varnam

Tripura Rahasya has the story of King Susena, who went on an Ashwamedha yagya. The royal horse was let loose, and the royal entourage followed. Eventually, the horse reached the ashram of rishi G...

https://www.varnam.org/2024/04/07/how-hindus-recall-times-vastness-today/

In Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life, a few alien ships appear and orbit around the Earth. The aliens (called heptapods, because they have seven lidless eyes that ring all the way a...

https://www.varnam.org/2024/03/15/samskritam-notes-navigating-non-linear-thought-with-sentence-structure/

In Vikram Sampath’s book “Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History,” he points out the significant issues within Indian historiography. The history we learn in schools, often ce...

https://www.varnam.org/2024/01/21/ayodhya/

On a date that would one day be marked by future tragedy, history quietly marked its own significant encounter. On the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, just near the bustling port of Surat, two ...

https://www.varnam.org/2024/01/12/aurangzeb-pirates-and-the-east-india-company/

In 1132 CE, in Mangalore,  the Tunisian Jewish merchant Abraham bin Yiju married Ashu Nair, a local Malayali woman. They lived together for less than two decades in great prosperity and raised a...

https://www.varnam.org/2023/09/08/the-12th-century-story-of-ashu-nair-and-abraham-bin-yiju/

While we all have heard of Rome, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, most of us have not heard of Eleusis. This Greek harbor town was the spiritual capital of the Western world. Plato visited Eleusis and wr...

https://www.varnam.org/2023/05/13/the-immortality-key-uncovering-the-secret-history-of-the-religion-with-no-name/

Conflict and discontinuity in Indian history is an obsession with Marxist historians writing Indian history. Any fresh development in India is seen as a revolt against the past; the new is consid...

https://www.varnam.org/2023/02/26/the-indic-obsession-with-continuity/

When this blog started in 2002, the only history books available were those written by Marxist historians. Looking at books on my desk in 2022, I am delighted to see many with a Bharatiya voice, ...

https://www.varnam.org/2022/12/30/best-books-of-2022/

One of the interesting stories mentioned in Sandeep Balakrishna’s Stories From Inscriptions: Profound Real-life Tales from Hindu Cultural History comes from a village called Hebbale near Hass...

https://www.varnam.org/2022/12/02/stories-from-inscriptions-profound-real-life-tales-from-hindu-cultural-history/

The above picture shows the organization of Samskritam varṇamālā in Devanagari script. First, there are the swaras at the top, followed by the vyañjanas. This sequence is the same in all Ind...

https://www.varnam.org/2022/11/25/samskritam-notes-sounds-and-vibrations/