Author: murali

If you have done any translation beyond high school compositions, you would have noticed ; it doesn’t need any profound word to confound you.

A simple usage of ‘dei’ in Tamil to address one is virtually untranslatable into English. Can’t be dude, hai, or hey..

A ‘dei’ in Tamil may indicates closeness, age of the addressee and the addresser, the mood, place , context and other things. Can any one English word convey all this ? Even a paragraph in English would not do justice.

If that be so, how have we accepted existing English words to translate Indic words like Dharma, devata, paramatma, Pooja, sampradaya, shastra and so on?

Bad translation in fiction is okay. These horrifying translations are used in our law books and constitution to interpret how I as a ‘hindoo’ live and how I may be ‘reformed’ to suit the global culture (meaning White Christian perception). Sadly , it is done by the mentally colonized ‘hindoos’.

Let’s take the word Dharma.

Indic civilization never believed in one right way to live.

Swami Vivekananda said

The proof of one religion depends on the proof of all the rest. It would be most unnatural to have only one way to Truth.

So we have the word Dharma broadly meaning duty, to manifest as Swadharma, rajdharma or varnashrama Dharma where varna can mean social divisions or stage of life. Whatever be , it differs from person to person and for the same person it changes with the stage of life and position in the society. What is an absolutely necessary ritual for a householder is meaningless if and when he reaches the stage of sanyasi.

(To get a perspective, compare this with a  Religious practice of a muslim. Can he ever outgrow the stage of doing namaz five times a day? )

The Europeans have something  they term as religion and denomination. Indic Civilization has no equivalent ideas.

Once you force Dharma to mean a religion, the entire understanding changes.
It become rigid with a need for a book, a place of worship  and some inviolable rituals that would be termed as Essential Religious Practices (ERP).

Call it by any name ,What difference does it make ?

Unfortunately, it makes a world of a difference.

As per Articles 25 and 26, a citizen has rights to practice and propagate his region, but he has no right to pursue a way of life.  Recently we have seen that the hizab protests have erupted to assert their right to practice their religion.

A practicing Muslim can demand his rights under these articles to wear hizab, take out a procession, occupy a public place for namaz, running a school the way he wants, demand for halal food ; and the list is endless.

Hindus can exercise any of their basic rights , not as hindus but as  common citizens,  only if they organize themselves into a religious group. For example if a small group of 20-30 people want to gather at a riverside for performing pind daan , they need to prove in the Court that the practice is essential for them.

Denomination is a word that basically relates to a christian sect, to indicate one of the 45000 sects globally; yes , people, there is no typo or any extra zero.

Followers of Jesus span the globe. But the global body of more than 2 billion Christians is separated into thousands of denominations. Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Apostolic, Methodist — the list goes on. Estimations show there are more than 200 Christian denominations in the U.S. and a staggering 45,000 globally, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

When two Christians talk about their faith the question that invariably pops up is “which church do you go to ?”

So to exercise a right to perform a ritual one needs to prove he follows a religion and then belongs to a denomination as understood by White Christians. Then you have to prove that all people who belong to a certain denomination need to practice such a ritual.

This could not be done in the case of Sabarimalai issue as Ayyappa followers are not a denomination and even if they are, not all temples of ‘Deity Ayyappa’ are same .

Hare Krishna !

Just bad translation of words resulting in gross miscarriage of justice. Today we ourselves are thinking in a language that misrepresents our identity and our way of life.

That’s how an entire civilization has been lost in Translation.

As I had mentioned earlier, reading J Sai Deepak has been a very pleasant surprise. There are many issues one is aware of and there are viewpoints one strongly believes in. Yet it is difficult to express them in speech or writing.  When you hear these views precisely  articulated by someone , well, you are caught ; hook , line and sinker.

I don’t claim what I write to be original at all. India That is Bharat is a difficult book to read. May be because it is written by a Mechanical Engineer turned Lawyer, some of the pages just read like equations in Integral Calculus.  But if you can understand  the functions and derivatives he talks about , you can see an unambiguous stream of logic analyzing and cutting through to separate the chaff from the grain smoothly and decisively.

I just pick some nuggets and try to express in a way a layman  would understand.

