Home › Journal
Journal
Essays, commentary, and myth-busting — written to think out loud, and to point back to the source-based guides.
Latest
Myth-busting Does the Hanuman Chalisa give the distance to the sun? A famous sum says one line of the Chalisa encodes the earth-sun distance. It does not, and the reasons are more interesting than the claim. Read → Myth-busting Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages? Research Who was allowed to learn Sanskrit? Myth-busting When will Kalki come, and what will he look like? Myth-busting Why is a coconut broken in Hindu ceremonies? Myth-busting Why is Om chanted at the start and end of prayers and yoga? Myth-busting Do Aghoris really eat human flesh? Myth-busting Why is Krishna blue? Myth-busting What the bindi actually means
Browse by category
Journal
Myth-busting Does the Hanuman Chalisa give the distance to the sun? A famous sum says one line of the Chalisa encodes the earth-sun distance. It does not, and the reasons are more interesting than the claim. 26 Sep 2026 · 8 min Myth-busting Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages? The claim is traced to one sentence written in Calcutta in 1786, and that sentence says the opposite of what it is quoted for. The idea it is used to support belongs to a different man, in 1808, and comparative linguistics spent the next seventy years dismantling it. 24 Aug 2026 · 23 min Research Who was allowed to learn Sanskrit? A Jain logician was expelled for twelve years for wanting the scriptures in Sanskrit. The Buddha made it a punishable offence to put his teaching into the brahminical register. The law books prescribed molten tin for a Shudra who listened to the Veda. And the language crossed Asia to Java anyway. 24 Aug 2026 · 10 min Myth-busting When will Kalki come, and what will he look like? Every generation produces a Kalki, a god-man or an internet prophet who says the tenth avatar has come. The texts say something stranger. By the tradition's own arithmetic he is roughly 427,000 years away, and the vivid Kalki everyone pictures is medieval. 24 Jul 2026 · 13 min Myth-busting Why is a coconut broken in Hindu ceremonies? It is smashed before a new car, a foundation stone, a temple threshold. We reach for one tidy reason. The coconut is doing several things at once, and the strangest of them is that this most Hindu of objects is not named in the Vedas. 24 Jul 2026 · 12 min Myth-busting Why is Om chanted at the start and end of prayers and yoga? The reason a prayer and a yoga class both open and close with Om: an old rule that says sacred knowledge leaks at both ends, the syllable that means Brahman and also means "yes," and the silence the chant is really aiming for. 24 Jul 2026 · 13 min Myth-busting Do Aghoris really eat human flesh? The documentaries call them cannibals. The word is not quite wrong, and that is the trouble: it arrives carrying a killing the record does not support. What the sources actually report is narrower, rarer and far less certain than the rumour, and it must not be confused with the crimes committed in its name. 23 Jul 2026 · 10 min Myth-busting Why is Krishna blue? Every poster shows him sky-blue. The oldest texts that describe him say something else. They call him dark, and his name says so first: Krishna means black. 23 Jul 2026 · 6 min Myth-busting What the bindi actually means At a music festival a pop star wears one as boho fashion and is called stylish; a South Asian girl wore the same dot to school and was called 'dothead.' The little red mark is not a decoration. It is a point, and a point is the most concentrated thing there is. 10 Jul 2026 · 11 min Essay Why Hindus touch elders' feet (charan sparsh) At an airport gate, a grown woman bends and touches her mother's feet, and a stranger watching finds it either beautiful or troubling. Here is what the gesture actually is: not submission, but an exchange. 10 Jul 2026 · 11 min Myth-busting Brahma, Brahman, Brahmin: one root, three worlds Three near-identical words that mean three completely different things: the Absolute, a god, and a class of people. Here is how to tell Brahman, Brahmā and Brahmin apart, and the single ancient root that ties them together. 4 Jul 2026 · 11 min Myth-busting Satan in Hinduism: the asuras are not what you think No single figure in Hinduism matches the Devil: no fallen angel, no ruler of hell, no eternal enemy of God. Here is what the asuras really are, why even demons can be devout, and where Hinduism actually locates evil. 4 Jul 2026 · 13 min Research Is Ram Setu man-made? What the geology actually says A chain of shoals runs across the sea between India and Sri Lanka, exactly where the Ramayana says Rama's army built a bridge. Did NASA prove it is man-made? Here is the geology, the scripture, and the myth about the satellite image, kept carefully apart. 4 Jul 2026 · 14 min Research Is the Bhagavad Gita an interpolation in the Mahabharata? Two armies stand ready, the conches have blown, and the epic stops for 700 verses of philosophy. The Gita reads so perfectly on its own that it feels dropped in. Here is what the manuscripts actually say about whether it was. 4 Jul 2026 · 14 min Essay Is your soul the same as the ātman? Ātman is usually translated 'soul,' but the word smuggles in Christian assumptions the Sanskrit never carried. Here is why 'soul' fits badly, and which Hindu idea your 'soul' actually matches. 