Hao Quang Vo

Aru Shah and the End of Time I love this middle-grade fantasy book by Roshani Chokshi. It's the first book of the Aru Shah series which is great with exciting plot, characters, and creatures from ancient Hindu mythology,  highly  recommended for fans of Rick Riordan . Twelve-year-old Aru Shah makes up stories to stretch the truth in order to fit in with her classmates. she'll take her autumn break at home, in the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture, waiting for her mom from her latest trip. One day, three schoolmates catch her in a lie. They don't believe her claim that the museum's Lamp of Bharata is cursed, and they dare Aru to prove it.  When she lights the lamp, she frees the awful Sleeper,  an ancient demon who would awaken the God of Destruction, and she freezes the world, her classmates and mother. She has to save them. Aru discovers she is a reincarnation of one of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, and must journey through th

The Four Great Kings Four Great Kings are devas in the Indian pantheon where they occupy the lowest of the devalokas (god realms). They feature in some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, representing a strand of Indian religous thought which was being adopted and adapted by Buddhists, probably in the first few centuries after the death of the Buddha. Each one presides over one of the four directions of space, and is associated with a particular type of non-human being. A very early set of four directional gods appears in the Yajur Veda with Agni (E), Yama (S), Savitṛ (W), and Varuna (N). The gods of the directions were shuffled around in Brāhmaṇa texts. See also my essay on an  early maṇḍalas , which discusses a maṇḍala in the Bṛhadāraṇuaka Upaniṣad. Scholars, however, place there origins of the four Lokapālas in the pre-Ariyan indigenous population of India. I favour a hybrid appraoch. Since some of the figures clearly do relate to Vedic gods in some ways (eg Vaiśravana and