Inner Metamorphosis

The concept of Dharma is not adequately understood by Hindus themselves, not to mention others. Dharma is not a set of do’s and don’t’s or a simplistic evaluation of good and bad. It requires considerable intellectual exertion to even begin understanding Dharma, let alone mastering its use. Is Dharma Translatable? Few words of a language cannot be faithfully translated into another without injuring its meaning, context & spirit. English translations of Dharma are blurred and yield words like religion, sense of righteousness, discrimination between good and bad, morals and ethics or that which is lawful. All these fall short of fully grasping the essence of Dharma. Every language has an ecosystem of words, categories and grammar which allow a user to stitch words together to maximum effect such that meaning permeates the text without necessarily being explicitly explained at each point. Sanskrit words such dharma, karma, sloka, mantra, guru etc., now incorporated in Eng...

Julayi  (telugu movie) released last year had an interesting premise and fantastic dialogues (trademark Trivikram style), though its retains all the commercial elements that are a norm in mass-entertainers. As the plot unfolds we find that our intelligent hero doesn’t believe in hard work and in an effort to make a quick buck falls prey to a series of events eventually culminating in his sister’s kidnap and his father getting seriously injured. In the only emotional scene of the movie, the father recovering from his injuries in hospital explains the value of steady growth and hard work to his son. Few routine action sequences later “all ends well” and our hero, now wiser, is on the way to attend an interview for a salary he once considered a pittance. Many of us, thanks to success-stories bombarded on us by media, think that our achieving our goals is simply a matter of charting a strategy and executing it. If only it were that easy – events as they say has its own way of u...

What do communists, evangelican Christians and Islamists have in common? Notwithstanding the irreconcilable differences between themselves, which group invokes hatred among all the three? Yes, as the title indicates, it is Hindu-hatred or Hinduphobia. This is my attempt to understand the core ideas that inform the perspective of  evangelican right  and  academic left  and am thankful to  Rajiv Malhotra  whose work forms the basis that I build upon. Abrahamic perception of Hinduism To the more devout sections of Christians and Muslims the fact that India is still majorly populated by  heathens  despite their best "efforts" [a millennium of Islamic aggression and two centuries of Western imperialism ] is an eyesore. The differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam is mostly about how the latest ideology supercedes the earlier ones, rendering the earlier belief obsolete because the newer one is more complete/ t...