Offstumped Community Portal

It’s that time of the year again. You might want to check where and how it all started or simply scan the awardees that made it to the 2008 list. Presenting the Most Loathsome People of India circa 2009. Truth be told, the folks who made it this year fiercely vied with each other in loathsomeness and except in very few cases, it was hard to award a rightful place to those who made to the list.

Another pain point was there were just too many contenders, each outclassing the other. To avoid the risk of expanding the list beyond managable proportions, I’ve restricted it to just 12. There was so much loathsomeness this year that lots of people ranked pretty much equally on all parameters of loathsomeness. …

The Slimes reports that

Thousands of people thronged a south Mumbai church on Monday to see water oozing out a cross and to collect what they believed was holy water, though church officials shied away from giving the occurrence any name.

What happens when a Westerner decides to write a book or make a movie on somebody belonging to the Dynasty? The outcome depends on what truth the said book or movie purports to reveal. If the truth even as much as hinges on the door of discomfort to the Dynasty, rest assured the book is never going to get written/published, or the movie is never going to be made/screened. So seems the case with Indian Summer.

The production of Hollywood movie Indian Summer has reportedly been put on hold and the reason is said to be the portrayal of the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy of India.

According to reports, India government officials have asked to scrutinise the script to review how the Nehru-Edwina affair …

The steady extermination, and/or conversion of Hindus in Pakistan has been a steady feature since 1947. On this side, we have exhibited characteristic apathy, in the same period. This news report is a continuation of the same status quo.

In the past four years, some 5,000 Hindus may have crossed over from Pakistan, never to return. It has not been easy abandoning their homes, sometimes even their families, but they say they had no choice: they had to flee the Taliban.

It started as a trickle in 2006, the year the Thar Express was flagged off. The weekly train starts from Karachi, enters India at Munabao, a border town in Barmer, and runs up to Jodhpur. In the first year, 392 Hindus crossed over. his grew to 880 in 2007. The next year, the number was 1,240, and this year

We have several specimens of people who call themselves Hindus:

Tearing-my-chest-Hindus: Firebrand Hindus whose commitment to, and faith in Hinduism is unquestionable but usually lack the intellectual rigour to defend attacks on Sanatana Dharma.

Intellectual Hindus: Scholarly types who are up for a good debate anytime, and are willing to defend Sanatana Dharma on the strength of their erudition.

Practising Hindus: May also be the scholarly types. These Hindus live Hinduism complete with all its rituals and injunctions. They may or not understand the meaning, rationale, or significance of the rituals they perform. Their commitment, too, is unquestionable.

Gross generalizations about a country, a people, and a culture are humourous when done in the lighter vein. In most other cases, they are appalling. If you wonder why Westerners/foreigners are so ill-educated about India, articles like this is the answer. The article and its byline both are courageous because of their absolutely misplaced confidence in the correctness of what follows. I mean, what worse generalization can you have than labelling the people of an entire country this way:

Why Indians don’t give back to society …Some characteristics unite Indians. The most visible is our opportunism

If you’re an avid observer of the steady dumbing down of the collective Indian consciousness, you’d have probably guessed what the piece boils down to: Hindu/India-bashing…

A few weeks ago, I made a hurried list that broadly categorized contemporary Hindus based on certain general parameters. Gurcharan Das of India Unbound fame adds to this list by slotting himself into a new category: Liberal Hindu. Much of what he says in that post is along familiar, “safe Hindu” lines but he does offer some positive difference from the mundane grist that we have come to expect from self-proclaimed liberals. For the familiar stuff, this assertion is a fairly reflective sample.

Hindu nationalists have appropriated my past and made it into a political statement of Hindutva.

This is a very clever cloak to hide behind: claim that you love your hoary Hindu “past” but blame the “Hindutva fanatics” for “appropriating it”– whatever that means. Even if you grant the possibility that “Hindutva fanatics” have politicized Hinduism …

Introduction

A pattern seems to have emerged over the past decade or so in the US. Each time any U.S-based Hindu organization(s) hosts a fairly well-attended event, alarm bells sound off from the expected quarters. These expected quarters wake up and emit a major stink about the–yawn–dreaded Hindu communalism / fascism /quest for revenge… The yarn is the same, only the hues are different. And so it is with this latest piece de disgrace (requires free registration to read) by Vijay Prashad, a well-known Hindu baiter, and rabid Marxism-retching machine stationed in the US. He is also a co-founder of a rather aptly named organization called FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists). Frankly, I’m not as charitable as Rajiv Malhotra who engaged him in a debate in Loutlook Outlook India in 2004. It’s pointless to debate with avowed Marxists becuase you already know …

It’s an attempt to cover up Government’s failures. Our dharmashastras prohibit hoarding of food, or acquiring material possessions, beyond the bare minimum as one of the qualities of an ideal Brahmin. The reason: The more you possess, the farther those possessions divert you from the path of self-study (swadhyaya), penance, and spiritual realisation.

A few thousand years later, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wore just a loin cloth to cover his modesty because he was appalled by the swarming millions of poor people in India. The third Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, forbade his family from using his official car for personal purposes, and his position to get jobs for his sons.

These are straightforward and everlasting examples of austerity. Cut to today. A few weeks ago, Minister for External Affairs….

The arguments against the setting up of a Sanskrit university in Karnataka are rooted in Marxist opposition to any effort to preserve and revive India’s cultural heritage

Ever since the Government announced the idea of forming a Sanskrit university in Karnataka, the forces of hell have been unleashed there. Normally, the two main Opposition parties who are always opposed to each other on every issue in the State are now united in their opposition to this proposal.

Sanskrit-bashing has been in vogue ever since it was institutionalised under the aegis of the Nehruvian secularist state. India’s first brown sahib wrote about Sanskrit in flowery English, but failed to grasp its fragrance. The result was the perpetuation of the missionary system f education that severed hundreds of thousands of Indians from their own roots.