Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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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
Nathdwara God in the Haveli
To devotees, Shrinathji at Nathdwara is the swayambhu (self-created) and swarupa (self-image, not representation) of the seven-year old Krishna…
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Articles
Krishna, the wrestler
When you think wrestling, Krishna is not the first name that comes to mind… And yet, Krishna is a great wrestler…
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Articles
Tirupati: Playing dice with a god in debt
Debt or rina is a key concept in Hinduism… life is about ‘giving’ not about ‘taking’. Giving reduces debt and liberates us. Taking binds us to the world…
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Articles
Beheading you, beheading me
Have you been noticing the rising number of politicians and ‘religious leaders’ who seem obsessed with lopping off heads: either their own or that of others. Are they influenced by tales of head-offering that we find in the Puranas?…
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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
Prosecuting the Gods
Conversations that seek to ‘justify’ the actions of mythic figures often miss the point…
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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
Breaking the royal pillar
Stories are not created in vacuum. They respond to a historical context and emerge to communicate a point of view…
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Articles
Our relationship with wealth
In the Hindu Puranas, the problem is never with wealth. The problem is with our relationship with wealth…
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Articles
Children of the Great
As parents spend more and more time at work, for work, there is a price to pay back home…
