Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
The Intoxicated Elephant
Mada, very specifically, referred to the dark fluid that oozes out of the temple of a male elephant in mushth. This fluid came to embody the spirit of extreme intoxication seen in musht elephants who are highly aggressive and unstoppable…
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Articles
What’s your Sanskaar?
Sanskaar refers to upbringing in India. It is the Key Performance Indicator of parenting to most Indians. It is an indicator of family values. It shows how civilized and cultured we are…
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Articles
Ramayana when it Rains
In Kerala, the traditional month of Karkidakam that falls in July-August is associated with heavy rains. It used to once be a time of scarcity, wetness and disease. There was no work in the fields and staying at home doing nothing meant boredom and quarrels for no reason. To cope with this, people began reading…
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Articles
Karta versus Yajaman
The two words are often used interchangeably but they mean very different things. They represent two levels of leadership…
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Articles
Entrapped by Hero-giri
“To succeed in the marketplace, leave your nose (symbol of ego) behind at home.”…
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Articles
Differential Values
Everyone assumes they have values. Problem is that their values are different from other people’s values…
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Customer is not the Only God
The attribution of ‘devata-hood’ to every thing and everyone was an attempt to draw attention to the uniqueness of all things. Nothing was without value…
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Articles
Don’t ask me that question!
In modern management, we are supposed to look at people only as a set of skills. We hire them for their skills and we pay them for skills provided. Period. Nothing more. Nothing less…
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Articles
Objective fact vs subjective truth: A textbook fight
A quick look at some (not all, one must repeatedly clarify) of recent books about Indian culture authored by Western scholars reveals a rather disturbing tilt in the interpretations of objective data…
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Articles
The Batman Mythos
Seventy-five years ago, a hero was created in North America. His name was Batman…
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Articles
What Is ‘Indianisation’ Of Education?
What we choose to teach our children reveals our prejudices and our hierarchies: it shows us up – what we consider to be true and worthy knowledge and what we dismiss as irrelevant and false – whether we are parochial, global or cosmic in outlook…
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Articles
Meaning of Bhagavan
The word bhagavan is traced to the word bhaga, which means share. Bhaga also means womb, or material delight, or even fate…
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Articles
Mother Brahmi
When I hear stories of how Ganesha acted as a scribe and wrote down the Mahabharata dictated by Vyasa or how Hanuman wrote his Ramayana on leaves, or the name of Rama on the rocks used to build the bridge to Lanka, I wonder what script they used?…
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Articles
Never-complete and Ever-Changing truths
The world is constantly changing. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is fixed. Seasons change. Societies rise and fall. Contexts change. Reasons change. Values come and go. Meanings shift. So ‘the truth’ is never complete and always changing…
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Articles
Pink Things to Good People
We are conditioned to believe the mythology of ‘fairness and justice’ popularized in recent time, and yet despite the complex of well-meaning laws, bad things continue to happen to good people…
