Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Aladdin is Disney's most subversive film

 On this beautiful summer day – the first of the Disney series.

Because Disney, at its best, was doing exactly what this series does: civilizational argument in the form that reaches everyone.

And of course — of course — we start with the Lion King.

Not because it is the most beloved. Because it is the most honest. A complete civilizational argument, a theology of life and transmission, a portrait of what fathers are for and what happens when they are gone. Disney made it in 1994 and somehow got away with it. We will not waste the opportunity.

1. The Circle of Life opens the film and states the theology immediately. Birth celebrated as a civilizational event. The whole savanna bowing to the new life. The sun breaking over the Pride Lands. This is the Religion of Life and Fertility stated in four minutes of music and image, before a single word of dialogue. Every child who watches understands, without being told, that new life is the most important thing that can happen.

2. Mufasa is the great father – and the rarest thing in contemporary cinema: a father who is genuinely great. Not absent, not bumbling, not learning from his child. Teaching. Forming. Taking his son to the edge of the kingdom at dawn not to give him everything but to show him what responsibility looks like. "Everything the light touches is our kingdom." Not yours. Ours. You will inherit it. You will be accountable for it. You will one day stand here with your own son. This is the transmission – the father forming the son not for comfort but for duty.

3. Scar is the Herostratus instinct in lion form. He cannot build what Mufasa built. He cannot be what Mufasa is. So he destroys it – through manipulation, through lies, through the carefully engineered accusation that turns the son against the memory of the father. The pride lands die under his rule. The hyenas multiply. Negative selection, with claws. The civilization hollowed out by the one who could not build it and could not bear that someone else did.

4. Hakuna Matata is the false paradise. No past, no future, no responsibility, no identity. Forget where you came from, forget what you owe, eat the bugs and enjoy the sunset. Simba almost stays. The Last Man, in lion form, blinking in the warm jungle and calling it wisdom. It feels like freedom. It is the slow erasure of everything that made him who he is.

5. "Remember who you are." The most important line in the film – and one of the most important in the Disney canon. Not "be brave" or "follow your heart" or any of the usual therapeutic imperatives. Remember who you are. Your Identity. The thing every temptation — every Scar, every Hakuna Matata, every comfortable exile — is designed to make you forget. Mufasa appears in the stars not to give Simba power but to give him back what he had lost: the knowledge of who he is and what that requires of him.

6. He lives in you. The second level – the one you revisit with your son when you are both old enough. The father who died is not gone. He lives in the son – in the values transmitted, in the courage inherited, in the sense of duty that became character. This is our immortality piece made into a film for children. The torch changes hands. The light doesn’t. Mufasa is dead. Mufasa is present in every choice Simba makes – including, finally, the choice to go back.

7. The return is the whole argument. The comfortable exile ends. The duty calls. The civilization that was dying recovers – not because conditions improved but because the right person remembered who he was and went home. Everything depends on who rules. The Pride Lands bloom again. The circle continues. A cub held up at the top of Pride Rock, as the whole savanna bows – because new life is the most important thing that can happen, and the civilization that understands this is the civilization that survives.

Watch it with your son. Then watch it again and again. The first time, he sees the lion. The next times, you both see everything else.

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Aladdin – my favorite Disney film. The only movie I ever saw three times at the cinema, in three different languages. The first of the Disney greats of the 90s.

Aladdin is the most subversive film Disney ever made. It tells a street rat that the system is wrong about him – and then shows exactly how the system works, why the lie is necessary, and what it costs. Most children’s films don’t go that far. This one does.

1. A street rat. No birth, no title, no inheritance. The system says this disqualifies him. The film’s opening argument is the longbow argument: the peasant who can do what the prince cannot has a claim the system must eventually recognize, regardless of what the system prefers. Aladdin is more capable, more courageous, and more genuinely good than every prince who came through the palace gates. The question is whether the system can accommodate this. Initially: no.

2. The wish for the performance. Aladdin’s first wish is to become Prince Ali – to put on the costume the system requires before it will accept him. The performance works and fails simultaneously. It works because the system accepts Prince Ali. It fails because Jasmine recognizes immediately that something is false – and falls in love not with Prince Ali but with the person from the marketplace. Authenticity cannot be fully disguised. The real person leaks through the costume.

