Religions
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Modern Management Is Essentially Violent As It Is Based on Consumption
Published on 16th April, 2022, in Economic Times. Consumption is violence. Bhoga (food) demands bali (sacrifice). Something has to be destroyed to produce the food that you consume. This is natural law. So the elements are consumed by trees. Trees…
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Female Voice in Rig Veda
Published on 10th April, 2022, in Mid-day. The Rig Vedic hymns were composed over 3,000 years ago, most probably by children of men who migrated into India with horses from Central Asia, and married local women. The hymns mostly reveal…
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How Hindus of Andaman and Nicobar Rejected Religious Bigotry,
Published on 9th April, 2022, in Times of India. Located where the Andaman Sea meets the Bay of Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar is a string of over 500 islands, of which only over 30 are inhabited. The northern islands are…
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Boars Were, Once, Respected
Published on 3rd April, 2022, in Mid-day. Hunting and eating wild swine or pigs was common in ancient India, a sport of kings. Hindus should have no problem with pork therefore. However, pork dishes in India today are linked to…
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No, It’s Neither a Sin Nor Un-Indian to Drink Alchohol
Published on 1st April, 2022, in Times of India. There are two types of alcohol. One produced by fermenting flowers, fruits and grain (Desi Daru). The other produced by distilling (English Daru). The former was produced in kitchens across India…
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The West Believes History Has a Direction, a Purpose, an End. But Indian Worldview Is Different
Published on 2nd April, 2022, in Economic Times. Conventional leadership frameworks begin with the notion that there is a problem to be solved, which leads to strategizing, planning, organising, implementing, regulating, motivating, enabling, and reviewing along the way. This model…
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Sankhya and Yoga
Published on 27th March, 2022, in Mid-day. Sankhya and Yoga form the building blocks of Indian philosophy. Sankhya means “enumeration”. To understand this philosophy, we have to compare and contrast it with yoga. Yoga means “union” with “vi-yoga” meaning separation…
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An Eclipsing of History That Frightens Many Hindus
Published on 26th March, 2022, in Times of India. People forget. If you go to Northwest Pakistan today, the region on either side of the Khyber pass, few will remember that in the Bronze Age, 4000 years ago, it connected…
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The Jain Monk and His Saka Saviours
Published on 25th March, 2022, in The Hindu About two thousand years ago incidents took place which involved the Jain community that inspired an epic ballad that was put down in writing a thousand years later in Prakrit and local…
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How Do We Know What We Know?
Published on 20th March, 2022, in Mid-day. How do we know what we know? This subject is called epistemology. Here, we try to understand how knowledge is created. This subject was a part of intellectual discourse in ancient India, under…
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How Do We Know What’s History, Myth or Legend?
Published on 12th March, 2022, in Times of India. In ancient times, ‘itihasa’ meant stories ‘witnessed’ by the storytellers. So Ramayana is ‘itihasa’ because it was witnessed by Valmiki who wrote the story. Mahabharata is ‘itihasa’ because it was witnessed…
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The Dark Man on a White Horse
Published on 6th March, 2022, in Mid-day. Most Indians have heard about Somnath temple that was raided by Mahmud of Ghazni a thousand years ago. Very few know that in the same century, the Chola king from the south raided…
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How Trade Blossomed an Exchange of Ideas Between India and Arabia.
Published on 26th February, 2022, in Times of India. Indians had been trading with Arabs for a long time. About 4000 years ago, trade happened with Harappans by ships that travelled along the sea-coast. Birds were used to identify the…
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Pashupati and the Harappan Seal.
Published on 25th February, 2022, in The Hindu. We have all heard of the Pashupati seal in Harappa. Scholars are clear that it has nothing to do with Shiva, even though it is still labelled as proto-Shiva in popular books.…
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The Body and House of God
Published on 20th February, 2022, in Mid-day. Now-a-days, we do not see the Mediterranean world as a unit. We see the northern shores as European and Christian, and the southern shores as African and Muslim. But for hundreds of years,…