Let’s take Globalism vs Nationalism

I have heard this many times ;

” We are in an age of globalism . We are all global citizens , why should we be confined to a narrow vision of Nationalism. Nationalism can only lead to jingoism and  conflicts. There should be a border-less world”

Mostly , our Indian liberals talk on these lines only when proposing to settle Rohingyas all over the country , not when they themselves apply for a passport or a visa to US.

Some, who are more romantic about the idea, love quoting John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. A beautiful number really; listen to that to take a break from serious stuff.

The real question is two-fold;

firstly, Is the rest of the world on the same page ? Has US opened it’s borders to all without passport or visa?

Secondly, Are your own countrymen reconciled to the idea of being on their own for governance of the State, to include security, justice, education , health care and infra structure?

The first lesson we learnt in Physics was about measuring instruments ; Vernier Calipers , Screw gauge and spherometer ; Why ? Physics deals with matter and we need a system to measure objects of various shapes.

The Western Civilization , if you don’t consider it an oxymoron, has laid a lot of importance to quantifiable factors. Those that were  not measurable were bypassed as though they never existed. That’s why Psychology as a subject was discovered so late.

What’s all this to do with Sabarimalai Temple issue ? For understanding the issue we need the right instruments . Do we have that ?

We have a Constitution drawn up in the mould of Western Democracies. We have the lawyers , judges and sociologists and social activists schooled in the Western System of education in a foreign language.

And what are we studying ?

It is the Indic thought process on worship of Swami Iyyappa as a deity by one section of Hindus. Our instruments are simply too inadequate.

Can a colonized mind understand the subtle difference between Devata and Paramatma  and the concept of idol worship ?

An idol is just a stone while it’s being sculpted. Once it is complete, the eyes are opened. After the consecration takes place, He or She is considered a living being . We start the day with Venkatesa Suprabatham to wake up lord Venkateswara. Then He is bathed, dressed up , fed and at night he has to be put to sleep. When you hear Annamacharya’s   Jo Achudananda , even someone without an iota of knowledge of the language can make out it’s a lullaby. For hundreds of years Tiruppathi Balaji has been going to sleep listening to  this lullaby.

A westerner or western trained mind tries to find parallels. Dharma is translated to religion . Then he looks for denominations and he labels Iyappa worship as a denomination.  When no parallels exist, forced parallels are made.  How do you translate Kumbhabhishekham? 

Then the standardization starts .

In Indic scheme of things, temple is not just a place of worship for followers of a particular religion and particular denomination. A temple is the house of god, a place where He lives; wakes up, bathes, eats, sleeps and meets his Bhakts. When Krishna is worshiped as a child, he is offered butter and may be Kheer or complete bhog as practiced in a particular temple on a particular occasion.

In Sabarimala Iyyappa is consecrated as naishtika Brahmachari . There are two kinds of Brahmacharya ; upakurvana and naishtika. The former remains celibate till he completes his studies while the latter remains a life-long celibate. A naistika brahmachari avoids even visual contact with women between age of 10 to 50.

Is it possible or even necessary for  judiciary  to appreciate these sentiments. If the judiciary rules that the deity will not mind , are they deciding that based on some evidence?

As Sai Deepak says

There is no Country  in  the world including US that that allows Judiciary to sits in judgement over a religious practice using the lens of constitutional morality.

Coming to Ram janma Bhumi case, when 92 year old Sr Advocate Shri K Parasaran was asked by CJI to present his arguments while sitting on a chair.

Shri Parasaran replied that I have always presented my arguments while representing my clients , how can I do it sitting for Lord Ram. Does it make any sense to a colonized mind that the Advocate was speaking to defend the rights of Lord Ram?

We have had enough of the Western ideas of secularism, religion, denomination and so on.

We need to have a totally new look from Indic point of view.

A colonized mind struggles to differentiate between diversity and discrimination ; between equality and uniformity; between pluralism and standardization.  We don’t need Barkhas and Rihanas interpreting the practice of Sabarimalai as regressive and prejudice against menstruation to declare it as gender inequality. Absurd.

As Sai Deepak says in the language of Game of Thrones , Jon Snow knows nothing.

