A Ramayana, a newspaper column, and a question that keeps returning.
This morning's Mumbai Sunday Mirror accompanied my usual cup of tea. One article in particular caught my attention: a Devdutt Pattanaik column titled "Would Ramayana meet approval of Sanatani censor board?"
At first, I thought it was an amusing thought experiment.
By the time I finished reading it, however, I found myself thinking about something quite different.
The article asked whether the Ramayana would survive a modern censorship board. It's the sort of question that immediately makes you smile. You can almost picture a committee sitting around a table with a checklist and a red pen, working their way through one of the oldest stories we know. Before long they would run into questions about power, violence, consent, Sita, Rama, and choices that don't sit comfortably within contemporary moral frameworks.
What stayed with me, though, wasn't the censorship board.
It was the uncomfortable realisation that I have one of my own.
I suspect most of us do.
Mine sits quietly somewhere in the background, approving some ideas and rejecting others, deciding what feels sensible or foolish, acceptable or offensive, moral or immoral. The strange thing is that I rarely notice it doing its work. Most of the time, I simply assume that my reactions are self-evidently correct.
The older I get, the more aware I become of this.
There are things I feel deeply convinced about today, yet if someone asked me exactly when I started believing them, I'm not sure I could always answer. Some of those beliefs came from my parents, some from school, some from books and friends, and some from the professional environments I've spent decades navigating. Others probably slipped into my thinking so gradually that I never even noticed them arriving.
Over time, these ideas settled into the background. They became part of how I understood the world. Eventually they stopped feeling like beliefs altogether and started feeling like facts.
Perhaps that's precisely when they become dangerous.
Not because they're necessarily wrong.
But because I've stopped examining them.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the Ramayana is that it refuses to leave me with easy answers.
When I was younger, I wanted stories to tell me who was right and who was wrong. Life seemed simpler that way. These days I'm far more interested in understanding people than judging them, which is probably why the Ramayana feels very different to me now than it did years ago.
Rama is admired for many reasons, yet people continue to debate his choices. Sita remains deeply revered, yet generations keep asking what her experience might have been. Ravana, perhaps one of the most compelling characters in the story, can simultaneously be seen as a villain, a scholar, a king, a devotee and a deeply flawed human being.
The more I read, the more I realise that these stories have never really stood still.
Across generations, writers, thinkers and storytellers have returned to them, not merely to repeat them, but to ask new questions. Devdutt Pattanaik frequently revisits familiar myths through the lens of culture, relationships and society. Amish Tripathi, through the Shiva Trilogy and the Ram Chandra Series, invites readers to engage with ideas of leadership, morality, choice and consequence. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to characters whose inner worlds are often left unexplored. Anand Neelakantan explores perspectives that traditional tellings may not always foreground. Ami Ganatra, through works such as Mahabharata Unravelled, encourages readers to revisit assumptions and engage directly with the epic itself.
And then there are platforms such as The Speaking Tree, where philosophers, teachers, writers, practitioners and ordinary seekers continue to explore these ideas from different angles. Some approach them through devotion, others through philosophy, psychology, ethics, leadership or self-discovery.
What fascinates me is not whether one interpretation is more correct than another.
It is that they can all exist.
These writers are not abandoning the stories. They are entering into a conversation with them. They ask different questions, focus on different characters and challenge familiar interpretations. Yet the stories endure.
In fact, one could argue that this continual reinterpretation is precisely what has kept them alive for so long.
What fascinates me most is not that these authors offer new answers. It is that they encourage us to return to familiar stories with fresh eyes. A reader may agree with them or disagree with them, but that is almost beside the point. Their real contribution is that they invite us to re-examine assumptions we may never have questioned and to revisit characters, events and ideas that we thought we already understood.
Stories don't survive because everyone agrees about them.
They survive because every generation discovers new questions hiding inside them.
Which brings me back to the idea of censorship.
A censorship board is usually asked to decide what should and should not be permitted. Yet I wonder whether there is another question worth asking before we reach for the rulebook.
Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether a particular interpretation should be allowed, but what that interpretation is trying to make us see.
What assumption is it challenging?
What belief is it asking us to revisit?
What value is it forcing us to examine more closely?
And have we really understood it before deciding whether we agree with it?
We often move quickly from exposure to judgement. We encounter an unfamiliar interpretation, feel uncomfortable, and instinctively decide whether it is acceptable or unacceptable. But understanding takes longer than judgement. It asks us to sit with an idea, examine it, challenge it and think about why it provokes a reaction in the first place.
Rules matter, of course. Every society needs them.
But judgement matters too.
And judgement begins with understanding.
That responsibility does not rest solely with the writer, storyteller, filmmaker or artist. It belongs to the reader and the viewer as well. If every unfamiliar interpretation is treated as an attack, conversation quickly gives way to outrage. Yet if we are willing to challenge ideas without fearing them, disagreement can become a source of insight rather than division.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons these stories have endured for so long.
They were never meant to end the conversation.
They were meant to keep it going.
I find myself thinking about this far more often these days, not just when reading mythology but when thinking about organisations, leadership, society and even my own life.
