."

Well he has Indianized English Grammatical style.

When I cleaned up the quote for my blog, I did it as: "accept the loner: a mentally-sound individual with non-aligned sensibilities"

Easier to read with the Readability bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

My eyes would bleed all to frequently if this gem didn't exist.

Or you could do ctrl+mweehlup ?

I suggest the http://www.readability.com/ bookmarklet. There's still some missing punctuation (source issues) but it's quite a bit better

Readability is great for reformatting most articles. It's also excellent for anyone with a visual impairment, or simply when the font is too small on a monitor. There are plug-ins that use it for firefox and chrome.

It's a mobile optimized version. The online version of this paper is very badly designed. Sorry, but yes, the article is definitely worth it.

Another option is to resize browser window width, to get about 10-13 words per line; and crtl-+ for larger text.

I couldn't read it in its current form. Readability redux really does a good job making it easier to read.

Do articles like this always emerge at a certain point in the boom bust cycle or tied to politics? Because it seems like right now the societal "noise" has peaked, and the 3/4 populace needs a refresher.

It's funny that this shares the HN front page with this Wired piece today, proving many of the Times' points: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683618

Despite the ridiculous punctuation and formatting, and Indianized English, its really refreshing to get a different perspective. Just pinch and zoom;)