Started reading the book India That is Bharat by J Sai Deepak.

Normally I write about a book after reading it in full. But this is one book , the very idea of decolonization shakes you up. The book attempts to put in right perspective  some seemingly anomalous issues .

Bharat is such an ancient civilization that excelled and is still excelling  in every aspect of life ; be it poetry, philosophy, Science architecture and the idea of humanity to include not just homo sapiens but every living being.

One book like Thirukkural or one Architectural marvel like Brihadeeswara Temple ,Thanjavoor, both over 1000 years old, is enough to see that we are a highly evolved Civilization.

Yet, we have Indians and Indian origin foreigners decrying , trashing our culture , hating the very idea of Bharat or Hindus.

There is an unwritten new lexicon that says,

modern/rational/scientific/aesthetic/decent  = western

desi is a kind of universal antonym for anything desirable.

Why so ?

Ban on entry to many places in Indian attire is accepted in our country .But there is a huge outrage on any ban on entry to just Hindu temples  in a western dress . Why ?

Communists and Islamists and Christians are  at one  another’s throat all over the world but are so cosy with one another in India. How ?

Why is it that a dog lover ‘owning’ a Siberian husky in Chennai moving from AC to AC environment keeps a special stick to chase the street dogs?

Why is it that nobody finds it incongruous to have glass front building in cities with just two seasons ; hot and hotter?

Why is nobody finding it odd many Indian homes adopt  foreign breeds of dogs while the desis are relegated to streets ?

Why are Indic languages , so rich in poetry and culture no more the languages spoken at Indian homes except for communication with maids and drivers?

Why are we running after pizza and pasta when Europeans don’t take to idli or Roti ?

We not only imitate western culture but actually denounce our own.

This book is all about  ‘Decolonization‘

some excerpts from the book:

It was only a matter of time before the new convert to European culture and religion not only disowned his previous identity but also spewed venom against it because he associated his past and heritage with weakness, superstition and defeatism, thus completing the process of severing ties with his roots.

Colonial curriculum was often imported from either Britain or North America, and was designed to produce Africans who would always consider themselves inferior in their interactions with Europeans, and would take pride in serving the interests of the White man.

The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were ‘black Englishmen’. We were taught—and believed—that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.

To cut a long story short, colonial education annihilated a society’s belief in itself.

European coloniality was directly responsible for disrupting the sacred relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, the destruction of their faith, language, political and societal structures and knowledge—in short, their entire culture.

Given that Bharat was (and remains) the land of heathendom in the eyes of the Christian coloniser, it was axiomatic that false religion abounded and immorality prospered. This laid the foundations of the colonial stereotype that the indigenous idol-worshipping Hindu was ‘untrustworthy, immoral, corrupt and cowardly’ and compared poorly to the ‘unyielding Muslim’ who, though he rejected the gospel, was closer to the Christian worldview, being ‘of the book’.

The West believes in recording the ideas and events in writing. Thanks to that obsession with written records , we have the papal bull of 1493 that spells out the original aim of what is now called Colonization.

In 1493 CE, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull or decree, “Inter Caetera,” in which he authorized Spain and Portugal to colonize the Americas and its Native peoples as subjects.

It was literally a search and destroy mission of all indigenous cultures all over the world.

The whiteman’s effort , the effort of the Church is still operative . It is  still an ongoing process as the minds of indigenous people too have been colonized and we are busy whipping ourselves for all that our ancestors believed in.

These indigenous anti-Bharat people in Bharat are today identified as leftists wokes, liberals, seculars, feminists, converted and what not.

We have seen great Indians like Swami Vivekananda, Subramanya Bharathi, Rabindranath Tagore and so on who refused to be swayed by the West even while being open to all ideas.

In todays world Swami Vivekananda would just be dismissed as Sanghi; so would bharathiyaar be.  Tagore would be quoted selectively but an institution like Shantiniketan would still be called Sanghi.

Today anyone talking well of Indic Civilization is called a Sanghi.

These are some of the people today trying to break the shackle of  colonization of the mind.

J Sai Deepak, Dr Vikram Sampath, Dr Meenakshi Jain, Dr Anand Ranganathan at Arth a Cultural festival Feb 2022.

