Published on 11th March, 2023, in Times of India. Nationalists on social media argue that the Mahabharata war took place 5,000 years ago, in 3,000 BCE, based on verses from 2,000-year-old manuscripts. They believe that Krishna and Arjuna rode a chariot drawn by horses. These ‘textual’ scholars are mostly upper-caste Hindu men, who ignore hard…
Published on 4th March, 2023, in Economic Times. Monotheism propagates the idea of one God. This very easily telescopes into the idea of one all-powerful leader of all people, which enables dictatorship. In polytheism, by contrast, there is no all-powerful God, so no all-powerful king. There are many gods who are constantly competing, collaborating and…
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in the Times of India. China today has a very problematic relationship with two provinces on its west. To the Northwest is Xinjiang, home of Uighur Muslims. To its Southwest is Tibet, home of Vajrayana Buddhism. In both these provinces, there are beliefs in forces that are greater than the…
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 is linear: there is a target at the end. This model is based on Western…
Luca Guadagnino’s Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name, with brilliant use of narrative, visuals and music…
While Classical, or Material, Marxism is based on tangible wealth (haves and have-nots), Cultural Marxism is based on intangible structures of power (privileged and unprivileged)…
Every successful religion has a force that creates unity and a counterforce that creates diversity…
It is a case of ‘reverse love’, or what the scriptures refer to as ‘vipreet-bhakti’, a state where you hate the enemy so much that you think about them all the time and it ends up being dedicated devotion…