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Category Archives: Dharma

Dharma

Every father has to get his daughter married?

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Indian Express reports a Bombay High Court judgment with a slightly misleading heading: Every father has to get his daughter married: HC.
Before I read the story, I wondered about the strong tone of a moral injunction, previously found mostly in the texts of Dharmashastra.
While the judgment seems to have included the [...]

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Wendell Berry and Thanksgiving

Sunday, November 26, 2006

From Iraq to Oakland, this thanksgiving has been a particularly violent one. Instead of reading depressing newspaper stories, here are a few paragraphs from Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth. As in his other novels, Berry offers a vision of how individuals can live in community and what I quote here articulates that vision [...]

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On America

Monday, May 1, 2006

We count the hovering Helicopters. Five. Six. There is the seventh. All cast their watchful eye, trying to count the sea of humanity in the streets below in downtown Chicago. Illegal aliens have come out. Some of their legal friends too. All have chosen not to work on May 1st, to demonstrate their contribution to [...]

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Dr. Rajkumar: Satya Hariscandra

Saturday, March 25, 2006

The plot of the film, Satya Hariscandra follows Raghavanka’s Hariscandra Kavya closely in its broad outline, but the primary objective here is to depict Hariscandra as a flawless character, truthful, unfailingly polite and dharmic.
Hence the film sets out to establish Hariscandra’s character as a truthful and generous king, who never refuses anything to any seeker [...]

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Hariscandra-2

Friday, March 24, 2006

This week let me return to Hariscandra and post what I wrote in mid-February. Here are the links to earlier stories: Raghavanka -1, Raghavanka - 2, From Cavundaraya to Hariscandra and Hariscandra.
In these earlier posts, I had written on the Sanskritic, puranic versions of the Hariscandra narrative, as well as on the two well known [...]

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Hariscandra

Friday, February 10, 2006

In my previous entry, I wrote about the first two accounts associated with Hariscandra. Today let us focus on narratives, which describe his commitment to truth and the various tests that Viswamitra puts him through. In these stories, two common elements appear to drive the plot forward: first, the traditional enmity between the two great [...]

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