AT THE OUTSET, The Dharma Dispatch wishes all its reader a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024. In September 2023, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of launching our sacred initiative dedicated to serving the Sanatana cause. You can read our jottings on that occasion here.
These five years have been an eventful journey involving much learning, insights, and the sheer joy of digging into and offering rare stories and other content from the inexahustible treasure-trove of the Sanatana annals. The response from you, our readership, has only grown by leaps and bounds. We continue to receive much affection and unstinted support from all corners of the global Hindu community and from all strata of society. So, once again, a heartfelt note of gratitude to everyone who have been a part of our journey.
Adhering to our annual tradition of publishing a list of the most read articles on The Dharma Dispatch each year, we have curated the list for 2023 as well. Happy reading!
This essay still remains the most read piece on The Dharma Dispatch since it was first published in March 2023.
It is a detailed commentary and critique of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who remains wildly popular in the West primarily for his battles against the Woke.
Yet, when we pierce his rhetoric, we find that he represents the same colonial mindset of demeaning and demonising practices, deities and symbols that Hindus consider sacred.
This essay argues that the Western model of ideological universalism of Left and Right has broken down on its own home turf and that India must consciously reject it and reshape her destiny using homespun models through decolonisation.
There has been a flurry of statements in public discourse recently about an alleged north versus south India divide. When we peel off the layers, at the core, we find that it is nothing but a variant of the familiar anti-Hindu narrative. It originated roughly about a century ago in the so-called Dravidian discourse.
This is a layman's introduction to how the Hindu legal system (Dharmasastra) travelled to southeast Asia and left its lasting imprint there. The Indian colonies in the Far East must ever remain as the high-water mark of maritime and colonial enterprise of the ancient Indians. The political conquest of Brhad-Bharata (Greater India) and the adjacent islands was rapidly followed by a complete cultural conquest. The local people readily assimilated the new civilisation and adopted the religion, art, social manners and customs, alphabet, literature, laws and administrative systems of the conquerors.
This essay narrates the little-known but painful history of the savage manner in which Bakhtiyar Khalji physically exterminated Gaur and erased all traces of its Hindu past.
The Muslim chronicler Badauni extolls Bakhtiyar’s pious devastation of Gaur in a heartfelt couplet:
Here, where was heard before, the clamour and uproar of the Kaffir
Now, here is heard resounding the shouts of “Allaho Akbar!”
This is an English adaptation of DVG’s lecture titled Samskruti delivered at All India Radio on May 10, 1957. It an invaluable piece of contemplation on the rapid decline of the Hindu society and culture that occurred during the last half a century. The decline was multifaceted and it impacted the basic character of family and relationships, attitudes of people towards work, the basic character of marriage, outlook towards food, and a sort of self-discipline that can’t be taught.
It makes for wistful reading because we no longer have access to that social and cultural milieu.
The Udyoga Parva is one of the most glorious sections in the Mahabharata offering a wealth of insights and guidance for the contemporary Hindu society. An extraordinary portion in this Parva can be likened to Kunti-Gita, in which Kunti advice to her sons delivered through Sri Krishna counts as one of the most heroic and clear expositions of Kshatra Dharma.
This is the real-life story of a 13th Century Kannada poet named Rudrabhatta, who pledged an alphabet in his name to get a loan. An inscription which narrates this story also provides us an eye-opening and elevating portrait of the profound values that the Hindu society of that era lived by.
A no-holds-barred dissection of the recent Bollywood movie, Adipurush. It delves into the toxic and deracinated psyche that drives the makers of such movies. Its origins are colonial and Christian and its Indian makers are its newgen inheritors. Calling Sri Ramachandra as Adipurush is the clearest evidence of a barren imagination.
This essay is part of a four-part series tracing the thrilling origins of the discovery of a rare and valuable Ayurveda manuscript titled Navanītakaṁ, dating back to the 2nd Century CE. This particular essay shows how Navanītakaṁ or the so-called Bower Manuscript contains a detailed exposition of garlic as a dietary item and as medicine. After its discovery, the Western medical community appropriated this information into its own research.
This essay series remains one of the most widely read pieces on The Dharma Dispatch.
This is a profoundly moving episode of the last days of the legendary Kannada writer, Sri C. Vasudevaiah's sister-in-law. Her piety and devotion to Sanatana Dharma even on her death bed appears superhuman -- even divine -- to the contemporary Hindu psyche. The episode also shows what the Hindu society has really lost.
This story elicited a flood of responses marked with deep emotion.
This essay contains detailed information about the recipes and the procedure for preparing hair-dyes in ancient India. It is taken from the aforementioned Ayurvedic text, Navanītakaṁ.
Happily for all of us at The Dharma Dispatch, this piece elicited a significant number of questions and queries as to how these methods could be revived in our time.
That concludes the list for 2023. Please do let us know if there is an article from this year that you personally liked but does not find a place in this list by tweeting to us or writing a comment on our Facebook page.
A very happy new year from all of us at The Dharma Dispatch!
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