India, March 10 -- We have just celebrated Mahashivratri this week. For someone not keen about following a specific belief system, the occasion, however, raises a question. Vedanta conceptualises God as formless and attribute-less. Yet we offer prayers to a form-god such as Shiva. Are they not contraindicative? And why is Shiva one of the most sought after?

There is no conflict. True, Vedanta hypothesises existence of a formless and attribute-less eternal reality, which spontaneously manifested into a world of names and forms with all its enormity and diversity. It, however, could not have been one stroke event. The process excited by the primal source progressively evolved - step by step - into a very intricate but an orderly system. Th...