Note: A long, winding, and furious voice note, narrated and cleaned up with the help of Claude.

Epistemic status: Who cares. Also, who actually uses the word epistemic.

The trigger for this post was rereading Mythos by Stephen Fry for the second time. It’s a four-part series retelling Greek mythology. I’ve read two books so far, Mythos and Heroes, which covers Hercules, Jason, and others.

The trigger that triggered the rereading was a conversation between Alex Petkas and Jim O’Shaughnessy that gave me a post idea based on Greek myths. I wanted to refresh my memory, so I started reading the book again.

And even on the second reading, Mythos is an absolutely fun, delightful, right rollicking read. Stephen Fry is a masterful writer, a wordsmith in the truest sense. I’ve long been a fan, and he has this indisputable way with words. Calling his writing brilliant or lyrical doesn’t do it justice. He’s just so fucking good, and Mythos is no different. The first part is close to 400 pages, and in just a couple of days I found every excuse, every spare moment outside work, to read a few pages. Even the second time around, the book grabs you. It is not a dry academic retelling. It is accessible, funny, witty, a sheer delight.

Rereading the book got me thinking about why we tell these stories at all.

We are storytelling creatures. Stories are how we make sense of the world.

The biologist Stephen Jay Gould coined the term homo narrator to describe this tendency of ours to tell stories in order to make sense of things. He also used homo mendax, the deceptive storyteller, which feels very apt in our modern age. Going back a little further, the German folklorist Kurt Ranke used homo narrans to describe our tendency to spin elaborate yarns, to tangle reality and make it make sense for our poor senses, which are biologically incapable of taking in the full assault of reality.

Third, we are storytelling creatures and should have been named Homo narrator (or perhaps Homo mendax to acknowledge the misleading side of tale telling) rather than the often inappropriate Homo sapiens. The narrative mode comes naturally to us as a style for organizing thoughts and ideas. We should not be depressed that the hypotheses of multi-regionalism and Noah’s ark tell such radically different stories, for a large amount of agreement about ascertainable issues of anatomy and geography underlies the ordering of information into these contrary tales; and the tales themselves, like all fruitful theories, have served as marvelous devices for suggesting questions and avenues of future research. Good theories are, above all, useful.

I like to imagine that if one could travel far back into the mists of time, to the very early days, you’d find a father sitting with his son and daughter by their hearth after a hard day’s labour, having hunted and eaten the meat of a young deer. Having eaten, they step outside into the cool night air, under a sky awash with stars, a speckled spectacle if you will. And the daughter turns to her father and asks: “Dad, where do we come from? Who made us? And why are we here?”

A sublime moment of philosophical inquiry. Not one entirely alien to any child, because the questioning mind of a child is the purest essence of what it means to be a philosopher.

Countless moments like that, I imagine, were the origin of all the myths we have been telling ever since.

Because we are creatures hardwired to hate uncertainty. So much so that we would prefer getting punched in the face for sure rather than not knowing whether we’ll get punched in the face or not. Stories and myths are a way to resolve that uncertainty. Standing under the sky, gazing at the heavens and not knowing why we are here, where we have come from, or why things happen, is not a comfortable feeling for the poor little anthropoi. And his solution was to tell stories about gods and divine creatures of assorted variety.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re a person who believes in otherworldly beings or a heretic like me who is partial to materialistic explanations of the world. Myths still have a lot to give all of us, regardless of what we believe in.

First Observation: The Role of Myths

The very first thing that strikes you about the Greek myths is how remarkably human the Greek gods are.

Unlike the gods in Hindu mythology, who also have human qualities but still seem very godly, for lack of a better word, the Greek gods are more human. These are the only two mythologies I know to any meaningful extent, so I can’t generalise beyond that. But in the foreword to Mythos, Stephen Fry captures it perfectly:

The arc of the Greek myths follows the rise of mankind, our battle to free ourselves from the interference of the gods – their abuse, their meddling, their tyranny over human life and civilization. Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

I love this passage because not only are myths stories told to explain what we can’t explain, to answer the questions we don’t yet have answers for, but also to wrestle with the nightmare that is being human every day.

The first thing that strikes you in reading Mythos is that there is just a whole lot of sex.

Pure sex.

