Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
View: The Beginning and End of Using Religion
Published on 6th February, 2021, in The Economic Times. When the Romans went about conquering, they did not destroy local temples or reject local gods. They simply demanded that those conquered owed libations to the Roman emperor, while carrying on with their own religious practices, to show their allegiance to Rome. They even tolerated the…
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Articles
Hindu Parliament and Churning the Ocean of Milk
Published on 6th December, 2020, in Mumbai Mirror. The design of the Parliament building in Delhi was based on yogini shrines of North India that were built over 1,000 years ago. They are circular without a central roof, very different from later temples dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu, where the deity is in an inner…
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Articles
Mahasiddhas Of Tantrik Buddhism
Published on 6th December, 2020, in Mid-day. Buddhism has a vast history of 2,500 years. The earliest form of Buddhism is called Theravada Buddhism. Here, Buddha is visualised as a monk. Gautam Buddha was a prince, who abandoned his kingdom and his family in search of the answer to life’s suffering. He concluded that all…
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Articles
Fox With Nine Tails
Published on 29th November, 2020, in Mid-day. In ancient China, the belief was that as the common red fox grew older, it would get supernatural powers. Its colour would change and its tails would multiply. Therefore, with the passage of time, an older fox would turn white and grow up to nine tails. A white…
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Articles
Ithasa As Propaganda
Published on 31st October, 2020, in Economic Times. If one travels to ancient Egypt, one sees gigantic monuments of Rameses II. These celebrate his victory against the Hittites, in Syria, in 1300 BCE, in the first real use of horse-driven war chariots in the world. However, if one checks with historical records and does a…
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Articles
Menstrual Taboos Are Not Unique to Hinduism
Who is a Hindu? Menstrual taboos are not unique to Hinduism Published on 16th August, 2020, in Mumbai Mirror. In Kerala, there is the story of a group of boys who found a rock bleeding. Those who touched it died instantly. The rest were told to wear women’s clothes and take it to the village,…
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Articles
Fat Buddhist Monks
Published on 26th July, 2020, in Mid-day. This is a story of two fat, Buddhist monks. One story comes from China and the other comes from Thailand. Many people link them with the Buddha, but they come from various local traditions that were absorbed into Buddhism. The first is the popular Laughing Buddha. In China,…
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Articles
How Was Hindu Rajdharma Different From Turuku’s?
Published on 26th April, 2020, in Mumbai Mirror People often speak of a civilisational rupture that took place when Islam came into India. The easiest way to understand this is to go back in history and figure out the different ways in which kingship was perceived, in medieval India and medieval Persia, before 1,000 AD.…
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Articles
View: Why Indians do not innovate
Published on 4th April, 2020, in the Economic Times Despite being highly creative, there are two reasons why Indians did not, and do not, innovate beyond the idea of ‘jugaad’ – contextual improvisations born of limitations that are generally not scalable. The first is caste (jati), and the second is the doctrine of contentment (santosh).…
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Articles
So Many Buddhas
Published on 3rd February, 2020, in The Times of India Buddha was imagined differently by Ambedkar, Savarkar and Nehru. Ambedkar believed that Navayana Buddhism, rooted in social justice, was the only way to stop caste affirming Manuvadi Brahminism that threatened India’s Constitution. Savarkar argued that pacifist Buddhism is the reason why India gave up its…
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Articles
Spot the difference between sign and symbol
Published on 16th December, 2019, in The Hindu The symbol of India in Indian passports and Indian currency notes has been a lion and a spoked-wheel or chakra, both from the Ashoka pillar. Now the government has introduced the lotus on the passport, as part of security measures, we are told, to be replaced by…
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Articles
Pakistani Mythology
Published on 3rd November, 2019, in Mid-day Pakistan was the first modern republic to declare itself ‘Islamic’. It imagines itself as the Eastern edge of Arab civilisation, when in fact, it is the Western edge of Indian civilisation. No Pakistani can buy land in Saudi Arabia, get a Saudi Arabian passport or marry a Saudi…
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Articles
Love in simplified Chinese is without a heart
Published on 18th October, 2019, in Economic Times In China, there are many dialects and a lot of diversity; however, everyone is united by the use of the single script. You can read the same script, in different languages but arrive at the same meaning. This is unlike Indian scripts, where even if different languages…
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Articles
Managing the boss in India
Published on 26th July, 2019, in Economic Times A friend from Southeast Asia once told me that the Chinese have had a civil service and bureaucracy for over a thousand years, complete with a civil service exam. The success of this bureaucracy is based on respect for hierarchy. It is not based on the individual,…
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Articles
Hinduism and Buddhism
Published on 28th April, 2019, in Mumbai Mirror. It was in the 19th Century that the wider world actually heard of the Buddha and Buddhism. Although Buddhism was practised for centuries in the Far East and Southeast Asia, people did not realise that the various images of the Buddha found in these countries belonged to…
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Articles
For all its noble aspirations, social media is pure business.
To make money, you need access to markets. To gain access to markets, you need to make sure that the controller of the market favours you. If the controller of the market shuts the door on you, you have no opportunity to enter the market…