Alternative History or Alternate History?

Alternate versus Alternative

I would've sworn that Wendy's book on the 'Hindus' was 'an alternate history'. I rechecked the amazon book title, which said : 'alternative history'. Why is this distinction important? Wendy, like most western academics born and brought up in English, choose their words smartly. Grammarist.com (or any one of the popular grammar sites) notes:

The implicit claim in Wendy's title is that her book does not seek to replace what existed for thousands of years, but provides an alternative for today's confused Hindus, 95% of who live in Nehruvian India. An India where the assertion of  being a proud practitioner of Hinduism, a religion that offers genuine mutual respect instead of mere tolerance like Abrahamic faiths, is considered "communal".

Fantasy is not a valid alternative

If God gave Wendy Doniger lemons, you really do not want to know what she does with it. One of the assumptions that Wendy's silly books relies on is that some Sanskrit words can have multiple, context-driven interpretations and she can freely choose whatever suits her psychology ("stuck in the anal-genital chakras"). Wendy's Child Syndrome. Alternative does not mean "anything goes". Alternative re-tellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata cannot be mapped into some Star-wars or Lord of the Rings type fantasy. An alternative driving route cannot send you to a different destination. A necessary condition for any alternative interpretation of Hindu concepts and methods is that it be dharmic. Hinduism, like Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, is a dharmic thought system. Unfortunately, Wendy's approach is dharma-nirpeksha, i.e. utterly indifferent to dharma. Dharma has contextual interpretation that is neither frozen as a commandment or fatwa, nor is it "anything goes" that degenerates into moral relativism. Wendy & her children lack the cognitive capacity to comprehend such profundity. An adharmic alternative can only really be a perverse substitute that seeks to wipe out rather than serve dharma. An alternate history that mocks natives as savages is a precursor to cultural genocide.

Facts = Data aberrations = noisy signal

Shoddy scholarship is not just Wendy's problem. Mentally colonized Indian intellectuals (sepoys) have shown that they are not just clueless but also careless. The so-called intellectual output toward creating an alternate history, produced by an entire generation of India's leftists, from Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen, down to those lower in the ranks like Ramachandra Guha, etc., is defined by mediocrity: sloppy research, use of meaningless adjectives, unquantifiable claims, and a lack of scientific rigor. Unlike scientific and engineering journal papers, here the conclusions come first, and the reasoning is whatever is necessary to justify the conclusion. There appears to be some kind of a mental condition that fails to recognize that facts are ... facts and that if something happened, it did happen (some so-called 'right wing' columnists too have fallen prey to this). But no. It is possible for sepoys to time-travel and alter what happened. And it is justifiable to do so because such facts are merely an aberration, a blip in the radar that does not, and should not be allowed to, derail their grand narrative.

The Invader Avatar Theory

(update  March 2015: Refer Rajiv Malhotra's 2015 Jaipur Lit Fest video for this)
If the ancient Indian civilization is advanced, it cannot have a Hindu origin since Hinduism is backward. So it must have come from outside. So add a "n" to Arya and invent the Aryan invaders. Then a succession of "invader avatars" who show up every few centuries to give India what it needed, from Vedas to Mughlai cuisine to sports to liberalism. Any factual evidence, be it genetic, linguistic, archaeological, astronomical, economic data, which contradicts the IA theory is but an isolated violation, a series of coincidences that do not invalidate the overall narrative. If Hindu leaders perform social service, then it cannot have Hindu origins and must have been borrowed from the Christian west or Islam, because Hinduism is fully of exotic mysticism and represents a self-centered, out-worldly quest for Moksha, and does not have or even require philanthropy. If Nehruvian India failed, it is because of Hinduism and their "Hindu rate of growth", not because of Nehru's corrupt Stalinist policies that has ruined the nation. If unimpeachable data is shown that dharma civilization was a dominant in major measurement indices for most of the thousand-plus years prior to colonization, this too is an aberration - some white noise, and the overall signal-to-noise ratio of their IA theory is strong. If Marxist-Leninist-Maoist politics has produced untold misery all over the world, and yet is blindly imported by sepoys and used to destroy the economy and society of Kerala and Bengal in India, that too is an aberration, and merely improper implementation of a sophisticated IA concept. Hinduism cannot be reformed by a Sankara because Hinduism is fossilized. If it is reformed, then of course, it cannot be Hinduism, which by definition is fossilized, so this has to be some neo-Hinduism that is the invention of a nationalist-minded Vivekananda after learning from the USA (read 'Indra's Net;). Hinduism, like India the nation, never existed until recently, yet this same Hinduism, even without existing, miraculously managed to destroy Buddhism and Jainism, as Arun Shourie pointed out recently. If a Babasaheb Ambedkar who spoke up for Dalits against persecution is venerated, the fact that he became Buddhist and remained true to his dharma (like Arun Shourie) and even wrote in praise of Advaitic Hinduism and 'Hindutva', is dismissed as an aberration. 