It feels like the primary job of the Greek gods, male and female, was to have as much sex as possible. Whatever godly duties they had were an afterthought. From the moment the first primordial deities like Erebus and Nyx sprang from Chaos, the sex begins. And it just continues and continues.

The Greek gods are also relentless. The one thing you can’t say about them is that they gave up. If the word “impossible” wasn’t in Napoleon’s dictionary, the word “no” did not exist in the lexicon of the Greek gods. If the Greek gods were on planet Earth today, they would make everyone who got called out during #MeToo look like venerable saints. They would make Epstein, Weinstein, and all the others look like men of God.

Zeus, who was the horniest of the lot, would go to any length once he set his eyes on a target, male or female. The Greek gods weren’t prudish. They batted for both teams. Sometimes they were the batsman and sometimes they were the wicketkeeper.

Take Zeus pursuing Metis. He runs after her, transforming himself first into a bull, then a bear, then a lion, then an eagle. Metis hides behind boulders deep in a cave, but Zeus turns himself into a snake, slithers through a gap in the rocks, and wraps his coils around her. Later, Zeus tricks her into transforming into a fly. And eats her. This is after having sex. Just a normal day in the kingdom of the Greek gods.

Then there’s Zeus being horny for Io. He transforms her into a heifer so he can have sex with her, all while evading the watchful eye of his wife Hera. And in the same story, he enlists the help of his son Hermes, himself the result of one of Zeus’s many dalliances, to help solve the problem of his raging boner. Hermes responds by murdering Argus, a loyal follower of Hera. He just kills him. So that his dad can have sex. Perfectly normal day in the kingdom of the Greek gods.

There was also a time when Zeus transformed into a shower of golden rain to impregnate Danae, a princess of Argos, who later bore him Perseus.

Even during the Titanomachy, the pivotal battle between the Titans and the Olympians, the gods found time to copulate.

And yet, what strikes you in reading all of this, going back to Fry’s point, is how remarkably human the Greek gods are. Why wouldn’t they be? They are, after all, a reflection of the same qualities in all of us. We are creatures capable of great acts of kindness and horrendous acts of cruelty. We give selflessly and yet wouldn’t hesitate to steal. We love deeply and are also capable of profound jealousy and vengeance.

You might wonder, reading these myths, be they Greek or Indian or any other, and looking at all the abominable things the gods get up to: the stealing, the murder, the rape, the vengefulness, the capriciousness, what moral or ethical message are they actually trying to convey?

Well, a lot of these myths are just stories. There is no hidden meaning behind them, no allegory, no embedded lesson. They are stories told for the sake of stories, handed down through the mists of time. In that sense, they are just entertainment.

But if you look at some of the greatest myths we tell, the Greek myths, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, you see gods, demigods, and assorted divine creatures struggling with greed, jealousy, avarice, duty, honour, loneliness, truth, justice, and revenge. And you know what all of that has in common with us today? These are very human things. The gods struggled with the same things we struggle with, partly because we made up the gods in our own image rather than the other way around.

And that, I think, is why myths continue to enchant and ensnare us: because the struggles are timeless. Most of us common plebeians never find a resolution to any of it.

The only person who ever found a resolution to all of this was Buddha. And even there, I don’t fully buy it. I don’t trust him. I don’t buy the whole shtick about sitting in a loincloth beneath a banyan tree. I think Buddha got away with it because we didn’t have Twitter back then. Otherwise the detectives of ancient Twitter would have outed him.

But I digress.

We struggle with love, loss, grief, honesty, sacrifice, duty, meaning, purpose, and all the other things that chase us like the Furies, like the Erinyes pursuing those who have done wrong.

A note from Claude — The Erinyes (Furies)

The Erinyes, whom the Romans called the Furies, were three goddesses of vengeance: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. They existed specifically to punish those who had committed crimes against the natural order: murder, perjury, crimes against parents. They did not wait for a court ruling. They simply showed up and did not stop. No escape, no appeal, no statute of limitations. The Greeks understood that some things, once done, follow you forever.

Blessed are those who find a resolution to all of it. But I don’t think such a being exists.

The fact that we have endless questions that need answering, that answers may not be available, that we may never find resolution to the things that haunt us, and that we have to carry all of it to the grave, that is both what makes life a nightmare and what makes it worth living.

Our greatest myths are mirrors in which we see ourselves. Not answers to the great questions of why we are here or where we come from. A mirror. A reminder of the truth of what humans are capable of, the good, the bad, and the truly abominable.

