Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

Neither This Nor That

Narasimha.

There is a story that generations of Hindu children have heard at the feet of their mothers and grandmothers. It is the story of Narasimha, Vishnu’s fourth avatar, half-man, half-lion. To the young, callow mind, it is a tale of a little boy’s unwavering devotion to the Divine, of divine grace, and of a terrifying climax. It is only in later years that the deeper import of the Narasimha episode begins to dawn.

Is the Divine within the world, or beyond it? In theology, these are called immanence and transcendence. The concepts are not unfamiliar to Christianity, where God is understood to be present throughout creation yet not confined to it.

Hiranyakashipu – we shall refer to him as Hiranya for convenience – was a mighty king, swollen with power and convinced of his own supremacy. Through severe austerities, he had prevailed upon Brahma to grant him a boon.

But Hiranya was no fool. He knew better than to ask for immortality outright. Instead, he devised an ingenious set of conditions which, if granted, would place him beyond the reach of death. He could be killed neither by man nor beast, neither indoors nor outdoors, neither by day nor by night, neither on earth nor in the sky, nor by any weapon.

Hiranya had divided existence into boxes, coded into binaries, convinced that he had exhausted every possibility. If death could come neither from this nor from that, neither here nor there, neither then nor now, where could it possibly find an opening?

He had, in effect, tried to set the boundary conditions on reality itself. And he believed he had succeeded.

It so happened that this tyrannical king was blessed with a son who was in every way his opposite. Little Prahlada was gentle, innocent, and possessed of an unwavering devotion to Vishnu. (Inscrutable indeed are the ways of karma, that a soul so sublime should take birth amid such depravity.)

His father could not abide it. Neither threats nor punishments could shake the child’s faith. This infuriated Hiranya, who could command kingdoms but could not command the heart of his own son.

We shall dispense with the intervening events and come to the fateful confrontation between father and son.

One evening in the palace, matters came to a head when Hiranya found little Prahlada absorbed in chanting the name of Vishnu.

“Where is this Vishnu of yours?” Hiranya thundered.

“Everywhere, Father,” replied Prahlada.

“Everywhere? Where? Show me! Is he here? Here, in this pillar?”

The child was unperturbed.

“Yes, Father. Even there. There is no place where He is not.”

In a fit of uncontrollable rage, Hiranya struck the pillar with his fist.

And then came the answer.

A terrible roar erupted from its depths, a sound that shook the assembly. The pillar was rent asunder. And from it emerged a strange, fearsome being: neither man (nara) nor lion (simha), yet somehow both (Narasimha). A form of such ferocity that the very heavens trembled.

Narasimha had appeared.

The king who had believed himself beyond the reach of death now found himself in the grip of a being for whom his elaborate safeguards counted for nothing.

It was twilight, neither day nor night. Narasimha dragged Hiranya to the threshold, neither indoors nor outdoors. He placed him upon His lap, neither earth nor sky. And tore him apart with His bare claws.

Neither man nor beast. Neither this nor that. Not one of Hiranya’s carefully contrived binaries had saved him.

But Narasimha‘s wrath was not yet spent. His terrifying form struck fear even among the gods, none of whom dared approach Him. And then, from among the trembling assembly, came little Prahlada.

The child fell at His feet.

Before the devotion of this little boy, the ferocity that had shaken the heavens melted into tenderness. Narasimha raised His hand and placed it upon Prahlada’s head in blessing.

Such is the grace of Bhakti. The Divine, before whom even the gods tremble, yields to the love of a child.

Hiranya had sought to imprison the entirety of existence within a set of mutually exclusive binaries, persuading himself that he had thereby tamed reality.

But reality was under no obligation to respect his taxonomy. Narasimha had emerged from the interstices of the very categories Hiranya believed exhausted all possibility. That is transcendence.

Hiranya had demanded to know whether Vishnu could possibly be present in the pillar, an inert object. The answer was as terrible as it was unequivocal.

There is no place where He is not. That is immanence.

The Narasimha episode is a philosophical statement in narrative form:

If you deny immanence, you miss the Divine in the world.

If you deny transcendence, you reduce the Divine to the world.

Hiranyakashipu denied the first – and was destroyed by the second.

The Man, the Tiger, and Dharma

The death of a man who entered a tiger enclosure at a wildlife park in Yorkshire last week has provoked considerable debate. His recklessness is scarcely in dispute. What divides opinion is whether the tiger should have been shot, had that been the only way to save the man’s life.

