Editor’s note Welcome to the inaugural edition of DHARMA TODAY
Dear Readers, “Clash of Civilizations” is a phrase familiar to most of us through history books, movies and more recently, video games. For a long time, I believed that it was limited to the ancient past. This is mainly because the stage, wardrobe, style of communication, logistics and weaponry all represented a bygone era. With grand empires and their powerful emperors, commanders and their galloping horses, soldiers and their swords, the ‘Monarch’ being the central figure, today ‘Clash of Civilizations’, at best represents a relic - piece of historical art. Just imagine the same in today’s context - what would the theatrical representation of it be? Armies with advanced battle tanks, ships, planes, camouflage uniforms, radio and satellite communications, espionage and so on! There would be one major difference though, the Monarch replaced by ‘democratically elected’ representatives. With the rise of the digital age and the ‘world-wide-web’, the concept of conquest has become further complicated. Ordinary folk are connected and empowered as never before. Today, nobody
wants to be known as a powerful or ruthless leader, whether it be in military, business or the sciences. Increasingly all the major players in society’s governance want to be seen as ‘friends and well-wishers of the world’ adorned with the virtues of compassion, charity and honesty. To become something (pious, honest, truthful) you have to actually ‘be’ it internally. But today, to be ‘seen to be’ is sufficient, as no one is bothered about the depth and authenticity of it. So you can market anything by being ‘seen to be’ it. With the erosion of ethics and morality, marketing and packaging have become more important than content. Sentiment of being ‘virtuous’ is being increasingly marketed without the essential quality within. All these together have compulsively driven the concept of conquest from the gross to the subtle. Modern mechanisms of conquests have incorporated monopolizing techniques in business, vulgarity in art, manufacturing perceptions in journalism, misrepresentation in linguistics and so on. The ‘worldwide-web’ has connected everyone in these battles. Dharma is the original virtue of existence and the original ‘world-wide-web’ encompassing every single facet of creation. It now waits to re-establish its ‘natural brilliance’ by replacing the ‘seen to be’ entities with those who truly represent dharmic values. Virtues are not to be manufactured and marketed by external means. It is a function that is internally present within the fundamental
state of everything in creation. It encourages an ‘internal conquest for an external welfare’. Yet although the eternal and truthful are often met with challenges and obstacles, in the final analysis these very challenges and obstacles will create opportunities for Dharma to rise higher and shine brighter than ever before! Dharma is not a monopoly of any class neither does it monopolize any aspect of life. It invites debate and discussion known as samvaad. Krishna being the absolute truth Himself, had a samvaad with Arjun on the Battlefield of Kurukshetra. He did not impose His intellectual logic on Arjun. Traditionally, differences of opinion were resolved with samvaad. There is, however, a major difference between traditional debates and modern ones. In the former, both parties were essentially ‘seeking the truth’ and concurred on some fundamental definitions of consciousness and character. For instance, Krishna and Arjun both agreed on ‘welfare of humanity’ as a common goal. The debate simply was on how to achieve it. However, in modern times, thought leaders do not necessarily have a moral standing on any issue at hand. In the absence of a virtuous character, lack of loyalty to the subject or sense of purpose - they stand to defeat the very cause they represent. In the competitive mind-space, a winner is who can fire up people rightly or wrongly on ideologies. Today, espionage is no longer limited to politics and governance – it is about capturing this mindspace. We can easily identify and
have accepted corporate espionage as a factual fragment of the social fabric. However, espionage in history and literature, traditions and cultures, ethics and morality, is not that evident to the casual eye and busy fickle mind. It exists, nonetheless. Have we thought about its theatrical representation? Who would be the actors of such a theatre? You only attempt to conquer something that is worthwhile. India, earlier known as Bharatvarsh, with her vast wealth, rich culture of arts, impeccable traditions and advanced sciences, has been a focal point for conquerors for thousands of years. And beware, this is not a thing of the past but holds true even today. You would think- but that’s incredible! Why or what would anyone try to conquer in today’s advanced, aware and reactive world? This lack of awareness and inability to accurately read the opponents’ motives coupled with the apathy towards the preservation and protection of this grand tradition is weakening the very fabric of India, the world’s oldest dharmic civilization. It is not possible to free-ride on the benefits of this great culture without taking responsibility for its nourishment and preservation. Remaining neutral in this regard is NOT an option. We welcome our readers to be part of this journey. Awareness, Empowerment and Relevance is Dharma Today.
By Jay Pandya
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www.dharmatoday.com
Volume 1 Issue 1
Publisher
Contents
Vol 1 Issue 1 | APRIL 2016
FACE TO FACE
ECONOMICS
C. J. Pandya
Editorial Board C. J. Pandya – Editor in Chief Shrirang Kulkarni Dr. Ganesh Ramakrishnan Dr. Ranjan Ghosh Taranand Naik
Online Division Palak Shah, Sandeep Shetty Ganesh M., Pradeep M. Pillalamarri,
Production
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The BATTLE for ‘SANSKRIT’i
12 CULTURE
By Rajiv Malhotra
By S Gurumurthy
Shirish Dongre, Amit Pusalkar
Designer & Layout
Economics of Bahuka & Greenspan
IN FOCUS
ETHICS FROM EPICS
Arun P. Shinde, Nandan Moghe, Dinesh S. Gawade
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Creative Consultant
When Germany is Christian, is India Hindu?
Milind Bhavasar
Proof Reading Santosh Ahire
Dharma Today Overseas Associates USA Aditya Satsangi
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Neutrality - A Vice or Virtue?
By Maria Wirth
HISTORY
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A Dose of Pragmatism to Counter Extremism? Dr. Ranjan Ghosh
By T Naik
Palak Shah SINGAPORE Yogesh Singh UAE Darshan Khatri Correspondence Office : 3rd Floor, Harmony Tower, N.S. Road, Thane-400 602. Maharashtra E-mail: info@dharmatoday.com All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Editor. Printed, Published & Owned by Mr. C. J. Pandya and Printed at Anitha Art Printers, Mumbai-400055 and published at Building no. 83/A, Flat no. 32, Brindaban Society, Thane West, Thane-400601. Editor: C. J. PANDYA Important: Articles, interviews published in DHARMA TODAY are the personal views and expressions of its authors. DHARMA TODAY does not necessarily agree to it. DHARMA TODAY can not be held responsible for such articles / interviews. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary enquiries before sending any money or entering into any agreements with advertisers / authors or otherwise acting on the same in any matter whatsoever.
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Why is the Ramayana Attractive? By Venugopal Acharya
The Need to Rewrite Indian History By David Frawley
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ADVERTORIAL
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Freedom of Expression & Its Relevance to Dharma By Kushal Mehra
VEDIC HERITAGE
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Bharat Bhasha Sanganan
Building the Sri Rama Temple in Ayodhya “The Legal Case”
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By Vishal Tandon
By Subramanian Swamy
By Stephen Knapp
Vedic Influence in Japan & Korea
FACE TO FACE
The BATTLE for SANSKRITi An Interview with Rajiv Malhotra
In an candid chat with Palak Shah, Rajiv Malhotra gives insights in and around his latest book The Battle for Sanskrit.
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successful entrepreneur at the peak of his career, while owning 20 companies in several countries, taking an early retirement at age 44 to pursue philanthropy, research and public service is something unheard of. Meet an internationally acclaimed author, Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian– American researcher, writer, speaker and public intellectual on current affairs as they relate to civilizations, cross-cultural encounters, religion and science. He established Infinity Foundation for this purpose in 1994 and has given more than 400 grants for research, education and community work at Harvard University, Rutgers University, University of Hawaii, Columbia University, University of California, University of Pennsylvania, etc.
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FACE TO FACE Q. After your deeply researched and stunning book, Breaking India and the philosophical masterpieces Being Different and Indra’s Net, you have now written, The Battle for Sanskrit. Why this book and why now? My themes are broad - defending: India, Bhartiya Sanskriti, Dharma and Vedic culture, among others. The forces opposing these important aspects, each having a certain focus, are unified under the broad umbrella of wanting to destroy Dharma. Somebody is attacking Gurus and Deities, someone else philosophy, others unified Hinduism and yet others Sanskrit. Each of my books tackles one of those big forces individually and refutes their charges and philosophies. Something of great import happened at the Columbia University, which required me to write this book. An Indologist named Professor Sheldon Pollock was on the verge of signing an agreement with the Sringeri Mutt, which is one of the major traditional centers of learning started by Adi Shankara some thirteen centuries ago. Columbia University was to create a Chair for Adi Shankara Studies of Religion and Philosophy and Sheldon Pollock was to head the Committee to select the Chair and determine the content. Now, Sheldon Pollock is basically a strong leftist, who approaches Hinduism from a Marxist, secularist and atheistic point of view. People representing the traditional Indian side and Sringeri Mutt constituted the Advisory Committee that had no adhikara – authority.
The Advisory Committee had to direct their requests to the Academic Committee, which had veto power. I know of many people being paid millions of dollars upfront, to be part of the Advisory Committee. The glamour of getting their pictures taken with the Chancellor, Dean or President of the University; getting their name and pictures in the newspaper with local Senators; the fame and prestige of being an Advisory Committee Member enamors people. They make announcements and are in a hurry to get this done because they are getting money. Everybody will be tweeting about this and social media will praise them. However, being totally uneducated about the intellectual Kurukshetra they don’t know what the issues are and the red flags to look out for. What happens is that once they’ve got the money and as time goes by, they decide who the professor will be and invariably it would be a student of Sheldon Pollock or Wendy Doniger or one of those kind of people. They’re grooming their own army of such people. The irony is that they are using Indian money and Sringeri Mutt to lend their actions legitimacy. They will also sing songs in praise of Adi Shankara, honor the Sankaracharya of today, tell you great things about the Math, garland any visiting Hindu dignitary, put him on stage and make him look very important. But all this is Public Relations strategies-niceties to make the Hindu side feel honored and proud! But ultimately, what matters is the substance
of the scholarship which they are promoting in the text books and teaching in class. All this is too detailed for most Indians to understand. So nobody bothers to try to understand those details until somebody like me points it out. But by then it’s too late. The dye is cast. I have been through all of this for 25 years in many places. There was a sense of urgency to publish this book because I wanted the devotees of Sringeri Mutt and the followers of Adi Shankara to look at both sides before they decide. I’m not demonizing the other side. All I’m saying is that their scholarship runs counter to the philosophy of Adi Shankara. That is what I am proving in this book. Their scholarship runs counter to the Bhakti and Devi traditions, the Vedas and the traditional understanding of Ramayana and Mahabharat. I have cited many examples to support this. It very clearly says that Vedic hymns, chants and mantras are Brahmin and a conspiracy to oppress people, which is not true. There is a great error in transferring adhikara and control to people who do not have shraddha. Even though I am not formally initiated or a devotee of Sringeri Math I am more broad based with allegiance to several denominations and lineages. Unfortunately, the people who were enthusiastically supporting and raising funds for this chair and passionately arguing against me are hopelessly ignorant about Adi Shankara’s philosophy and hence don’t understand that these academics are saying the exact opposite.
