ravan was chasing me. he had ten heads and ten faces and ten sets of teeth bared as he sprinted effortlessly, bow and arrow in hand. his skin was swarthy, his eyes bulged, his hair blew wildly in the wind. i could feel my breath getting shorter and shorter, till there was practically no breath left. my feet were tired. my head was hurting. how would i ever come out of this alive? then i remembered something. i stopped running.…
cap pistol (remember those?), rahul dev burman, new clothes, midnight movies, razia sultan, drumbeats, ghugni, exams, flowers in my clasped hands. the one with ten arms comes to my mind on many things. she’s been around for a long long time, quite taken for granted, part of life. to be worshiped, to be gazed at in awe, to be surrounded by noise and joy, to be danced and acted before, to be rejoiced with food and friends, to be prostrated…
actually, there’s no magic involved. both are stories of faith. perhaps the sort of faith that brings miracle. i heard one when i was a child, the other after i got married. as my husband, who is jewish, finished telling me why eight oil lamps are lit on hanukkah, i thought of a tiny pot of yogurt and the tale of madhusudan’s bhar. “bhar” means earthenware pot in bengali, and the sound of “r” at the end is more like…
it’s one of those evenings. feels as if the world is spinning out of control. i wonder what control we seek and what is this world that seems to be in such danger. around me, in “reality”, all is as it should be. or so it seems. what if nothing is the way we think it is? what if we are just creating a fantasy, each our own, and what we see touch taste hear smell is just in our…
The other day on a local radio station a boy and girl were arguing if dragons were real or not. Actually.. let me rephrase.. the girl was insisting that the boy be open to the possibility of the existence of dragons. The world of Game of Thrones is real, she reasoned. The future of their relationship depended on the outcome of the argument. So, in case you are ever faced a similar situation let me arm you with all the necessary knowledge…
J.K Rowling would do this sort of thing way better. In fact, she has a book on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them which covers the Harry Potter Lore about some of these. Still, I thought it would be fun to read up and talk about all the part animal like creatures that often pop up in fiction, legend and, sometimes, even newspaper sightings around us. Fire breathing or gentle, evil or pure, to part human or god, they…
For today’s generation, Hindu Mythology is a complex subject compromising of Gods and kings, stories and folklore and many aspects that often tend to seek clarifications. What are the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas? When was the Ramayana and Mahabharata written? Which Holy book followed which? Why are there so many Gods and Goddesses in Hindu Mythology? And so on the questions sprint in. A new show on the Epic Channel, ‘Devlok with Devdutt Pattanaik’ tries to make these complex…