Ideas travel further than the people who had them.
Essays that follow a few of them forward: Indian thought, history, science, and the machines we now ask for answers.
Featured essay
When machines become oracles
I built an astrology engine and refused to call its outputs predictions. Modern AI raises the same question about what a model can actually see.
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Recent writing
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The age of answers, and the lost art of questions
Answers used to be expensive and are now nearly free. If scarcity has only moved rather than disappeared, what became scarce is knowing what to ask.
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The Layered Birth of Gods
One temple accepts only flowers; another remembers blood. Read those differences as fossils rather than local flavour, and the gods start to look assembled.
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The Lord of the Hills and the Clay of the Desert
A terracotta goddess excavated at Ur around 1800 BCE looks unmistakably like Venkateshwara. Coincidence, or a shared grammar for picturing the divine?
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Age of the Shiva Tandava Stotra
The hymn is credited to Ravana, but its metre, vocabulary and imagery point somewhere else entirely: eighth-century Rashtrakuta India.
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Why India created so many spiritual systems, and kept them all
Ritual, self-knowledge, mantra, yoga, devotion: India kept adding paths without discarding the old ones. Why the contradictions were allowed to stand.