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Lord Shiva

Basavanna (1106 - 1167) was the leader and saint of the medieval religious Bhakti movement. 

The rich
Will make temple for Shiva
What shall I 
a poor man,
do?

My legs are pillars
the body are shrine
the head a cupola
of gold.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things, standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay. 

(source: Speaking of Siva - Translated By A K Ramanujan).

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Lord Shiva - By Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (1835 – 1911) was a British civil servant, literary historian and poet. He was born at Coulsdon in Surrey , the second son of Alfred Lyall and Mary Drummond Broadwood, daughter of James Shudi Broadwood. He died at Freshwater, Isle of Wight . 

Throughout his life Lyall also worked as a writer. As a biographer his chosen subjects were Warren Hastings Lord Dufferin. As a historian he was acclaimed for his imaginative as well as philosophical insights into the course of Indian history. He also produced a number of volumes of poetry.

He has pictured Lord Shiva in vivid verse:

I am the God of the sensuous fire
That moulds all Nature in forms divine;
The symbols of death and of man’s desire,
The springs of change in the world, are mine;
The organs of birth and the circlet of bones,
And the light loves carved on the temple stones.

I am the lord of delights and pain,
Of the pest that killeth, of fruitful joys;
I rule the currents of heart and vein;
A touch gives passion, a look destroys;
In the heat and cold of my lightest breath
Is the might incarnate of Lust and Death.

Shiva: Lord of the Dance of the Universe.

***

If a thousand altars stream with blood
Of the victims slain by the chanting priest,
Is a great God lured by the savoury food?
I reck not of worship, or song, or feast;
But that millions perish, each hour that flies,
Is the mystic sign of my sacrifice.

Ye may plead and pray for the millions born;
They come like dew on the morning grass;
Your vows and vigils I hold in scorn,
The soul stays never, the stages pass;
All life is the play of the power that stirs
In the dance of my wanton worshippers.

And the strong swift river my shrine below
It runs, like man, its unending course
To the boundless sea from eternal snow;
Mine is the Fountain—and mine the Force
That spurs all nature to ceaseless strife;
And my image is Death at the gates of Life.

In many a legend and many a shape,
In the solemn grove and the crowded street,
I am the Slayer, whom none escape;
I am Death trod under a fair girl’s feet;
I govern the tides of the sentient sea
That ebbs and flows to eternity.

And the sum of the thought and the knowledge of man
Is the secret tale that my emblems tell;
Do ye seek God’s purpose, or trace his plan?
Ye may read your doom in my parable:
For the circle of life in its flower and its fall
Is the writing that runs on my temple wall.…

Let my temples fall, they are dark with age,
Let my idols break, they have stood their day;
On their deep hewn stones the primeval sage
Has figured the spells that endure always;
My presence may vanish from river and grove,
But I rule for ever in Death and Love.

(source: Shiva - By Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall).

Pre-Islamic Arabic Literature on Lord Shiva and Hinduism

Sair-ul-Okul is an anthology of ancient Arabic poetry available in the Turkish library Makhtab-e-Sultania in Istanbul . In this anthology is included a poem by Prophet Mohammed’s uncle Omar-bin-e-Hassham. The poem is in praise of Mahadev (Shiva), and uses ‘Hind’ for India and ‘Hindu’ for Indians. Some verses are quoted below:

Wa Abaloha ajabu armeeman Mahadevo Manojail ilamuddin minhum wa sayattaru
If but once one worships Mahadev with devotion, One will attain the ultimate salvation.

Wa sahabi Kay yam feema Kamil Hinda e Yauman , Wa Yakulam na latabahan foeennak Tawajjaru. (Oh Lord grant me but one day’s sojourn in Hind, Where one can attain spiritual bliss.)

(source: Antiquity and Origin of the Term ‘Hindu’ - By Dr. Murlidhar H. Pahoja).

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Mahakaleshwar- the third revered Jyotirlinga

Call it a city of famous Hindu king Vikramaditya or great poet Kalidas or city of Tantriks , Ujjain is known for its great cultural and spiritual importance like Varanasi or Benaras. Ujjain , the erstwhile state capital of Malva region is now also one of the major cities of Madhya Pradesh. Situated 183 km west of state capital Bhopal . Ujjain is also known for its Simhastha Kumbha Parva.

Ujjain and Mahakal are synonymous with each other. For each Hindu devotee, Ujjain means Mahakal. Yes,Mahakaleshwar is the presiding deity of Ujjain and it is the third sacred Jyotirlinga of Hindu Dwadash Jyotirlinga circuit.

Mahakal: The Lord of the earth and legend

Mahakaleshwar temple

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According to Hindu scriptures, the universe is seen as consisting of three regions-the sky, the earth and the nether. Mahakal is Lord of the earth. Out of the 12 Jyotirlingas, only Mahakal is known as the Lord of the earth and Lord of the death. The meaning of Mahakal is taken as Lord of Time and also Lord of death. In astronomical calculations, Shanku Yantra is an important instrument. It is believed that at the centre of earth Ujjain at the place of that shanku yantra the Jyotirlinga Mahakala is established. From this place the astronomical calculations for the entire world was done.

Avantikhand of Skand Purana narrates that it was a Mahakalvan(forest) and it was a favoured place for penance for Yaksha, Rishis Gandharvas etc. There are two stories related to Mahakaleshwar.

According to one story there was a ruler of Ujjain called Chandrasen(some also call as Vrishabhsen), who was a pious devotee of Lord Shiva and worshipped him all the time. One day, a farmer's boy named Shrikhar was walking on the grounds of the palace and heard the King chant the Lord's name and rushed to the temple to pray with him. However, the guards removed him by force and sent him to the outskirts of the city near the river Shipra. 

Meanwhile, kings of the neighboring kingdoms decided to attack on Ujjain . Hearing this, Shrikhar started to pray and the news spread to a priest named Vridhi. He was shocked to hear this and upon the urgent pleas of his sons, he prayed to Lord Shiva inside the river Shipra. The Kings chose to attack and were successful. With the help of the powerful demon Dushan, who was blessed by Lord Brahma to be invisible, they plundered the city and attacked all the devotees of Lord Shiva.

Upon hearing the pleas of his helpless devotees, Lord Shiva appeared in his Mahakal form and destroyed the enemies of King Chandrasen. Upon the request of his devotees Shrikhar and Vridhi, Lord Shiva agreed to reside in the city and become the chief deity of the Kingdom and take care of it against its enemies and to protect all his devotees. From that day on, Lord Shiva resided in his light form as Mahakal in a linga.

According to Matsyapuran,a demon called Andhak once tried to kidnap Goddess Parvati. Lord Shiva thus came into action and there was an intense fight between Shiva and Andhak. Lord Shiva created a world of Mahakals to win over Andhak and finally he succeeded. Thus Lord Shiva came to be known as Mahakal and Ujjain was also known as Mahakalpur.

The third story is about a Brahmin. According to this story, a Brahmin called Devvrata was a devotee of Lord Shiva and he was staying with his four sons. Once the family was performing Shiva pujan, a demon called Madandh dushan attacked the family. To protect the Brahmin, Lord Shiva emerged in the form of Bhutanath and destroyed the demon. Lord Shiva stays in this place and hence it is known as Mahakaleshwar.

Mahakaleshwar Temple

Ved Vyas sang glory of Mahakala in Mahabharat and so did poets like Kalidas, Banbhatt and Bhoja.In 11th century, the temple was renovated during Parmar regime. In 1234,Sultan Iltutmish of Delhi attacked on Ujjain and demolished Mahakal temple. From the Shivapuran reference, it appears that the temple was built eight generations before Nanda, the guardian of Lord Krishna. Perhaps at that time the Jyotirlinga was established. The Shikhar of the temple has been high and the premises been large from ancient times.

Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga is situated below ground level in the main temple. The idol of Mahakaleshwar is known to be dakshinamurti, facing the south. 

To attend Bhasma Arti in Mahakaleshwar is desire for every Hindu devotee.

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The present temple of Mahakaleshwar located near a lake is set upon a spacious courtyard and surrounded by massive walls. It has five levels, one of which is underground. The Shikhar is sculptural finery. Brass lamps light the way to the underground sanctum. The present beautiful temple was constructed by Sukhtankar Ramchandra Baba Shenavi, a divan of Ranoji Shinde during Bajirao Peshwa regime in 18th century.

Mahakaleshwar Sanctum

Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga is situated below ground level in the main temple. The idol of Mahakaleshwar is known to be dakshinamurti, facing the south. This is a unique feature upheld by tantric traditions to be found only in Mahakaleshwar among the 12 Jyotirlingas. Due to these considerations, worship of Shri Mahakal with vedic mantras proves fruitful for the devotee.

The idol of Omkareshwar Shiva is consecrated in the sanctum above the Mahakal shrine. The images of Ganesh, Parvati and Kartikeya are installed in the west, north and east of the sanctum. To the south is the image of Nandi. The idol of Nagchandreshwar on the third storey is open for darshan only on the day of Nagpanchmi.

Mahakal and Bhasma Arti

(source: Mahakaleshwar- the third revered Jyotirlinga - By Vipul K Shukla - gujaratglobal.com).

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Vedanta and Shakara

Shankara (5th century BC) is a prominent source of Hindu Wisdom. His literary output was enormous. He not only made commentaries on the Vedanta Sutras, the principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, but produced two major philosophical works, the Upadeshasahasri and the Vivek-chudamani (the Crest-Jewel of Discrimination). He was the author of many poems, hymns, prayers, and minor works on Vedanta. 

O Lord, dweller within;
You are the light
In the heart's lotus.
Om is your very self,
Om, holiest word,
Seed and source of the scriptures.
Logic cannot discover
You, Lord, but the yogis
Know you in meditation.
In you are all God's faces,
His forms and aspects,
In you also
We find the guru.
In every heart you are
And if but once, only,
A man will open
His mind to receive you
Truly that man
Is free forever.

(source: Sankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination - Vivek Chudamani - Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood  p. 1).

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Konark - The Black Pagoda (Sun Temple)

Sir John Marshall (1876 - 1958) Director General of Archaeology of India said:

"There is no monument of Hinduism....that is at once so stupendous and so perfectly proportional as the Black Pagoda (Konark), and none which leaves so deep an impression on the memory."  

Konark Sun Temple, Orissa. India

"There is no monument of Hinduism....that is at once so stupendous and so perfectly proportional as the Black Pagoda (Konark), and none which leaves so deep an impression on the memory."  

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Centuries ago Abu Fasl, wrote of this singular architecture:  

“Its cost was defrayed by twelve years’ revenue of the province. Even those whose judgment is critical, and who are difficult to please, stand astonished at its sight.”  

We stand astonished. We saw a great, ornate pile of the general form common to Hindu architecture, in which the pyramid seems to be the general origin of design. It was a species of flattened pyramid, with lines and proportions exquisite and perfect.  

As we approached, an extraordinary wealth of sculptured decoration made itself manifest, for the sloping faces of the Black Pagoda were carved, inch by inch over all their huge expanse, with countless figures in deep and delicate relief. I recalled the telling phrase of the renowned Bishop Heber, that the Hindus “build like Titans, and finish like jewelers.”  

Delicately carved fragment - Great wheels are carved in the lower exterior walls to represent the proper appendages of a chariot.

***

We sauntered among broken masses of sculptured stone, where accessories of the giant structure have fallen. We walked with eyes now lowered to some delicately carved fragment, now lifted to the majestic proportions of the temple. We trod the ancient floors of lofty inner rooms and sanctuaries. The sculptures were exquisite, some of them in a green stone almost as lovely as jade. 

The temple has the symbolical design of a chariot, appropriately symbolizing the sun god. Great wheels are carved in the lower exterior walls to represent the proper appendages of a chariot. Dominant among the human figures is the splendid presence of Vishnu in his solar guise. 

Lord Surya (Sun God)

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He is seen in perfectly sculptured effigies of stone that are models of proportion and of strength and delicacy.  

(source: India Land of the Black Pagoda - By Lowell Thomas p. 326 - 329).

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Tribal Jagannath as a Hindu deity

A 24-feet-tall Hanuman statue, installed at Sunset Point, Kanyakumari, on September 21, 2008, was surreptitiously removed by the Tamil Nadu administration in the wee hours of September 30 after alleged complaints from local fishermen.

The task was directed by Kanyakumari district collector Jyothi Nirmala, who claimed, “The trust which installed the statue had only obtained the permission of the panchayat and this was insufficient.” The panchayat had permitted Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Nama Bhiksha Kendra to create a ‘Hanuman Park,’ but, said vice-president S Pushparaj, “My wife Felicity, elected head of the panchayat, did not understand the difference between a simple park and the installation of a large statue in a public place, and allowed the installation. She wrote to the collector and withdrew her permission.” There cannot be a greater example of religious intolerance than this peremptory removal of an image of India’s most popular deity. The incident is also indicative of the extent to which the country’s sensitive coastline has been turned anti-Hindu through evangelisation. This raises the question: 

Why are monotheistic traditions unable to live in peace in pluralist societies?

It is precisely this kind of de-nationalisation that tribals are doggedly contesting in the remote jungles of Orissa, where Christian missionaries are trying to tell them that they (tribals) are not Hindus! 

Orissa is a State whose spiritual-cultural landscape explicitly reveals the deep symbiotic relationship between tribals and non-tribals from ancient times. Tribal gods have always dominated the Hindu pantheon and in Orissa this has coalesced into a regional tradition centred around Jagannath, one of the foremost deities of the all-India Hindu pantheon.

Till today, Daita (Daitya) priests, descendants of the original tribal worshippers, alone have the right to dress the god, move him, and regularly renovate his wooden image. Similarly at the Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar , tribal Badu priests alone are allowed to bathe and adorn the deity.

If, as missionaries allege, classical Hindu tradition was different from the tribal, why would tribal deities rise to become the dominant figures in the Hindu pantheon?

It is precisely this kind of de-nationalisation that tribals are doggedly contesting in the remote jungles of Orissa, where Christian missionaries are trying to tell them that they (tribals) are not Hindus! 

***

Jagannath was first worshipped by the Sabara (Savara, Saora) tribe, and ‘miraculously’ appeared in Puri much later. Till today, Daita (Daitya) priests, descendants of the original tribal worshippers, alone have the right to dress the god, move him, and regularly renovate his wooden image. Similarly at the Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, tribal Badu priests alone are allowed to bathe and adorn the deity.

Orissa is equally famous for the legend of Narasimha, the Vishnu avatar who burst out of a pillar to kill the asur Hiranyakasipu. The pillar is a uniconical image worshipped in tribal areas and to this day Orissa abounds with Narasimha images on wooden pillars symbolising Khambheshvari (Goddess of the Pillar). Narasimha is believed to derive his power from the shakti residing in the pillar. The pillar motif became so popular in Hindu tradition that Shiv as Bhairav was said to have emerged from a pillar.

The girija or hill-born aspect of Narasimha reinforces the tribal roots of Hindu dharma. An aboriginal god in the form of the head of a lion or tiger was worshipped in the caves and mountains of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. Orissa has instances of Narasimha being worshipped as a saligram stone.

Jagannath, Vishnu as ‘Lord of the World’, shows the metamorphosis of a tribal god into a pre-eminent deity of the classical Hindu pantheon. The god’s icon is even today carved out of wood (not stone or metal), and the tribes whose rituals and traditions were woven into his worship are still living as tribal and semi-tribal communities in the region. This tribal god took a fairly circuitous route to his present pinnacle, via absorption of local shakti traditions and merger with the growing popularity of the Narasimha and Purushottam forms of Vishnu in the region in the medieval era.

Queen Vasata in the eighth century built the famous Lakshman temple in brick at Sripur. The temple plaque opens with a salutation to Purushottam, also titled Narasimha, suggesting a trend in Vaishnav tradition to stress the ugra aspect of Vishnu. This culminates in Puri where Jagannath, widely revered as Purushottam until the end of the 13th century, had close connections with Narasimha who became popular in Orissa in the post-Gupta period.

But who exactly was this wooden god? After the death of Anantavarman Chodagangadev, who reputedly commissioned the Puri temple, his chief queen, Kasturikamodini, built a temple in his homeland in Tekkali (present Andhra Pradesh), east of his first capital Kalinganagar, in 1150 AD. The temple was dedicated to the god Dadhivaman, and the inscription reveals that the image installed was of the ‘Wooden God’, and not the famous Puri Trinity of Jagannath-Balabhadra-Subhadra. Scholars say this means that Chodagangadev was a devotee of this god, and as the god’s name is preserved in Tekkali in this early period, it seems likely that Dadhivaman (or the tribal form of this Sanskritised name) was the original name of the ‘Wooden God’.

Ratha Yatra in Puri

Jagannath, Vishnu as ‘Lord of the World’, shows the metamorphosis of a tribal god into a pre-eminent deity of the classical Hindu pantheon.

(Image source: Painting by James Fergusson (1808 - 1886).

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As the original ‘Wooden God’ was a unitary figure, temples for the single deity continued to be built even after a Trinitarian image emerged at Puri. Even today there are 344 Dadhivaman temples in Orissa, which perpetuate the original state of the god. The Kondh continue to practice a ritual renewal of wooden posts.

There is also something striking about the figures comprising the Jagannath triad. Subhadra’s image consists of only a trunk and a head, but Jagannath and Balabhadra are larger, with a trunk, over-dimensional head, and arm stumps. But while the heads of Subhadra and Balabhadra are oval with almond-shaped eyes, Jagannath’s head is curiously flat on top and is dominated by enormous round eyes.

Scholars explain this in terms of Narasimha’s association with wooden posts representing tribal deities. In the Andhra village Jambulapadu (Anantapur), Narasimhasvami is worshipped as a pillar to which a sheet shaped in the form of a lion’s head is attached. This lion-head explains Jagannath’s large round eyes, typical of Narasimha on account of his fury (krodh). The head of the Jagannath image makes sense when perceived as a lion’s head, where the emphasis is on the jaws, rather than as a human head.

If, as missionaries allege, classical Hindu tradition was different from the tribal, why would tribal deities rise to become the dominant figures in the Hindu pantheon? As this has been a regular pan-India phenomenon, it seems reasonable to deduce that tribals were never culturally subordinate in their interaction with non-tribal (caste Hindu) communities, but were rather the fountainhead of the Hindu cultural evolution.

(source: Tribal Jagannath as a Hindu deity - By Sandhya Jain - dailypioneer.com  Edit Tues/Oct 14 2008). Refer to It happens only in India - By S L Byrappa. Watch video Hindus Under Siege and  India under attack and Congress : A Merchent of Death for Hindus in India / Delhi Blast  and  Secularism in India exposed

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Obama’s Indian fans face burning cross

Police promise action as acts of racism pop up after Obama win

Arianna Grewal kept waking up frightened after racists burned a six-foot cross in the dead of night on the little Indian girl’s front lawn in their home in northern Warren County in New Jersey. “It is shocking that we are living in the 21st century, and we have to deal with this — in America ,” said 8-year-old Arianna’s father Gary Grewal, a management consultant who emigrated from India and now lives in Warren County .

Cross-burning is a practice widely associated with the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan as a reminder of faith. In the early 20th century, the Klan burnt Christian crosses near the homes of those they wished to intimidate, usually African-Americans and Jews. 

Ariana helped her mother Alina Grewal hand-paint a bed-sheet banner reading “President Obama — Victory ‘08,” which had been stolen from their yard. Racists returned with the banner and torched it along with a burning cross on Thursday.  “I don’t want anybody to think they can intimidate us or dictate to our family how to live and how to think,” said Alina Grewal. The blatantly racist crime received significant attention on Friday on New York television stations.

Before Obama’s historic win, almost no African Americans expected a black man to become president of the United States .

(source: Obama’s Indian fans face burning cross - samachar.com). For more refer to chapter on Glimpses XX and Racism at JP Morgan

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Comrade Vijay Prashad attacks NRI in Obama's Team  

Cross-burning is a practice widely associated with the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan as a reminder of faith. In the early 20th century, the Klan burnt Christian crosses near the homes of those they wished to intimidate, usually African-Americans and Jews.   

Racism in America: Obama’s Indian fans face burning cross in New Jersey.

***

The attack by Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, CT in (The Many Faces of Sonal Shah: Obama's Indian) is an interesting attempt to demonize an NRI and undermine her appointment by Obama. The motives are interesting. The Old South Asianism's power base in US politics has eroded, with the American pragmatism seeing India as opportunity and solution provider, rather than as basket case of human rights abuses. So the Old South Asianists feel left out and abandoned in this new discourse on India , because their training on "caste, cows, dowry" seems obsolete. As more westerners experience India directly, there is less dependence on the old middlemen sitting in academic cocoons, dishing out weird exotica to feed the white folks' fear of dangerous savages and wild places. It is interesting how very indirect links in her background get highlighted by Prashad, and sensationalized to produce the classical guilt-by-association profile. Indian so-called "tribal" religions get described by him as "Christian and animism" with Hinduism as the alien oppression - good for Prashad's Christian support base. Obama is trying to create a new liberalism, and it remains to be seen to what extent he will be allowed to break loose from past shakles of the ideologues. It will be Old Liberalism vs. New Liberalism.

(source: Vijay Prashad attacks NRI in Obama's Team).  Refer to Bobby Jindal: An Exorcist?

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Religious conflict: Tracing the roots   
Biblical creeds and Indic/Vedic Traditions

If all religions preach love, amity and peace, why are there so much hatred, strife and violence in the name of religion? This question has often baffled not just atheists and agnostics, but also quite a few devout souls. The short answer is that every religion wants unity of mankind under its own banner - the operative word here is ‘banner’ and not ‘unity.’ What is worded as a call for brotherhood of mankind is very often a call for the conquest of the world by the faithful. 

When Hindus come face to face with the behaviour pattern patented by followers of Islam and Christianity, some of them are often puzzled. “We respect their religious traditions, sacred books, prophets, messiahs and holy places as much as our own. We do not convert anyone. But they hold our traditions in contempt, indulge in senseless violence, destroy our sacred places and convert our people with force, fraud and allurement. Why should it be so?” Most people end up by concluding, mostly unconsciously, that people of other faiths are as a rule wicked, untrustworthy and prone to violence. This only deepens prejudices on either side. Since this is a sensitive matter, it is necessary to clear the ground by tracing the conflict to its roots. To put the matter brusquely, there are two types of religious traditions. One may be called the Biblical or Abrahamic tradition and the other, Vedic or Indic tradition.

Biblical creeds

The Bible-derived creeds are founded on a central figure (Jehovah, God, Allah or History) who commands the exclusive and overriding allegiance of the believers. He is jealous, cruel and brooks no rival. To equate or identify Him (e.g. Allah) with gods worshipped by people of other faiths (e.g. Rama or God of the Bible) is to insult him by denying his supremacy. He (e.g. Allah) is the only true god. All other godheads are usurpers, pretenders and impostors, and their worship, being a denial of the only true God, deserves to be stopped.  This only true god is not accessible to ordinary human beings. He deals with his people through an intermediary messenger, prophet or Sole Saviour. His teachings are contained in the Book. The Book is sole repository of Ultimate Truth. 

The Bible-derived creeds are founded on a central figure (Jehovah, God, Allah or History) who commands the exclusive and overriding allegiance of the believers. 

He is jealous, cruel and brooks no rival. To equate or identify Him (e.g. Allah) with gods worshipped by people of other faiths (e.g. Rama or God of the Bible) is to insult him by denying his supremacy.

(image source: toomanytribbles.blogspot.com).

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Thus in these creeds, there is only one Truth; there is only one way to it; the God has given it to the chosen people, and them alone; it is contained in ‘our’ Book and in ‘our’ Book alone. Since the Book is authored by God Himself, every word in it is true, excellent, immutable, and binding. The Book, al-kitab, is beyond the comprehension of most of even the believers, and certainly the non-believers. They must therefore heed the Church, the Priest. Faith in the Book is the overriding duty, as is the duty of making others ‘see the light.’ Since this is the absolute Truth, since it alone can lead to Heaven or permanent bliss, mankind must be awakened to it for its own good, at any cost, in whatever way. No sacrifice is too great for holding on to it; no means impermissible for converting others to it.

The exclusivist claims about the only true god, the prophet, the Saviour etc. are to be accepted on faith, on authority. A believer is not permitted to ask for proof or confirmation of the claims or contents of the book. Asking for proof which cannot be supplied is to show one’s lack of faith, a great disqualification. 

Since their entire edifice rests on unquestioning acceptance of the dogma or belief system, the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam as well as their secular variants like Nazism and Marxism - have always despised doubt, suspected reason and viewed science as a rival if not enemy. For them, testimony of the book is stronger than the proof of logic or testimony of experience.    

The very idea of an absolute monopoly of ultimate truth contains within itself seeds of intolerance, aggression, strife and authoritarianism. It is a charter of killing, destruction and subversion with a clean conscience. Within the Church or the Party, there will always be more than one claimant to this monopoly of truth. Outside, there are bound to be others who refuse to acknowledge the authority of the Church or the Party.

Vedic tradition 

The Vedic tradition, on the other hand, is founded on very different premises. The starting point of this tradition is human consciousness, which can be explored, which can be purified progressively, and which can be transcended till it attains the loftiest heights of knowledge and creativity. At this summit, the Self becomes one with the Universe and sees all things, animate and inanimate, in Himself and Himself in everything. In this vast vision, sanctity attaches not only to human life, but to the whole of creation. This is the sumum bonum of spiritual humanism, which has always been India ’s message to mankind. 

The Indic tradition teaches us that Man is the child of Light, that he grows from within, responding to what he secretly is. The quest for spiritual truths is innately ingrained in Man, just like hunger or thirst. These truths are not contained in or confined to a Book. On the contrary, they lie secretly in every human heart and have always been accessible to those who seek them. These truths never need any Jihad or Crusade for their spread and propagation. On the contrary, these truths are self-propagating due to their own inner strength. All they need is the dedication they inspire spontaneously in all those who invoke them. 

Yoga

The Vedic tradition advises people to be busy with themselves, that is, their own moral and spiritual improvement. No single individual, book or sect has a monopoly of a vision of or path to the Ultimate Reality. Several sages all over the world, in all ages, have attained it. They have put down approximate descriptions of that reality as well as hints of how to attain it in some books. These books are like travel guides. What matters is not the adherence to the travel guide, but to arrive at the Truth, to perceive and be one with the Reality.

These truths never need any Jihad or Crusade for their spread and propagation. 

Watch Introduction to Hinduism video - By Hinduism Today

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The Vedic tradition advises people to be busy with themselves, that is, their own moral and spiritual improvement. Several disciplines have been evolved for this purpose: tapas (austerity), yoga (meditation), jnana (reflection), bhakti (devotion), etc. A seeker can take to any path or discipline that suits his adhara (stage of moral-spiritual preparation). There is no uniform prescription for everybody, no coercion or allurement into a belief system, and no claim of merit for aggression against others. No single individual, book or sect has a monopoly of a vision of or path to the Ultimate Reality. Several sages all over the world, in all ages, have attained it. They have put down approximate descriptions of that reality as well as hints of how to attain it in some books. These books are like travel guides. What matters is not the adherence to the travel guide, but to arrive at the Truth, to perceive and be one with the Reality. Buddha cautioned his followers that they should not mistake his finger (his teachings) pointing at the moon for the moon itself.  

The Message and the Means

The essential points are three: First, it is the individual who has to strive for himself; second, different ways will suit different persons; and third, the striving, the search is directed inwards.  The Biblical tradition, on the other hand, teaches people to be busy with others. One is supposed to have become a superior human being as soon as one confesses the ‘only true faith.’ Thenceforward one stands qualified to ‘save’ others. The only training one needs thereafter is how to man a mission or military expedition, how to convert others, and how to kill or ruin or blacken those who refuse to come around. As the Message is the ‘Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth,’ as there is no truth beside it, those who do not accept the Message are cussed. Worse, they are thwarting the Will of God/Allah or the march of History (Marxism-Leninism). The believers, therefore, have a right as well as a duty to make them accept the Message, and if they refuse, to vanquish them altogether. Abrahamic religions therefore, are closer to ideologies of power than pathways to spiritual truth. They use the language of theology, but their objectives are political. They aim at conquest of the world by decimating other traditions, capturing territories, and converting people.    

The Indic tradition has given to the world many schools of Sanatana Dharma, which have practiced peace among their own followers as well as towards the followers of other paths. On the other hand, the Biblical tradition has spawned intolerant, aggressive and violent cults such as Christianity, Islam, Communism and Nazism, which have always produced brutal conflicts with the rest of the mankind, with one another, and even within their own ranks. 

The syrupy slogan of sarva-dharma-samabhava glosses over the basic differences between these two traditions. This has caused an enormous amount of confusion.    

(source: Religious conflict: Tracing the roots   - By Virendra Parekh - vijayvaani.com).

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The disaster of ‘me, me’
The rise of unfettered individualism and erosion of family

As India attempts to copy the West, it clearly misses the serious economic issues that confront West, thanks to its obsession with unfettered individual and human rights. Many in the West now seem to realise that continuously undermining the moral and social order has led to the present economic crisis. The West did not slide overnight. Beginning from the late 19th century, the Anglo-American West gradually moved away from a relation- based lifestyle to a contract-based lifestyle.

While culture and tradition govern relation, law and rights inhere in contracts.

And this move from relation to contracts became almost complete in the second half of the 20th century. With law overriding relations, even parents could not curb the rights of their wards once they legally matured.

Unbridled Human Rights And Unrestrained Personal Freedom

It is the other way. If they acted against their wards, the law would punish the parents for child abuse. So contracts replaced relations, and rule of law substituted for moral order. To what effect? The rise of unfettered individualism and undefined feminism have led to the erosion of families and a rise in divorces, singleparent families, unwed mothers, lesbians, gays and almost the collapse of traditional families. Over 50 per cent of the first marriages, 67 per cent of the second marriages, and 74 per cent of the third marriages end in divorce in the US . Over 40 per cent of births are outside wedlock. Almost half of the families are headed by a single parent.
The number is more in most of Europe . It was seen as cultural erosion first. But slowly it has turned into an economic disaster.

The contract-based model undermined families and led to low or no household savings, high personal debt, credit card based living, outsourcing of household functions including kitchen work. The erosion in relation-based lifestyle soon imposed a huge social security burden on the state because the family mechanism that supported the unemployed, infirm, aged and the rest and the state had to step in to aid them. Thus the family functions were taken over by the state. The families were nationalised. The overburdened state consequently had to shed its traditional functions, like public works, and privatise itself.

The socialisation of family functions obviated the need to save for a rainy day and led to even lower savings. With the growth of individualism to the exclusion of kinship and relations, corporates and the state alike promoted unrestrained consumerism. Result, some 110 millions US households have some 1.2 billion credit cards, almost a dozen cards per household.

Are the West’s current financial problems due to excessive emphasis on them?

As the people saved less and spent more, they got into trillions of dollars of private debt; and as the government spent more, it also ran into tens of trillions of dollars of public debt. The result is that the government is bankrupt and so households are insolvent. More, the US , the largest creditor nation of the world three decades ago, is today the number one debtor of the world, with $12.5 trillion of debt. A quick survey shows this: all individual- centric economies are deep in debt; but nations more family-oriented and less individual- centric, like Japan, China, India, and generally Asian nations, account for over three-fourths of global savings; the individualist West lives off the savings of family-centric Asia. Today the West says that, in the present crisis only Asia , which has huge savings thanks to family orientation, can save the West, which has almost lost its traditional family lifestyle.

So the idea of unbridled human rights and unrestrained personal freedom that have led to social and cultural degeneration are increasingly seen as the cause of the present economic crisis. Weeks ago, Thomas L Friedman, a leading economic journalist, wrote in the New York Times that he had told those eating in a restaurant that they could no more afford to eat out and they had better cook and eat at home. But how will they cook and eat at home unless families are re-created? If they do, how would the US compensate for loss of employment if restaurants, which exist because households have closed their kitchens, shut down? There seems to be no solution within economic laws to the present crisis of the West. Amoral economics once yielded higher returns. It now yields negative returns.

Here Renukas and Arundhatis advocate unbridled individualism that has undermined families and morals and dynamited the economies of the West. Renuka Chaudhary questions the idea public morals. Arundhati Roy advocates amoral living. Both seem unaware that an economy built at the cost of family and social morals, too collapses on the ruins of the morals it has brought down. QED: morality supports economics; lack of it ruins economies

(source: The disaster of ‘me, me’ - By S Gurumurthy New Indian Express, 26 Feb 2009).

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Gitmo (Guantanamo Bay) for guilty liberals

Poverty Porn

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Slumdog movie is about defaming Hindus

In keeping with American politics of the times, Slumdog Millionaire has been nominated for as many as 10 Oscars and our deracinated media, which constantly looks for inspirational ‘good news’ stories that invariably revolve around Western appreciation of ‘truthful’ portrayal of the Indian ‘reality’, has gone into a tizzy.

Presenting a distorted and perverted shape of India

How to sell your soul for a few 'Pee on Pagan' awards from the West

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Aravind Adiga and Vikas Swarup

Aravind Adiga crafted his novel in a manner that it could not but impress the Man Booker judges who see India as a seething mass of unwashed hordes which worship pagan gods, are trapped in caste-based prejudices, indulge in abominable practices like untouchability, and are not worthy of being considered as an emerging power, never mind economic growth and knowledge excellence.

Refer to The Waffle of the Toffs: A Socio Cultural Critique of Indian Writing in English - By M Prabha. 

Today, the reality is that anti-Hinduism has become the world's new anti-Semitism and will have similar disastrous consequences.

***

The larger point is not really about going gaga over an American award or a British prize, but how they are seen as India being admitted into the charmed circle whose membership is strictly controlled and is by invitation only. Aravind Adiga crafted his novel in a manner that it could not but impress the Man Booker judges who see India as a seething mass of unwashed hordes which worship pagan gods, are trapped in caste-based prejudices, indulge in abominable practices like untouchability, and are not worthy of being considered as an emerging power, never mind economic growth and knowledge excellence. Similarly, Danny Boyle has made a film that portrays every possible bias against India and structured it within the matrix of Western lib-left perceptions of the Indian ‘reality’ which have little or nothing in common with the real India in which we live.

Roland Joffe and Dominique Lapierre, author of City of Joy

The last time depravity was portrayed as the Indian ‘reality’ was when Roland Joffé did a cinematic version of Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy. In that film, the Missionaries of Charity were shown as the saviours of an India trapped in filth, squalor, poverty and Hindu superstition. Some two decades later, Boyle has rediscovered Joffé’s India and made appropriate changes to fit his film into the Hindu-bad-Muslim-good mould so that it has a resonance in today’s America. Islamic terrorism has almost wiped out the Hindu population in Kashmir. Hollywood should now turn the camera towards the joys of Muslims experiencing democracy (sic) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Muslim world.  

***

Therefore, it is not surprising that Boyle’s film is about a slum where extreme social exclusion, political suppression and economic deprivation define the lives of its inhabitants. He has made every effort to shock and awe the film’s audience by taking recourse to graphic and gory portrayal of bloodthirsty Hindu mobs on the rampage — the idiom that defines India as it is imagined by the lib-left Western mind — laying to waste Muslim lives (a Hindu is shown slitting a Muslim woman’s throat in an almost frame-by-frame remake of the videotape that was released by the killers of Daniel Pearl) and property. There’s more that makes you want to throw up the last meal you had: Hindu policemen torturing Muslims by giving them ‘electric shock therapy’, street children being physically disfigured and then forced to beg, and such other scenes of a medieval society where rule of law does not exist and every Hindu is a rapacious monster eager to make a feast of helpless Muslims.

The last time depravity was portrayed as the Indian ‘reality’ was when Roland Joffé did a cinematic version of Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy. In that film, the Missionaries of Charity were shown as the saviours of an India trapped in filth, squalor, poverty and Hindu superstition. Some two decades later, Boyle has rediscovered Joffé’s India and made appropriate changes to fit his film into the Hindu-bad-Muslim-good mould so that it has a resonance in today’s America .

(source: Slumdog is about defaming Hindus - By Kanchan Gupta - dailypioneer.com). Refer to India : Poverty, and clichés slumdog millionaire – By Francois Gautier. Refer to They've started calling Indians 'slumdogs' and Islamic terror and Massacre in Mumbai. Refer to Bengal Genocide and Muglistan and The Missionary Position: The Ideology of Mother Teresa and Survivors Network of those Abused by Christian Priests.  Watch  And the world remained silent – By Ashok Pandit and Islamic terror and Massacre in Mumbai

Christian Evangelist Producer Using Islam to Batter Hinduism  

Danny Boyle, maker of the film Slumdog Millionaire, is evidently a committed Christian, the kind who is usually keen to advance the interests of his faith. The agenda of his Catholic Church is to convert Hindu India into a Christian enclave like the Republic of Korea , which is apparently what Slumdog Millionaire wishes to further by portraying the grimly violent nature of Hindus.

And of course the West and their lowly scum politicians (from Lord Morley and Lord Wavell ro whippersnapper Miliband) have long used Islam as the battering ram with which to undermine Hindus.

This explains Boyle's espousal of the Teesta Setalvad version of the fate of Muslims in India in the film, also the excuse of Pakistanis terrorists for killing Hindus. I am glad Vikas Swarup made more than the standard thirty pieces of silver for selling India down the river since I remember him pretending to be a militant patriot when he was a diplomat in London . But, hey, the money, was too good to turn down and he got to become friends with the pucca, gora sahib and Hindu-baiter, extraordinaire William Dalrymple!

And of course the fierce evangelical NDTV and the execrable Barkha were all over Boyle earlier this evening.

(source: Christian Evangelist Producer Using Islam to Batter Hinduism ). Refer to Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle almost became a Catholic priest and Survivors Network of those Abused by Christian Priests 

Gutter Inspectors

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Selective manipulation of Third World squalor 

"When the British ruled India , they called Indians 'dogs'. Why do we want to call these poor children 'dogs' 60 years after we got independence?"

                                                             -   Nicholas Almeida activist.

Danny Boyle's film is sweeping up awards, but it's wrong to revel in the misery of India's children.

A few hours later I was wincing in my seat. The film opens with a scene of horrible violence: a man hanging from the ceiling of a police station, being tortured to unconsciousness, a trickle of blood running from his mouth. It moves swiftly into scenes of utter misery and depravity, in which small starving children are beaten, mutilated and perverted.  Mothers die horribly in front of their sons, small girls are turned into prostitutes, small boys into beggars. I hope it won't spoil the feel-good surprise if I tell you that one particularly sadistic scene shows a young boy having his eyes burnt out with acid to maximise the profits of street begging. 

White Man's Burden and Manifest Destiny

The movie is nothing but endorsement of an erstwhile imperial mindset of the West 

Gutter Inspectors:  Danny Boyle and Katherine Mayo, author of Mother India. The book was felt as an outrage, there was an around public condemnation of it in India, and perhaps elsewhere too, and Mahatma Gandhi called it “Drain Inspector’s Report.” 

Slumdog absolves the white man’s burden with game-show flash and shrillness. 

In one incident, our child-hero is beaten by the Indian (naturally) driver of a White American tourist. He weeps – “this is real India ,” and immediately his saviour peels off a US $ 10 bill, with the mantra: “this is real America, son.” (In real life, as the police in any Indian state will tell, paedophiles are made out of this Good Samaritan stuff; only Hollywood doesn’t know it). 

To make sure his point about Hindu devilry is not missed, director Boyle has a shot of a child dressed as Lord Rama, one of Hinduism’s most cherished gods. Imagine the outcry that would have resulted if Boyle had reversed the above: i.e., had a shot of a child dressed as prophet Mohammed or Jesus as Muslims/Christians hurried off to persecute members of another faith! But since Hindus seem oblivious to any and every insult, Boyle has not only gotten away with his blasphemies, but seems well on his way to awards and accolades.  

Therefore — as was in the days before the age of electronic media, when Katherine Mayo pioneered this whole process by her “Mother India,” followed by a truckload of works to the same ultimate aim and purpose was to defame India and Hinduism. The essential ‘masalas,’ the great Indian feast of cow-caste-curry is served before the champagne-caviar-and-red-carpet circuit at Cannes film festival. For an America that is experiencing what is possibly the worst recession in its history since the Great Depression, Slumdog Millionaire offers some relief from its own lethal cocktail of unemployment, unaffordable food, homelessness and increasing debt.  

Would Danny Boyle make a movie on this - Refer to Amen - an autobiography of a nun.

***

As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too. Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.

The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) has placed this work in the COMEDY genre.” Comedy? So maybe that's it: I just didn't get the joke.

An editorial in dnaindia.com, a Mumbai-based online newspaper, read: 

“The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the Western viewer... The awarding of the Booker Prize to The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in Western sensibilities. The White Tiger's victory left many Indians underwhelmed; who is to say that when Indian audiences finally see Slumdog they will not be equally put off?” 

As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.” 

Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.” Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.

When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours. 

(source: Shocked by Slumdog's poverty porn - By Alice Miles - timesonline.co.uk).  Refer to Survivors Network of those Abused by Christian Priests. Refer to British paedophiles make mockery of 'crackdown' - British paedophiles are defying a Government crackdown on sex tourism by travelling to Cambodia and sexually abusing children. Refer to The Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp and Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and Islamic terror and Massacre in Mumbai.  Refer to Slumdog Poverty in America - Diane Sawyer - abcnews.com

The Mis-Education of a Millionaire

Don’t expect the real India: Danny Boyle gives guilty liberals absolution through game-show gimmickry.

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Milllionaire is a stylized, excessively edited rags-to-riches goof about a little boy from the slums of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) who grows up to win 20 million rupees on the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?  Uniquely British in its TV-influenced ostentation, Slumdog is directed with attention-deficit compulsiveness like so much product from England’s advertising mills

Also uniquely British is the film’s blithe condescension about the dehumanizing conditions of the former colony. Slumdog absolves the white man’s burden with game-show flash and shrillness. 

Boyle’s response to poverty and degradation is to go pop: Dogme videographer Anthony Dod Mantle uses a festive range of colors that gives false vitality to the soul-deadening action. Teeming crowds, hustling con artists, smiley/treacherous child-abusers, ethnic rioters, outhouse jokes, chase scenes and gunplay are used for excitation and shock. There hasn’t been a social drama this decadently over-hyped since City of God. Boyle plays the same game of pandering to liberal sensibilities while entertaining safe, middle-class distance.

Over-stimulation crushes feeling; Boyle only evokes sentimentality. His cast of child actors is overly cute—for easy sympathy and for automatic horror when they’re shown being mutilated by adults who run a beggar/prostitution underground. This parallels the game-show interval where Jamal is tortured—beaten, waterboarded, hung-up, electrocuted—by the show’s host. A little Gitmo for guilty liberals. Boyle’s patronizing pattern is revealed when survival-minded Jamal swindles white tourists. “You wanted to see a bit of the real India? You’re in it!” he says. And the bleeding hearts respond, “Well here’s a bit of the real America” giving Jamal a hundred-dollar bill—his first taste of unexamined extortion. That ugly exchange typifies this anti-Darjeeling Limited. Boyle trades exploitation for schmaltz. Slumdog proves British cinema has a knack for producing TV-slick frauds: Boyle, Michael Winterbottom, Adrian Lyne, Tony and Ridley Scott. Their fancy misrepresentations disgrace Britain’s narrative legacy.

Boyle is a poverty pimp with an Avid.

(source: The Mis-Education of a Millionaire - By Armond White - nypress.com). 

Sign Petition - Protest movie 'Slumdog Millionaire'  

26 November 2008 and Slumdog Millionaire are the two most recent events that have put Mumbai on the map of world consciousness. There are striking similarities between both. Terrorist Ajmal Kasab grabbed the limelight when captured on CCTV, walking through parked trains at Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminal, shooting innocents. Slumdog hero Jamal Malik, by coincidence, is seen in the last shot at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, passing through one parked train after another to reach girlfriend Latika. Were Ajmal Kasab to see Slumdog, he would feel vindicated about his Mumbai killing spree. All propaganda elements used to lure Muslim youth towards terrorism are strangely present in the film. A riot by Hindus and exploitation by the rich and famous create hurdles in the way of Slumdog’s young hero.

Both events have conned the Indian people and left them to their fate. After 26 November, a false assumption that the world supports India in the war on terror has reassured the Indian people. After Slumdog’s Golden Globe, Indians similarly feel that world have recognized Indian creativity. Few understand the poor light in which Indian culture and poverty have been projected, and India denuded of self-respect.

The backdrop is Dharavi, Asia ’ largest slum, its street urchins, crime, abused and exploited children and child beggars, not to mention the ubiquitous underworld, its signature tune. But we also know that these slums are home to millions of dignified people fighting poverty, working hard and breaking through into the outside world. The slums are places of enterprise, small scale industry and innovative business that keep millions of families going. They have wonderful volunteers and social workers who may not be as richly funded as Mother Teresa, but provide genuine health care, education and opportunities. We are winning the war against misery and poverty because we keep hope alive.

Slumdog’s focus on the slums and the exploitation is unduly harsh and hopeless, missing the dignity of the poor and the checks and balances of Indian culture. The script seems to cater to a particular international mindset; hence the sinister plot to murder Mumbai a la 26 November. Danny Boyle shows us a very hellish Mumbai and does no justice to the unconquerable spirit of Mumbai. Indians are actually used to appreciating people rising from the ranks of the weak or under- privileged. Slumdog denied Indian society this credit, and in fact paints Indians as intolerant and anti-poor. An alien attitude, compatible to a Western audience, is projected upon India, to win accolades for a British director.

Escaping the gangster, our hero jumps into a running train and manages to reach the Taj Mahal. This is equated with arrival in heaven. In backdrop of the Taj Mahal, children are shown earning huge sums of money – actually the big dollar tips that generous White tourists mythically shower upon India ’s poor. In one incident, our child-hero is beaten by the Indian (naturally) driver of a White American tourist. He weeps – “this is real India ,” and immediately his saviour peels off a US $ 10 bill, with the mantra: “this is real America , son.” (In real life, as the police in any Indian state will tell, paedophiles are made out of this Good Samaritan stuff; only Hollywood doesn’t know it). 

Nowhere does the film showcase the tradition and modernity of a unique country where the two do not clash, as in many other societies. It prefers a slanted stress on poverty and exploitation, robbing in the process the dignity and commitment of poor Indians who are heroes in the real sense of the word. Slumdog has a sinister agenda; it is tailored to the prejudices of a western audience, to reinforce bias about India and particularly the so-called plight of its Muslim citizens. Hollywood should now turn the camera towards the joys of Muslims experiencing democracy (sic) in Afghanistan , Iraq , and other parts of the Muslim world.  

(source: Slumdog Millionaire: Another Husain? - By Himanshu Jain - vijayvaani.com). Refer to Bengal Genocide and Muglistan

Big B slams 'Slumdog Millionaire' on blog

Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has slammed Danny Boyle's Golden Globe award winning underdog drama "Slumdog Millionaire" for showing India in poor light. 

 "The commercial escapist world of Indian cinema had vociferously battled for years, on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray... and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass-oriented box office blockbusters that were being churned out from Mumbai.  "Ray portrayed reality. While, the other — escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice (film festivals)," he explained. He further wrote: "But look how rapidly all that is changing. Dedicated TV channels running Hindi cinema on prime timings. Premieres at Leicester Square (referring to 'Chandni Chowk To China'), the home of all Hollywood royalty, thronged by hundreds on the street in cold biting weather."

(source: Big B slams 'Slumdog Millionaire' on blog).  

Where Would Danny Boyle Be Without The Slums Of Mumbai!

It seems that the British are still longing for their lost colonial glory, the prestige, the wealth, the power, and above all, the right to claim ownership for more than one-fifth of the world’s population. That is what they miss the most when a Brit says, “we lost India .” 

India was and is a hierarchical society, and so is the old and new Britain, with its aristocracy, and class-conscious citizens. India was more than a colony; it was the “crown Jewel” of the British Empire . India was the symbol of British colonial hegemony over millions of natives across the globe. 

As the African slaves were the source of labor in the British colonies in America and the Caribbean, Indian indentured laborers were recruited for other colonies in Asia and Africa , where British Mercantile capitalists had large plantation and mining industries. After 60 years of independence from Britain , entrepreneurial Englishmen still keep coming to India looking for their fortunes! 

(source: Where Would Danny Boyle Be Without The Slums Of Mumbai!  - By By S. Hewage - indianrealist.wordpress.com).  

The Legendary wealth of India
To Shake the Pagoda Tree

Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeran (1760-1842) German historian and Egyptologist has observed:

“India has been celebrated even in the earliest times for her riches.”  

The wealth, splendor and prosperity of India had made a strong impression on the mind of Alexander the Great, and that when he left Persia for India, he told his army that they were starting for that “Golden India” where there was endless wealth, and that what they had seen in Persia was as nothing compared to the riches of India. Chamber’s Encyclopedia says” “India has been celebrated during many ages for its wealth.” The writer of the article “Hindustan” in the Encyclopedia Britannica remarks that India “was naturally reputed to be the seat of immense riches.” 

Milton voiced the popular belief when he sang of the wealth of India: 

“High on a throne of royal state which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind (India)
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric, pearl and gold.”   

According to Economist Angus Maddison (1926 - ) in The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, the region that today comprises the Indian subcontinent held the largest share of the world's gross domestic product until the beginning of the 16th century, when it was rivaled by China, and then again throughout most of the 18th century.  At the end of the 16th century, India's great wealth sustained a population of more than one hundred million people. 

In "India, the Silicon Jewel of the East" (Digital Journal, May 13, 2004), Paul William Roberts states, "There was an abundance of arable land, and the state of Indian agriculture compared favorably with any of the Western European countries. Right down to the subsistence-oriented peasant, everyone saw a good return on land and labor. There was a large and vigorous skilled workforce turning out not just cotton but luxury items for the barons, courts and ruling classes. Consequently, the economy produced a fabulous financial surplus." 

Refer to chapter on Hindu Culture and Glimpses XII and European Imperialism

Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (1842-1936) American born, former President of the India Information Bureau of America and Editor of Young India (New York). Author of India, America and World Brotherhood, and Causes of Famine in India. He has written glowingly about India's culture: 

"Another cause of India 's impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures, as the result of British rule. When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. "

"The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia but in all the leading markets of Northern Africa and of Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part they are gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which they were carried on are now largely or wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by them have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India 's markets. She could not find entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured the market for her own goods. India would have protected herself if she had been able, by enacting tariff laws favorable to Indian interests, but she had no power, she was at the mercy of her conqueror."

(source: The New Nationalist Movement in India - By Jabez T Sutherland - theatlantic.com). Refer to European Imperialism

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“Great Insights” of P. Chidambaram

P. Chidambaram (1945 - ) has liked “Slumdog Millionaire” and now is asking all Indians to feel “inspired” by it. He has seen nothing wrong with the movie, its racial prejudice and its stereotyping of India as a land of unspeakable poverty, horrors, oppression, squalor and crime. The movie shows this as the “reality” of India . And to rub salt into our wounds, Chidambaram is asking us to feel “inspired” with this image of our country that has been projected to the whole world!

But then, Chidambaram is the same “leader” who had said that India was never a rich country ! "India was a country where rivers of milk and honey used to flow, is a great historical myth, believes Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram.  “The poverty has always been there in India and whoever propounded the myth about India being a rich country is wrong,” he said. The old teaching that India was a country of milk and honey about five centuries ago was factually incorrect, Chidamabaram said. “Poverty was there and is still there in India , though prosperous pockets existed here and there,” he said. 
 
The finance minister said the books that propounded the glorious past of India were liable to be burnt. 

Perhaps he needs to be reminded that Babar, who called India Sone ki Chidiya.

(source: “Great Insights” of P. Chidambaram - indianrealist.com).  

Congress counts 8 Oscars as part of UPA `achievements'

India has been governed by Congress governments (or Congress led governments) for most of its existence. 

Keen to be part of the euphoric `Slumdog’ bandwagon, Congress has counted the eight Oscars as part of the UPA’s `achievements’. The party lost no time in claiming credit for the `Indian triumph’ and hinted that good times had come with the UPA government. 

Slumdog just reinforces all the old Negative stereotypes

Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh. 

India has been governed by Congress governments (or Congress led governments) for most of its existence. The governments of India are really slumlord billionaires. They did create slums and made billions.

So, when we are celebrating the laurels of our achievers, we should also ponder the negativity of the film. Those who saw the film would think of India as a country of dirt and filth, ridden with poverty, where violence and deceit are the key to success and where girls are often taken to brothels. Today, the reality is that anti-Hinduism has become the world's new anti-Semitism and will have similar disastrous consequences.  

***

Danny Boyle is not Indian though the slums most certainly are. So I suppose anyone claiming credit for the Oscars won by a movie set in the Mumbai slums is proudly displaying their role in creating the slums that made the movie possible.

Slums are one of the many visible consequence of extreme urban poverty. Poverty is one of the most predictable consequence of failed economic policies. Economic policies are dictated by governments. India has been governed by Congress governments (or Congress led governments) for most of its existence. People at the helm of the various governments of India have over the decades made tens of billions of dollars and created the conditions for over half a billion people to have to survive in less than a dollar a day. The governments of India are really slumlord billionaires. They did create slums and made billions.

(source: Slumlord Billionaire and Congress counts 8 Oscars as part of UPA `achievements').

Mock India for the viewing pleasure of the First World

***

Don’t see “Slumdog Millionaire”. It sucks!

A phony poseur that has been made only to mock India for the viewing pleasure of the First World !!  

The emperor’s new clothes! That’s “Slumdog Millionaire” for you… Five minutes into this celebrated patchwork of illogical clichés and you are struck by the jarring dialogues. The cumbersome delivery in a language which doesn’t come naturally to most of the actors sounds like someone scratching on walls with one’s finger nails; it ruins the possibility of a connection… Had this film been made by an Indian director, it would’ve been trashed as a rotting old hat, which literally stands out only because of its stench, but since the man making it happens to be from the West, we’re all left celebrating the emperor’s new clothes. The film borrows an undoubtedly interesting narrative style – from films like “City of God ” – but then uses it to weave in a collection of clichés from the Third World’s underbelly for the viewing pleasure of a First World audience. The real slumdog in the movie is not the main protagonist but India as a whole… The makers and those celebrating this movie’s hard-to-spot brilliance are actually serving up India as the accidental millionaire, which in fact happens to be a slumdog… and like shameless fools we are gloating over its success without realising that it makes a caricature out of India .

The real slumdogs who’ve hit the jackpot after wallowing in acres of human waste are the makers of this film who are now raking in millions while those court jesters who’ve critiqued the film and showered tributes and awards need to ask themselves why, scores of years after our independence, they still feel the need to suck up to the gora sahibs.

The rest of the film is just a modern version of the West’s view of India where slums, slumdogs and Bollywoodian clichés have replaced the elephants and snake charmers. But the fact is that the film’s entire narration seems like the germination of a terribly sadistic and complex mind with the sole aim of satisfying the western idea of India.

And the awards almost seem like a sadistic effort to show the world – look we knew that this was India , and these are the slumdogs we are outsourcing our jobs to. It stinks of racial arrogance and it’s such a shame now on second thought to see the Indian faces – including that of the undoubted master, AR Rahman - celebrating its success.

When the West wanted Indians to embrace them and their companies to come to India and capture the lucrative markets, suddenly we had all the Indian women, some very beautiful and some not necessarily so, winning all the Miss Universe and Miss Worlds. Today, they are in a crisis and India is looking unstoppable despite its slums and poverty, and they are losing their businesses to us. Isn’t it the best time to paint India as the Slumdog Millionaire?? All in all, the film is nothing but an endorsement of an erstwhile imperial mindset of the West and its blinkered vision of India . An English master has made an Indian slumdog. Don’t even waste your time watching this film in the theatres. It sucks and there is nothing great in it as a film too. Amitabh Bachchan was spot on when he said that Bollywood has made far better mainstream films. Take out a DVD of one of his old films instead…

(source: Don’t see “Slumdog Millionaire”. It sucks! - By Arindam Chaudhuri).

Damn the Hindus to win global awards

With everyone singing hosannas to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, let me offer an alternative perspective. This film targets the easiest of targets: the average placid Hindu. The hero is, of course, a Muslim in India, whose mother is burned to death by an attack on Muslims by barbaric, fanatical Hindu mobs. No need for subtlety in either dialogue or depiction here; the Hindu mob says: “They are Muslims. Let us hit them,” and the hapless Muslims cry as they flee in terror: “The Hindus are coming! The Hindus are coming.”  

Refer to Lord Vitthal Temple of Pandharpur under threat from terrorists! and Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits  - By Aditya Raj Kaul. Refer to Bengal Genocide and Muglistan

To make sure his point about Hindu devilry is not missed, director Boyle has a shot of a child dressed as Rama, one of Hinduism’s most cherished gods. Imagine the outcry that would have resulted if Boyle had reversed the above: i.e., had a shot of a child dressed as prophet Mohammed or Jesus as Muslims/Christians hurried off to persecute members of another faith! But since Hindus seem oblivious to any and every insult, Boyle has not only gotten away with his blasphemies, but seems well on his way to awards and accolades.  

The sledgehammer hits against Hindus and Hinduism does not end there. On the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the Muslim hero is asked a question by the TV host: “What weapons does Lord Rama bear in his hands?” Our Muslim hero answers: “If there was no Rama, my mother would have been alive.” Again, imagine the outcry that would have resulted if the hero was a Hindu from Kashmir (Islamic terrorism has almost wiped out the Hindu population in Kashmir) and he had said: “If there was no Allah, my mother would be alive.” 

Watch  And the world remained silent – By Ashok Pandit and Islamic terror and Massacre in Mumbai

Today Hindus are hounded and ridiculed in their country thanks to a perverted form of Secularism

Lord Ram

Boyle is being feted and felicitated, because most Hindus have been too cowed by hundreds of years of Mogul invasions and British rule and subsequent Christian conversions to feel any sense of pride in their faith or outrage when their beliefs and Gods are blasphemed. And since the average Hindu is without pride—or a clue, for that matter—we have become the easiest of targets. There will be no “fatwas” against Boyle and his cast and crew, no protests or organized expression of outrage by Hindus against his producers and distributors. Indeed, most Hindus would be delighted that a white man has made a film about their country. After all, any attention from whites and the Western media—even of the most viciously negative sort—must be good!  

Few understand the poor light in which Indian culture and poverty have been projected, and India denuded of self-respect.  Today, the reality is that anti-Hinduism has become the world's new anti-Semitism and will have similar disastrous consequences.

***

I have picked just two of many blasphemies from Boyle’s film. And he is being feted and felicitated, because most Hindus have been too cowed by hundreds of years of Mogul invasions and British rule and subsequent Christian conversions to feel any sense of pride in their faith or outrage when their beliefs and Gods are blasphemed. We take no pride in India being a secular democracy—for Hinduism openly sheltering, over thousands of years, Christians and Jews from Syria and Persia, who fled Islamic persecution; Parsis who fled Muslim persecution for worshiping Zoroaster; Armenians who fled the Turks, and now Tibetans fleeing China. We take no pride in the fact that our faith does not ask us to proselytize or convert anyone else, nor are we proud that Hindus have never waged wars or invaded any other country in the name of religion. We give no credit to our religion for having the open-mindedness to give freedom of worship to others who believe differently, so that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahais, Jains, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and others can rightly call India their home.

And since the average Hindu is without pride—or a clue, for that matter—we have become the easiest of targets. There will be no “fatwas” against Boyle and his cast and crew, no protests or organized expression of outrage by Hindus against his producers and distributors. Indeed, most Hindus would be delighted that a white man has made a film about their country. After all, any attention from whites and the Western media—even of the most viciously negative sort—must be good!

(source:  Damn the Hindus to win global awards - greathindu.com). 

Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise?

Sitting inside a crowded movie theatre in Nariman Point, South Mumbai surrounded by other pasty-skinned foreigners and a few overtly wealthy Indians, I was forced to stifle an audible groan. Enough was enough. For an hour and a half (and for Rs 250), I had watched a right proper Brit and a middle-class Mumbaikar stumble through cheesy dialogue, all the while pretending to represent the Mumbai slums.

'It's official,' I thought. 'Slumdog Millionaire is massively disappointing. It's inauthentic and vain. And it's making a mockery of Hollywood 's annual awards season.'  The realisation saddened me because I tried hard to like the film. Desperately, in fact. From the moment I had first heard of acclaimed director Danny Boyle's plan to shoot a movie in India , I positively swooned. 'My India , my Mumbai, no longer a crude caricature!' I had gushed. 'The world will finally see her as she is!'

During the horror of 26/11, (refer to Islamic terror and Massacre in Mumbai) while Western film critics instructed the laity to 'see Slumdog Millionaire in order to better understand this benighted Asian metropolis', I consoled myself by conjuring up images of packed American theatres, where attentive US movie-goers could receive a genuine taste of Mumbai. So when Indian friends pronounced themselves 'woefully underwhelmed' with the 'overrated' film, I dismissed their opinions and instead turned to glowing reviews in the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and others.  An earnest, talented outsider's cursory glance at Mumbai slum-life. But the best film of 2008? Worthy of all the awards and accolades that Hollywood has to offer? Hardly. And why in the world has Simon Beaufoy been award for best screenplay? It's terrible, worse than bad, more full of holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

It was the absurdity of slum-kids knowing all about Samuel Colt, the completely inauthentic (and clich�d) call-centre scenes, the bizarrely callous game show host, the indifferent studio audience, the implausibility of a hardened Mumbai gangster asking for a sandwich, the doubtful CST rendezvous (Ever seen CST at 5 pm? The phrase 'needle in a haystack' comes to mind), the ubiquitous Queen's English, the improbability of a fully-clad mini-Ram ready to wage war on Mumbai's Muslims. But, most of all, it was the disastrous performance of the lead actor, Dev Patel.

For starters, his Jamal couldn't be any more British if he tried. Apparently, having brown skin was the only pre-requisite for taking on the role. Never mind the accent. What resulted, naturally, was a completely unbelievable character. Every single thing he did rang hollow: every piece of dialogue, every bit of action, everything. Let's be honest. Dev Patel wouldn't last five minutes in a Mumbai slum.

One of the first negative reviews of Slumdog I read was from the blog The Great Bong, who absolutely lacerated it. In it, the blogger wrote, "Well yes these things do happen in India . However the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India for the sake of crowd pleasing."

He goes on to propose a film about an outlandish string of events happening to an African-American boy in the US, and says, "Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the 'American experience' and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn't be on 94 percent on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favourite."

He's right. Say an Indian director travelled to New Orleans for a few months to film a movie about Jamal Martin, an impoverished African American who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, who once had a promising basketball career, but who -- following a drive-by shooting -- now walks with a permanent limp, whose father is in jail for selling drugs, whose mother is addicted to crack cocaine, whose younger sister was killed by gang-violence, whose brother was arrested by corrupt cops, whose first born child has sickle cell anaemia, and so on. The movie would be widely panned and laughed out of theatres.

That, to me, is Slumdog Millionaire: contrived, pretentious, absurd, hollow, inauthentic, a pseudo-statement about social justice. And yet today the film stands on the precipice of Hollywood 's highest honour, the Academy Award for Best Picture.

(source: Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise? - By Matthew Schneeberge - rediff.com).

Salman Rushdie slams 'Slumdog'

India-born "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie is not impressed by the triumph of "Slumdog Millionaire" at the 81st Academy Awards and says the movie "piles impossibility on impossibility". In a speech at Atlanta 's Emory University , Rushdie called the book and movie nothing more than "feel-good". He also complained about various portions of the narrative, from how characters manage to acquire a gun in India to how they mysteriously wind up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles away from the previous scene. This isn't the first time that "Slumdog Millionaire" has felt the lash of Rushdie's tongue, Examiner.com said, noting that in January he told the New York Times: "I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire'." "I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the storyline. I find the storyline unconvincing. It just couldn't happen. I'm not adverse to magic realism but there has to be a level of plausibility, and I felt there were three or four moments in the film where the storyline breached that rule," he said.  

(source:  Salman Rushdie slams 'Slumdog' - samachar.com).

British Racism: Now we are slumdogs instead of coolies

The “grand success” of SDM has had one benefit for Indians: now we have begun to be abused as ’slumdogs’ all over the world. Abuses such as “Pakis” and “coolies” have become old-fashioned. Now we are greeted with the shouts of: “Hey you bloody slumdog, step out of the way!”

It is disgusting to see the frothing-in-the-mouth of Anil Kapoor who is delirious with joy and running all around the world grinning ear to ear at his “success.” If there is actually a coolie in India , it is him. But wait a minute. On second thoughts, there may be another one. Congratulating the ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and “Smile Pinky’ team for winning Oscars, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the “winners have done India proud” and their achievement is a tribute to the Indian film industry. 

(source: Now we are slumdogs instead of coolies and Slumdog and Malignant Western Narcissism). Refer to Poverty Porn and British Racism.

Slumdogs and fat cat bankers

Mesmerised by the cinematic kitsch of Mumbai's underbelly, Americans are seeking palliatives to the horror stories tumbling out of the Byzantine world of investment banking.

The eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire -- three of these going to a couple of true blue Indians -- for a romanticised Dickensian tale of a vile Fagin, exploited children and an uncaring system comes as the perfect stardust for a country seeking to gloss over the cruel realities of its 21st-century poverty and joblessness, a predicament made worse by the deepening global recession.

Thus, entire front pages have been given over to the delirium of watching the Indian slumdog arrive on the international stage, never mind that the portrayal is as savage as you can get in an oddly prettified plot.

For an America that is experiencing what is possibly the worst recession in its history since the Great Depression, Slumdog Millionaire offers some relief from its own lethal cocktail of unemployment, unaffordable food, homelessness and increasing debt. For them, specially the legion who have lost their homes in the property market crash, real life characters like John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch and Co, who couldn't work without a $1,400 wastebasket in his office and a $35,000 commode in his toilet, are probably harder to stomach than the impeccably British-accented Jamal Malik who tries to pass off as an unlettered chaiwallah (tea boy) and hops from one implausible situation to the next with all the aplomb of an Etonian before winning Rs 2 crore (Rs 20 million) in a game show. 

The Bollywood-style melodrama is as superficial a slice of India as you can get although its makers claim to be reflecting the joyous spirit of the slum dwellers.

It's not surprising that the euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire is limited to the mainstream media and the upper classes. Collections in India show that the movie hasn't been a hit, and its Hindi version almost a flop.

(source: Slumdogs and fat cat bankers - By Latha Jishnu - rediff.com).

Reflections on Slumdog Millionaire

Despite the hoopla in some circles about Slumdog Millionaire, I find it a disturbing film: empty-headed in one way, and malicious in others. Slumdog Millionaire treats the poor as disposable cartoon-characters to be ill-treated and tortured; of course, they also break into song at convenient moments.

There is no such redeeming virtue in Slumdog, which is unapologetic about graphic violence. There is a harrowing scene where a young child has his eyes burnt out with acid. There is a similar scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom , set in fascist Italy , where a handsome young man’s eyeball is gouged out. Salo is one of the most brutal and horrifying films ever made: and it was intended to be so, in a Brechtian way – the viewer was supposed to be horrified at man’s capacity for evil.

Perhaps Danny Boyle imagines he is following in Pasolini’s footsteps when he portrays Mumbai as a living hell. Is this film, similarly, an indictment of India ? Is there more to the film than an exercise in artistry? Is it purely coincidental that it carries an eerie echo of the official position of the British government, as recently articulated by their Foreign Minister David Miliband, on a visit to India ?  

(Refer to Don't attack us please, UK ads to say on Pak TV).

Let us be charitable and assume that Boyle wanted to condemn whatever it is in India that has caused this abject poverty to happen and continue. Who were the culprits? Ironically, it was British imperialists who beggared a hitherto prosperous India by “borrowing” capital that is worth $10 trillion — yes, trillion — in today’s terms. 

Besides, tens of millions of Indians were starved to death by uncaring British imperialists, as graphically described in Mike Davis’ Great Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World . Perhaps this would be a good time to ask Britain for reparations?

And who has kept 250 million Indians in poverty even after the imperialists left in 1947? Why, the Congress, and the Communists! Through mind-numbingly idiotic schemes whose main result was the large-scale transfer of public wealth to private hands, the Congress and the Communists, through sixty years of their rule, have successfully prevented a large number of Indians from rising from poverty. So Boyle is targeting the true villains.

Danny Boyle’s target – everybody’s soft target, because it does not retaliate with violence – is Hinduism.

This is similar to how Deepa Mehta and Shabana Azmi dissembled about their use of the names “Sita” and “Radha” – names pregnant with meaning for Hindus – in the over-rated film “Fire”.

There is a tendency among the British to stereotype and demonize Hindus in particular and Indians in general. For some reason, this is welcomed with nothing short of rapture by a section of the media and the self-proclaimed “intelligentsia” of New Delhi . There is, for instance, a second-rate historian who routinely thunders against Hindus. The level of his incompetence was exposed in a BBC film where he suggested that the Christian apostle Thomas “could have” come to India . Well, he didn’t – and history is generally about what happened, not what “could possibly have” happened.

One is that the British always found it easier to relate to Mohammedans, because both thought of themselves as natural conquerors. British rule was also heavily influenced by the Church, as is documented in Suhash Chakravarty’s brilliant study The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions. The Christian British found Hindus incomprehensible, and this continues to this day.

Danny Boyle, on the other hand, doesn’t matter. He may get his Oscar, and he may make his next film about the man, somewhere in the US , who kidnapped a teenage hitchhiker, raped her, cut off both her hands, and left her to bleed to death. The girl, somehow, survived. Or about the man in Austria who kept his daughter captive in his basement for twenty-four years, raped and impregnated her repeatedly, and fathered seven children with her. Or about those teenage-runaway-junkie-hookers in San Francisco ’s Tenderloin district, who accost passers-by with a drug-dazed “Wanna party?” Their lives are unlikely to be better than what the New York Times reports about teenage prostitutes in Cambodia.

(source: Reflections on Slumdog Millionaire - By Rajeev Srinivasan).

Rush Limbaugh US radio host: Indians are 'slumdogs'

On April 10, while discussing the outsourcing of jobs from America , Limbaugh viciously insulted India and her citizens, inanely referencing the Danny Boyle smash-hit film Slumdog Millionaire to make his point.

"There's a reason [these jobs] aren't coming back. They're outsourced for a reason, an economic reason, and they're not coming back," Limbaugh said while speaking to a caller named Terry from Ohio . "If you're sitting out waiting for a job that's now being done by a slumdog in India , and you're waiting for that job to be cancelled, for the slumdog to be thrown out of work, and you to get the job, it ain't going to happen. It's not the way economics works."

(source: US radio host: Indians are 'slumdogs' - rediff.com).

Slumdog Millionaire: the prejudice continues?

But contemporary film making seems to have appreciated little of these ground realities; instead we find a rehash of the old and improbable rags to riches story in an ultra-regressive style. A magnificent Mumbai slum, two Muslim brothers, a Hindu mob killing innocent Muslim women, criminally amputated children singing Surdas"s songs, Hindu policemen torturing an innocent Muslim boy and a diabolic Hindu game-show host who hands his Muslim contestant to his Hindu police which hates the Amnesty international, and voila, you have all the ingredients for a "secular" potboiler which is on the road to the Oscars! You might argue that it"s not realistic but only fantasy since there is greater probability of winning the jackpot on a lottery ticket without being abused by the police than winning the top prize on a quiz show with 15 unique questions.

But then you can be kidding with the graphic depiction of blood curdling anti Muslim riot in which a Hindu mob slits the children"s mother, the Indian policeman electrocuting the Muslim suspect or the gory scene of the amputation of the street children by the mafia who are then forced to sing Surdas"s bhajans. The book by Vikas Swarup has the main protagonist named as Ram Mohammad Thomas who was conveniently transformed into a Muslim boy, Jamal Malik who lost his mother to a Hindu mob to make it sound in the author"s own confession more "politically correct."

This ostentatious display of anti Hindu sentiment is of course lost on the jingoists or those ABCDs who go gaga over such pernicious cinema. Sincere critics questioning the dumb plot where a slum boy grows up into a sophisticated leftist JNU product with a flawless English accent are censured by appealing to the authority of the Golden globe awards.

(source:  Slumdog Millionaire: the prejudice continues? - By Saurav Basu - indiacause.com). 

Is India still the 'slumdog' for the West?

SlumDog Millionaire has won over the Western audiences with its 'fairy tale in a Mumbai slum' storyline but back home the film has opened up a heated debate about the stereotyped representation of India and Mumbai in the Western films.

But despite the astounding success achieved by the film, which is being touted as the next big winner at the Oscars, Bishakha Dutta, a documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai, is articulate about her disappointment with the much-hyped film. She says, "The film takes each and every cliche there is about India and Mumbai and puts it in its plot. The result is a film that takes you from one horror of Mumbai to another, in a plot that is incredulously unbelievable."

(source: Is India still the 'slumdog' for the West? - rediff.com).

They've started calling Indians 'slumdogs'

Bollywood composer Aadesh Srivastava says he is embarrassed to walk on the streets of the US after Oscar-nominated 'Slumdog Millionaire' because 'they have started calling Indians slumdogs'.

'I'm so upset. They've started calling Indians 'slumdogs', just like 'coolie' was a 'slang' in Britain . Now in the US I feel slumdog is a 'gaali' (slang) for Indians. Mumbai has given me everything,' Srivastava told.

'To see the city being shown as a place of dirt, filth and crime only is very humiliating. Even I can make a film on child prostitution and paedophilia. But it won't get Oscars because I am not a 'gora' (white),' added the composer.

Refer to Survivors Network of those Abused by Christian Priests

The film was lauded in the West, but it has been criticised by some in India for showing its ugly side by concentrating on grinding poverty.

'What right does the director have to show Mumbai as a slum? Now we are considered a slum city in all parts of the world. Humlog kahin mooh dikhane laayak nahin rahe (we're unable to show our face anywhere),' said Srivastava, who watched the movie in Los Angeles this week.

Srivastava applauds fellow composer Rahman's music in the movie, but says he'd never be part of a film that makes India look like a slum. 'I'm so upset. It's a disgusting movie. Being an Indian it was doubly humiliating to be watching the film with Americans. Even if Steven Spielberg asked me to compose music for a film that makes fun of India , I won't do it,' he said. Being a diehard Amitabh Bachchan fan, Srivastava is appalled by the way the Big B is shown in the film. 'I puked when I saw that kid smeared in shit asking for Bachchan saab's autograph. What the f...k was that? Does Danny Boyle know what Bachchan saab means to us Indians? Who would dare approach him like that? 

'We applaud people who come to our city and spit in our faces!' he said.

(source: They've started calling Indians 'slumdogs': Aadesh Srivastava - musicindiaonline.com).

India : Poverty, and clichés slumdog millionaire – By Francois Gautier

Why, as a film Slumdog Millionaire, which conveys a negative image of India - slums, exploitation, poverty, corruption, anti Muslim pogroms – meeting the so successful in the West?

There are several answers:

1. When the missionaries began to evangelize India, they quickly realized that Hinduism was a religion that was not only practiced by a huge majority, but it was deeply rooted in the mentality of Indians. They therefore decided to blacken the 'defects' of the Hindu religion, by multiplying by one hundred: caste, poverty, child marriage, superstition, sort of widows, sati ... Today, these stereotypes persist and focus on the 'image we have of India . 

2. We, Westerners continue to suffer from a superiority complex in relation to peoples of the Third World in general and India in particular. Sitting in front of our television time information, a steak frites before us, we like to feel sorry for the misery of others, it flatters our ego. That is why books such as the City of Joy Dominique Lapierre , which give the impression that India is a vast slum, or a film Slumdog Millionaire, deftly handling the half-lies, have a such impact.

3. In this film, the enemies of India join hands. Today, billions of dollars that gullible parishioners give to charity used to convert the poorest in India . Once converted, they are taught to hate their culture, their religion, thus creating an imbalance in the Indian psyche. Islamic fundamentalism ruthlessly hounds also against India , as demonstrated by the recent bombings in Mumbai. Indian communists are in power in three states, made alliance with the Adventists (and other radical Protestant sects) and the fundamentalist Muslims against Hindus. And finally, the over-Americanization also seriously social and cultural capital of India . Slumdog plays on all these pictures of a misleading way.

4. Closer to home, in France, French Indian, played by researchers in South Asia of CNRS, and its affiliates such as EHESS, has often been the vehicle for misérabilisme: caste, poverty and of 'denial': the 'Hindu fundamentalism'. Can be done most glaring contradiction? Hinduism has shown throughout its history a remarkable tolerance to the Christians of Syria, Arab merchants, the Parsees of Zoroaster, the Jews of Jerusalem, persecuted at home, to settle in India and 'practice their religion freely. At the beginning of the film, Jamal's mother has throat cut by Hindu fanatics. But it is the Muslims who slaughter live a Daniel Pearl and broadcast the film on the internet - never the Hindus. Riots in India are always initiated by the Muslims: the anti-pogroms in Gujarat were triggered because 59 Hindus, including 36 women and children, were burned as in dogs in a train by a mob of Muslims.

5. And finally, it is true that the Indians, because they have been colonized for so long (unlike the Chinese) do not have a lot of national pride and are sometimes even proud of being criticized. Today much of the intellectual elite of India has lost touch with its cultural roots as well as spiritual and only look to the West to solve its problems, ignoring its own tools, which are very old and possess infinite wisdom . It is the eternal history of the colonized become more sectarian than the settlers.

How else that Slumdog Millionaire, which literally defecating on India from the first frame (a child who plunges into a sea of crap to get an autograph of Amitabh Bacchan), is a tobacco? Some scenes from the film are, however, in the perverted imagery of director Danny Boyle, because we can not find them in the book by Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat, whose film is based. The hero of the film (which is not Muslim, but many religions: Ram Mohammad Thomas) does not pass his childhood in Bombay , but in a Catholic orphanage in Delhi . Jamal's mother is not killed by "Hindu fanatics' in the book, but she abandons her baby, of unknown religion in a church. Jamal torture is not a television presenter, but an American who wants the Russian who bought the television rights of the game. The scene of tears three children abandoned in the rain is also not in the book. Jamal and his heroine from colliding when they are teenagers and they live in an apartment and not in a slum.

(source: India : Poverty, and clichés slumdog millionaire – By Francois Gautier).

Slumdog and Western Narcissism

“Slumdog Millionaire” belongs to the genre of movies like “city of joy”, “fire” and “Mr and Mrs Iyer.” It is another reinforcement of the western “manifest destiny” or “white-man’s-burden” view of India – the constructed image of the “other” that the narcissistic civilization that is the “west” needs in the process of defining its own self.

Colonized peoples in all cultures and all times in history, (whether politically colonized or remaining colonized at the psychological level after the political colonization has ended) must be constructed in terms that the colonizer can comprehend and control: in the case of India and Hindus — as irrational, obscurantist, superstitious, primitive, divisive, territorial, violent, destructive — and therefore, poverty-ridden, downtrodden, immoral, corrupt — and therefore — in the ultimate analysis, unfit for self-determination or self-rule.

This basic process of imagining the other remains the foundation for present-day economic-cultural imperialism via “manifest destiny” as it was during the euro-colonial era via the “white-man’s-burden.”

Therefore — as was in the days before the age of electronic media, when Katherine Mayo pioneered this whole process by her “Mother India,” followed by a truckload of works to the same ultimate aim and purpose – the film medium, with a more instant and wider reach and many times more visual, verbal and vital effect, must be put to full use – either by the west itself, represented by likes of Dominique lapierre, Richard Attenborough, or — now — Danny Boyle, or by the “native informants” of the west — the purchased cultural prostitutes in the form of Deepa Mehta, Aparna Sen, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and the like. And the “money” used for the purchasing are typically “critical acclaims”, “awards”, “reviews” and “film-festival-entries.”

(1) The slum — the foremost basic ingredient, complete with lepers, beggars, naked urchins, goons, horribly amputated sub-human humans begging by singing Surdas or Meera bhajans (read: in the name of Hinduism) etc. – must be first used in liberal amounts.

(2) Muslims = the victims and Hindus = unprovoked aggressors;

(3) Muslims = secular and suffering and Hindus = the powerful hostile majority;

(4) Authorities (policemen) picking on Muslims = Hindu = Hindutva misrule and minority oppression;

(5) Riot victims = always Muslims (to be shown as always in panic or running mode) – thereby successfully reinforcing Hindu India into a hostile, savage jungle where minority lambs and sheep have to spend their entire lives constantly running and trying to hide;

(6) Christian nuns = benevolent rescuers, selfless servers and constantly in the risk of getting raped anytime. “Confirming” that Hindu-majority India can have no decent human rights performance, and Christianity (read: western helping hand) has no welcome or appreciation from the barbarians;

(7) Blue-bodied Rama = Hindu icon = inspiration behind the violent, fanatical, irrational, insensitive, dehumanised Hindu; inspiration behind “Hindu communalism” (the Sangh parivar — Rama connection established) = a dark (”blue” — as also in Kali) symbol that can even turn a pre-teen kid into a raging bloodthirsty hate-filled fanatic.

Bombay police = the authority, the ruling power, the law-keeper of Hindu India = always picking on the Muslims = intolerant and suspicious of help from outside = helps the Hindu fanatics with the power of their uniforms, therefore making the prevalent law-and-order situation, human rights records and civic/public life and insecurity of minorities under Hindu majority rule “very obvious”;

(9) The Christian church = the white, Christian first-world western “helping-hand” trying to make things better for the Hindu masses, trying to rescue, humanize and enlighten them, but constantly hounded by the hostile, savage heathens, who cannot go on with their evil if the church is allowed to flourish and people are made “aware” and “emancipated”;

(10) Amnesty International = another form of the white, Christian, first-world western hand, extended to the downtrodden dehumanized Hindu India, but which is not allowed by the authorities, law-keepers and the public (the powerful and unrestrained Hindu majority) to do its work for the poverty-ridden heathen Hindus in peace, but is constantly harassed and forced to try to work under very “challenging and hostile conditions.”

With these ingredients — the essential ‘masalas,’ the great Indian feast of cow-caste-curry (to use the phrase coined by Rajiv Malhotra) is served before the champagne-caviar-and-red-carpet circuit at Cannes film festival.   Refer to Survivors Network of those Abused by Christian Priests 

(source: Slumdog and Western Narcissism - india-forum.com). Watch The Truth about our "Secular" Indian Media

Slumdog just reinforces all the old stereotypes

We all knew Danny Boyle would get the award, having portrayed India negatively, projecting the slums and drains of Bharat, the inhuman behaviour of the police and highlighting the brothels of Mumbai.

After all, it’s this aspect of India that’s been adored by phirangs in the past, who term India as the country of snake-charmers and elephants, refusing to believe that it is at par today with any other country in the areas of IT, science and technology, fashion and beauty care as well.

Is it not an irony that for greater exposure of the already known talent of our films, we needed Slumdog? Couldn’t we have managed it without exhibiting the negative-side of our story? The answer is “NO”.  

So, when we are celebrating the laurels of our achievers, we should also ponder the negativity of the film. Those who saw the film would think of India as a country of dirt and filth, ridden with poverty, where violence and deceit are the key to success and where girls are often taken to brothels.  

For the recognition of a very few in the outside world, we have allowed outsiders to portray, not the other side, but the wrong side of Bharat. A senior officer of the tourism ministry confided that India has been shown as a country where youngsters are so crazy that they would not give a second thought in jumping into a pit of night soil just to see Amitabh.

(source: Slumdog just reinforces all the old stereotypes - By Anita Saluja). 

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Bishop, mend thyself! - On Dalit Christians

Shri Joseph Pulikkunnel, the eminent scholar and Director of Indian Institute of Christian Studies, is known for his maverick views on social issues especially those pertaining to Christianity. He has sent us a copy of his "Open Letter to the Protesting Bishops". In this letter he unveils the duplicity of Bishops and the chemistry behind their demand for reservations for the so-called Dalit Christians. "It was with the false hope of an egalitarian status within the 'Christian community that once "depressed classes" (Dalits) agreed to convert to Christianity. " Pointing an accusing finger towards the clergy for the so-called Christian Dalits' oppression he writes, 

"You are playing politics with the poor Christian 'Dalits'."

Following is the text of his letter.

Dear Bishops,

It is reported in the newspapers that your Graces, and Lordships have graciously comedown to the earth in New Delhi, in a protest, march for equal rights for "Dalit" Christians. I am happy to know from media photos that many of you, clad in Roman royal dress, thereby distinguishing yourself from the common people, graced the occasion with a Royal touch. It is heartening to know that at least now, Your Lordships have learned that there are "Dalits" in the Christian community. "Dalits" mean persons who are being persecuted and oppressed.

When your Graces And Lordships, and your predecessors converted Dalits from the Hindu Society, the main attraction offered to them was that there was no caste discrimination in the Christian society and that they would be treated equally as brothers in Christ. It was with this false hope of an egalitarian status within the Christian community that the poor Dalits converted themselves to Christianity. If they are still dalits, the question is who has been oppressing them of late.

When the father of the Constitution provided for the Dalits' reservation Hindus, who formed the vast majority, of the population, accepted in principle the reservation for Dalits. They were surrendering the equality of opportunity enshrined in the Constitution in favour of the, Dalits, as a compensation for the ill-treatment their forefathers did to that community. 

Here it may be remembered that this charitable disposition was not shown by the white Christians towards the black Christians in America.

If there are Dalits in the Christian community the responsibility to compensate for their oppression is vested in you, for your, hierarchy itself was responsible for ordering and maintaining the social discrimination in the Christian community. The question is whether you addressed yourself in the past to the problems of the converted Christians-your "beloved" sheeps-who had been living for more than 100 years as Christians? If you make a solemn heart search you can see that you have done practically nothing for their uplift. If you look into the yearly income of all the dioceses, parishes, monasteries and convents of India , that would be equal to the budget amount of any state in India. Perhaps this is a random estimation, because nobody knows your real income, as it is a well guarded secret. If you were to set apart 10% of your annual income, internal and foreign, for the newly converted Christians, I am sure all of them would be having a good house and funds for education. If you were to reserve just 20% of the job opportunities in your institutions that are protected by minority rights, I am sure 10 years all educated "Dalit" could be provided with jobs.

When a group of "Dalits" and others who wanted to present a memorandum to you at the conference of the All India Bishops held in Vadavathoor, Kottayam, Kerala a few years back you called in police protection. If converted Christians are "Dalits" today, certainly you are the oppressors. You cannot reasonably put the blame on anybody else. Had you ever cared for their economic uplift with the huge amount of money at your command, they would never have been an oppressed lot.

You were more interested, in the number game increasing the number of Christians in the census reports. 

You converted the Dalits by pouring water on their heads and now you wash your hands of the responsibilities and recommend the mercy of the state, bailing them out with the Hindu Dalits. You have taken over the condemned leprosy of caste system on the Christian society and unashamedly own it. You are playing politics with the poor Christian "Dalits". You know by your muscle power and vote-bank mechanism can obtain concession from the government by creating social tension in India; you are using your money power to that end.

(source: Bishop, mend thyself! - On Dalit Christians - By Joseph Pulikkunnel - organiser.org). Refer to It happens only in India - By S L Byrappa

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The UK Booker “Pee on Pagan” Award
Pampering Self Conceit of the West?

Translated from Dainik Jagaran. This is a nice article about the farce that goes by the name of English writing in India . Some Indians have caught on to the trick of making money from the rich Westerners by pissing on their own land and culture.   

Literature up for Sale - By S Sharma

Long back, well-known Hindu writer Narendra Kohli translated a story written by Khushwant Singh and sent it to a Hindi publication. Its editor returned it with the comment that “We are not into the habit of publishing this kind of low-quality literature.”  Actually, the glamour and prestige that has become associated with the English language in India often manages to obscure the ugly reality of its English writers. The truth is that the kind of stuff our English writers churn out is carefully crafted by them not to serve the taste of Indians but of foreigners. The English writers of India get acceptance and approval from the Westerns only if they affirm through their work a strange and twisted kind of image about India that the foreigners love to promote. 

Recently, Arvind Adiga has been given the Booker Prize, the UK ’s most popular literary award, for his book “The White Tiger.” Adiga received the prize money of about one hundred thousand US dollars because the Booker panel seems to have been mightily impressed by his story about a killer servant. According to the head of the panel Michael Portilo, after reading the novel, his beliefs about India have changed and he got to know about the “real India.” Let us see what this “real India ” is that Adiga’s novel has allegedly revealed. 

 Presenting a distorted and perverted shape of India.

In the beginning of the novel, its hero Balram says: “Before starting a story, there is a tradition in our country to kiss some god’s arse. But which god’s arse? There are many options. Muslims have only one god. Christians have three. But we Hindus have three crore and sixty lakh gods, any of whose arse we can choose for kissing.” This way, it has been alleged that instead of reciting mantras or slokas such as Saraswati Vandana, Mangla-charan or Ganpati Vandana, the only tradition Hindus have before starting any work is to “kiss some god’s arse.”  Now tell me, which Indian-language publication will publish this kind of trash even if it gets translated? 

Our English writers in their greed for awards, prize money and Western approval vend a distorted and perverted shape of India . 

Indian citizens should be under no illusion about the “achievements” of Indian English writers in receiving Western awards. There is a major role of lobbying by agents in securing these. But the main thing is that many English writers do a kind of “formula writing” that is tailor-made to attract the Westerners and pamper their self-conceit. The kind of strange facts and spin about India that they portray in their writing are clearly not meant for consumption by the Indians. These are actually meant to lure foreign personalities who hold the key to Western awards and prize money. This tendency of our English writers has been scrutinized in detail by M. Prabha in her book “The Waffle of the Toffs: A Socio Cultural Critique of Indian Writing in English.” According to her, English writing in India is a purely commercial business that is run by a small but incestuous group of Indian con-artists. Their output has absolutely no originality or creativity. Instead, it is deliberately stuffed with “saleable” material.  

“Time” magazine has carried a two-page report about Arvind Adiga bagging the Booker prize. Nothing has been said in it about the literary quality of Adiga’s book except that it reveals the real face of Indian poverty, shows how meaningless all talks about economic development and advancement of India actually are and proves how competent Adiga’s agent is that he got him this award. But even the Times report calls the book a commercial success, not a literary one. The only comment it makes about the plot and writing style of “The White Tiger” is that these are about the success of a killer servant. Is this the alleged “reality of India ” that has been revealed? Even today in India , English is the language of the elite who account for a mere one or two percent of the population. There is a negligible number of Indians who use English as a medium of thinking and self-expression. It is not without reason that most of Indian English writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Suzanne Roy, Amitabh Ghosh, Farukh Dondhi, Jhumpa Lahiri and so on live in either England or America. 

All present day Indian writers writing in English come from affluent, well-connected and influential families, which, as in the hypothesis propounded above, makes all their writing essentially insignificant. All the male novelists who count are the products of places like Doon School , St. Stephen's College, Oxford and  Cambridge . 

Even those who live in India also have an eye permanently cocked toward the West. In other words, these people never consider other Indians as their readers and neither do they write for Indian society or readers. This is why English writers lack quality as well as diversity. Some people may get fooled by media coverage, royalties and awards, but such English writing is never meant for Indians.

There seems to be some kind of conspiracy of silence about “Waffle of the Toffs” as this scholarly work never gets mentioned anywhere and hardly any references are available to it online. It seems the pack of English Writers and journalists of India have closed ranks to give this work a quite burial.

(source: The UK Booker “Pee on Pagan” Award - indianrealist.com and Preserve of the affluent - thehindu.com).

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The Nexus of Christism, Islamism, and Maoism in India  

The "secular" media have created a terrible inferiority complex among the Hindus.

Proselytizing Christism, Marxism, and Jihadi Islamism are totalitarian and rigid empire building political dogmas for invasion, expansionism, plunder, oppression, exploitation, and destruction of "non-believers" and their traditional cultures.  

These "closed" systems compete and oppose one another in many parts of the world. However, in India they seemed to have become strange bedfellows and have made an unholy alliance against Hindu systems of philosophy and pluralistic spiritual traditions. Their use of a veneer of noble values, political philosophy, falsely presented secularism, and beliefs about equality in human existence, and dualistic perspectives conceal their closed dogmas that are often taken for granted as benign and even pious when it comes to religions.  

Watch NDTV & CNNIBN Defending Antinationals & Terrorists and Intellectual Terrorism and Subversion in polity – By Radha Rajan

The "secular" media have created a terrible inferiority complex among the Hindus. 

Proselytizing Christism, Marxism, and Jihadi Islamism are totalitarian and rigid empire building political dogmas for invasion, expansionism, plunder, oppression, exploitation, and destruction of "non-believers" and their traditional cultures.    These "closed" systems compete and oppose one another in many parts of the world. However, in India they seemed to have become strange bedfellows and have made an unholy alliance against Hindu systems of philosophy and pluralistic spiritual traditions. 

The goal of this axis is to eliminate Hindus and Buddhists from political power from Fiji, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, and eventually from India. 

***

We are unaware of their hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Our politicians lump them as "religions" to be given all concessions in a secular country or respect them as political systems, communities, or parties needing special representation in a democracy to win the vote banks for the UPA (Indian National Congress) and inadvertently or knowingly accord them status and opportunities for expansion.  

Hindus forget the Christists', Islamists', and Communists' past history, their track record of deception and violence, their current designs, and future plans for wiping out Hindu majority. The word "Hindu" is abhorred and vilified in their own country and Hindus are hated by their own brothers who pride themselves as "secularists" though going to the same temples and offering same prayers as the other Hindus, but feeling ashamed to say they are Hindus in their own country.

The "secular" media have created a terrible inferiority complex among the Hindus by focusing on the shortcomings and evils of Hindu society as if other societies do not have their defects and social evils at all. By promoting such anti-propaganda against Hindus the media and the UPA Government have facilitated creation of a criminal nexus against Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains in India but this axis is also operating around the world. 

The goal of this axis is to eliminate Hindus and Buddhists from political power from Fiji, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, and eventually from India. 

(source: The Nexus of Christism, Islamism, and Maoism in India - By Dr. Babu Suseelan Haindava Keralam).

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In The Twilight of Life, A Newborn Love for India
The Will to be different...

Robert Brayon (61), an American citizen, was cremated on the banks of the Saryu river in Bageshwar according to Hindu rituals. Instead of being laid to rest, it was Brayon's wish to be cremated like Hindus. 

Brayon was cremated at the confluence of the Saryu-Gomti rivers in Bageshwar this morning. His last rites, according to his Will, were performed by Mr Anand Singh Negi, his landlord. Brayon had left Rs 20,000 for his cremation and an additional Rs 5,000 for Shanti Paath (rituals for the soul's peace). The American had passed away in Hotel Prakhar of Haldwani on Monday. Brayon, who was suffering from blood cancer, had come to Haldwani for treatment in Susheela Tiwari Memorial Hospital here. On his death police recovered the Will and sent a copy of it to the US Embassy which immediately approved his cremation. “We received the fax from the embassy approving of his cremation and immediately thereafter sent his body to Bageshwar, where he was residing,” said Mr Bhatt, PRO SSP Nainital.

The Saryu river at Bageshwar.  In The Twilight of Life, A Newborn Love for India

Watch Introduction to Hinduism video - By Hinduism Today

***

“As stated in the Will, Mr Negi performed Brayon's last rites like a member of his own family,” said Chandan Parihar, an eyewitness to the cremation in Bageshwar. The duo enjoyed a very good relationship, he said in his statement to The Statesman. Brayon had been living in Mr Negi's house as a tenant for the past five years. 

Brayon had come as a tourist from New York a few years back. But when he came to Kosani at Bageshwar he was so mesmerised by the beauty of the place that he decided to stay back. The American extended his visa again and again as he did not want to return home at the twilight of his life.  He developed a liking for Indian culture, particularly Hinduism. Convinced that he would not live long in view of his disease and deteriorating health, he made his Will some time ago to ensure that he was cremated like a Hindu. Brayon's wife Theodora EV and his sisters Martha and Helene, who live in New York, have been informed of his demise and cremation as per his Will, but they have not turned up as yet, said Parihar.

(source: The Will to be different...  - By Swati R Sharma - thestatesman.net).

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Demolished once for all: Aryan Invasion Racist Theory

This fraudulent history has been lapped up by upper caste elite Indians, as their racial passport to Europe . Such has been the demoralization of the Hindu mind, which we have to shake off through a new factual account of our past. 

***

Girilal Jain  (  - 1933)  doyen of Indian journalists and editor of The Times of India from 1978-1988, was a passionate crusader of the Hindu cause. Author of The Hindu Phenomenon, he has observed in his masterful review of Shrikant G. Talageri's ‘Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism,’ published in 1993 thus:

“An unknown Indian has taken on proponents of the Aryan invasion/migration theory, demolished their case, and established that northern India is the original home of the Aryans and the Indo-European family of languages. The importance of this remarkable achievement cannot be exaggerated. In course of time, it can compel the revision of the history not only of Indian but also world civilization.” 

This is not the first time that the Aryan Invasion Theory has been disproved. It has been demolished several times over in the past. Talageri’s specialty is that he uses only objective, non-controversial and verifiable data from ancient texts to support his conclusions. Talageri’s point of departure is the internal chronology of the Rigveda. The Rigveda, the oldest book in the world and the most primary source of knowledge about ancient India, consists of 1028 hymns divided in ten Books, or Mandalas. The composition of these hymns, their collation and compilation in the present form, must have been a gradual process stretching over a vast geographical expanse, spanning several centuries if not millennia, and involving generations of seers, kings and other actors.

That argument can be simply stated. Rigveda and Avesta have a lot in common—names of people, animals, meters, geography. However, the Early Books of Rigveda have very little in common with Avesta, while the Middle Books have a little more. But it is the Late Books of Rigveda that have a lot in common with Avesta, pointing to a period of contemporary development.

Apart from names and name-elements, there is the evidence of the development and use of meters used in various hymns of the different Books. The earliest hymns in the Avesta, the Gathas, composed by Zarathustra, use the six-line Mahapankti meter, which is used only in the Late Books of the Rigveda. On this parameter also, the evidence points to the same conclusion: the common development of the joint Indo-Iranian culture represented by these two sacred books took place in the period of Late Books of Rigveda. The Early and the Middle Books of Rigveda belong to a period which is older than the period of the development of this joint culture. 

The geographical evidence of Rigveda is very clear and unambiguous. It shows that the Vedic Aryans, in the period of the Early and the Middle books, were inhabitants of interior parts of India, to the east of river Sarasvati and were only just expanding into and becoming acquainted with areas further west. The geographical horizon of the Rigveda extends from (at least) western Uttar Pradesh in the east to eastern and southern Afghanistan in the West. Let us divide it in three regions: the eastern region comprising the Sarasvati and areas to its east, mainly modern Haryana and western UP; the western region comprising the Indus and areas to its west, mainly the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, Afghanistan and contiguous areas of southern Central Asia; and the central region comprising Saptasindhu or Punjab between the Sarasvati and Indus.

The eastern region is clearly known to the whole of the Rigveda. Copious references to the rivers such as Sarasvati, Drshadvati, Hariyupiya, Yavyavati, Ashmanvati, Yamuna, Ganga, places such as Ilayaspada, Kikata, and animals such as elephant, buffalo, peacock and spotted deer are scattered all over the Rigveda, but particularly in the Early books. In sharp contrast, the western region is totally unknown to the Early Books, only very newly familiar to the Middle Books, but quite familiar to the Late Books. The western places (except a solitary reference to Gandharva in a late hymn), animals, lakes and mountains are totally unknown to the Early as well as the Middle Books, and exactly three rivers are mentioned in Book IV, which represents the western-most thrust of the Vedic Aryans in the Middle period. 
The late books, on the other hand, are strewn with references to rivers such as Sindhu, Amitabha, Rasa, Svetya, Kubha, Krumu, Gomati, Sarayu and Susoma; places such as Gandhari, mountains such as Arjikya and Mujawat, lakes such as Saryanavat, and animals such as Bactrian camel, Afghan horse, mountain sheep, mountain goat and boar.

Most interesting are the references to the central region—the Saptasindhu or Punjab between Indus and Sarasvati. Very significantly, the Nadi Sukta lists the rivers from the east to the west. Book VI, the oldest book, does not know any of the five rivers of Punjab. The second oldest book, Book III, mentions only the two easternmost rivers—Vipas (Beas) and Sutudri (Sutlej). The third oldest book, Book VII, mentions Parushni (Ravi), the third river from the east, with reference to the Battle of Ten Kings in which the non-Vedic enemies figure as western people of the fourth river Asikni (Chenab). Even the phrase Saptasindhu first appears in the Middle Books.

As Girilal Jain had observed, “if it can be established that the movement of the users of the Indo-European speech in India in ancient times was from the east to the west and not vice-versa, the invasion/migration theory, as it has been propounded, cannot stand.”

This makes the Rigvedic Age contemporaneous with the Indus Valley culture. Far from being the destroyers of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, Vedic Aryans turn out to be the architects of those great cities. This is what Girilal Jain meant when he said that in course of time Talageri’s research can compel the revision of the history not only of Indian, but also world civilization.

(source: Demolished once for all: Aryan Invasion Theory - By Virendra Parekh - vijayvaani.com). Refer to chapter on Aryan invasion theory (AIT) and First Indologists and European Imperialism. Refer to Did the Vedas get Written around 1200 BC? Says Who? - indianrealist.com and The Alleged Massacre at Mohenjo-daro - indianrealist.com. Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna.  Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy within - indianrealist.com.

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The Imperialist History of India
A Mythical India?

What is the gist of this British imperialist-tailored Indian history?

In this history, India is portrayed as the land “conquered” first by the ‘Dravidians’, then by the ‘Aryans’, later by Muslims, and finally by the British. Otherwise, everything else is mythical. Our history books today exhibit this obsession with foreign rule. 

For example, even though the Mughal rule from Akbar to Aurangzeb is about 150 years, which is much shorter than the 350 year rule of the Vijayanagaram empire, the history books of today hardly take notice of the latter.  In fact the territory under Krishna Devaraya’s rule was much larger than Akbar’s, and yet it is the latter who is called “the Great”. Such a version suited the British rules who had sought to create a legitimacy for their presence in India.  

Furthermore, we were also made to see advantages accruing from British rule, the primary one being that India was united by this colonialism, and that but for the British, India would never have been one country.  Thus, the concept of India itself is owed to the plunder of colonialists. On the contrary, there was always as India which from north to south, thought of fundamentally as one country.  Just as Hinduism exists from ancient days despite a lack of a Church, Book, or Pope, Hindustan too existed from time immemorial but without the parameters of a modern state. The invading Muslims and the British on the contrary tried to disrupt that unity by destroying the traditional communication channels and educational structures.

It is this foreign version that makes us out to be foreigners in our own land. The Aryan-Dravidian divide in the history taught in schools and universities is purely a conception of foreign historians like Max Mueller and has no basis in Indian historical records. This fraudulent history had been lapped up by north Indians, and by south Indian Brahmins, as their racial passport to Europe. Such was the demoralization of the Hindu mind, which we have to shake off through a new factual account of our past.

Bharat Varsha

In this Imperial history, India is portrayed as the land “conquered” first by the ‘Dravidians’, then by the ‘Aryans’, later by Muslims, and finally by the British. Otherwise, everything else is mythical. Our history books today exhibit this obsession with foreign rule. 

Even though the Mughal rule from Akbar to Aurangzeb is about 150 years, which is much shorter than the 350 year rule of the Vijayanagaram empire, the history books of today hardly take notice of the latter.  In fact the territory under Krishna Devaraya’s rule was much larger than Akbar’s, and yet it is the latter who is called “the Great”. 

***

The accepted history of no country can however be structured on foreign accounts of it. But Nehru and his Leftist cronies did just that, and thus generations of Indians have been brainwashed by this falsified history of India.  The time has come for us to take seriously our Puranic sources and to re-construct a realistic well-founded history of ancient India, a history written by Indians about Indians. Such a history should bring out the amazing continuity of a Hindu nation which asserts its identity again and again. It should focus on the fact that at the centre of our political thought is the concept of the Chakravartin ideal – to defend  the nation from external aggression while giving maximum internal autonomy to the janapadas.  A correct, defalsified history would record that Hindustan was one nation in the art of governance, in the style of royal courts, in the methods of warfare, in the maintenance of its agrarian base, and in the dissemination of information. Sanskrit was the language of national communication and discourse. In particular, it was not Hindu submission as alleged by JNU historians that was responsible for our subjugation but lack of unity and effective military strategy.

(source: Fraudulent history of India - By Dr. Subramanian Swamy - indianrealist.com and Falsification of Chronology in India’s History - By Dr. Subramaniam Swamy - indiarealist.com). Refer to Thus Spake Professor Michael Witzel: A Harvard University Case Study in Prejudice? and Hindus Under Siege - By Dr. Subramanium Swamy  p. 1 - 20. Refer to Hindus Under Siege - By Dr. Subramanium Swamy and Hindus laud Virginia Education Department for curriculum revision showing Hinduism appropriately

Reject this anti-Hindu education and history

“Language is the distillation of hundreds, if not thousands of years of experience of a collective... So when the language disappears you're really throwing away that whole library of knowledge.’ 

                                                                    - Rachel Nez, Navajo speaker

***

Apart from de-Hinduising Hindus, Macaulayan education has distorted Hindu religion and history. As per this education, Hindus never resisted any foreign aggression, and they do not have any glorious history. This education suppresses how Hindus valiantly fought invaders for several centuries, and defended their religion and motherland.

Sanskrit which is the best, sweetest and divine language (bhashasu mukhya madhura divya geervaan bharati) has been driven out of Indian schools and colleges by Macaulay’s education. With the exception of Tirukkural which is in Tamil, almost all ancient Hindu scriptures like Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayan, Mahabharat are in Sanskrit. 

The UPA Government (headed by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi) has succeeded in persuading more state governments to accept the NCERT texts. A report on Monday (January 5, 2009) said 12 more state governments have accepted to teach NCERT texts in their schools.

Glorification of Invaders

In his book The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant (1885-1981), the American historian, calls Muslim rule in India as the bloodiest story in history.

Glorification of Invaders

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Sonia Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh

The UPA Government (headed by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi) has succeeded in persuading more state governments to accept the NCERT texts. 

Marxists’ interpretation of Indian history is motivated, fictional, anti-Hindu, self-righteous and objectionable. Inspired by their anti-Hindu agenda, these sham historians fabricate history to defend the actions of Muslim invaders. 

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As against this, history books issued by National Council of Educational Research and Training, and written by Marxists, glorify Muslim rule in Hindu Bharat; and downgrade Hindu heroes like Prithviraj Chauhan, Maharana Pratap and Chhatrapati Shivaji. These books falsify history and denigrate Hinduism. As per these books, Ramayana and Mahabharat are mere fictions; and Ram and Krishna did not exist.

Apart from acting as academic cheerleaders for terrorists, many leftist historians are deliberately distorting history to make it compatible with Marxism. They support the discredited Aryan Invasion Theory, and deny the existence of ancient river Saraswati.

Marxists’ interpretation of Indian history is motivated, fictional, anti-Hindu, self-righteous and objectionable. Inspired by their anti-Hindu agenda, these sham historians fabricate history to defend the actions of Muslim invaders and rulers like Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghazni, Mohammad Gouri, Feroz Tughlak, Allauddin Khilji, Taimur, Bahmanis, Babar, Aurangzeb, Nadir Shah, and Ahmadshah Abdali. They suppress the killings of millions of Hindus, and destruction of thousands of Hindu temples by Muslim invaders over the centuries.

They reject the existence of glorious Hindu past. They dub their detractors as communal, and downgrade genuine historians. And for presenting anti-Hindu fiction as history, these fake historians are rewarded with national and international awards, honours and acclamations.

(source: Reject this anti-Hindu education and history - By J G Arora). The writer is former Chief Commissioner of Income Tax.

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Our Voice in History

Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games

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We don’t quite get it, the first globalized civilization was in India.

Academic freedom, private funding and historical research

“The Indus Valley civilization dwarfed Egypt and Mesopotamia in area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and was aggressive in globalization 5000 years back.” 

These are words from Andrew Lawler’s lead article in the June 2008 issue of Science magazine which had Indus Civilization as the cover story.

Previously archaeologists believed that Indus people got their ideas from Mesopotamia and was a civilization without deep roots, but as per new evidence, Indus evolved from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan . Archaeology has also found evidence of occupation in Harappa dating to 3700 B.C.E and in Farmana in India to 3500 B.C.E.

Writing about the religious beliefs of the Indus people, Lawler mentions that the proto-Shiva seal has fuelled speculation that the religious tradition of Indus helped lay the basis for Hinduism. While there are questions to be answered on their language, religion and form of government, decades of archaeology has changed the image of Indus from a xenophobic and egalitarian society to one which was vibrant and complex.

Though the article was fairly balanced covering excavations in Harappa, Baluchistan, and Kot Diji in Pakistan and Farmana, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan in India , it had the usual western hatchet job, blaming Indian archaeologists for using Hindu texts as a guide. This is a no-no, we are told, because (a) it is inflammatory to the Pakistanis and (b) India has a large Muslim population.

The article has other issues too. Drought, as a reason for the demise of Indus , is scoffed at while many other reasons, including “change in a society that they say emphasized water-related rituals” is offered as an alternative. The western scholars quoted in the article themselves admit their theories are pure speculation, but the drying up of Ghaggar-Hakra around 1900 B.C.E is ignored, since it would involve a reference to the Rig Veda.

As Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games — a very different one from that practised in their own research centers — we need to evaluate what can be done. Whining about unfairness can be cathartic, but it does not solve the problem.

Different Standards and Inept Government

We too should not indulge in speculative archaeology, but first Indian archaeologists and scholars need to be unapologetic about knowing the scriptures and using them for clues.

Sadly this attitude cannot be taken by people who work for government funded institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Universities. The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. 

(If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia).

Recently the Government of India cut funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools because - it is getting tad repetitive - India has a large Muslim population and there was a fear that it would instill religious and cultural pride among students. In such an atmosphere, it would be naive to expect the government to lead the battle in understanding our history. Instead of wasting time writing letters to ministers, we might be better off digging in our own backyard for Painted Grey Ware.  

Colonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.  

An Inept Indian government - The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. 

If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia. 

***

The second problem is mentioned in the Lawler’s article itself. Indian archaeologists have done excellent work, like R. S. Bisht in Dholavira and Vasant Shinde in Farmana, but they are slow to publish and collaborate. Bisht’s work has revealed “monumental and aesthetic architecture, a large stadium and an efficient water-management system”, but has largely been unpublished. The lack of data from people who had first access to the location helps in sustaining myths about the civilization.

Solutions

There is an urgent need to create institutions where scholarship is free of bureaucracy and political interference. One such institution — the Indus Heritage Center — funded by the Global Heritage Fund is coming up in Vadodara. Besides starting a Smithsonian class center in India , the center also plans to popularize the findings of Deccan College , the Department of Archaeology of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Archaeological Survey of India.

There have been xenophobic comments regarding this institution due to the involvement of western professors, even though the professors don’t believe in the Aryan Invasion theory. The fear is that they will be applying western frameworks on our history resulting in misinterpretation.

But instead of complaining about west, it is time we adopted some of their techniques for popularizing history. Building a Smithsonian style museum is an insuperable problem for the cash strapped ASI which can barely manage the monuments under its care. The Indus Heritage Center model where private donors in association with various colleges build research centers in which native interpretation of history can happen should be considered. Right now there are few sincere individuals who are involved in correcting Western biases; their efforts are exemplary but not sufficient to make an impact.

Past many decades of research have found no archaeological evidence for the Aryan Invasion theory. It has been discredited through genetic research as well. The demise of Indus valley is understood to be due to hydrological changes. 

Still, pick up a book like Karen Armstrong (1946 - ) The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, which is used as text book in graduate courses, and you will find that colonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.

One Indus Heritage Center cannot change such entrenched ideas. To give the megaphone to differing voices, more Indus Heritage Centers which are financially secure are required. This dovetails into the larger debate about the need to free higher education and research from government control and facilitate an atmosphere where private capital can provide funding. With such freedom, scholars would be able to delve into research as they see fit, instead of surrendering to artificial political fears.

Five thousand years back our ancestor living in the Indus Valley sailed across the vast Arabian sea in reed boats with cotton sails and made the best of the Bronze age globalized world. It would be a shame, if we did not show even a fraction of their ingenuity in making our voice heard in a debate about our history.

(source: Our Voice in History - By Jayakrishnan Nair - varnam.org).

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The Aryan myth in perspective - History, science and politics

From its inception, this modern concept of "race" was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus "race" was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used "race" to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.

As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each "race," linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought.

(source: AAA's Statement on Race).

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To a historian of science, there is a remarkable similarity between the attitudes of theologians in Galileo’s time and of philologists and anthropologists in our own. They cannot accept the fact that the very foundation of their discipline—not just the Aryan invasion theory—has collapsed. Natural history and genetics have demolished their theories as well as their methods. And like Galileo’s adversaries, they too have chosen to resort to politics and propaganda, though the forces they invoke lack the authority of the Church in Galileo’s time.

A Racist Myth that refuses to die

When judged by evidence and logic, the various Aryan theories, especially the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) must be regarded one of the weakest intellectual exercises in recent history— an intellectual failure of the first magnitude. But if longevity and capacity for survival are measures of success, then the Aryan myth—it is hardly a theory—must be counted among the most successful.

It is now more than a century since the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) made its way into history books and encyclopedias the world over, as the basis for the history of ancient India and the source of the Vedic civilization. Though linguistic in origin, the climate in which it evolved—dominated by British colonialism and German nationalism—ensured that it soon acquired a political and even biological form, giving rise to such notions as the Aryan race and the Aryan nation. Government departments in British India like the Anthropological Survey mixed up physical appearance and character traits and made it a tool of divide and rule.

Because of its European origin and orientation, there were attempts to shift the origin of the Vedic Civilization and its language to sources in lands closer to Europe . This gave rise to an academic discipline called Indo-European Studies, devoted to exploring the origin of Europeans, their language and culture. A major result of this approach has been to make India and its culture including the Vedas to be of non-Indian origin. The Aryan invasion (or migration) has been the lynchpin of this discipline.

While the defeat of Nazi Germany and end of European colonialism put an end to the political needs of these theories, they have survived in Western academia because of the heavy investment that scholars have made in Indo-European studies. Recent findings in science, particularly in population genetics have delivered a mortal blow to the Aryan Invasion Theory. This has led its proponents to resort to propaganda and political lobbying to save it by overturning scientific and historical facts.

This campaigning, like during the recent controversy over the revision of California schools curriculum, is only the latest manifestation of the kind of struggle that is waged whenever new discoveries overthrow old ideas. The most famous of these took place in the time of Galileo. In the end, the supporters of Indo-European studies are no more likely to succeed than Galileo’s opponents, who too had the support of powerful political and religious interests. Ultimately, it is truth not personalities that will prevail though the battle for truth is likely to be prolonged. It is best to take a long-term view and prepare the ground for a new generation of researchers.

It [Aryan invasion theory] gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.

That is to say, the British presented themselves as a ‘new and improved brand of Aryans’ that were only completing the work left undone by their ancestors in the hoary past. Today it is sustained by ‘special interests’ rather than special conditions that no longer exist. These new interests include political chauvinism in India and the survival of Indo-European studies as a discipline in Western academia. It is only a matter of time before this vestige of colonial politics disappears from the scene making way for a more objective approach to the study of ancient India . This is already happening. In the interim, the kind of dispute and controversy witnessed in California are only natural.

The seriousness of this struggle for survival of this academic discipline, and its practitioners cannot be underestimated. This existential fear is what is behind the desperate actions bordering on the bizarre of some Western Indologists , notably the Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel and his colleagues.

On the scientific side, the emergence of molecular biology and the growth of population genetics in the second half of the twentieth century have delivered the coup de grace to this pseudo-discipline. The story that science has to tell us is very different from what had been believed for well over a century

(source: The Aryan myth in perspective - History, science and politics - By N S Rajaram).  For more refer to The Alleged Massacre at Mohenjo-daro - indianrealist.com. Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna.  Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy within - indianrealist.com.

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Stop political abuse of History

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Dr S.R. Rao is the foremost marine archaeologist, who discovered the submerged city of Dwarka of Sri Krishna, off the coast of Kutch, in Gujarat, which is considered to be the greatest archaeological discovery in independent India.

According to Dr S.R. Rao, SSCP has violated all international norms and conventions for saving underwater cultural heritage, a mandatory for every maritime member to “list, preserve and protect all underwater cultural sites.”

How did you discover the city of Sri Krishna ?

There was a modern building that was obstructing an ancient temple. It was then we decided to demolish the modern building. Underneath we found an ancient temple which led to subterranean steps that led to steps covered with mud. When we got them cleaned up, they led to passage that led to the seacoast and a port, which when probed led to the greatest discovery in the archaeological history—the discovery of submerged Dwarka city. On one side of the city was four kilometers long wall with a complete port and storage area, warehouse, and weighing stones that are completely intact for holding the ships from drifting away.  

Are there any international conventions to save underwater heritage?

What caused the destruction of the city?

Poompuhar was a very important port and was very extensive of Sangam period but got submerged. What about Ramayana which was even earlier and several thousands of years older? It is absolutely certain that it is historical and of mythological importance. The sea in the western coast of India is not that violent but the eastern coast has been facing one of the most violent seas as we have encountered in our underwater expeditions. Hence this region contains the richest archaeological heritages of the world. 

Some researchers say there are so many such sites—as much as 20,000 in the world—and what is the definition of a underwater site?

The definition of the underwater cultural heritage should cover objects of archaeological interest. It should also cover sites and landscapes which are of great importance for understanding of our history. If the site of the naval battle of Salam’s (BC 480) and a recent 100-year-old Titanic (sunken luxury liner) could be mentioned as landscape sites then the protection should not only be guided by archaeological and historical interest but also by the need to preserve information about a site even if nothing is recovered from it. The chairman of the international convention stressed on the need to protect sites of mythological significance to traditional communities as non-human heritage. Everything dating back from before the 20th century should be protected. It was also observed that there is no such thing as a time limit to archaeology.

(source: Stop political abuse of History - haindavakeralam). Refer to Did the Vedas get Written around 1200 BC? Says Who? - indianrealist.com

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Writing Politically correct history: Award diplomacy of the Whites

Evangelical West's Neo colonial Sepoys

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The wise may arraign or applaud
Wealth may flow in or vanish
as it will,
Death may occur today
or when the epoch ends
The steadfast never stray
from the path of righeousness

                             - written in Sanskrit by Bhartrihari in Nitishatak

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Romila Thapar’s Kluge Prize

Sir (Dr) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound philosophers of this century, author and educationalist. In 1926, he was deputed by Calcutta University as the university delegate to the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1940, first Indian to be thus honored. He succinctly said: 

“The West tried its best to persuade India that its philosophy is absurd, its art puerile, its poetry uninspired, its religion grotesque and its ethics barbarous”.

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The colonial era of Indian history was an era of historical myth-making. Innumerable myths were created and propagated to falsify history with a view to change Indian psyche and denationalize Indian identity.

A. K. (Anthony Kennedy) Warder is a scholar of Indology, mostly in Buddhist studies and related fields, such as the Pāli and Sanskrit languages. He has written 15 books and numerous articles. He currently holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit in the School of East Asian Studies in the University of Toronto. Writing years after Independence, he notes: 

“The standard imperialist version of Indian history, worked out during the colonial period, is now, most remarkably, taken for granted among modern Indian historians of almost all persuasions, not least among them the ‘Marxists’ (who in this respect remain Hegelians; S. A. Dange is an honourable exception), as well as among academic historians in all other countries, again regardless of political persuasions.”

(source: Contending paradigms of Indian history: Did India lack historical agency? - By Shivaji Singh). 

Refer to Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee. Refer to Romila Thapar's BS - By Seriously Sandeep and Interview with Romila Thapar - varnam.org.

Romila Thapar has been awarded the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity for ostensibly creating “a new and more pluralistic view of Indian civilization, which had seemed more unitary and unchanging, by scrutinizing its evolution over two millennia and searching out its historical consciousness”. Thapar’s US Congressional acclamation seeks to validate a blatantly provocative, uni-dimensional and ideologically extreme view of India’s past, espoused mainly by its Stalinist fifth column, assorted Islamist Jihadis and militant Christian evangelists. The Kluge Prize selection committee might have imposed a simple test on Thapar by requiring her to present examples of two positive statements that she has composed on the Hindu past in her entire career. Instead what the decision of the Kluge committee suggests is racial arrogance, contempt for Hindu sensibilities and the malign influence of a powerful Bostonian non-Hindu Indian, infamous for campaigns belittling Hindu suffering. The award resoundingly reaffirms a deep American animus against Hindu India that has been a constant feature of US foreign policy towards it since independence. It was this vicious hatred and a half-baked strategic calculus that prompted US support for the perpetration of Pakistan’s genocide in East Pakistan in 1971. 

Stalinist hatchet job of disinformation on Indian History

This award will satisfy the evangelical constituency that wishes to extirpate Hinduism and the Islamic Jihadists who assert historical legitimacy for their claims to imperial dominion over India and regularly pursue it by murderous ventures that emulate Nazi pogroms against Jews and Slavs.

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Indian historian Romila Thapar, Librarian James Hadley Billington and Billionaire John Kluge.

Most mainstream Hindus find Romila Thapar’s interpretation of ancient Indian history grossly disingenuous and thoroughly objectionable. Indeed a large number of Hindus regard her as a deeply mendacious enemy of Hindus. Romila Thapar’s infamous patronage of the discredited Aryan invasion theory always had an Islamist rationale as well. And she herself also makes a disgracefully cavalier accusation against the distinguished K. M. Munshi of an attempt to revive the Hindu Aryan (sic!) past for his endeavours to restore Somnath Temple.

She loftily declined the native Padma Bhusan, but a million dollar prize, effectively the same kind of state award she found unpalatable, from the racist sponsors of mass murder is apparently another matter. 

It is no surprise to see that Romila Thaper recieved a Kluge prize for her work which undermines Hindu Civilization. The library of Congress librarian, James H. Billington has impeccable evangelical credentials and he had the final say in choosing the awardee. Billington is on the Board of the Center for Theological Inquiry (Theology Today) and was long time advisor for Theology Today. His daughter Susan Billington Harper who works for Pew Charitable Trust is author of a book on Anglican Bishop V.S. Azariah. Instead of getting awed by these awards these awardees should be looked at as neo colonial sepoys.  

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Most mainstream Hindus find Romila Thapar’s interpretation of ancient Indian history grossly disingenuous and thoroughly objectionable. Indeed a large number of Hindus regard her as a deeply mendacious enemy of Hindus. She and her genocidal Stalinist associates studiously and maliciously ignore the immense suffering of Hindus as a result of successive Islamic invasions and the brutal rule of violent iconoclasts. It represents an example of holocaust denial that has been sedulously promoted by British imperial deceit and US Cold War aims. The indiscriminate killing of the old, the very young, the systematic rape of girls, boys and women, the destruction of places of worship (eliminating most major Hindu temples in north India), mass slavery and loot are a bitter reality denied, though subsequently echoed in Constantinople, Buda and countless defeated cities. It begs the question whether such a prize would have been awarded to an historian of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic faiths if the pedagogue was so viscerally repugnant to a significant number of the faithful of these communities. I think not, logical profundity and all artifices about intellectual freedom notwithstanding.

It is only in India that a historian without adequate command of Sanskrit can claim expertise on its ancient past right across its entire length and breadth. 

It is only in India that a historian like Romila Thapar, without adequate command of Sanskrit can claim expertise on its ancient past right across its entire length and breadth. 

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Social status is all that counts in feudal India, a feature on display in virtually every aspect of its social life and all that is required to silence disbelief. In a pathetic attempt to apply deep thought to Mahmud of Ghazni’s invasions of India, Romila Thapar piles one speculation upon another, fabricating motives and thought processes with abandon. She writes as if she had been a contemporary of the conqueror, priests and participants in major historical events over several centuries. She turns notions of scepticism in judging historical evidence on their head. Her personal authority becomes the only referent for increasingly wild assertions! There is no scholar of ancient Europe or any other part of the world that would dare advance ludicrous claims to expertise without command of the relevant languages and usually over a modest geographical expanse. The likes of Fernand Braudel and Chris Wickham are very rare indeed and Romila Thapar might wish to consult their historical oeuvre in penance for a multitude of sins.

A central purpose of her banal lifetime agenda has been to legitimise the destruction of Somnath by Mahmud of Ghazni. According to Romila Thapar, he was motivated purely by greed, a secular impulse that supposedly erases any iconoclastic religious rationale. One startling claim she also appears to make is familiarity with supposedly extant corroborative Persian and Turkish sources on his lack of religious conviction, presumably the pre-Kemalist script in which even few contemporary Turks claim to read, though it is Sanskrit she really needed to bone up on. Much the same can be said of her sturdy defence of Aurangzeb’s iconoclasm, asserting secular political motives for the destruction of the Kashi Viswanath temple (and countless others) and the erection of a mosque in its place. Her JNU colleagues indulge in even more bizarre fantasies, such as imperial sanction against the temple for the abduction of some local princess though the evidence adduced is miraculously fictitious. This is the stuff of undergraduate student union debates and all that she and her execrable Stalinist JNU colleagues are able to conjure in old age.

There is hysterical denial that any Muslim ruler was ever loyal to his faith and followed the Prophet’s iconoclastic example. By asserting robbery as the principal motive in every significant instance of temples being destroyed they end up in the unenviable position of having to explain why there is so much discussion about division of the spoils of conquest in the numerous wars of Jihad waged by the Prophet himself? The delicious paradox of this assertion, which dear Romila has not evidently thought through, is that Islam, if they are correct in their imputation of robbery as the only significant motive for its imperial expansion, is merely about theft and the recourse to the Almighty Allah a ruse! She is proposing, in effect, that Muslim Jihad against infidels was not inspired by their religious faith at all and they were only out to rob and pillage.

But why this extraordinary insight should have reassured the victims of robbery, murder and mayhem is a matter she obviously cannot comprehend. Quite clearly, common sense is at a premium since it would have dictated that religious motivation and desire for loot have always co-existed in most imperial expansions.

Romila Thapar’s infamous patronage of the discredited Aryan invasion theory always had an Islamist rationale as well. By maintaining, on the basis of grotesque colonial historical misrepresentation, and its subsequent validation by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, that contemporary Hindu upper castes were invaders she sought to grievously injure the legitimacy of India’s entire Hindu past.

What she was effectively arguing was that racist invaders had subjugated indigenous Indians in the past and casteist Hinduism was their ideology. By inference, later Islamic invasions were no more remarkable since they were merely successors to a well-established pattern of invasions. Of course, for India’s venal Stalinists Islam represented liberation since it was monotheistic and preached equality. That it guaranteed sexual slavery for women and death (enslavement after every conquest) to those who resisted conversion to Islam was a quirk in the prescription of Islamic equality that escaped tortured Stalinist logic. Even now contemporary India heaves with the distorted logic of this colonial historical intervention, which is being used to justify social pogroms against alleged upper caste oppressors no matter how deprived many of them may be and by communities that wield significant economic and political power in India now. Truly, such deep-rooted malice underpinned the eventual extermination of European Jewry. The fact that the Aryan invasion theory lies in tatters has only prompted the devious reworking of its original formulation by her. The blatant Islamist and Christist demonization of alleged upper caste oppression has now been artfully re-phrased by transmuting invasion into immigration, a parallel to the historic libel against Jews of poisoning wells, to renew the charge of illegitimacy against upper caste villains.

She breezily speaks of truth in historical writing, imagining that all her critics are fools who cannot conceivably be aware of a well-worn professional discussion on the contestable nature of historical truth and partisanship in historical scholarship. Some of them are also familiar with the work of historians of greater professional distinction than Romila Thapar and infinitely superior intellectual integrity, who have written rather differently on ancient and medieval India.. In her case, what stands out resoundingly, again and again, is a determination to vindicate every aspect of Muslim rule over Hindus and celebrate their most egregious crimes or ignore them altogether with breathtaking impudence?

In this context, it is not ancient India in which she proclaims expertise, but any period requiring the usual Stalinist hatchet job of disinformation. And it is for this highly politicised defence of Islamic rule over India that a Christian America, steadfast friend of Islamic Jihad against it, is rewarding a sworn enemy of the Hindu people. Mahmud, Timur, Aurangzeb, Nadir Shah and the Abdali killers ought to feel refreshed with the taste of the blood of hundreds of thousands of Hindu men, women and children even as they find an honourable place at Allah’s table. 

Eminent Historians R C Majumdar, Sir Jadunath Sarkar and K M Munshi.

Such is the audacity of Thapar and these second-rate Stalinists that profound ontological and epistemological differences with historians of the stature of R. C. Majumdar and Sir Jadunath Sarkar are evaded by merely accusing them of communal Hindu methodology. 

The eight volume History of India, as told by its own historians, compiled by Eliot and Dowson, is also damned by imputing partisan motives though their contents are not uniformly damaging to Islam, yet highlight enough evidence of despoliation to prompt their blanket denouncement by India’s fifth column. And she herself also makes a disgracefully cavalier accusation against the distinguished K. M. Munshi of an attempt to revive the Hindu Aryan (sic!) past for his endeavours to restore Somnath Temple.

***

Such is the audacity of Thapar and these second-rate Stalinists that profound ontological and epistemological differences with historians of the stature of R. C. Majumdar and Sir Jadunath Sarkar are evaded by merely accusing them of communal Hindu methodology. The eight volume History of India, as told by its own historians, compiled by Eliot and Dowson, is also damned by imputing partisan motives though their contents are not uniformly damaging to Islam, yet highlight enough evidence of despoliation to prompt their blanket denouncement by India’s fifth column. And she herself also makes a disgracefully cavalier accusation against the distinguished K. M. Munshi of an attempt to revive the Hindu Aryan (sic!) past for his endeavours to restore Somnath Temple.

Yet, these fifth columnists never detect such base motives in the reams of diabolical contemporary Islamic and Christian hate literature used incessantly to insult Hindu sensibilities in their own homeland. This is a tradition that dismisses those who disagree with them as communal, the pronouncement of an auto da Fe to paralyse them.

Her alleged expertise on ancient India is a badge deployed for typically cynical Leftist aims of aggrandisement, marked by opportunistic alliances and complicity in genocide that has usually ended in historical oblivion. But much blood will first be spilt and on a scale that would make any bloodletting specifically sponsored by Hindus, with all the enormous caveats that signification ought to imply, a few mere commas compared to the respective histories of genocide wilfully engaged in by Islam and Christianity. Romila Thapar belongs to the cynical tribe of Indian Stalinists who thrive by self-righteousness, which in the Indian context bears a familial resemblance to the racial supremacy that Europeans once openly declared and now quietly assert. Basically, it is divide-and-rule by mobilising every division and fissure amongst the non-whites to their advantage and the use of sophisticated media brainwashing techniques that simultaneously affirm equality while ensuring racial hierarchy. The noble campaign against tradition and ignorance melds effortlessly with the depravity of the masters of the universe, eagerly delivering incendiary tonnage on Afghan wedding parties and Iraqi schoolchildren. But the clamorous natives are forever at the door, resentful, gross and uninitiated in the mores of cosmopolitan sophistication. And their imperfect command of the English language is a weapon used against them, to criminalize their ignorance and question their humanity.

But nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of progress, the logical summit of which the great theorists Mark Horkheimer (1895 –1973) and Theodor W. Adorno noted was ascended in the gas chambers of the same civilisation that produced Goethe and Beethoven.

 The sordid outcome of the Kluge prize for Romila Thapar is an attempted validation of the intellectual genocide against Hinduism. And the Indian Stalinist anti-colonial rant evaporates the moment their aircraft approaches the American shoreline. As a fully paid up member of India’s deracinated upper crust, Romila Thapar loftily declined the native Padma Bhusan, but a million dollar prize, effectively the same kind of state award she found unpalatable, from the racist sponsors of mass murder is apparently another matter. 

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound philosophers of this century, author and educationalist.

The real high-minded tradition examining the Hindu past represented by the noble efforts of many like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan were not on the Kluge radar. 

***

The real high-minded tradition examining the Hindu past represented by the noble efforts of many like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan were not on the Kluge radar. It will satisfy the evangelical constituency that wishes to extirpate Hinduism and the Islamic Jihadists who assert historical legitimacy for their claims to imperial dominion over India and regularly pursue it by murderous ventures that emulate Nazi pogroms against Jews and Slavs. It is Romila Thapar who is their intellectual mentor and Kluge has emphatically joined the same genocide chorus. The con-joining of the name of historian Peter Brown for the Kluge prize on the same occasion is a cause for mourning since this great scholar has done so much to advance our understanding of the ancient world, with insight that testifies to profound scholarship and elegance that is enviable.

(source: Romila Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com). Dr. Gautam Sen Taught for more than two decades and at the London School of Economics and now writes on international political economy.

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Endorsing Racist Aryan Invasion Theory:  Award diplomacy of the Whites

Indian historian Romila Thapar gets 2008 Kluge Prize  

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932 - ) Nobel Laureate, was born in Trinidad into a family of Indian origin is known for his penetrating analyses of alienation and exile. Writing with increasing irony and pessimism, he has often bleakly detailed the dual problems of the Third World: the oppressions of colonialism and the chaos of post-colonialism. His  grandfather had emigrated there from India as an indentured servant.  

He is the author of several books including Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, India: A Wounded Civilization, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, India: A Million Mutinies Now.  

He has observed:

“ India has been a wounded civilization because of Islamic violence: Pakistanis know this; indeed they revel in it. It is only Indian Nehruvians like Romila Thapar who pretend that Islamic rule was benevolent. We should face facts: Islamic rule in India was at least as catastrophic as the later Christian rule. "

"The Christians created massive poverty in what was a most prosperous country; the Muslims created a terrorized civilization out of what was the most creative culture that ever existed.”                                                                   

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Indian historian Romila Thapar was Thursday conferred the 2008 Kluge Prize by the United States Library of Congress for lifetime achievement in the Study of Humanity. Emeritus professor of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi , India, Thapar is the seventh recipient of the award. She will share the prize money of USD 1 million with Peter Robert Lamont Brown, professor of history at Princeton University .

Since the last decade or so (ever since the BJP emerged as a serious contender for ruling India), the Westerners have adopted a calculated strategy to raise the profile of all Indian communist fellow travellers and make them famous or respectable by giving them awards on one pretext or another. Their objective is to ensure that the national discourse in India remains dominated by leftists and communists (as it has been since the time of J.L. Nehru) and is not allowed to veer toward the right end of the spectrum. Showering awards on Indian leftists and communists, and thereby increasing their importance within India , is how they are achieving this. The award diplomacy of the Whites has become more shrill and blatant in the last five years or so.  It is as if they are almost in a panic.

To be eligible for Western awards, Indians have to meet some essential conditions: (i) You should be a certified ‘Jholawala’ (leftist / commie fellow traveller) or a part of the fully Anglicised Indian elite which looks outside the borders of India for inspiration. (ii) You should be hostile to Hinduism and any kind of native nationalism, and nurse a rabid hatred of so-called “Hindu nationalists.” (iii) All your works should be in English. (None of the Indian languages is recognised by the Gora sahibs.) (iv) You should actively sympathise with Indian naxalites or Maoists and agree with their ideology, if not their methods.

There is a whole battalion of such much-awarded brown specimens running around in India, from looney leftists such as Praful Bidwai to “historians” such as Romila Thapar to writers such as Arvind Adiga and Suzanna Arundhati Roy (who never mentions her Christian first name) to alleged social activists such as Sandeep Pandey to Maoist sympathisers such as Binayak Sen to a gang of Indian communists residing in the US and operating from American universities, such as Angana Chatterji.

Show me an Indian leftist / fellow traveller and I will show you the Western award he / she has received. Most of these people are in the area of humanities (the den of communists anywhere in the world). They are full-time commentators on everything happening under the sun. They are also writers, historians and social activists. Some of them carry nonsensical designations such as “facilitator of inter-faith dialogue” or hide behind labels of human rights which give them a wide leeway to operate.

Most of the leftist Elite Indians chosen for these awards are self-alienated from the salt of the land. 

They are seditious and hostile to the idea of India as it exists today. They have contempt for democracy and call it “tyranny of the masses” or “majoritarianism.” Instead, they are working toward their vision of India shedding democracy and becoming some kind of utopia built upon a foundation of Marxist “egalitarianism.” They inhabit a cuckoo-land that exists only in their own minds. This suits the Whites just fine, thank you. 

So what is the reason behind this recent marriage of Whites with Indian fellow travellers? What are the Westerners trying to achieve with nurturing Indian communists in American universities and raising their profile by showering awards on them almost every month? The real motive is quite sinister. It is to push India toward a Maoist takeover.  Sounds radical? It won’t if you consider what has happened in Nepal , how the Nepal king was taken out and who got arrested for air-dropping truckloads of arms over Purulia. Through the Maoists, the CIA wants to cook the goose of a rising India which may pose a threat to the hegemony of Western civilisation in another 30 years or so, while the church wants to use Maoists to purge vast tracts of Central India of Hinduism and eliminate Hindu religious leaders operating in these areas. The Maoist belt running from Andhra Pradesh to Orissa to Chattisgarh to Jharkhand to Bihar to Nepal is actually a Christian belt of recent converts who are being quietly radicalised by the Church and CIA, according to their time-tested strategy of “first convert and then arm the converts.”

Americans have already practised in Latin America this strategy of engineering Maoist revolutions to destablize peaceful countries. Now, it seems they have begun to use the same strategy for India . Westerners are scared of India becoming a militarily strong capitalist country grounded in Hindu nationalism. At no cost will they allow this to happen. Their solution is to push India toward a domination by the leftists and communists.

The latest Romila Thapar award has a history behind it. Most Indians of non-leftist persuasion were enraged when she was appointed the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress. A campaign was run against her by such Indians and a petition signed by hundreds of people was sent to the Library of Congress. Promptly, some fellow travellers such as Praful Bidwai (he is also much awarded by the whites) jumped to her defence. He even graced the rabidly leftist “Frontline” magazine with an article about the issue.  

The Americans feigned ignorance about the whole matter and denied having received the signed petition against Thapar’s appointment. Now, five years later, Romila Thapar has been given this Western award. Whom are the Americans fooling? We understand what they are trying to do to India . Indians should learn to flush their Western awards down the toilet and be wary of people in their midst who owe their fame and prominence only to these awards.

(source: Awards diplomacy of the Whites- indianrealist.com).

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Vatican owes us an apology

His Majesty the king has ordered that there shall be no Brahmins in his land and that they should be banished.”
“In the name of his Majesty I order that no Hindu can or shall perform marriages…”
“The marriages of the supplicants are superstitious acts or functions which include Hindu rites and ceremonies as well as cult, adoration and prayers of Hindu temples…”
“I order that no Hindu temples be erected in any of the territories of my king… and that Hindu temples which already have been erected be not repaired…'

***

Anybody familiar with the brutalisation of Hindu customs and practices, indeed Hindu faith and belief, could mistakenly believe these extracts have been taken from royal decrees issued during Muslim rule. The harshness with which suppression is prescribed in these decrees, the callous disregard that is advocated for the other’s sentiment, the cruelty that is so palpable in both thought and action, suggest that these firman could have been issued by one of the “shadows of god” who ruled this land, laying to waste Hindu lives and temples.

But these are not extracts from firman issued by the Mughal court of, say, Aurangzeb. They have been taken from firmans issued by the Portuguese who ruled Goa and recognised no religion other than Christianity as the legitimate means of communion with god. It was no secular rule that they imposed, but a ruthless system of pillage disguised as trade and a cruel administration for whom Hindus were nothing more than “supplicants” to be crushed into submission or exiled into oblivion.

Torture Chambers of the Holy Inquisition

The Holy Inquisition in India. Horrors inflicted on Hindus.

***

The horrors inflicted on Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition — the Vatican has now admitted that the Church was wrong and Galileo was right — are well known. Not that well-known, and tragically so, are the horrors inflicted by the Goa Inquisition. Every child reads about Galileo’s trial and how it is symbolic of the triumph of science over faith. But there is no reference — indeed, all reference is scrupulously avoided — to the brutal attempts of the Church to stamp out Hinduism in the territories controlled by the Portuguese in India .

And this silence is not because there exists no evidence: There exist, in full text, orders issued by the Portuguese Viceroy and the Governor. There exist, in written records and travelogues, penned not by the persecuted but by the persecutors, full details of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Christ. Hindus who dared oppose the persecution were punished, swiftly and mercilessly. Those who were fortunate, got away with being banished. The less fortunate had their property seized and auctioned — the money was used, in large measures, for furthering proselytisation. The least fortunate were forced to serve as slave labour on the galleys that transported loot from Indian shores to Portuguese coffers.

Viceroy D Constantine de Braganca issued an order on April 2, 1560, instructing that Brahmins should be thrown out of Goa and other areas under Portuguese control. They had a month's time to sell their property — it is obvious who gained from such distress sale. Those found violating the viceregal order, it was declared, would have their properties seized. Another order was issued, this time by Governor Antonio Morez Barreto, on February 7, 1575, decreeing that the estates of Brahmins whose "presence was prejudicial to Christianity" would be confiscated and used for "providing clothes to the New Christians".

The attitude of the Portuguese administrators in India and the Church hardened over the years, to a point where each fiat, each decree, each order, each letter, became an instrument of religious persecution. The Third Concilio Provincial — a gathering of bishops and other clerics — met in 1585 to review, among other things, the progress of converting the “heathens” to the “only faith”. The Concilio adopted a resolution which said, ‘His Majesty the king has on occasion ordered the Viceroys and Governors of India that there should be no Brahmins in his lands, and that they should be banished therefrom together with the physicians and other infidels who are prejudicial to Christianity, after taking the opinion of the Archbishop and other religious persons who have experience in the matter. As the orders of His Majesty in this regard have not been executed, great impediments in the way of conversion and the community of New Christians have followed and continue to follow.”

One can quote from many other orders, resolutions and instructions that resulted in the hideous Vatican-backed Goa Inquisition. The details are not unknown to most of us; they are definitely well known to the Vatican . The reason I have raised the issue of the Goa Inquisition is two-fold. 

First, Pope Benedict XVI should bear in mind the horrors inflicted on Hindus in the name of Christianity before he berates them for being intolerant towards Christians. Second, the Vatican owes an apology for the crimes committed during the Goa Inquisition; it must apologise and repent for its misdeeds against Hindus and gross attempts to stamp out Hinduism. Not to do so would amount to continued endorsement of the crimes and the unfair practices of missionaries.

Ten years ago, the Vatican issued a 14-page document, ‘apologising’ and ‘repenting’ for not doing enough to save Europe ’s Jews from the Holocaust. While it is common knowledge that Pope Pius XII did not feel particularly appalled by Hitler’s ‘final solution’, the Vatican claimed in its 1998 document that he was unaware of the concentration camps, the mass slaughter, the gas chambers and the furnaces. The document, understandably, failed to impress Jews who have made it clear that Pope Benedict XVI is not welcome to visit Israel unless he offers an unqualified apology and makes public documents of that period which are now stored in the Vatican’s archives. The Vatican may have eliminated the phrase “perfidious Jews” from its liturgy and Pope John Paul II may have made it fashionable for the Pontiff to refer to Jews as “older brothers”, these are seen as no more than meaningless, insincere gestures.

The purpose of securing an apology for the Goa Inquisition is not to belittle the Vatican , but to drive home the point that it cannot seek to occupy the moral high ground till such time it has apologised and atoned for the sins committed against Hindus. If the Vatican can say sorry to others, there is no reason why it cannot say sorry to Hindus. 

Their faith is no less than those of the Book.

(source:  Vatican owes us an apology - By Kanchan Gupta - dailypioneer.com). Refer to chapters on European Imperialism and First Indologists. Refer to Idol desecration in Goa  - By Yadnesh Sawant and Christian Saints for Sale - By C I Isaac - vijayvaani.com

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Godhra report says train carnage a conspiracy  

The Nanavati Commission report probing into the Godhra train carnage was tabled in the Gujarat Assembly on Thursday amid high drama.  

The Nanavati report says the incident of burning S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002, was a pre-planned conspiracy and not an accident.

The first part of the report gave a clean chit to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi saying there was no evidence of the role of CM and any Gujarat minister in this case. It also added that there was no evidence of them having not been able to provide protection, relief or rehabilitation to any riot victim.

The report also said that 140 liters of petrol was purchased as the part of conspiracy to burn the bogey.  

The report says Raza Kurkur and Salim Panwala had purchased petrol on the night of February 26 to be used in burning the bogey of Sabarmati Express.The conspiracy was hatched at Aman guest house and meant to spread terror in the area, the report adds.  

Doors of S-6 and S-7 bogey were forcibly opened and a person called Hassan Lalu threw objects which were burning inside the bogey, according to the report. It also said that Molvi Umarji planned the entire conspiracy. Others named in the conspiracy are Shaukat Lalu, Imran Sheri, Rafique Batuck, Salim Zarda, Jabbir, Sheraj Bala.  

The hypocrisy of the Congress-UPA and Left leadership of India.

Justice Girish Thakorla Nanavati (1935 - ) 

Not bothering to so much as study a report written by a former judge of the Supreme Court, not caring to go into specific arguments and pointing out logical inconsistencies or flaws, the Congress-UPA and Left leaderships have trashed Justice Nanavati's assessment. They have questioned the honesty and credibility of Justice Girish Thakorla Nanavati, but offered no reasons for doing so. Such hit-and-run tactics could be expected from the familiar bunch of left-liberal activists who have made a career of Gujarat bashing.

The same Justice Nanavati inquired into the anti-Sikh violence following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1984.

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"It had been conclusively established that Nanavati Commission was a commission, UC Banerjee Committee was just a committee not a commission,” he added. As the report was being tabled, Congress legislators staged a walkout in the Assembly.  Meanwhile, spokesperson of Gujarat government and also the Health Minister of the state Jai Narayan Vyas said,

“The report has clearly gone into details, analysed all the evidences and has come to the conclusion that there was no failure of machinery as far as maintenance of law and order is concerned."

***

Godhra Commission report gives Modi clean chit

The Sabarmati Express coach-burning was a 'pre-planned conspiracy', a probe panel has said also giving a clean chit to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the state police in the subsequent post-Godhra riots that claimed over 1,000 lives.  Retired Justice Akshay Mehta was the other member of the Nanavati Commission.

"There is absolutely no no evidence to show that either the Chief Minister or any of the ministers in his council or police officers had played any role in the Godhra incident," said the report of Justice G T Nanavati, a former Supreme Court judge, that went into the train burning incident.

(source: Godhra report says train carnage a conspiracy and Godhra Commission report gives Modi clean chit).

Insulting Justice Nanavati 
Congress/Left cussedness

In rejecting the Justice GT Nanavati Commission report that inquired into the Sabarmati Express fire at Godhra and the violence that followed in Gujarat in February-March 2002, the Congress and its UPA allies, as also the Left, have acted with expected cussedness.

Without going into an analysis of the Nanavati report, it is worth commenting on the perverse responses it has drawn from those politically opposed to the Gujarat Chief Minister.  

Not bothering to so much as study a report written by a former judge of the Supreme Court, not caring to go into specific arguments and pointing out logical inconsistencies or flaws, the Congress-UPA and Left leaderships have trashed Justice Nanavati's assessment. They have questioned the honesty and credibility of Justice Girish Thakorla Nanavati, but offered no reasons for doing so. Such hit-and-run tactics could be expected from the familiar bunch of left-liberal activists who have made a career of Gujarat bashing -- and who have, indeed, said that Justice Nanavati has not "inspired much confidence". That it comes from mainstream parties that are running the Union Government is alarming. Consider the hypocrisy. The same Justice Nanavati inquired into the anti-Sikh violence following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1984. On the basis of that Nanavati report, two Congress leaders, Mr Sajjan Kumar and Mr Jagadish Tytler, were put in the dock. Mr Tytler was even forced to resign from the Union Government. The Congress accepted the report, as did the UPA allies and the Left. The cabal of professional civil rights activists hailed Justice Nanavati's dogged pursuit of the truth. In Delhi , he was a heroic judge; in Gujarat , he is an untrustworthy charlatan!

There was a time in India when a judicial Commission of Inquiry had a certain sanctity. It was left free of politics and its findings were debated, discussed, disputed and disagreed with -- but not debunked wholesale. 

(source: Insulting Justice Nanavati - dailpioneer.com  Edit page September 25 2008).  Refer to Dial CPM Brinda and Teesta for cash-for-false-affidavits  

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Nomenclature terrorism

The ELM and the pseudo-seculars in India have a sworn duty: that of cultural extinction of the native civilization of this country.

The recent fuss about alleged “Hindu terrorists” has entertained me hugely because all the usual suspects played their expected roles to perfection. The pseudo-secular media had a field day insinuating that Hindu terrorism is as major a problem in India as is Mohammedan and Christist terrorism. The UPA forgot its axiom that “terrorism has no religion”, and joyously crowed about “Hindu terrorists”. The BJP was apoplectic in its attempts to distance itself from the alleged “Hindu terrorists”.

Meanwhile, some actual – not imagined — terrorism activity has been going on in Kerala, where at least 300 people have been recruited by Mohammedan fundamentalists to wage war on the Indian State . Newspaper reports suggest that at least 96 young men from Kerala, who were given military training by SIMI, are at large. 16 of them are in Kashmir, the others in Bangalore or Kerala, according to Intelligence Bureau reports. Apparently there are special instructions in Malayalam in SIMI jungle camps held all over the country, for the poor dears are not so proficient in Urdu/Arabic. These young men were dispatched to Kashmir with simple instructions: kill Indian soldiers and facilitate infiltration by the Pakistanis. Terrorism has now become just a job.

So much so that so-called “spiritual advisers” (“paymaster” may be a more accurate designation) are out there recruiting known gangsters, converting them and sending them off to Kashmir . A particular gang of Christist criminals in Cochin has apparently supplied several converts who made the trek to Kashmir : including one Verghese aka Yasin who took a bullet in his head from the Indian Army and had to be identified from his fingerprints.

All this is ironic: Kerala has long been a supplier of manpower and womanpower – first it was the clerks and petty shopkeepers all over India, as well as a lot of soldiers; then it has been nurses, next construction labor and professionals for the Persian Gulf and America, and most recently, Christist padres and nuns for the conversion industry and as gastarbeiter for the shrinking seminaries of Europe. I guess it is but a small step to terrorism as a profession. As Adi Sankara said in a slightly different context some centuries ago, “udara nimittam bahu krta vesham” (one wears various roles to satisfy that despotic stomach).

And then there’s the news about serial blasts in Manipur and – as I write this – in Assam , that have killed large numbers of innocent people. There are all the other blasts – there have been so many we begin to lose count – in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, etc. etc. etc. – where the perpetrators unambiguously let it be known that they were Mohammedans inflamed by religious fundamentalism and jihad.

Christist terrorists have been running rampant in the Northeast for some time: their modus operandi is a little different – they prefer the AK-47 and they generally target specific individuals. They have ethnically-cleansed 45,000 Reang tribals from Mizoram for refusing to convert; they shot respected litterateur and patriot, Bineshwar Brahma in Guwahati; they shot Hindu priest Shanti Tripura in his own temple; and most recently, they shot Swami Lakshmananda in Orissa (let’s not kid around about this: even the alleged Communist terrorist who was trotted out, suitably incognito, on TV to exonerate Christists admitted that most of his flock were Christists).

Not to mention that almost the entire top echelon of the dreaded Tamil Tigers are Christists, and the non-Christists mysteriously suffer “accidents” or are captured by the Sri Lankan Army or “commit suicide”. Velupillai Prabhakaran, Anton Balasingham, et al are all Christists. So was Dhanu, the suicide bomber who blew up Rajiv Nehru Gandhi. There is reason to believe that the so-called Maoists in Nepal are also crypto-Christists, especially some of their top brass.

Of course, none of this qualifies for the “religious terrorism” moniker as far as the lovely English-Language Media and the UPA are concerned. Their sound and fury is reserved for some poor Hindu nun who is, by the power of “truth by repeated assertion”, subjected to an electronic lynch, deemed a terrorist and subjected to tejovadham. This is to be expected, as the ELM and the pseudo-seculars in India have a sworn duty: that of cultural extinction of the native civilization of this country. Once you understand this axiom, their baffling acts are self-consistent in a certain bizarre frame of reference.

Whether the pseudo-seculars do this for money, or they have been brainwashed by the predatory State, is not entirely clear. But then it doesn’t matter, does it, since the end result is the same?

And this deliberate use of nomenclature terrorism – the use of insinuation to demonize and to create defensiveness – is a purely Goebbelsian propaganda tactic. I tried a little experiment on the pseudo-seculars some years ago by returning the favor. I started referring to their ideology as Nehruvian Stalinism. Their immediate knee-jerk reaction was to label me a Hindu fundamentalist, Hindu fascist etc. Which I was prepared for: I told them, fine, maybe I am all that, but you, you are Nehruvian Stalinists.

I got the reaction I expected: when the tables were turned, the pseudo-seculars did exactly what they expect others to do under their attacks. They got defensive, they labored to explain why they were not Stalinists, and how different Nehru was from Stalin. They grew increasingly exasperated as I kept insisting that Nehru was a lot like Stalin: the personality cult, the imperiousness, the purges, the heavy-industry fetish, etc., and how Jawaharlal was merely a little less effective in his ruthlessness.

Happily, I got a few pseudo-seculars into an absolute tizzy denying these allegations; they practically foamed at the mouth. I had succeeded – I had got them to play on my terms, on the playing field I defined; instead of protesting that I was not a fascist, I had changed the terms of reference and forced them to defend their cherished shibboleths. It was good to watch them squirm.

That, I submit, is the way to play this game. Hindus should not bother to try and prove that they are not terrorists. We should say “Yes, there must be Hindu terrorists, just like you guys are Communist terrorists, or Christist terrorists, or Mohammedan terrorists. Any questions?” If they continue to blather, one might hint darkly of caches of AK-47s and RDX.

It is evident that the pseudo-seculars are cowards and bullies, and this will shut them up. Only, gentle reader, I suggest you be careful in your choice of words, just in case somebody has a hidden camera– make veiled threats, where you cannot be pinned down to anything specific. And occasionally mutter knowingly about some atrocity perpetrated by the Christist or Communist or Mohammedan terrorists, and insinuate that you have certain “friends” and you know where the pseudo-seculars live. You know, the kind of thing the Mafioso say in those gangster movies.

Nomenclature terrorism is a game two can play, and the sinister Nehruvian Stalinists can be – as in the quaint phrase they use – hoist on their own petard.

(source: Nomenclature terrorism - By Rajeev Srinivasan - haindavakeralam.com). 

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Godhra: The True story

What transpired then, in the Indian press? Let’s imagine a coach of French pilgrims coming back from Lourdes, burned alive.

***

Godhra, a city of the Indian State of Gujarat , was the lead story in all Indian newspapers on February 27th-28th, 2002. A shattering piece of news: 58 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive in a train. “57 die in ghastly attack on train” ran the Times of India’s headline; “Mob targets Ramsevaks [Devotees of Rama] returning from Ayodhya”; “58 killed in attack on train with Karsevaks [volunteers]” (The Indian Express); “1500-strong mob butcher 57 Ramsevaks on Sabarmati Express” (The Asian Age). But the BBC’s announcement had a very different tone: “58 Hindu ‘extremists’ burned to death” … or Agence France Press on March 2nd: “A train full of Hindu ‘extremists’ was burnt.”

A deluge of anguished news followed about a “Muslim genocide”: “Mass killings of Muslims in reprisal riots” (NYT, March 5th), “The authorities … share the prejudices of the Hindu gangs who have been busy pulping their Muslim neighbours” (The Observer, March 4th). We were told that Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, intended to eradicate Muslims from the State — more than 9% of Gujarat ’s population, in other words five million people. We read that the police was conniving in the mass slaughter and did nothing to prevent it. Narendra Modi was compared to Hitler, or Nero. We shuddered reading the reports describing rapes and various horrors, supposedly inflicted on Muslims by Hindus.

Today, six years later, with the noises and cries of the wounds having fallen silent, what emerges from those events? What are the facts?

At 7:43 A.M. on February 27th, 2002, the Sabarmati Express rolled into the Godhra station, fortunately with a four-hour delay, in broad daylight. This train transported more than 2,000 people, mainly karsewaks on their way back to Ahmedabad after participating in the Poorna Ahuti Yagya at Ayodhya, a ritual at the traditional birthplace of Lord  Rama.

Godhra carnage

What transpired then, in the Indian press? Let’s imagine a coach of French pilgrims coming back from Lourdes , burned alive.

Strangely, instead of clearly, straightforwardly condemning the act, the Indian English-language press tried to justify it: “Pilgrims provoked by chanting pro-Hindu slogans” (they were not slogans but bhajans, or devotional songs, ending with “Jai Sri Ram” (Victory to Sri Rama). “It’s because they were returning from Ayodhya, where they asked for the reconstruction of a temple at the traditional birth place of Rama; this offends the feelings of the Muslims.” In sum, the victims, roasted alive, were guilty.  

***

As it pulled out of the station, the train was pelted with stones and bricks, and passengers from several bogeys were forced to bring down their windows to protect themselves. Someone pulled the emergency chain: the train came to a halt about 100 metres away from the platform, surrounded by a large crowd of Muslims. The railway police managed to disperse the crowd, and the train resumed its journey.

Within minutes, the emergency chain was simultaneously pulled again, from several coaches. It halted at about 700 metres from the station. A crowd of over 1,000 surrounded the train, pelting it with bricks, stones, then burning missiles and acid bulbs, especially on the S-5, S-6 and S-7 coaches.

The vacuum pipe between coaches S-6 and S-7 was cut, thereby preventing any further movement of the train. The doors were locked from outside. A fire started in coach S-7, which the passengers were able to extinguish. But the attack intensified and coach S-6 caught fire and minutes later, was in flames. Passengers who managed to get out of the burning compartment were attacked with sharp weapons, and stoned. They received serious injuries, some were killed. Others got out through the windows and took shelter below the coach.

Fifty eight pilgrims were burned alive, including twenty-seven women and ten children. The whole attack lasted 20-25 minutes.

What transpired then, in the Indian press? Let’s imagine a coach of French pilgrims coming back from Lourdes , burned alive.  

Strangely, instead of clearly, straightforwardly condemning the act, the Indian English-language press tried to justify it: “Pilgrims provoked by chanting pro-Hindu slogans” (they were not slogans but bhajans, or devotional songs, ending with “Jai Sri Ram” (Victory to Sri Rama). “It’s because they were returning from Ayodhya, where they asked for the reconstruction of a temple at the traditional birth place of Rama; this offends the feelings of the Muslims.” In sum, the victims, roasted alive, were guilty.

(source: Godhra: The True Story - By Nicole Elfi - jaia-bharati.org). Refer to NGOs, Teesta Setalvad spiced up Gujarat riot incidents: SIT and Setalvad in dock for 'cooking up killings'  and Teesta, It hit your face

Gujarat riot myths busted

The Narendra Modi baiters among NGOs on Monday suffered a major setback when a Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) charged a leading activist, Teesta Setalvad, with adding morbidity into the post- Godhra riots in Gujarat by “cooking up macabre tales of killings”.

The so-called human rights activist, Teesta Setalvad her partner and husband Javed Anand - Co-editor, Communalism Combat and Secretary, Citizens for Justice and Peace — who paraded the Gujarat riot victims before the Supreme Court and claimed they had been denied justice — suffered embarrassment on Monday after a Special Investigation Team (SIT) gave sufficient grounds for the apex court to doubt the authenticity of incidents highlighted by her NGO Citizens for Justice and Peace.

SIT headed by former CBI director R K Raghavan said “many incidents were cooked up, false witnesses were tutored to give evidence about imaginary incidents, and false charges levelled against the then Ahmedabad police chief P C Pandey”.

Referring to another instance that exposed the Citizens for Justice and Peace’s much ‘trumpeted’ charges, Rohtagi said the SIT investigation found untrue allegation about a gangrape of a pregnant woman Kauser Bano, whose stomach was allegedly pierced by sword and her foetus killed.

Refer to Why is Teesta Setalvaad not behind bars? and  Gujarat Riots: The True Story: Busting the Media Myths and Tehelka Exposed and Teesta, It hit your face.  Refer to NDTV

Even the instance of dumping of bodies into a well at Naroda Patiya and a charge of the police allegedly shielding accused persons in murder of a British national was found to be untrue, Rohtagi said. Firing a salvo at the NGO, 

Rohtagi said, “It is clear from the report that the horrendous allegations made by the NGO were false. Cyclostyled affidavits were supplied by a social activist and the allegations made in them were untrue,” he added, with an obvious reference to Setalvad.

(source: Gujarat riot myths busted - By Abraham Thomas - dailypioneer.com and Setalvad in dock for 'cooking up killings' - economictimes.indiatimes.com and NGOs, Teesta Setalvad spiced up Gujarat riot incidents: SIT).  Refer to Profile of Anti-India activist

Also refer to Gujarat riots  - Isn't it about time that every thinking citizen of Bharat came together and forced the offending media— CNN-IBN, NDTV, AAJ TAK, Hindu, Telegraph, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagrika Ghosh, Pranay Roy, Prabhu Chawla, etc. to apologize and mend their ways? Refer to NDTV  

The Mind of a Slave.

Father Cedric Prakash, photographed here receiving the Chevalier de la Legion d’ Honneur Award from the French Ambassador in New Delhi on 14th July 2006, is well known in some circles as a resolute defender (?) of "human rights" in Gujarat. In the Mail Today of May 8, 2009, page 9, he is quoted as saying: (Narendra) Modi cannot nurture prime ministerial dreams unless he is acceptable to the Western (?) world.

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The Mind of a Slave

Fr. Cedric Prakash, photographed here receiving the Chevalier de la Legion d’ Honneur Award from the French Ambassador in New Delhi on 14th July 2006, is well known in some circles as a resolute defender of "human rights" in Gujarat.

In June, a delegation from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is scheduled to visit India. The team will travel to Gujarat and Orissa. Fr Prakash had testified before USCIRF in June 2002 after the Gujarat riots. The idea of a US body investigating religious freedom in India is a bit disturbing. Fr Prakash's take on the subject is, however, fascinating.

In the Mail Today of May 8, 2009, page 9, he is quoted as saying:

(Narendra) Modi cannot nurture prime ministerial dreams unless he is acceptable to the Western world.

Fr. Prakash does himself proud with such an honest articulation of his beliefs.

(source: Pumpkin Republic - By Swapan Dasgupta). Refer to The USCIRF in India - By Radha Rajan

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UNCIRF – will it visit convents where nuns are raped?  - By Hilda Raja

The UPA government’s unprecedented step of inviting the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (UNCIRF) to visit Gujarat and Orissa is not only disturbing, but also portents greater harm to the harmony and unity of the country. 

It exposes India to international policing which has ramifications on the integrity and sovereignty of the nation. Today it can be a Commission; why not later an army for the purpose of protecting minorities? The basic premise is the same.

It is invasion - be it territorial, social or religious. No matter which area, invasiveness of any kind cannot be accepted. What is the role of the Congress-led UPA government? Does it not stand indicted for impotency to curb violence? It cannot abdicate responsibility and obligation to protect minorities and rein in State governments. If this is logically followed, the accused is the Congress–Manmohan Singh - proof of his political weakness. Which country would tolerate such invasion and interference in its internal affairs? Are we bonded to the USA ? No patriotic Indian, irrespective of religion, would accept the policing of this nation by outside agencies.

Can the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) and the INDIAN Churches which objected to such invasiveness nine years ago now make a U-turn? In the course of five years, what is the persecution witnessed in India . Brahmin Pundits killed in hundreds and chased away from J&K under ethnic cleansing has not raised international concerns. The furore caused by wrongful reporting of the rape of five nuns in Jhabua was set right when the nuns themselves gave interviews stating it had nothing to do with religion. Indeed, the culprits were converted tribals. 

In Orissa, the massacre of Swami Laxmanananda and his disciples led to clashes in which Christians and Hindus were equally victims. The infamous Gujarat riots are being investigated by the Special Investigation Team, but earlier versions and gory stories of brutality, rape and massacres narrated by activist Teesta Setalvad were found faked, cooked up, witnesses and statements doctored; hence the Supreme Court rejected the bundle of lies. Against this backdrop, Congress allowing UNCIRF to enquire into violence against minorities is political in intent and has everything to do with further dividing the people on religious grounds. 

Will UNCIRF be allowed to enter Pakistan or any Islamic country where there is discrimination against minorities?

Congress and Christian churches seem to conspire against Hindus. This is evident when one looks at the pre-election scenario. Church double-speak has exposed its ulterior motive - nine years ago (Sept 2000) CBCI described as “unwarranted” the proposed hearing on religious freedom in India by UNCIRF, and distanced itself from John Dayal, saying he was attending it in his individual capacity. It is relevant to recall what Christian MPs felt then. They acknowledged the need to curb the influence of fundamentalists over the community and the Church. By deposing before the US panel, Dayal has given Hindu extremist groups valid reason to doubt the integrity of the community and ‘we could just be inviting Hindu extremist backlash’ rued Patty Ripple Kyndiah, who added that the antics of John Dayal is against national interest. Former Speaker P.A. Sangma endorsed Kyndiah, ‘This is our internal problem. We are capable of solving it’.

What has changed in nine years? The number of churches built has increased more than hundred fold. Christian institutions are given all financial assistance, Christians have occupied hundreds and hundreds of acres of  promboke land on which they quickly erect a shack and a cross - for further constructing pucca buildings, both commercial and religious. Thus occupying the land, they acquire assets, evade tax, and even electricity charges.

It is in the national interest to survey the status of Churches property-wise and cash-wise. When in so-called Christian countries churches are closing down, here in India churches are annually increasing in number. Even in Italy , churches are empty but here churches are full every Sunday and the pulpit is used even against the government, but goes unchallenged. From a poor country like ours, money flows to Rome , from congregations working for the poor and destitute in India , money flows to Vatican . Are these signs of a persecuted church? The flow of money to churches and church-allied ‘development organizations’ has trebled in the last five years, on Government of India records. Is this a sign of a church under duress? 

Why should money from here go to Rome/Vatican? One is first an Indian - for one cannot change one’s nationality but can change one’s religion.

The power games of the powerful have torn nations apart by war followed by famines leading to total destruction and subjugation of people. Interference in our internal affairs must be seen in wider perspective. Invasiveness of any kind in the affairs of a sovereign country means two things - the supervisory role of the invasive country/organization and the subjective, subservient level of the interfered country. We have a democracy and a Constitution which has stood us well. Except for some aberrations brought by vest interests, the people have always been able to overcome this and to set the tone and tenure for harmonious unity. India is the only country in the world which has opened its arms to all religions and all people and thus become the cradle of world religions. Fringe Christian churches have been misusing Freedom of Religion for proselytizing, poaching on other churches as well, and creating social tensions. One is not judged by one’s religion, but will be judged by the measure of love one has lived with and the Truth one has upheld. 

PS: Would the Church permit UNCIRF to visit the convents which have reported rapes, sexual violations, murders and oppression of women (nuns).

(source: UNCIRF – will it visit convents where nuns are raped?  - By Hilda Raja - vijayvaani.com).

The USCIRF in India

"In passing this Act on International religious Freedom the U.S is basing its case on the noble founders of the nation, on 'the pillars of our nation' - a nation that was built on the blood and sweat of genocide and slavery – both of which were practiced in the name of the Christian faith!!" 

The U.S has set several precedents post September 11 – precedents worthy of emulation. The right to revenge, the right to pre-emptive strikes when faced with threats to national security, the right to demonstartive nationalism/protectionism. The U.S must ask itself why other religious minorities in India , the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Buddhists and Jains never face the problems that Christians and Muslims in India face at the hands of 'Hindu extremists? Why did the normally gentle Hindus take to extremism? Why did the U.S carpet bomb Iraq and Afghanistan ? National security is threatened not only when our borders are threatened by foreign invaders in conventional war but when our homes, communities and societies are threatened by religious invaders and terrorists. Christian missionaries and Islamic terrorists threaten Hindus and Hindu society. The right to revenge is as much the prerogative of Hindus as it is of the U.S. So USCIRF or ABCDEF, the U.S cannot preach to India what it has never practiced. Enough of this impertinence USCIRF. Care for your backyard before you venture into other nations.

Refer to A Little Matter of Genocide - By Ward Churchill. 

And one more thing, this constant harping on rising Hindu extremism threatening the secular, democratic fibre of the country and all that crap. The Indian State is democratic and secular. The Indian nation is not. The Indian nation like most nations of the world, is religious. And the rich diversity and pluralism which you keep harping about, it has existed for over two thousand years, when the first Christian and Muslim missionaries/traders/invaders begin to appear in our country, not because of the USCIRF or the U.N or the Indian Constitution or the Human rights industry. It has existed for centuries because the nation was Hindu. The Hindu thought is assimilatory not exclusivist like the Abrahamic faiths. And it is this nation which is being threatened by the missionary activities of the Christian fundamentalists and the secessionist activities of Islamic fundamentalists. The Hindus have survived 600 years of Muslim barbarism, 200 years of savage colonialism. We survived violent partition in 1947, and we are living through the problems in J&K and the North-east. Hindus have the right to exist, the right to protect their faith, the right to territory, the right to protect and defend their women and children, the right to revenge and the right to pre-emptive strikes against their aggressors. "

(source: The USCIRF in India - By Radha Rajan). Refer to Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians  - By Ward Churchill                

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Modi exoneration: A slap in the face of secular brigade 

Call Narendra Modi a communalist, a Hindu fundamentalist or a fascist and our intellectuals would joyfully agree. Clear him of charges of genocide and there will be proverbial snarls. Our intellectuals and secularists are so accustomed to accept the portrayal of Modi as a vicious Muslim-hater that when a report was submitted to the Gujarat Legislative Assembly clearing him of all charges of complicity in the post-Godhra riots cries of ‘no, no!’ could be heard in the editorial columns of our newspapers.

An example is The Indian Express (September 27). “Compromised individuals and governments cannot set up commissions of enquiry and then expect the world to hail these as impartial and true”, the paper pontificated. The report in question was submitted by the one-man Nanavati Commission. It happens to contradict reports of a commission chaired by another judge UC Banerjee. If the Justice Banerjee report condemned the Gujarat government and Narendra Modi, the Justice Nanavati Commission, at least in the first of its two-part report has totally exonerated Modi and his government. As the Express put it: “Both reports reflect a polarised society and it is clear that the Nanavati Commission has been selective and partisan in its findings as probably the hurriedly set-up Banerjee Committee.” Probably? Why probably? Justice Banerjee submitted his report hurriedly. Justice Nanavati has taken five years to submit his report. Can we call it ‘hurriedly’? Justice Nanavati has named names.

The report says that the people who set fire to coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express bought 140 litres of petrol prior to its arrival at Godhra, this has never been challenged. What were those 140 litres of petrol meant for? To brew tea? To make hair oil? If Justice Nanavati were to say that the sun rises in the east in Gujarat , our secularists would demand that he provide evidence. The Times of India (September 27) also finds it hard to accept that there can be truth in Justice Nanavati’s report. But to prove how secular it is the paper argues that “even if the Nanavati Commission is correct…. that can’t be taken to justify the days of carnage and breakdown of public order that followed”.

Obviously it is okay to damn the Modi government through a report provided by a Justice commissioned by Lalu Prasad. We live and learn. In the matter of religious conversions again, many of our newspapers are remarkably silent one suspects because criticising the Church would amount to supporting Hindutva. Not a single newspaper so far has made a deep study of how many Protestant missions are functioning in India , how many churches have been built in recent years and how many conversions have taken place. Interestingly, internet shows that one Amrita Singh has written a strong piece in The Times of India (September 7) exposing the doings of missionaries. Amrita Singh is quoted as saying: “One of the most effective church planting agencies working in India is the US -based AD 2000 and Beyond Movement. It is impressively organised, having mapped the whole of India by caste and identifying those most likely to be receptive to their message.” AD 2000 lists nine Indian tribes as Priority I, because they are so poor and deemed most likely to convert. The names of the nine tribes are enumerated. And there is more of this kind. Is the UPA government aware of all this? Is it taking any measure to handle large-scale invasion of evangelists into India ?

Does anyone know how much money is pouring in, how much is distributed and how many conversions take place? According to Amrita Singh, a forecast made by the World Religious Council plans to increase the Christian population to 125 million by the year 2050. The present population is 25 million. Maybe the World Council is exaggerating. Maybe it is all a joke. But equally maybe, it is all true. Is this permissible? Or is the UPA government going to tell us that the Constitution clearly lays down that propagation is permissible under the Constitution and if anybody wants to change his religion of his own free will he is free to do so?

We need some clarification here. Christian churches—especially Protestant churches—are hell bent on conversions on a large scale. Our secularists will say that is all very well. We are heading for trouble. Churches will be attacked and all Hindus will be blamed. Our Constitution is used to damn us and that is the worst part of it all. It doesn’t help to be idealistic which our constitution-makers were. What is being planned by the evangelists is “a silent invasion” entirely within the law. Poor people are literally “bought”, not forced, to become Christians. And isn’t that within the law? How dare anybody doubt it? One suspects that all this activity has the benevolent approval of the president of the Congress—secular—party.

(source: Modi exoneration: A slap in the face of secular brigade - oragniser.org). 

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Chandrayaan a tribute to nation’s genius and Aryabhatta
Chandrayaan: the Sanskrit word for "moon craft"

In the early hours of Wednesday, India created history by successfully launching Chandrayaan-I, the first Indian spacecraft destined for the moon. India thus became one of the elite group of six countries to have sent a mission to Earth’s closest celestial companion; if the mission succeeds, we shall be one of four countries to have accomplished this feat. Hours before Chandrayaan’s launch from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, the numerous scientists who have toiled for many months to make the mission a success completed the final set of drills, the most important of which was to fill the engines of the powerful PSLV-CII launch vehicle with liquid propellants and pressurised gas. Luck too was on the side of the scientists as they could not have asked for better launching conditions after worries about rain and lightning. Since the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 that saw American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon, many countries have aspired to replicate that ‘giant step for mankind’ but few have actually dared and even fewer succeeded in doing so. Since then there have been several moon missions, mostly unmanned, that have been carried out by several countries, both singularly and in collaboration. So much so that today sending a surveillance mission appears to be somewhat tame. But if one looks at the fact that there are only three other countries that have the technical prowess to successfully carry out such a mission, then India definitely has reasons to be proud. The launch of Chandrayaan, therefore, is of great significance for the nation and a feather in the cap of all scientists who have been associated with it.

India created history by successfully launching Chandrayaan-I, the first Indian spacecraft destined for the moon. India thus became one of the elite group of six countries to have sent a mission to Earth’s closest celestial companion.

Although Chandrayaan has been made possible with the help of international cooperation, the mission is essentially a tribute to India ’s inherent genius — and Aryabhatta.

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The Moon has long been an object of mystery, veneration and fascination not just in India but the world over. It has also found its way into many works of fiction and travellers’ tales. This mission provides an exciting opportunity to unravel some of the Moon’s deep secrets. There have been other Moon missions before but none has explored it in as great a depth and over such an extended period of time as the Indian scientists propose to do. This unmanned lunar exploration spacecraft, which will orbit the moon about a 100 km above its surface, has high resolution sensing equipment that will survey the lunar surface over two years and try and explore its mineral composition and, most importantly, try to find out whether water and helium deposits exist. The polar regions of the moon are of special interest as they are the most likely places where water might be found.

The Chandrayaan mission constitutes an important scientific study because apart from expanding our knowledge about the Moon it is hoped that it will also help confirm the theory about its origin. The mission will also shed considerable light on the genesis of our planet and the solar system. These significant scientific findings will, in the long run, help us in managing our planetary resources better. No less important is the fact that a mission of this scale will also add considerably to our scientific and technological capabilities, inspiring the next generation of scientists to scale even greater heights. Although Chandrayaan has been made possible with the help of international cooperation, the mission is essentially a tribute to India ’s inherent genius — and Aryabhatta.

(source: Chandrayaan a tribute to nation’s genius and Aryabhatta - dailypioneer.com  Edits - Thursday, October 23, 2008).

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Fly Me to the Deity

AN unmanned spacecraft from India — that most worldly and yet otherworldly of nations — is on its way to the moon. For the first time since man and his rockets began trespassing on outer space, a vessel has gone up from a country whose people actually regard the moon as a god.

The Chandrayaan (or “moon craft”) is the closest India has got to the moon since the epic Hindu sage, Narada, tried to reach it on a ladder of considerable (but insufficient) length — as my grandmother’s bedtime version of events would have it. So think of this as a modern Indian pilgrimage to the moon.

As it happens, a week before the launching, millions of Hindu women embarked on a customary daylong fast, broken at night on the first sighting of the moon’s reflection in a bowl of oil. (This fast is done to ensure a husband’s welfare.) But reverence for the moon is not confined to traditional Indian housewives. 

The Web site of the Indian Space Research Organization — the body that launched the Chandrayaan — includes a verse from the Rig Veda, a sacred Hindu text that dates back some 4,000 years: 

“O Moon! We should be able to know you through our intellect,/ You enlighten us through the right path.”

One is tempted, in all this, to dwell on the seeming contradiction between religion and science, between reason and superstition. And yet, anyone who has been to India will have noted also its “modernity of tradition.” The phrase, borrowed from the political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, might explain the ability of devout Hindus — many of them, no doubt, rocket scientists — to see no disharmony between ancient Vedic beliefs and contemporary scientific practice.

The Hindu astrological system is predicated on lunar movements: so the moon is a big deal in astrology-obsessed India . That said, the genius of modern Hinduism lies in its comfort with, and imperviousness to, science. A friend tells me of an episode from his childhood in Varanasi , the sacred Hindu city. Days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a model of the lunar module was placed in a courtyard of the most venerable temple in the city. The Hindu faithful were hailing man-on-the-moon; there was no suggestion that the Americans had committed sacrilege. (Here, I might add — with a caveat against exaggeration — that science sometimes struggles to co-exist with faith in the United States in ways that would disconcert many Indians.)

“O Moon! We should be able to know you through our intellect,/ You enlighten us through the right path.”

 Devout Hindus no disharmony between ancient Vedic beliefs and contemporary scientific practice. Science sometimes struggles to co-exist with faith in the United States in ways that would disconcert many Indians.

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Of course, the Chandrayaan is also a grand political gesture — space exploration in the service of national pride. This kind of excursion may provoke yawns at NASA, but judging from round-the-clock local coverage it has received, the mission has clearly inflamed the imagination and ambition of Indians. Yes, even moon-worshipping ones.

(source: Fly Me to the Deity - By Tunku Varadarajan - nytimes.com).

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The End Of American Capitalism?

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.

Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.