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FACE TO FACE My concern is that this being done with so much smoothness and sophistication at very high levels of our people, that even well-intended people cannot see through it. People are fooled by these nice, generous Western scholars who come to India, speak Sanskrit and do puja. So somebody has to go beneath the surface of that facade and tell people what it really is. That is why I decided to write this book. Q. Today for many reasons Sanskrit has at best a marginal place in the education of majority of Indians. How is Sanskrit relevant to Indians generally and to the practice of Hinduism today? Why write a book on the issue of Sanskrit? My book is called The Battle for Sanskrit but actually it is a battle for ‘sanskriti’ - civilization/ culture, because Sanskrit texts are being attacked. The book exposes how they are misinterpreting Vedic texts. The initial chapters concentrate on the reasons Sanskrit is important to our culture. Sanskrit vibrations and sounds are not manmade, but are part of the cosmic rhythm. They are part of the fabric of creation and existence. Mantras take you from the intellectual level to the emotional, channeling deeper and deeper psychological states. You keep chanting a mantra it becomes part of your unconscious, without you even realizing it! That is your bridge to a deeper existence/ level of Divinity. Sanskrit has been the medium of intellectual
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discourse and philosophy. One important uniqueness of Sanskrit is that you cannot get the same effect if you replace the Sanskrit mantra with something in English that means the same. English terminologies do not have the philosophical sophistication that Sanskrit does. Sanskrit is non-translatable as it is built on non-translatable root sounds. So some of the terms we use in Sanskrit do not have an equivalent in any other language. If you translate atman as soul, it doesn’t mean the same thing in the Christian/ Biblical sense because souls exist in humans, not animals and plants and don’t reincarnate. In the Medieval era the church concluded that Africans don’t have a soul and perpetuated all kinds of stupid stuff. Sanskrit is unique because it is the DNA of all Indian languages. It is the template and substratum upon which the Indian languages have evolved. Because of the sophisticated grammar there is rigor in the way knowledge is presented, transmitted and communicated. It’s an important source of integration because the architecture of Sanskrit permeates the architecture of other languages, the physical design of temples and buildings and also dance and music. Knowledge of Sanskrit is essential to perfectly understand the Vedas and perform yajnas. The Mahabharata and Ramayana explain Vedic ideas in a simplified manner for the general public of Kali Yuga. It’s been presented in different
levels of complexity for different yugas. Hence, the same knowledge moving through different epochs, kinds and levels of society is presented differently. So I would say that Sanskrit and Vedic unity is the substratum from which all of this other stuff emerged. If people want to go beyond their particular lineage into a deeper spiritual understanding, then they need deep knowledge of Sanskrit and the Vedas. Q. You just described how important Sanskrit and sanskriti are to our tradition and India, across many dimensions. What are the dangers India faces if Sanskrit and sanskriti are lost and forgotten and how far have we already fallen in this direction? A good question! Take for example of Translations of Sanskrit works. Robert Goldman and Sheldon Pollock, among others, know Sanskrit well, but they do not have Shraddha. When they study Sanskrit literature, they are not looking for sanctity but for oppression in order to create political divisiveness. They have secured funding worth millions of dollars from Indians, to translate knowledge in Sanskrit into English. Most of the chosen translators are either Westerners or Indians trained by Westerners. They are not people trained in tradition. Their goal is to carpet bomb Indian literature in English and sell such books cheaply. Our next generation will know Indian culture only through these “Made in USA, English libraries”. That is
FACE TO FACE
Q. One of your phrases piqued my interest - this idea of carpet bombing Sanskrit translations across India. Which particular narratives do you think general public read and out of those which ones worries you the most? I think that Ramayana has been abused a lot in recent times. Ramayana has been depicted as an oppressive narrative where it is masculinity ill-
treating Sita. Such adverse conclusions are being drawn by these modern scholars. Sheldon Pollock has said that traditionalists project Ram as a divine king; Ravana as raksasha – demon, meant to depict Muslims. Therefore, rather than viewing Ramayana as a sacred text which you can learn from, it is positioned as target practice of secularists who want to bring it down. That’s my concern. In the translation of a “critical edition” of Mahabharata by the University of Chicago they translated Shudra as slave and Kshatriya as war lord or feudal king, imposing European medieval history categories that are non-existent in Indian history. Another exaggerated and serious narrative they manufactured is the big divide between Buddhist and Vedic systems. They say that Vedic tradition was corrupted by the Brahmins, who were exploiting people and reserving exclusive rights to sacred texts. Then Buddha came and rescued Indians from their own bad culture and tradition. So (according to them) Buddhism is a sort of reformation of Hinduism, as Vedic tradition is full of problems which Buddhist traditions are trying to solve! They will shower praise on the literature, conduct sessions with show of bhakti and then go ahead and translate/ interpret things the way they seem fit. This is disturbing. This creates a lot of divisiveness and is fodder for modern politics. According to them, Buddha an outsider to Vedic tradition intervened and now it is for Westerners to continue /complete that process. So, in my concluding chapter I have listed 18 major topics that need to be popularized, debated and resolved.
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Letting non-practitioners (people who were never invested in or have loyalty to tradition) control the translation, interpretation and dissemination of sacred texts is very dangerous. Adhikara has been shifted from people who were raised within the tradition to non-practitioners, who have personal agendas.
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a tragedy because it makes English, currently the language for elite discussion, conversation, business and government, the more important language. But English is not the language for transacting your bhakti, doing a yajna or puja. Can you imagine in the future, people will chant English hymns to Ram or Krishna! Here is my key message: Letting nonpractitioners (people who were never invested in or have loyalty to tradition) control the translation, interpretation and dissemination of sacred texts is very dangerous. Adhikara has been shifted from people who were raised within the tradition to non-practitioners, who have personal agendas. Rapid translation projects are doing a big disservice because they are not being done by right kind of people or with the right attitude. The right way of translating would be to educate readers about Sanskrit non-translatables, with explanations of how it is different from the English equivalent in a way that preserves traditional sacredness and retains the sraddha for the text. But that is not how things are being done. So I feel that Sanskrit is losing out in the deeper institutional mechanism in India.
Q. Now shifting gears ... let’s assume the revival of Sanskrit and protection of India’s cultural and spiritual traditions are solely up to the general public. What are the key steps to revive Sanskrit as a living, embodied language at the grass roots level? Well qualified home teams and institutions must be developed. Ideas will live and spread only through human containers and transmitters. Let’s take a look at Indians today: Ultra-orthodox, ultra-traditional Hindu gurus who are ill-equipped to understand what the opposition is doing as they have not done the required purva-paksha building a deep familiarity with the opponent’s point of view before criticizing it. Their adhikara
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FACE TO FACE has been taken away using language that is alien and confounding to traditionalists. Orthodox and traditional Hindus, who superficially know what is being written. However, they have been bought off (with trips to the US, royal treatment, positions in committees and organizations and large doses of limelight on the world stage) to support Westerners. What they don’t realize is that their credibility has been usurped, they’ve been reduced to being token mascots; and really thorough and deep interpretation of scriptures is no longer their prerogative. There is a huge segment of people who seriously and regularly practice spirituality, but have absolved themselves of their responsibility to tradition. Either they are too busy, don’t care or find this too controversial. But you know their heart is at right place, because privately they will tell you, ‘Yes you are doing a good job,’ and yet refuse to take onus and do something about it. Ultra-modern and self-alienated Indians active in social media and talk shows; glittery stars in literary festivals, hardly ever constructively contribute to tradition. Politicians are mostly interested in political power will pander to any segment who will help them achieve their goals and retain them! So having shown how some constituents of Indian society cannot be relied upon to take on this onerous task, I have decided to align the various Hindu institutions and denominations, intellectuals and equivalent people in other denominations; empower them with knowledge and then disseminate this information. Modern Hindus can assimilate this change. Q. Wow, amazing! You have addressed this particular question across a number of your responses. If you would summarize the key mistakes we are repeatedly making in sabotaging the revival? We are not doing purva-paksa and the others are. We are trusting blindly. We fund Chairs, activities and projects not under our control and simply empower opponents. We should not call them enemies but opponents - more dignified – because they are entitled to their ideology even if it is not consistent with ours or something we would promote. Therefore, I would say that one of the most serious mistakes is that we are empowering the wrong people.
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Second issue-too much into the selfish introversion. ‘I am doing my own job and I don’t have time for this. Somebody else may look after it.’ We have a large number of people calling themselves Hindu leaders to get something out of it, become somebody important quickly and differentiate themselves. They are not doing the seva needed, so I think there is this lack of sacrifice and tapasya. The pettiness of rivalry and craving for political position are also issues. Q. There will be those who would point a finger and say you are not a Sanskrit scholar by training - on what basis did you choose to write The Battle for Sanskrit? Of course, that’s a very valid question! The crux here is not about knowing Sanskrit, but knowing to critique, build an argument, a thesis, how you debate. It is imperative to understand Western thought, history, psychology and politics and also to recognize the Western ways of exploitation and colonization. What my critics don’t understand is that I have met with these “trained Sanskrit scholars”. Not one of them read Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Jack Frawley, Western Indology or done the purva-paksha, which I am doing! So I am doing actually a job which I should not be doing. When somebody asks me this question I say, ‘Ok, thank you so much. Now you take over this job. I want you to write a 500-page book - a critique of one or two very prominent schools of Western Indology in 12 months. Do a purva-paksha and read about 4000 pages of their work. Promise me that this is all you will do day and night, in the next year. If 5 people can promise me that, I promise I will retire tomorrow.” There were no takers, so I started it myself. They simply don’t understand it. That, by the way, is my favorite question! Q. There were attempts to sabotage the writing of The Battle for Sanskrit even before you began writing. Who attempted to do this? What was the ultimate result of their efforts? The Crown Prince of Thailand hosts the World Sanskrit Congress Bangkok every 10 years. I was the keynote speaker with Murli Manohar Joshi in 2005. I was invited again in 2015, when I informed the Crown Prince of my upcoming book and shared an outline with him. The Indians and Buddhists of Thailand loved it. The Crown Prince told the organizer that mine was the finest talk
delivered there. Sushma Swaraj, Minister of External Affairs, was present and complimented me. Now in 2005, the majority of participants were Western Sanskrit Indologists and local Thai people; maybe 10-15% were Indians and they were on the side of the Westerners. In 2015, more than 50% of the participants were traditional Indian scholars, Hindus and different kind of voices, 20% were Westerners and the rest were local Thai people. The Westerners were very angry and resented the fact that they were not treated like gods anymore. Then a guy like me was given the prime slot of main speaker. There was much negotiation behind the scenes to throw me out of the event. Some Indians too were part of this. Within 24 hours of my successful talk, the firing started. The team appointed to go after me claimed that I am a rich man who is exploiting my power, I am against Shudras and Muslims, and all kinds of weird things! Incredible though it may sound Indians foolishly started re-tweeting these accusations. This is part of our internal problem. This encouraged Richard Fox to petition that all my books be banned and the publisher withdraw them. Stupidly, the whole Indian contingent of leftists, rightists - everybody - just believed that being a Princeton University professor, he was using academic standards. This was the perfect opportunity for Fox to come up with completely fabricated, idiotic charges and allegations about some grave violations in my work. Nobody bothered to verify Fox’s credentials. He actually has nothing to do with Princeton University, but runs a Christian seminary. He is deeply involved in conversion activities especially in South India, Dalit Christian movement & Aryan Dravidian divide. Sometimes you feel demoralized and beaten up and need someone to encourage you; otherwise you wonder why you are doing all this. Luckily, I have a few strong supporters who came to my rescue. I couldn’t have done it alone. We started a counter-petition publicizing the story and eventually they ran away because none of those points they made had merit. They could not persist. The mere fact we could get this book out is itself a pretty amazing journey! Q. Rajiv, this was indeed a wonderful opportunity to get an insight into your innermost thoughts on a subject important not just for Indians but all of humanity! Exactly what I feel!
