If "Bollywood" could be given a birthday, it might well be May 3, 1913. It was on this day, one hundred years ago, that D.G. "Dadasaheb" Phalke presented before an audience at the Coronation Theater in Bombay his movie Raja Harischandra.

For a film culture that has come to...

Sixty years ago, an Indian filmmaker made a movie about a woman forced to stop her studies and marry an older, unfaithful man. The subject is not unusual. Many movies have depicted women in such a predicament. They weep, pray and reform their husbands. In Puttillu, though, the woman does...

On a bright sunny January morning, as people in India celebrated the festival of Sankranthi, I returned to Prasanthi Nilayam, the home of my family's revered Guru, Sri Sathya Sai Baba. It was my first visit there in nearly five years, and more importantly, it was my first...

For once, the television channels in India on New Year's Eve are not full of inane celebrations. For once, the tick-tock of clocks and countdowns does not seem like a mere routine. Instead, every news channel is full of people, hundreds and sometimes thousands of them, in dozens of cities,...

What is the difference between the sound of a squeaking door and the cries of a dog being beaten and stabbed?

If there is any difference at all, if there is even the slightest difference in how you would, as a human being, react to the cries of pain...

It must have been a busy night up in the heavens, or wherever it is that the gods and goddesses who nourish the dreams of all those who believe in them live and do their work.

I can imagine Ganesha, going here and there on his mouse, making obstacles...

India's fascination with mythology is perhaps easier to experience than explain. For one thing, it remains a remarkable cultural achievement that what we call mythology remains a living tradition, unlike in other cultures where the word often refers to fictions and dead beliefs. The stories of the gods, and those...

Satyamev Jayate is an ancient Sanskrit saying that means "truth alone triumphs." It is India's national motto and appears on the national symbol. Since it is so closely associated with government iconography, its mention in a conversation is likely to be steeped in irony, rather than optimism or...

One year after Sri Sathya Sai Baba's passing on April 24, 2011, I have yet to find the right words for what he meant to my family and to me. It is not a cliché but a professional admission, since I rarely feel such an inadequacy. My belief in Baba...

Like millions of people, I grew up thinking of Lord Shiva simply as Lord Shiva, a God, one of the many forms of God. From his depictions in paintings and sculpture, he was clearly a smiling, adoring, adored sort, despite slightly wild hair and wild creatures around him. His consort,...

Baba loved us. Like a father, a mother, a guru, a friend. Like Krishna or Shiva, as we imagined them to be from our stories. Like a simple and affectionate village elder from Rayalseema. Like a celebrity whose grace and poise could electrify a hundred thousand spectators at once. Like...

Rarely has ignorance made a mockery of greatness on the scale that it has in the past few days. If our world has taken to calling Gandhi a racist and a cheat, then we better invent new words to describe racism and dishonesty. Gandhi was a man who became a...

We should look at Groupon's Tibet ad not just in terms of sensitivity in advertising but in terms of what five hundred years of colonialism have done to us and to our ability to tell a simple story about our world and its people. We may have developed sophisticated means...

Long before America rearranged my name into its present form, I was known largely as Jamuna koduku. Jamuna's son. Not that my name was unknown. To this day I meet people who say their nephew or cousin was named Vamsee because their mothers were fans of my mother's. Thanks to...

If it weren't for the father of your nation, I wouldn't have been here today as the president of mine. I cannot imagine a better way of saluting the interconnectedness of the world we live in than what President Obama said in his speech to India's parliament. I...

In an age when the word "reality" has become synonymous with nasty behaviors on TV shows and "truth" seems impossibly divided between political cults, perhaps we could find a better sense of both in what we lightly call "myth." The tales of the gods and goddesses that we have told...

The gods of Hinduism have never been up there in some cold palace playing cruel whimsical games of fate with us humans. Instead, they have taken their place among us. They have let us call them friend, cousin, son, mother, teacher, and adore them as such. For it is only...

In an age when "reality" means anything but, it was inspiring to see two of our culture's most luminous diviners of truth on the same screen. What Stephen Colbert did for a fear-torn, war-hawked nation a few years ago, Jonathan Safran Foer is doing now for a dietarily-deceived...

All prejudices are unpleasantly alike on some level, but the prejudice that India and Indians face on a global scale has proven to be exceptionally resistant to change.

In a week that saw innocent Indians being murdered and imaginary Indians being maligned on opposite ends...

Hyderabad is the sort of city that makes poets out of ordinary men. It has a history of being home to different sorts of people, accepting them with an easy charm that only Hyderabad knows. Centuries ago, in the days of the Golconda kingdom, it was the center of international...