As a reader, one of the most gratifying trends that you would notice in recent years is the tendency to gravitate towards books which inject flavour into that part of India’s history and culture which has been influenced by Hinduism. Be it The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das – which is a sombre reminder of what we can take from the Mahabharat into our daily lives and what we can discard – or the cheeky Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor – which hilariously meshes the Mahabharat and the Indian freedom struggle – or even the masterfully compiled In Search of Sita edited by Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale – which visits the many interpretations of the lady – there are many, many books which challenge our conventional notions of spirituality, religion and “Bharatiya Sanskriti”. Are these too the “Hinduisation” of popular culture? Even The Hindu carried a brilliant op-ed by Chitra Padmanabhan on the lessons for the Uttarakhand tragedy from the myth of the Ganga. How then, do these works support the statement that “the modern Hindu is denied the freedom to re-interpret and interrogate his religion because of fear”?