Today , they are termed as Right Wing , keeping with the idea of the West categorizing all people into Left and Right.

You know, as per Abrahamic faiths every man has the Angel and the Devil on  the shoulders guiding away from  or tempting a man to sin.

Note that here too the Angel is on the right 🙂

It’s a chequered board of nights and days
Where Destiny with men for pieces plays,
Hither and thither ,moves ,mates and slays
And one by one ,back in the closet lays.

—Rubiyat , by Omar Khayam, Translated by Fitzgerald.

It’s an amazing parelel between a game of chess and Life.

Opening is sedate, structured and provides the base for a good game.

The middle game is full of excitement, gambits, traps , pitfalls and innumerable options . Every such option exercised would have profound implications not just in the middle game but in the whole game .

In the end game, the board is clear, pieces are few and options are limitted. The King that had been well protected by the resources available is generally out in the open fighting by himself with limitted mobility .

Time is in plenty, moves may be slow but have to be precise. There is hardly any scope for gambits.

…and a well played game ends in victory with the promotion of pawns to queens to take over the fight.

What a story !

A story that spans across two centuries in time and two continents in space. A story of human greed and hope, of the incredible capacity for human beings to inflict cruelty on fellow humans.

No animal , however strong, enslaves another animal, same species or different. But we humans not only enslave animals, but also homo sapiens. Even today, the visible chains are not there but exploitation exists everywhere.

Coming to the book “home going” , it traces the lives of seven generations of two sisters born in the present African Republic of Ghana . One is enslaved and shipped to America and another is married to a slave trader but her descendants go back to their people , an Asante village.

The story meanders along two parallel lines one in Ghana and another in America. Both tracks run along the lives of  seven generations . The story ends where, a descendant of one line from Asante tribe of the eighth generation, Marjorie Agyekum , meets a descendant of the sister sold into slavery , Marcus Clifton. Of course , the characters themselves are not aware of their lineage as victors write history , not the vanquished ,least of all, slaves. 

Obviously it is not history but only fiction ,but a very probable story.  The  Cape Coast Castle and the dungeons were slaves were kept stacked like cargo still exists.

The narration is weaved around historical events like British-Asante wars and American Civil War. 

A history of slave trade as taken from Wikipaedia…

The large quantity of gold dust found in Ghana was what primarily attracted Europe, and many natives of Cape Coast used this to their advantage. In exchange for gold, mahogany, other locally produced goods, and enslaved captives, local Africans received clothing,  blankets, spices,  sugar, silk and many other items. The castle at Cape Coast was a market where these transactions took place.

At the time enslaved Africans were a valuable commodity in the Americas and elsewhere, and slaves were the main trade in Cape Coast. Due to this, many changes were made to Cape Coast Castle. One of the alterations was the addition of large underground dungeons that could hold as many as a thousand slaves awaiting export.

Many European nations flocked to Cape Coast in order to get a foothold in the slave trade.

The business was very competitive, which led to conflict and for this reason, the castle at Cape Coast changed hands many times during the course of its commercial history.

What we read as history does not touch  the trials and tribulations that natives world over went through , due to  the greed of the White-man. Where-ever they went, be it Asia, Africa , America or Australia , their industry and zeal for  exploration brought untold misery to the natives caught up in their adventurism. The European powers fought among themselves and also the local powers. Whatever, it is the simple innocent people who suffered ; after all, when elephants fight, it is the grass that gets crushed.

Long after slave trade was abolished the African Americans continue to suffer. The book brings out the problems faced by them in US leaving one wondering ,whether a slave was actually better off than a freeman who is still struggling with poverty, unemployment, drug menace and just plain racism that puts every black a suspect in the eyes of law.

In Akan region, the term for a white man was ‘Oburoni’ which according to the author translates to ‘wicked or cunning man’. Some tribes called him ‘the cunning dog’ ; a being that comes licking but ends up biting the hand that feeds.

It is Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel . But  considering the kind of research that has gone into it and the  style of narration , the story comes across as the work of a mature writer. The author is born in Ghana and raised in US. The character  ‘Marjori’ seems to be the narrator of the story. In all probability, her US counterpart Marcus is also based on some real person.

