That night, after seeing the end of both her men and having anonymously alerted the police about the double murder, she expectantly waited for Dhruva to turn up at her bungalow, the gates of which she deliberately kept ajar, and when he knocked at the main door, she received him in lingerie.

"Why not we together create history," she said invitingly. "It's my curiosity to measure up the cop who would turn up for my questioning that made me appraise you on the sly; even as your looks surged my sexual passion, your manner induced a sense of belonging in me. Believe me; my urge to make a new beginning with you fuelled my desire to be freed of both of them even more; that way, my man, you are an abettor of the crime. Whatever, in the wake of the murders, breathin...

Who said the novel is dead; 'Benign Flame' raises the bar as vouched for by one Spencer Critchley, an American Literary Critic thus: The plot is quite effective and it’s a refreshing surprise to discover that the story will not trace a fall into disaster for Roopa, given that many writers might have habitually followed that course with a wife who strays into extramarital affairs.

But what a poetic justice it was that the publishers’ apathy, for my literary foray into an uncharted fictional arena, pushed me into Roopa’s despondent shoes, leg for leg! So to say, to atone for myself, and to earn for her the empathy, at least, of a few discerning readers, I self-published it, in which some have found freshness - “it’s a refreshing surprise to discover that the story will not trace a fall into disaster for Roopa, given that many writers might have hab...

Being in the seventy-fifth year of our republic, it is imperative that WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA must evaluate THOSE PEOPLE OF INDIA, who had adopted our constitution. But to put things into perspective, who ‘We’ are need to be ascertained for the constitution, instead of forging India into an unified nation, turned it into a conglomeration of disparate entities, though by then, Gurajada had famously stated that ‘it’s not the soil but its people that make a country’ (desam...

When Mohandas Gandhi took the satyagraha path to free India from the British rule, as that was in sync with their pacifist psyche, shaped by the foreign yokes for a millennium, Hindus in their millions flocked to him wide-eyed as if awoke from their collective slumber. However, having sensed that the dispiriting Gandhian way would be self-defeating in every which way, when Subhas Bose came up with ‘give me your blood, I’ll give you freedom’ tune, by and large, it failed ...

While a conflict of interest, be it in life or in fiction, can bring about self-introspection, strange though it may seem, a casual encounter could lead to self-discovery. So it happened with me in the wake of my rebuff to a dogged tempter, “money is not my weakness” and his “what is your weakness” repartee; for the record, either I had been a straight purchase officer or a strict loss assessor, occupations amenable to monetary mischief.

However, the idea of this article is not to gloat over my uprightness but to present the genesis of my attitude to money and the vicissitudes of my life as a subject matter for possible research. But the caveat is that much of my growing up that shaped the same was in the times when the social pulls and the peer pressures, not to speak of the student stress, weren’t, as they have come to become of late, as emotionally unsettling. It was primarily because, as compared to ...

No mistaking it, in India’s socio-religious turf, caste is the divisive creed of the Hindus, largely immune to the cultural credo of the Hindutva, formulated by Savarkar, which diminishes their demographic strength in its electoral arena, comprising of non-Hindus in considerable numbers, who, in stark contrast, are religiously cohesive and politically emotive, particularly against the Hindu nationalists. But the lazy explanation offered by some for the lack of Hindu com...

It is worth noting that in the early 11th Century as Al-Beruni noticed, the Vysyas the agriculturist-traders and Shudras the artisan-labour force lived in the same quarters, which happenstance underscores that the varna vyavastha of yore was not that caste-tight after all. But sadly, so it seems, at some point thereafter, Shudras, based on their respective occupations, came to sub-divide themselves into numerous caste groups in what can be called vruththi vyavastha, an i...

Unmindful of the old adage, when you point a finger at someone else, there are three pointing back to you, Udhayanidhi, the Christian son of the atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin and his devout Hindu wife, had raged an unseemly controversy through his clarion call for the eradication of sanatana dharma aka Hinduism that he likened to dengue, malaria and corona. It is another matter though that he has no issues with the ethics of the Christianity that requir...

As a corollary, it can be said that without saying as much, Dr. Bhagwat had debunked the diabolical chātur-varṇyaṁ mayā sṛiṣhṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśhaḥ (v13, ch4) and such divisive verses from the eminently egalitarian Gita that were blue-penciled in the author’s Bhagvad-Gita Treatise of Self-help sans 110 inane interpolations, published way back in 2003. Be that as it may, before the veracity of the Sangh Pramukh’s “If some pundits citing scriptures are talking about ca...

