Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Was Macaulay Anti-India Or Anti-Brahmin?
The debate around Macaulay, English, and education is not just about colonialism. It is about whether India wants a future shaped by open inquiry or a past shaped by inherited authority…
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Articles
Pigeon Spirituality
Who funds these monks who promote non-violence and vegetarian food? Those who make money from industries that pollute rivers, seas, and air. India’s biggest industrialists are vegetarians. …
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Is Lingayat a caste or a religion?
The Lingayat community today insists it is a separate religion. They refuse to be placed within the Veerashaiva fold, or being seen as a subset of Hinduism. This demand has upset those who seek to unite Hinduism under a single umbrella by referring to it as ‘sanatan dharma’…
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Articles
How Merchants Shape the Satvik Holiness
The richest families in India are strictly vegetarian and belong to the vaishya varna. They are supported by politicians committed to the cause of vegetarianism or Satvikism, a new form of Hinduism. As these rich communities take control of temples and pilgrimage sites, we find them pushing for Satvikism…
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Articles
How Beer Established Civilisation
We are told that the dawn of agriculture was about bread. That our Stone Age ancestors settled down to plant wheat and barley so they could bake loaves. But a growing body of research suggests that this may not be entirely true. The real lure of grain was not bread. It was beer. …
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Articles
The Non-Brahmin Priests of Hinduism
Hinduism has many groups and communities. Different castes and tribes have different gods. Each of these gods have different priests.…
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Articles
The Horsemen Of Kanchi
For over 3,000 years, horses were imported into India. They were critical to govern empires and, therefore, were always in demand. But a little known fact is that horses are difficult to breed in our country, which explains the need for annual imports…
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Articles
How Afghan and Turkic Invaders Transformed Indian Warfare
We know that from the 10th century, horse‑breeding groups from Afghanistan and Central Asia invaded …
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Articles
Stories Behind Diverse Calendars of India
India has many calendars; different communities use different calendars in different regions. Therefore, it is very difficult to create a single Indian calendar, even if it follows traditional rules…
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Articles
Cultural Significance of the Buffalo
Buffaloes are found in ponds, rivers, marshes, and wetlands meant for rice cultivation. Cows, on the other hand, prefer drier jungle areas. India has both dry jungles and wet river basins…
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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…
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Articles
Funeral practices across faiths and regions in India
Different cultures imagine the afterlife differently and so have different funeral practices…
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Articles
How Is Knowledge Transmitted?
Knowledge can be transmitted orally or in the form of texts. Hindus preferred the oral form…
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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. …
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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. …
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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…