CULTURE
When Germany is Christian, is India Hindu? By Maria Wirth
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hough I’ve lived in India for long, there still are some points that I find hard to understand – for example, why many so-called “educated Indians” become agitated whenever ‘Hindutva’ is mentioned. The majority of Indians are Hindus. India is special because of its ancient Hindu tradition and Westerners are drawn to it. Why this resistance by many Indians to acknowledge the Hindu roots of India? Why do some even give the impression that an India that values those Hindu roots is dangerous? Don’t they know better? Their attitude is strange for two reasons.
Where is the Cultural Identity First, these people have a problem only with ‘Hindu’ India, but not with ‘Muslim’ or ‘Christian’ countries. Germany for example, is a secular country and 59 percent of the population are registered with the Protestant and Catholic Churches. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, recently stressed the Christian
roots of Germany and urged the population ‘to go back to Christian values’ Two major political parties, including Angela Merkel’s ruling party, carry ‘Christian’ in their name. Government agencies collect Church tax (8% of the income tax) and pass it on to Churches. Germans are not agitated that Germany is called a Christian country, though I actually would understand if they were. After all, the history of the Church is appalling. The socalled success story of Christianity depended greatly on tyranny. “Convert or die”, were the options given to the indigenous population of America some 500 years ago. In Germany, 1200 years ago, Emperor Karl the Great decreed death for refusal of baptism in his newly conquered realms. Heresy was put down with an iron hand. In the Nuremberg castle prison, one can see the torture instruments and chamber that were used during the inquisition. Second, Hinduism is in a different category
from the Abrahamic religions. Compared to Christianity and Islam, its history is undoubtedly the least violent as it spread by convincing arguments and not force. Hinduism is not a system that demands blind belief in dogmas and the suspension of one’s intelligence, but encourages using one’s intelligence to the hilt. Ancient rishis enquired into truth, discovered universal laws and showed how to live life in an ideal way. Hinduism comprises a huge body of ancient literature, covering Dharma and philosophy, music, architecture, dance, science, astronomy, economics, politics, among others. If any other western country had this kind of literary treasure, they would have proudly highlighted its greatness at every opportunity! We Germans have to be content with one ‘ancient’ epic “Nibelungenlied’ which was written around the13th century and probably refers to incidents around 400 AD. That is how far back ‘antiquity’ reaches in Europe. Naturally Westerners consider the existence of Sri Krishna and Sri Rama as myths. How could they acknowledge a civilization much more ancient and refined than their own?
Is Indian Tradition any inferior? Inexplicably, Indians cater to western arrogance and ignorance by downplaying and even denying their tradition. There is a “Copernicus Marg’ in New Delhi but Indian children are not taught in school that thousands of years before Westerners ‘discovered’ it, the Rg Veda mentions that the earth is round and goes around the sun. (Rg 10.22.14) When I read some Upanishads, I was stunned at the profundity. Brahman is not partial; it is the invisible, indivisible essence in everything. Everyone repeatedly gets the opportunity to discover the ultimate truth and
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CULTURE
their tradition except what the British told them, i.e. the major features are caste system and idol worship. They don’t realize that India would gain, not lose, if they solidly backed its profound and all inclusive Hindu tradition. Hindu civilization is gradually being depleted of its valuable, exclusive assets. The Dalai Lama said that as a youth in Lhasa, he had been deeply impressed by the richness of Indian thought. “India has great potential to help the world,” he added. Now then the question arises When will the westernized Indian elite realize it?
About Author
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Hindu civilization is gradually being depleted of its valuable, exclusive assets. The Dalai Lama said that as a youth in Lhasa, he had been deeply impressed by the richness of Indian thought. “India has great potential to help the world,” he added.
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is free to choose his way back to it. Methods are given but not imposed! In my early days in India, I thought that every Indian knew and valued his tradition. Soon I realized that I was wrong!
A western colonized mindset The British colonial masters have been successful in not only weaning away many of the elite from their ancient tradition but also making them despise it. That the ‘educated’ class could no longer read the original Sanskrit texts and believed what the British
told them helped. This lack of knowledge and the brainwashing by the British education system is the reason why many ‘modern’ Indians are against anything ‘Hindu’. They don’t realize the difference between western religions that have to be believed (or at least professed) blindly, and which discourage, if not forbid, their adherents to think on their own and the multi-layered Hindu Dharma which gives freedom and encourages using one’s intelligence. Most do not realize that on one hand, Westerners, especially those who dream to impose their own religion on this vast country, will applaud them for denigrating Hindu Dharma, because this helps western universalism to spread in India. On the other hand, many Westerners, including Church people, know the real value and surreptitiously appropriate insights from the vast Indian knowledge system, drop the original source and present it either as their own or make it look as if these insights had been known in the west. If missionaries denigrated Hindu Dharma, it would not be so bad, as they clearly have an agenda. But sadly, many Indians assist them because they wrongly believe that Hinduism is inferior to western religions. They belittle everything Hindu instead of getting thorough knowledge. As a rule, they know little about
Maria Wirth is a German with psychology studies from Hamburg University. She visited the Ardha Kumbha Mela in Haridwar in April 1980 where she met Sri Anandamayi Ma and Devaraha Baba, two renowned saints. With their blessing she continued to live in India. She dived into India’s spiritual tradition, sharing her insights with German readers through articles and books. You can find more of her writings at mariawirthblog.wordpress.com
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ECONOMICS
Economics of Bahuka & Greenspan By S Gurumurthy Bahuka figures in the Bhagawata Purana, and was the advisor of Jarasandha, who was Kamsa’s father-in-law. Kamsa, who regarded Sri Krishna as his enemy, asked Bahuka’s advice on how to make his subjects state-dependent.
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ny discussion on contemporary US economy will remain incomplete without reference to Alan Greenspan, who headed the US Fed for 19 years till 2006, and was revered as the ‘Money God’. In 2007, he wrote a book, The Age of Turbulence, in which he theorized that people in developing economies needed to save, but, not those in advanced economies, because they enjoy state-provided social security. He wrote: “Despite their lower incomes, households and businesses in developing countries save a greater share of their income than do households and businesses in developed countries. Developed countries
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have vast financial networks that lend to consumers and businesses; most often backed collateral, enabling a significant fraction to spend beyond their current incomes. Far fewer such financial networks exist in developing nations to entice people to spend beyond their current incomes. Moreover, most developing nations are still so close to bare subsistence that households need to secure against future contingencies. They seek buffer against feared destitution, and since few of these countries have government safety nets adequate to protect against adversity, the only way for the households to do so is to set money aside. People are forced to save for a rainy day and retirement.”
Greenspan’s Theory It was Greenspan’s theory that directed the very course of the US economy, and of the globe, for two decades, till the 2008 crisis questioned it. See how the social security programmes celebrated by Greenspan as sparing the Americans from the need to save, and enticing them to spend instead, did the US economy in. The ever-expanding US social security schemes, theoretically framed to protect families, practically ended up breaking them, besides bankrupting public finances of US. Even as far back as 1970, the perverted effect of social security and welfare schemes on families didn’t escape watchful eyes. The
ECONOMICS
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the US brought out a book titled “The US Economy in transition”, in 1980. It contained prophetic views of experts, including Milton Friedman, on US social security. Martin S. Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and President of NBER, wrote, in his introduction to the NBER work, that ‘welfare programmes introduced and expanded to help poor families might weaken the family structures’; that ‘in more subtle ways, government programmes that substitute the state for the family, cause behaviour that weakens the development of future population; fewer births, more unmarried individuals, more unmarried couples and more divorced parents; that medicare and medicaid introduced to help the elderly and poor might lead to an explosion in health care costs.’ Milton Friedman declared that ‘as children stopped contributing voluntarily to the support of their parents and began contributing through a system of government
fiat, a serious erosion of family values became inevitable’ and saw ‘social security system as a detrimental influence on social patterns’. The NBER work also pointed out how ‘family functions such as production of food, clothing and fuel and some other staple items were taken over by business firms, and responsibilities such as education, childcare, and social insurance have been assumed by the state.’ What the NBER meant here is that business firms and the state had,
together, robbed the families of their functions, leaving them functionless, therefore, dysfunctional. Conceding that ‘the market system is the most efficient, and most conducive to individual freedom yet devised’, NBER pointed out that the market itself ‘doesn’t provide for the organisation of the society’ but its ‘success during the last 200 years is attributable in good part to the existence of strong nonmarket institutions such as the family; also
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ECONOMICS
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It was Greenspan’s theory that directed the very course of the US economy, and of the globe, for two decades, till the 2008 crisis questioned it. See how the social security programmes celebrated by Greenspan as sparing the Americans from the need to save, and enticing them to spend instead, did the US economy in.
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adding that the ‘decline of the family and the growth of the government will jeopardise the market system and associated social, political and cultural freedoms.’ It concluded: ‘In the long run, a healthy economy requires a healthy society.’
Prophecy Fulfilled Each one of these warnings came true sooner than later. Here is a look at US families before the expansion of social security in 1960s and after. US homes had an average of 4.5 persons in 1930; this came down to 3.5 per home in 1950, and now to 2.6. This alone cost 88 million additional houses, valued at $16 trillion at current prices! In 1940, the marriage rate was 24.2 per 1000; it declined to 21.2 in 1970; 19.6 in 1990; 14.4 in 2009. The divorce rate per 1000 rose from 9.2 in 1970 to 16.9 in 2008, though less than the peak of 22.6 in 1980. Between 1970 and 2008, the US marriage rate declined from 63.4 to 37.4 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women. As compared to 1960, in 2008, households with children less than 18 declined from 49 per cent to 31 per cent; children living with single parents rose from 9 per cent to 26 per cent; unwed motherhood rose from 5 per cent in 1960 to 40 per cent.
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Whatever NBER had prophesied 30 years ago — less marriages, more divorces, more unmarried women, more unwed mothers, more single parent homes — has come true. While social security programmes caused the decline of families first, later, such decline in turn led to more and more social welfare spend to support the weakening families, thus feeding each other. US families reel under debt. The home loans of households top $10 trillion. More than a third of these loans weren’t incurred to buy houses. According to studies by Greenspan himself, households borrowed $3.2 trillion against the security of appreciation in their home values (called ‘home equity cashed out’) during 2002 to 2007, and splurged it on consumption! Further, the 111 million US households use 1.2 billion credit cards, on which they owe $2.5 trillion. So, not just families, their finances too are broke, thanks to the financial networks of the US praised by Greenspan, having ‘enticed’ and made the US families profligate.
