Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Interviews
Meet the characters who appear in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana (and find out why)
From Parashurama and Jambuvan to Shiva and even Sita/Draupadi…
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Articles
What is Tamil Veda?
Depending on who you ask, you will find one of three books identified as the Tamil Veda, locally known as Dravida Veda or Tamil Marai…
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Articles
Why is Shiva represented by a sexual symbol, asks a new book
Shiva to Shankara – a book excerpt…
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Articles
Who made God Perfect?
When Shiva and Vishnu merge into one being Hari-Hara, to show they are the same, not different, not higher or lower…
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Articles
The Goddess Meenakshi of Madurai
Published on 27th November, 2016, in Mumbai Mirror. We have all heard the story of Ram, a prince from North India, who went to the southern tip of India. But when was the last time you heard of a queen who travelled from Madurai in the south to Kailasa in the North to find herself…
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Articles
Why bother with icons? (Learn to respect your symbols)
We can blame the government and the education system, but how many parents actually take their children to museums, or temples, and play the game of ‘let us identify this god’…
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Articles
How Adi Shankaracharya united a fragmented land
Is our current understanding of Shankara contaminated by the ambitions of his not-so-intellectual followers who relish the idea of domination?…
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Articles
Waiting for Ram
At her abode in the caves of Jammu, the Goddess manifests herself as three outcroppings of rock which represent its three forms Maha-Lakshmi, Maha-Saraswati and Maha-Kali…
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Articles
THE LION ON THE HILL
Simhachalam is special for the worship of a composite image of ‘masculine’ avatars of Vishnu, Varaha and Narasimha…
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Articles
Doesn’t Shiva take drugs?
To understand this mystery, we have to appreciate how Hinduism divides the world into inside and outside, the home and the wilderness, the realm of the householder and the realm of the hermit…
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Articles
A ritual cleansing
Notions of reform are often based on ‘assumptions of deformity’, which are dependent on ‘assumptions of normality’…
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Articles
Divine domestic discords
The malaise of modern scholarship on Hinduism often comes from the assumption that Hindu sacred texts, like Bible and Koran, are instructive and seek to ‘reform’ humans…
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Articles
Rebirth of a God
The rituals by which Jagannatha, the presiding deity of Puri, Odisha, will die and be reborn along with his sister Subhadra and his elder brother Balabhadra and his weapon, the Sudarshana…
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Articles
Talking Heads
His laughter is not the kind we want to hear,for it mocks us and reminds us of what only we and he know…
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Articles
The Context of the Mahabharata
To understand the Mahabharata we have to appreciate the Ramayana and to appreciate both we need to appreciate the Vedas…
