Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Vedanta and LGBTIQ
A selective understanding of the faith by those who control social discourse is the tragedy of Hinduism…
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High cost of diversity
Can we say that India’s diversity is the reason why it seems ‘chaotic’?…
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Who is a Hindu? Forgotten tales of folk-hero gods
Fascinating stories are not being told because of our fixation with Western concept of religion and pan-India narratives…
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How conversation on food and food culture helps us connect with business partners
Food is one of the most powerful tool to discover how people imagine the world around them. It is a mirror of culture…
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Queer Gaze for the Indian Tourist
A manifestation of thought, temples like the hidden verses of epics, have unseen images on their walls. What you understand depends on what you want to see…
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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
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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The spread of Hinduism
By the time the Upanishads were composed, 2,500 years ago, there was a familiarity with the Gangetic Plain…
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Marking your expiry date
Nothing lasts forever. We know that. Yet, culture is all about ‘built to last’…
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Articles
Homophobia is subtle in Gurudom
Most of these gurus do oppose the criminalising of homosexuality, and so appear to be modern. However, they do see homosexuality as a deviance (or its Sanskrit equivalent), or a ‘fluidity’ that needs explanation, management and re-alignment…
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Articles
Yagna or Puja
Vedic yagna is conventionally translated as ‘sacrifice’ and Puranic puja is translated as ‘worship’. This translation is the basic problem…
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Articles
Who is a Hindu? The temple as saviour
Our monumental temples, such as Puri’s Jagannatha temple, were a reaction to the arrival of a foreign faith, and a sign of resistance to it…
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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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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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Both Rahul Gandhi & Narendra Modi subscribe to a western, Christian reading of Mahabharata
The villain in Hindu narratives is not evil but is just someone frightened and clinging to wealth, power and throne…