2016 / Articles
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End of Enlightenment?
‘A WISE man is calm in fortune and misfortune. He does not separate good times and bad times. He lets go of sukkha, the feeling of joy, and dukkha, the feeling of sorrow.’
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Reverse devotion
The most peculiar form of devotion is called reverse devotion, or devotion of the enemy. This is viparit-bhakti.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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’.
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A Jain Jatayu
Many Jain scholars have retold the Ramayana epic. Often, there are tales on the past lives of many key characters.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Adinath Temple of Ranakpur
The Jain temple enshrines a sage, who has attained the highest state of realisation.
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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?
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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.
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When Saraswati met Indus
Decoding the correlation between the hymns of the Rig Veda and the artefacts of the Indus Valley civilisation.
