Bharatbarsha

Yazidis are in news for a grave situation in northern Iraq. They are being literally exterminated by the Islamic State Jihadis. Only 7,00,000 or so Yazidis remain on the planet today and most of them are in the northern provinces of Iraq near Kurdistan. 1000s have died already this year and their mass killing via siege, starvation and other means is gut wrenching. The world is watching without doing much to save this extremely rare race.  #SaveYazidis  cry on the social media is not having much effect as 10s of 1000s of them are on the verge of extinction or capture into slavery by the extreme radicals of ISIS. The situation of women and children starving to death has created an uproar across the world, but not much help is coming forward.  Yazidi - Victims While researching into who these Yazidi people are, I stumbled upon some unmistakable similarity with Hindus of India. Two hours back, I didn’t know much, but after putting these side by side, I am almost getting conv

The Diplomat An ancient epic's lessons for India ring true today. By Akhilesh Pillalamarri August 23, 2014 This past weekend, the Indian television show the Mahabharat finished airing. The show, which began airing in 2013, was a version of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, and was widely successful, garnering millions of viewers daily. Its success followed that of another televised version of the epic that ran from 1988 to 1989. The Sanskrit epic itself is the world's longest epic poem, at 100,000 couplets or 1.8 million words. It is ten times the combined length of the Iliad and Odyssey and three times the length of the Bible. Structurally, the Mahabharata is a compendium of ancient Indian mythology, history, political theory, and philosophy, and has sometimes been described as an ancient encyclopedia of Indian knowledge. The holy Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, which is considered a summary of the vast Hindu religious and philosophical literat

The year 980 C.E. marks the beginning of the Muslim invasion into India proper when Sabuktagin attacked Raja Jaya Pal in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is today a Muslim country separated from India by another Muslim country Pakistan. But in 980 C.E. Afghanistan was also a place where the people were Hindus and Buddhists. (Wisdom courtesy: Subodh Kapoor) The name "Afghanistan" comes from "Upa-Gana-stan" which means in Sanskrit "the place inhabited by allied tribes". This was the place from where Gandhari of the Mahabharat came from, Gandhar whose king was Shakuni. Today the city of Gandhar is known as Kandahar. The Pakthoons are descendants of the Paktha tribe mentioned in Vedic literature. Till the year 980 C.E., this area was a Hindu majority area, till Sabuktagin from Ghazni invaded it and displaced the ruling Hindu king - Jaya Pal Shahi. Shiva worship was widespread in Afghanistan. There was a time when the entire region was replete with