Over the years I've sat through countless discussions about governance, risk, compliance, policy and process. All of them matter, and most were created for good reasons. At some point, someone was trying to protect something valuable: fairness, trust, integrity, safety or consistency.
Yet every now and then I come across a situation that leaves me uneasy.
On paper, everything has been done correctly. The process has been followed, the approvals obtained and the controls adhered to. Nobody has technically done anything wrong.
Yet something still feels off.
Whenever that happens, I find myself asking a different question.
Not whether the rule was followed.
Why did the rule exist in the first place?
I've seen organisations become exceptionally good at preserving processes while gradually losing sight of the values those processes were designed to protect. The rule survives long after people have forgotten the purpose behind it.
Perhaps that isn't very different from the censorship question that started me on this train of thought.
When we focus only on compliance, whether in organisations or in our own minds, we sometimes lose sight of what we were trying to protect in the first place.
Maybe that's why the idea of dharma has always intrigued me.
I certainly don't claim to fully understand it. In fact, the older I get, the less convinced I become that concepts like dharma are meant to be fully understood. They seem less like answers and more like invitations to think.
Life rarely presents us with one responsibility at a time.
We have obligations to parents, children, partners, colleagues, organisations, communities and, at some point, to ourselves. Most of the time these responsibilities coexist peacefully. The difficulty begins when they collide.
What do you do when being fair to one person feels unfair to another? What happens when what is good for an organisation comes at a personal cost? What happens when your responsibilities pull you in different directions and each one feels legitimate?
There isn't a process document that can settle questions like these.
Perhaps that's what makes the epics so enduring.
The characters are usually not choosing between something obviously right and something obviously wrong. More often, they are navigating competing obligations and trying to make sense of conflicting responsibilities.
That is what makes Rama's choices so difficult to discuss even today. He is not simply a man making personal decisions. He is also a son, a husband, a king and a symbol of something larger than himself.
Whatever conclusion we reach about those choices, the story leaves enough space for us to question them.
And perhaps that's the point.
The burden of judgement remains ours.
As I was reflecting on Pattanaik's article this morning, I realised that this question seems to be appearing everywhere in my life lately.
I keep running into it in conversations, in books I'm reading, and in quiet moments when something I've long taken for granted suddenly invites a second look.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether our instinct to label everything as right or wrong sometimes prevents us from understanding why people make the choices they do.
That doesn't mean values don't matter.
It certainly doesn't mean every action is equally defensible.
If anything, it suggests the opposite.
Values matter so much that we shouldn't reduce them to mere rules.
A rule can tell me what to do.
A value makes me stop and think about why I'm doing it.
And perhaps the moment I stop asking why, I become capable of following a rule perfectly while completely missing the reason it was created.
What I find beautiful about living traditions is their willingness to make room for inquiry.
They allow us to revisit old stories through new eyes. They allow disagreement without demanding rejection. They allow reinterpretation without insisting that the original must be discarded.
I find that refreshing.
The world often rewards certainty. Certainty is comforting. It gives us the feeling that the world is understandable and that difficult choices can be reduced to clear answers.
But life rarely behaves that way.
The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to questions rather than certainty. Questions force us to acknowledge complexity. They require us to live with ambiguity. Sometimes they even ask us to revisit beliefs we have carried for years without ever examining where they came from.
Perhaps that is why the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and countless other stories keep returning in different forms.
The stories become mirrors.
At one stage of life, we may see Rama as the hero. Later, we may find ourselves empathising more deeply with Sita. On another reading, we may become curious about Ravana. The stories themselves have not changed. We have.
And perhaps that is why every generation finds something new in them.
If Hindu thought has any enduring strength, perhaps it lies not in protecting itself from questions, but in creating space for them. Every debate, every reinterpretation and every uncomfortable question opens another door. Not necessarily to certainty, but to deeper understanding.
Not every interpretation will be convincing.
Not every argument will be correct.
But the conversation itself remains valuable because it pushes us to examine assumptions we may otherwise never question.
Perhaps the point was never agreement.
Perhaps it was understanding.
When I finished reading Pattanaik's article this morning, I wasn't left thinking about censorship boards.
I found myself thinking about the rules I carry around in my own head.
Which of them have I examined recently?
Which of them am I simply inheriting?
Which of them would survive scrutiny if I genuinely questioned where they came from?
I genuinely don't know.
And perhaps the fact that I don't know is the point.
The older I get, the less interested I am in collecting answers and the more interested I become in understanding the questions underneath them.
That, at least for me, is what keeps drawing me back to these stories. Not because they tell me what to think, but because they keep nudging me towards questions I might otherwise avoid.
Looking back, I wonder if that is the real reason these stories endure.
Not because they escaped scrutiny.
Not because everyone agreed with them.
Not because they were protected from reinterpretation.
But because every generation found something new to argue with.
Valmiki told a story.
Others retold it.
Writers continue to reinterpret it.
Readers continue to debate it.
And somewhere in that process, the story stays alive.
And of all the questions that seem to return, one keeps appearing.
Why?
Not because it always leads to an answer.
But because it keeps the conversation alive.