3. The lie is unsustainable. Each deception requires another to support it. The distance between who you are performing and who you actually are grows until it becomes unmanageable. The film is not making a therapeutic point about self-esteem. It is making a structural point: you cannot build anything durable on a false foundation. Reality will eventually be exposed. Everything built on it falls.

4. Jafar – the man for whom enough was never enough. Wants to be the most powerful man in the kingdom. Gets it. Insufficient. Wants to be the most powerful sorcerer. Gets it. Still not enough. Wishes to be an all-powerful genie. Gets it – and gets the bottle. The totalitarian personality in animated form: the man whose need for control is not about security but about the void inside that power was supposed to fill and never does. Every authoritarian in history has been Jafar. They all ended up in the bottle.

5. The Genie is the most powerful being in the world – and the least free. Constrained by whoever holds the lamp, unable to use his power in his own interest. Talent imprisoned by institutional power. The film’s moral test: what does Aladdin do with his third wish? Not wealth. Not the princess. He frees the Genie. Power used to give freedom rather than accumulate it. The correct use of power, stated in one wish by a street rat.

6. Jasmine had already refused every prince who came through the door – because she recognized immediately that they were offering the performance, not the person. She is the character who sees through managed reality to actual reality. Which is why she recognizes Aladdin in the marketplace and recognizes him again behind Prince Ali. The person who has never been fooled by the performance is the most dangerous to those who depend on it.

7. The resolution is not "be yourself" in the therapeutic sense. It is deeper: the person you actually are is sufficient – but only if you have the courage to present it and act on it rather than hide it. Aladdin’s transformation is not from street rat to prince. It is from someone who believes the performance is necessary to someone who discovers it isn’t. The system changes to accommodate reality rather than reality contorting to accommodate the system. Which is why the film survives in every language.

https://x.com/i/status/2088659493760450683

Beauty and the Beast

The third great film of the Disney Renaissance – and perhaps the most explicitly civilizational of them all.

If The Lion King is about transmission, and Aladdin about merit and authenticity, Beauty and the Beast is about what happens when genuine sensitivity and depth collide with loud, self-celebrating mediocrity.

1. Belle is the girl who sees and who wants more.

In a provincial town that values strength, looks, and conformity, she reads, wants adventure, and refuses the life mapped out for her. She is not merely "different." She is the civilizational impulse in a place that has none – the person who looks past the surface because the surface is all the village has. Her books represent imagination, memory, and the accumulated world beyond the narrow one she was born into.

2. Gaston is the perfect product of that village. Handsome, strong, popular – and completely empty. His confidence is not earned through achievement or insight. It is the default setting of a man who has never met a higher standard and therefore assumes he is the standard. "No one shoots like Gaston…" is the anthem of surface celebrating itself. He does not need to understand Belle. He needs to possess her as proof that the village’s values still rule.

3. The Beast is the opposite. Nobility and capacity for depth locked behind a form the world finds repulsive. The Beast is a man who has lost control of himself. The curse is isolation – the price of having been shallow once, now forced to wait for someone capable of seeing substance. He is rough because he has become isolated; he becomes gentle because someone finally sees the person underneath. The film does not excuse his cruelty. Instead, it asks whether he can change. And the answer is: yes – but only through choice, discipline, and humility. The turning point is self-mastery. That transformation is not magic. It is what happens when genuine capacity meets genuine recognition.

4. Gaston’s proposal is the purest statement of entitled mediocrity. He does not court. He announces. Belle’s rejection is not simply a matter of taste. It is the higher mind refusing the lower one. And mediocrity never forgives that. The moment she chooses the Beast, Gaston does what the average does when excellence is preferred: he organizes the mob.

5. The mob song is the civilizational diagnosis. Ordinary people, led by the loudest empty man, storm the castle of the one who is different. They do not really know the Beast. They do not understand him. They simply know that he is outside the village’s categories – and that Belle, the one who reads and sees, prefers him. The threat is not the monster. The threat is the possibility that depth might be valued over popularity. "Kill the Beast" means destroy the exceptional – destroy what you cannot understand so the comfortable can remain comfortable.

