Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Human Sacrifice to Riots: Political Tools of Control
Published on 22nd August, 2020, in Economic Times. In Meso-America, the Aztecs sacrificed humans to their gods. This was deemed barbaric by Spanish conquistadors who arrived there in the 16th Century. It became the reason to label them savages, justify their conversion into Christianity and market the conquest of their land as a civilizing mission.…
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Articles
Let Me Sleep And Dream
Published on 28th June, 2020, in Mid-day. A long time ago, in the rivers and ponds of Europe, there lived a special creature called Ondine. She, one day, fell in love with a human. He was a handsome man; but not the most faithful of men. When she discovered he was unfaithful, her heart broke.…
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Articles
Being J. K. Rowling Today
Published on 14th June, 2020, in Mid-day. As long as JK Rowling tweeted against Trump, she was the darling of the liberals. Then, she expressed her views on transgenders, in December 2019, in a tweet that created an outrage. Suddenly, the creator of Harry Potter series was an evil oppressor. The wicked witch. A TERF…
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Articles
View: Fake News & Politics & Economics Of Faith
Published on 13th June, 2020, in the Economic Times. The Knights Templar was an order of warrior knights that existed nearly 900 years ago. It owed its allegiance to the Christian Church. In its 200-year history, it also established one of the first banking institutions in the world, before it was brutally suppressed by French…
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Articles
Did the Harappan know to write?
Published on 24th May, 2020, in Mid-day. Writing in India emerges only in the Mauryan period, 2,300 years ago. It is in the Ashokan edicts that we find the Brahmi script. Vedic hymns and Buddha’s lectures, before that, were orally transmitted. The Harappan civilisation, 4,000 years ago, with its sophisticated brick cities and sewage system,…
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Articles
Islam’s Agricultural Contribution
Published on 17th April, 2020, in the Economic Times Nabi Bansa is a Bengali epic written over 300 years ago that narrates the tales of Islamic prophets. Here we are told that when Adam was cast out of Eden, he fell to Serendib, the island of Sri Lanka, and then walked across what we now…
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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
Beyond objectives are consequences
Published on 20th March, 2020, in the Economic Times Indian mythology is based on the principle of karma, where every action has an unforeseen reaction. There is no escape from consequences as everything has cause. This Indian paradigm shapes Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. However, this principle is alien to western discourse. The western discourse is…
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Articles
Aryans of the Freedom Struggle
Published on 15th March, 2020, in Mumbai Mirror The British had long justified colonisation using different stories. Before the 1857 Uprising, they said British were saving Hinduism from oppression of Muslim rulers. They propagated the lie that they were using Indian soldiers in Afghanistan not for Company interests but to get the doors of the…
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Articles
Dancing in Krishna consciousness
Published on 19th January, 2020, in Mid-day In America and Europe, one often encounters white men dressed in orange robes, wearing beads and garlands around their neck, vertical marks on their foreheads, holding kettle drums in their hands, singing and dancing—a format that many find colourful, amusing, mildly irritating but harmless. They keep chanting Hare…
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Articles
Did Cain really kill Abel?
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…
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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
Aryavarta
Published on 24th August, 2019, in Mid-day The word ‘Aryavarta’ has become quite popular. There are novels written about it, tele-serials based upon it, and it is increasingly being associated with an extremist Hindu vision of the past. But, the word ‘Aryavarta’ means land of the civilised people. Those who spoke Sanskrit were considered civilised,…
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Articles
Love for Notre Dame
Published on 5th May, 2019, in Mid-day. Notre Dame means Our Lady in French. Though popular as a name for the most famous Parisian church, which recently caught fire, it refers generally to Mary, Mother of Jesus, who plays an important role in Catholic mythology and in medieval European history. The New Testament of the…
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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…