Europe
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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…
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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…
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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…
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How India lost its rich maritime tradition to Europeans
Published on 22nd March, 2019, in Economic Times. Sea travel is mentioned in the Buddhist Jataka tales but not in the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, perhaps because the former was patronised by mercantile communities (vaishyas) and the latter by…
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Herding Indian cats in a non-compliant culture
Published on 9th February, 2019, in Economic Times. One of the things that you notice when you travel to countries like Australia and Singapore is the obsession with rules and regulations, and the rigorous implementation of systems
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Bypassing the womb
In Puranic literature, we come across the concept of ayonija, someone who is not born from the womb, and consequently, is able to bypass or rise above the cycle of birth and death
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Who is a Hindu? Hindu ship of Theseus
Traditions may change every few years, but one school of thought says the essence of Hinduism will remain the same.
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Mountain of Vedas
Through stories of the mountain of Vedas and the blinking gods, Hindus were made aware of the scale of the universe and its wisdom, very different from the finite, closed word of ancient Greeks, inherited by the church
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Is post-truth same as myth?
Western myth, or the dominant worldview that shapes the long history of the West, remains singular and linear
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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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‘Lazy minds often confuse mythology with history’
In this interview with Latha Srinivasan, author Devdutt Pattanaik talks about the central role mythologies play in shaping societies, and how liberal values can be derived from tradition.
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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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How technology has turned the State into an all-powerful God
The only difference between Abrahamic religions and nation-state structure is that God is a supernatural entity established by faith in the former, while the state is an artificial structure established through reason in the latter.
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Who is a Hindu? The making of Hindu anger
Can a religion be objectively criticised? Whose criticism must be taken seriously — the outsider’s or the insider’s?
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Bromance is a strong part of Indian tradition, and different from same-sex attraction
Same-sex love is a strong part of Indian tradition and needs to be distinguished from same-sex attraction.