Meera Subramanian
Meera Subramanian is an editor of Killing the Buddha and writes about the environment and culture for Nature, InsideClimate News, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, and others. Her first book is A River Runs Again: A Natural History of India from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (PublicAffairs, 2015). Visit her at meerasub.org.
Recent Posts by Meera
Dream State in Sturgis Library
The story threads written so long ago still tied us to the world out there, like spider silk unspooling across the moat.
Young Evangelicals Fighting for Climate Action
For students at this top evangelical college, loving God means protecting creation. That includes dealing with the human sources of climate change.
For Anna
I am in the middle of movement and want nothing but to stop. I am starved for silence, for stillness in the New Delhi swirl. I’m disoriented without the sight of stars, only catching that the moon has tipped through full when I spotted it through a nighttime haze we’ve swept up into the sky….
Evidence of Your Journey
From our new e-book,Oh God Oh God Oh God: Essays on Sex and Religion, available now!
Born Again Rural
How to get found in the woods.
From KtB to Lolita
Mark your calendars. If you’ll be in New York City on June 16, come out to Lolita Bar for the Restless Legs reading series. I’ll be joining a handful of other fine women as we read from the Best of Women’s Travel Writing anthology, just out from Travelers’ Tales. My contribution is a KtB original….
KtB in Best Women’s Travel Writing
I just returned from another trip to India. On my second day there, I was eating lunch at my aunt and uncle’s house, setting out the tiered tower of stainless steel tiffin containers to reveal finely cut green bean curries, sambar, rasam and other South Indian staples. In an attempt to be polite, I served…
The Lingering Loveliness of Long Things
When was the last time someone read you a (really long) story?
Om. Hindu. Huh?
Yoga. Fifteen million practitioners in the United States…and not one unified position on what exactly yoga is. What a surprise! And yet the debate rages on, among Southern Baptists and Orthodox Jews just to name a couple of religious groups, about whether or not yoga is a specifically Hindu practice, and whether to practice it is…
The Dark Side of the Festival of Lights
I knew something was changing in India when I arrived for Diwali about ten years back and some of my nephews were boycotting the five-day Hindu Festival of Lights. While subtler forms of light are used too—a cascade of clay oil lamps illuminating sets of stairs—firecrackers are the big attraction in this annual commemoration of good over…
In the Courtyard of the Beloved
In my travels through Delhi, I have passed through the area of Nizamuddin a dozen times. I have snuck in the back way to Humayan’s Tomb and run along its looming stone wall, climbed up its dark staircases to the towers above. I have lugged baggage up and down the Nizamuddin railway platform, coming and…
Laughing for Pakistanis
Comedian Aasif Mandvi, correspondent for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, began last night’s “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” at Comix on W. 14th Street in New York (previously blogged by Jess) reflecting on things he missed as a kid growing up Muslim. “Santa Claus. Bacon Bits.” (Pause, the critical tool of the comic.) “Seeing my…
Letting Gravity Win
Four questions whose answers might save your life.
Judgement for Ayodhya
Today, the Allahabad High Court in Lucknow, India announced its decisions in the Babri Masjid case, the controversial site that both Muslims and Hindus lay claim to in Ayodhya. Among other questions, the three-judge panel was determining whether the controversial site was indeed the birthplace of the Hindu Lord Ram. Sopan Joshi, of the Indian newsweekly Tehelka…
Do You Believe Oil Is Lighter Than Love?
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has engineers scrambling, environmentalists screaming through their tears, biologists getting their rubber gloves and cleaning supplies ready, the military finally being put to some good use, BP stockholders selling, fisherman learning how to be oil skimmers instead of shrimpers, and—over at Religion Dispatches, Peter Laarman asking, in…
Immaculate Clarification
My piece Virgin Birth that we ran on Christmas inspired Robert B. Tapp, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Religious Studies, and South Asian Studies at University of Minnesota and Dean & Faculty Chair Emeritus at The Humanist Institute in NYC to write: Thanks for your sensitive piece on surrogacy. Having lived for a year in Pune…
The Virgin Birth
By an act of God—or a Petri dish and a bit of cash.
Explosions in Mumbai
A year ago today ten men in jeans and black t-shirts took ten minutes to hijack Mumbai, a cosmopolitan city that everyone here in India compares to New York. With guns and grenades and bombs in backpacks, they killed 164 people and left the city in flames. Most of the attackers were killed in the…