6. The library is the moment the Beast begins to understand love. He gives Belle an entire world of books – not jewelry, not status, but civilization itself: knowledge, memory, imagination. And he learns the essential lesson of love: you cannot possess the person you love. You have to give them freedom. When he finally releases Belle, even though he may lose her forever, he has become worthy of her.

7. The final transformation is almost secondary. The Beast becomes beautiful again, but the real transformation happened earlier. Belle chose the one who could change, not the one who already thought he was perfect. The village cheers the latter. Civilization requires the former.

The quiet arguments of the film:

True beauty sees what others cannot see.

Do not confuse what looks good with what is good.

And true love does something even more demanding:

It calls the person capable of becoming better to actually become better.

Watch it with your daughter.

The first time, she sees the princess and the Beast.

The next time, she sees the books.

And one day, she sees Gaston and everything else.

https://x.com/i/status/2089007744133026093






















Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra 

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Monday, August 17, 2026

Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze forged the ideological weapon that paralyzes the West

 I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for having given birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is just a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here's what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found fertile ground there that didn't exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married that substrate, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That's how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That's how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history deserves to be defended, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It's shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It's our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt like others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that's the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and who are not ashamed to pass it on.

So, sorry. And back to work.

https://x.com/i/status/2055411322628583488

Deconstruction claimed to throw out the colonial bathwater, but it ended up drowning the baby—and that baby was the civilization that had invented the bathtub, the soap, and the very idea that anything could be washed at all.

Derrida wanted to teach us to read between the lines; his heirs just learned how to burn the book. Foucault hunted down relations of power; they turned it into a grid to mechanically apply to anything that sticks out.

And at the end of the chain, we find ourselves defending, through cultural relativism, the planet’s most anti-woman, anti-press, anti-Jewish, anti-gay regimes, all in the name of the fight against oppression.

The worst part is that deconstruction started out as a powerful critical tool. But transformed into a mass ideology via American social science departments, it became what it claimed to combat: an ethnocentric dogma (middlebrow Western academic) that’s blind to itself, projecting its moral categories onto civilizations that couldn’t care less and that, unlike it, have no qualms about defending their own.

Western civilization is the only one in history to have made self-criticism a cardinal value. That’s its strength, and it’s become its Achilles’ heel: against opponents who don’t play that game, the asymmetry is deadly.

https://x.com/i/status/2055648802762059801

Yesterday, I destroyed three builders of ruins.

Today, I want to celebrate a French builder who got everything right and who shaped the mind of one of the most powerful men in the world: Peter Thiel. This man is named René Girard.

He taught at Stanford while his Parisian contemporaries were teaching suspicion. And he discovered something that I consider, soberly speaking, one of the greatest anthropological insights of the 20th century: mimetic desire.

The idea can be summed up in one sentence. We desire almost nothing spontaneously. We desire what others desire. Desire is not an arrow shooting from me toward the object; it’s a triangle. Me, the other, the object. And it’s the other who teaches me what’s worth wanting.

Taken seriously, this realization changes everything.

It explains why the most violent rivalries erupt between the closest brothers, partners, neighbors, direct competitors. The more the model resembles me, the more his desire becomes mine, the more we want exactly the same thing, the more the hatred rises. Cain and Abel don’t fight despite their resemblance. They fight because of it.

Now, read Peter Thiel in light of this.

Thiel met Girard at Stanford in the late ’80s. He says himself that it’s the intellectual encounter that structured his entire investing life. And when you understand mimeticism, you understand why Zero to One is essentially a Girardian book disguised as a startup manual.

The heart of Thiel’s thesis “competition is for losers” isn’t a libertarian provocation. It’s the direct application of Girard to economics.

Here’s the argument. When you enter a competitive market, you enter a mimetic structure. All the players want the same thing, set their prices off each other, copy each other’s features, recruit from the same schools, raise from the same funds. Margins get crushed. Innovation dies. The sector converges toward homogeneous mediocrity. You’re Cain and Abel in suits, killing each other for a point of market share on a product that could have been great if someone had dared to go elsewhere.

