Free Speech, RoPiophobia, and the Karna Syndrome

Said the Viceroy to brown natives: What do you know about free speech? Until voices like yours are silenced, there can never be free speech in India. And this Pax-Romana ushered in an era of peace and free speech was born. And the quiet native started to listen.

The viceroy continued: Tis a religion of peace. You suffer from RoPiophobia. If an RoP chap commits violence and disturbs peace, he can't be RoP, by definition, can he? Never mind its operating manual. It's a R.o.P. Like R.o.L. Peace & love in our time. How hard can this be? Remember how you, with your Hindu rate of 'growth', were not a team player and let down the perfect world we gave you? After all, it worked perfectly elsewhere. In addition to this FreeSpeech, We launched many a BestProduct, designed many a FoolProofPlan, passed a variety of PerfectLaws, provided TopSecurity, created many a DreamJob, gave you every FundamentalRight, IdeaOfIndia, RoP, RoL, ... we built a freakin utopia for 60 years, and it still did not work because - know this - India is a country which even perfection cannot save. You fatalistic natives are utterly incapable of improving yourselves. Karma. You are only fit to be chaiwallas.

And one did, but many a native believed this Indra and turned sepoy. He gave up the very divinity and distinctiveness that he was born with in a moment of stupefying generosity. That resilient defense - those divine earrings of Sanskriti, the unbreakable armor of Dharma, in exchange for a one-time use of wonder-weapons made in the west. He's used it up. Karna's wheels have come off. His moral compass is lost and he is rudderless. Yet the syndrome looks for a way out. He's still got the gift of the gab.  Arjuna must do his duty. This is Kurukshetra, and there can be no compromise in a Dharmayudh.

postscript: western universal idea of "branding" creates a lot of useless products. Remember the flat cricket pitch marketed as "those who bend their back can extract bounce"? If you did not extract any bounce, then you did not bend your back. Hindu rate of growth.

Creating History: Patriots versus Drohis

How patriots create history: 'When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today'

Secular-socialist government: 'If you manage to get home, warn them of us and say, for our today, we are taking your tomorrow'

Eminent historian sepoys, and Hinduphobes: 'When you go home, tell them of us but deny that, for our today and tomorrow, we took your yesterday'

Let Us Not be Art Sepoys

A bizarre request came the other day. We'd like your kid to be part of the festivities at some kind of Teen USA type beauty pageant. Specifically, an opportunity to showcase classical Indian dance forms like Bharatanatyam, Odissi, etc. How long was this performance? 30 seconds. The bigger kids would be putting on a few seconds of show to lend 'color'. The theme: atrocity art. You know depict how the girls of India have overcome the oppression of patriarchy, dowry, female infanticide, rape, and all the other good stuff that is used to define India and Hinduism.

I have to drive my kid more than 60 miles each way to be part a 30-sec exotica side-show in some teenage beauty pageant with the express purpose of volunteering my heritage to mock my heritage in front of a ignorant TV audience? I was in two minds. Like Viv Richards undecided whether to hit the ball for a four or six. Dear organizers, idhu konjam over.

Still, I would be ready to do the needful, provided the following things are part of the festivities:
- dancers from the middle east depict how Yazidi girls, Kurds, etc. are overcoming the slaughter and oppression of fundamentalist Islam
- Ballet from Europe will depict how Roma girls,  African girls, and Jewish girls have overcome centuries of racism and colonialism that continue to this day, the two world wars that they inflicted on the rest of the world, the communism and the churchianity that continues to extinguish the aspirations of millions of girls all over the world, ..
- Dances from China will depict how their girls are fighting for the human rights that have been trampled there for decades, and the millions that their secularism has killed
- Dances from North America will depict how the few remaining native American girls from a population that was once as big as Europe's are fighting against all odds, and how little kids continue to be molested in some of their churches, girls being shot in schools, girls being abused at a very high per-capita rate, girls overcoming racism, girls not joining science courses in college, girls on drugs, girls with mental issues, girls bullying in schools, etc. are being overcome ...
- South America will similarly show how their natives have overcome the torture and massacre of tyrants from European invaders to corrupt leftists to drug-lords
- Australia will show how the few remaining Aborigine girls who have escaped extermination are coping ..
- dances from "South Asia" will show how Hindu girls in Pakistan and Bangladesh have been systematically annihilated solely because of their faith
....

Let us see all those dances too. Let atrocity art be equal and proportional opportunity. If India gets 30 seconds to "showcase" itself, then surely these other examples should be given at least 300 seconds each to depict how they have covered themselves with glory. Noting that dharmic India has on its own, done more self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-reform than the rest of these ideologies and cultures put together despite centuries of brutal foreign occupation that introduced a lot of the problems. Let us showcase that fact too.

Or, let us use the occasion to spread a positive message of hope amongst our girls, and proportionally show each of the cultures celebrating the best representation and accorded status to the women and the girl child in their heritage. You will find that dharmic India will need to be given 3000 seconds if the others get 30 seconds.


Of course, one need not go far from India to find folks ready to fight stupidity with stupidity. Many dysfunctional male and female artists in India are misusing their dharmic art training to mock Hinduism and dharmic India and make a quick buck in front of a cheering western universalist audience - betraying the very open-minded culture and heritage that bestowed on them their skills and fame without fear or favor in the first place. 'Being clueless' has become a marketable talent in secular India.

This August 15, let us pledge to free ourselves of mental colonization. For starters, we must not allow our children to become tomorrow's art sepoys.

जननी जन्मभूमिश्च स्वर्गादपि गरीयसी

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.