Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
The gallery of female rogues
Women can be dangerous forces of nature, or hypersexual beings, who take away the power of men, chain them to the material world and prevent them from walking the spiritual path…
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Articles
Bypassing the womb
In Puranic literature, we come across the concept of ayonija, someone who is not born from the womb, and consequently, is able to bypass or rise above the cycle of birth and death…
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Articles
Land of body parts
The Buddhists and the Hindus share the idea of the land becoming sacred, when it is connected with the body of a holy being…
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Articles
Ancient incest in the sky
In the Vedas, long before people knew about gods such as Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, there was a story of how the god of heaven committed incest with the goddess of dawn, his daughter…
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Articles
Mountain of Vedas
Through stories of the mountain of Vedas and the blinking gods, Hindus were made aware of the scale of the universe and its wisdom, very different from the finite, closed word of ancient Greeks, inherited by the church…
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Vedic approach to desire
The Vedic approach was very different. Suffering can be reduced when we pay attention to, and try to satisfy, each other’s desires…
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Many happy Buddhas
The fundamental difference between Mahayana Buddhism and the older school of Buddhism is that it had a far more optimistic view of life…
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Articles
Acknowledging Islam’s Diversity
At the time of the World Wars, beyond the traditional Shia-Sunni divide, Islam had many regional forms: there was an Arabic form, there was a Persian form, there was the Indian form, there was an Indonesian form…
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Articles
Othering the Asuras
Published on 8th July, 2018, in Mid-day. In Hindu mythological stories narrated in the Puranas, …
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Articles
The forgotten Buffalo King
Not much is known about him, but the shrine is clearly not a Brahminical one and there is nothing about him found in Sanskrit literature…
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Articles
Evolution of the Devil
From the 16th century onwards, the Devil appeared as a goat-like creature. Those who opposed God were called Devil-worshippers… The Hindu idea of hell also evolved over time…
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Articles
Epics about Women
In the Tamil epics, we see three kinds of women: the woman who has relationships with many men, the woman who has a relationship with one man, and the woman who has relationships with no man…
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Articles
Radha or Meera?
People… are unable to distinguish the mythic past from the historical past…
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Articles
Listening to the Buddha’s hands
In the early days of Buddhism, Buddha was represented by a symbol: a footprint or a wheel or a pot or a tree…
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Articles
A ring of tantrik women
One thing that often goes unnoticed in many traditional Hindu temples, is that the walls of the shrine is made of a circle of women…
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Articles
A Hinduism before Bhakti
A thousand years ago, India was very different from what it is today. North India had yet to face significant conquest by Muslim warlords from Central Asia…
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Articles
The Peacock Angel of the Yazidis
To the north of Iraq live the people known as Yazidis, roughly half a million in number, who have been mercilessly hunted down by the rabid hordes of the Islamic State (ISIS) on grounds that they are Devil-worshippers…
