no new comments are published. the newest is 48 mins now.shiv wrote: I have started countering silly replies
Sorry to go OT. The theory is that matter rose out of nothingness and all matter can be sensed (traditionally called "heard") by the supreme ear. That "sound" is the "natural name" of that object. But most of these "sounds" are inaudible to the human ear and when a few are audible they are only a partial parody of the complete sound. Om is one such sound - the normal human cannot get much closer than that to hearing "natural" names of absolute creation. But a person who realizes the absolute could hear them. The vedas are a record of those sounds. The "sounds" exist with or without humans. This is from the "Garland of letters" bookShauryaT wrote:All practitioners are agreed that the Vedas are without origin. In human parlance the works of god. Now, what and who these gods are is left to imaginations, vicar and anubhuti.ramana wrote:KLP Dubey keeps saying the RIg Veda is not written by man.
See?…Any letters matching small portions of Shakespeare’s writing are plucked out and formed into his plays, poems or sonnets.
This is so true and where we (generalization) completely lack IMHO, and readily go into defensive mode. Not just on Hinduism, but anything related to India. All the books attacking our way of life, our belief systems, our religion, our human rights, women's rights, rape statistics, protein starvation are all to force Indians to be ashamed and on the defensive. Not equipped to deal with the criticism, and construct a viable counter point, the quickest escape for many Indians is to join the chorus to blame India and Hinduism.Suraj wrote:Always focus on putting the other side on the defensive.
Malhotra has said she is no dummy. But a huge "U-turn"-er, among other things.matrimc wrote:Actually Prof. Doniger had translated Rigveda for Penguin. It is one of the Penguin Classics. Her translation is not bad at all. I will post the nAsadIya sUkta here just as an example. She does understand at least the mystic and the skeptic part going by the preface she had in that book. Instead of "tamasOmA jyOtirgamaya" she is regressing for 30 talons of silver and start crucifying another non-expansionist religion which is just like her own putative religion.
That's correct too. I think Malhotra's point is probably that she knows enough to be dangerous and deliberately malicious. Her excretion in the NYT does reveal a mindset that is highly political and not that of an detached scholar. Probably a radical feminazi type who wants to "empower". I want to go through the book to see what the scholarly basis is for claiming that "dalit" and other marginalized voices of Hinduism are being represented here. What is the methodology for acquiring access to these voices, since presumably "marginalized" people had no access to writing or literacy (or conversely anyone who wrote in Sanskrit is automatically an elite fascist). How did she tap into all these voices?UlanBatori wrote:Didn't Witzel, Herr Professor von Sanskrit in das Harvahd, slam her translation as being garbage, and call her an incompetent and an idiot?
Shashank Bengali is South Asia correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, covering India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and surrounding countries. He lives in Mumbai.
A foreign correspondent and editor for the past decade, he has reported from more than 40 countries including Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Libya, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
He previously worked for McClatchy Newspapers, serving as bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya; Middle East correspondent in Baghdad and Cairo; and national security editor in Washington. He shared in a McClatchy President's Award for coverage of the Arab Spring and was a finalist for the Livingston Award in international reporting for a series on population growth in Africa.
He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2012 as a national security reporter in Washington. He began his career as a reporter at The Kansas City Star and has also written from overseas for Playboy and Monocle magazines.
Originally from the Los Angeles area, Shashank earned degrees from the University of Southern California and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He speaks French and conversational Gujarati, has forgotten most of his Kiswahili and now is attempting to learn Hindi.
Read his former blog, Somewhere in Africa.
Menial Sepoy Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.By GARDINER HARRIS
MARCH 5, 2014
Continue reading the main story
NEW DELHI — Kashmiri students at a private university in northeastern India were suspended indefinitely and removed from their dorms on Monday after they cheered for the Pakistani team during a televised cricket match against India.
“You cannot pass judgments against your own national team,” said Manzoor Ahmed, vice chancellor of Swami Vivekanand Subharti University in Meerut, explaining the decision to remove the students. “Their behavior was not conducive to peace on the campus. It creates bad blood with the local boys.”
Cricket is a national obsession in India. Some Kashmiris root against the Indian team because of resentment from decades of national policies deemed oppressive there, including routine arrests of pro-independence figures and thousands of disappearances.
India and Pakistan, once part of the same country, violently divided in 1947and have since fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, a region divided between the two countries. Pakistan has been the source of repeated terrorist attacks in India, including one in Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.
The issue of the suspensions was raised in Kashmir’s Parliament on Tuesday by the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, which supports the suspended students. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party did not support the students and walked out of Parliament to protest the discussion.
