Society
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Gender bias in temples as old as the walls around them
Is celibacy a sign of respect for women, or just a clever form of misogyny?
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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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Rasgullas for Lakshmi
As a Non-Resident Odia (NRO), I am often asked if rasgulla, the sweet dish, is of Odia or Bengali origin. So, what do we know?
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Understanding the(ir) Truth
To understand truth, it is useful to familiarise ourselves with three terminologies commonly used by philosophers. These are ontology, epistemology and phenomenology.
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Hinduism: Pre-Modern, Modern, Postmodern, Or Post-Postmodern?
What exactly is the best phrase to describe Hinduism? Or, what is the best approach to arrive at an appropriate description?
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Superstition and the inherent cruelty of rationalists
Rationality, secularism, religion, and superstition are parts of the same continuum called culture.
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Scanners for menstrual blood
The practice of restricting access to menstruating women is rooted in the pre-modern belief that links purity and power to bodily fluids.
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Intolerance: the Movie
Nobody is interested in countering the menace. Everybody seems to be more bothered about branding!
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The invisible violence of vegetarianism
Many people are of the opinion that eating vegetarian food is indicative of kindness and non-violence. That is not so.
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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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Debutante ball & puberty rites
We would like to imagine patriarchy as a religious phenomenon. But it also thrives in ‘secular’ societies, in the richest and most developed nations, with a hunger for status. And status is often attached to the woman as in the…
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14 things historians taught me
The best thing they passed on is that no knowledge is fixed and finite.
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Indian, single and parent
it is important to keep ourselves informed about the many stories of successful single parents – male and female – in Hindu mythology.
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Stories in the language of ghosts
The original collection of many fairy tales known as Brihat-katha, or the ocean of stories, was written in a language called Paisachi, the language of ghosts, which is neither Sanskrit nor Prakrit.
