(abandoned substack draft)
There’s a lot I want to talk about, but I will need many tries to begin to get it right. So here’s one of many attempts. I’m going to be skipping from thing to thing with slightly stark “jump cuts”, forgive me in advance.
My name is Visakan. I was born and raised in a Hindu family in Singapore.
Visakan
I wouldn’t say that my family is particularly devout or religious. But my parents did name me Visakan after the Visakha Nakshatra in Hindu astrology, based on the time of my birth. Vishakha literally means “branched”, and it’s an amusing bit of nominative determinism for me that I am so prolific, and that my Twitter threads for example are full of branching paths.
Visakan is also one of the names of Muruga, who is a son of Shiva. Most people will be able to recognize lil’ Ganesh/Vinayagar on Parvati’s lap – well, Murugan is his little brother!
It seems probable to me that the words “Deus” and “Deity” are related to the words Indian-origin words “Deva” and “Theivam”. They seem to come from from *dyeu-, which is a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to shine,” related to ideas like “sky, heaven, god.”
Hinduism
To write this segment of this post I went to rewatch some youtube videos about Hinduism – to verify my own understanding as well as to get a sense of how people typically talk about it.
Hinduism is widely understood to be the world’s oldest active religion, having been practiced for 4,000+ years. Hinduism can be hard to talk about with people who are primarily only familiar with the Abrahamic religions. It’s a very diverse, syncretic, kaleidoscopic religion. To complicate matters, “Hinduism” as a concept is barely a few hundred years old, just as “India” is. To Western audiences, I might gesture at how concepts like “Italy” and “Italian” are relatively recent concepts tidily wrapping up much, much more complex history. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t think of himself as “Italian” – his name itself is a clue, “Leonardo of Vinci”.
The concept of “avatar” comes from Hinduism.
India is a very, very large country. At ~1.4 billion people, It has almost double the entire population of Europe. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the differences between people in different parts of India, is even more pronounced than the differences between, say, Swedes and Spaniards.
Singapore
The consensus about the origin of Singapore’s name is that it’s of Sanskrit origin, Singa-pura, Lion City. It was allegedly named by a prince from Palembang, and there’s some complication there about what is myth and what is reality. The myth is that a prince named Sang Nila Utama came to Singapore amidst rough seas – there’s this bit where he tosses his crown into the sea and it calms down, and then he saw a lion, and so he named the island Singapura. But he can’t possibly have seen an actual lion – all Singapore had at the time were tigers. I’m quite convinced by the theory that the whole mythology was deliberately constructed for PR purposes.
Mariamman temple
Sri Mariamman Temple is Singapore’s oldest Hindu temple, built in the Dravidian (South Indian) style, originally founded in 1827 by Naraina Pillai.
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The tower in the back, literally titled Capital Tower (a bit on the nose, don’t you think?) is a 52-storey skyscraper completed in 2000. It’s the 4th tallest building in Singapore.
“If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” – Joseph Campbell
“In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews.” – Russell Brand
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: “There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. “They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us,” said Odin. “You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.”
Sanjay’s Super Team [2015]
Somebody on Twitter once asked, “what was the first time you saw yourself represented in media?” And for me the answer to that question is in the Pixar short, Sanjay’s Super Team, written and directed by Sanjay Patel, a Gujarati-American animator born in ~1974. (It’s about 7 minutes long, you’ll need Disney+ to watch it.)
Sanjay: “I told John Lasseter, every morning my dad would pray to his gods at his shrine, and I would pray to mine at my shrine, which was ironically the TV, and the cartoon superheroes that I worshipped. […] For any kid of an immigrant… I’ll just speak for myself… I just wanted to fit in, I wanted to get rid of my weird name… I was just embarrassed and felt ashamed of being different… it took a long time to discover myself as an artist, and finding some identity there, and it took even longer to find artwork and inspiration from my parents’ culture, and once I did, that just felt like all the dots connected. What I discovered with my parents’ culture helped me understand who exactly my parents were, and suddenly I was just immensely proud of their culture, and where they’re from, and it suddenly sort of completed me. I found some sort of version of home.”
Breath of Fire II
“Hmm? You aren’t looking at me by any chance, are you? Well now this is a welcome surprise… I thought everyone had forgotten me… All I hear out of people these days is ‘Eva’ this, ‘Eva’ that… Nobody thinks of the old Dragon God anymore. Sometimes I find myself longing for the good old days… Ah, pardon the ramblings of an old-timer. I may be getting up in my years, but my memory’s still sharp as ever… Is there anything you would like me to remember for you? The tale of your journey thus far, perhaps?” – Dragon God statue
The Pantheon of Wojaks
// abandoned