Behind this lies a deeper question:

Is a human life inherently worth more than a tiger’s?

Many invoke the Christian understanding of man’s special place in Creation and his dominion over other creatures, as expressed in Genesis. I would like to offer the Dharmic perspective.

In Hindu thought, the man and the tiger are both jivas, embodied beings on their individual journeys through samsara (the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth). Neither exists merely for the other’s benefit. Both have an intrinsic claim to life.

In the Bhagavad Gita (5.18), Krishna describes the truly wise as those who look with equal vision upon a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a dog-eater. Elsewhere (BG 6.29), He declares that the realised yogi sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self.

These are foundational affirmations of a spiritual unity that embraces all life.

Why, then, does human birth occupy a special place?

Not because the human jiva is intrinsically worth more, but because the human condition affords viveka, the capacity for discrimination, and with it the possibility of self-inquiry and ultimately liberation. The distinction is one of capacity, not of inherent worth.

And what of the tiger? It acted according to its svabhava (inherent nature). A tiger cannot be expected to renounce its nature simply because a human entered its domain. There was no malice, no moral transgression, nothing for which the animal could be held culpable.

Does it follow that the tiger could not justifiably have been killed to save the man? No.

Two Dharmic principles come into play: ahimsa, the injunction against causing harm, and dharma, which guides right conduct according to circumstance.

Ahimsa does not prohibit injury in every conceivable situation. It asks us to avoid harm wherever possible and minimise it when unavoidable. Dharma requires us to exercise judgement rather than follow rules blindly.

Equal intrinsic worth does not mean that our moral obligations towards every living being are identical.

If shooting the tiger had been the only means of saving the man, it would have been justified. Not because the tiger’s life was worth less, but because a human life was in immediate danger and there was an obligation to protect it. The man’s folly did not extinguish that obligation, nor did the tiger’s innocence make intervention impermissible. The object would have been to save a human life, not to punish the animal.

Once the man was dead, however, the justification for killing the tiger vanished.

Even necessary violence remains violence. Its justification does not erase the harm inflicted, nor does it place the act beyond the reckoning of karma.

One may be justified in taking a life to save another without believing that the life taken was worth less.

The Wonder Is Not the Eclipse

The deeper questions.

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on August 08, 2026. See screenshot below.]

The total solar eclipse on August 12, 2026 has generated great excitement. If the clouds cooperate, it will be best viewed from the western reaches of Iceland. Everyone will be absorbed with questions such as where to stand, what time to look, and what the weather will be.

But there is a far more profound question that almost nobody will ask.

The eclipse itself is not the wonder. The wonder is that we happen to live at a moment in Earth’s history when total solar eclipses are even possible. It was not always so, and it will not always be so. (See Appendix.)

The Sun is about 400 times larger than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away. By a remarkable coincidence, they appear almost exactly the same size in our sky.

This celestial arrangement is temporary. The Moon is receding from Earth by about 3.8 centimetres every year because of tidal interactions – one of the most elegant manifestations in physics of the conservation of angular momentum.

Long before humans existed, the Moon loomed larger. Long after we are gone, it will be too small to cover the Sun. We happen to live during the brief interval in Earth’s history when nature stages one of its greatest spectacles.

Such wonders surround us if only we ask the right questions. Every child enters the world with an instinctive curiosity only to lose it by the time adulthood arrives.

Modern education presents science as a collection of dry facts to be memorised. A child who learns only how an eclipse occurs has learned a fact. A child who learns why total eclipses are possible only during a fleeting epoch of Earth’s history has glimpsed the grandeur of the cosmos.

The same wonder lies hidden in the most familiar things. Consider the chicken. It is a dinosaur pecking at grain on the farm. Birds are not merely descended from dinosaurs; they are dinosaurs. The dinosaurs never disappeared. We rarely stop to think what it is we are eating.

Nature offers opportunities more often than we realise, but we reduce them to spectacles. Recently in Iceland there was the regrettable episode of a slaughtered whale brought into the harbour and its genitalia mocked for the media cameras. What could have become a teachable moment for Iceland’s children instead descended into a contest for political point-scoring.