Competition, in the sense that standard management thinking celebrates it, is a mimetic trap. It’s exactly the mechanism Girard describes: the convergence of desires produces violence, then exhaustion, then sacrifice—except here the sacrificial victim is economic value itself.

The monopoly, on the other hand, is what happens when you refuse the mimetic triangle. You stop looking at what the neighbor wants. You look at what no one sees. You build something no one else can build, on a truth no one else has noticed. Thiel calls it the “secret” question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? It’s a purely Girardian question. It asks you to step out of collective desire to access a proper desire.

And that’s exactly why Thiel made 26 years of bets that look, from the outside, like luck, and are in reality an anti-mimetic discipline applied with near-monastic rigor.

PayPal in 1999 when everyone was building portals. Facebook in 2004 when no one believed in social networks post-Friendster. Palantir in 2003 when the idea of selling analytics software to the government made Silicon Valley laugh. SpaceX, Stripe—every major bet has the same signature: everyone in the room thinks it’s stupid, he sees the structure others don’t because he’s spent his life asking himself, what do I desire that isn’t just the reflection of what others desire?

That’s it, Girardian investing. It’s not a financial analysis thing. It’s a hygiene of desire.

And that’s why Girard is the exact opposite of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Where French Theory teaches that everything is power, so everything is suspicion, so nothing is worth building, Girard teaches that everything is desire, so everything depends on who you listen to, so your freedom begins the day you stop listening to the crowd. It’s not a philosophy of deconstruction. It’s a philosophy of election in the original sense: choosing, from a point not dictated by others, what deserves your life.

For an entrepreneur, the message is brutal and liberating at once.

If you’re building in a crowded market against direct competitors, optimizing the same metrics as them, raising the same rounds, repeating the same pitches, you’re up to your neck in mimeticism. And mimeticism, in startups, is a negative-sum game. You burn your capital, your time, your mental health, to win a slice of a pie that shrinks while you fight.

If, on the other hand, you identify a truth your competitors refuse to see out of laziness, conformism, or because their own mimetic desire blinds them to it, and you build from there, you access a space where competition doesn’t exist, because no one else has the same compass.

That’s it, the Girardian monopoly. It’s not a market position. It’s a state of mind.

So there you have it. France gave the world deconstructors who taught a whole generation to suspect. But it also gave Girard, who taught a man at Stanford how to build by looking elsewhere than the crowd—and that man financed a non-negligible part of the world we live in today.

The yin of French Theory is generalized suspicion. The yang is Girard. And the yang wins, because it builds. To those who build: stop looking at your competitors. Find the secret. That’s where value awaits.

https://x.com/i/status/2056134360785445217

[PDF] A Developmental Map for Psychic Abilities: Yoga Traditions, Contemporary Esoteric Practice, and Western Empiricism

J Mathias, D Banerji, D Ganguli - 2026
… However, from Sri Aurobindo’s perspective, miracles should not be sought to be
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[PDF] Ethical Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Its Resonance in Modern French Intellectual and Cultural Discourse: A Comparative Study

S Kumar - AIJFR-Advanced International Journal for Research, 2026
… The present paper explores the importance of the ethics of Sri Aurobindo in the
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[HTML] The Divine Feminine: The Inevitable Synthesis of Evolutionary Spirituality and the Dawn of a Twenty-First Century Religion

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… essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the
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The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga by Patrick Beldio

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The Divine Feminine in Sri Aurobindo's Dramatic Works: A Spiritual, Philosophical, and Feminist Interpretation
This research paper examines Sri Aurobindo's dramatic works through a feminist-spiritual lens, focusing on how womanhood becomes a medium for expressing his ...

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/greeks-gave-west-reason-romans-gave-it.html

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/american-founders-read-burke-hume-smith.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

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Saturday, August 15, 2026

First Chief Minister to visit Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata after 50 years

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

In 1947, we won our freedom. Nationhood, we must win every single day. For months, thousands of you have written to me with the same question: What can I do for my country?

Today, I have an answer. This Independence Day, I am launching Transform India Initiative: a non-partisan platform where scholars, practitioners and ordinary citizens come together to work on the twelve decisive questions India must answer next.

