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  • J Sai Deepak’s Book and What’s Happening in India Today

    If you are following Indian politics, chances are, this is what you have been hearing: the country is taking a right-turn, prime minister Modi leading millions of his followers towards Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), and majority of the population succumbing to his ideology. That does not tell the whole story; in fact, it barely touches…

  • Chachnama: The First Muslim-Conquest of India

    The Arabs of the seventh century, inspired by their own version of Islam, poured out of Arabia and spread east and west, overthrowing decayed kingdoms and imposing the new faith. They moved fast. In the west, they invaded Visigothic Spain in 710; in the east, in the same year, they moved beyond Persia to invade…

  • Do You Have the Right Posture for Meditation?

    ORDINARILY we think of meditation as an activity involving our minds, but in truth meditation is initiated by assuming a specific gesture with our bodies. This gesture or posture forms the literal base on which the focused inquiry of meditation ultimately rests and depends. If we build a house with a faulty foundation, we create…

  • Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

    Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131) was a Persian polymath. Born at Naishapur in Khorassan (today’s Iran), he made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and poetry. His poetry collection, translated by Edward Fitzgerald under the title Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, contains a selection of quatrains. The book remains one of the most…

  • Socio-Religious Reforms in 19th-Century India

    “I regret to say,” wrote Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, “that the present system of religion adhered to by the Hindus is not well calculated to promote their political interest. The distinctions of castes introducing innumerable divisions and sub-divisions among them has entirely deprived them of patriotic feeling, and the multitude of religious rites…

  • In Praise of Drinking Wine

    Throughout recorded history humans have made life bearable by taking intoxicants. And, while societies differ over which intoxicants should be encouraged, which tolerated and which forbidden, there has been a convergence of opinion around one all-important rule: that the result must not threaten public order. The Native American pipe of peace, like the Middle-Eastern hookah,…

  • Show, Don’t Tell. What’s That?

    SHOW, DON’T TELL. If you are someone who writes stories, you are going to get this advice all the time. However, those who offer such advice don’t always care to explain what it really means. Does it mean that we narrate a story as is done in a play or movie-script? Not necessarily. Let’s see…

  • The Story of First Philosophers

    Nobody will ever be sure who started it. It could be that some poor genius invented philosophy and then fell into the abyss of unwritten history before he could announce himself to posterity. There is no reason to think that such a person, but then there wouldn’t be. Happily, there are at least records of…