See, preachers—like everyone else—filter their teachings through layers of personal experience. Some are gentle guides, others take a hard line, but most fall somewhere in the middle. That’s not surprising. We all lean on what we know: our stories, our histories, our mistakes. It’s just that, for religious teachers, this bias carries extra weight. Sometimes their perspective anchors a community, offering stability and belonging. Other times, accumulated bias can make a religion feel rigid or exclusionary—raising walls instead of building bridges.
There’s an intricate relationship between philosophy and religion—one that’s often faded from daily life, maybe because it’s just hard for most people to grasp or use in a practical sense. That’s where the main character enters: PREACHERS. They’re the interpreters, translating religion into rituals and everyday guidelines. On the surface, that all seems calm, maybe even comforting. But it isn’t always so simple.
But bias, on its own, isn’t always bad. It gives people a sense of identity and keeps tradition alive. Still, complications arise when personal bias edges out openness or drowns out plural voices. Suddenly, religion’s hopeful message gets tangled with narrow views. Yet, even then, radical views rarely bloom from bias alone. Social pressures, political strife, or feelings of displacement all add fuel—so let’s not pretend it’s all about the preachers.
Where does philosophy fit in? It doesn’t just ask us to question; it invites us to wrestle with paradoxes, to sit with uncertainties, to explore meaning where answers might never be clear. Philosophy doesn’t compete with faith—it walks alongside it, a companion or sometimes a gentle challenger.
Truth isn’t always a bright, singular light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it’s a mosaic—multi-colored, shifting as we move, built from different lives and beliefs. Maybe the truth will always be just out of reach, but our search for it—our willingness to ask, listen, reflect—defines who we are.
Two recent campaigns deserve attention from marketing enthusiasts, one of Campa Cola (reenergised by the Reliance Group) and of Tata Sampann's species. The challenges these two brands face are too distinct from one another. Campa, on the one hand, aims to fight the global brands like Pepsi and Coca-Cola, whereas Sampann looks to create a market in indian spices that has been dominated by local players like MDH and Everest. However, their strategies have something in common: getting the distributors to stock more of their products on the shelves. Campa is offering the distributors twice the margins, while Sampann is leveraging its vast portfolio to make stocking only Tata products a win for the distributors. Image credit: Economic Times To understand why this is happening, and what makes this interesting, one has to look back on the history of marketing, more specifically the shift from a push to a pull-based marketing, where the focus of the brands shifted from pushing their produc...