Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
-
Articles
Vegetarianism Is Not About the Environment, But About Caste
You start deluding yourself that you are a kind person because you build a zoo to house animals that have been displaced by your industries, that destroyed their natural habitat, in the first place…
-
Articles
Hindu Temple in China
In the city of Quanzhou in Fujian province of China, there is a Buddhist temple, whose base and pillars are full of Hindu imagery. …
-
Articles
How Did the Guru Become More Godlike Than God?
Today, we find gurus speaking about gods like Ram and Krishna in their Ram-katha and Bhagavat-katha, yet the guru has become the focal point. …
-
Articles
Is a Dvija the Same As a Savarna?
The term ‘Savarnaʼ was coined by the Left wing to distinguish the Hindu elite from the ‘Avarnaʼ, those who are deemed outside the caste system and denied human dignity…
-
Articles
Funeral practices across faiths and regions in India
Different cultures imagine the afterlife differently and so have different funeral practices…
-
Articles
How Is Knowledge Transmitted?
Knowledge can be transmitted orally or in the form of texts. Hindus preferred the oral form…
-
Articles
The Sindoor Goddesses of India
The oldest image of Durga, dated to the 1st century BC, was found in Nagar near Chittorgarh, Rajasthan. It shows the goddess with two hands, plucking out the tongue of a buffalo. …
-
Articles
Elephants As Symbols Of Wealth and Power In Indian Culture
We cannot imagine India without elephants. Elephants have been a powerful symbol of wealth and power since ancient times. …
-
Articles
Historian’s Myth
It is generally assumed that historians are objective and express ideas outside their cultural influence, owing to academic training. However, this is never true. Historians, like all other humans, live in myth. Very few admit it…
-
Articles
Caste As the Opposite of Conversion
Every Indian is born into a caste and a religion. But you cannot leave caste. You can only leave religion. This makes the doctrine of caste an antagonist of the doctrine of conversion…
-
Articles
Why Kubera Is Not Ganesha
While plants and animals seek nourishment and security, humans seek more. Our hunger and fear is amplified infinitely by imagination. But food does not take away imagined hunger. If anything, it amplifies imagined hunger. We seek more resources, more power, more knowledge about resources and power…
-
Articles
Consonant-gods and Vowel-goddesses of Many Brahmi Scripts
Hanuman wrote Ram’s name on rocks while building a bridge to Lanka. The Mahabharata was written by Ganesha who used his tusk as his stylus. This gave rise to the community of scribes known as Kayastha in North India and Karanam in South India. To save themselves from Parashuram, many warriors became scribes and turned…
-
Articles
Naming the Land Beyond Indus
The word India originates from Sindhu, meaning river. In Persian regions, Sindhu was pronounced as Hindu, while the Greeks referred to it as Indu. …
-
Articles
Diversity and Unity Amongst Castes
The battle over caste identity continues, as it remains a struggle for both access to resources and access to status…
-
Articles
Rise of the Brahmi Script
The ancient Indian writing system or the Brahmi is unique in that it is an abugida – which falls between an alphabet (vowels and consonants are separate) and a syllabary (vowels and consonants are merged)…
