Darshana & Itihasa: The Civilizational Gaze

A wise philosopher would know that the human mind is not designed to discover the ultimate answers to the fundamental philosophical question...

Philosophical ideas do not travel through history on their own. They travel through the medium of political movements. How influential a phi...

I am reading Karl Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times .  The book narrates the story of the Vienna Circle that was spearheading logic...

Liberals, as a political force, seem haunted by two persistent fears: first, the influence of religious and cultural elites; second, the pos...

The belief that conservatives will rescue the world from Marxism, socialism, communism, nihilism, or religious fundamentalism is both naïve ...

We examine the history of past civilizations through the stories of decline and fall.  When civilization is being built, the society is led ...

Every Democratic nation is a battleground of two irreconcilable forces: the nationalists and the counter-nationalists.  The nationalists fig...

I am inspired by the books of Leon Uris, especially his book Exodus , which describes the founding of the nation of Israel. But I have alway...

The history of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) is a history of maya. It is the history of Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas. It is the history of myt...

“Truth be told, Kashmir has turned into a snake-and-ladder game. The ladders are provided by Pakistan and the snakes by Indians. I say India...

Secularism, multiculturalism, diversity—these lofty sounding but naive ideals were conceived by Europeans who lived in nations dominated by ...

Economic success has weakened the appeal of the Gods in the Western countries and has led to the social problems of atheism, alienation and ...

When a civilization is on the rise, it excels in engineering, infrastructure projects, global trade, warfare and conquests, and religious an...

The Americans and the West Europeans are making the same civilizational mistakes today that the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent and the Zo...

History moves in one direction, hopes and imagination in another. The future, however, is directionless. Neither history, nor hopes and imag...

Among the books that I read in 2023, these 10 standout: The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition by Narendra Sing...

A society that forgets its Dharma—its religious, cultural, and historical foundations—risks losing the very principles that safeguard its pr...

Narendra Modi Narendra Modi seems to be a better reformer and politician than the four other reformist world leaders of the last 50 years: M...

Laws of morality apply only to individuals, never to civilizations—therefore, there are no good civilizations and evil civilizations. There ...

Territory is as old as instinct. In the wild, among wolves and hyenas, lions and dogs, territoriality is a primal impulse—etched not in law ...

Socialism creates tyrannical and nihilistic nations; capitalism creates schizophrenic and woke nations. Socialist nations die from economic ...

“Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed man...

The Rama Rajya (Godly civilization) envisioned in the ancient Hindu texts is more magnificent, advanced and happy than the utopia of the com...

The 4 most powerful geopolitical forces in the history of civilization are: pandemic, apocalypse, war and belief in one true God. The propag...

The notion that life is rational is a myth propagated by materialistic Western philosophers. Life is not rational. Life is governed by the i...

When a man praises himself, he is revealing his lack of wisdom and knowledge. When a nation praises itself as the best in the world, it is r...

Who is the world’s worst book reviewer? It is Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon. When I see a book being recommended by Gates, I know for sur...

“It was not a melting pot, it was a pressure cooker, for they came from every corner of the earth and had lived under every variety of circu...

I just finished reading Catherine Nixey’s book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . The book’s leitmotif is...

During the times of great religious and civilizational wars, the tenets of morality, ethics and legality become less important for the warri...

It takes thousands of years of religious thought, philosophizing, spiritual advancements, agriculture, political struggles, religious and po...

Reason is not the ultimate way of arriving at the truth, the laws of morality are not final. Both reason and morality are subjective; both a...

The idea that leftism is anti big business is a myth.  The reality is that the supporters of leftist ideology have been driving the global e...

Sri Aurobindo In 1920, Sri Aurobindo said that Mahatma Gandhi’s political method, founded on Tolstoy’s ideas, could lead to the imposition o...

Rama story carved in wall of Shiva temple Ellora Caves, 8th Century On the day of Vijayadashami, the festival signifying triumph of good ov...

"No army can stop an idea whose time has come."  This saying, often attributed to Victor Hugo, smacks of the "hindsight is 20...

Parvati and Dancing Shiva  Ellora cave Vishnu is the collectivist, Shiva the individualist. In his avataras, Vishnu builds great coalitions...

In the 1980s, the American CIA funded, trained, glorified and armed the Taliban in Afghanistan because they wanted to use the Taliban to des...

All humans crave for land, but only a few quest for meaning. The ones who quest for meaning are capable of making fruitful use of the land. ...

The quest for perfection is futile. Even the powerful Gods cannot create perfection in the universe. In the Bhagavad Gita , Lord Krishna rem...

Every birth is a rebirth, every death is a redeath. This applies to everything inside the universe and to the universe itself.  Every entity...

In ancient Indian astronomy, the asterism of the Big Dipper is described as the physical representation of the Saptarshi, the seven sages wh...

Goddess Saraswati  (10th century) The idea that man is a rational creature is a myth propagated by the power-hungry intellectuals and polit...

Lord Kalki, an avatara of Vishnu, appears at the final or ultimate moments of the Mahayuga.  Metaphysically, Lord Kalki represents the end o...

John Galt, the central figure in Ayn Rand’s  Atlas Shrugged , is often hailed as a prophet of radical individualism and the quintessential l...

Started reading Rajiv Malhotra's book Being Different yesterday. Now on Chapter 3.  This book is full of arguments against the postmoder...

Raja Ravi Varma’s Painting  of Bhima Arjuna, the third among the Pandava brothers, is viewed as the greatest warrior of the Mahabharata . Bu...

Shiva enters the Mahabharata as the god of fire and vengeance, the ascetic who destroys yet also grants the strength to destroy. Though the ...