It was this Double Hindu Squeeze affected by the Dalit and Shudra Cards which enabled the Nehruvian forces to retain their political dominance in the post-colonial India for over six decades that was till Narendra Modi managed to unify some sections of the Shudras under his party’s Hindutva flag in 2014 only to add more such in 2019. What with the Hindu consolidation leading to the 2024 hustings is ever on the raise, the unraveled Nehruvians, driven by their craving for ...

Instead of bashing the Manu Smriti a la flogging the dead horse riding a blind ass, it pays the mankind to discard the redundant chaff to nourish itself on the pristine grain in Manu’s ancient granary.

However, the moot point is whether or not Manu can be exonerated on the grounds that his original composition was subsequently fouled by caste prejudices and vested interests, and it seems to be the case. It all began thus: 1.1. The great sages approached Manu, who was seated with a collected mind, and, having duly worshipped him, spoke as follows: 1.2. ’Deign, divine one, to declare to us precisely and in due order the sacred laws of each of the (four chief) caste...

In the ‘in vogue’ Bhagvad-Gita’s philosophical discourse could be found some ritualistic postulations in chapter 3, titled karma yoga, which, are nothing but innovations of Manu’s stipulations in that regard. Likewise, Gita’s Cycle of Creation, in chapter 8, akshara parabrahma yoga, follows Manu’s course.

It is worth noting that at the end of each of its eighteen chapters, it is asserted in the Gita that it is the quintessence of the Upanishads and the Brahmasutrās, and as argued in my critique supra, one-hundred and ten verses in it are latter-day interpolations bereft of the Upanishadic and Brahmasutric connotations. What is more, while some of those smear its inclusive philosophy with sectarian postulations, which echo Manusmritic caste discriminations that are inimica...

No less than Narendra Modi, India’s erudite prime minister, had attributed the self-disparaging Indian character to its thousand years of slavery, that too on the floor of the Indian parliament. And it’s no wonder that Asaduddin Owaisi, the Islamist revivalist in the Indian remnant, promptly contested the said proposition. Needless to say, while Modi echoed the lament of the Hindu nationalists, albeit in a politically correct vocabulary, Owaisi sees the Muslim invasion o...

Wonder why the thoughtless Hindus should indulge in making such ridiculous claims even as their ancestors had left a host of unimaginable accomplishments, acknowledged by the world at large, for their feel good - the invention of zero, value of pi, and the decimal system in mathematics, and the discovery of ‘precession of the Equinoxes’ in astronomy, just to name a few. It is in this context, this excerpt from the ‘Cheiro’s Book of Numbers’ is noteworthy. The ancient Hi...

No wonder then that at the critical juncture of India’s sunder, the Hindu elites - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect – moulded in a century-old Macaulay brainwash to totally disregard their religion and develop a near contempt for their culture, were naturally devoid of any dharmic wherewithal to guide Bharat in a proper post-partition sanatana direction. So, the by then rootless Hindu masses too...

For starters, India that came under the Islamic onslaught in the early 8th Century culminating in the Mogul rule over it in the late 15th Century carries the oldest extant civilization on earth. Then, at the beginning of the 17th Century, the British landed in the sub-continent as spice traders to end up pitching their colonial tents under the British Raj upon which the sun had never set that was until the mid 20th Century. That was when the clamor of the Musalmans for a...

Poetic pain of an unpublished author

I wasn’t poor, being not rich Life was fine, thanks to hope All that changed, owing to muse,

A satirical poem on God's creation

Told God man In Genesis One Him He created in form of His Not when asked as how He did Thought He fit in Genesis Two To tell He used the dust for that But to change tack after that,

This essay seeks to analyze the motives behind the false propaganda about India's alleged religious intolerance towards its minority Muslims and the Christians as well as the duplicity of the Indian left-liberals who undermine the Indian national interest.

However, while the Musalmans, fearing that the western education would lead to the dilution of Islamic faith among their wards, avoided Macaulay like a plague, the Hindus embraced him willy-nilly giving up their ‘haughty’ indifference to other faiths end ending up with ‘naive’ indulgence towards them. What is worse, from the Hindu point of view, the Macaulay education, over time, succeeded in making them have a dim view of the sanatana dharma of their progenitors and ske...

