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Baolis of Delhi: A Lost Heritage
Since the beginning of civilisation, humans have tried to hold water for their consumption. In India, techniques to store and source water have evolved from the Great Bath of Mohenjodaro to modern dams and reservoirs. In the last 1500 years, people in South Asia have refined their ways of accessing subterranean water by extending the…
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Book Excerpts: Caveman’s Secret Sauce
Maybe you are stressing about what’s going to happen at work. Or there is something going on in your relationship that requires immediate attention. Maybe you have been a little vulnerable on the health front and are trying to recover. Maybe you are distracted, struggling to focus here. Whatever the struggle, let’s just take a…
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Sir Syed Ahmad Khan on Hindus and Muslims
Syed Ahmad Khan was perhaps the most eminent Muslim reformist and philosopher of the 19th century. He was born in Delhi in 1817. The family was not orthodox in any sense — they patronised musicians and mystics. There was a tradition of scholarship too: among Syed Ahmad Khan’s forebears were some keen mathematicians. He continued along…
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From Macaulay to Sunak: How the British attitudes have changed towards Indians
The year was 1834. The East India Company was working to change the education system of India, trying to make it ‘modern’. In that year Thomas Babington Macaulay became the president of the Committee of Public Instruction. Declaring that a ‘single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India…
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A Short Essay on The Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita gained widespread popularity when the British East India Company first translated it into English around 200 years back. Let’s look at what it’s all about.
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Indian Philosophy on the Concept of Heaven and Hell
Traditionally speaking, especially through the lens of Christianity and Islam, it is believed that you are born once and you die once, and when you die, you either go to heaven or hell, depending on how you lived your life. This, however, is not the case when we come to the Indian religions. Since rebirth…
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The Story of Mahabharata – Part Two
In the first part of The Story of Mahabharata we learnt about the two brothers — Dhritarashtra and Pandu. Since Dhritarashtra was the elder brother, he was supposed to get the throne of Hastinapur, but because he was blind, Pandu was chosen as the rightful heir. The marriage life of the two brothers was no…
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The Story of Mahabharata – Part One
In this series, I am going to narrate the story of Mahabharata. The epic poem consists of over a hundred thousand couplets in Sanskrit, therefore, it is likely that a number of details will be missing from this account. Nevertheless, here is an attempt to give you a flavour of this thousands of years old…
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