The Discover India Podcast by Professor Pankaj Jain: Bhārat Darśan

"Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached" is one of the most quoted lines in modern India — but only the first half comes from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. Verse 1.3.14 reads उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत (uttiṣṭhata jāgrata prāpya varān nibodhata): arise, awake, approach the wise, and truly learn. "Stop not till the goal is reached" is Swami Vivekananda's own expansion — he was preaching, not translating, and he never claimed otherwise.

The verse also carries a warning the popular version leaves out: क्षुरस्य धारा निशिता दुरत्यया (kṣurasya dhārā niśitā duratyayā) — the path is sharp as a razor's edge, hard to cross. W. Somerset Maugham took that image as the epigraph and title of The Razor's Edge (1944).

Part 1 of "Arise · Walk · Arrive" — three Sanskrit lines, three texts, one map of a life.

Watch the full decode series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ProfPankajJain
All platforms: https://pod.link/profpankajjain

#KathaUpanishad #Vivekananda #Sanskrit #Upanishads #IndianPhilosophy #TheRazorsEdge #DiscoverIndia #BharatDarshan

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson gave the West its defining story of the divided self — Dr. Jekyll drinks a potion to split the monster from the man, and the severing destroys him. The Bhagavad Gita's 16th chapter, the daivāsura-sampad-vibhāga, had mapped the same divide long before: the daivī and the āsurī, the divine and demonic dispositions in every person. Fearlessness, restraint, truthfulness, and compassion on one side; arrogance, anger, cruelty, and self-deception on the other. Not two people — two pulls inside one.

The two traditions agree on the diagnosis and split on the cure. Jekyll amputates; Krishna governs — closing the three gates of ruin: kāma, krodha, lobha — desire, anger, greed (Gita 16.21).

The West tried to cage the monster. India tried to civilize it.

A scholarly note: this is a parallel of ideas, not a claim of influence — there is no evidence Stevenson read the Gita. "Demonic" is a translation convention for āsurī, a disposition rather than the Christian devil.

Sources: Bhagavad Gita 16.1–5 and 16.21; R. L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

Watch the full decode series: https://www.youtube.com/@ProfPankajJain
All platforms: https://pod.link/profpankajjain

— Prof. Pankaj Jain · Discover India: Bhārat Darśan

Nikola Tesla was born 170 years ago today — July 10, 1856. In 1896, in New York, he met Swami Vivekananda, and by Vivekananda's own letter from that year, Tesla was charmed by two Vedantic concepts: akasha, the all-pervading substance of space, and prana, the energy moving through it. Tesla hoped to demonstrate mathematically that matter and energy are reducible to one another. He never completed that work — Einstein published E=mc² in 1905. But Tesla adopted the Sanskrit terms, and they appear in his later writing.

This episode decodes that meeting the honest way: not "India discovered relativity first," and not Tesla borrowing his physics from Vedanta — two thinkers from opposite worlds converging on the same question. What is everything made of?

From Discover India: Bhārat Darśan by Prof. Pankaj Jain — Professor and Indologist at FLAME University, exploring India's philosophies, history, and living traditions.

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/E6GT45sCJjo
All platforms: linktr.ee/ProfPankajJain

Prambanan (9th century; a UNESCO World Heritage Site) is Indonesia's largest Hindu temple complex, raised for Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. Around the time it rose, Javanese poets re-wrote the Ramayana in their own language — the Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa, Old Javanese, not Sanskrit. And since 1961, in the shadow of those spires, Javanese artists have staged the Ramayana ballet night after night — in what became the world's largest Muslim-majority nation. Not as religion. As inheritance.

The point isn't that India "exported" the Ramayana to Asia. Asia adopted it — gave it a new language, new names, new music — and made it home. Some stories don't belong to one country; they belong to everyone who keeps telling them.

A scholar's quick decode. This is about heritage and language, not policy.

A few notes: Prambanan's main compound is usually dated to around the mid-9th century (I round to "twelve hundred years" for the format); the Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa is Java's own re-authoring, not a copy; and I describe the performers as Javanese artists in an overwhelmingly Muslim society without claiming any individual's faith.

News peg: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2026/07/08/modi-prabowo-celebrate-shared-heritage-at-prambanan-temple

More from Discover India: Bhārat Darśan with Prof. Pankaj Jain: https://open.spotify.com/show/5jSL5qrjKmgYHQhMGLUdJ2

#Prambanan #Ramayana #Indonesia #Kakawin #IndianHistory #SharedHeritage #DiscoverIndia #BharatDarshan

Deadline पर panic होता है? 2,000 साल पहले श्रीकृष्ण ने इसका जवाब दिया — भगवद्गीता 2.48.

