Newcomers told of communists’ propensity for virgins coupled with ‘Islam against the rest of the world’ mentality.

How did Inana or Ishtar reach Balochistan from distant Mesopotamia?

The Sindhu was the river whose channel was cut by none other than the god Varuna so that it “ran on to win the race”.

Ctesias tried to learn as much of India as was possible and quizzed every Indian visitor to the court about it.

Devotees are spread across the religious spectrum: Muslims, Hindus, Christians.

Pir Ghar houses a shrine, said to have been visited by Prophet Ismail. Today it is visited by couples seeking children

Dharti Mata is still revered and resorted to by Muslims and her shrines are spread across the country.

In 1996, a man told me that those afflicted by eye trouble went up into its ruined monks’ cells to pray to be cured.

Xuanzang who came to our part of the world in 631 CE, was a remarkable man and a raconteur of the first order.

A bureaucrat mutated into an ‘intellectual’ that hogs the waves of an Urdu channel is a liar and a charlatan.