Analysis/Insights

As a child, I moved around frequently. My parents emigrated from India to the U.S. when I wasn’t even five years old, and we moved from place to place. Unfortunately for me, the schools I attended weren’t ever very religiously diverse. Christian kids usually made up the vast majority of my peers. In social studies [...]

I bring positive greetings to you on this festive and most holy observance of Diwali. I have offered to make a small verbal contribution to this observance today on this Hindu holy occasion of Diwali and as such I would like to invite a few minutes of your attention as I proceed with this delivery, [...]

Gary J Bass’s ‘The Blood Telegram’ details the genocide carried out ahead of the war. Ahead of Bangladesh’s liberation in 1971, the Pakistani Army systematically committed genocide” of the Hindu community in the then East Pakistan and the Nixon Administration kept a blind eye to it, a new book says. While the Indian Government was [...]

In the classic children’s story Goldilocks went into someone else’s house to eat and sleep uninvited. To her horror she was confronted by the owners, which happened to be three bears. Discovered she fled.  At no point were negotiations on the agenda. It was after all pretty indefensible. This is a bit like the manner [...]

Modern science has come to the conclusion that all is one energy. Long ago, India’s wisdom came to the conclusion that all is one awareness/ consciousness, i.e. the one energy of science ‘knows itself’. It is not inert, not dead. So far, science either does not know about the claim of the Indian rishis or [...]

One not uncommonly comes across the opinion today that India was never really a nation but that its nationhood was only recently invented by the British through their definition of the region as part of their empire. Similarly we are told that Hinduism was up to recently not a religion at all but merely various [...]

The world, perhaps as usual, is in a state of crisis. Yet unlike previous crises, which were local in nature, the fate of the globe itself is now at stake, not only humanity but all life on Earth is threatened.  And in this extremity no nation has yet arisen as a defender of the Truth [...]

If India ’s academia is dominated by Stalinist professors with their inflexible Marxist dogma, how does this reflect upon how people outside the country view Hinduism? In India secularism is a strange beast which constantly warns of the threats which Hindu fundamentalism and fascism pose to the very fabric of democracy yet having the gall [...]

Today casteism is rampant. It is a new phenomenon. Old India had castes but not casteism. In its present form, casteism is a construct of colonial period, a product of imperial policies and colonial scholarship. It was strengthened by the breast-beating of our own “reformers”. Today, it has acquired its own momentum and vested interests. [...]

 Over a century ago, the great sage Sri Aurobindo wrote an article called “The UnHindu Spirit of Caste Rigidity” (available here). His ideas for striking at the very root of the caste problem are valid even today, and need to be taken up with more urgency that in the past. To secure its future, Hindu [...]