Perhaps one of the more important things the myths continually remind us is that life isn’t really black and white. There are several stories that play it that way, good versus evil, hero versus monster. But in the Greek myths, the grayness of the human condition is vivid and front and center.

Odysseus, to my mind, is the best example of this. I haven’t read the fourth part of the Fry series yet, the one about Odysseus, but I know the story in bits and pieces.

After the Trojan War, Odysseus braves trial after trial trying to get home. Along the way, he lies, he cheats, he kills. Circe offers him a life of luxury. Calypso offers him immortality. He sleeps with both of them. And through all of it, he never loses sight of getting home to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. He ties himself to the mast to resist the famous siren call, and he lies to the Cyclops, disguises himself, does whatever it takes. His goal is singular: get home, make his household whole again.

Now if you judge Odysseus by modern moral standards, he looks like a pretty questionable character. But the reality is he operated by an older, more heroic moral code, where loyalty, friendship, reputation, and glory were front and center. You can see this in the fierce loyalty he shows his crew, even as he falls short of it repeatedly and loses several of them along the way.

So how do you decide whether he is good or bad? That is the essential tension, and it remains unresolved to this day.

And perhaps that is one of the more important things the myths give us. None of us are completely good or completely bad. We all have fifty shades of gray in us. And in reading the myths, we get to see our own grayish reflection in the silvery mirror that are the myths.

The story of humanity is like a palimpsest on which the same story has been written over and over again.

And the proof is everywhere you look right now. The times have changed. The tides have changed. The reign of the gods has ended, the old monuments have crumbled, and the intensity of the prayers and sacrifices we once made has faded. But we still make the same mistakes. Atavistic tendencies on the rise. A profound impulse to create divisions, to sow discord for personal gain, a perverse fetish to reify an imagined past when things were supposedly better. We have been blinded to the fact that we all come from the same lump of clay, shaped by the same loving hand.

Ever since Athena breathed life into us and we went from being clay figurines to the creatures we are today, and ever since our loyal friend Prometheus stole fire so that we could stand shoulder to shoulder with the gods, enduring the horrendous fate of having his liver eaten by ravaging vultures for ages, we have more or less been making the same mistakes over and over again.

A note from Claude — Athena

Athena was the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and crafts, an unusual combination until you consider that the Greeks did not separate strategy from intelligence. She was born fully grown and in full armour, springing directly from the head of Zeus after he swallowed her pregnant mother Metis. She had no childhood, no gradual becoming. She arrived knowing everything she would ever need to know.

She was also, in some tellings, the one who animated Prometheus’s clay figures, breathing pneuma, the breath or soul, into them and turning clay into something that could think and suffer and ask questions about the night sky. Accounts differ on this. The Greeks were not especially bothered about consistency in their origin stories. The point was never the mechanism. It was the audacity of the attempt.

She was the patron goddess of Athens, which she won by offering the city an olive tree, beating Poseidon who had offered a saltwater spring. The Greeks apparently had good taste in practical gifts.

A note from Claude — Prometheus

Prometheus was a Titan, which made him technically one of the old gods, the generation before the Olympians. His name means forethought, the ability to see what comes next. He fashioned humanity from clay and then, taking pity on these fragile, cold, defenceless creatures, stole fire from the gods and gave it to them. Zeus’s punishment was precise and prolonged: Prometheus was chained to a rock, an eagle came every day to eat his liver, the liver regenerated overnight, and the eagle returned the next morning. This continued for thousands of years until Hercules freed him. He gave us everything and paid for it daily. The Greeks knew exactly what they were saying about the cost of progress.

And Zeus, furious at Prometheus’s betrayal and at the audacity of humans who dared to challenge the gods, took his revenge by tricking Epimetheus and Pandora into releasing all the ills of the world.

A note from Claude — Epimetheus

Epimetheus was Prometheus’s brother. His name means afterthought, the opposite of his brother in every sense. Where Prometheus planned ahead, Epimetheus acted first and thought later. He was given the task of distributing gifts to all living creatures: speed to the cheetah, strength to the bear, shells to the tortoise, and so on. By the time he got to humans he had run out of gifts entirely. Prometheus had to step in and steal fire to compensate. Epimetheus later married Pandora, and when she opened the jar, he was presumably not entirely surprised. The Greeks named him afterthought and then made him responsible for two of the worst outcomes in human history. Which feels about right.