If you feel called to build, visit TransformIndia.com and tell us, through the form, where you would like to contribute. Freedom was won for us. The India that follows is ours to build. Jai Hind - Gitanjali J Angmo 

https://x.com/i/status/2088323829978534073

Independence Day is about freedom. August 15 is an emotional and intellectual code, invoked to connote a state of mind and existence that knows no bounds except those defined in a compact given unto us by ourselves. The day is the vantage point, our ...

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/editorial/freedom-is-an-unfinished-promise-4111691

Kolkata: At Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, West Bengal CM Suvendu Adhikari says, "I am proud that after 50 years in this important place, I am here due to the people of Bengal. There is no need to discuss why no CM came here, but I am happy to be here. The contribution of Sri Aurobindo is unparalleled...State government is ready to do something for Sri Aurobindo; we want to send the proposal to Dr. Saumitra Mohan, Secretary for the Information and Cultural Affairs Department of the Government of West Bengal."

https://x.com/i/status/2088605448517890233

Sarkar entered academia when modern Indian history was still largely framed through the binary of colonial oppression versus Indian resistance. From his first major work, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, he demonstrated how ordinary people could be both hierarchical and democratic, communal and nationalist. This commitment to history from below found its most eloquent expression in Modern India, the textbook that helped make him one of the founding figures of Subaltern Studies. Sarkar would eventually distance himself from the group as it increasingly turned towards cultural theory. The historian, he believed, had to take the challenge of communalism head-on.

https://indianexpress.com/agency/editorial/

August 15, 2026, is Sri Aurobindo’s 154th birthday. It is also the 79th birthday of the modern Indian state. To me, they represent a profound link in the nation’s destiny with one of the greatest exponents of the Veda the modern world has seen. For it was Sri Aurobindo who brought our attention to the spiritual significance of the Veda and how it was the foundation of the entire India culture, civilisation, literatures, arts, darshanas, languages and sciences. As we stare at the increasing takeover of our lives by technology, AI, & the singularity of technology, we would do well to remember the singularity of the spirit that Sri Aurobindo proposed as an alternative to the mechanisation of humanity By: @PariksithSingh

firstpost.com/opinion/india-…

https://x.com/i/status/2088417781863858635

Want to know more about this quote? On Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, dive deeper into his provocative vision of human evolution, consciousness, and transformation through Vedic wisdom with @PariksithSingh and @MakrandParanspe  youtu.be/d5T8Hcyztdw?si…  @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/i/status/2088606632368648269

The Vedas aren’t dusty relics—they’re a message sent across time, lovingly preserved for generations who believed someone would need this wisdom. Could that someone be you? Discover📖@VedaforGenZ by @PariksithSingh. Buy now. amazon.in/Veda-Gen-Z-Par… @AmazingVedas @MakrandParanspe

https://x.com/i/status/2088326033569182057

Vedic Sensitivity 

It took me a long while to realize that the sensitivity of the Vedic world was different from modern humanity 

How? Notice how aware they were of sound and its nuances. How they were awake to every unit of language and word music! How they responded and used sound as a mode for transmitting power and knowledge

We have perhaps lost that ‘auditory access’ to a universe of pure sound. We are more visual perhaps although the Vedic sensibility is visually very advanced and refined too

One very important shift that the Veda brought in me was an appreciation of the mantrik vibration and its immense ability to transform us. This may be why we need to cleanse our senses with its reverberation 

https://x.com/i/status/2088332996206108719

Vedic Nirukta

Let us look at this dhatu ash- अश्

What do you feel when you say it? To me, an open sound of a- अ is followed by a sibilant श् which closes the tongue to where it nearly touches the palate

The open followed by closure. The soft followed by strong. The gentle followed by harsh. The slow followed by speed

This gives a sense or bhaava of a gentle opening suddenly rushed into force and intensity. Hope that makes sense. This is why the ash- dhatu signifies striking, speeding, force, energy, swallowing etc

And we can see this guna in the words we see in the Veda. Words such as ashva, ashu, ashvin, ashri etc Each signifies speed, force, power 

In RV 1.4.7 the device of using ashu twice is brilliant because it takes this quality of ash- and multiplies it by using it in succession in the word एमाशुमाशवे 

