Why we can’t stop adding God to genius
Indians have a strange and enduring obsession: the need to spiritualise human talent. It’s not enough for someone to be a genius—they must have had divine backing, supernatural ancestry, or at the very least, a mythological sidekick whispering mantras into their ears. It’s as if the human brain, unaided by gods, is simply incapable of greatness.
This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural muscle memory.
Every time someone from ancient India did something remarkable—be it writing an epic, singing a hymn, or solving a philosophical puzzle—we wove a myth around it. A god visited them in a dream. A celestial being intervened. A holy sage gave them a mantra. Because if something doesn’t come naturally to the masses, it must have come from God. Or worse, if someone wrote something so extraordinary that it couldn’t be understood easily, it was easier to say it was divinely inspired than to try replicating or challenging it.
Take Valmiki, for example. Revered as the author of the Ramayana, his origin story sounds like a rejected Bollywood script with a dash of divine licensing. Once a robber, Valmiki supposedly tried to mug the mythological sage Narada. But instead of arrest or resistance, he got a mantra. He meditated, transformed, and boom—out came the Ramayana.
Now imagine a version without Narada. Just a reformed man who sat down and wrote one of the greatest epics in human history. Inspiring? Sure. But maybe not divine enough for us. Because if Ram wasn’t born out of a divine narrative, he would’ve been just another literary character—like Nirmala, created by Premchand. And Ramayana? Just a well-written book.
Then comes the story of Vyasa, author of the Mahabharata. His conception is a cocktail of mysticism and miracle. His father, Sage Parashara, meets a fisherwoman named Satyavati. A romantic encounter follows—on a boat, no less. He uses his yogic powers to create a mist of privacy (every Bollywood cinematographer’s dream), restores her virginity after the act, and blesses her with divine fragrance for good measure.
But the real kicker? Vyasa is born immediately—not as a crying baby, but as a fully-formed sage who nods at his parents and strolls into the forest to begin his spiritual journey. What a way to make an entrance.
Had Vyasa just been a regular kid born to two regular people, the Mahabharata might have been studied, sure—but not sanctified. Without the magic, Vyasa would’ve been grouped alongside George R. R. Martin, not garlanded in temples.
These mythologised biographies weren’t meant to deceive. They were tools—used to immortaliseliterature. If the author was touched by the divine, then the text became untouchable. Sacred. Eternal. It wasn’t just literature; it was revelation.
But here’s the catch: in making these works divine, we also made them impossible to match. No modern writer could compete, because no modern writer is born from mist and mantra. We inadvertently killed the idea that greatness can emerge from regular people—people like you, me, or your neighbour with the poetry blog.
And perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen another Ramayana or Mahabharata in over 2000 years. It’s not that India lacks talent. It’s that we’ve caged our expectations in myth. We’ve made genius so sacred, so inaccessible, that no one even tries. Worse, if someone does, we look for divine credentials first.
So the real question isn’t “Where are the new Vyasas?” The question is, “When did we stop believing that humans alone could create greatness?”
Maybe what India needs isn’t another sage in the forest—but someone on a bus, or in a tea shop, or sitting at a broken laptop in a noisy apartment—writing furiously, brilliantly, humanly. With no mist, no mantras, and no divine backstory. Just raw thought, fearless voice, and the audacity to believe that gods aren’t the only ones who can tell stories worth remembering.