I was often told by well-meaning family and friends – steeped in a culture that propagated and encouraged obeisance to God – that I would be subjected to divine retribution for my heretical views. It was lost on them that the beauty of being an atheist is that things you don’t believe in cannot be …
Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian led me on a voyage of discovery, not only into the writings of this extraordinary man, but also to think very deeply about our blind faith in God and religion. The line “If I were granted omnipotence and millions of years to experiment in, I should not …
That picture of the Milky Way is from the internet, but the scene in the sky on that night I walked up the hill with my grandmother was uncannily close. The night sky gives us perspective, and perhaps the reason why “uneducated” village folk like Panikkar, who taught me what the word equanimity truly means, was …
My great grandmother died as a child. She was 96. She was never married. She was handpicked by the local Brahmin ( Namboodiri) to have a “sambandham” ( relationship). He was 64. She was 19. She didn’t have a choice. It didn’t last. Not much beyond a year. He slipped out literally leaving her holding …
I was ten years old. While on school holidays at our ancestral home in the tiny hamlet of Aliparamba in Kerala, Ammamma, my mothers’ mother, asked me – “do you want to come to the temple with me tomorrow morning”