Ami Ganatra's book "Mahabharata Unravelled" is going to be revelatory for those who are used to a steady diet of modern, almost fictitious and agenda driven, retellings, or rather remodellings, of dharmik epics. It must be read as a stepping stone for the study of the source text to understand and absorb the main epic in a deeper manner.
Dr. Pingali Gopal reviews 'The Imperishable Seed' By Bhaskar Kamble, a theoretical physicist from IIT Kanpur and presently a data scientist in Germany.
The linear progression of history from a primitive past to an advanced future, deeply entrenched in western philosophy, embeds itself in Indians even today as a classic case of ‘colonial consciousness’. Bhaskar has done a brilliant job of describing the history of mathematics, a much ignored subject in our educational systems, and tracing the roots of many subjects to the genius mathematicians of ancient and mediaeval India.
The Jagannatha Ratha Yatra of Puri, Odisha, while not the only such event in the country, is certainly the most prominent and important one. The siblings Jaganatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra (Krishna with His elder brother and younger sister) are brought out and travel to their aunt's house, known as the Gundicha temple, where they stay for a two week period.
Ratnakar Sadasyula throws light on the lesser known aspects of the Ratha Yatra, its traditions and procedures, in detail.
"Communism, as the logical outcome of materialism, cannot but be hostile to religion in all its aspects. Thus from the very beginning, the Communists aimed at the destruction of religious belief and worship in Soviet Russia."
Halley Kalyan pens a review of “The Fate Of Muslims Under Soviet Rule” - a booklet about Soviet government rule in regions that had a significant population of practicing Muslims, by Erich W Bethman (1958); and highlights the shared antagonism towards religion (Hinduism in particular in the Indian context) between the Communist dogma and the Indian version of Secularism.
Since the partition in 1947, Hindus in Pakistan, the persecuted minority, have found their voices unheard and suppressed.
Once inhabited by Hindus and Buddhists, the region that forms Pakistan at present has a demographically insignificant, if not laughable, population of minorities. With the physical disappearance of the Hindus in Pakistan, their history as indigenous inhabitants of the land is gradually becoming a fading memory.
‘India In The Eyes Of Europeans’ by Martin Farek, one of the scholars of the Comparative School of Cultures in the Czech Republic; is a book that analyses the biases of the Christian European scholarship in interpreting all that is foreign to it; especially the way that scholars influenced by Christian theology, Western and Indian alike, view Indian and more specifically Hindu history.
According to Dr. SN Balagangadhara, the framework to define a religion as done by Semitics does not apply to Indic religions as they more akin to traditions.
From the colonial period to even the present time in independent Fiji, Hindus continue to be treated as 2nd class citizens.
Even though it was recently unmasked and forced to apologise, NPR has had Hinduphobic views for quite some time.
The media coverage of events in India have a heavy tilt where they repeatedly show Hindus in a bad light.