Gods: Made in India, and Still in the Making

Over the years, many of my non-Indian friends have asked me about Indian gods. The conversation often follows a familiar pattern. Someone asks how many gods we have, and an Indian in the room says, with some satisfaction, “thousands.” We almost expect the other person to be surprised. Then come the usual questions: Do you worship all of them? Are they different gods or different forms of the same god? Why does this one have an elephant head? Why does that one have so many arms?

What has become more interesting to me over the years is not how many gods we have, but how much innovation seems to be happening around them. Every time I have one of these conversations, I remember another astonishing detail: a god worshipped intensely in one district and barely known in the next; a particular food that a god apparently likes; another god who accepts meat or alcohol; a new style of clothing or forehead mark that suddenly seems to be everywhere; enormous new statues; temples that have grown from local shrines into major destinations; and festivals that seem to get bigger, more elaborate, and more commercial every year.

What is equally astonishing is the economy that has grown around all of this. Temples, pilgrimages, hotels, buses, airlines, flowers, food, jewelry, clothing, construction, statues, real estate, television, YouTube, donations, tourism—the network surrounding religious practice in India is enormous.

I sometimes think about countries in an admittedly ridiculous way: America has software, China has hardware, and India has gods. Obviously, that is not an economic theory. America manufactures plenty of things, China writes plenty of software, and India has one of the world's largest technology industries. But there is something behind the joke that I find difficult to dismiss. Different societies become extraordinarily good at building ecosystems around particular things. India seems extraordinarily good at building ecosystems around gods—creating temples, rituals, festivals, pilgrimages, imagery, stories, products, and entire local economies around them. There is no reason that building an economy around religious experience is inherently more or less legitimate than building one around smartphones, entertainment, luxury goods, or software.

When I talk about the gods, I sometimes describe the landscape this way: we have local gods and global gods, vegetarian gods and non-vegetarian gods, old gods and new gods. There are gods known across India, gods known mostly within one state, and gods who can be enormously important in a handful of villages and almost completely unknown twenty miles away. Some gods are closely associated with particular castes or sub-castes; some belong particularly to a family, or household. Some are offered fruits and sweets, some meat, and some alcohol.

An Astonishing Amount of Innovation

I don't think I appreciated the scale of this until recently. Across India, people seem to be continuously creating new ways of seeing, dressing, feeding, celebrating, and even understanding gods. New temples appear. Existing temples become enormous. Local festivals become regional events. Regional events become national events. Statues become taller and more elaborate. New pilgrimage routes develop. New devotional songs, symbols, slogans, decorations, and rituals spread incredibly quickly. Sometimes an obscure local god seems to acquire an entirely new constituency within a generation.

Calling all of this “tradition” hides how dynamic it is. Of course, much of it draws on very old stories, practices, and symbols. But the particular combinations we see today do not necessarily have to be old. The god may be old while the way the statue looks is new. The pilgrimage may be old while the enormous annual spectacle surrounding it is new. The ritual may borrow ancient elements while its current form is quite recent. What interests me is not deciding which practices are authentic. I am simply fascinated by how rapidly new practices can emerge and then begin to feel old.

Local Gods, Global Gods

The idea of a “local god” is more complicated than it sounds. To simplify, the same god can exist in many local forms. Different towns, castes, and households may worship versions of the same local god with different food offerings, flowers, fasts, stories, and rituals. These are not necessarily conscious inventions; many are inherited practices that communities have continued to shape over generations.

My own name comes from a local god named Mallanna. I know at least ten local variants of this local god around where I grew up. My household is devoted to one; our neighbors may follow a Mallanna from another town, with different practices.

More global gods such as Ganesha or Shiva are somewhat different. Their stories, imagery, and practices have been more widely standardized through scriptures, temples, preaching, television, and now social media. Local gods leave much more room for innovation, and households to develop their own traditions.

Vegetarian Gods, Non-Vegetarian Gods

Food makes the differences even more obvious. Some gods receive strictly vegetarian offerings. Others are traditionally offered meat, sometimes with alcohol. Particular sweets become inseparable from particular temples. There are rules about what should be cooked, who should prepare it, when it should be eaten (e.g., what time of the day depends on the god), and what should not be eaten on particular days (days of the week, months of the year, etc).

In our household, and among neighboring families from the same caste, we have a few dozen non-vegetarian gods, whose rituals, festivals, offerings, and practices are spread throughout the year. The god after whom I am named, is vegetarian, and we are expected to avoid meat and alcohol on Sundays throughout the year, as well as for seven weeks from around mid-November to mid-January. We also worship a few dozen global gods (e.g., Shiva), most of whom are vegetarian.

Who Said Gods Don't Give Money?

