Opinions and Commentaries
Offers views on life and the world, as I travel through them
Sadhu Free Zone. Moving On
From the heart of Fort Kochi in Kerala whence I arrived just a month ago, I am now ensconced in a small apartment in a largely Muslim residential part of town, which, being surrounded by mosques, offers ample exposure to…
Going Full Sadhu
What do I mean by ‘going full sadhu’? I have sometimes made the point that, especially during the height of the Pilgrimage years. I styled myself more upon the concept of a sadhu, the wandering spiritual seeker espousing the life…
Pilgrims, Mendicants and Beggars
Mendicancy. What exactly is meant by that? Dictionary definitions tend to divide the concept into two broadly different manifestations, being those with an explicit religious purpose which essentially denies a gainful life in the world in favour of a…
Come Buy, Come Buy
“Morning and evening maids heard the goblins’ cry, ‘come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy!'” (1) The famous poem ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti was first published in 1862. I remember it well as a child, from a…
The Stories We Tell
In the stories of our lives that we are constantly recounting, revising, reimagining, there tend to be some themes or tropes that recur, and of these, the stories that we tell about why we are doing something, is one of…
The Price of Enlightenment
I once called myself a version of ‘Roadrunner’ given so much of my life has been spent travelling in one way or another, usually in pursuit some academic goal or another, and I have fairly accumulated archaeological and anthropological projects,…