4 Jul 2026 · 12 min Research Did the Mahabharata describe nuclear weapons? A famous passage claims the Mahabharata describes an ancient atomic bomb, 'brighter than a thousand suns.' Here is where that quotation actually comes from, what the epic really says about the Brahmāstra, and the one connection to the atomic age that is genuinely true. 4 Jul 2026 · 15 min Research Vimanas: did ancient India have flying machines? The Ramayana really does describe a flying chariot, the Pushpaka. So did ancient India have aircraft? Here is the difference between the genuine flying craft of myth and the famous 'ancient aviation manual' that turns out to have been written in the twentieth century. 4 Jul 2026 · 14 min Research Where was Dvārakā? The search for Krishna's drowned city The Mahabharata says the sea swallowed Krishna's city after his death. Off the coast of Gujarat, divers have found submerged stones. Here is what the marine archaeology actually recovered, how it was dated, and where the evidence stops and the headlines begin. 4 Jul 2026 · 14 min Myth-busting Is manifestation the same as Hindu sankalpa? The internet keeps calling sankalpa the ancient version of manifestation. The Sanskrit word is older and stranger than that, and it points the opposite way: toward vow, discipline, and action, not toward wishing. 2 Jul 2026 · 9 min Essay What Oppenheimer's Gita line really means The most famous line the West knows from the Bhagavad Gita is a mistranslation of a mistranslation. What Krishna actually says is stranger, and quieter, than a boast about the bomb. 2 Jul 2026 · 9 min Essay Reincarnation: is there any real evidence? For sixty years a University of Virginia psychiatrist and his successor documented thousands of young children who described the lives of the dead. Here is what that record does and does not show, held next to the Hindu doctrine of rebirth. 2 Jul 2026 · 9 min Myth-busting The swastika was sacred for 5,000 years before the Nazis One man rotated an ancient sign forty-five degrees and gave it to a regime that murdered millions. But the mark itself is older than writing, and roughly two billion people still draw it every day for luck. This is how to tell the two apart. 2 Jul 2026 · 11 min Myth-busting The real meaning of Namaste You have heard it at the end of a yoga class, palms together, eyes closed: 'the divine in me bows to the divine in you.' It is a beautiful line. It is not what the word says. Namaste means 'I bow to you,' and the dictionary is older and plainer than the studio. 2 Jul 2026 · 8 min Myth-busting 'Idol worship' is a mistranslation At the end of the festival they carry the god to the sea and let the clay dissolve. If Hindus believed the image was God, they could not do that. 'Idol' is a borrowed word that gets the whole thing wrong. 26 Jun 2026 · 11 min Commentary Nachiketas and the god of death A boy is given away to Death by his own angry father, waits three nights at the door of Yama, and asks the one question the god would rather not answer. The Katha Upanishad puts its deepest teaching in the mouth of death itself. 26 Jun 2026 · 11 min Essay Why Hinduism has no founder, and why it matters Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism each begin with a person and a moment. Hinduism begins with neither. It is not that the founder is lost. There was never one to lose, and that absence shapes everything. 26 Jun 2026 · 10 min Essay Is 'Hinduism' even a religion? The word Hindu began as a river, and as somebody else's word for it. The '-ism' that turned it into a religion is younger than the steam engine. So is religion even the right container? 25 Jun 2026 · 10 min Commentary The Nasadiya Sukta: the hymn that ends in doubt At the root of the oldest scripture in living use sits a creation hymn that refuses to claim certainty. It ends by wondering whether even the one who oversees it all knows how it began. 25 Jun 2026 · 9 min Myth-busting What 'karma' doesn't mean In English, karma came to mean cosmic payback. In the texts it means something plainer and stranger: action, and a law of causation that puts your freedom at the centre, not your fate. 25 Jun 2026 · 9 min Myth-busting Yoga was never about flexibility In the founding text of yoga, no posture is named, the word flexibility never appears, and the whole subject of asana is finished in three sentences. The mat came later than almost anyone thinks. 25 Jun 2026 · 9 min Essay Bhaja Govindam: the hammer that shatters delusion An eighth-century hymn that calls itself a hammer, swung verse by verse at everything we mistake for permanent. A reading of the whole of Bhaja Govindam, and why its blows still land. 23 Jun 2026 · 16 min Essay Why so much online "spirituality" is inauthentic, and how to tell A field guide to separating genuine tradition from repackaged New Age content. 3 Jun 2026 · 11 min Myth-busting What the West gets wrong about chakras The rainbow seven-step model most people know is a recent hybrid. Here's what the texts describe. 28 May 2026 · 8 min Commentary Reading the Bhagavad Gita in the modern world What a battlefield dialogue still asks of anyone trying to act well under pressure. 14 May 2026 · 9 min