Who Brahma is
Brahma is the creator, the first of the three great gods, the Trimurti, of whom Vishnu preserves and Shiva destroys. He sits on a lotus that grows from Vishnu's navel, with four faces looking out to the four directions, and out of his four mouths came the four Vedas. He makes the world at the start of each cosmic day and it is unmade when his day ends, after more than four billion years.
He is also the god who writes fate. When a child is born, people say, Brahma writes its life on its forehead, and what he has written comes to pass.
Hiranyagarbhah samavartatagre: in the beginning arose the golden embryo. The Rigveda's hymn to the creator, who became Brahma.
And yet he is the least worshipped of the great gods. His temples can be counted on the fingers. The stories give reasons. He told a lie at the pillar of fire, claiming he had found its top, and Shiva cursed him to have no worship. He grew so proud of his fifth head that Bhairava pinched it off. At Pushkar, his wife Savitri cursed him for marrying another while he waited for her. In the Puranas he is usually the god who gives boons, to demons as well as to sages, and then the other gods must deal with the result.
The few places that do worship him make up for it. Pushkar, by its lake, is his great pilgrimage. At Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu he sits in meditation, and people bring him their horoscopes to rewrite. And far from India, in Bangkok, the four-faced Phra Phrom of the Erawan Shrine is one of the most visited images in all of Asia.
