R. Radhakrishnan's Blog, page 23
May 23, 2021
Laughing away our fear.
It is out there, the enemy
Of life, laughter and love
It grips the heart with fear
It muddles the mind in rage
But I am amidst my friends
Surrounded by those I love
We laugh at silly stuff
We never feel our age
We look fear in the eye
There is misery in loss
The heart mourns in tears
But we rally round
Together we will hold
We will laugh all we can
We will laugh our fears away.
R.Radhakrishnan
4th May 2021.
Namaste till the next time.
May 22, 2021
Sita’s Strength, a different story from the Ramayana.
The Ramayana is a poem of love of the ideal man Rama.
Rama is the avatar of Vishnu tasked with the killing of Ravana, the Rakshasa King of Lanka who troubles the Earth with his atrocities.
There are many versions of the Ramayana and most of them tell the story from Rama’s perspective.
Sita is the ideal woman, an avatar of the Goddess Laxmi but her voice is muted or rather muffled in the mainstream versions.
Sita in these versions is like the heroine of many Indian Movies today, i...
May 19, 2021
Books and the pleasure of reading
On a lazy Sunday, with nothing else to do as the pandemic and lockdown has affected our trips my kids and I decided to rearrange our bookshelf.
.
All of us have our Kindle as well as other digital book readers and our separate collections of ebooks.
But this was our physical book collection, treasures collected over the years on our travels and postings.
The plan was to do the cleaning of the bookshelf, remove the books we did not want, and again rearrange the books in some sort of...
May 18, 2021
Mandodari, Ravana’s Remarkable wife.
The Indian view is starkly different from the western view as regards good and evil.
Life is not seen in black and white, Dharma itself is not a fixed constant, it may change with the person and situation.
Unlike other religions, Hinduism does not have one single book which constrains its adherents’ behavior.
The belief in Hinduism that we are part of universal consciousness and that this consciousness also exists in all of us leads to the premise that in everyone there is good and ther...
May 11, 2021
Presumption and Perception among Friends part 2
Friendship is a mix, complicated, simple, sublime, misery, and happiness. Our stories are full of friends and their relationships.
Our ancient epics and Puranas explores the various facets of friendship.
There is a friendship between Karna and Duryodhana. A friendship that redeems them. Karna willingly gives up everything and lays down his life for Duryodhana. If Karna had accepted Kunti or Krishna’s offer he, as the undisputed elder of both the Pandavas and Kauravas, would have become th...
May 10, 2021
Presumption and Perception among Friends part 1. A Story from the Mahabharata.
Friendship, especially childhood friendships can suffer due to presumption and perception.
We have all experienced it. We are friends in school, we drift apart and meet again after years. In our eyes, we are the same, and the other person is also the same.
We meet with great joy, we open our hearts. We look at each other through the prism of time. We see a distorted image.
But life and our experiences have changed both of us. We don’t realize this and sometimes the friendship ge...
May 8, 2021
The Women who protected Draupadi.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are pan-Indian tales. The cast of characters is huge and the stories themselves have local variations.
There are of course the mainstream versions which have small changes and the changes are nuanced to reflect local ethos and empathies.
There are also folk traditions that are very different in some respects.
Today we look at a traditional story from Tamil Nadu. A version not from books but an oral retelling that has survived over the ages.
Yet it i...
May 4, 2021
Ganesh and Ravana
The Lord of Lanka, Ravana was a great bhakta of Lord Shiva. He was also a powerful king who had subjugated many rulers and the Devas, the celestial lesser Gods, themselves were frightened of him.
One day Ravana decided to go to Kailasa, the abode of Shiva, and pray to him.
Ravana not only wanted to have a darshan of Shiva he wanted to get Shiva to materialize the Atma linga and give it to him to take to Lanka.
Now, this Linga would make Ravana more powerful. The Devas were worried when ...
May 3, 2021
A time of loss, this Pandemic.
The leaves are still,
The trees dont sway
The world is waiting
An eerie calm around
The sun sinks slowly
Every breath is pleasure
Who knows when it ends
Men in arrogant Hubris
Owned the world
Ravaged the land
Nature was patient
She cajoled, she warned
Humanity was lost
The scourge unleashed
In droves they died
Like flies they dropped
Rich men, poor men
Great men, little men
The young and the old
Friends gone without...
May 2, 2021
Swaminatha and Om, the primordial sound.
Om is the primordial sound in Hinduism. It has a sophisticated, complex meaning and there have been whole books written about it. It is also called the Pranava Mantra.
To put it simply Om is Atman, the soul, our breath, our consciousness. But the word soul here has different meanings than the straitjacket sense of soul in western culture.
It denotes the Atman the soul in us, it denotes the Brahman, the supreme consciousness. The soul and everything else is found within the Brahaman, but ...