Social Security The state-provided social security that has replaced the families and made them state-dependent is stressed and potentially bankrupt. Richard W. Fisher, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has estimated the present value of future social security obligations at close to $100 trillion unrepresented by assets — meaning that the government will have no money to pay them when they fall due in future. Tailpiece: Here is the Indian equivalent of Greenspan’s economics — the economics of Bahuka. Bahuka figures in the Bhagawata Purana, and was the advisor of Jarasandha, who was Kamsa’s father-in-law. Kamsa, who regarded Sri Krishna as his enemy, asked Bahuka’s advice on how to make his subjects state-dependent. Bahuka told him: “Open your treasury to the people. Make the people eat, drink and enjoy themselves. Bring up children to look upon parents as old and useless. That will make them laugh at those who talk of duty, love and compassion. Like well-fed cattle at the mercy of the cowherd, the people will be completely dependent on you.” Rejecting the sage advice of the likes of
Milton Friedman and Martin Feldstein, decades ago, the US opted to follow the economics of the likes of Greenspan. The result: Half of American families are state-dependent. But fortunately, Bahuka’s economics, close to Greenspan’s, was ignored by Indians thousands of years ago, though, of late, some Indian politicians seem influenced by Bahuka’s economics.
About Author
Swaminathan Gurumurthy, popularly known as a writer and journalist in India, is a corporate adviser, being a chartered accountant by profession. Highly rated for his investigative writing, he has ceaselessly campaigned against corruption at high places, exposing the bribery in Bofors arms deal and the nexus between corporates and government. Gurumurthy was rated among 50 most powerful persons in India in 1990 [Gentleman magazine]; as the 8th most powerful [Business Baron magazine 2004]; as the 17th most powerful [India Today magazine in 2005].
ETHICS FROM EPICS
Neutrality - A Vice or Virtue? By T Naik neutral towards his grandchildren (Pandavas and Kauravas), but invariably ended up supporting the evil Kauravas. To cite two instances: 1. Duryodhana had attempted to burn the Pandavas, who eventually escaped with the help of Vidura. When they returned to claim their rightful position, Duryodhana had already been installed as the Prince of Hastinapura. Should Duryodhan be asked to step down and hand over the kingdom back to Yudhishthira or let him continue, was the dilemma facing Bhishma. Rather than punishing Duryodhana for attempting to murder the Pandavas, Bhishma took the easy way out and carved the kingdom into two!
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eutrality has two distinct features. First, it is often meant to not take any sides in a conflict and second, expected to make judgments independent of any bias. When someone is looking for endorsement, approval for his or her behavior or protection, the former neutrality is despised! Someone famously commented, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality!” When India was overrun by invaders, the unaffected people refused to stand up and fight for the oppressed fellow human beings. Since they were not being attacked, their logic was ‘why create enmity’. This foolish logic of being ‘the neutral party’ suited the invaders who killed, both, their enemies and ‘the neutral party’! Be it modern, medieval or Vedic society, history is replete with examples of neutrality being the cause of a greater violence.
Victim of Neutrality Bhishma, the Kuru grandsire, was always
2. This same neutrality prevented Bhishma from protesting when the Kauravas attempted to disrobe Draupadi in the royal court. The attitude of the grandsire encouraged the Kauravas to behave arrogantly and viciously. Bhishma maintained neutrality at the cost of dharma and justice and this culminated in him fighting alongside the wrongdoers, Kauravas, in the battle of Kurukshetra.
Even though he decided not to take up arms during the battle, Krishna was never neutral – he sided with dharma, represented by the Pandavas. He knew, being neutral in situations of injustice, is taking sides of the oppressor. Life challenges each one of us to take a stand in life. Being indecisive or (even worse) ambiguous never helped anyone, because situations ultimately force one to take a stand. It would be in our best interest to be guided by dharma when making decisions. Wouldn’t you rather be Abhimanyu who perished attempting to uphold dharma rather than Bhishma who also perished, but supporting the wrong people/cause or worse yet perish because you did not take a stand and preferred to stay neutral at all costs?
About Author
Krishna’s dealing with Neutrality Balarama, Krishna’s brother was another prominent figure who ‘resolved to be neutral’ at a crucial juncture in life. His sympathies lay with Duryodhana so he decided to remain neutral and set out on a pilgrimage before the battle. He returned on the last day of the battle and witnessed the fight between Bhima and Duryodhana - a fight that would decide their own fate and the future of Hastinapura. When Bhima struck Duryodhana below the belt, apparently breaking one of the rules of mace fighting, Krishna prevented Balarama from striking Bhima, by reminding him of his ‘resolve to be neutral’. Here too, Balarama’s neutrality almost supported the wrongdoer!
T Naik, is a community leader practicing monastic discipline in International Society for Krishna Consciousness since 30 years. He travels extensively worldwide engaging in thoughtful discussions on Vedic Literatures.
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ETHICS FROM EPICS Ravana, the king of demons. The love for the Lord was the guiding force for each of these devotees, who joyfully and gratefully accepted inconveniences to serve Him. In contrast, Ravana and his associates display the psychology of modern humans wanting everything for themselves, and using everyone and everything for their own interests. Ravana professed to love Sita but when she refused to yield to his advances, he threatened to kill and eat her for breakfast! The Ramayana portrays good and evil in unambiguous terms and sharp contrasts.
By Venugopal Acharya Today people eulogize evil and portray Ravana as a hero someone superior to Rama. This reveals the dangerous mindset of humans. Little wonder that in contrast to the young soldier who laid down his life, we have politicians who sell the country for vested interests, and lovers who cheat on their partners without shame or remorse. A tragic event Emperor Dasharat of Ayodhya was coerced by his favorite wife Kaikeyi into granting two boons: banishing Rama, the rightful heir, to the forest for fourteen years; and proclaiming Bharat, her own son, as the king. The king incessantly lamented at the folly of trusting his wife; he cried inconsolably as Rama happily left for the forest, and eventually, unable to bear the separation from Rama gave up his life. Bharat furiously disowned his mother for her nasty act of banishing the faultless Rama. That’s when realization dawned that she had fallen prey to the evil designs of Manthara, her hunchbacked
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servant. Desperately, Bharat went to the forest to coax Rama to return, but failed. While Bharat resolved to live austerely in a hut, he insisted that Kaikeyi continue to live in the palace and realize how her greed for wealth and position had caused great pain to everyone in Ayodhya. Her futile life in the very kingdom that she gained through an evil plot, having “lost” her son, would torture her and that would be her purification. Besides Rama’s relatives, there were others like Hanuman who performed heroic acts with deep humility and love for the Lord. Jatayu, a vulture, bravely laid down his life trying to protect Sita while she was being abducted by
Ravana and his associates display the psychology of modern humans - wanting everything for themselves, and using everyone and everything for their own interests.
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Why is the Ramayana Attractive?
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ETHICS FROM EPICS
What is it about Lord Rama’s pastimes that even millennia after they happened, they remain ever fresh and inspire people from all walks of life? Ramayana has always been the foundation of Indian ethos, and has attracted all because it exemplifies the highest degree of character, integrity and sacrifice: • Rama displays unparalleled detachment from power and position. • Sita reveals the highest standard of chastity and dedication. • Lakshman could have continued to remain in the palace for he was not ordained to go to the forest, but chose to accompany, selflessly serve and protect Rama and Sita. • Urmila, at the insistence of her husband Lakshman, remained in Ayodhya to care for the three mothers who would feel intense separation from the Rama and Sita. Her service was to give hope and encouragement to those who missed the Lord. Thus her being in the royal palace was as much a sacrifice as Sita giving up her royal comforts.
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Amazingly, today’s lovers emulate Ravana and inflict harm when their beloved refuse to reciprocate. Recently a boy grievously and permanently injured the beautiful face of a girl, by throwing acid because she didn’t love him the way he ‘loved’ her.
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Joy of Sacrifice
• Bharat could have easily accepted the throne and kingdom bestowed upon him. He insisted that the throne belonged to Lord Rama and chose the life of an austere caretaker till Rama returned from the forest after fulfilling his father’s order.
curse coming true that prevented Ravana from enjoying Sita. Today people eulogize evil and portray Ravana as a hero - someone superior to Rama. This reveals the dangerous mindset of humans. Little wonder that in contrast to the young soldier who laid down his life, we have politicians who sell the country for vested interests, and lovers who cheat on their partners without shame or remorse. Therefore, it’s time now to reestablish Rama Rajya - the kingdom of Rama consciousness, where everyone wants to serve, love, and live for others.
About Author
Sacrifice is universal Coming to more recent times, a young Indian soldier laid down his life during the Kargil war. His fiancé was just 23 then. While he became a martyr for the Nation’s cause, she chose to remain unmarried and thus sacrificed her life for the cause of love. Both sacrifices touch the heart because personal pleasure is forsaken for a higher cause. Generally, people seek gratification, so those who chose to relinquish their desires inspire others to love, serve and be selfless. Compassion and sacrifice touch the heart and brings tears to the eyes. Amazingly, today’s lovers emulate Ravana and inflict harm when their beloved refuse to reciprocate. Recently a boy grievously and permanently injured the beautiful face of a girl, by throwing acid because she didn’t love him the way he ‘loved’ her. Similarly, They even glorify Ravana’s forbearance in not forcing himself on Sita, while she was in his custody. Little do they know the facts! Once Ravana raped a heavenly damsel and her husband had cursed that if Ravana ever forced himself on any woman again, he would die. The Ramayana reveals that it was the fear of the
Venugopal Acharya has done his Honors degree in Economics, Masters in International Finance, and is also a post-graduate MBA in Finance. He has worked with the Times Group and undertook projects for prestigious organizations such as ICICI Bank and KPMG Pete Marwick before he accepted monastic discipline in ISKCON. He travels globally spreading the Vedic wisdom. Read more of his passages on his website http://yogaformodernage.com
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The Need to Rewrite Indian History By David Frawley
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n recent years, the government of India and several state governments have decided to revise history books, particularly relative to the ancient period, bringing up recent data that calls into question the Aryan invasion and the many theories that have arisen from it. Over the past few decades numerous archaeological finds have been made throughout North India, considerably widening the civilization of the region and uncovering its continuity through time, rendering the Aryan Invasion idea obsolete. Quite predictably, leftists in India raised a cry of tampering with history, as if history is a fixed science that cannot be adjusted. The fact is that history books in India still largely teach the British view of India from the colonial era and have not changed much since the independence of the country over fifty years ago. The only exception is history books in Marxist states like Bengal that have been rewritten in a communist slant, which is even more against the traditions of the country than the British view. History books are always being rewritten and they should be, as new information comes in and our understanding of culture widens. This does not mean that history should carelessly be rewritten to suit an ideology, as in communist Russia or in Nazi Germany, but that we must not turn old accounts of history
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into an unalterable dogma. History is not a material science like physics that deals with hard facts and even physics textbooks are continually being updated. The West has often tried to give its version of history the finality of science, but political changes since the end of the colonial era have revealed the biases behind its accounts, particularly of Africa and Asia. The western account of history cannot be given the finality of the physical sciences and should be expected to change radically over time.