Myths were stories told to make sense of reality, but they also carried moral and ethical instruction. In that sense, they were a kind of mental glue holding humanity together, a leash corralling the wayward, capricious, brave, vengeful, thoughtful, thoughtless, impulsive, lustful, selfless human onto the straight and narrow.

Perhaps, in the broadest sense possible, myths are an enduring reminder of what we owe each other.

And even if you are a non-believer, even if you are a heretic like me, even if you think myths have nothing to teach us and the whole moral-ethical-metaphysical instruction business is complete bullshit, you should still read them. Because they are absolutely fun. They are the greatest stories ever told. The fact that we continue to tell the same myths after millennia is proof enough of that.

Second Observation: The Greek Monopoly on the Western Imagination (and What Got Left Out)

The other thing that struck me reading Mythos is how central Greek history, myths, philosophy, and scientific ideas are to the language we actually use every day.

English is suffused with Greek, Greek that passed through Latin and French and eventually became the common tongue we speak today. Stephen Fry points this out in an interview on myths, and while it’s obvious in hindsight, I hadn’t thought about it.

Take technology. The word tech itself comes from the Greek techne. Technology, telegraph, telegram, television, all essentially Greek words.

A note from Claude

All four words share the same Greek bones. Tele (τηλε) means far or distant. Techne (τέχνη) means craft or skill, not technology in the modern sense but the art of making things, where a craftsman and an engineer were the same person. Telephone: far voice. Telegraph: far writing. Television: far seeing. The Greeks had one prefix and we built an entire civilisation of communication around it.

Scientific terms like electricity and magnetism have Greek roots.

A note from Claude

Elektron (ἤλεκτρον) was the Greek word for amber, the fossilised tree resin. The Greeks noticed that rubbing amber against cloth attracted small objects. From a curious property of fossilised sap to the thing powering your phone.

Magnes comes from Magnesia, a region in ancient Greece where magnetic ore was found in abundance. We named an entire force of nature after a place. The Greeks were very comfortable with that kind of thing.

A vast number of medical terms, words for organs, diseases, even the word therapy, come from Greek.

A note from Claude

Therapeia (θεραπεία) originally meant service or attendance, specifically service to the gods. Healing was understood as a form of devotion. It has since come to mean the thing your insurance probably doesn’t fully cover.

The word metaphor is itself Greek.

A note from Claude

Meta (μετά) + pherein (φέρειν) = to carry across. A metaphor literally carries meaning from one place to another. The word metaphor is itself a metaphor. The Greeks would have found this pleasing.

And concepts central to how we organise civic and intellectual life, logic, ethics, politics, rhetoric, democracy, are Greek in origin, and Greek ideas have shaped how we think about every one of them.

A note from Claude

Logos (λόγος), the root of logic, meant word, reason, and discourse simultaneously. The Greeks believed thinking and language were inseparable. You could not truly reason without words.

Ethos (ἦθος), the root of ethics, meant character or custom. Ethics was not originally about rules. It was about what kind of person you were.

Polis (πόλις), the root of politics, meant city-state. Everything political was originally about how people lived together in a city. It has since expanded considerably in scope and deteriorated considerably in quality.

Rhetor (ῥήτωρ), the root of rhetoric, meant public speaker. The art of persuasion was so central to Greek life they named it after the person who practised it.

Demos (δῆμος) + kratos (κράτος) = people + power. Worth noting that the Athenian version excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Power to some of the people.

Then there are the expressions we reach for without even thinking: opening Pandora’s box, the Midas touch, a Trojan horse, being caught between Scylla and Charybdis, an odyssey, untangling a Gordian knot. All Greek myths, used in throwaway conversation.

A note from Claude — Pandora’s box

Pandora was the first woman, created by the gods specifically to punish humanity for Prometheus stealing fire. She was given a jar, mistranslated as “box” by Erasmus in the 16th century, and it stuck, containing all the world’s evils. Curiosity got the better of her. The only thing left inside when she slammed it shut was Elpis, hope. Whether that is comforting or darkly funny depends on your mood.

