August 27, 2019
An Interview with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Author of White Dancing Elephants
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of reading Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut short story collection White Dancing Elephants. It’s a mesmerizing group of stories, filled with both joy and sorrow, […]
August 14, 2019
The Story the Storytelling Tells: A Note on the Ramayana
Every God has his consort, his corresponding Goddess—so Brahma, the Creator-God, has Saraswati, the Goddess of arts and letters, a match made in heaven, so to speak. Shiva’s consort is […]
March 25, 2019
On A TALE OF FOUR DERVISHES by Mir Amman
Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages. Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
October 29, 2015
Hard and Brittle Religions
Why do some religions die out, while others persist in the face of brutal persecution? Religious diversity, while not completely analogous to biological diversity, has drastically diminished over the […]
July 12, 2014
Twin Towers of the Intellect
Both the theologian, advancing abstract definitions of Deity as the Ground of Being, transcendent of language and intellection, the impersonal prime mover, hardly so limited and vengeful and silly as […]
December 11, 2013
Believe What You Wish
The Buddha’s hard-to-disagree-with central insight—that desire is at the source of human suffering, and human action in general—has ready examples in our loves, lusts, and ambitions; it seems to have […]
November 29, 2013
About the “Singularity”
To decide whether Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity is “true” or an “accurate” depiction of our future is to mistake the nature of prophecy. Imagine someone in 1914 predicting the […]
October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
February 10, 2013
“Western” and “Modern”
It is interesting to note that among Indian Hindus, the words “Western” and “modern” are well-nigh interchangeable in usage. That is, a “modern” way of dressing, loving and marrying, […]
August 27, 2012
The Two Gandhis
Takes on Mahatma Gandhi tend to focus either on the Mahatma or on the Gandhi: That is, they either consider him a holy man whose politics emerged from an inner “truth” […]