Inner Metamorphosis

“If you think that your culture is being unfairly portrayed in news, books and movies, why don’t you produce them yourself?” I’m old enough to remember how leftists used to the taunt Hindus who complained of biased representation of their religion in the popular media. At the height of their cultural monopoly, they didn’t anticipate a day when Hindus could escape their choke-hold. Enter, 2014. Leftists assert that it’s BJP’s ascendance to power that radicalized people. They’ve got it upside down. It’s the new breed of aware Hindus, energized and educated by literature on the internet (which left didn’t set its eyes on yet) that made BJP’s rise possible. Without the ideological support of these self-educated people, angry at the systematic injustice meted to their lot for decades, BJP could still have been a marginal power. Certainly not the juggernaut it has become today. No more monopoly For his seminal work on Veer Savarkar, its author Vikram Sampath got elected as a Fell

It’s hardly a secret. We know the day will come. Yet, when it announces its arrival, we’re in denial. At some point, we begrudgingly accept it: the middle age. It’s difficult to pin the middle age. It’s probably when we experience what it means to be parents of rambunctious children and to be children of overbearing parents. When stray sprains and headaches show no signs of budging for days. When your memory fails you at the most inopportune time. During one of my long morning walks, it stuck me: what if I had misinterpreted the script of my life so far? Did I allow myself to be sentenced to silence too long? Did I willingly forfeit my right to defend myself and let others' judgment to prevail upon me? Could it be possible that guilt blinkered me from seeing how debilitating circumstances forced my hand as much as my own incapacity. The middle age, for all its attendant decays, provides one extraordinary compensation in bargain: perspective. All these years there was no data to und

Of the many reasons we celebrate Diwali, one of the chief is the return of Shri Rama to His home after 14 years of exile. Consider our good fortune that we will see Him back home, back to his Ayodhya, after over 500 years of exile. This is the story of unyielding persistence against insurmountable odds. This is a saga of civilizational yagna against repeated assaults, two waves of Abrahamic attacks, and then from a 'secular' state that has been as much a stranger to its roots as its foreign rulers were.  I shudder to think about the kind of upbringing that results in statements like: " Shri Rama wouldn't have wanted to build his temple this way". "This is not my Hinduism". "Shouldn't we focus on economy instead of a mandir?". "Why rake up the unpleasant past? Let's look at future." It cuts a sorry figure that many of our own think this way. It only reflects how poorly conversant they are with the epics. Consider the stratagems

Life happens between “what if” and “what is”. The chirping of winged angels at dawn wakes you up a tad too early. You’re jolted out of your dreams, but don’t have the heart to awaken into reality yet. In that chasm slip memories of yore. Some sweet, some sour. You look at your younger self with nostalgic yearning. Then, something hits you hard: the missed opportunities . What if in that critical crossroad of life you took a different path? What if you persisted a bit longer instead of yielding to circumstances? What if you had given up on that futile endeavour and focused on something worthwhile? But, that road is long gone. You can’t go back. You must wrestle with “what is”! The mind, stealthily, begins to rein the heart gone haywire and reasons: things could have been worse . Indeed, you second that; though amused. Could it be because man is a rationalizing animal and not the rational one we've prematurely assumed? Slowly, the mental fog is dispersed by the warm t

Kancha Ilaiah’s tirade against the trading community in his latest offering “Samajika Smugglerlu Komatollu” (Vysyas are Social Smugglers) is a unique blend of misplaced Marxist lens with blinding Hinduphobic tint. Which precisely explains why his theories, each competing with the other in the race to logical abyss, are lapped up by the left-liberal world and Christian missionaries alike.  Eyelids become heavy when he refers to himself as a successor to Buddha, Phule and Ambedkar in the recent spate of interviews to Telugu media. If only he had bothered to research a fraction of what Ambedkar did, we would have had a less pompous, but more measured ‘intellectual’. Speaking of ‘intellectual’ (that’s how he refers to himself!), it is instantly clear to any objective viewer that what passes on as a social scientist’s observations are actually nothing more than Hindu hatred in its purest form.  Since he repeatedly refers to his “Why I am not a Hindu” as some sort of modern bib