योगस्थः कुरु कर्माणि सङ्गं त्यक्त्वा धनञ्जय।
सिद्ध्यसिद्ध्योः समो भूत्वा समत्वं योग उच्यते॥

"Established in yoga, perform your duties with equanimity" — संतुलन में रहकर काम करो, सफलता और असफलता को एक जैसा समझो। यही समत्व है, यही योग है।

घबराया हुआ मन खराब निर्णय लेता है। Equanimity सिर्फ एक spiritual idea नहीं — ये एक performance tool है। इसी विचार से जुड़ा है स्थितप्रज्ञ (गीता 2.54–72) — स्थिर बुद्धि वाला व्यक्ति।

"गीता जीवन के लिए" (Series 1) — रोज़मर्रा की ज़िंदगी के लिए गीता का ज्ञान, हर हफ्ते एक श्लोक।

📚 Full English Gita translation series: My complete Bhagavad Gita Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk1BebxgmgQ&list=PLAvLthebN2HDFIKGhHIuoG93SI8jqLxpA&index=3
🔗 More: youtube.com/@ProfPankajJain · Instagram @ProfPankajJain

Dr. Pankaj Jain — Professor & Head of Humanities and Languages, Director of The India Centre, FLAME University; author of Dharma in America (Routledge, 2020).

MS Dhoni turns 45 today — and the calm the world calls "Captain Cool" has a 2,000-year-old name. In the Bhagavad Gītā (2.54–72), Krishna describes the sthitaprajña — the person of steady wisdom, unshaken in sorrow, not grasping in success, free of fear and anger. A packed stadium in the final over is the modern echo of the battlefield where Arjuna first asked how such composure is possible.

But the Gītā asks for something harder than clutch nerves: releasing the outcome entirely — niṣkāma karma, action without craving the result. Cricket admires the calm; the Gītā names its price. A scholar's quick decode for a birthday, tracing an idea from a nickname to its oldest source — an analogy to a public temperament, not a claim about anyone's personal beliefs.

Sources: Bhagavad Gītā 2.54 and 2.56.

Full English Gītā translation series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO32J3sliB0&list=PLAvLthebN2HDFIKGhHIuoG93SI8jqLxpA

Follow along: youtube.com/@ProfPankajJain · Instagram @ProfPankajJain

Dr. Pankaj Jain is Professor and Head of Humanities & Languages and Director of The India Centre at FLAME University, and author of Dharma in America (Routledge, 2020).

India's internet is arguing about E20 petrol — the 20% ethanol blend. That "E" is ethanol, and ethanol comes from sugarcane. Which makes it, quietly, one of the most Indian things in your tank.

In this short Bhārat Darśan decode, I trace how the Sanskrit word śarkarā — which first meant "gravel," for the shape of the crystals — traveled the world: Persian shakar → Arabic sukkar → Latin succarum → English "sugar." Sugarcane was first refined into crystallized sugar in the Indian subcontinent, and in the seventh century, China sent missions to India to learn the art. Every time the world says "sugar," it's speaking a little Sanskrit.

This isn't a take on E20 fuel policy — it's about where the word comes from.

🎥 Watch the video version: https://youtube.com/shorts/McDu-MKFuEs?feature=share
📖 Read the full essay on my Times of India India Centre blog: The India Centre Blog - Times of India BlogSources: standard etymological dictionaries; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 6. The Ikṣvāku–ikṣu link is offered as a traditional etymology.

Every Fourth of July, the world remembers a nation declaring its freedom. There is a second kind of freedom tied to the same date.

On July 4, 1902, Swami Vivekananda passed away — the monk who, nine years earlier, had introduced Vedanta to the West at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The freedom he spoke of was not political. It was moksha: the liberation of the spirit.

And four years before his death, on July 4, 1898, he sat on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Kashmir and wrote a poem for the American friends traveling with him. He titled it "To the Fourth of July." It hails a nation's liberty, then turns inward, toward the freedom of the soul — a nation's freedom and a person's, held together in a single date.

In this short piece, I trace that connection: the two freedoms, the man who lived between two worlds, and the poem almost no one remembers.

The poem closes:

Till men and women, with uplifted head,

Behold their shackles broken, and
Know, in springing joy, their life renewed.

— Swami Vivekananda, "To the Fourth of July," Kashmir, July 4, 1898 (Complete Works, Vol. 5)

Watch the video version: [paste YouTube link]

Discover India: Bhārat Darśan — connecting today's questions to India's civilizational knowledge, philosophy, and heritage. Follow for more.

"मन लागो मेरो यार, फ़कीरी में" — my heart is set, O friend, on the fakir's way.

Fakiri isn't poverty. It's vairagya — the freedom of wanting nothing and belonging to all; not renouncing the world, but holding it lightly. A short poem of search and surrender, in the spirit of Kabir: beyond the stars, there is something each of us must find.

Fakiri (in translation below, original Hindi is in the podcast episode)

Who knows what my heart still seeks in this life of grace,
Who knows whose silent presence I pursue in restless chase.

Beyond the stars there waits a truth I long to claim,
A treasure no worldly fortune ever could contain.

If that One would dwell within the landscape of my mind,
New life would fill each verse and song my soul could find.

If that One would walk beside the passions of my heart,
Love and faithful devotion would gain a deeper art.

At every step I strive to reach the radiant sun above,
Though I am but a speck before its boundless light and love.

कबीर — traditional depiction (no verified likeness of Kabir exists); stamp: India Post, 1952.

— Prof. Pankaj Jain · Discover India: Bhārat Darśana