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On Being Spiritual
Spirituality is cool these days. Its warm and fuzzy aura
now appeals to more and more people in the West. Online dating sites
abound with claims of being ...
Peter Brook's Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter
Brook's
Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my
admiration for it has grown. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic
productions of all time.
Size Matters!
For ages now, men have made women feel
self-conscious, nay worthless, making them obsess
over the size of their, er ... various body parts...
The Carvakas
It comes as a surprise to many that in ancient "spiritual" India,
atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with. Predating even
the Buddhists, the
Carvaka is one of the earliest ...
A Mousetrap for
Metaphysics
About six years ago, after an obsessive, multi-year
engagement with history and philosophy, I struggled with the following
question: Is it possible to reduce the ...
On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos
Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what
they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers,
fakirs, the deformed. Their India
...
The Dilwara Temples
Many Indians claim that the Dilwara Jain temples of
Mt. Abu are a more magnificent achievement than the
Taj Mahal
– both were stunningly ...
The Idea of India
A friend of mine recently asked me: How did Indians
themselves refer to India during the Raj? Did they call it "India"? I
mean back then, it had ...
Reporting from Home
I'm a non-resident Indian (NRI). I left India
in 1989 for a masters degree in the US. I then lived in N. California and
W. Europe
and had traveled to 50+ countries by ... |
America and the Cold War
The US pulled out of
Vietnam in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat.
The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white
boys had come home in body bags ...
Land of the Free
Which country has the highest incarceration rate in the
world? The US of course. The prison population in the US has more than
quadrupled in the last quarter century
On Patriotism
Recent years have seen a surge in “patriotic feeling”
across the US.
One expression of this is the flag, which is now routinely seen on cars,
shop fronts, windows, roofs, even jacket lapels.
On Shooting People
Shooting with a camera, that is.
Most regular readers of
this
blog are probably aware of my large collection of travel photos on
shunya.net. About a month ago, a man from Germany sent me a note:
A Hammam in Damascus
Traveling in India, for all the personal growth it brings, is a dust,
soot, and sweat laden experience. Even after a bath, rubbing a random
spot on my arm produces
...
Gandhi's 'Inconsistent Pacifism'
Last week the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee made a rare and candid
admission:
"Our record is far from perfect … not giving Mahatma Gandhi the Nobel
Prize was the biggest omission" ...
On Photography: Which
Thousand Words?
If a picture
says a thousand words, which thousand words does it say to whom? If we
all wrote down what we hear, no two accounts would be the same....
Nagarjunakonda
About 1,700 years ago,
Nagarjunakonda flourished as a city and a great religious and
educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism in ... south India... |
Rereading
Naipaul
I first read
Naipaul in the mid-90s: India: A Million Mutinies, The Enigma
of Arrival, and A Way in the World. They resonated with me
well enough. But in the ensuing ...
Al-Beruni's India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was
led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian
history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, ...
The Bold and the Beautiful
Teeming with character and incident, the
Aeneid is a Latin epic
poem of high craft and seductive energy. Set in the aftermath of the
Trojan war of Homer's Iliad, ...
The Namesake
Mira Nair's movie packs
in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri's
book. Rather than the movie's fidelity
to the book, my main basis of comparison
...
Omar Khayyam of
Persia
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master
of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and
mathematics....
Democracy in Athens
The
liberal-popular and the conservative-aristocratic emerged as the two
dominant factions in Athenian democracy ... The spirit of the agon
(competition), fame, ...
The True Cost of
Our Gadgets
The next time we whip out our Blackberries, cell phones, gaming
consoles, iPods, and laptops, we would do well to remember their true
cost, beyond what we paid ...
The
Burning Ghats of Varanasi
Varanasi, on the left bank of the Ganga, is one of the seven sacred
cities of the Hindus. Among the oldest continuously inhabited cities
of the world, ...
Second Date
On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red
curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets in tight clothes.
They stop at a red light behind .... |
On Diversity
Last October, I went sightseeing in
Calcutta with a friend. We began with a short
cycle rickshaw ride, took a local train to Sealdah, wandered near
College St, ...
Respecting the Holocaust
The UN General
Assembly recently adopted by consensus a
resolution condemning the denial of
the Holocaust. This US sponsored resolution "urges all member states ...
Putty in Her Hands
Sasha calls on Saturday afternoon, ‘Are you free?’ Sasha is a Russian
escort, 28, slim, dark-haired, with dreamy green eyes. She needs a ride in
an hour to Plaza Hotel, downtown ...
On Dignity, Rights, and Responsibility
In today’s world, we often take for granted ideas like human dignity and
human rights. Many of us hold them to be natural, inalienable, or
universal. But we would do well to ask: ...
A Qawwali
Concert
A year or so ago, I attended an open-air
Qawwali concert in
Jaipur by the famous
Sabri Brothers, who claim
direct descent from
Mian Tansen himself, the legendary ...
Wise Man Socrates
Socrates, like Jesus and the
Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him
are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that
emerges ...
An MSc and a Ph.D
Two days earlier, on the bus from Amman to Petra, I met Mohammad, 27,
and Zayed, 29. Muhammad wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, a
moustache and a two-day stubble on his square face ...
Al-Farabi, Medieval
Islamic Philosopher
During the so-called golden age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, ...
The man ... held second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim
thinker called Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE).
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