The scale becomes much harder to ignore when money enters the picture. Large religious sites today support enormous economies: temples, hotels, transportation, restaurants, flowers, jewelry, clothing, statues, construction, real estate, tourism, media, security, donations, and digital services. A successful pilgrimage site can transform the economy of an entire town. Religious festivals create temporary economies of their own - on par with the scale of Taylor Swift's concerts.

That also makes me wonder whether the market influences which religious practices survive and which ones scale. A tiny village ritual has limited capacity to reproduce itself. A temple receiving millions of visitors can reproduce its imagery, food, rituals, and stories on an industrial scale. The most successful religious practices today may therefore spread not only because people believe in them, but because there is now an enormous physical and commercial infrastructure capable of carrying them.

Gods Are Still in the Making—and Faster Than Ever

I don't know how much of what I am seeing has to do with India's changing politics. Modi has been prime minister for more than a decade, during which temples, pilgrimages, religious symbols, and ceremonies have become much more visible in national life. Modi or the BJP obviously did not invent these gods or practices; many are much older. But I do wonder whether today's politics is helping some of them grow faster, travel beyond their regions, and become part of a more common religious culture across India.

Politics is probably only one part of it. Television, social media, better roads, rising incomes, migration, and easier travel allow a local god or festival to reach millions of people remarkably quickly. A politician visits a temple, television covers it, videos circulate online, more people visit, businesses appear around it, and the cycle continues. Gods have probably always evolved; what may be different today is the speed and scale at which this happens.

I also wonder about another political change. The region I come from was under different Muslim rulers for more than 400 years before becoming part of India in 1950. Since Independence and the end of Muslim princely rule, religious life may simply have taken a different turn. The political order changed, communities gained different kinds of freedom and power, and local religious practices may have found new ways to grow and become more visible. I sometimes wonder whether the rapid growth and reinvention of gods that I see today is partly connected to that change—or whether it would have happened anyway.

I Am Not Even Sure What “Hindu” Religion Means Here

This is also why I hesitate to describe all of this simply as innovation in “Hinduism.” I am not making a philosophical claim that Hinduism does or does not exist. I simply don't remember growing up with that abstraction playing much of a role in everyday religious life. My parents knew the gods they worshipped, the festivals they celebrated, the temples they visited, and the practices they inherited from their parents. I don't remember anyone worrying very much about how all of those things fit into one internally consistent religion.

I do sometimes wonder whether something else is happening alongside all this local innovation: a gradual standardization. Local gods still exist, local practices still differ enormously, and the contradictions are still everywhere. But television, migration, national politics, large temple organizations, markets, and social media allow certain images and practices to travel across the country at a scale that probably was not possible before. We may therefore be seeing two processes at once: an astonishing amount of religious invention and, simultaneously, an astonishing amount of religious consolidation.

And perhaps the strangest part is how quickly the innovation disappears from memory. Someone introduces something new, enough people repeat it, their children grow up seeing it, and eventually nobody remembers that it was ever an innovation at all.

Publishing in Computing Research

Over the past decade, I have had the privilege, and sometimes the misfortune, of publishing across several different computing communities. My work is pretty interdisciplinary, spanning networking, wireless, multimedia systems, and AR/VR, which means I submit papers to conferences such as SIGCOMM, MobiCom, INFOCOM, NSDI, IMC, ACM Multimedia, MMSys, SIGGRAPH, IEEE VR, and ISMAR. Although these conferences all belong under the umbrella of computer science, they often feel like entirely different academic worlds. They ask different questions, value different things, and sometimes seem to practice entirely different definitions of research.

The first thing that struck me was the enormous difference in review culture. Computer networking conferences (e.g., SIGCOMM or MobiCom) are relatively small communities with a narrow focus. Their papers tend to emphasize the big picture, such as why the problem matters, whether it is relevant to today's industry, and whether the ideas can realistically influence systems in the very near future. A paper can sometimes succeed or fail based on how compellingly the problem is articulated, even more than the technical details themselves.

Multimedia and AR/VR conferences operate very differently. Papers are expected to get to the technical contribution quickly, often assuming that reviewers already possess the necessary domain expertise. The reviews tend to focus on the ideas, algorithms, experiments, and technical soundness rather than spending pages debating whether the problem itself is important.

One thing that has increasingly frustrated me in networking conferences is how attached communities become to familiar applications and trends. This is specific to one of my areas which is video streaming and application layer networking. There are researchers who have spent decades working on video streaming problems, and understandably so. The area has produced excellent research and tremendous real-world impact creating an entire industry ecosystem of online video. But when entirely new forms of media emerge, such as volumetric video, point clouds, or dynamic 3D scenes, there is often resistance to treating them as first-class networking problems. They forget that we are enjoying the fruits of radical video streaming innovation decades ago.

