RSS. Rakhi. & Qawwali
What does interfaith understanding actually look like? This month, between Rakhi, Qawwali, Krishna Janmashtami, temple tours, and one very boring “oneness” RSS event at Madison Square Garden, I kept returning to the same idea: faith is not only something we read about, it is something we experience. From welcoming two Greek Orthodox visitors into a Hindu temple to bringing a Jewish family and their 10-year-old daughter to Ganesha puja, this is a story about curiosity, compassion, and what it really means to see the world as one family.
Lord Shiva - The Ultimate Valentine
Valentine’s Day is not a Western invention.
Long before modern culture reduced love to consumption and spectacle, Hindu philosophy understood desire, intimacy, sex, and sensuality as sacred forces, paths toward balance, knowledge, self love, relationships, and spiritual union.
In this essay, I unpack how scriptures like the Kāmasūtra and stories of Lord Shiva, Goddess Parvati, and Lord Kamadeva were never about indulgence or vulgarity, but about love as cosmic power, distorted by colonization, fetishization, and misunderstanding. How modern culture suffers from generational and cultural trauma which leads to conservative societies when our actual faith is accepting, open, and at its core love. From Bhakti (devotion) poetry to temple art, from queer divinity to embodied devotion, this is a reclaiming of what love was always meant to be.
This is education the world urgently needs, now more than ever. Let’s reclaim our histories and narratives!