All These Words

 “Slow down. Breathe.” That was how the session on communicative intelligence began - not with a definition, but with a pause. In a world that speaks faster than it listens, the art of communication begins in the mind that pauses. To communicate -  from the Latin communicare , “to share, to make common” - is to build a bridge between two inner worlds. To be intelligent -  from inter (“between”) and legere (“to discern, to choose”) is to gather meaning with care. Communicative Intelligence , then, is not a soft skill. It is the meeting of clarity and empathy, the intelligence that turns understanding into speech, and speech into understanding. Vāk and Prayer Every word we speak traces back to Vāk , the sacred principle of speech. To pray  prārthanā  is, at its simplest, “to ask.” Communication, too, is a kind of prayer: an offering of thought in the hope that another mind will receive it with grace. So we said, “May noble thoughts come to us from all dir...

  How else is a person to think of themselves - living in 2025, in the sovereign democracy of Bharat except as a king or queen?   We vote, speak, assemble, dissent, build, and bless. We walk a sacred geography whose memory runs deeper than our maps. But there’s a paradox at the heart of this dignity: In a democracy, every citizen is a king. But every king is a servant - Not to wealth or whims, But To Dharma (order), Constitution (vow), Memory (lineage), and Conscience (witness). To rule is to align; to align is to serve, And to serve is to make freedom accessible to those with the least power. Crown yourself, not with gold, but with restraint. Seat yourself, not above, but among. Let your word be consecrated in truth, And your work be larger than name. For we are citizens Servants to the song that outlives us, Keepers of a country we can only borrow from our children.

  Invocation: The Verse of Rama "Api Swarnamayi Lanka na me rochayate Lakshmanah,            Janani janmabhumishcha swargadapi gariyasi." ["This golden Lanka does not interest me, Lakshmana.    One's mother and motherland are higher than the highest heavens"] Shri Rama’s words shine across the ages like an echo in the soul of this land. His refusal of golden Lanka is not rejection, but remembrance. He turns homeward not from poverty of desire, but from fullness of belonging. To him, janmabhūmi is not territory - it is truth. The Hindu loves the land, not because it is his, but because he belongs to it. He is born of her dust and drawn by her silence. His breath carries the scent of her rain; his bones remember her rivers. He does not stand upon the land as master, but within it, as flame within the lamp. The Sacred Relationship In the Rig Veda , the world is bound by a hidden rhythm: ṛtaṁ ca satyaṁ cābhīd dhāt tapaso ’dhyajāyata....

When India became independent in 1947, our leaders inherited a wounded, fragile nation. Partition had torn the land, displaced millions, and left Muslims within India anxious about survival. In such a moment, our Constitution-makers faced a profound choice: should all citizens be guaranteed the same dignity in family law, or should communities retain their separate “personal laws”? They chose pluralism over uniformity. Hindu law was codified and reformed in the 1950s - polygamy was abolished, inheritance was modernized, minimum marriage ages were fixed. But Muslim law was left untouched, on the grounds that it was “too sensitive.” Article 44 of the Constitution promised a future Uniform Civil Code, but only as an aspiration. That “later” never came. And it is here that lies the great betrayal. The Vote Bank Trap In the decades after Partition, India’s political class found it easier to treat Muslims not as citizens but as a vote bank. Once  the educated elite had migrated to Paki...

 The 99 Names of Allah -  al-Asmāʾ al-Ḥusnā , the Most Beautiful Names are meant to unveil the nature of God. Each Name is a facet of the Infinite: mercy, peace, justice, wisdom, love, light, patience. Taken together, they form not a list, but a vision. And yet, across history, God has often been reduced to the image of a warlord’s deity that is partial, vengeful, insecure, demanding blood and obedience. But if we listen to the Names themselves, this image collapses. The Names expose the gap between divine transcendence and human narrowness. How can al-Raḥmān  - the Most Gracious - be represented by cruelty? How can al-Salām - the Source of Peace - sanction endless war? How can al-ʿAdl - the Just - delight in eternal damnation for disbelief? How can al-Wadūd  - the Loving - be mirrored in coercion and fear? The Names do not support this narrow portrait; they refute it. They open instead to a God beyond possession, beyond tribe, beyond violence. A God who is m...