Ideological differences shouldn’t be turned into enmity

A Message for Astrologers from PURANIC COSMOLOGY UPDATED by Thea

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, Director, Aeon Centre of Cosmology, Tamil Nadu, India. 3 March 2012

There is the basic division of 12 (equal to 30 degrees of the circle), of 9 (= 40 degrees), 144 (= 2.5 degrees); or else 27 (= 13+ degrees) as in the famed Nakshatras. These magical divisions of the one wheel display the brilliance of the Vedic methodology. They have nothing to do with the arbitrary ‘zodiac’ of astronomers projected into the Beyond. To seek to impose this fiction on astrologers in India is to move definitively away from the Vedic poise in favour of a relativism that was absent when the fundaments of astrology arose in the consciousness of the Rishi…

Therefore I say to Shri Darshaney, rethink this issue. Begin your calendar and the year on Mahavishuva – the March Equinox. That is the beginning of the zodiacal ‘journey’ as it figures in the initiation documented in the Rig Veda.

Namvar Singh releases Tarun Vijay’s book at International Book Fair Fratricidal Hindus and casteism reasons for their decline in South Asia-Tarun Vi from Tarun Vijay

Tarun Vijay said that he is grateful to Dr Namvar singh who has shown the Indian path of mutual respect for other view points as ideological differences shouldn’t be turned into enmity and this event has proved the quintessential pluralistic spirit that defines India…

Tarun Vijay has argued in the book that Inspite of modern Hindus rising phenomenally in education and social status, their political decline in the entire south Asia is mainly due to the caste based discriminations prevailing in society and Hindu double standards and hypocricy…

Tarun Vijay has argued in this book, titled Man Ka Tulsi Chaura (sacred sapling in the soul's courtyard) published by Vani Prakashan, that the failure of Hindus in accelerating socio-religious reforms through clean and orderly temples, rivers and pilgrim centres, reflecting the spirit of the new Hindu, encouraging Sanskrit, institutionalising studies of the assaults on their soul from various internal and external factors and most importantly ensuring decision making positions to young leaders from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, has resulted in widening Hindu divisions from within…

Hindus must look inward, introspect and make corrections, Tarun Vijay says in the book. The hope for Hindus lies in the success of movements like Swaminarayan, Gayatri Pariwar, RSS and Mata Amritanandmayee, the book argues.

SHADES OF ORIENTALISM: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography Peter Heehs [published in History and Theory 42 (May 2003), pp.169-195 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656]

A serious investigation into the formation of cultural ideas in India would have to begin with the precolonial period, that is, the nearly three thousand years that precede the colonial era. Hundreds of traditions are preserved, to a greater or lesser degree, in texts written in a dozen or more languages.[90] Even a cursory study of the textual, historical and anthropological data makes it clear that religion [p.190>] played an important role in the lives of the people of the subcontinent as far back as we can go. It follows that an adequate theory of the construction of Indian cultural forms would have to include a critical reading of precolonial religious texts. At present, such theories are far more likely to be based on readings of eighteenth-century British scholarship – or nineteenth-century British fiction.

There are practical reasons for this. It is easier to get hold of and understand the novels of Jane Austen than the treatises of Abhinavagupta. Even scholars who read Sanskrit and other subcontinental languages tend to subject Indian discourse to European theory – just as their colonial predecessors did. This is due in part to the continuing fascination of Foucault, in part to the exigencies of contemporary politics. Liberals and leftists are so afraid ofHindutva and the culture of violence it has spawned that they brand any scholar who tries to examine Indian religion on its own terms as a fascist or fellow-traveler – a phenomenon Arvind Sharma calls “secular extremism” and Edwin Bryant “Indological McCarthyism.”[91]

HT HOME / BLOGS HOME > JUST FAITH / RELIGION / Sri Aurobindo, Heehs and the fragility of faith : Just Faith By Gautam Chikermane

Returning the issue that’s bigger and vaster and more precious than any single book or person, I find that as a society, India’s level of tolerance and toleration — something we push strongly for in other countries, the Bhagwad Gita being banned in Russia that I wrote about earlier, for instance — has fallen to depths unseen. We use whatever tools we can to curb free speech — threat, violence, politics, power, goons, police, state, non-state and this new development of abusing the due process of law that results in delaying books from being published.

Heartening News: Experimentation is Back in Odia Music from Nothing to Declare by shyamanuja

For at least three decades—60s to 80s—Akshaya Mohanty stood for all that was new in Odia music... His music combined the nativeness of Odissa in all its forms—folk, classical, or the newly emerging urban culture of Odisha—with inspiration from across the world—in form, style, and content. While Harry Belafonte’s There’s a hole in the bucket  became a highly odia-ized Mathiare gote kana, Bachchan’s poem Laao laao piya nadiya se son machhari became Dhibara re anide anide mote suna Ilishi. In some others, he used khanti (pure) Odia content to try new forms.