Personal Notes
In this riveting talk, Chaturvedi Badrinath casts light on the symbiotically spiritual relationship Swami Vivekananda had with some of his American women-followers and femininity in general. They were not ‘instruments for use:’ he never used any human being for his own ends or for his work’. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The Sanskrit word saha, meaning ‘together’, ‘in togetherness’, is a prefix to a very large number of words in that language that denote relational contexts of every variety; perceived as the natural foundation of all relationships, personal and collective, not just in Indian civilisation. Saha opens up the whole history of human living, says. Chaturvedi Badrinath. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
What are the means to knowledge? How do we know that what we know is free from error? What is the nature of error in knowing? What is truth and what are its criteria? These questions relate in the first place to the knowing of the self and the knowing of the other in their mutual relationship; questions not just for philosophers alone but for rdinary people, Chaturvedi Badrinath averred. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
From the 16th century onwards, a tremendous misconception has prevailed: there is something called ‘Hinduism’; that it is a religion and that Indian civilization is really Hindu religious civilization. Chaturvedi Badrinath avers that the central concern of all Indian thought is dharma, the concept enshrined the totality of the Indian understanding of man. To understand India is to ask: What is dharma? Not what is Hinduism?…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Folklore is the artifice of enchantment; liminal, it includes the sites of both sorrow and joy; death and life but boundaries are fluid, forest-covered, unmapped. Alok Bhalla on folklore as gateway to life’s renewal.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Wildlife and conservation journalist/film-maker and writer .Swati Thiyagarajan. dwells on what it means to be a Hindu, a Brahmin no less and offers up a portrait of a composite, historically-rooted woman and an Indian. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A riveting and deeply philosophical story on changes in a traditional artisanal family pondered over by a carpenter working on a scaffold in a heavy downpour on a high-rise construction site. By Balwant Bhaneja. …[Read More]…