Indian Philosophy
Dharma 101: A Critique
As promised to Yossarin, I hereby add, clarify, and (hope to) correct some items in Yossarin’s elucidation of Dharma. I’ve adopted his question-answer format because it offers a nice readymade template.
What is Dharma ?Dharma is about righteousness of actions. It is about righteousness which is universal and eternal i.e. it is invariant of […]
Dissecting Contextual Morality: Part 3
Read Part 1
After observing how AKR leaves us confounded with academic jargon and widely deviating from his original theme, I’ll continue the same examination a tad more. A commenter helpfully added some valuable information about AKR’s corruption of the ullurai concept.
The focus is slightly different in this case.
AKR presents a very clear understanding of a […]
Dissecting Contextual Morality: Part 2
I had concluded the previous post with a note on AKR’s understanding of Hindu ethics and traditional expositions on Dharma. He notes that
Each addition is really a subtraction from any universal law. There is not much left of an absolute or common (sadharana) dharma which the texts speak of, if at all, as a last […]
Dissecting Contextual Morality : Part 1
Preface
In an interesting article on Narendra Modi, TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan (link courtesy Nitin) concludes that contextual morality is the one magic explanation for all ills that have plagued India for more than 100 years. He says
…Narendra Modi is our own creation, of liberals, conservatives, fascists, communists and every other man jack of us. He is not […]
Observations on the Rama Setu Issue
A gentleman made an insightful observation on another forum I’m part of. While this observation is not new, it underscores what we all know: post-Independence Hindu society has failed to defend itself adequately. I had to make this post now because the Rama Sethu issue is relatively “alive” in public consciousness.
Koenraad Elst has made […]
Progenitor of a New Calendar
Great men are known for greater quirks. So it is with Karunanidhi–I leave his greatness to both your imagination and evaluation. A brief background before this.
In the Hindu tradition, one of the ways greatness is measured is by suffixing pravartaka (literally, converter, precedent-setter etc). Sages were honoured with titles like Gotra Pravartaka (givers of […]
Who Wrote This?
The Mohammadan conquest with its propagandist work and later the Christian missionary movement attempted to shake the stability of Hindu society and in an age deeply conscious of instability, authority naturally became the rock on which alone it seemed that social safety and ethical order could be reared. The Hindu, in face of the […]
On what the Mahabharata Really Says
An article (link courtesy the Acorn) by Nandini Sundar that tries to examine the Maoist menace by drawing guidance from the Mahabharata, gets the Mahabharata portion almost wholly wrong.
Being what it is, you can dive into the Mahabharata, and you’re certain to find in it whatever you want to prove. The best bit is […]
Freedom to Convert
The elections are over but the secular crowd never seems to tire of slamming Gujarat. This time, a social scientist of sorts holds the baton. He tries to prove that the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 is dangerous.
His bottomline: the Act misunderstands the “nature of faith and of religious quest.” He elaborates on what […]
Ramanujan’s Ramayana
The old suspect, A.K. Ramanujan emerges out of the woodwork on Outlook’s pages. The magazine’s leader to this article says:
…in a pocket of the Delhi University, right-wing student activists have taken exception to this essay by the celebrated scholar A.K. Ramanujan, on the many Ramayanas living across languages and narrative genres, each different but no […]