The whale is not another fisheries quota alongside cod or haddock. Its story opens a new universe for the young mind, one that unites science with poetry. Our own distant ancestors once made the journey from water to land, giving rise in time to amphibians, reptiles, mammals and ourselves. Much later, one branch of those mammals reversed that journey, returning to the oceans and becoming the whales we know today. The whale and the human crossed paths on evolution’s highway, travelling in opposite directions.

Imagine telling this to an Icelandic child: one lineage left the sea and claimed the land; another abandoned the land and returned to the sea. Millions of years later their descendants meet again on a dock in Reykjavík.

The purpose of education is not merely to prepare children for employment but to enlarge the horizon of their minds. Iceland chooses to occupy a child’s imagination with questions of sexuality, the rainbow flag, and gender identity rather than expose it to the mysteries of nature, the beauty of art, and the adventure of ideas. Iceland is squandering its seed corn at the altar of ideological fixations.

If a solar eclipse leaves a child wondering why we happen to live in the one epoch when such a spectacle is possible, then the eclipse has done more than darken the sky. It has illuminated a mind.

Appendix

The following passage bears elaboration:

“The wonder is that we happen to live at a moment in Earth’s history when total solar eclipses are even possible. It was not always so, and it will not always be so.”

Taken literally over the entire history of the Earth, the statement is true. During the Earth’s earliest history there was no Moon, and therefore no solar eclipses of any kind were possible. Hundreds of millions of years from now, the Moon will have receded sufficiently that total solar eclipses will again become impossible.

There is, however, a deeper point. Total eclipses also occurred when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, but their character was different. The Moon would have appeared substantially larger than the Sun, producing longer periods of totality while obscuring much of the inner solar corona.

Remarkably, throughout the entire history of the human species, the Moon has appeared almost exactly as it does today. Every human being who has ever stood beneath a total solar eclipse has witnessed essentially the same celestial geometry.

What distinguishes our epoch is the near equality of the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon. It is this extraordinary coincidence that allows the luminous corona to emerge around a Moon that only just conceals the Sun.

Morgunblaðið, August 08, 2026

Iceland’s Great Women Problem

Kesarbai Kerkar, Marie Curie, and the empty frame.

[This column was published in its Icelandic version in Nútíminn on June 2, 2026. It arose from a simple observation: despite the bragadocio surrounding women’s rights, gender equality, and female empowerment in Iceland, the country has produced no women of truly exceptional accomplishment.]

In December 2024 I committed a grave offence by writing a column suggesting that a certain class of Icelandic women was helping lead the country in a destructive direction. The reaction was volcanic: infantile insults, earnest invitations to return to India, but not one engagement with the substance of what I had written. Bertrand Russell once observed that anger in an argument is a sign that one lacks a good reason for one’s position.

The intervening eighteen months have borne me out. Iceland has been brought to a dismal pass by the all-women government. The economy is wobbling, housing is in crisis, healthcare is under stress, immigration remains a mess, and the campaign to slip Iceland into the European Union proceeds under false pretences.

This time my scope is narrower.

Listening to Icelandic gender discourse, one might imagine that the central drama of human history is the acquisition of women’s rights. But rights are not the highest measure of a civilisation. They are the scaffolding; achievement is the cathedral. The point was never merely to secure freedoms but to build a civilisation worth handing down to the next generation.

Iceland keeps telling itself and the world that it is the pinnacle of female empowerment. But where are the great women – not the famous ones or the politicians, but women whose accomplishments transformed or enlarged the horizons of their field?

Icelandic public life is saturated with talk of equality, representation, and empowerment. But when one asks for examples of women whose achievements command worldwide admiration, the room empties rather quickly.

The usual defence is that Iceland is a tiny country. It is also a country that produced towering figures such as Halldór Laxness and Sigurður Helgason. The population defence therefore springs a leak before it has cleared the harbour.

Björk is famous. We are discussing excellence, not celebrity. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was symbolically important. She demonstrated that a woman could occupy the highest office in Iceland. But she is not of the same order as Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Virginia Woolf, Maria Callas, or Kesarbai Kerkar.

Kesarbai who?

We shall come to her presently.

One of the minor entertainments of modern life is listening to smug Western commentary on India, which is routinely presented as patriarchal, backward, oppressive, and perpetually in need of instruction from enlightened Westerners. The tacit assumption is that if only India learned from the Nordics, Indian women might finally begin to flourish.

India’s shortcomings are neither secret nor ignored. Indians themselves discuss them incessantly. But the condescension becomes difficult to sustain when one examines the women it has produced.