Hope you can appreciate the pulsatile movement created by this sandhi and see the exquisite detail of sound in these verses 

https://x.com/i/status/2088330421222150480

If you agree with this understanding of ash- dhatu based on the Guna of its seed sounds, then it becomes clear why meaning comes after the nature or quality of the sound in Sanskrit

That is how the word ashva can mean both the horse and prana because both are swift, energetic, strong and intense

This is the reason we should not fixate on the meaning of Vedic words first but the sensation and feel of the sound. That is how Agni has multiple meanings and so does the word gau and so many other Vedic words. This is the unique quality of Vedic also called Polysemy that the Rishis exploited to the fullest to create a multidimensional world of experience and meaning 

https://x.com/i/status/2088429985392439713

[PDF] Politics of Control in Orwell's 1984: Education, Surveillance, and Authoritarian Legitimacy in South Asia

FH Meem, NN Afra, MA Maruf - 2025
… Comparable trends appear in India, where textbook revisions under Hindutva
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… Hindutva may not yet have transformed political common sense so profoundly as
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MODERN HISTORY

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India: Bots, Ballots, and Bullets

T Singh - Digital Psychological Warfare: Weaponisation of Digital …, 2026
This chapter examines India’s digital political landscape, focusing on the
psychological use of bots, misinformation, and polarising narratives during elections.
It analyses how digital platforms are used to amplify partisan content, suppress …
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Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Religions aim at surrender, control, or adherence

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika..one of the best books on Hatha Yoga, and what it means and implies. It is not about performing a few asanas, but an entire way of life. The text is dated between the 6th and 12th centuries, composed by Svatmarama. This version has an extensive commentary.

https://x.com/i/status/2087057543835328574

Kiran Bedi (Former Lt Gen of Puducherry): "[An Indian] woman not only leaves her parental home, but is also expected to treat her in-laws like her parents, which is not only absurd but also impractical." via @NDTVLifestyle 

ndtv.com/lifestyle/here… https://x.com/i/status/2087112799734677994 

The tragedy of personality cults is that they encourage us to outsource our judgment and to mistake admiration for patriotism. The true measure of a republic is not whether it can produce extraordinary leaders. It is whether it can renew itself without becoming dependent on them. Former Ambassador @NMenonRao writes about how personality cult derails democracy. A relevant piece contemporary times

https://x.com/i/status/2087019911868727789

Don't believe the charade that @narendramodi and @AmitShah are enacting with the help of @RSSorg chief Bhagwat, writes @mkvenu1. Each of these three gentlemen is as much to blame as the other for the mess that has been created in India's education system – and for the brutal crackdown on young Indians protesting the government's failure to run something so basic as a proper examination system. 

thewire.in/politics/naren… https://x.com/i/status/2086808531148435655

In today’s Idea, the social psychologist John Drury challenges the widely held assumption that crowds encourage ‘mob mentality’, drawing on a range of research conducted in real-life contexts from football crowds to riots https://bsky.app/profile/psyche.co/post/3mssezi2sye2s

The advent of reading “altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of,” @RoseHorowitch argues—and the decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude:

https://x.com/i/status/2087135734750749069

I explore this idea that all religions teach love in detail in my book 'Spider-Man Called God.' No religion in the world primarily speaks of love or compassion. Depending on the religion, their aim is surrender, control, or adherence... 

The roots of Hitler's efforts to exterminate the Jews in World War II lie in Christianity. Hitler himself has explained this. My book explains, with book citations, how Martin Luther—the founder of Protestantism—wrote a book against the Jews that became Hitler's inspiration.

If we must give credit to Christianity for education and hospitals, then to whom should we give credit for the 14 centuries of genocides, cruelties, and cultural erasures?