Colonial Distortions of History East and West Up to two decades ago, the history of America was taught as the wanton aggression of the Native Americans, the so-called Red Indians, on the gentle white settlers who simply wanted to farm and raise their families in a wide land that had room for many people. This was the predominant view of Christians and of educated Europeans in America. The real history was one of the genocide of native peoples and their cultures in a greed for land and power. The socalled savages honored all treaties. The so-called civilized white man didnt honor any. The European history of Africa followed similar prejudices, with the native blacks as uncivilized barbarians that had to be civilized by the white Europeans. That the blacks did have
venerable and rich old cultures and were really the target of exploitation and genocide was covered over. The same phenomenon occurred throughout the colonial world, including Asia, where native peoples were subjugated and their cultures denigrated. Like the blacks, some Asians were turned into slaves or serfs, uprooted from their land and taken to foreign countries and commercially exploited. This was also done in the name of civilizational advancement through Christianity and European culture. That is how over a million Indians ended up in the Caribbean in Trinidad and Guyana. The European treatment of India was the same as that of America and Africa, starting with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, who brought the cruel ways of the Inquisition to India. The Indian mutiny of 1857 occurred because the British brought in aggressive and intolerant missionaries and had the country in the grip of a cruel economic exploitation. Yet such oppression has been left out of the history of India as told by the Europeans and independent India has not rewritten the record adequately. Similarly, the destruction wrought during the Islamic period, which was worse than the British period in terms of religious and economic exploitation as well as genocide, has been similarly ignored or downplayed so as not to offend minority communities. Yet can one seriously imagine given all the colonial distortions of history worldwide which are only slowly being removed today that no real revision of the history of India needs to be made? Can we believe that somehow by luck, in spite of their prejudices, that colonial and European scholars got the history of India right and wrote it without any distortion or bias in their favor, though they failed everywhere else? Liberals and leftists in America sympathize with the native cultures of Africa and America and their need not only for correcting historical accounts but also for restoration for historical wrongs. But, strangely, leftists in India still vaunt
HISTORY
British induced famine in Bengal 1770 & 1943 the colonial view that India was uncivilized before the British and denigrate their own native traditions! When ancient historical finds are made in China, as with the uncovering of the tomb of the first emperor dating to the third century BCE, there is great national pride even among the communists. But all the massive finds of the Harappan/Sarasvati culture, as well as the retracing of the once great Sarasvati River, bring no pride to many intellectuals of India. They would ignore these, dismiss them as an invention of Hindu communalists, or imagine that they represent an unknown civilization that vanished mysteriously with no real connection to the later traditions of the region! Though the Vedic literature is the largest of the ancient world by all accounts, Indian leftists will have no pride in it and seek to denigrate it as best they can. Though the Mahabharata at over two thousand years old is the world’s oldest and longest national epic, Indian leftists don’t even want it taught in the schools (even when the common people find great pride in watching the Mahabharata on television). In this regard, we should remember that Marxism and communism in India are largely anti-national movements. Marxists in India sided with China against India during the IndoChinese war of 1962 and raised no criticism of China for its attack. They sided with the British during the independence movement. This is a stark contrast to communism in Russia, China and Vietnam in which were part of larger nationalistic movements. This is because Indian Marxists came mainly from a British Marxist background and did not participate in anticolonial struggles, as did the followers of Mao and Ho-chi-minh. They were largely intellectuals
from wealthy families, educated in England, not workers in the field, much less freedom fighters. The distortion of history has been done intentionally by many modern Indian historians, particularly covering over historical wrongs against Hindus. They believe that by correcting history that the present can be changed. They pretend that the generally cruel Muslim rule in India was benign and secular so that this account will serve to make modern Hindus and Muslims more benign and secular and help them bury the past. But the opposite is true. If a nation does not face its true history, it has no future and its present remains confused. This would be like American historians pretending that Native Americans (Red Indians) were treated well through history and that accounts of their oppression and genocide were false or exaggerated, so as to bring harmony to the two communities today. This would only allow old prejudices to continue. India has not faced its past in order not to offend certain minorities in the country who may still harbor anti-nationalist sentiments. It has also been intentionally done in order to prevent the majority community from awakening to its colonial and religious oppression, fearing this would increase communal disharmony, even though distortions caused by this, like the image of Hindus as barbaric idolaters, continue in the world media today. The result is that the country lacks a genuine national pride and a sense of its continuity to ancient times.
History and Nationalism One of the main purposes of history books, as taught in different countries in the world, is to instill a sense of national pride and honor in short to inculcate a sense of patriotism and nationalism. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as long as these countries have existed as modern nations. The lives of great leaders, particularly the founders of the country are highlighted, the continuity of the nation’s history is emphasized, and the importance of the nation in the history of the world and the greatness of the national culture are stressed. Students are expected to come away from reading accounts of their history with a sense of national greatness
and purpose, not only for the past but also for the future. However, India is a strange and unique country in which history books are often anti-national in nature. India has largely kept in tact the British approach to Indian history devised in the colonial era. Students of such textbooks come away apologetic or confused about their country and its traditions. Textbooks in Marxist ruled states of India like Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the greatness of communism and communist countries like China or even Russia which is no longer communist, rather than any real regard for India and its great traditions. History books in India try to ignore the dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period. India’s greatest historical and cultural document, the Mahabharata, is hardly given any attention in the schools. So too, the Vedas, Ramayana, Puranas, Buddhist Jatakas and other prime historical and cultural documents of the country are ignored because of their religious overtones. If they do address India as a nation, it is only India of the independence movement that they acknowledge, as if prior to 1947 India did not really exist. While Nehru is made important, older kings from the Rig Vedic Bharatas to Yudishthira of the Mahabharata period to the Marathas of the eighteenth century are hardly mentioned. There is no real sense of any historical continuity to the culture, much less to the country. While Mahatma Gandhi is emphasized, the greater spiritual traditions of India and its great teachers from the Vedic rishis, Vedantic, Buddhist and Jain sages to modern savants like Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi is not given much attention.
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HISTORY
It is true that history should not be a mere instrument of a destructive nationalism and should avoid instilling aggression against other lands and peoples, even when upholding what is valuable in a nation’s history. But this does not require that the national value of historical studies is negated altogether. The question, therefore, is how the history accounts in India can be made to reflect and instill a genuine nationalism and sense of the country’s history and destiny. India, after all, is one of the great civilizations of the world, with cultural traditions that have much value for humanity. Such historical accounts must reflect the richness and diversity of Indic civilization, but they cannot ignore its unity and continuity either.
Building a Nation The fact is that you cannot build a nation without creating history books that instill a positive nationalism, particularly in the youth. The real danger in India is lack of national spirit and historical consciousness that keeps people alienated from their roots and the country divided. A true Indian nationalism will be rooted in an Indian ethos of dharma, spirituality and pluralism, but this does not mean there can be no national or historical pride without encouraging communalism in the country. On the contrary, a greater sense of national identity would be the best thing to counter the disintegrating influence of religious, castist and regional interests that are bringing the country down. Therefore we must ask: Why can’t Indians connect India’s traditional ancient literature, the Vedas, with its archaeology through Harappa and the many Sarasvati river sites? Why can’t Indians find national pride in their own history both on literary and archaeological levels? Why should history in India be used for national shame, rather than national pride? Why should
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the history of India place Indic civilization out of India? These are questions that must be answered. Western and Indic Views of History The subject of history in the western context is a very different than in the Indian context. In the western view, history is mainly an account of political events and economic progress, a purely outward affair. In the Hindu view, history is a means of teaching detachment, showing how great kings and kingdoms come and go in the course of time. It has an inner value as a spiritual teaching about the nature of human life and the need for liberation from worldly concerns. In the western view, history is progressive from the crude beginnings of agriculture and village life moving forward to the present day urban culture. In the Hindu view, history is cyclical, with various cultures coming and going over time as the soul seeks liberation from the phenomenal world. The western progressive account of history is quite flawed. For example, the first civilizations of the ancient world that we can document including Egypt, Sumeria, India and China did not regard themselves as the first but were aware of many cultures and kingdoms before them, particularly prior to a great flood. The civilizations that we regard as the first saw themselves as very old with many antecedents! Yet we pretend that there was nothing before them! In addition, the civilizations of the Third Millennium BCE, like those of Egypt and Harappan/Sarasvati India, had better urban and architectural achievements than those that followed for many centuries. Even Europe had its Dark Ages after the Roman period in which much knowledge was lost. This idea of history as linear progress is clearly not the case. While humanity has progressed scientifically, this is mainly over the past five hundred years. On the other hand, we see a spiritual decline since ancient times, and over the last century we can note a decline in culture, art, music and philosophy in Europe itself, coinciding or even caused by great advances in science. As India is the only civilization of antiquity to survive the onslaught of time, it is the special responsibility of Indians to discover not only their history but also that of the entire ancient world. Just as there are unquestioned
distortions of ancient India, similar distortions of other ancient cultures also exist. For example, the religion of ancient Egypt, which like that of the Vedas demonstrates much occult and spiritual significance, is similarly dismissed as polytheism, idolatry or henotheism (worshipping different Gods as the supreme God), exactly like the Vedas. Revamping the way history is taught in Indian schools would be a major step in the direction of a more authentic and spiritual sensitive history of the world. It is a scientific and spiritual imperative, not only for India but for all countries. (Chapter from book-Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations)
About Author
Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) D. Litt., is a recipient of the prestigious Padma Bhushan award, one of the highest civilian awards granted by the government of India, for distinguished service of a higher order to the nation, honoring his work and writings as a Vedic teacher, which he received in March 2015. He is the founder and director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which offers educational information on Yoga philosophy, Ayurveda, and Vedic astrology.
IN FOCUS
A Dose of Pragmatism to Counter Extremism ? Dr. Ranjan Ghosh What divides the world The recent terror attacks in Europe have collapsed questions on public policy, strategic affairs and social integration to a rare common standstill: how to curb dogmatic religious influence and yet protect civil liberties? It is evident that today’s is a confrontational world. Newer and bolder forms of violent fundamentalism tear across both the Muslim and non-Muslim societies. In response, backlash from civil society has also been intense. When I was walking through the Christmas markets of Brussels the past December, it was like walking into a war-zone. After Paris terror attacks in November and Charlie Hebdo massacre in early 2015, there was heightened security to guard against potential threats in all major European capitals, especially Brussels. Yet, it was attacked. Will tightening security, imposing stricter border controls and deporting migrants solve the problems? Can political extremism counter religious extremism? I would disagree, unless an important distinction is made: what divides the world of ‘rationality’ and that of ‘beliefs’? This was a central theme in the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, especially the branch led by William James in late 19th and early 20th century. James saw the worlds of science and beliefs as a ‘clash of human temperaments’ between the ‘tough minded empiricist’ and the ‘tender minded religionist’. While the loyalty of the tough-minded is to facts, the tender-minded places more confidence in human values; while the tough-minded is more suited to skepticism, the tender-minded is more prone to romanticism. Pragmatism conceded that society like a human body is not only made up of a mind but also thrives on a heart; that there is a need to accommodate both the temperaments and not to necessarily see science, religion and morality in competition. A favorite example of William James was the syllogism of a human trying to get sight of a squirrel running around a tree which runs just fast enough to always keep the tree between itself and the human witness.
liberals in public and intellectual space. This will go a long distance in not only reducing the feeling of alienation and mortification by the tender-minded but also make them responsible for detecting spiteful elements who only wear the mask of tenderness and victimhood. Unless mutual respect and reconciliation becomes the grain of new thinking, liberalism founded on science and rationality will remain elitist and religions will tend towards fanaticism. For a pragmatist, more than hysteria, this would counter extremism more effectively. The answer to the metaphysical question of ‘does the man go around the squirrel or not’, according to James depends on what is ‘practically’ meant by ‘going around’. So if it means passing from north of it to east to south and then to west, then the answer would be ‘yes’ the man goes around the squirrel. If it means going in front of it, to behind it and then coming back to its front, then it is ‘no’. This is a typical pragmatic resolution of disputes.
