[Ferrotoral]

If hindus praise our religion, they are despicable hindutvavadis. If foreigners praise our religion, hindus are pathetically insecure and suffer from himalayan inferiority complex. what a strange logic?

sarang,

there are types of praises and types of praises.

works by rajaji, radhakrishnan, kannadasan and (of late) discourses by (ex tamil actor) shiva kumar or vishaka hari, whom i came to know only recently, there is absolute devotion and commitment there, and as a practising hindu, i love to read and hear these.

what i fail to understand, is excerpts picked through googling at random, from western scholars and quoted here, with what i feel, a vehemence as if to prove a point, that even if some tambrams do not appreciate our heritage, there are western scholars who do!

it is but a pyrrhic victory, if at all these are victorious statements?

no amount of western thought and praise, is good enough, only as good, as the roots of the faith within india is strong.

which is why, i go along with thoughtful people, who think through instead of blindly accepting the mores and norms of the milleniums past and say that these are good for today, if these were good enough all these years. that arguement simply does not hold water.

any of our great grandparent, ie 2 generations ago, if they would come into this world today, i am positive, they would not be able to relate to our lives. yes, they will see a senseless repetition of rituals like amavasai or thevasam, the regular 13 day kriyaiyis after death, the regular visit to kasi and chanting or rudrams and other hymns.

but our values? in many way, they will disagree. i am almost willing to bet the world on that.

i am bound to think, our fraternization with other castes, groups, eating with other communities, our polluted form of observing 'madi' and above all the loss of many entitlements that they enjoyed, right from preference through word of mouth in the civil service to almost a monopolizing status in the lives of the people of tamil nadu.

today's tambrams have moved far away from those practices and we are much more egalitarian and liberal inoutlook than even our
grandparents. in cities we simply do not have two tumblers. atleast in my relatives' houses of today.

but, dear sarang, where i think, we fall short, is our obsession with quotas and reservations re colleges/govt jobs, because we narrowly think of our own community, and not our country. no country can afford, to leave wayside certain sections of its populations to garbage, and blame the victims for their abject lot.

if anyone claims that reservations/quotas are failures, one only has to look at the communities of tamil nadu, and it is a proud achievement even nari kuravas have a doctor from their community, the same nari kuruvas, who used to chase/hunt squirrels, cats in the madras of my youth, catch and use them as food, and sell glass beads for a pittance. this is progress and this is the india, that we need to be proud of and not look at with envy and distaste, which many tambrams here do, because of the concept of reservations/quotas, which they feel, took away their entitlement to government services.

identity with hinduism should and i think, will be, in the long run, a flat society and not the stratified one we are all used to, with brahmins at the top of the varna, the various shudra in between, and the panchamas outside of it. any tambram who even sniffs support for this status quo, in my opinion, is doing more harm than the poster abundant evangelical pastor.

hope this explains, atleast somewhat, why i think, looking for praises from western scholars for our philosophy and cultures, is useless. also, the same western scholars, if you go through them deeply, will have sharp things to say about brahmins re their daily practices of exclusions, and that will hurt.

http://www.youtube.com/topic/MYSTXpgVaSc/vishaka-hari