Myths are not just tales about gods and goddesses. They portray a culture, its abiding values, mores and philosophy and act as a means of their transmission across generations. Not through life-like reproductions of the portrayed subjects, however. To use the language of art, the one school that myths do not belong to is realism. Myths use techniques of surrealism, impressionism and cubism, so to speak, to bring out the many dimensions of the verities of a culture that a realistic depiction would fail to reveal.

Myths send your imagination soaring. They engage your nine emotions, move from sense to sensibility, seep into your moral being and set up scarcely noticed signposts in your mental universe. Above all, they entertain.

Indian mythology is one of the richest in the world. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain myths hail from the Indian subcontinent. The amazing variety of the stories and their subjects is matched only by the amazing ability of unknown codifiers of myths to link up the myriad tales into a unified whole. Indian myths are originally presented in the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale format. The Mahabharata, everyone knows, contains many tales. The Mahabharata itself is a recounting of the lineage of a king performing a rare sacrifice (sarpa yagya) to kill all the world's snakes to avenge his father's death by snakebite. It is not possible to reproduce the ocean of Indian mythology in the magnificence of its entirety. We can, however, catch a wavelet or marvel at the colours of its shimmering spray. Happy surfing.