Then Modi, on the anti-graft and the national security planks, arrived to wrest the decade-long power from her by busting her anti-national political gang at the hustings. Backed by the public mandate, he set out to do what he could do in his first term to reverse the ant-Hindu gear in the hostile eco-system hitherto nursed by the Nehruvian cliché. So, the sight of him unfurling the Indian tricolor from the ramparts of the Mogul built Red Fort in Maharaja’s headgear was ...

However, as time passed by in the ancient past, owing to the mundane distortions in the divine discourse that the Bhagavad-Gita is, the debilitating caste biases and the irrational ritual practices became the new norm of sanatana dharma to the immense hurt of the Hindu society as argued in the writer’s free ebook Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation). So, in time, it fell upon Siddhartha, as Gautam Buddha, to negate the twin evils that...

Why is This Book Now? The Manusmriti, the social doctrine of yore, and the Bhagvad-Gita, the spiritual tome in vogue that lay down the discriminatory dharma (duties) of the four social classes (castes) have been the bugbears of the Hindu backward classes. However, to their chagrin, of late, as the latter is being mindlessly promoted even though the former was constitutionally debunked, they began advocating that it too should be dumped in a dustbin. Ironically, the im...

Bhagvad-Gita, often referred to as the Gita, comprises eighteen chapters, which, in all, contain seven hundred slokas (verses) that is not counting the unnumbered opening number of its thirteenth chapter. Though it has gained prominence on its own steam, in fact it is a part of the epochal Mahabharata, which, with over 100,000 slokas, is the longest tome in the world of letters. Moreover, this epic, probably compiled around the third century BCE, whose authorship is attr...

It can be said that the Gita as it is unmistakably propounds the caste system and unambiguously details the caste characteristics that is besides the earmarked social occupations / obligations of its members. Hence, one should ponder - would have Krishna chosen to reduce Shudras, his own people, literarily that is as Krishna himself was a Shudra, as menials even as Jehovah, having enabled the Jews to come out of slavery, made them his Chosen People!

The sore point to those at the rough-end-of-the-caste-stick in the ‘in vogue’ Gita (short description of the Bhagavad-Gita) is God Krishna’s alleged owning the creation of the very discriminatory caste system thus: chātur-varṇyaṁ mayā sruṣhṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśhaḥ tasya kartāram api māṁ viddhyakartāram avyayam (Ch 4 v 13) Well, the plain reading of this Sanskrit sloka indicates that based on the (human) qualities and (mundane) activates he had created the four varna...

Owing to the all-pervading purānic narrative that is in tune with ¬¬the above, by and large, the Hindu religiosity has come to be steeped in propitiating the gods through assorted rituals and fervent prayers to avert adversity or for self-aggrandizement and /or both. It’s another matter though that in our materialistic time, it has further descended into a religious barter with gods, or worse, of seeking to bribe them that too only after they second man’s bidding! Hence...

Long before the advent of the Torah, not to speak of the Bible and the Quran that followed it, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad had it that “.. since he (man) created gods who are better than he: and also because, being mortal, he created immortals, it is his higher creation. Whoever knows this, comes to be in this, his higher creation.” However, in the latter-day Nārāyana Upanishad, the ‘mortal man’ sought to control the ‘immortal god’ he himself had created thus: “daiva dē...

Adolf Hitler had on his hands the blood of six million gas-chambered Jews besides fifty million soldiers, in the flower of their youth, and thirty million civilians of all ages, who perished in the World War II that he started, but yet he is among the most debated about worldwide. Moreover, Mein Kampf, his autobiography with an anti-Semitic slant is not ostracized either by the book world, but in a stark contrast, uttering the very name of Nathuram Godse, the man who ass...

Godse, in his own words, was “Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone,” and that should have...

Though the dalit tag affords political clout to its desperate classes as a whole, it had failed to buttress the self-worth of its disparate caste groups for in the Indian cultural calculus, caste is intrinsic to the social-worth of its members. Thus, it is imperative to cast a sense of caste-worth in the dalit fold in the ‘Black is Beautiful’ mould for the collective moral upliftment of its member castes. But self-belief being the by-product of the zeal to strive and no...

Though slavery was abolished in America way back in 1865, the undying discrimination against its ‘free’ Negroes remained such that even Jesse Owens, who having symbolized the U.S. sporting power in the Berlin Olympics of 1938, had to keep holding the bias end of its racial stick. Though the innate physical strength of Negro biology continued to yield sporting returns in their scores of Olympic medals that buttressed the American athletic glory, their racial plight remain...