This has always puzzled me. At the application layer, data is still data. The networking questions remain largely the same e.g., how should the network transport it, allocate resources to it, or adapt itself to new demands? Yet networking researchers sometimes become attached not to the fundamental problem, but to the particular applications they have grown comfortable with.

I have seen a similar shift in attitudes toward core networking research itself. Older generations of networking papers often introduced bold and radical ideas supported by analysis or simulations. Today, simulation-only papers are frequently met with a simple question -- "Where is the real testbed?" Testbeds are valuable, but they are not always necessary for fundamental research. Sometimes the contribution is the idea itself, or the identification of a new design space that others can later build upon.

This push toward immediate validation can unintentionally bias communities toward incremental work. If every paper must demonstrate a deployable prototype, then naturally the incentives favor solving small, practical problems over exploring risky new directions. The irony is that many of the systems we now consider foundational began as speculative ideas long before the technology existed to implement them. A field that only rewards what can be built today may slowly lose its ability to imagine what should exist tomorrow.

The biggest difference I have observed, however, is review quality. Networking reviewers often review up to twenty papers for each conference. Under those conditions, even excellent reviewers simply do not have the time to deeply understand every paper, particularly interdisciplinary ones. In multimedia and AR/VR conferences, reviewers usually handle far fewer submissions, which often allows for much more thoughtful and technically detailed reviews.

I have had papers rejected in both communities. But after reading reviews from multimedia and AR/VR conferences, I am usually left thinking, "I disagree with the decision, but the reviewers understood the paper." I cannot always say the same after networking conferences reviews. A rejection based on disagreement is healthy for science; a rejection based on a very high level review without technical details is much harder to accept.

Another aspect of networking research community that I find fascinating is its tendency to respond to dissatisfaction by creating new conferences. Networking researchers became unhappy with aspects of INFOCOM and created CoNEXT. More recently, frustrations with SIGCOMM have contributed to the creation of Nines conference. New conferences are not inherently bad, and experimentation with publishing models is important. My concern is that these decisions are often driven more by frustration with the status quo than by a long-term vision for how the community should evolve. New conferences frequently emerge around existing social networks of advisors, students, collaborators, and colleagues, which can unintentionally make outsiders feel that they are joining an already established club rather than helping build an open scientific community. From the perspective of a young researcher, the constant fragmentation can feel chaotic. Where should a graduate student publish? Which community should they invest their time in? Which venue will still matter ten years from now? Senior researchers often have the reputation and network to comfortably move between conferences, but younger researchers are still searching for a home community.

Perhaps the most troubling realization for me has been that many computing communities do not particularly respect each other's research traditions. This becomes particularly problematic during funding reviews. Networking research today is a collection of loosely connected communities like SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, CoNEXT, MobiCom, GlobeCom, ICNP, etc, each with its own culture, expectations, and definition of novelty. Researchers from one venue do not always appreciate the style of work produced by another, even when they are fundamentally studying the same problems. A paper that feels perfectly natural to a SIGCOMM audience may seem uninteresting to an INFOCOM reviewer, and vice versa. The same disconnect often appears in funding panels, where proposals end up being judged not on the merits of the ideas themselves, but on whether they conform to the norms of whichever subcommunity happens to be reviewing them. For a field that prides itself on systems thinking, we have built surprisingly fragmented research communities that often struggle to understand each other.

After nearly a decade of publishing across these venues, I have come to a simple conclusion that computer science is still a remarkably young discipline. Other sciences settled long ago on journals, editors, revisions, and continuity. We chose conferences because we wanted quick feedback and faster dissemination. Ironically, many of our conferences are now reinventing the very mechanisms that journals have used for decades. We have introduced rebuttals, revisions, reviewer continuity, resubmissions, and shepherding. We simply avoid calling them major revisions, editors, and journal processes. In many ways, our communities are all trying to solve the same problems while pretending to be inventing something entirely new. Perhaps that is simply the growing pain of a young field.

Academia vs. Industry

One question students often struggle with: should I go into academia or industry?

I’ve spent time in both, and the more I think about it, the less I believe this is a binary choice. The two paths are built on fundamentally different incentives.

Academia is driven by curiosity, asking why things work, pushing boundaries, and building knowledge that may take years to mature. Industry is driven by execution, taking ideas, shaping them into systems, and delivering impact at scale.

They optimize for different things: depth vs. speed, exploration vs. iteration, freedom vs. constraints shaped by real-world needs. And importantly, computing careers today are fluid, people move between these worlds more than ever.

I put together a short slide deck for a student talk that walks through these differences in a bit more detail.

