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Showing posts from July, 2011

Ākāśāt Patitaṃ: Many Forms, One Reality

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Adi Shankara: The image that's stayed with me forever Sanskrit and shlokas have always fascinated me. The sheer vastness of Sanskrit literature is humbling. There are enough verses, texts, commentaries and traditions to occupy many lifetimes, and still leave one feeling that one has barely scratched the surface. But I didn't think much about any of this when I was growing up. I would recite shlokas in the morning and evening without fail. They were simply part of life. The words were there, the rituals were there, the temples were there—but much of it happened in the background. I was busy with academics. There was no time for Sanskrit or Vedanta. At least, that is what I used to tell myself. Of course, time was never really the problem. I could spend five days watching a Test match from morning to evening and somehow consider that perfectly legitimate use of my time! The truth was simpler: Sanskrit and Vedanta had not yet become priorities. Gr...

Limitless wonder

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Certainly not the way I eat! I remember that, in school, fellow students made it a point to ask this question to put a timid and meek lad in trouble.   Do you live to eat or eat to live? It was after considerable deliberation that the right answer was arrived at.  Right answer in this case was the one that did not invite the giggles and that condescending look of You can't even come up with the right answer.  Anyway, now, nobody would ask that question, and the answer would be way different.  The passage of time has corrected several of my answers now, which I had presumed to be right back then. Food has always been a priority.  One does not have to go through any kind of difficulty to get awesome vegetarian food in Bangalore.  By default, all the good restaurants are pure vegetarian only. In fact, till I was in Engineering, I had never entered a restaurant that had non-vegetarian food. Anyway, all this is for another day.  As I got exposed to t...