About Author
Modernity and Co-existence Modernity, unfortunately, in its over-enthusiasm to overcome the thick clouds of religious oppression in medieval-Europe marginalized, if not ignored, this need of the society. What this has led to today is another form of social inequality where control over information, social opinion and public policy are concentrated with a small proportion of the tough-minded creating a sense of mainstream alienation by the tender-minded. If we have to move forward, those who wield power over information cannot afford to be victims of a modernistic fallacy that scientific temper is the only way to design the contours of public space. It has to acknowledge that there is no ‘ruling’ epistemology and real liberalism is to find the reconciliation between these temperaments. What such a pragmatic approach will do is to bring believers that ‘reason’ into the mainstream. In other words, it will increase the critical mass of
Dr. Ranjan Ghosh is an economist with a keen interest in philosophy of science and dharma. He earned his PhD from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany and conducting part of his work at the Nobel Prize winning Elinor Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. He currently works & teaches at the Department of Economics, SLU Uppsala, Sweden
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IN FOCUS
Freedom of Expression & Its Relevance to Dharma By Kushal Mehra
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Questioning God “Om sam gachchadhvam sam vadadhvam, Sam vo manaamsi janatam”, the concluding hymn of the Rig Veda (10.191) means “Assemble, speak together: let your minds be all of one accord.” This verse of the Rig Veda is urging people to come together and exchange views freely and harmoniously. Another Rig Veda hymn (10.121) “sa dādhāra pṛthivīṃ dyāmutemāṃ kasmai devāyahaviṣā vidhema” means “He fixed and holdeth up this earth and heaven. What deva shall we adore with our oblation?” Every year in the last week of May thousands of hill tribes converge at the Ayyappa Temple at Devarapura, Karnataka, to celebrate Kunde Habba (Bodu Habba in Kodagu), a festival of abusing God. The story of the origin of this festival is that once Lord Ayyappa took the tribals hunting. However, when Lord Ayyappa met Goddess Bhadrakali in the forest he abandoned the tribals and left with her. Incensed by the Lord’s action, the tribals abused him. Since then they started observing this “abusing” festival to commemorate the incident. All day long, the tribals dance to the tunes of folk songs and at the end of the day the tribals assemble in the temple and apologize to the Lord. Can you imagine any faith actually allowing people to abuse God? At a Dinner Keynote Address, Salman Rushdie spoke about Freedom of Expression in Indian Tradition. I saw it on You Tube and am sharing his exact words “That the Indian tradition also includes from its very earliest times, very powerful defenses of free expression. When Deepa Mehta and I were working on the film of Midnight’s Children, one of the things we discussed often was a text which is very dear to her heart and also to mine, which is the Natya Shastra. Now in the Natya Shastra we see the Gods asking for theatre. The Gods were a little bit bored in heaven, with not much to do, and they decided they wanted entertainment. And so a play was
made, and the play that was made was, as perhaps you know, about the war between Indra and the Asuras, in which Indra using his mighty weapons defeat the demons. When the play was performed for the Gods, the demons are offended by their portrayal. The demons feel that the work insulted them as demons. That demoness was improperly criticized. And they attack the actors; whereupon Indra and Brahma come to the actors’ defense and Gods were positioned at all four corners of the stage, and it is Indra who says that from now on that the stage would be a space where everything could be said and nothing could be stopped. So in one of the most ancient of Indian texts, the Natya Shastra which contains an explicit and extreme a defense of freedom of expression as you can find anywhere in the world. This is not alien to India. This is our culture, our history and our tradition which we are in danger of forgetting and we should do well to remember it.”
Freedom of Opinion A few verses of Cārvāka (ca. 600 BCE), the oldest atheistic school of thought known to mankind: While life is yours live joyously; No one can avoid Death’s searching eye: When this body of ours is burnt, How can it ever return again? If a beast slain as an offering to the dead will itself go to heaven; Why does the sacrificer not straightway offer his father?; The Sacrifices, the three Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing oneself with ashes — Brhaspati says these are but means of livelihood, for those who have no manliness nor sense. Think of the time when these words were uttered. Can you even imagine someone today abusing a God or questioning the intelligence of a person who performs rituals or the skeptical rishi asking which deva, the central theme of the Vedic times, to offer oblation to. If something like this were to happen in today’s world, the social media would be abuzz. Which # tag would we harangue on? Decide for yourself which era had freedom of thought and expression. Schools of thought such as Jainism, Buddhism and Cārvāka etc. among others
IN FOCUS
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The underlying tone of most Dharmic sampradayas is of skepticism, so as to encourage and empower the individual’s personal search for higher metaphysical principles and to experience the ultimate meaning of life.
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that run contrary to Vedic philosophy have peacefully coexisted in Indian society, essentially because intellectual freedom complemented by freedom of thought and expression were an integral part of Vedic society. The underlying tone of most Dharmic sampradayas is of skepticism, so as to encourage and empower the individual’s personal search for higher metaphysical principles and to experience the ultimate meaning of life.
Indian Law Now let us review some of the pertinent laws of our current legal system. IPC 295A: Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious
beliefs.—Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of 273 [citizens of India], 274 [by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise], insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 4[three years], or with fine, or with both. IPC 153A: Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony (1) Whoever (a) by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities, or (b) commits any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities, and which disturbs or is likely to disturb the public tranquility, 2[or] 2[ (c) organizes any exercise, movement, drill or other similar activity intending that the participants in such activity shall use or be trained to use criminal force or violence or knowing it to be likely that the participants
in such activity will use or be trained to use criminal force or violence, or participates in such activity intending to use or be trained to use criminal force or violence or knowing it to be likely that the participants in such activity will use or be trained to use criminal force or violence, against any religious, racial, language or regional group or caste or community and such activity for any reason whatsoever causes or is likely to cause fear or alarm or a feeling of insecurity amongst members of such religious, racial, language or regional group or caste or community,] shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both. Offence committed in place of worship, etc. - (2) Whoever commits an offence specified in sub-section (1) in any place of worship or in any assembly engaged in the performance of religious worship or religious ceremonies, shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to five years and shall also be liable to fine.] IPC294: Obscene acts and songs. - Whoever, to the annoyance of others (a) does any obscene act in any public place, or (b) sings, recites or utters any obscene song, ballad or words, in or near any public place, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three months, or with fine, or with both.]
Article 19 in The Constitution of India 1949: Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech etc. (1) All citizens shall have the right a. To freedom of speech and expression; b. To assemble peaceably and without arms; c. To form associations or unions; d. To move freely throughout the territory of India; e. To reside and settle in any part of the territory of India; and f. Omitted g. To practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business
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IN FOCUS
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One of the most basic tenets of Freedom of Expression is the right to raise objections. It may appear offensive at times. However rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. When differences of opinion are voiced keeping with view the larger common interests of the society and to generate a debate that will strengthen the ethos, it is welcome.
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(2) Nothing in sub clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt
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of court, defamation or incitement to an offence. These laws are ambiguously worded and one could without any doubt one say that Cārvāka and the tribals of Devarapura would serve time for breaking the laws.
Criticism must be genuine Look at the entire history of human civilization. Every time a new thought or fact has been represented it has met with a huge amount of resistance. Had Galileo not decided to go ahead and present his discoveries we would have been robbed of some important findings in regards to the cosmos and science would have suffered. Galileo did offend the Christians of his time. If we try to understand and measure the amount of offense he would have caused we can safely assume that it would have been in equal proportion to the kind of offense a Rangeela Rasool or a Kaum De Heere will cause today. Have you ever heard of a scientist going and taking up an AK 47 and try to shoot the people who disagree or make fun of his point of view or his discovery. Why then should any religious thought or idea if it is truly valuable, be beyond the realm of critique and satire? Why should religion get a special privilege in society without being tested with its views on diversity and ability to coexist with opposite views? One has a right to object and also has a right to seek legal remedies if offended. One of the most basic tenets of Freedom of Expression is the right to raise objections. It
may appear offensive at times. However rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. When differences of opinion are voiced keeping with view the larger common interests of the society and to generate a debate that will strengthen the ethos, it is welcome. But when the freedom of expression invites a vicious political game it becomes abusive of its own strength. The basic essence and strength of Hinduism is it’s pluralism and tolerance of differing points of view. I urge each and every one who takes pride in this countries culture and past to realize what Dharma is and actually start acting on these terms. Don’t let the West stake copyright’s to this concept of ‘Freedom of Expression’ too. Don’t allow the political domain to invade the thoughtful function of Freedom of expression. It would be a damn shame that the one of the most important concepts of human existence that has clear origins in Indian Culture also gets appropriated/digested by the West. Stand up for a concept that is truly yours and fight for it till the last breadth in your body. Freedom of Expression is a very Dharmic idea and that is why we should cherish it all the more and try to preserve it and not exploit it.
About Author
Kushal Mehra is B.Com from Mumbai University, Self-Employed textile entrepreneur, part-time socio-political activist
ADVERTORIAL
Bharat Bhasha Sanganan By Vishal Tandon
M
otivated with zeal to preserve and upgrade the ‘Bharatiya’ culture in the digital age, Ganesh Arnaal of SM Capital Advisors has come up with a very unique first-of-its-kind competitive digital offering. Deeply committed to Dharma and revival of our ‘civilizational values’, he believes that to revive Indian languages, it is imperative to use ‘Indian languages in computing’. It cannot be done by merely being consumers of content through mobiles. It can be achieved only by creating serious vyavaharika content in Indian languages using PCs. The first step in this direction is to have Office Productivity Suites with Indian language User Interfaces. Hence, BBS हिन्दीOffice.
Need for BBS fgUnhOffice Intent on serving a market of 12.5 crores
Indians (twice the population of UK), who are the privileged 10% that are comfortable using English and have access to computers, software developers have ignored the computing needs of the remaining market of over 100 crore Indians, causing a ‘digital divide’. Says Ganesh, “Bharat Bhasha Sanganan [BBS] has been formed to dedicatedly develop Indian Language Computing, and make it a standard way of doing business computing in Hindi. BBS intends to bring world class computing standards to Indians, in their mother tongue, at affordable prices.” Incidentally, BBS is a pioneer in the Managed Open Source Software [MOSS] in India. The cost of proprietary software is proving to be extremely high in a competitive world looking to reducing the cost of Information Technology. The future
of computing is linked to MOSS. BBS is committed to providing world class MOSS products, equivalent to proprietary software in features and usability.
Overcoming the Digital Divide Being entirely dependent on ‘English’ for software programmes, millions of Indians cannot compute due to their lack of familiarity with the language. Interestingly, the top 10 ‘exporting nations’ of the world use their mother tongue for business and computing needs. Even small countries like Taiwan, Thailand, Korea and Hungary have leading software programmes available in their mother tongue. Hence unless we have computing tools in Indian languages, we cannot hope to ever overcome the digital divide. For this reason, BBS has launched its
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ADVERTORIAL
first MOSS product - BBS fgUnhOffice, a professional, complete and Office Productivity Suite made for India, along the lines of Microsoft Office. Letters, Max, Show and Records are the fgUnhOffice equivalent of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, respectively.
