Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
-
Articles
Pre-Macaulay Models of Teaching
Published on 3rd July, 2022, in Mid-day. Today, anyone can go to a school or an institute, where a set of subjects are taught by experts who follow a fixed timetable, an approved curriculum, a standardised method of teaching and evaluation. That was not the case before. In the old Indian model, your caste determined…
-
Articles
Two Gods In Our Brain
Published on 26th June, 2022, in Mid-day. We are familiar with that false idea that the left brain grants us logical thinking and mathematics and the right brain grants us creativity and abstract thinking, and that students of science and commerce have left brain orientation while students of the arts have right brain orientation. In…
-
Articles
Economics Of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva That Businessmen Across the World Need to Know
Published on 25th June, 2022, in Economic Times. The Puranas were composed 1500 years ago, between 5th and 10th century AD. What differentiates the Puranas from the Vedas is the value placed on temple worship, pilgrimages and stories to express a philosophy. The chief protagonists are the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva and their…
-
Articles
Shiva from Tibet?
Published on 19th June, 2022, in Mid-day. The idea that Tibet was the homeland of Aryas came from Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who in the late 19th century, founded the famous Arya Samaj. He valued the Vedas as the original source of Hinduism, but saw Puranas including worship of Shiva-linga as a degeneration of Arya-dharma, a…
-
Articles
How Hinduism Flourished in Kerala
Published on 18th June, 2022, in Times of India. As per legend, the western coast of India, Kerala especially, came into being when the sea recoiled in horror on receiving Parashuram’s axe soaked with the blood of the many kings he had killed. He had killed them because they had failed to uphold dharma. They…
-
Articles
Why Did Medieval Indian Cavalries Shun the Parthian Shot In Archery?
Published on 17th June, 2022, in The Hindu. In one retelling of the epic Ramayana, Ram was so righteous that even though he knew Ravana’s weak spot was his navel, he kept shooting arrows at Ravana’s head, in keeping with Kshatriya dharma. Exasperated, Hanuman got his father, the wind god, to send a fierce breeze…
-
Articles
Burning Lanka in Odisha
Published on 12th June, 2022, in Mid-day. Ravana-podi means burning effigies of Ravana. In the Gangetic plains, this happens at the end of autumn Navaratri after the rains on Vijaya Dashami. In Odisha’s Dasapalla, Nayagarh district, the same happens at the end of the spring Navaratri before the rains on Ram Navami. However, in another…
-
Articles
Divine Mathematics
Published on 11th June, 2022, in Economic Times. People often ask, if Aryabhatta invented zero, how did people count Ravana’s ten heads and Gandhari’s hundred heads before that. It is one of those foolish WhatsApp “mysteries” for people who do not realise number systems predated the invention of the number zero. For example, ten can…
-
Articles
Mahabharata in Jataka
Published on 5th June, 2022, in Mid-day. While some see Mahabharata as history, others see Mahabharata as an epic born of a common pool of folk stories that was shared by Buddhist Jatakas also. Here are four stories that share plots with the Mahabharata as a result. The first is the Vidura Jataka. Here we…
-
Articles
What Our Upside-Down Ancestors Say About Justice and Dharma
Published on 4th June, 2022, in Times of India. Though dharma is often translated as justice in modern translation, there is a fundamental error in such an understanding. Dharma presupposes karma, hence rebirth. Justice does not. In the dharma discourse, we are born with karmic debt that we have to either repay or reclaim. That…
-
Articles
Flying Mountains Do Not Lie
Published on 29th May, 2022, in Mid-day. Nationalists want to believe that Hinduism existed homogeneously across the Indian subcontinent (Akhand Bharat) since time immemorial. However, everyone who studies history knows this is not true. Harappan civilisation thrived 4,000 years ago only in Northwest India. Vedic civilisation emerged 3,000 years ago only in Gangetic plains after…
-
Articles
Full-and-Final Settlement Before God
Published on 28th May, 2022, in Economic Times. We often forget that the word cash is derived from the Sanskrit word “Karshapana”. Indians invented the idea of money long ago. Irregularly-shaped copper coins were used by merchants for banking 2500 years ago, about the time coins began being used in ancient Greece and China. Even…
-
Articles
Claiming the Earth as Nation
Published on 22nd May, 2022, in Mid-day. In prehistoric times, people captured a hunting ground or agricultural land or pastures by claiming that is where the ancestor was buried. Burial was an important ritual invented by ancient people to claim rights over lands. Later, they invented stories to claim land. The Maori say that their…
-
Articles
Kashmir Before Islam
Published on 21st May, 2022, in Times of India. The Muslims say that Suleiman (Solomon) came to Kashmir on a flying throne (takht), sat on a hill in Srinagar, and got his djinns to clear the lake, get rid of barbarians and create a land of the true faith. But Islam actually emerged in Arabia…
-
Articles
Out of the Woods
Published on 20th May, 2022, in The Hindu. The word ‘history’ as we know it today, which means the scientific evidence-based understanding of the past, is less than 200 years old. The Sanskrit words ‘itihasa-purana’, both of which are translated as history, are over 2500 years old, and refer to cultural memories. But itihasa is…