So, if you want to be compassionate, be loving, go ahead and be that way. But don't rush to hand out credit for it to any religion. Our compassion, love, humanism, and respect for human rights—all of it stems from the influence of modern thought. Not from the teachings of any ancient religion. - Sridhar Subramaniam| Spider-Man Called God | Sridhar Subramaniam | Article | Yaavarum Publishers | 90424  61472 |

https://x.com/i/status/2087065039949979860

This collection of essays by @_YogendraYadav and published by @PrakashanSetu, “forces us to confront the foundational questions: what does it mean to be an Indian? Can democracy survive without the moral glue of fraternity? But the book, sadly, while raising this important question, finds shelter in easy simplifications.” @Apoorvanand__ writes

theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/h…https://x.com/i/status/2087039507568959512

Dhyana is participation, not Quietism

https://x.com/i/status/2087000838464225624

Rammohun Roy the so called Sati reformer, hated the fact that his widowed mother Tarini Devi was a devout Hindu who contributed money for "idol worship" in Pujas. When he refused to pay his share from the family's land for contributions to Hindu ceremonies, his mother filed a case through his nephew, which Rammohun easily won due to his links with the British administrators. After winning the case against his mother, Rammohun took over all the property and kicked her out on the streets. His mother had to seek refuge in the temple of Jagannath Puri and died there in wretched conditions in 1822. When Roy's sister in law, Durga Devi also filed a case to recover back some money from family properties - Rammohun again ensured that his influence helped him win the case. He then forced his widowed sister-in-law out on the streets.

This is the man who is touted as the savior of widows - but himself ensured that the two widows in his own family were thrown out on the streets and forced to live in wretched poverty after taking over all their property - all in the name of his hatred against "idol worship".

https://x.com/i/status/2056305491387760933

Radar

Central planning and Social justice - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Garry Jacobs - Finding One's Path By Allowing the Divine to Find Us 10:22 Jacobs is author of two books on business manag...
Is The Life Divine a tissue of lies? - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra The Life Divine Reconsidered: A Skeptical Review of Sri Aurobindo's Magnum Opus, Frank Visser / ChatGPT 7 hours ago — Fe...
Esoteric aspects should be restricted to personal consumption - As Founder of Savitri Era Religion (2006), I take a different line in many respects which need to be understood clearly. Most people have not read The M...
Becoming a warrior of light - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra The Life Divine Reconsidered: A Skeptical Review of Sri Aurobindo's Magnum Opus, Frank Visser / ChatGPT 7 hours ago — Fe...
The entire Veda is a massive spiritual riddle - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra ઐતિહાસિક એમએસ યુનિવર્સિટીના ડોમ નું રીસ્ટોરેશનનું કામ પૂર્ણ થયું #Sparktodaynews​ # ... 1:47 Greetings, you are watching...
The Divine is the one thing to be followed after - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra A Rare Historical Letter & Autograph of Dr. Krishna Dhun Ghose | Sri Aurobindo's Father 8:43 | Sri Aurobindo's Father In...
Quit India movement, American Revolution, and Vedic insights - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Vedic Kaavya: Rig Veda 1.4.10 यो रा॒यो॒३॒॑ऽवनि॑र्म॒हान्त्सु॑पा॒रः सु॑न्व॒तः सखा॑ । तस्मा॒ इन्द्रा॑य गायत ॥ This is ano...
A body can hold higher consciousness - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Discovered the works of M M Sankhdher while going through the papers of Hayek and started reading his work ‘Reflections...
The Life Divine raises profound problems for philosophy and science - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra I love how some otherwise intelligent people use objectivity and engagement as a trope to periodically endorse Mohan B...
The Life Divine lacks the burden of proof - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Sri Aurobindo to Dilip read by Narad - Book 1, Part 6 13:12 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip read by Narad - Book 1, Part 6. @Sri-A...
Nature is conscious, Body corrects itself - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Lecture series on Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga (by Ranganath), pp - 480-482 42:28 Lecture series on Sri Aurobindo's... 
Taking possession of our whole self - Is Shintō the Japanese Localisation of Sindhu (Hindu) Civilisation? Shintō is widely regarded as Japan's indigenous religion, distinct from the religiou...
Sri Aurobindo gave humanity a new spiritual ideal - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Sri Aurobindo Yoga Peeth | Khandwa | A Spiritual Journey in Madhya Pradesh 6:58 Welcome to Sri Aurobindo Society, Khandwa...
Belief remains the mainstay of a religious man - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Vedic Meditation साक्षी or witness The witness is one of the greatest discoveries of the Vedic Vedantic way of life ...
Abhijeet Dipke and Prashant Kishor - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Can India's Gen Z Change Politics Like US Students Did? - Frontline - The Hindu 4 hours ago — In some respects, when Gen...
Varied experiences and myriad lessons - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra I used to use a text-only format which seems to be no longer possible. Being bombarded by a continuous stream of visual...
Journey of Odia music - Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra Recorded songs from the first decade of the 20th century (1900–1910) are extremely rare, but archival efforts have iden...