BBSf gUnhOffice It is a bilingual application available in Hindi and English based on Apache Open Office v.4.0 and rendered in Hindi. The user can easily switch the language of any application using Tools [उपकरण] –> Options [fodYi] –> Language Settings [भाषा fodYi] –> Languages [भाषाएँ]. Developing the fgUnh user interface was a mammoth task. Over 90 thousand strings running into 8,00,000+ words had to be translated into Hindi to deliver the final product. BBSfgUnhOffice offers a seamless computing experience comparable to computing in English. On installing BBSfgUnhOffice, the Hindi Inscript Keyboard Layout is auto activated making the regular Qwerty Keyboard bilingual. Just install BBSfgUnhOffice on your machine and start typing in Hindi! For ease of use, we recommend that you buy a bilingual English/ Hindi Key Board or stickers. As menu options are in Hindi, BBSfgUnhOffice allows the Hindi user to develop his document, spreadsheet or
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presentation intelligently, selecting just the features he wants. BBS is also working on other Indian Language versions.
Freedom from non-Unicode Fonts In English you have a choice of several beautiful fonts. However, for fgUnh, Windows offers 2 fonts – Mangal and Kokila, of which Mangal cannot handle jodakshar. To use beautiful fonts, fgUnh users need to deploy non-Unicode fonts like Krutidev and Shivaji. However, files with such fonts cannot be opened in computers on which these fonts are not installed. To overcome the problem of non-unicode fonts, fgUnh users have either been using font conversion software [like Shrilipi and Aakruti], or installing the font which has been used in the file. But it is not always easy to find or install fonts and the available alternate is pdf files, which again cannot be edited because they are images. Thus, collaboration which is so common among computer users today is denied to users of fgUnh. In China, Thailand, Korea, Germany, France, Hungary, UAE, Saudi Arabia, they have the user interface in their own language and all fonts available in Unicode. Now you can be liberated from the tyranny of non-unicode fonts, because with every BBSfgUnhOffice you buy, popular fonts like
Krutidev and Shivaji are available in Unicode free of cost. To enable the typists of Indian languages to continue using the layout they are comfortable with, BBSfgUnhOffice has also created the Remington Rand Keyboard Layout which can be used to type in Unicode.
Spreadsheet Functions now in Hindi In MaX, the spreadsheet application, there is a very important feature which is not available in the Hindi version of Microsoft Excel. All the functions or formulas can be called by their Hindi Short Names, eg SUM = योग, AVERAGE = औसत, IRR = आपदर ( short form of vkUrfjd çR¸kk; nj+ ) and so on …. This feature is unique to MaX.
Presentation BBS Show, the presentation package like PowerPoint, allows the Hindi user to explore the full potential of the software as the Menu features are in Hindi.
Inter-Operability To make it extremely user-friendly, files created in BBSfgUnhOffice can be opened in Microsoft Office and vice versa. Please visit www.bharatbhasha.in. for BBSfgUnhOffice training videos. There is a continuous addition of new videos to make it a comprehensive Tutorial and Training Tool.
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Building the Sri Rama Temple in Ayodhya - The Legal Case By Subramanian Swamy
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Sri Aurobindo said: “All great movements of life in India have begun with the new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity”. Even Jawaharlal Nehru ultimately at the fag end of his life acknowledged this truth in his foreword to one of Dr. Karan Singh’s book as follows: “It is significant to note that great political mass movements in India have had a spiritual background behind them”.
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society based on dharma is vitally needed at this moment in our history, because there is a dimension to the current national crisis, namely, the moral decay and the decline of character in our society which if not stemmed, will slowly poison to death our nation. This decay and decline is visible in every aspect of our life—politicians defecting for office and cash, bureaucrats taking bribes, teachers selling exam questions, students passing by cheating, businessmen adulterating products, lawyers cheating clients, doctors betraying their patients etc. To some extent such degeneration is there in every society, but the alarming aspect in India is the pace of this decay and the spread of it. Consequent to this decay is the wave of dangerous cynicism amongst the youth. This moral decay has to be stemmed. A renaissance of values in society has to take place. How will this renaissance come about? And which leader shall be its instrument? For this, a leader shall be one who is committed to an ideology and determined to implement an agenda for renaissance.
The National Icon In India, the majority is the conglomerate Hindu community that represents about 80% of the total Indian population, while minorities are constituted by Muslims [13%] and Christians [3%]. Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, and some other small religious groups, represent the remaining four percent. Sri Rama while revered by Hindus as an avatar, the other religious groups respect his nobility and moral courage. Thus Rama is a
‘eternal national icon’ for all Indians. Thus rebuilding Sri Rama Temple in Ayodhya becomes a national goal. It must however be accomplished legally and with maximum consensus. The re-building of the Rama Temple is part our renaissance. It means righting a historical atrocity. True and devout Hindus believe that Bhagvan Sri Rama was born in Ayodhya, the then capital of a flourishing kingdom of the Suryavamsa dynasty. Rama is venerated as Maryada Purushottam, and worshipped by Hindus of the north. As an avatar of Vishnu, while it was first propagated by the Tamil saints known as Nayanmars and Alwars who composed many hymns and songs dedicated to his divinity, the North which later came to accept Rama as one. In that sense, Sri Rama was the first truly national king of India. That is why poet Iqbal called him Imam-e-Hind. The ethos of a nation and democracy are strengthened on facts. It is therefore very essential to understand the issue with proper facts than mere whimsical emotions.
Historical and Archaeological Readings The exact spot of the palace where Rama was born, has been and a remains firmly identified. This is the very area where stood from 1528 till December 6, 1992 a structure that came to be known as Babri Masjid, put up in 1528 by Babar’s commander Mir Baqi. In fact, Baqi was a Shia Muslim, and hence he intended it to be a place for Shias to ‘read namaz’. In Skanda Purana [Chapter X, Vaishnav Khand] the site is vividly described. Valmiki Ramayana also describes it beautifully. Less than two decades before Mir Baqi carried out the horrible
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CURRENT AFFAIRS Hindu religion. It is now well established by GPRS- directed excavations done under the Allahabad High Court monitoring and verification in 2002-03, that a large temple did exist below where that Babri Masjid structure once stood. Inscriptions found during excavations describe it as a temple of Vishnu Hari who had killed the demon king Dasanan [Ravana].
The Litigation
demolition of the Ram Temple, Guru Nanak had visited the Ramjanmabhoomi and had darshan of Ramlala in the mandir at the spot. There are many commentaries on this visit which are a part of the Sikh scriptures. Guru Nanak himself records the barbarity of Babar’s invasions [in Guru Granth Sahib at p.418]. In Akbar’s time, Abul Fazal wrote the Ain-i-Akbari in which he describes Ayodhya fame as the place of “Ram Chandra’s residence which in Treta age combined spiritual supremacy and Kingship” [Tranlated by Col. H.S. Jarrett and published in Kolkata in 1891]. In Chapter X of the Report of the Archeological Survey of India, NW and Oudh (1889), it is mentioned (p.67) that Babri Mosque “was built in AD 1528 by Mir Khan on the very spot where the old temple of Janmasthan of Ram Chandra was standing.” Hindus throughout foreign occupation of India have deeply held as sacred that exact spot where the Babri Masjid once stood, as is recorded in many official and judicial proceedings. In 1885, for example, Mahant Raghubar Das in a Suit No 61/280 of 1885 filed in the Court of the Faizabad Sub-Judge against the Secretary of State for India (who was based in London), prayed for permission to build a temple on the chabutra outside the mosque. However, in his Order the Sub-Judge, an Englishman, stated thus: “ It is most unfortunate that a Masjid should have been built on land specially held sacred by the Hindus. But as the event occurred 358 years ago, it is too late now to remedy the grievance.” The Judge took the easy way out and dismissed the Suit March 18, 1886. Notable historians have held that the temple, of which remains are still there in the archeological records, must have been built in the days of Raja Vikramaditya of Ujjain, hence of heritage value besides being an essential part of
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Today, the Sunni Wakf Board that entered the legal dispute in the year 1961 and has been litigating in the court claiming the title to the land and the structure does not accept these findings as of any meaning or of any consequences. I call it a ‘structure’ since it cannot be strictly called a
mosque by Sunni edicts-- because it did not have the mandatory minarets and wazu [water pool]. For the Sunni Wakf Board it does not however matter if all this was indeed so or not, since under Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code[IPC] it is prescribed that “Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons, with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defilement as an insult to their religion, shall be punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.” The offence under Section 295 IPC is cognizable and non-bailable, as well as non-compoundable. Mosque - A facility for prayer What is sacred and what is not is identified only by a ‘body of persons’ and not by any
court. It does not matter if the majority does or does not hold so. The fundamental question before us is thus this: Can a temple and a masjid be considered on par as far as sacredness is concerned? Relying on two important court judgments that hold the field today, the answer is: No! A masjid is not an essential part of Islam, according to a majority judgment of a Constitution Bench of India’s Supreme Court. In the famous Ismail Farooqui vs Union of India case[reported in (1994) 6 SCC 376], the Supreme Court observed: “ It has been contended that a mosque enjoys a particular position in Muslim law and once a mosque is established and prayers are offered in such a mosque, the same remains for all time to come a property of Allah… and any person professing Islamic faith can offer prayer in such a mosque, and even if the structure is demolished, the place remains the same where namaz can be offered” [para 80]. The Constitution Bench rebutted this contention stating: “ The correct position may be summarized thus: Under Mohammed law applicable in India, the title to a mosque can be lost by adverse possession…A mosque is not an essential part of the practice of the religion of Islam and namaz (prayer) can be offered anywhere, even in the open. Accordingly, its acquisition is not prohibited by the provisions in the Constitution of India.”[para 82]. It is important to note here that as of now there are eight mosques in Ayodhya area that the ASI has taken over since these had no one coming to ‘read namaz’. The position in Islamic law is even more clearly on a similar premise: In Saudi Arabia the authorities demolish mosque to lay roads and build apartment building. Even the mosque where Islam’s Prophet Mohammed used to pray was demolished! Thus, an order of acquisition is within law, if the government decides to do so in the interest of public order, public health and morality according to the Article 25 of the Constitution.
