By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist If you only consume today’s festival talk, you would think India’s calendar is a relay race between Ram and Krishna. That is a late narrowing. The older seasonal spine is goddess-centred and nature-driven. It was about paying attention to the weather, to the vegetation, to the…
By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Kambaramayanam is one of the most celebrated works of Tamil literature. Composed by the poet Kamban around the ninth century in Tamil Nadu, in the time of Chola kings, it is a lyrical retelling of the Ramayana filled with rich poetry, elaborate metaphors and deep moral…
Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The goddess we call Saraswati today begins as Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech, identified primarily with the Vedic deity Vac. Her earliest stories foreground the immense power and sometimes the deceptive nature, of the spoken word. These are found in ritual Vedic texts known as the Brahmanas….
By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Over 2,200 years ago, two rulers on opposite ends of Asia confronted a similar problem: how to hold together vast, diverse territories emerging from long periods of conflict. Qin Shi Huang in China and Ashoka in India both inherited States forged through conquest. Yet the solutions…
By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity. The early Upanishads were composed between 600 BC and 200 BC, while the early Dharma-shastra were composed between 200 BC and 500 AD. The former is more spiritual. The latter is more legal. Strict…
By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The historical Buddha is largely an artefact of 19th-century European scholarship rather than a recovered fact, as per scholars like Bernard Faure. He argues that virtually nothing is known about the figure known as the Buddha and historical reconstructions are just as pious and imaginative as the myths and legends they claim to supplant. Far from…
By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The Ramayana and the Mahabharata reached their final written form around 2000 years ago, exactly when the Dharma-shastra was being coded. There is a Ramayana inside the Mahabharata, known as the Ramopakhyana, narrated by Markandeya Rishi to the Pandavas. In this telling, the role of Brahmin…
Dasara is hereOctober 10, 2026
October 10, 2026
Two-phase security strategy for DasaraOctober 10, 2026
MLA Sait opens white-topped National Highway ...October 10, 2026
Recent Comments