We think of love stories as those that end in happily-ever-after. But thousands of years ago, in ancient India, love was understood in a different way — as one of the four aims of life, as a means for spiritual growth, as a celebration of the play of the Divine. As something profound, beautiful, and sometimes elusive.

The sacred texts of Hinduism are populated with astonishing stories of love between gods and goddesses, between mortals and celestial beings, between sages and saints and ordinary humans. Not just ancient lore, these iconic stories have come to define one of the oldest continuous living civilizations and cultures in the world.

This book takes more than 25 stories from the Itithaasa and Puranas, the epic literature of ancient India, as well as stories from history that exemplify the many different aspects and dimensions of love. These stories were transmitted over thousands of years until they became part of the memory of a people. These stories teach us how to find love, how to rise through love, and how to become better through love.

Here you will find —

Stories of the apsaras, the female spirits of the waters and the clouds, exquisite dancers as elegant as they are beautiful;
Stories of rishis and rishikas, the sage, wise ones who find their balance between asceticism and earthly pleasures;
Stories of kings and queens, scholars and forest dwellers, demons and deities;
Stories that traverse death and span different worlds;
Stories that may be bittersweet, joyous, humorous, and tragic — but all stories that point us to Dharma.

There may not always be a happily-ever-after — but there can always be a Dharmically-ever-after!

Can watch the Event on Our Youtube / FB / Twitter

Speakers

Aditi Banerjee

Author

Aditi Banerjee’s first novel, The Curse of Gandhari, was published by Bloomsbury India in September 2019. She is a practicing attorney at a Fortune 500 financial services company and has also completed an Executive MBA at Columbia University. She is a prolific writer and speaker about Hinduism and the Hindu-American experience. She is a member of the Indic Academy and Indic Book Club, which sponsored a successful six-city book launch tour for The Curse of Gandhari in September 2019 across India. She co-edited the book, Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America in collaboration with Rajiv Malhotra, and has authored several essays in publications such as The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America since 1945 and Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in America: A Short History (Religion in American Life) (Oxford University Press). She earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and received a B.A. in International Relations, magna cum laude, from Tufts University. In her free time, she enjoys wandering the Himalayas and reading voraciously.

Abhinav Agarwal

Host

Abhinav is a technology professional with over twenty years in the software industry, the technical editor of a book published by McGraw-Hill, a prolific writer on areas on technology and Indology. He is a computer engineer and holds a post graduate diploma from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.