Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Why do Hindus worship idols?
Why not? Who said how a Hindu or any human is supposed to worship the divine? Who made these rules?…
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Articles
A Hinduism before Bhakti
A thousand years ago, India was very different from what it is today. North India had yet to face significant conquest by Muslim warlords from Central Asia…
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Articles
The Peacock Angel of the Yazidis
To the north of Iraq live the people known as Yazidis, roughly half a million in number, who have been mercilessly hunted down by the rabid hordes of the Islamic State (ISIS) on grounds that they are Devil-worshippers…
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Articles
Who is a guru?
Different people in different contexts use the word guru differently to refer to different kinds of people…
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Articles
The Jealous God of Science
Published on 26th November, 2017, in Bangalore Mirror. Western scholars often state that Indians do not have a sense of history. Rows over films like Padmavati confirm that. Unlike their Chinese, Arabic and Greek counterparts, ancient and medieval Indians show little interest in historical documentation, except maybe land grants on copper plates or stone walls…
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Books
I Am Divine So Are You
How Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism affirm the dignity of queer identities and sexualities. …
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Articles
India’s New Age gurus believe sexuality may be fluid – but not brutal structures of caste, gender
They have fine-tuned Indian philosophy to pacify middle-class guilt about wealth and power while amplifying guilt over pleasure that could disrupt social norms…
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Articles
Does Hinduism have anything to say about mind, perception and cognition?
The word “spirituality”, which is about self-discovery leans towards the former, and the word “religion”, which is about social engineering leans towards the latter…
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Articles
Rituals, not belief
Hindu unity is sought by looking for the familiar, and ignoring the unfamiliar. There is no idea of a ‘false’ god…
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Articles
Hutatma, the martyr-witness
At the heart of martyrdom is the idea of clinging. And this is why it is not a central theme in mythologies based on karma, where liberation (moksha) follows only when you let go!…
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Articles
Who is a Hindu? Always and everywhere
The notion that religious texts have always been around may be rooted in the timelessness of philosophies…
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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
Why do Hindus worship cows?
Hindus don’t just worship cows. They also worship cobras and monkeys and elephants, as finite forms of the infinite divine…
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Articles
God’s Marital Status
Is celibacy or singleness a prerequisite to seek an ideal world? It’s another matter that marital pleasures are fine for temple deities with their consorts…
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Articles
Why are Brahmin and Kshatriya aspirational for most Hindus and not Vaishya and Shudra?
The chatur-varna system or the four-fold division of society was the hallmark of Vedic society. But it is completely theoretical, probably based on “aptitude” rather than “birth” but one is not entirely sure…