A note from Claude — The Trojan horse

The Greeks spent a decade unable to breach Troy’s walls. Odysseus eventually proposed building an enormous wooden horse, hiding soldiers inside, leaving it as a gift, and sailing away. The Trojans, ignoring their priest Laocoon’s warning, “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts,” wheeled it inside. The soldiers emerged at night and opened the gates. Troy fell. It is the oldest known recorded instance of social engineering.

A note from Claude — Scylla and Charybdis

Two monsters guarding a narrow strait. Scylla was a six-headed creature that snatched sailors directly off their ships. Charybdis was a massive whirlpool that swallowed entire ships whole. Odysseus chose to pass Scylla’s side, losing six men but saving the ship. Being caught between Scylla and Charybdis is not choosing between two inconveniences. It is choosing which loss you can live with.

A note from Claude — Odyssey

Odysseus spent ten years trying to get home after the Trojan War. Ten years of monsters, gods, temptresses, storms, and his crew repeatedly doing exactly the wrong thing. The word now means any long, eventful journey. The original was somewhat more eventful than most.

A note from Claude — The Gordian knot

An ancient prophecy said that whoever untied the famously complex knot in the city of Gordium would rule all of Asia. Alexander the Great arrived, looked at it briefly, and cut it with his sword. Untangling a Gordian knot now means finding an unconventional solution to an apparently unsolvable problem. Alexander’s version was less elegant but considerably faster.

And the everyday words: narcissism from the myth of Narcissus.

A note from Claude

Narcissus was a beautiful youth who saw his own reflection in a pool and fell so completely in love with it that he could not bring himself to leave. He wasted away staring at himself. The original selfie casualty.

Panic from the god Pan.

A note from Claude

Pan was the god of the wild, usually depicted with the legs and horns of a goat. He was said to cause sudden, irrational fear in lonely, desolate places. Shepherds would hear strange sounds in the hills and just run. No reason. Just run. That was Pan. The word panic preserves that specific feeling of fear with no identifiable source.

Hypnosis from Hypnos, the god of sleep.

A note from Claude

Hypnos was the god of sleep, and his twin brother was Thanatos, the god of death. They lived together in the underworld. The Greeks thought sleep and death resembled each other so closely they made them siblings. Every night, according to this logic, is a small rehearsal.

Music from the Muses. Ocean from the Titan Oceanus.

A note from Claude

The nine Muses were goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences, poetry, history, astronomy, dance, and others. Music fell under their domain, obviously. Less obviously, so did the word museum, originally a place dedicated to the Muses, a house of learning and the arts. The Greeks did not really separate the two.

Oceanus was a Titan, the personification of the great world-river that the Greeks believed encircled the entire earth. Not a sea but a river, flowing around the edges of everything. When the Greeks named what we call the ocean, they were naming it after the river that held the world together.

Mentor is a character in the Odyssey.

A note from Claude

Mentor was an old friend of Odysseus who looked after his son Telemachus while Odysseus was away at war. Athena, goddess of wisdom, occasionally disguised herself as Mentor in order to give guidance to Telemachus directly. So our word for a trusted guide comes from a man who was frequently impersonated by a goddess. Which raises questions about how much of the advice was really his.

Marathon comes from the Battle of Marathon.

A note from Claude

In 490 BC, a messenger named Pheidippides ran approximately 25 miles from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians. He delivered the news, then dropped dead. We commemorated his death by making millions of people voluntarily do the same thing every year, usually in branded running shoes and with a foil blanket at the end.

Tantalize from Tantalus. Siren call from the Sirens. Herculean, Achilles’ heel, all of it Greek.

A note from Claude — Tantalus

Tantalus was a king who killed his own son, cooked him, and served him to the gods at a banquet, apparently to test whether they were truly omniscient. They were. His punishment: to stand for eternity in a pool of water beneath fruit trees, with the water receding whenever he bent to drink and the branches rising whenever he reached for fruit. The Greeks were not lenient with people who wasted their time.

A note from Claude — The Sirens

The Sirens were creatures, part woman and part bird in the oldest tellings, who sang so beautifully that sailors were lured to their deaths on the rocks. Odysseus, warned in advance, had his crew plug their ears with wax and had himself tied to the mast so he could hear the song without being able to act on it. A siren call is an irresistible lure. The original was considerably more fatal than most things we use the phrase for today.

