Found this on The Acorn’s blog. Pretty interesting. The Acorn writes,

Like many a communist appartchik, Confucious is on his way to revival and rehabilitation. Still suspicious of organised religion, the Communists may be hoping old man Confucious can provide the salve the society so very much needs.

Which is welcome news. And I hope our eminences at the top do realize that it is good to mold the destiny of a People by moving backward instilling in them a sense of pride in their roots instead of blindly aping this or that fashionable Theory of the Day. A person finds his/her identity primarily by way of genealogy, the proverbial family tree and by extension, in his/her own culture. When some people decide that it is not a good thing for him to do, problems start creeping in. The person is denied the crutch vital identity-support; not all are strong enough to shape their own identities/leave their own towering marks in the…well, sands of time.

To the Chinese it still is Confucius and to a large majority of us Indians, it has been the Vedas, and the legendary Indian mythology. This news stands as testimony to the timeless truths that Confucius taught despite the bloody Communist revolution, the ideology that seeks to wipe out the past physically and build a “new world order.” That Confucius has survived also proves that Communism hasn’t been the spectacular success it was expected to be in China; this and the fact that China has become a market economy. The words, Confucius can provide the salve the society so very much needs are also significant. The question is why Confucius now? China already established a New World Order several decades ago where all workers have the say etc, etc. Why hasn’t it become the paradise everyone had hoped for? I know these aren’t new questions. My point is, you cannot reject the past in toto and build a world out of nothing. It is foolish, to say the least.

India, like China is one of mankind’s oldest civilisations, having to her credit several towering contributions. It is sad that while China is rightly going back to its roots to find solutions for its pressing problems–Confucianism for one, India lags behind here. Decades of Marxism and colonised ways of thinking have instilled in us a sense of shame rather than pride, about our roots.

I’ll leave you to dwell on this before signing off: a majority of, if not all protests against British rule were rooted in the Vedic/Hindu spiritual ethos: be it Dayananda Saraswati’s call of Back to the Vedas, or Tilak’s spiritual unification of Maharashtra using Ganesha as the unifying force (which continues till date), or Mahatma Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence and satyagraha. Despite this, why do we hesitate to take pride in our cultural/spiritual identity? Why do we quickly adopt labels of progressive/secular without fully understanding what they mean or whether they really apply in the Indian context?