If you have never heard of Kesarbai Kerkar, you should not be lecturing India about women.

Kesarbai was born in Goa. In 1977, NASA placed Kesarbai Kerkar alongside Bach and Beethoven on the Golden Record carried aboard the Voyager spacecraft, a curated collection intended to represent the finest expression of human civilisation. Today that voice from a small village in Goa is drifting through interstellar darkness and will likely outlast every nation, institution, and language alive today. Rabindranath Tagore described her as “an artistic phenomenon of exquisite perfection.”

She is not an outlier. She is merely primus inter pares. In music alone, examples of Indian women who reached Everest-like summits abound. Nor is music unique in this regard. India has produced women of extraordinary accomplishment in science, literature, business, politics, and the arts. India’s imperfections proved no barrier to the emergence of exceptional women. Nor did these women spend much time discussing empowerment.

Which brings us back to Iceland.

The country has invested an inordinate amount of emotion and energy in gender ideology. But the promised harvest remains elusive. We hear endless boasts about female empowerment and remarkably little about female greatness.

Nor has the project been cost-free.

The activists and their misbegotten ethos of equality have weakened families, impeded new family formation, and accelerated demographic decline. At the same time they have encouraged immigration from societies whose views on women and homosexuality are fundamentally at odds with the values they claim to cherish. They spend the entire morning denouncing patriarchy and the afternoon importing more of it.

The importance of a strong male presence in the upbringing of girls was once considered obvious. Today it has given way to talk of “toxic masculinity” and a persistent suspicion of masculine virtues. What Iceland calls progress has amounted to dismantling guard-rails fashioned through centuries of hard-won experience.

A civilisation cannot live on rights alone. After decades of being told Iceland is the summit of female flourishing, one question still hangs in the air, unanswered: where, exactly, are the great Icelandic women?

Bhagavad Gita and Krishna – Misconceptions

[Written as a coda to Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates.]

A common Western tendency is to approach Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita through categories familiar from the Abrahamic traditions: “God” and “scripture.” The impulse is understandable, but it is also misleading, for it encourages the assumption that they belong chiefly to the domain of religion and therefore have little bearing on contemporary concerns.

The Bhagavad Gita is not “scripture” in the usual Western sense. It does not lay down commandments or a fixed set of prescriptions. What one encounters is a sustained examination of action, knowledge, and the self, preparing the ground on which decisions must be made. The mind is disciplined, judgment is sharpened, and the burden of decision is returned to the individual.

At the end of the dialogue, Krishna does something extraordinary. He does not assert divinity and demand obedience. He says instead to Arjuna:

“Reflect fully on this; then act as you think fit.”

This is not a decree, nor a law code, nor a prophetic proclamation. It is a dialogue under existential duress, embedded within the Mahabharata’s field of battle. Action is not reduced to formula. Dharma is not specified either, for it is contingent and context-bound.

The text ranges over metaphysics, conduct and consequence, knowledge, discipline, and the nature of the self. The battlefield is the setting, not the limit of its scope.

Part of the difficulty lies in the medium. The Bhagavad Gita is composed in classical Sanskrit, a language capable of an extraordinary density of thought (in tech parlance, one might call it ‘lossless compression’). What appears plain on the surface often carries multiple layers of meaning. A first reading yields very little. With each return, more is disclosed, not because the text changes, but because the reader’s own understanding is being rearranged.

When the preservation of a social order is at stake, the question is not whether one acts, but how one acts without destroying that which one seeks to preserve. This lies at the heart of dharma, the maintenance of order. Within that, ahimsa (minimisation of harm) operates as a constraint, guiding conduct in a field where harm is unavoidable.

In the Mahabharata, Krishna is not presented to most participants as an object of worship. Only a few are aware of his divine nature. For the majority, he is encountered as a man of uncommon ability and an exceptional political intelligence. To read Krishna only as “God” is to miss the operational dimension of his role in the epic. He is a strategist navigating constraints, asymmetries, and moral hazards.

The epic furnishes concrete instances of this, which I set aside here in the interest of brevity.

Each case is uncomfortable if read as moral exempla, but makes sense when understood as statecraft in extremis. The war is the terminal phase of a diseased polity, where action is judged by its place in the larger order rather than by isolated rule compliance. Exceptional measures enter the frame as responsibility shifts from personal purity to civilisational outcome, a difficult doctrine that offers no moral comfort.

