Inanna

Published on 31st May, 2020, in Mid-day. Nearly 4,000 years ago, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates was known as Mesopotamia. It is now called Iraq. This is where some of the world's most ancient civilisations such as Sumer, Assyria and Babylon thrived. Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian society was familiar with queer people—from homosexuals to transgenders to intersex people. From them rose the world's first queer 'non-binary' superhero. Inanna, the goddess of love, sex and fertility, fell in love with a beautiful man called Dumuzi. He was so beautiful that even her twin sister, the goddess of death, Ereshkigal, fell in love with ..

Published on 26th December, 2019, in The Times of India Two hundred years ago, in America, many white people justified the slavery of Africans arguing that their black skin was the ‘mark of Cain’. That they descended from the first murderer in recorded history. Before that, many Christians in Europe argued that Jews bore the ‘mark of Cain’ which is why they had peculiar features like hooked nose, and they circumcised themselves, and kept wandering like exiles, unable to settle anywhere. Thus the ‘mark of Cain’ – a mythological idea – was used to justify the slavery trade and antisemitism. Mythological ideas do impact in ..

Published on 22nd October, 2016, in Hindustan Times. Fact is everybody’s truth. Fiction is nobody’s truth. Myth is somebody’s truth. It’s a cultural truth, a religious truth, a nation’s truth, one that binds a community together by giving them a common worldview to function within. Science can tell you how the world functions, but only myth can tell you why it functions the way it does. The idea of God, for example, is a cultural truth: it is not part of Buddhism, Jainism, or secularism. Likewise, the idea of prophets makes no sense in the Hindu worldview. The idea of hero, villain and victim is ..