Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator

Articles

  • Reverse devotion

    Reverse devotion

    The most peculiar form of devotion is called reverse devotion, or devotion of the enemy. This is viparit-bhakti…

  • Is samosa Indian, or Vedic?

    Is samosa Indian, or Vedic?

    Many ingredients and dishes came to India from foreign lands. Likewise, many ingredients and dishes went from India to foreign lands…

  • Hiss of the PIO Bharat Tyagi

    Hiss of the PIO Bharat Tyagi

    A small group of PIOs, Queen Victoria’s frozen-in-time children, imagine they must save India from Indians…

  • A reminder on the border

    A reminder on the border

    The lesser known Sharada Peeth, a temple in POK, is now a ruin…

  • Has Kalki arrived?

    Has Kalki arrived?

    Whether Trump wins or not, his rise has stripped the West of all its moral snobbery, their strategic use of social justice frameworks to put other countries and cultures on the defensive…

  • 10 best mythological tales from around the world

    10 best mythological tales from around the world

    Equality is not a rational concept, it is a subjective truth, a belief that comes to us from Abrahamic mythology. Likewise the idea of justice comes from Greek mythology…

  • Why bother with icons? (Learn to respect your symbols)

    Why bother with icons? (Learn to respect your symbols)

    We can blame the government and the education system, but how many parents actually take their children to museums, or temples, and play the game of ‘let us identify this god’…

  • A Jain Jatayu

    A Jain Jatayu

    Many Jain scholars have retold the Ramayana epic. Often, there are tales on the past lives of many key characters…

  • The gates of Dwarka

    The gates of Dwarka

    The Krishna in Dwarka has four arms, the upper arms holding the chakra on the left, the gada on the right, and the lower arms holding the shankha on the left and the padma on the right…

  • The hermits of Samanar Hills

    The hermits of Samanar Hills

    Devdutt Pattanaik hikes up a hill in Madurai to map its height in 2,500 years of Jain history in Tamil Nadu…

  • Can we say that Hinduism’s Narasimha is like Hollywood’s Wolverine?

    Can we say that Hinduism’s Narasimha is like Hollywood’s Wolverine?

    We often seek similarities between Indian and western stories. But we must probe the reason…

  • Adinath Temple of Ranakpur

    Adinath Temple of Ranakpur

    The Jain temple enshrines a sage, who has attained the highest state of realisation…

  • The vessel of rasa

    The vessel of rasa

    Typically, in India, we refer to an actor in a play or a character in a book as ‘patra’ which literally means vessel. Why?…

  • Is a yogini a female yogi, or a wild erotic witch?

    Is a yogini a female yogi, or a wild erotic witch?

    The answer depends on what feelings are evoked in you by these four words: yogi, wild, erotic and witch…

  • When Saraswati met Indus

    When Saraswati met Indus

    Decoding the correlation between the hymns of the Rig Veda and the artefacts of the Indus Valley civilisation…

  • Big, bigger, biggest

    Big, bigger, biggest

    The idea of measurement is a key theme in Hindu mythology: three measures of man are not quite the three measures of God…

  • Dr Pattanaik’s Events in the United States of America, 2016

    Dr Pattanaik’s Events in the United States of America, 2016

    The list of Dr Pattanaik’s events in the United States of America, dated between late September, 2016 and early October, 2016…

  • Recommended Reads

    Recommended Reads

    A list of books written by Dr Pattanaik to be highligted for the US Tour…