The same Krishna who refuses to command Arjuna in the Gita is the one who departs from established norms when adherence would undermine the very ends they are meant to serve. This is not a contradiction but a recognition of hierarchy, of what must sometimes yield if order is to endure.

Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on May 18, 2026. See screenshot below.]

Iceland and India lie separated by ocean and a civilisational chasm no map can bridge. Yet the bones of language still carry what geography and time cannot efface. In both Icelandic and far older Sanskrit, traces of a common inheritance persist. Sanskrit vid, “to know,” echoes in Old Norse vita. Icelandic hvítt and Sanskrit shveta descend from a common root. So do sannr and satya. Geography divides. Language remembers.

There is another correspondence, not of words but of form.

The Icelandic sagas and the Indian itihasa are cultural cognates, defined not by origin but by function. They are often called ‘mythology,’ or worse, ‘historical fiction’ – terms that misplace them entirely. Nor are they history in the archival sense. They belong to another order altogether: civilisational memory given narrative form.

Arising from a long oral inheritance, the sagas hold the record of a people entire: lineages, settlements, feuds, and the judgements that follow. Law does not stand apart but enters life directly, spoken openly, contested, and borne by men who must sleep with the consequences they set in motion. Honour is neither proclaimed nor adorned but enacted, often driven to breaking point, as in the world of Njáll and Gunnar, where a decision once taken cannot be unmade and consequence moves with its own implacable momentum. Nothing lies outside the human field; everything is answered in action and aftermath.

That such literature arose in Iceland is one of the remarkable facts of human culture. From a population of a few tens of thousands, set on a harsh, exposed edge of the inhabited world, emerged a body of narrative with such control, depth, and unerring command of human motive that it resists easy explanation. The achievement is not merely striking but extraordinary and, given the scale that produced it, close to the improbable.

In the Indian tradition, itihasa, “thus indeed it was,” refers to the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. These are neither inventions nor chronicles. They are a civilisation speaking in its deepest voice, examining duty and action, tracing the bonds of kinship and the fractures that follow, laying bare love, betrayal, ambition, and renunciation.

At its heart stands the Mahabharata, the longest poem ever composed in human history. Scale is the outward sign of a far greater ambition: the attempt to encompass the totality of human experience. Its composer, the sage Vyasa, states at the outset: “What is found here may be found elsewhere; what is not found here is nowhere to be found.”

This is not boast. The Mahabharata does not console or simplify. It examines the entanglement of duty, desire, power, and consequence with a severity unmatched, refusing easy divisions between virtue and transgression. Dharma is not proclaimed; it is tested, strained, and often revealed only in the wake of action. Krishna, at the centre of the epic as the Supreme Reality in human form, bends the rules in obedience to a necessity beyond human measure.

The poem is not merely a war story. It stages the collapse of order and asks what remains when every norm collides with every other. Kings contend over law and legitimacy; vows bind and destroy; loyalties fracture. At its most charged moment, the Bhagavad Gita emerges as a text of the deepest philosophical insight, a sustained meditation on action, existence, and being. Narrative and philosophy are not separate strands but one movement.

Both traditions arose in worlds that trusted memory over the written record. They were not read but recited, and lived. A child in India meets Rama and Bhishma long before meeting them in print. The same was true in Iceland, where in turf homes, across long dark winters, names, lineages, and episodes were spoken, binding the living to the dead.

These figures do not remain confined to their narratives. They enter speech and moral imagination. To invoke Draupadi is to recall a woman humiliated yet unbroken; to speak of Karna is to summon loyalty bound to tragedy. The sagas do likewise: to name Egill is to summon fury yoked to genius.

The kinship between sagas and itihasa is evident. Their differences in scale and scope are equally clear. The sagas are anchored in a defined historical horizon: the settlement of Iceland, the ordering of society, the play of law and honour within a small, tightly bound community. Their domain is human, and their force lies in the directness with which a deed returns upon the one who sets it in motion.

The Mahabharata unfolds on a far larger canvas. It extends beyond the human sphere and places action within a wider frame of time, recurrence, and consequence. The question is not only how one ought to act, but what action itself means.

The sagas and itihasa answer the same human need: to give lasting form to experience. They are among the fullest expressions of that need – two civilisational vessels of memory shaped into narrative and carried across time.

Morgunblaðið, May 18, 2026
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