Our Name

Our name is a nod to an ancient Indic tale: the story of the Vedic deity Ganesha scribing the longest known epic poem in the world, the Mahabharata.

As the story goes, a great sage named Vyasa had asked Ganesha to scribe the Mahabharata while he composed and dictated it. Ganesha agreed on one condition: that Vyasa would never pause the dictation. Vyasa agreed with a counter-condition of his own: that Ganesha must fully understand and digest everything Vyasa said before writing it down.

It was a deal that struck a beautiful balance between absorption and articulation, between cognition and expression.

Whenever Vyasa needed to buy some time, he would compose something particularly complex for Ganesha, weaving in astronomical detail and puzzles, so that he would pause to digest it before writing. Once, as Ganesha was writing, his quill broke. Not wanting to stop, he broke off one of his tusks to continue to write and complete the epic.

The Mahabharata sets out to capture the complete range of human experience and does so in over 100,000 poetic couplets and some long prose passages, well-known for its thorough exploration of all the moral grays human life entails.

At Tusk & Quill our ambition is similar to Vyasa’s; we are inspired by the vastness of the vision, wanting to develop an understanding of the world we live in that is appropriately deep and complex, seeking to earnestly understand before asserting what we know.

Our hope is that, through this process, we may arrive, along with our readers, at a more durable and robust understanding of the world than when we started, just like the tusk in the story proved a more durable instrument than the quill Ganesha began with.