Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Can Hanuman Protect Us From Political Sorcery?
Published on 27th April, 2022, in Times of India. Hanuman Chalisa is a 400-year-old Awadhi poem of forty (chalis) verses, aimed at invoking Hanuman to get health, wealth, wisdom, security, and success. Jai Hanuman Gyan gun sagar. Jai Kapis Tihun lok ujagar. Victory to Hanuman who is the ocean of wisdom and virtue. Victory to…
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Articles
Bankura Horse for Dharma Thakur
Published on 24th April, 2022, in Mid-day. Terracotta Bankura horses serve as decoration today. But for many centuries, these were offerings made in rural Bengal to the god Dharma who is formless and all-powerful. Stories about Dharma Thakur were written in the 17th and 18th century, in the Mangal Kavya tradition of Bengal where specific…
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Articles
The Jogi As Seasonal Hermit
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in The Hindu. In North India, especially in the Gangetic plains, in what is now Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, we find songs known as Baramasa. It is a 12-month cycle in poetry, expressing the loneliness and longing of a woman in a village, for a husband who is travelling…
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Articles
What Genghis Khan Can Teach Us About Secular Values
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in the Times of India. China today has a very problematic relationship with two provinces on its west. To the Northwest is Xinjiang, home of Uighur Muslims. To its Southwest is Tibet, home of Vajrayana Buddhism. In both these provinces, there are beliefs in forces that are greater than the…
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Articles
Brahmin Father, Dalit Mother
Published on 17th April, 2022, in Mid-day. From 16th-Century Kerala, comes the folktale, some say legend, called Parayi petta panthirukulam that informs us about a Dalit woman who bears a Brahmin man twelve illustrious children. Vararuchi, a learned Brahmin courtier, could understand the language of birds. They told him that he was fated to marry…
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Articles
Modern Management Is Essentially Violent As It Is Based on Consumption
Published on 16th April, 2022, in Economic Times. Consumption is violence. Bhoga (food) demands bali (sacrifice). Something has to be destroyed to produce the food that you consume. This is natural law. So the elements are consumed by trees. Trees are consumed by animals. Animals are consumed by animals. Nature is designed around consumption that…
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Articles
Female Voice in Rig Veda
Published on 10th April, 2022, in Mid-day. The Rig Vedic hymns were composed over 3,000 years ago, most probably by children of men who migrated into India with horses from Central Asia, and married local women. The hymns mostly reveal the valours of the fathers, but occasionally the longings of the mother. The marriage hymn…
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Articles
How Hindus of Andaman and Nicobar Rejected Religious Bigotry,
Published on 9th April, 2022, in Times of India. Located where the Andaman Sea meets the Bay of Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar is a string of over 500 islands, of which only over 30 are inhabited. The northern islands are called Andaman and its original inhabitants comprise the “Negrito” tribes (Onge, Sentinelese, Jarawa) who came…
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Articles
Boars Were, Once, Respected
Published on 3rd April, 2022, in Mid-day. Hunting and eating wild swine or pigs was common in ancient India, a sport of kings. Hindus should have no problem with pork therefore. However, pork dishes in India today are linked to either tribal or Christian communities of India, and those with a strong European influence. Pork…
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Articles
No, It’s Neither a Sin Nor Un-Indian to Drink Alchohol
Published on 1st April, 2022, in Times of India. There are two types of alcohol. One produced by fermenting flowers, fruits and grain (Desi Daru). The other produced by distilling (English Daru). The former was produced in kitchens across India for thousands of years, offered to the many villages gods and goddesses, before the rise…
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Articles
The West Believes History Has a Direction, a Purpose, an End. But Indian Worldview Is Different
Published on 2nd April, 2022, in Economic Times. Conventional leadership frameworks begin with the notion that there is a problem to be solved, which leads to strategizing, planning, organising, implementing, regulating, motivating, enabling, and reviewing along the way. This model is linear: there is a target at the end. This model is based on Western…
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Books
Hindi: The Boys who Fought
Translated version of The Boys Who Fought: The Mahabharata for Children…
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Articles
Sankhya and Yoga
Published on 27th March, 2022, in Mid-day. Sankhya and Yoga form the building blocks of Indian philosophy. Sankhya means “enumeration”. To understand this philosophy, we have to compare and contrast it with yoga. Yoga means “union” with “vi-yoga” meaning separation and “su-yoga” meaning “good alignment”. Now, when things are separated, you can list them into…
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Articles
An Eclipsing of History That Frightens Many Hindus
Published on 26th March, 2022, in Times of India. People forget. If you go to Northwest Pakistan today, the region on either side of the Khyber pass, few will remember that in the Bronze Age, 4000 years ago, it connected Harappan cities to settlements in North Afghanistan, which was the source of the much traded…
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Articles
The Jain Monk and His Saka Saviours
Published on 25th March, 2022, in The Hindu About two thousand years ago incidents took place which involved the Jain community that inspired an epic ballad that was put down in writing a thousand years later in Prakrit and local languages. This was the Kalak Acharya Katha that became the standard appendix of the main…