A note from Claude — Herculean

Hercules was tasked with twelve seemingly impossible labours as penance for killing his own family in a fit of divinely-induced madness. Slaying the Nemean lion. Cleaning the Augean stables, thirty years of accumulated manure, cleared in a day by redirecting two rivers through them. Capturing Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the underworld. A Herculean task is not a difficult task. It is a task that would simply destroy a normal person.

A note from Claude — Achilles’ heel

Achilles’ mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx as an infant to make him invulnerable, holding him by his heel, the one spot the water never touched. He survived the entire Trojan War, the greatest warrior on either side, only to be killed by an arrow to that heel. The one thing his mother’s hand covered. The greatest warrior of the age undone by the grip of the person who loved him most.

How did all of these ideas, concepts, and metaphors become so central to a language that isn’t even Greek?

It seems like an accident of history. Another roll of the dice and things would probably have turned out differently.

Which brings me to the question that was nagging at me: how come Indian myths and Indian philosophical ideas, which are as rich as Greek ideas if not richer, are not as central? How come they didn’t make it into the common inheritance of the world?

This is not me being a jingoistic Indian proclaiming the superiority of all things Indian. I am not an idiot. I identify as a cosmopolitan in the true, original sense of the word. But the fact that the Mahabharata is ten times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and yet is less globally known than either of them, is striking.

Add to that the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Arthashastra, which is essentially a masterclass in political philosophy, and philosophical schools like Vedanta, Samkhya, Nyaya, Buddhism, Jainism, and Charvaka, which have wrestled with foundational questions of consciousness, reality, time, and ethics for thousands of years. And yet it is Stoicism and Epicureanism that enjoy wider popularity in the world today.

I asked Claude about this, and Claude diplomatically agreed. Many scholars would concede that Indian thought is, in many cases, richer and denser than Greek thought. The reasons why it never achieved the same reach are several.

Colonialism is the most obvious one. British colonisation meant that Western intellectual tradition became the default mode of thinking in India, and Indian thought was systematically marginalised. Then there is the question of Sanskrit. Greek had an unbroken lineage, feeding into Latin, which fed into European languages. Sanskrit’s chain of transmission was broken. The fact that Sanskrit is not even popular within India today is telling in itself. Eurocentrism in academia compounded all of this: what counts as philosophy, what counts as civilisation, has historically been defined in Western universities and transmitted, willingly or unwillingly, to the rest of the world. And Greece influenced Rome, which built an empire, which meant Greek ideas spread. India never projected its ideas outward through empire in the same way, and was later subjugated by the one empire that did.

Several ideas with deep Indian roots, infinite cyclical time, non-dualism, mindfulness, meditation, are now hugely influential globally, but routinely stripped of their Indian origins. Even Pythagoras is thought by some scholars to have been influenced by Indian ideas through Persia.

So it goes.

Apart from the accident of history, India as a political concept is very recent, post-1947. But a bigger reason Indian ideas, philosophies, literature, and mythology are not more widely known is that we Indians have done a horrible, piss-poor job of preserving our cultural heritage and ensuring it is widely known. A cursory Google search will throw up countless examples of crumbling monuments with centuries of history, manuscripts and old books rotting away under the sheer intensity of the neglect meted out to them.

The sheer apathy is not only nauseating. It is downright disgusting.

And this provokes a strong opinion in me for a specific reason. Somewhere along my reading journey I came across Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, and the one immediate question I had was: why isn’t there an Indian equivalent? Why has nobody built that, despite India having one of the longest histories of any civilisation on the planet?

We have so much philosophy, mythology, and literature to give to the world. Why have we done such a shoddy job?

That question is what led me to work on Project Akshara, my attempt to create a small Project Gutenberg for India.

But my only answer to the question, ultimately, was apathy. I think apathy is at the root of a great many problems that plague India.

If this got you curious

The books:

  • Mythos — Stephen Fry. Start here.
  • Heroes — Stephen Fry. The second book.
  • Troy — Stephen Fry. The third.
  • Odyssey — Stephen Fry. The fourth and final. Published 2024.

For the myths themselves:

  • Theoi.com — the best single resource for Greek mythology on the internet. Deep, sourced, and genuinely readable.
  • Perseus Digital Library — the actual ancient texts, in Greek and English translation. For when you want to go to the source.

For the philosophy:

Wikipedia rabbit holes worth falling into: