Tejpal and Secularism: A Symbiotic Relationship

The original Indian way of understanding the cosmos is to get to the very essence. This process of discovery was developed and refined by our Rishis to try and comprehend the ultimate truth that is Satya, by transcending sensory limitations. If the language of this discovery was Sanskrit, and Sanskriti, this culture of discovery, then the Sanskrit word 'dharma' that robustly sustains and upholds is the essential. On the other hand, one has English, the vehicle of synthesized science, in which this blog is written in, that can, at best, convey an limited understanding of Satya and Mitya, invariably leaving the remainder as 'an exercise to the reader's imagination'. It is this colonial inheritance that India's post-colonial intellectuals have chosen as their vehicle for propagating their half-baked theories. And this is exactly what Indian secularism is: a slogan of half-truth of, by, and for half-wits.

Rajiv Malhotra's path-breaking book 'Being Different' encourages us to rediscover for ourselves the Sanskrit way of getting to the essential and then contrast it with the synthesized approximations employed in the west. The essence of 'secularism' that can be obtained by doing a rigorous 'Purva Paksha', is summarized in his tweet:
"Secularism is dharma-nirapeksha (without dharma), leading to corruption. We need a dharma-sapeksha society & governance".

Secularism, as distilled above, is at best a band-aid, a temporary ceasefire that can hardly be expected to sustain a nation of 1.2 Billion people. The situation has reached such a farcical level that even as Indian secularism 1.0 (1947-2014) is being exposed on various fronts (e.g., read "Breaking India'), a Hassan Suroor, while being totally ignorant about dharma, challenges the so-called "right wing Indians" on:
(a) their weak intellectual roots unlike their western counterparts, and
(b) their disloyalty to this west-imported secularism.
The world of post-colonialists involves a rite of passage to peer-recognition and reward that requires Indians to first repudiate their Sanskriti and profound dharmic thought systems. Thereafter, rather than gazing at themselves and/or reversing the gaze at the west from such refreshing dharmic points of view, Indians are required to compete on how well one has internalized and is able to regurgitate and apply relatively stale, largely irrelevant, and homogeneous "modern" and "post-modern" techniques to solve a variety of India's problems. Such cookie-cutter models, when taken out of their western context and force-fitted into adharmic "idea of India", virtually guarantee findings that have a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, leading to all kinds of erroneous conclusions and poor approximations of reality that cause Himsa when applied - they harm far more than they help. Thus, 'dharma-sapeksha' is replaced with a far weaker band-aid of secularism that at least made temporary sense in the western world of organized religion. Such a secularism is practically silly in the Indian context at best, and downright harmful, at worst. Tragic too is the terminological violence employed by this self-serving ecosystem of post-colonialists, and the browbeating of the Indian public and the force-feeding of this secular diet. A wanton cultural genocide of a pluralistic, dharmic India.

"Secularism leads to corruption". A Tejpal is not using secularism as a last resort. That charge is quite absurd. A rejection of secularism, and adherence to dharma would have saved him and his victims. No, secularism has always been his willing and faithful companion and accompanied him in every 'penance' he has performed. Tejpal's track record based on his Tehelka and Thinkfest activities shows his devotion to secularism. Secularism's track record shows its devotion to Tejpal. He, who served secularism loyally, anticipates nothing more and nothing less than for secularism to bail him out in this hour of need. To the bitter end, Tejpal was faithful only to Secularism and it is precisely his successful internalization of secularism that has lead him to this state.

Secularism, Tejpal's accomplice in his every act, gave him remarkable wealth and power, but also corrupted him, just as it has corrupted the hundreds of so-called Indian intellectuals haunting the humanities departments around the world. His plea in the name of secularism has resonated with some of these intellects, while the more pragmatic ones in India who do not have ready access to western funds, have since deserted this sinking ship to find new shores. Some even exhort people to ignore the adharma in Goa, and instead look at the abstract principles that they claim is what really matters in the long run. This is a classic leftist three-card trick: get you to ignore both the trees and the forest, and focus instead on the mirage of a theoretical, feel-good idea - secularism in this case, that the linked article claims, is causing a "remarkable awakening in India towards crimes against women". Ground reality in India suggests the opposite is more likely to be true, and this should not be surprising. Genuine mutual respect between man and woman can be expected in a dharma-sapeksha society, and has not and cannot emerge from some dharma-nirpeksha secularism that offers the truce of tolerance at best. Men and women internalizing such artifacts are stuck in the infinite loop of a porcupine's dilemma, and thus you can see their feminists barely tolerating men, and their Tejpals contemptuously tolerating their own women.

Do dharma a service. When Secularism 1.0 is digging its own grave, lend a helping hand, and then prepare for v2.0.

Transcendental Bullshitting

Work in progress .. 

Update 3: Heavily edited for brevity and added Mrs. Ghose to the list, December 19, 2014.

Update 2: November 29, 2013.

There are different types of ignorance.

(source: farnamstreetblog.com)

Belonging to the first category, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are "thousands of bullshitters who live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others." But the focus of this post is on the BSers from the second category: those who recognize their ignorance, and profit from it.

Part-1 (October 2, 2013)
Last week, I've heard two dharmic thinkers make an important and related point. The first one was on facebook, and the second one was a tweet.

 

The first category can be debated, while the latter can only be exposed. It is sensible to avoid debating with certain kinds of people: The ones not bright enough to dazzle you with brilliance, yet stupid enough to try and baffle you with bullshit.


Part-2 (Update 1: November 11, 2013)

If I assumed in Part-1 that only India's secular minions were afflicted by this disease, I was wrong. The rot starts at the top. After observing several tweet samples of eminent historians, secular sadhus, newspaper chief editors, some simple ideas around the 'art of bullshitting' began to crystallize.

Step 1. You have to discover your cognitive limitations and deficiencies way before anyone else does. Now our Indian Rishis too, informally speaking, advise this, so far so good. For example, if you are constantly discovering evidence that contradicts virtually everything that you postulated would happen, you are on the right track. Kinda like George Costanza of Seinfeld. If I recall correctly, Rajiv ji once pointed out that those who support and enrich the discredited 'Aryan Invasion Theory' tend to do so on the premise that if "X" can happen, then "X" must have happened. Thus, if there are a zillion possibilities, you are moronic enough to conclude that the world must have followed that one path that you like and will profit from the most. Now along comes an inconvenient evidence "Y" that contradicts your pet theory "X". You must be able recognize this inconvenient truth much before anybody else in order to continue to profit from "X".

Step 2. Exploit the vital secret (that only you truly understand the full depth of your own ignorance in the matter) to your advantage, and to such an extent that it stuns your opponent into frozen disbelief. Thus if fact 'Y' contradicts pet theory 'X' then you calmly state that the fact 'Y' cannot have happened! In other words you have achieved a transcendental state of Zen-like denial, a higher state of avidya and maya, if you will. You've realized that given your mediocrity, you are going to be a lifelong bullshitter at best, but rather than quit, you transcend the depression of this discovery by turning it into a commercial weapon of mass obfuscation. Think Deepak Chopra. This way you are always one step ahead of the others on the "learning" curve and you get to ride the gravy train.

If you examine the body of work of the Indian sepoy writers of history, they have built an entire genre of hi-fi work: historical fiction. Like the legend of 'Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks', and the 'Lord of the Rings', and 'Hogwarts', their stories are largely consistent, but only after the initial fabrication. Eventually of course, if you take away that foundational BS from hi-fi works, you are left with that kind of stark nudity that only exposed ignorance creates. Nevertheless, to top the merit list of idiocracy over decades requires a collective effort. Behind every prize idiot sepoy who wins a western award as payoff is an ecosystem that nurtured him or her. Which leads us to step 3.

Step 3. Spread ignorance. The ability of two transcendental bullshitters to recognize each other in a room full of strangers is uncanny. The world is full of such examples. If this is not Quantum Entanglement, what is? This is where dharmic peoples, who focus on individual karma, and taking responsibility for ones own actions, invariably fall short. Pooling resources to achieve collective stupidity requires not just a keen antenna for spotting a fellow BSer, but also discipline: Two gems must find each other and sacrifice their Ahankaar by giving up to each other the secret of their individual ignorance in the cause of greater profit. The collective is far more lucrative than the gain from individual idiocies. Sepoys Sibal, Shashi, Siddharth, Sagarika, and Sen are in the payroll precisely for their force multiplier value. Like Potemkin villages, the goal is to design a robust BS network of plausible concoctions with built-in redundancies. If Nehru the incompetent is exposed, then Nehru the secularist comes alive to combat, and if he is felled, Nehru the scientific rationalist is ready for battle. It's like a Chakravyuha of multilayer BS to befuddle fact-driven Abhimanyus.

This much is clear: It is mutually beneficial to debate those who still have enough conviction left to respect facts, even if we disagree with their world view, but the incorrigible can only be exposed.

What the heck does 'minority' mean, anyway?

This post is written in the Indian context.

If minority status means 'economically backward', join the queue, there are millions ahead of you in the line. You are not a minority (thanks to Nehruvian socialism).