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

If Islamic genocidal maniacs like Aurangazeb killed more than four million Indians, that too is an aberration, since he was more like Shakespeare who went wrong only towards the end of his reign when office-pressures were mounting (credit: William Dalrymple). If Tipu massacred or forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus, then that is an aberration, since he was secular on the average because he left a couple of Hindu temples intact (read this recent book for reasons). Balance! Reminds me of Pam Shriver who described a 0-6, 1-6 tennis match against Martina Navratilova: "it was a very balanced game. I broke serve once, and held once". Detailed first-hand accounts by neutral Westerners and Europeans against such fundamentalist maniacs who've committed mass-murder of Indians cannot be accepted since they are biased. Heck, blow-by-blow accounts by personal biographers of these tyrants are not acceptable because they don't really mean what they saying, unless they are speaking of non-homicidal contributions, if any.  However, the neo-Hindu oxymoron propagated by western 'missionaries in mufti' like Paul Hacker and Ursula King is perfectly balanced and acceptable to Ramachandra Guha, Ashutosh Varshney,  Pankaj Mishra (who won a $150K sepoy Baksheesh recently), Romila Thapar, etc.. The stuff of Wendy and children from the west is lauded and praised as a scholarly alternative. The racist colonial missionary myth of "Aryan-Dravidian" is acceptable. Anything said against the Hindus in any book, by anybody is acceptable; neutrality, objectivity, fact-checking be damned. The conclusion drives the cherry-picking of data. Such is the world of social "science" and humanities! If no data remains after all this pruning, then their IA theory is proposed as something that actually happened, and taught to Indian school kids to create the next generation of mentally colonized Indians.

In every instance, it is clear that the aim is not to provide an alternative picture, but an alternate narrative that is written to erase evidence and replace it with pet theories. What is the mental condition that drives sepoys to such dishonesty?

(The basis for some of the info interpreted above is derived from the works of original Indian thinkers, including Rajiv Malhotra, Arun Shourie, and S. Gurumurthy)

Why?

The Islamic mauraders and Western colonizers murdered, raped and pillaged India for centuries. Yet the vast majority of India - the hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians held on to their dharma. They endured mind-boggling physical torture and mental trauma, yet their spirit was intact, their 'Mano bal' (morale) remains alive, thanks to dharma, the very basis of anti-fragility. As Ajit Doval asks and answers: "When is a war over? The war is over only after we win". The Hindus have protected their itihasa and dharma, and with the guidance of Rishis like Rajiv Malhotra and fact-driven thinkers like Gurumurthy, they will continue until they prevail.  The only irreversibly damaged people? The sepoys. They rejected dharma, thereby allowing their intellects to be repeatedly molested, their deepest thoughts to be violently penetrated by Hinduphobic thinkers. Consequently, their deflowered minds have collectively produced ZERO original, truly alternative Indian thought, but given birth to tons of mutilated, bastardized alternate ideas of India and Hinduism that are dead on delivery. I have only pity for sepoys. Truly tragic victims of colonialism.

