Rohan Monteiro

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The pursuit of the perfect...desert?

Back in the good old days, when I had more hair on my head than growing out of my ears, there was a girl I dated briefly. She was on a quest to find the perfect coffee. Every weekend, she would visit a different café across Dubai , choose a Cappuccino and pen down her observations in her journal. I had no such interest. Going out to a café became a thing in Mumbai roughly in 1996, when ‘Barista’ started popping up as a trendy chain of outlets across the city. Or maybe that was when I first began venturing out of my sheltered little pod because it was my first year of college. Until then, I hadn’t seen much of the city except a square kilometre around my house in Juhu which included my school, the doctor, the pharmacist, two churches and a graveyard. Basically, everything I might ever need was in that space and I had never ventured outside it. But now, I was in Bandra – the cooler, more hep cousin of all the other suburbs with shorter skirts, tastier food and a lot more entertainm

COTY #3 -From the Cutting Floor - The Caste System

This is the 3rd in a series of posts written originally as part of 'Curse of the Yaksha' but that were dropped from the final version. This piece is about the caste system in India. The Caste system is a social hierarchy that has been prevalent in India since ancient times (2500 -3000 years), according to some sources . For context, particularly non-Hindu readers, there were four broad categories in the caste system: o Brahmans - Scholars /Sages o Kshatriyas - Warriors o Vaishyas - Farmers, Traders, Merchants o Shudras - Manual Labour Although there are four main castes, thousands of sub-castes further divide India's people. Additionally, there is a separate caste who aren't considered part of the system at all – the Untouchables or Dalits. They are shunned by society and forbidden to live amongst those of high castes. They handle the jobs the rest of the castes refuse to do, such as cleaning latrines, manual scavenging, prostitution, animal slaughter, leather cra

COTY -From the Cutting Floor #2 - Dating the Mahabharata

This is the 2nd in a series of posts written originally as part of 'Curse of the Yaksha' but that were dropped from the final version. This piece is about the likely dates when the Mahbharatha took place . As part of the story and because I am occasionally neurotic about some details, I decided to attempt to calculate the most likely date for when the Mahabharata took place. The primary reason for doing so was that the very first diary entry by Akran mentions a date and I didn't want to get it wrong. However, I found myself enjoying the research process immensely, so let me breakdown my hypothesis as to when the event actually occurred. According to Hindu scriptures, the Kali Yuga began when Krishna left this realm . The length of the Yugas is almost certainly an exaggeration—432,000 years is the number that gets thrown around most often because a day in heaven was equivalent to one year on Earth. (To put that into perspective, a day on Venus is approximately 243 days on

COTY -From the Cutting Floor #1 The difference between mythology and history

This is the 1st in a series of posts written originally as part of 'Curse of the Yaksha' but that were dropped from the final version. This piece was written after reading an article about including certain myths as part of the Indian history syllabus. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MYTHOLOGY AND HISTORY? This was a question I felt I would like to pen down some thoughts on At the time of writing this, The NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) in India has recommended that the Ramayana and Mahabharata be included in History. It is unclear if this is ignorance or simple stupidity, but the point stands – there are enough and more examples of people being unable to distinguish between the two. History is written by the victors but based on objective fact. The propaganda that creeps into a historical narrative when written by the victors rarely becomes fantastical. Mythology, on the other hand, is an oral tradition that evolved. It isn't meant to

Behind the Scenes -Curse of the Yaksha AKA HOW IT ALL BEGAN

In 2016, I shared a room in London for two weeks with an ISKCON devotee. Vinod, as most people remember him was someone who had indulged in a whole host of activities that could be considered sinful. This included eating meat, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, not going to the temple, not keeping fasts etc. Until one day, he turned into a devout ISKCON devotee. The change was dramatic. And confusing. And I was fascinated. In those two weeks, I quizzed him on everything. What changed? How did you go from being a complete non-believer to a pious devotee in under a month? Why do you have just one wife when Krishna had sixteen thousand? Stuff like that. Bemused but delighted at my interest. V gladly answered all my questions. His absolute conviction in theism clashed with my absolute opposite stance on the matter but I enjoyed our discussions. His biggest complaint was that Indian mythology was so rich and interconnected that he couldn’t fathom why everyone else wasn’t as passionate ab