The university rented several buses to take the 67 suspended students off campus after the episode, which happened on Sunday. Only a few of them cheered too enthusiastically, Mr. Ahmed said, but because no one would tell administrators who had done so, all but one of the Kashmiri students in a dorm dominated by them were suspended.
“They shared guilt because nobody came out with information,” Mr. Ahmed said.
A chair and a pane of glass were also broken during the game, Mr. Ahmed said. But he said that cheering for Pakistan was the most egregious offense.
The Kashmiri students will have to appeal their suspension before being allowed to return to the university, Mr. Ahmed said.
India has an ambivalent relationship toward free speech. Statements or writings deemed hurtful to some groups are illegal, and the works of certain authors have sometimes been banned. Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” is still banned, and last month a prominent publisher withdrew a scholarly book because of a lawsuit claiming that it denigrated Hindus.
Hurt feelings can sometimes prompt mass killings, which have afflicted India for most of its modern history. Meerut is in Uttar Pradesh, a giant state that has suffered more than 100 deadly riots over the past year, including one inMuzaffarnagar in August that caused 43 deaths and led thousands to flee their homes.
A shared love of cricket has sometimes brought India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors who perpetually flirt with war, closer, but it can also be explosive. In a separate episode, a Kashmiri student at Career Point Gurukul in Kota, a test-preparation academy, said in an interview that administrators gave a dozen Kashmiri students a separate room to watch Sunday’s match, fearing a confrontation. The student asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.
When India lost, he was chased by a mob of fellow students, from whom he barely escaped, he said. Administrators eventually moved the Kashmiri students to a protected building, he said.
“I was born in Kashmir, and since childhood everyone around me supported the Pakistan cricket team,” the student said. “I don’t like Pakistan for anything else. It’s just their cricket team that I support.”
NEW DELHI — For decades, India’s business elite dreamed of an alpha-male dictator who would also be a university graduate and generally a wonderful person, while the intellectual elite waited for the revolution that would set everything right. The poor ensured that India remained a democracy by turning out to vote every time they were asked to. In tribute, the politicians ensured that they remained poor.
.......
What the elections are largely about this time is the rise of the fierce Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi — whose charm in no small measure derives from the sense of danger he exudes from having been accused of complicity in the 2002 riots in Gujarat State that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims — and the political responses to his ascent.
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Deepak Sarma
Cleveland, OH 9 hours ago
Studying Hinduism as a scholarly activity is largely ignored and denigrated by the elite, wealthy, and educated Hindu community in India and in the Diaspora. Pushing their children to the so-called STEM fields has allowed the academic study of Hinduism to remain a largely "Western" discipline and construct which remains within its colonial history and confines. It is not that insiders ought to be given a louder, or the only, voice. Rather that the academic study of Hinduism would be different if, like the academic study of Christianity and the academic study of Judaism, there were more voices, both emic and etic. The academic study of Hinduism would be different if it received support from the global Hindu community, as has, for example, the academic study of Judaism has received from the Jewish community.
I know this is asking too much of people who pay fees at the U.Chicago, or buy books by their Divinity faculty, but please try Googling "Books banned in India". You may learn a lot, including 4 simple facts:
(1) There is no "blasphemy" law in India. There is a "don't incite riots" law which asks people to exert some adult sense of decency (I mean as in responsibility not the Doniger kind) and respect towards others.
(2) The list of banned books and movies shows almost none banned to cater to "Right Wing Hindutva" whatever.
(3) Despite trying for decades, no U.Chicago Divinity Faculty have managed to get their books banned.
(4) Prof. Laine of some obscure school, did manage at his SECOND attempt. On his first attempt, when it came to a hearing (not for blasphemy, but outright lying and false advertising) he fell on the mercy of he court, claiming that his "history book" was all fiction. Q.E.D.
Sorry, but per the law, Doniger's right to peddle her wares does not trump some poor person's right to life, and a peaceful existence undisturbed by riots. That is what the law has conveyed consistently by the list of banned books. But seeing that takes honesty. Doniger's problem is that she is facing real peer review outside her bigot dump for the first time, and publishers rush to admit that they have been conned.
Actually mine appeared after an 8 hour gap (I post as BenneDose) which I thought was strange. I suspect that comments were pouring in by the thousand - and a second comment I made in response to a stupid comment did not make it.matrimc wrote:NYT closed comments on that article. Mine did not make it. I see even shiv's did not make it. Looks like words "jewish, antisemitism, holocaust" even if you are on the side of Jewish people, is vorboten. Aha, double standards right there and muzzling freee voices from the other even in support.
