Amit's Blog

Why Bhima—Not Arjuna—Was Vyasa's Instrument of Last Resort In the Mahabharata, every one of Dhritarashtra's hundred sons was killed by Bhima alone—not Arjuna, not Nakula, not any other Pandava. This is not a casual detail but a profound philosophical statement. Vyasa uses Bhima's solitary, brutal vengeance to argue that some evils cannot be answered by chivalry or rule-bound warfare. Bhima drinks blood, breaks thighs, and fights outside kshatriya codes—yet he is never condemned. The epic suggests that visceral love, when violated, must become visceral rage. Refusing that rage is not virtue but impotence. Bhima carries the stain of his acts but never pretends otherwise. His truthfulness, not his purity, is his dharma. The Mahabharata offers no comfort—only the unbearable question: what would you have done? The mace is wet, the hands are stained, No clean god watches from above. For those who loved, the rule is plain: Some sins are the only shape of love. A Dis...

How a Refusal to Fight a War Over Water, Not a Chance Encounter with an Old Man, May Have Driven Siddhartha Gautama to Abandon His Throne   The man who became the Buddha walked away from everything. That much is undisputed. But why he left—and what he left behind—has been debated for twenty-five centuries. The familiar story tells of a sheltered prince who first encountered old age, sickness, and death outside his palace gates, then fled in the night on a magical horse. It is a beautiful tale, rich with symbolism and spiritual urgency. Yet the earliest texts tell a different story: one of weeping parents, public confrontation, and a young man shaving his head before walking away in broad daylight. Some scholars go further, arguing that Siddhartha did not leave because of existential dread but because he refused to fight a tribal war over water rights. This alternative narrative—championed by Dharmanand Kosambi and later codified by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar—transforms the Buddha from...

A journey through matrilineal uncles, roasted masalas, snake worship, and the real reason your Mangalorean friend judges your sambar The Western Ghats are not a mountain range. They are a 1,600-kilometer custody order separating two warring siblings: coastal Karnataka—wet, matrilineal, coconut-drunk, spirit-worshipping—and interior Karnataka—dry, patrilineal, millet-chewing, temple-proud. For two millennia, the Ghats ensured that a Mangalorean fish curry and a Mysore ragi mudde never shared the same plate. Colonial ports bred English-speaking, pork-eating cosmopolitans. Princely Mysore bred Sanskrit-spouting, ghee-pouring royals. Today, Bengaluru’s traffic jams blur the line, but ask a Bunt about Aliyasantana and a Lingayat about gotra—they will stare at each other like Europeans meeting Amazonians. The irony? They now meet in corporate cafes eating quinoa salads, united only in their disdain for the other’s pickles. Across the Ghats, a line of rain, One side feast, one side grain...