Temple - A Home of Deity But then what of a temple? Is it in the same category as the mosque in our jurisprudence? When I was Union Law and Justice Minister in 1990-91, this question of the status of a temple-even if in ruins or without worship--had come up before me in a case of a smuggled-out bronze Nataraja statue which was up for auction in
CURRENT AFFAIRS London. Earlier the Government of India, when Rajiv Gandhi was PM, had decided to file a case in the London trial court in 1986 for recovery. The Nataraja statue had by then been traced to a temple in ruins in Pathur, in Thanjavur district. A farmer named Ramamoorthi had in 1976 had accidently unearthed it while digging mud with a spade near his hut. When the news spread, touts of an antique dealer by name Ahmed Hussein reached him and paid a small sum and smuggled it out to London, where in 1982 they sold it to Bumper Development Corporation Private Limited. In turn the said Corporation sent it to the British Museum for appraisal and possible purchase. By then the Government of India was onto it and asked the UK government to take action. The Nataraja idol was seized by London Metropolitan Police, and thus the Bumper Development Corporation sued the Police in court for recovery but lost the case. An appeal was filed in the Queens Bench (Indian High Court equivalent in UK) which was dismissed on April, 17 1989. So, the Bumper Corporation went to the House of Lords (Indian Supreme Court equivalent in UK). On February 13, 1991 when I was Law Minister, the judgment came, which is truly landmark, dismissing Bumper’s final appeal [see (1991) 4 All ER 638]. The House of Lords upheld the Indian government’s position that because of the prana prathista puja , a temple is owned by the deity, in this case Lord Shiva, and any Hindu can litigate on behalf of the deity as a defacto trustee. The Bench consisting of Justices Purchas, Nourse and Leggatt concluded : “We therefore hold that the temple is acceptable as party to these proceedings and that it is as such entitled to sue for the recovery of the Nataraja.” [page 648 para g]. Thus, even if a temple is in ruins as the ASI had found the Thanjavur temple or destroyed, as Ram Temple was in the Babri Masjid area , any Hindu can sue on behalf of Lord Rama in court for recovery ! No such ruling exists for a mosque for the simple reason that a mosque is a ‘facilitation centre for reading namaz’, and has no essentiality for Islam religion. It can be shifted as any building can and are being so today in Arab countries and Pakistan. That is not the position vis a vis a temple in which the idol has been consecrated by prana prathista puja and built according to Agama
for the misdeed of miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold”. Thereby, it is obvious that Hindus are not treated evenhandedly: it is pertinent to note that there is a reasonable prima facie presumption that the Babri Masjid itself (and indeed a large number of mosques all over India) was constructed after the original temple was demolished by Muslims.
Legally and with maximum consensus
shastras. The Rama idol on the chabutra (the chabutra was built within the complex during Akbar’s regime) is one such consecrated idol. That is, the Ram Temple on Ramjanmabhoomi has an overriding claim to the site than any mosque. This the fundamental truth in the Ayodhya dispute. This truth will apply, for example, to Kashi Vishvanath and Brindavan temple sites as well.
Thus, if the Sri Rama Temple issue were settled legally and by an overwhelming consensus, then it would trigger a renaissance in the Indian cultural ethos, and lead the nation to gradually but inexorably define an ‘Identity for all Indians’. The nation would then become united as never before. That will be the fit atonement of the so-called secular people of our nation for tacitly tolerating for so long the demolition of Ram Temple on the orders of Babar of Afghanistan.
About Author
Bearing the Cross on the Chest This Hon’ble Court [in the Farooqui case:(1994) 6 SCC 361] had permitted worship in the makeshift temple of Ramlala, subject to maintaining the status quo in the disputed site but made a statement, “….it appears to be reasonable and just in view of the fact that miscreants who demolished the mosque are suspected to be persons professing to practice Hindu religion. The Hindu community must, therefore, bear the cross on its chest for the misdeed of miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold”. At some stage, I however reserve the right, on some other appropriate occasion, to challenge the judicially delivered dictum that the Hindu community” must bear the cross” for the Babri Masjid demolition. Specifically, re: the Babri Masjid, this is a finding of a Commission of archeological experts that was set up on the directions of the Hon’ble High Court , and this forms part of the proceedings record in the main title suit in progress before the Lucknow Bench of the Hon’ble High Court. “But it would be very wrong from that, to extrapolate that the Muslim community must therefore bear the cross on its chest
Dr. Subramanian Swamy is a senior member of the BJP govt. He is a former Union Minister for Commerce, Law &Justice; Former Professor of Economics, IIT, Delhi; Convenor of the Legal and Parliamentary Cells of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, National President of Virat Hindustani Sangam. He holds a Ph.D from Harvard in Economics
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VEDIC HERITAGE
Vedic Influence in Japan & Korea Excerpts from the book Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire by Stephen Knapp Japanese scholar Okakura observes, in his Ideals of the East: “The religion and culture of China are undoubtedly of Hindu (Vedic) origin.”
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edic tradition went from India to China and on to Japan. The practice of meditation, for example, was Ch’an in China and became Zen in Japan. However, some of these traditions also arrived in Japan through the sea route from Tamil Nadu. This explains how some Sanskrit terminology was adopted into Japanese through Tamil phonology, or why Sanskrit mantras are written in the Siddham script of South India. Sanskrit words such as homa - Vedic fire ritual and acharya – teacher became goma and achari, respectively, in Japanese. In Central Japan they observe the homa fire ceremonies, rub incense on their foreheads (similar to applying tilak) and consider Ganesh the remover of obstacles. Temples follow the basic Vedic design - a main hall before the sanctum and a circulatory path around them. Vedic devas have their Japanese counterparts!
Vedic Gods In Japan The Shingon pantheon of Japan include Daikoku (Siva), Shoten sama or Kanjiten (Ganesh), Taishaku (Indra), Katen (Agni), Emma-o (Yama), Benzaiten or Benten (Sarasvati), Suiten (Varuna), Futen (Vayu), Ishana, Bonten (Brahma), Jiten (Prithvi), Nitten and Gatten (Surya and Chandra), among others. “Though most of the deities are venerated only as forming part of Mandara (mountain]), some of them such as Shoten sama, Emma-o, Suiten and Benten are popular objects of worship and have temples dedicated to them.” (Sir Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism, London, 1935, p.355). According to
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author Hisashi Nakamura, there is no country in the world other than Japan where students are taught the rudiments of Sanskrit. About 15 miles from the heart of Tokyo is a Vedic temple of Indra with two figures of Hanuman guarding the image. Large crowds also visit the temples of Saraswati and Fudo, a form of Shiva, who possesses a third eye, trident, and a lasso of snakes. You can still recognize deities of Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Durga, Ganesh, and others in the temples at Kyoto, Nara, Miyajima, and other places. Nara was a center of Sanskrit learning even earlier than 700 CE. Japanese temples have Sanskrit manuscripts, some of which are much older than those preserved in India. Furthermore, according to Japanese Shinto scholar Taka Kasu, Japan’s oldest religion was Brahman-okoyo, or Brahmanism, now known as Shintoism, the main religion of Japan today. Shinto centers around the belief in worship of natural forces and ancestors and also some Vedic gods, mentioned earlier. At the Kotohira shrine on the island of Shikoku, sailors worship Kompera, which is a
corruption of the Sanskrit word Kumbhira (crocodile). The divine architect in the Rig Veda, Vishvakarma, was regarded in ancient Japan as the god of carpenters, Bishukatsuma. In Japan, the Kanjiten (Ganesh) cult was first mentioned in 806 and the images clearly reflect the deity’s Vedic origins., While the Indian deity is elephant-headed, Kanjiten may be depicted with an elephant’s head and human body, or a pair of two-armed, elephant-headed deities in embrace. Mahayana Buddhism spread to China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and with that came the basic Vedic pantheon of deities. Mahayana Buddhist scriptures were also in Sanskrit, while the earlier Theravadin texts were in Pali. You may also see Ganesh at some Buddhist temples, such as the popular temple at Futako Tamagawa in Tokyo. Benten is usually depicted as a beautiful oriental woman dressed in sophisticated robes, wearing a jeweled crown, often
VEDIC HERITAGE with multiple arms, playing her biwa or lute. As with Sarasvati, Benten is the Goddess of music, learning, the arts and entertainment and additionally of rivers and water. For this reason, Benten shrines can be found on islands, in rivers, ponds, lakes, or near the sea. Benten has also been identified with the Shinto Goddess of islands, Itsukushima-Hime or Ichaikishime-Hime. Some of the most popular jinja or temples to Benten include the small island shrine at Enoshima, connected by a bridge near Kamakura. There are two images of Benten inside, both over 600 years old. Itsukushima has a small shrine on the island reached by ferry from Hiroshima. Chikubushima has a shrine in Lake Biwa, along with other Buddhist temples for her. There is a shrine to Zeniarai Benten in a cave in the hills above Kamakura, where deep within it the image of Benten is in the form of a snake with a human head. Other shrines near Tokyo include the one at Shinobazu Pond at Ueno in Central Tokyo, and at Inokashira Pond at Kichijoji, which means Lakshmi Temple. Other small shrines or temples are scattered throughout Japan. According to author Donald A. Mackenzie: “The Indian form of myth of the churning of the Milky Ocean reached Japan. In a Japanese illustration of it, the mountain rests on a tortoise, and the supreme god sits on the summit, grasping in one of his hands a water vase. The Japanese Shinto myth of creation, as related in the Ko-ji-ki and Nihon-gi, is likewise a churning myth. Twin deities, Izanagi, the god, and Izanami, the goddess, stand on ‘the floating bridge of heaven’ and thrust into the ocean beneath the ‘Jewel Spear of Heaven.’ With this pestle they churn the primeval waters until they curdle and form land.” (Myths of Pre-Columbian America - By Donald A. Mackenzie p.190-191)
Further Evidence Of Vedic Influence The cultivation of cotton in Japan is also traced to an Indian who had drifted to the shore of Aichi Prefecture in 799. To commemorate the event, the Japanese named the village where the shipwrecked Indian had landed Tenjiku, which was the Japanese name for India, meaning heaven. The popular Japanese game of sunoroku or sugoroku (backgammon) is of Indian origin. In Japan the game is played as nard, which is regarded as an Iranian game. But the ninth century Arab scholar, Al Yaqubi,
considered nard an Indian invention used to illustrate man’s dependence on chance and destiny. According to Wei-Shu, sugoroku was brought to China in ancient times from Hu country, which at that time meant a country somewhere in the vicinity of India. Karl Himly has pointed out, the Hun Tsun, Sii, written during the Sung period (960- 1279), states that t’shu-pu, another Chinese name for sugoroku, was invented in western India, that it was known in its original form as chatushpada, and that it reached China during the Wei period (220-265).
dynasty, which had its capital in Ayodhya in India. The capital of Korea at that time was Kaya. Many times it is written as Gaya after the name of the holy town in India. So the name of Korea may have come from a corrupted translation of the name Gaya or Gouriya.
About Author
The Vedic Influence In Korea English orientalist Philip Rawson writes in The Art of South East Asia: “The culture of India has been one of the world’s most powerful forces. Countries of the Far East, including China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Mongolia owe much of what is best in their own cultures to the inspiration of ideas imported from India.” Korea was already profoundly influenced by Vedic traditions and its Sanskrit language before the arrival of Buddhism. It had plenty of Vedic temples and was a center of Sanskrit studies. Five hundred years ago Korea wanted to change its script to Devanagari. China changed Korea’s language and ideographs, but India’s Sanskrit and phonetic letters from which syllables or alphabets were constructed remained for vernacular writings and printing. Modern historians believe Korea formally accepted Buddhism in 372 CE and presumed that Korea’s links with India must have started then. But Vedic culture had already influenced Korea many years earlier. The name of a 1st century Korean King was Kim Suro. According to Vedic tradition, the family lineage called Suryavanshi was connected or descendants from the solar dynasty. Kim Suro also claimed to be a Suryavanshi and had a marital connection with the most illustrious solar
Stephen Knapp is the Founder and owner of The World Relief Network, a publishing company for the dissemination of accurate information on the Vedic philosophy. As a Founding Member and President of the Vedic Friends Association, over the years, he has made numerous global presentations on Vedic culture and spirituality, He has authored several books on Vedic culture and traditions. See more on http://www. stephen-knapp.com
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