I was toying with the idea about a dedicated thread for lies by western academics, but I need to put in homework first and dig up all that I have discovered, be it about the Dognigger, or Pretzel or others - apasrt from some stuff like plagiarism that came up on the US bostive neuj threadUlanBatori wrote:Came in the email: Censored by the Champions of Freedom of Expression (maybe we should make a blog site About The New York Times?)
I think he is angling for the wealthy silicon valley entrepreneurs to fork out monies for a few chairs in Case (?). Bu then that place already has a healthy Endowmwnt being a private school with wealthy donors. Prof. Don Knuth (the god of theoretical CS) went to school there. I heard he is also one of the best christian believer there is. Tooday all these people are writing papers using his software and his font system (TeX and MetaFont) but would turn around and start dissing him as a Christian fundoo (which he is far from - an extraordinary but still a self effacing mathematician/CS theorist).UlanBatori wrote:Deepak Sarma
Cleveland, OH 9 hours ago
... snip salesdroid tripe ...
By the way one can still recommend any of the comments including replies to other comments. I went there and bumped a several which are to my liking.ShauryaT wrote:Do not let the closing of the comments section stop you, write to letters@nytimes.com
What is not realized is that a lot of work has been put in by Indians, but the sepoy mentality has meant that Enlish educated Indians pick up Western stuff before they pick up anything done in India. Indian publications are more likely to have cheap binding and bad English about which all of us are taught that these are hallmarks of shoddiness and backwardness - to be laughed at and mocked.UlanBatori wrote:I had to post this comment from the NYT Pondy *orniger farticle. It is by one of the most menial of the menial sepoys, who used to operate the "RISA" dump. Used to post their *rap out on the open Internet, until they decided to go underground when they couldn't stand the laughter.
Deepak Sarma
Cleveland, OH 9 hours ago
Studying Hinduism as a scholarly activity is largely ignored and denigrated by the elite, wealthy, and educated Hindu community in India and in the Diaspora. Pushing their children to the so-called STEM fields has allowed the academic study of Hinduism to remain a largely "Western" discipline and construct which remains within its colonial history and confines. It is not that insiders ought to be given a louder, or the only, voice. Rather that the academic study of Hinduism would be different if, like the academic study of Christianity and the academic study of Judaism, there were more voices, both emic and etic. The academic study of Hinduism would be different if it received support from the global Hindu community, as has, for example, the academic study of Judaism has received from the Jewish community.
Of course that suggests that this is all that was wrong with the farticle... standard NYT standards of honestythe following has now been posted on NYTimes website:
Correction: March 6, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described an Indian law criminalizing homosexuality. It dates to 1861; it is not new. (The law was struck down by the Delhi High Court in 2009, then reinstated by the Indian Supreme Court last December.)
Speaking of facts; the original farticle had thisSuraj wrote:I was about to post a comment to the following effect but the yellow bellies at NYT locked comments:
The first word of your article (banned) is wrong, since the book wasn't banned; the publisher chose to withdraw it since sales were too small to warrant the cost of defending it. The last line of the correction is also wrong, since the Supreme court did not restore the law, as much as state that courts were not in a position to strike down laws, and that the process must be conducted through the legislature, and not the judiciary. The likelihood of everything else in between being factually accurate is therefore poor. But don't let facts get in the way.
First of all, it was "liberal", "progressive", "scientific" west that pushed the notion that the study of religious stuff was useless. The Indian elite thought that chanting mantras all day wasn't letting Indians sh!t in dignity or allowing them to develop properly. So everyone was encouraged to study stuff that is actually useful for building a better society. Like Nehru's modern temples being damns and power plants and such. Besides, there is not much new to say about all this ancient wisdom that many brilliant people from Sankara to Radhakrishnan haven't already written extensive commentaries on that can be read and appreciated. What Indians did not bargain for was the perversion and rewriting of this that would happen by western "scholars" and their marxist/feminist sepoys with a radical agenda. To that end, should some Indians have stayed in academia in these subjects to guard against it? That seems to be the accusation being made rather hypocritically. That Hindu scholars should be regurgitating and churning over the same things that have been gone through for 1000s of years, and occasionally mounting a vigorous defense when attacks happen. There is absolutely nothing new any of this western "scholarship" has added to the understanding of Hinduism, and the only reason we now need an authentic Hindu voice is because of the nonsensical brain-washing being attempted by those with an agenda.Studying Hinduism as a scholarly activity is largely ignored and denigrated by the elite, wealthy, and educated Hindu community in India and in the Diaspora. Pushing their children to the so-called STEM fields has allowed the academic study of Hinduism to remain a largely "Western" discipline and construct which remains within its colonial history and confines.