👉 Open slides in a new tab

It's a War: None of Your Damn Business

I am an academic. My job is to understand and teach new knowledge. And lately I find it increasingly hard to sit down and do any of that without the weight of what's happening in the world pressing down on my chest. One of the problems that's causing this is war. Witnessing wars from aggressors like Russia, Israel, and the US over weak foreign states like Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, Venezuela. Civil wars in countries like Myanmar, Sudan, and many African countries. Killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. All of this in the 21st century. And I'm supposed to be studying computers and publishing papers.

Since most of us are unfamiliar with this subject and it feels like it's beyond our control, what do we do? What do I do? What do you do?

Millions of ordinary citizens including academics such as myself and students, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and software developers are walking around with this same quiet unease.

Well, we must first accept that there will always be an aggressor with no morals. There will always be the strong and the weak, the advanced and the desperate. History has proven, with exhausting repetition, that at some point the powerful move against the vulnerable. Even in the 21st century. So whether we like it or not, we are never really outside of it. We are always on either the offense or defense side.

Many of us misinterpret war and defense. Fight vs. fighting back. War, the organized, financed, politically sanctioned action, where men in suits make decisions in AC rooms, and young people with nothing to lose die in the desert for it. Conflating war and defense is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and we all fall for it every time.

It's not just the violence. It's the concentration of power that makes the violence so easy to choose. A small number of people who never face real accountability make decisions that kill thousands, displace millions, and reshape the world. The rest of us find out on our phones. We are not consulted. We are, at best, informed after the fact.

Since most of us do not know how to react to these circumstances, the first thing we can do is refuse ignorance as a coping mechanism. This is, with no hesitation, meant for my academic community in particular. Ironically, we are one of the most embarrassingly ignorant communities on this subject. I understand the impulse. The news is genuinely unbearable, and there's a real argument for protecting mental health. But there is a difference between managing media consumption and simply looking away. Consuming high-quality information is helpful most of the time. Informed people are harder to manipulate, and right now the entire political economy of war runs on public ignorance and manufactured consent.

The second thing is to stop treating politics as someone else's profession. We have somehow arrived at a world where a software engineer will spend years mastering how to write code but won't spend two hours understanding how their government makes foreign policy decisions. A doctor will read fifty papers on a new treatment but couldn't name their own representative. The unseriousness of our generation, quite frankly, is embarrassing to witness. We have outsourced our civic lives entirely, and the people who filled that vacuum are not filling it well. I'm not saying everyone needs to run for office, though frankly, we need more scientists, engineers, and doctors in politics, desperately, but disengagement is simply stupidity. It is a gift to the people already in the room.

The third thing, and I say this as someone who works in technology, is to be deeply skeptical of the idea that our technological tools will save us. We are pouring extraordinary resources into technology, into the next platform, the next optimization. And I believe in that work. But technology does not have values. It reflects ours. And right now we are applying our most sophisticated tools to serving ads and maximizing engagement while using almost none of that capacity to strengthen democratic institutions, reduce corruption, or make power more accountable.

The least we can do is stay awake. And be more active. Be deliberate. Because the alternative is sleepwalking through a life scripted by others.

A Statement on Collective Human Responsibility

What is unfolding in Minneapolis is heartbreaking.

America has long presented itself as an advanced civilization and the leader of a free world. Today, it finds itself at a moral crossroads.

When a powerful force such as a regime, government, institution, or any authority with overwhelming power begins to treat everyday people as disposable, it leaves a fracture in the collective conscience. When ordinary neighbors, caregivers, mothers, fathers, and healers are met not with protection but with violence, it shakes something deep within all of us.

Two innocent people were killed in broad daylight by a powerful force acting under the authority of the American government. Renee Good. Alex Pretti. Two human beings with lives, families, and futures that ended abruptly and violently.

When innocent lives are taken, the only honest response is to mourn. To pause. To feel the weight of what has been lost. Anything less diminishes us. Under no circumstance should we allow governments, leaders, institutions, or policies to divide us from that truth. We cannot move forward by excusing violence. We cannot call ourselves civilized while defending cruelty.

I write this to my academic community because we carry a responsibility that extends beyond our work. We shape minds. We model values. We help define progress. And progress cannot mean becoming numb to violence or learning to rationalize cruelty. We cannot replace grief with justification, nor sorrow with silence.

We should not be silent. Silence does not mean neutrality. It means acceptance.

Together, we can choose a different path. We can acknowledge the pain, sorrow, and fear being felt right now. We can lead peacefully by encouraging empathy, insisting on accountability, and working to make our communities safer. We can treat one another with dignity and respect, remembering that before anything else, we are human.

This is not politics. It is not about parties, policies, or ideology. It is simply human decency.

Behind every loss is a life that mattered. If we cannot mourn innocent lives together, then we have already lost something far more precious than safety; we have lost our humanity.