Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
How Brahmins helped create temple-states and kingdoms in South India and Southeast Asia
It is fashionable nowadays to use the word ‘Brahmin’ with contempt … But this outrage (real and imagined) must not blind us to the contribution of Brahmins …
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Articles
The goddess of sailors
Most images of boats in Indian art are related to ponds and rivers, and not the sea, such as images of Ram and Sita crossing the Ganga, or Krishna and Radha on Yamuna…
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Articles
Trishanku in America or those betwixt and between
Trishanku is a famous character in Hindu mythology who hangs upside down between heaven and earth, belonging nowhere…
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Articles
Cultural leadership: hierarchy in the east and individualism in the west
A cultural understanding of leadership, an appreciation of cultural differences, work at a collective or statistical level, not at an individual level…
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Articles
Defining Hinduism
WHO IS A HINDU? How a quest to define the faith has resulted in a shift of power away from the common man…
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Articles
The myth of Cultural Marxism
While Classical, or Material, Marxism is based on tangible wealth (haves and have-nots), Cultural Marxism is based on intangible structures of power (privileged and unprivileged)…
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Articles
Intolerance: the Movie
Nobody is interested in countering the menace. Everybody seems to be more bothered about branding!…
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Articles
How many gods must our judicial system please?
Hindu wisdom seems incompatible with our courts, where the state almost becomes a jealous God who can throw whoever it deems unfit into hell…
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Interviews
Why I Insist On Calling Myself a Mythologist
Devdutt Pattanaik refuses to accept colonial definitions of the words ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’. For him, mythology is the study of a subjective truth of people that is communicated through stories, symbols and rituals…
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Articles
New avatar for old crusades
For the Muslim world secularism, rationality, liberalism and democracy are just new avatars of their old Christian foes…
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Articles
Indianomix – Mythical or Modern
This is an exclusive excerpt from Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya’s book “Indianomix,” published by Random House India on Dec. 6. This excerpt is adapted from the fourth section of Chapter 5, “Mythical or Modern?”…
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Articles
You still eat with your hands
What is okay for me need not be okay for you.What is not acceptable is you putting down what is okay for me…
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Articles
Dum Maro Dum
Putting conditions and restricting the use of certain substances is not as helpful as it should be.After,all we love to consume what is supposedly “bad” for us,dont we ?…
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Articles
The Constructions of Holy Books
The modern cosmopolitan urban Hindu often overlooks this history and these divisions perhaps because it is so much convenient to ‘unify the diversity’ of Hinduism through one book…