Awakening 'the Indian genius': The epistemic aims of Indian liberatory education

D Agrawal - Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2025
I argue that philosophers Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo
Ghose were ultimately concerned with epistemic reforms in education, rather than
ideological reforms. In opposition to the narrow epistemic framework of British … Similar to Tagore and Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo was trying to devise a national system of education that was uniquely suited to some essence of the Indian... … His entire philosophy of Integral Yoga was centred around bringing about a higher evolutionary consciousness through intentional living and education. This
evolved consciousness would be the ultimate force for good—without systems or … personality. In fact, Ghose’s early writings were deeply concerned with uncovering …

[PDF] Effectiveness of 'Toy-based Pedagogy'Towards the Inculcation of Freedom Values Of India in Regional Context for Secondary Level Classes

S Sujatha, S Janaki - Naveen International Journal of Multidisciplinary …, 2025
… Sri Aurobindo believed that learning happens in a free and creative environment
that aids and allows the development of a child’s interest, creativity, and mental,
moral as well as aesthetic sense. J. Krishnamurthy was of the view that since the …

[PDF] Relevance of the ancient Indian curriculum and pedagogic approaches in the present context with reference to NEP 2020

N Yadav - Eureka: Journal of Educational Research, 2025
… Thus, for many years, education has been an integral part of our lives. However,
historical analysis indicates that the goals, delivery methods, … and collaboration,
and embrace practices such as yoga and Ayurveda, ultimately aiming to transform …

Aspects of the Commercialisation of Religion and Religious Practices

D Iliško - Business, Economy and Commerce in the Name of …
… The confessional teaching of religion has been abolished and changed to more
inclusive approaches that view religion as an integral part of the … Another example
is the practice of Yoga, as introduced by the local coaches who got their training in …

Commercialization of Religions Worldwide: A Look Through Ninian Smart's Seven Dimensions of Religion

T Martikainen, M Moberg - Business, Economy and Commerce in the Name of …, 2025
… For example, internationally spread meditation practices such as mindfulness and
yoga have increasingly made their ways into traditional Christian settings, thus
significantly altering not only the actual ‘doing’ of religion but peoples embodied and …

[PDF] The Science & Art of Living: A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga and Holistic Life Style

RK Gupta
… Traditional Indian practices, including yoga, pranayama (breathing exercises),
and vegetarian diets, have been integral to holistic health approaches for centuries.
Recent research has explored the physiological and psychological effects of these …

The Path towards a Unified Health System in India: From Fragmentation to Integration: A Narrative Review.

S BOBADE, S ASUTKAR - Journal of Clinical & Diagnostic Research, 2024
… Yoga is a form of system of medicine that involves non pharmacological lifestyle
interventions, including asanas (physical postures), … Ancient traditional system of
medicine such as Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy have been integral to …

Exploring Sri Aurobindo's vision on educational leadership and their suggested practices

SK Lalotra, AK Mantry - International Journal of Leadership in Education, 2025
… The Teacher of the Integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the teacher’s
method within us. He will lead the … of an integral approach to leadership in
educational institutions and diverse fields. This commentary invites readers to join …

Money, Marketing, and Religion: An Economics of Religion Perspective

N Bauer - Business, Economy and Commerce in the Name of …
… Money, or the meaning and handling of money, also has a symbolic function in
religious traditions and is an integral part of religious practices. The history of
religion knows numerous examples of this, for example, almsgiving (Grund, 2015b) …

[PDF] RELIGION AS A DIPLOMATIC TOOL IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A MULTIFACETED INFLUENCE

K Nagarjun
… Religion is an integral part of culture and a prime factor in structuring societies
and international relations. In today’s world, often branded “… on practices like yoga
and principles like environmentalism. Initiatives such as the International Day of …
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