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. R. Balasubramaniam There is a particular variety of human being that the great Indian experiment has produced with remarkable consistency over the last several decades and I have the dubious honour of being a specimen in reasonably good working condition. We are the middle-class Indians, a tribe so distinct in our habits that anthropologists, had they…
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…
By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam There is something deeply philosophical about an Indian railway platform. It is, if you think about it carefully enough, the only place in the country where everyone, regardless of caste, class, conviction or confusion, arrives at exactly the same level of anxiety. I must have been around eight years old the first time my father took…
India seems to have developed a peculiar relationship with humour. We are confused about what comedy actually is. Every offensive remark is treated as either a national crisis or a Constitutional issue. This confusion is becoming increasingly visible as stand-up comedy explodes across the country. Particularly popular is the newer ‘crowd work’ format, where comedians…
This morning, I took part in a panel discussion on media and tourism at Mysore Travel Mart-2026, organised by the Mysore Travels Association. GRS Fantasy Park was the principal sponsor and NOT the Karnataka Tourism Department. The Department sponsored nothing. That absence said a great deal. It seems the task of promoting Mysuru appears to…
By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD A small news item buried deep inside my newspaper caught my eye today. It said that the National Medical Commission (NMC), the body that governs and regulates medical education in our country, has decided to bring in a rule that restricts the maximum time allowed for an undergraduate medical…
For years, D.K. Shivakumar was the eternal bridesmaid of Karnataka politics. He was always close to power, always indispensable to the Congress party, but never quite the chosen one. Now, at last, he has arrived at the altar and is set to become the Chief Minister of Karnataka. But… The question is not whether Shivakumar…
By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD Centuries are what history is made up of and centuries are what any cricketer would like to quickly pile up, in the basket of his achievements and a century is what most people would love to live for, although very few of us live long enough to get there….
Indian politics is about personality and not policy. We are a people driven by blind emotion and some of us hope that our heroes can deliver in the real world what they perform in the reel world. Nowhere is this hope more visible than in Tamil Nadu, where cinema and politics have long shared a…
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