If minority status means 'socially and educationally backward', then petition the leaders of your community to adopt more liberal, dharmic, and scientific thinking, and do away with dogma. Seek government intervention if things don't change, but the ultimate solution lies inside, not anywhere outside (thanks to Nehruvian secularism).

If minority status means 'numerical census count by religion', then check if your religion is monotheist. If not, you may indeed be a minority. If it is, then your religion is almost surely a global, several trillion-dollar power center that supports you and advocates on your behalf on every single important religious issue. Its headquarters is located either in the middle east or Europe, and you will find that you are reporting to the local leader in this mammoth chain of command, and your organization is free from government interference. You even have the powers to convert people to your religion by persuasion, force, or, bribe. This more likely makes you a 'majority', rather than a 'minority'. anywhere in the world.

If minority status means 'minority voice in a democracy', then check if you are voting as a group. If you are a vote bank, and your vote bank is bigger than other vote banks, you aren't really a minority.

So the smallest minority is an individual. Not so fast. A single person armed with a semi-automatic weapon in a crowd of thousand, while technically being a minority, practically represents the majority despite being outnumbered 1000:1. Numerical metrics mean little. The group or person that controls the rights to, or can buy the biggest gun in town is the majority. Examples:

The apartheid minority in South Africa versus the native African majority, the colonizing European minority versus the Native American, and of course, the adharmic dynasties lording over the dharmic majority in India over the last millennium. If you have the means to directly or indirectly control the majority market-share of wealth, public discourse, foreign policy, populist projects and 'quotas', real estate, legislations and ordinances, then you certainly aren't a minority.

Reverse the gaze, and what was obfuscated becomes clear. Terminological tyranny is another clever means of achieving mental colonization. In the pluralistic Hindu culture of India, the meaning of 'minority' is unambiguous and useful only when it is applied in context; universal application of this term is extremely fuzzy if not outright gibberish. For example, if minority is applied in the context of "maliciously neglected, and deliberately vilified people", then patriots are India's only real minority.

Internet Hindu: Dehumanizing Virtualization

Recall how the Nazis made Jews wear yellow/blue color-coded badge associated with the Star-of-David, and systematically deconstructed the Jewish race and religion - to dehumanize as well as ID them and others like the Roma people, making it much easier for their death squads to implement their final solution without troubling their conscience that they are taking the lives of human beings. Once Operation Barbarossa was launched, the Nazis and Communists fought the most savage battles ever known to mankind, leading to a complete breakdown of dharma. Each side forced the other into cannibalism and acts of extreme depravity and perversion. They were able to achieve this state of mind by completely dehumanizing their opponents. Such methods, once adopted in real life, never fade away.

Fast-forward to India today, and what triggered this post.
India Today carried this article: "Rise of the Cyber Hindu" that is written for one and exactly one purpose: demonize a dharmic, grassroots movement of a heterogenous group of marginalized voices belonging to multiple religions,  Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, from different parts of India and also from different parts of the world, who even before the turn of the century, and much before Narendra Modi became CM of Gujarat, began to go online seeking alternatives to the increasingly virulent anti-Hindu monoculture being promoted in mainstream media literature. Today, we have prominent media persons and powerful politicians who apply eerily similar methods to WW2 Europe: Pin saffron-coded eSwastikas on Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, who go online to ask for their rights as citizens, to virtualize, mock, and denigrate them as "Internet Hindus", etc., projecting a virtual caricature of a group of humans. Once 80% of India is dehumanized, almost exactly like how the Jews and Roma people in Europe, and the  majority native Americans in North America were portrayed by colonizing minority Europeans, and the majority native Africans were targeted by the apartheid minority, it eases the burden on the conscience, paving the way for  the rest of the media, politicians, and even the so-called intellectuals to declare open season on native Indian culture, lives, and rights. Atrocity literature, foundation-sponsored research studies, and error-riddled newspaper articles on caste, cow, dowry, Sati, superstition, are used to reinforce the idea of a trouble-making subhuman, backward species that need to be put back in their place. Cultural genocide and quiet appropriation and digestion of anything useful and valuable in Hinduism becomes acceptable, even desirable. Chota-mota bombs don't hurt cartoons, floods & land-slides won't hurt straw-people. Saffron zombies in a secular video game - made of bits, and can be blown to bits. Easy. .... Dehumanize .. Desensitize .... provoke .... execute .... justify ...

Sagarika Ghose appears to be especially proud of her cleverness in coining "Internet Hindu", and gets upset when she is not credited for it.