The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system. 

"People around the world once admired us for our economy, and we told them if you wanted to be like us, here's what you have to do -  hand over power to the market," said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. "The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis. And of course it raises questions about our credibility. Everyone feels they are suffering now because of us."

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Financial Crisis in USA and the Lesson for India

"An open, competitive and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarcer resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than government intervention,"" Henry Paulson, the U.S Treasury secretary said in Shanghai in March 2007. This year it sounds like a big joke given the fact that both the United States and UK government s are nationalizing banks and financial institutions in order to avoid a complete meltdown of their financial system.

This money will come from U.S. taxpayers, most of whom are ordinary workers. It amounts to taking around $2500 U.S. dollars from every U.S. citizen - and giving it to the banks and finance companies. This money could have been used for health care, for improved education, for scientific research, for social welfare program; for environmental protect; or other socially useful purposes. Instead these are going to support a false doctrine. The media is not telling us the real reason behind the crisis that is as serious as 1930"s crash of the share market in USA if not more so due to the globalization of finance in these days of electronic fund transfers and interdependency of the financial institutions in major capitalist country. What is at stake is the Anglo-American liberalized economic system promoted since 1980"s, which accepts only the free market and a privatized economy without public ownership.

Meanwhile, it looks like the U.S. administration is now doing exactly what it always advise the developing countries not to do - not to subsidize the domestic economy via negative real interest rates or wider fiscal deficit. At the same time, international financial institutions such as the IMF are expressing support for U.S. authorities, while they were always very critical against similar policies of any developing countries. There is one rule for the rich and another for the poor.

Greed is Good:

Another factor that has contributed to the crisis is the greed of the corporate managers of these financial institutions. Getting intoxicated by the creation of the virtual money using bets on the financial futures they have rewarded themselves astonishing salaries which sometime higher than national incomes of most countries.

Forbes magazine listed 587 individuals and family units worth $1 billion or more. The combined wealth of these billionaires reached $1.9 trillion. The wealth of these few hundred people exceeds the gross domestic product of the world"s 170 poorest countries combined, and equals nearly 4 percent of the annual production of the entire world. The world's top three billionaires alone possess more assets than the combined Gross National Product of all the least developed countries and their combined population of 600 million people.

While 1.3 billion people struggle to live on less than $US1 a day, the world's richest 200 people have their net worth more than $1 trillion. About 840 million people are malnourished, and close to one billion find it difficult to meet their basic consumption requirements. More than 880 million people lack access to health services, and 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation. Their needs cannot be satisfied by the market system when one of the richest countries of the world cannot satisfy the basic needs of almost one third of its population using the same market system.

After looking at the experience of USA and the UK , India should learn that the Anglo-American model does not work. They have failed to lift up the living standard of their own poor and thus cannot provide any lesson for India.

Anglo-American economics, whether of David Ricardo of 18th century or Paul Samuelson or Robert Merton of 20th century, looks beautiful in the virtual world but it is meaningless in the real world. Our Prime Minister who has learned only a very diluted form of that economics has no clue how to solve India "s perennial problem of poverty with the virtual instrument of the Anglo-American economics. There was no financial melt down in the Soviet Union, but every citizens were assured of adequate housing free of charge where the state used to provide all utilities, electricity, water, gas, heating, free of charge as well. Anglo-American model, which depend on the private mortgage market and the whims of the real estate agents could not provide adequate housing for everyone. Those who have attempted to overcome that problem by taking loans which they could not afford, ended up as both homeless and loan-defaulter at the end and the Anglo-American financial system that is supposed to provide efficient market solution to the housing problem failed miserably at the end of the day.

(source: The End Of American Capitalism? - By Anthony Faiola and Financial Crisis in USA and the Lesson for India - By Dr. D Basu - indiacause.com).

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Global economic meltdown and Swadeshi

A few political leaders from the capitalist world have the courage to accept the failure of capitalism, which is full of greed and exploitation. The President of France and the present Chairman of European Union have recently accepted the failure of crony capitalism.

J K Galbraith has disclosed in The Industrial State that monopoly in capitalist world and bureaucracy in management in former USSR are not different.

The West has been eulogising all the time that laissez faire has no alternative for smooth economic activities. The state should not intervene in private sector’s activities for making the economy most competitive and achieving continuous economic growth. They, however, have ignored the aspect of economic equality among all the players of the economy. What we witness today in the developed countries is that big hundreds of corporations, financial institutions and banks are standing in a queue to beg financial ‘bail out’ for their own survival.

History of capitalism has blessed some people who are in minority when compared to the entire population of the world. This history, however, is tainted with warfares, oppressions and injustices, holocaust, racism, colonialism, slavery, exploitation of all kind, economic equality, pollution of water, air, food and cultures, homelessness, poverty etc. When big corporations control our finances, media and legislators, our freedom, democracy and the well-preserved civilisation will be only an illusion.

The USA model was marketed as the ideal capitalist model for others to emulate for removing poverty and achieve all round prosperity. The USA and other developed countries have used many tactics and coercive forces on developing economies for opening their economies and become a part of global world for sharing the gains of ‘free market’ economies. Marxian economy has collapsed in early 1990s. It had some of the contradictions what we see in present day capitalism. It was nothing but the ‘state capitalism’. Monopoly of all economic activities was centralised in the state. Both systems have created and eulogised classes of people.

Marxism has collapsed due to this contradiction. Now it is the turn of capitalism to collapse. Signals of collapse of capitalism are now clearly visible across the world The collapse is not going to get restricted to developed countries, but it would take the developing countries like India along with.

At the time of importing monopoly and exploitative capitalism in to our country, i.e., around 1990s, there was quite a resistance from some of our experts against the very capitalistic economic model. This model was imported without taking the Parliament and the people of this great country into confidence. Many experts were instead arguing the case for Swadeshi economy. The Swadeshi Jagran Manch was established for propagating the Swadeshi concept of economy for the welfare of all. This model was eco-friendly as well as non-exploitative. The opposition to Swadeshi model of economy was coming from those who believed in and also taught to their followers and students in colleges the concept of western capitalism. Whatever form the West was good enough for these ‘experts’. This was the slavery mentality. It is still continuing among the so-called experts. Some of them also sarcastically called Swadeshi approach a ‘reaction’ to the capitalism and Marxism

Water, air, ecology, human health and cultural values have suffered serious damages. All this is happening due to greedy minds of some people in the West who believe in material satisfaction. By damaging natural resources they feel that they are the most ‘developed’ people and their nations. Their civilisation has no moral values, ethics, love and concern for others who live along with them in the same world. Those who do not believe in such materialistic pleasure but pursue the path of spiritualism are being called ‘backward’ or poor people. Now the question that has come up before us is whether we should continue such menace of consumerism and lose our civilisation’s identity forever. I must say that this time around the western social leaders have realised that their civilisation is in the process of demolition as they have reached the plateau of materialistic happiness. It may be difficult for us to change the attitude and objective of these so called ‘developed’ people. But we certainly can stay away from them by aggressively adopting our own values and retaining our thousands of years old civilisation.

(source: Global economic meltdown and Swadeshi - By DG Bokare - organiser.org).

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Hindu Neel Kashkari: A Portrait of the $700 Billion Man as a Young Banker
Move over Bobby Jindal - here comes Kashkari

Kashkari, (1973 - ) the 35-year-old interim head of the Office of Financial Stability, has been the source of great worry. Many fear he’s too young and too inexperienced to handle the task of rebuilding the nation’s financial system. Of course, Kashkari may just have the job for a few months. Paulson made clear he will appoint somebody and try to get the new person confirmed in November, and that person would transition into the next administration.

Forty-five days isn’t a long period in normal times, but in this crisis it’s an age. To get a better understanding of him, Deal Journal spoke to people who knew Kashkari well in his childhood and during his time at Goldman Sachs to find out the character and working style of the man who is managing the nation’s bailout. Here’s the portrait that emerged: Kashkari is smart, dutiful, detail-oriented, and takes orders well. In the parlance of investment banking, he is a good “execution guy”: He leaves strategy to the bigwigs. But if you give him a project, he will prioritize, delegate and finish it. 

These people report he has an amiable manner and is a good, intent listener. He doesn’t make waves and never dominates a discussion; he thinks before he speaks and he lets people express themselves. He is particularly good at presenting complicated ideas and leading team projects that depend on gaining cooperation from others. Those include the Sunrayce project to build a solar car as well as his work on the space telescope. “Neel is just plain good, with a high standard of ethics,” said Dr. Surinder Bhardwaj, a Hindu community priest who is a close family friend to the Kashkaris in Ohio . “This is a responsibility that requires the interest of the nation as a whole, and requires a very strong base of morality, which he has.”

Kashkari comes from a small, tight-knit community of Indian Hindus in Ohio , where his parents had a high profile in the local community. His mother, a pathologist, was known as a community resource. “She’s a good listener and helps guide people out of stressful situations,” said Dr. Bhardwaj. “They are very compassionate people, his parents, and maybe that’s where he’s getting his value system from.” Kashkari’s father is a retired engineer with a bent to public service, particularly in West Africa , where he spearheaded efforts to bring electricity and clean water to poor villages. Kashkari met his wife, Minal, in college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . They were married in a traditional Indian ceremony in Chicago where participants remember the bride being carried in on a festive palanquin and Kashkari, busy even then, taking the time to put each guest at ease.

(source: Neel Kashkari: A Portrait of the $700 Billion Man as a Young Banker - wsj.com).

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False Gods? 
Should we be Worshipping 'mutilated corpse of a dead Arab stuck on a stick'.

"World is worshipping false idols like those worshipped by the pagans of antiquity."  - says Pope Benedict 

Adoration of Lord Vishnu

***

(Note: Therefore, the world must worship the true idols: that dubious work of mythology, the Bible, and the 'mutilated corpse of a dead arab stuck on a stick'.  At least the Statues worshipped by Pagans never sodomize, tortured and kill. Or manufacture dubious saints or installed the notorious Inquisition).

"Has not our modern world created its own idols?" he said, recalling ancient pagans who worshipped gold and silver statues. "Has it not imitated, perhaps inadvertently, the pagans of antiquity, by diverting man from his true end, from the joy of living eternally with God," he said. "Have not money, the thirst for possessions, for power and even for knowledge, diverted man from his true destiny?" he said, wearing gold, white and red vestments and speaking fluent French. 

Pope wears Prada and Gucci

The Pope has been seen wearing Prada shoes and Gucci sunglasses. the pope's penchant for wearing luxury designer clothing. 

Pope wearing Prada shoes and Gucci sunglasses.

Pope's repeated attacks and sermonizing on money and power because, well, he has lots of money and power.

 Besides his affection for Prada and Gucci, just how frugal is life at the Vatican Palace? 

***

Pope's repeated attacks on money and power because, well, he has lots of money and power. Besides his affection for Prada and Gucci, just how frugal is life at the Vatican? Anyone who has ever visited the Vatican is no doubt familiar with the luxuries inside and that's only the section that they allow outsiders to see. I hear it's much nicer inside and despite the big talk of abstinence for others.

(source: The Pope wears Prada - newsweek.com).

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The Indian who made the Big Bang test necessary
Satyendra Nath Bose (1894 - 1974) and Western Racism

Of the three main past and present physicists behind the landmark proton-smashing quantum physics experiment in Geneva on Wednesday, one has a Nobel Prize, the other is waiting to find out if he has one, and the third never got one. The third man is the Bose of the ‘Higgs boson’ experiment — Satyendra Nath Bose. It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle ‘boson’ is named — probably the only noun in the English language named after an Indian (hence never capitalised). 

Satyendranath Bose and Big Bang Experiment.

It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle ‘boson’ is named — probably the only noun in the English language named after an Indian (hence never capitalised).  “I certainly do think he deserved the Nobel. When I was researching my documentary I was outraged that this man was so brilliant, yet so overlooked, perhaps because of institutionalised racism. No one gave a damn because he was an Indian."

***

The Large Hadron Collider experiment in Switzerland on Wednesday could not have happened without Bose and Albert Einstein.

In 1924, Bose sent a paper to Einstein describing a statistical model that eventually led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon.

The paper laid the basis for describing one of the two categories of the elementary particles that make up an atom — one was boson, and the other came to be known as fermion, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Einstein had already won the Nobel in 1921 for services to theoretical physics and the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, and Fermi won it in 1938.  Decades later, in 1964, the British scientist Peter Higgs returned from a walk in the Scottish mountains to tell his colleagues that he had just experienced his “one big idea”, which could hold a clue to how matter in the universe got its mass in the billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Higgs eventually came up with his theory of the Higgs boson, a boson that gives mass to all other subatomic particles that happen to interact with it in a ‘Higgs field’. The more they interact, the heavier they become. And the ones that don’t interact don’t gather mass. The theory could not only throw further light on the creation of the universe, but also help explain the shape of it.

Wednesday’s experiment at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where protons will be smashed against each other at great speed, will be the first attempt to actually observe the Higgs boson - nicknamed the ‘God particle’. So far, it is the last undetected elementary particle, also called a fundamental particle, going by the standard theory of particle physics. Higgs, who is professor emeritus at Edinburgh University , is now widely tipped to win the Nobel, particularly if the Higgs boson is detected.

The first Nobels for physics in the 21st century went jointly to three Americans — Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. They won it for creating the ‘condensate’ — a new type of matter — that Bose and Einstein had postulated. 

According to Bose’s grandson Falguni Sarkar, six other physicists have won the Nobel for work in the area of Bose statistics. However, 34 years after his death, the Nobel continues to elude Satyendra Nath Bose himself. Sharon Ann Holgate, a British science writer and broadcaster who made an acclaimed radio documentary on Bose for the BBC some years ago, said she had no doubt the Indian deserved a Nobel.

“I certainly do think he deserved the Nobel. When I was researching my documentary I was outraged that this man was so brilliant, yet so overlooked, perhaps because of institutionalised racism. No one gave a damn because he was an Indian,” she told IANS. “I was really angry, and wanted to make him a bit more widely known.” Holgate added. 

(source: The Indian who made the Big Bang test necessary - sify.com).

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In Praise of Lord Krishna - Songs from Bengal

In India, the worship of Lord Krishna unites reverence with passion, for he appears to mortals as both God and lover. Songs in his praise are in fact religious love poems. Above the highest heaven is the dwelling place of Krishna. It is a place of infinite idyllic peace, where the dark and gentle river Yamuna flows beside a flowered meadow, where cattle graze; on the river's bank sweet-scented trees blossom and bend their branches to the earth, where peacocks dance and nightingales call softly. Here Krishna, ever-young, sits beneath the trees, the sound of his flute echoing the nightingales' call. Sometimes he laughs and jokes and wrestles with friends, sometimes he teases the cowherd-girls of the village, the Gopis, as they come to the river for water. And sometimes, in the dusk of days an eon long, his flute's summons the Gopis to his side. He is the fulfillment of all desire. The loveliest and most beloved of the Gopis is one called Radha.

It is told in ancient Hindu texts that once, long, long ago, Lord Krishna came to earth, and with him came all the things and people of his heaven - the river, the cows, the peacocks and nightingales, and the Gopis who love him. The story takes place in Vrindavan, in a kind of micro time, all that is happening eternally in the source, the heavenly Vrindavan. And, it is said, all this what takes place in the human heart; the Gopis' love for Krishna is the love of man for God.

Radha Krishna in Vrindavan.

The Gopis' love for Krishna is the love of man for God. The loveliest and most beloved of the Gopis is one called Radha. Radha longs for utter union with her divine and emerald-colored (Shyam, dark-colored) lover

***

It is man's nature to long for that which is most beautiful: the gentlest of sounds, the most radiant color, the sweetest scent, his whole body for that which is most tender and full of grace. The sound of Krishna's flute is gentlest. His body, glowing like a blue jewel, is most radiant. His scent is sweetest. And the grace of his posture and the tenderness of his love are the most soothing, and most exciting, to the heart which yearns. Radha longs for utter union with her divine and emerald-colored (Shyam, dark-colored) lover:

Let the earth of my body be mixed with the earth
my beloved walks on.
Let the fire of my body be the brightness
in the mirror that reflects his face.
Let the water of my body join the waters
of the lotus pool he bathes in.
Let the breadth of my body be air
lapping his tired limbs.
Let me be sky, and moving through me
that cloud-dark Shyama, my beloved.

(source: In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali  - Translated By Edward C Dimock and Denise Levertov p. vii - ix).

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Chinese 'gopi' collects Krishna Statues

You could call Wen Kunrong, a 54-year-old Chinese woman, a devotee of Hindu God Krishna, but she would rather be called his 'gopi' (consort). She has collected nearly 20,000 idols of her favourite deity, not just from across India but from different countries. Kunrong, who runs a restaurant at China Town in eastern Kolkata, is a passionate collector of Krishna idols since 1974. Ancestors of many residents in the area migrated from southern China in the 19th century. Kunrong's family has been here for five generations.

"It was my 20th birthday and a Bengali friend gifted me a tiny stone idol of Krishna . As soon as I looked into the eyes of the idol I felt a soul connection with him. It seemed as if I am born for him. Since then my Krishna hunt is on. All I look out for anywhere I go is Krishna and I can't control myself on seeing his idol," Kunrong told IANS.

Krishna statues

Despite being a Chinese, every day I read translations of Bhagavad Gita (a book containing Krishna 's teachings) and also worship him. Every year during Janmashtami ( Krishna 's birth anniversary) there is an elaborate ceremony at my place," Kunrong said.

***

Kunrong has a collection of 19,366 Krishna idols. I am too possessive about my Krishna and fantasise myself as Radha as well as Meera ( Krishna 's famous devotee). Despite being a Chinese, every day I read translations of Bhagavad Gita (a book containing Krishna 's teachings) and also worship him. 

Every year during Janmashtami ( Krishna 's birth anniversary) there is an elaborate ceremony at my place," Kunrong said.

She has collected Krishna idols not only from across India but also from different countries. "I have collected idols from almost every corner of India, including Delhi , Bangalore , Hyderabad , Mathura , Vrindaban, Mumbai, Chennai, as well as from Tibet, Nepal, China, Australia, America, Japan , Costa Rica and Spain ," Kunrong said. "My addiction to Krishna has made me want to capture him in all possible moods and I christen them as I wish - Hanging Krishna, Angel Krishna, Baby-face Krishna, Flute-less Krishna, Swan-rider Krishna, Buddha-Krishna, Laddu-Gopal and Makhan-chor Gopal are some of them," Kunrong said. When it comes to getting a Krishna idol, Kunrong makes her pick from roadside stalls to shopping malls. "Most of the idols I picked up are either from street hawkers or roadside stalls. Some are from shopping malls and curio shops as well. And obviously, knowing of my passion for Krishna , I get similar gifts from friends and relatives too. "I don't go by the price tag while getting a Krishna idol. Prices for the idols in my collection range from Rs.10 to Rs.100,000. I am a single woman and don't have a family as such. So whatever I earn is for Krishna ," Kunrong added.

(source: Chinese 'gopi' collects Krishna Statues - hindustantimes.com)

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Kailasa museum in Java, preserving Hindu civilization 

As the oldest site of Hindu civilization on Java, Dieng is often seen by some people as the location of an ancient Hindu kingdom due to the lack of information. In reality, no kingdom was ever set up on this plateau. It was the center of Shiva worship for Hindu saiwa sect followers during the 7th to 12th centuries.  

The presence of this sect is shown through its Hindu features in the temple complex. For instance, Arjuna Temple within the Dieng complex has the wimana (bamboo structure design) in India while Bima Temple represents the sikhara or India 's pagoda. One of the inscriptions also refers to Dieng as Kailasa, which is believed to be the heavenly abode of Shiva. Kailasa is also the name of a sacred mountain considered to be the center of the world by local Hindus.  

Jave relief and Bhima temple.

Preserving Hindu civilization.

***

Sadly, though, the historic value and natural marvels of Dieng have gone largely unnoticed. People are more familiar with Borobudur Temple and other historic places thanks to their better marketing systems. In an effort to provide comprehensive information on Dieng, the Banjarnegara regency administration in cooperation with archeologists, historians and volcanologists of Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University (UGM) and the Archeological Heritage Conservation Agency has opened Kailasa Museum. UGM archeologist Nia Nugrahani said preparations for the museum had taken place for years, but that intensive studies of Dieng, involving various disciplines of science, had been undertaken in the past 22 months.

Themed "Dieng in natural and cultural history", the studies gathered everything about the zone from the plateau's formation to the tradition of locals. "It's like doing a jigsaw to create a Dieng information system," Nia said. Dieng plateau is the second highest plateau in the world after Nepal . It lies at an altitude of 2,093 meters, where cool air, a beautiful hilly panorama and diverse flora and fauna can be enjoyed. When the weather is fine, Dieng is the only place to watch the glows of the so-called "double sunrise". As a hilly zone formed out of millions of years of volcanic activity, Dieng is also naturally endowed with a lake called Telaga Warna -- named after the different colors it reflects as rays of sunlight pour over its surface.

(source: Kailasa museum in Java, preserving Hindu civilization - jakartapost.com).

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Ramayana most popular performing art in Bangladesh  

Hindu temples are more or less distributed all across the country. 

The Kantaji Temple is an elegant example of an 18th century temple. The most important temple in terms of prominence is the Dhakeshwari Temple , located in Dhaka . This temple along with other Hindu organizations arranges Durga Puja and Krishna Janmaashtami very prominently. The other main temple of Dhaka is the Ramakrishna Mission.

***

In the green hinterland of Islamic Bangladesh , the Ramayana is the most popular performing art form, says a leading playwright of the country.

(source: Ramayana most popular performing art in Bangladesh - newkerala.com).

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William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.

....then, as the Hindoos draw
Their Holy Ganges from a skiey fount,
Even so to deduce the stream of human life
From seats of power divine; and hope ...
That our existence winds her stately course
Beneath the Sun, like Ganges, to make part
Of a living Ocean."

(source: The excursion - By William Wordsworth).

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Hinduism makes India a successful democracy : Advani

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate LK Advani on Friday said only Hindu religion allows secularism and pluralism, making India a successful democracy.

"For the success of democracy, there should be tolerance for the other point of view. Intolerance is most visible in religious matters.

Hindu polity never accepts theocracy, making us a successful democratic nation," Advani told a gathering during a book launch function organised by India First Foundation.

He gave examples of theocratic nations to prove that it is only India that could support democracy.

"Generals and others take over nations after independence in theocratic nations. Look at Bangladesh , we gave them a secular nation but they could not sustain that for long," Advani pointed out. Commenting on one of the three books released at the function, 'Fateful Fourth Generation' - a compilation of dynasties of the world that fell during their fourth generation, Advani laughed and said, "I will not comment on this for it might create a controversy, but going by the examples it seems that all the troubles begin at the fourth generation."

He said the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is "intentionally inactive" against terrorism.

"We keep on deceiving ourselves for the sake of vote bank politics. Why can't we see the obvious and take action against it. Is it our policy or habit now to keep deceiving ourselves?" he asked.

(source: Hinduism makes India a successful democracy: Advani - ibnlive.com). Refer to Sarah Palin Linked To Spiritual Warfare Network

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Elephant-shaped Ganesh Plant, A Small Miracle in New York

Sam Lal, a Hindu who immigrated from Guyana 30 years ago, found a flower near his garage growing in the unusual shape of an elephant's head and trunk. At just about the same time, a back pain that had been hurting him for months disappeared. "This formation came to heal my illness," said the 60-year-old Hindu.

Experts at the Queens Botanical Garden identified the plant as a member of the amaranth family, which is native to Africa, India and southern Central America. Horticulturalists at the garden have never seen an amaranth take an elephant-like shape, garden spokesman Tim Heimerle said. "For it to have that long trunk like this is not a natural thing," he said.

Lal believes the flower's position - growing through concrete, facing a garage he converted to a prayer space - is evidence of a connection to Lord Ganesh, revered as the Remover of Obstacles.

***

Lal believes the flower's position - growing through concrete, facing a garage he converted to a prayer space - is evidence of a connection to Lord Ganesh, revered as the Remover of Obstacles. Lal knows some people will be skeptical and insisted he did nothing to sculpt the flower. Experts said that wouldn't be possible anyway, because the plant is too fragile. With the fall chill in the air, Lal covers the flower at night to protect it from cold; amaranths are frost-tender. "It hurts me to know I'll lose it."

(source:  Elephant-shaped Ganesh Plant, A Small Miracle in New York - hinduismtoday.com).

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Did you Know

Goddess Saraswati Statue in Belfast Gardens of Northern Ireland

This is one of the first non-Christian religious artworks in a public place in Northern Ireland and is situated in the Palm House in Botanic Gardens Belfast.

ArtsEkta , Northern Ireland first and only Multi-Ethnic arts organisation, last week unveiled a wood carving of Saraswati Mata, Hindu Goddess of Arts and Knowledge. This is one of the first non-Christian religious artworks in a public place in Northern Ireland and is situated in the Palm House in Botanic Gardens Belfast.

The woodcarving was placed in Belfast ’s Botanical gardens in memory of Vyishnu Somasundram, a young and dedicated volunteer who worked hard for the community in Northern Ireland . He passed away sadly in September 2007 at the young age of 15. Nisha Tandon, ArtsEkta’s development manager, said, “Vyishnu was a great asset to Northern Ireland ’s arts community, a very talented artist and dedicated volunteer. He will be missed for ever.” Commenting on the carving, she said, “This is a very appropriate memorial. Vishnu himself had supported the idea of having this created a month before his death. He was a Hindu and great artist, the theme of Saraswati is ideal.”

The Somasundram family came to Northern Ireland seeking asylum from Sri Lanka . Shortly after Vishnu’s tragic death, asylum was granted. 

(source: Saraswati Statue in Belfast Gardens - organiser.org).

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Updated - October 28, 2008