The Missing Questions in the Arnab-Rahul Interview

An interview and a plan
Prince Rahul obliged India with a TV interview after 10 years. Apparently, age did not dim his instinctive ability to respond to questions that nobody in India was asking. Rahul was mocked relentlessly for this on social media, and other unpaid media. However, we conjecture
- that maybe, just maybe, that his team worked with the PR firm Dentsu to shape a 'hedgehog strategy' customized for the princely genius.
- that the 500 crores were not spent in vain. That after Dentsu confirmed that the prince's sole trick (that in itself was surprising, given his ill-endowed gene pool) was an ability to remember and reproduce up to 4 statements, the plan was simply to get this message across regardless of the questions.
- that in any case, the UPA is so far down the opinion polls that there is no way but up for them, and they had nothing to lose. This was the right time.
- that the soap-watching, mentally colonized India would simply look at the buzz words in TV news channel tickers the next day (thanks to VIKAS PANDITA ‏@TORUKH_MAKTO Jan 27 : we have the buzzword stats:

RTI: 69 times, System: 76, Empower: 25, Women: 19 #ArnabvsRahul)

Next, here is a simple word-cloud I created using the text from the interview transcript. If people only saw these words without context, and ignore the total nonsense that links these words and the actual questions asked, it looks pretty reasonable. A serious guy talking about people, system, riots, and country. wah.

Public Response
We hypothesize that the job of the primary paid / anti-social media partners was not to actually host the actual interview (Arnab was the sacrificial goat), but to simply filter the these buzzwords from the gibberish by de-contextualizing the answers from the questions, and spoon-feed it to India as shown above. Then, for added safety, you have the English-speaking sepoys ever ready to intellectualize even such gibberish and add the right amount of sanctimoniousness to justify this diabolical plan of hoodwinking the public. As they say, once you've lost your dignity, there's nothing to lose. In fact, if one were to re-watch the interviews without looking at the questions at all, and just the answers, Rahul indeed does a plausible job. And we that was always the plan from day-1, and it was apparent with a few minutes of the start of the interview. The only problem with voting in a bright chap like Rahul Gandhi along with a UPA-3 is this:
just one example. If a Pakistan were to take advantage of this situation to declare war on India and attack Kashmir,  Mr. PM may launch an invasion to annex the Andamans. Or he may file RTIs, or launch a Rajiv Yojana to empower women that his dynasty impoverished. In real life, useful answers are tied to the question. inextricably.

What I will take away from this decision of the prince and his courtiers to make a mockery of Arnab (rather than the more loyal anchors of NDTV/CNN-IBN) is the sheer cynicism, sense of entitlement and vanity, and the utter disregard for a long-suffering public that is required to even contemplate such adharma. And of course the paid media that participates willingly in this sham.

Sane Indians responded thus:
1. Recognized Rahul's incredulously poor intelligence and laughed their heads off

2. Fact-checking web-sites scrutinized the many unsubstantiated claims in his interview and exposed him for the incorrigible liar that he was in that interview.

3. Others recognized the kid-glove treatment given to Rahul and presented the interview conducted in an alternative universe.

4. Then we have the excellent site "Ask Rahul Anything" (http://engagedino.com/askrg) that is going viral, which allows you to ask Rahul any question you want.

The Missing Questions
We managed to identify ten questions to Rahul's answers that were previously float aimlessly, orphaned without any questions to go along, using the 'Ask Rahul Anything' website. Our analysis absolves Rahul of all crimes: we show that in fact our questions result in no unsubstantiated claims, we questioned all answers briefly, honestly, and to the point, on a wide range of topics:

1.   Futility of Modi's smart cities (brightest bulb - 1)
2.   The brightest bulb in the dynasty - 2
3.   The economic race with China
4.   1:1 debate with Narendra Modi
5.   The specific women he will empower
6.   Moving from undesirable pSecularism to undesirable secularism
7.  The original interview: interview or a date
8.   The brightest bulb in the dynasty -3
9.   How Manmohan became PM
10. National security

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.