The novel does remind a reader of the Famous true story “The Roots” by Alex Haley.

The book leaves the reader pondering over many questions.

• • How can a human being be so cruel to fellow human beings?

• • How could the idea of buying and selling human being coexist with the much talked about Christian values? Even as slave trade flourished the Evangelists were busy saving souls. Ironically, today about 70% of people in Ghana are Christians.

• • Does ending of slavery meant ending of exploitation of one human being by another ? Even today the rich nations exploit the poor nations and within a country one section exploits the other.  Vast sections of the populations are still some kind of slaves without visible chains.

• • Lastly, would the world have been a better place today if only the white man had confined himself to the land mass of Europe?  Wherever you see irremediable problems today in any part of the world, you find the white man’s greed there; Arab-Israel issues, Rohingyas, South Africa, African Americans and so on.

You hear a lot about people being technologically challenged ,math challenged etc and sometimes it comes with an air of pride. But you hardly hear anyone saying they are ‘intellectually challenged’. But many people are blissfully  so .

While intelligence has been divided and subdivided into various categories. As per psychologists, there are 16 types of intelligence, like spacial Intelligence , inter-personal, intra-personal, kinaesthetic, musical  and so on, to cater for all kinds of people.  The numbers might grow so that nobody is left ‘challenged’ in that field.

Intellect is, by and large, defined as ,”the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters.” just the ability to analyse, dissect and understand.

What exactly does an intellect give you. Nothing. At least nothing useful. Intelligence is more than adequate to solve day to day problems without the added distraction of solving other problems on the sidelines, mainly to satisfy your ‘intellectual curiosity’.

As the saying goes, aam khane se matlab hai pata ginne men nahin  . The idea is to access the fruits not to count the leaves. It is even more futile to be doing an in-depth analysis on why a fruit or a tree is the way it is.

There is the story of Sultan of Multan , Virendra sehwag. After the marathon partnership of 410, only when he was back in the dressing room did Sehwag came to know that Rahul Dravid and he were just 3 runs short of a 50 year old record  .

This may not gel well with an ardent cricket fan with statistics on his fingertips and thayir sadam in his tiffin box. (read a chennai cricket fan) .
But then for Sehwag, ball was there to be hit and he did that exceptionally well without the distraction of statistics or post match / pre match analysis and the theories behind the arts of batting and bowling.

Intellect may still be useful for the society when someone like Adi Shankaracharya wrote commentaries on almost every work on philosophy available at his times. He provided a great insight with his razor sharp intellect. So did someone like Stephen Hawkins in the recent times.

But what exactly did they gain ? Intellectual satisfaction , may be.

An intellect requires constant supply of material to dissect, analyse, solve and when that is not available, the mind starts eating itself driving a person crazy.

People take to activities like cryptic crosswords, sudoku or chess to feed this monster. Then there can be pastimes like computer coding and puzzle solving.

But why can’t everyone be happy reading or just forwarding the daily trash on WhatsApp groups? To top it you have wonderful 24 x 7 programs on TV that people wrongly call an Idiot Box. It is an intelligent , kind , people friendly Box that saves your mind from eating itself .

Before the times of printing press, it was the debates that kept the ‘intellectuals ‘ occupied. The famous book of Plato , ‘The Utopia ‘ is in the form of questions and answers. Socrates spent his life teaching and preaching through his questions and answers till he was finally convicted of poisoning young minds .

After the invention of printing press, intellectuals got their regular fix from Books. They didn’t have to look for debaters , but could just occupy themselves in reading and writing. Newspapers, magazines and subject specific journals were ideal for mass dissemination of their precious thoughts and analysis.

Then came internet, the mother of all repositories of some useful but mostly useless information. It takes a lot of self convincing to accept that there was really no need to know everything or verify every information you come across. Life goes on and goes on well irrespective of whether you know the longitude and latitude of Timur-Leste . If you have read this far and if this line sends you googling , well, you are cursed with the intellectual curiosity that has already eaten up hours, days and may be years of your life.

May be that’s one reason to avoid the term ‘ intellectually challenged’ ; it could well be  termed ‘intellectually blessed.’