Girish's Blog

The Vishnu SahasranAmam describes the 1000 names of Lord Vishnu. Some of them describe the Lord, some his attributes and some his powers. As many spiritual masters have said, there is no difference between the name of the Lord and the Lord Himself. Sri Ramakrishna said, “ There is infinite glory in God’s Name. The Name is the seed; the Name is the tree; and the Name is the fruit. God dwells in His own Name. ”  The Srimad Bhagavatam (1:1:14) states, " By resorting to His name, be it even in a mood of distress and helplessness, one entangled in the cycle of births and deaths would at once get release. " There are over a hundred names that describe the Lord in the Vishnu SahasranAmam. His vastness and His subtlety Vishnu is वामनः (152), the One who has a small body and प्रांशुः(153), One whose body is vast. He is ब्रह्म(664), the biggest, the vastest and the all-pervading and अणुः(835), the subtlest and the all-pervading. He is बृहत् (836), the greatest in dimension. He is al

  For me, as part of a generation which had its education in the last quarter of the 20th century, Savarkar was not mentioned in any of the official study materials except for the insinuation that he was involved in the murder of Mohandas Gandhi. In the absence of viable alternatives to arrive at one’s own conclusion, the official position on Savarkar was the only one. Now with the arrival of social media and history in India being liberated from the clutch of vested interests in central institutions, new light is being shed on the contributions of individuals other than Nehru and Gandhi to the freedom struggle. Volume 1 of Vikram Sampath’s epic biography deals with the upbringing of Vinayak Savarkar, the political environment in India and how it shaped him, his journey to England for his legal studies and his evolution as a political revolutionary plotting to overthrow the colonial British empire in India. It ends with his receiving conditional release from his sentence of life impr

Swami Vivekananda proceeded to Jaffna from Colombo. He had to shelve his plan of sailing for Madras (Chennai) from Colombo as he was receiving numerous telegrams from various Tamil-inhabited towns of Sri Lanka to visit them. On January 19, he took the train to Kandy — the hill station inhabited by tea plantation workers from Tamil Nadu. He was welcomed at the Kandy railway station by a traditional band and temple insignia amid loud cheers.  After delivering a brief speech, Swami Vivekananda set out for a long, arduous journey to Jaffna by a stagecoach as there were no railway line linking Kandy and Jaffna in those days. It was during this 200-mile journey that an outrageous incident happened. After nearly 50 miles, the coach broke down near Dambulla, known for its famous cave temple complex. This forced him to take a bullock-cart to reach Anuradhapuram, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka and the largest ‘buried city’ of the world.  Anuradhapuram hosts the Bo-tree, offshoot of the Bo-tree

One hundred and twenty five years ago, to the day, on the evening of the 16th January 1897, Swami Vivekananda gave a public lecture on "India, the Holy Land" in the Floral Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Swami Vivekananda had arrived in Colombo by the German steamer 'Prince Regent Leopold' on 15 January 1897. He was met on board by the reception committee comprising Swami Niranjanananda, Kanakasabai, Sockanathan and T.G. Harrison, a Sinhalese Buddhist. A decorated steam launch took him to the pier where thousands had gathered to cheer him. From the harbour he rode in a carriage to Barnes Street in Cinnamon Gardens accompanied by Ponnambalam Coomaraswamy, Member of the Legislative Council, and a sibling of the better known duo, Ponnambalam Ramanathan and Ponnambalam Arunachalam. The whole street had been lined by festoons and topped by arches made of coconut leaves and palmyrah fronds.  This was his first public lecture in the Indian subcontinent after his return from the We

The Hoysala Empire ruled most of what is now the state of Karnataka between the 10th and the 14th centuries. The capital of the Hoysalas was initially located at Belur but was later moved to Halebidu, both of which still have the remnants of the magnificent temples that were constructed. In the year 1258 CE, Somanatha Dandanayaka, a general of the Hoysala King Narasimha III built a temple to Sri Krishna at Somanathapura which in later centuries would come to epitomize the best of Hoysala architecture.  A little over fifty years after the temple was consecrated, it was attached by Islamic  invaders. The first attack was by Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji’s general in 1311 and in 1326 Muhammad Bin Tughlaq destroyed the remaining structures.  The invaders forced the king Veera Ballalla III to submit, and looted him of 312 elephants and 20,000 horses, besides jewellery. The king fled to Tiruvannamalai, but died in Madurai, while fighting the invaders. The account of Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan