Fix the root of the problem…

One praises a terrorist and criticizes the nation for punishing him, another says that he will not rest till the country is divided. 

These are scenes we witnessed in the country’s premier educational institute, JNU, in New Delhi. One may wonder what makes them so rabidly anti national. What makes them detest our Heritage? The problem lies in our curriculum which seldom instills any values in the minds of the student. The reason why values like patriotism and nationalism are mocked at by some of the present day students is that the curriculum was designed by those who don’t subscribe to the concept of nation. Majority of our textbooks are written by leftist “intellectuals” who want to run down our country. This is an endeavour which is continuing right from the colonial days.  If the minds of children are filled with contempt towards Hinduism and India from childhood onwards, then how will they revere it when they grow up?

The intention of these curriculum designers is to wean the students away from the nationalistic fervour which  And the proven way to do that is foist a diabolical history on them. Nation has history and geography as two constituents in it. The Geography of a nation can be maintained intact only if real history of that nation is told to its subjects in entirety. The lessons that ought to be learnt from the History, the legacy to be revered and followed, the tradition and heritage which are to be fostered and promoted, can be instilled in the minds of the subjects only if it is told to them with a proper perspective. The Jews after their exodus from Egypt got scattered throughout the world. But they could regain their geography because of their knowledge about their History. It re ignited the fire, generation after generation to get their Holy land back, which fructified finally in 1948. Seeing such examples our adversaries are bent upon not only delinking our young generation from its heritage but also imposing a fabricated version of history on them. This is a sure and proven way to subvert a Nation’s sovereignty.

one would naturally have.

This subversive curriculum should be replaced by a nationalistic one. Only then can a holistic, harmonious, future be assured for our Nation. Many countries have the practice of compulsory induction of their citizens in Armed forces for a specific period. Such a program is also very much needed for a country like ours. Though because of the size of the population, implementing that may not be feasible, government can make enrolling in NCC and Scout mandatory for all the students in the schools. This will ensure that discipline and a sense of patriotism is instilled in the minds of the younger generation. These ought to be done expeditiously to stem the rot.

V.V.Balasubramanian

YB-ET

 

 

Mahishi on the Prowl…

Dream of a society where women are not allowed entry into places of worship. Imagine they are banished to keep their religious practices confined to their homes. Imagine they are taught that they serve God best by serving their religious husbands. Think of the God as formless and yet it is only Him not Her. Get snapped out of the dream and come to reality. There exists such a society that lives this dream. Not only in the middle-east, but it exists well within free and democratic India. Not only that it exists, it is very well protected by the constitution through the fundamental rights to practice one’s own religion.

Now start dreaming again. Dream of a society where women freely enter places of worship. Imagine some of the women sing in praise of deities and become saints themselves. Imagine they are not only taught religious practices, rather some of them become exponents in the field of inner exploration and teach the paths to other practitioners. Think of the God as formless, or having form. Think of the deity as Him or Her; if any of this is uncomfortable and doesn’t fit in your scheme of imagination, think of the deity as neither Him nor Her but as one having either genders or having none of them. Just for the charm of it, imagine that one of such a deity remains in the masculine form and the other masculine deity takes a feminine form for a short period. Extend your imagination and give them a child. Give him all the powers of both his parents and also give him a bell around his neck. Imagine a young lady waiting to avenge the slaying of his demonic brother, disillusioned and embodying all anger and negativity in her. Think of this young man by his sheer entry into the lady’s life transform her into a beautiful angelic woman. Having inspired by this brave man, think of the lady as falling in love with him and offering herself in marriage to him. Imagine this young man wanting to lead a celibate life instead and therefore turns down the offer. Give him the freedom to look for a place where women do not reach so that he can continue to remain in an undisturbed yogic state. Give the angel the patience and ability to wait for centuries till the time he completes his tapas and come back to marry her. While imagining all this, don’t forget that this deity has only chosen a place free of alluring disturbances for his meditation. In your imagination make a resolution not deny him that choice. While dreaming of all this, never forget that there are thousand other deities who has not taken such decisions. They all live happily with their consorts or sometimes away from them. They all have temples that are visited by men and women alike, while this strange young man with a bell around his neck is also a star, and only one of them, in some small corner of your imaginary universe. Get out from the dream startled and come back to reality. There exists such a society too, that lives this dream. It exists well within free and democratic India and nowhere else. Yet, unfortunately it is in the danger of being questioned and abandoned by the same constitution that promises fundamental rights to practice one’s own religion.

The Supreme Court of India recently questioned the age old practice of not entertaining women in menstruating age span within the Ayyappa temple premises at Sabarimala while hearing a public interest litigation filed by the Kerala unit of a lesser known NGO, Young Lawyers Association. The Honourable Supreme court, no doubt, has all the powers to question a social practice that may seem conflicting with the constitutional guarantees of equality and justice. While doing so, it would serve well by exercising equality of perception and judgement on all sections of the society; not by concentrating only on one section and that too, the least harmful. By the time this issue of Yuva Bharati is in the hands of the readers, in all likelihood, there would be a clear picture of the stance taken by the Court. Having made the point, let us confine to elaborating on a more pressing issue; the components that drive decision making in our country even after so many decades of freedom; the engine, piston and the fuel.

With continual and dismal trend of criticising, ridiculing and dismissing the time tested religious and cultural practices, irrespective of public sentiments or cultural validities, the engine that drives the country, appears to be something that the British carefully left behind as a forced gift for free India. This gift is essentially, a mindset that keeps on doubting about all practices that are native to this land as primitive and needing modernization. This mindset is an outcome from a factory of the modern education system. The production line in this factory, at one level has a framework for worldview. The produce goes through this framework and course corrections are made by filtering out any good regards for native value systems, its inherent diversities and pluralities. Thus the engine, namely the mindset is devoid of nativity and comes through as a well groomed and ready-to-fit into a monolithic western value system.

With continual and dismal trend of inconsistent secularism, the engine has a piston that keeps running back and forth during every cycle of elections and run up to elections. And that is appeasement politics. With every forward movement, the piston pushes favours to minority groups, thereby creating congenial electorate. With every backward movement, the piston disregards the majority to keep the engine running.

It is better to mention what the fuel is, without any decoration of expressions. The simple reason is because the fuel on which the engine runs is nothing but ‘ignorance’ – ignorance of the Hindus about their own religion, religious practices, scriptures and philosophies. It is because of this engine of enslaved mentality, the vehicle of free India doesn’t seem to move in the direction it ought to move. As darkness is nothing but absence of light, ignorance is not something which is true. It is merely the absence of knowledge. The absence of knowledge happens because it is convenient for the enslaved mind to remain in the comfort zone believing that all that is traditional is against modernity.

If it was not for the ignorance, the narrative about women not being entertained in the Sabaraimala temple would have been very different. It would have included a mention of a temple not very far from the holy hill, the Attukkal Bhagavati amman temple, where 4.5 million women gather for the Pongala festival. The line up of women who gather to cook prasadam in earthen pots, run several kilometres spanning half a dozen villages. If the argument was about the ‘weakness’ of Ayyappa’s ability to continue his meditation irrespective of who visits, the narrative would have included mention about women being allowed to visit thousands of other local Ayyappa temples anytime. If the argument was about the ‘primitiveness’ in considering women unclean during menstruation, the narrative would have included mention of another temple in the opposite end of the country, the Kamakhya temple at Guwahati, with the presiding deity being an embodiment of the sacredness in the process of menstruation.

A tradition can have answers for any number of doubts. But no tradition, however ripe and rich it may be, can have answers to motivated campaigns. The answer for such campaigns should not be searched in tradition under question but in the motivation of the campaigner. Any attempt to service the engine will not help. The vehicle will change course only when we change the engine, to that of National education, with a piston pumping Nationality running on the fuel of Knowledge. If plurality in India is still a reality, it is not because of what the constitution promises but because of what Hinduism dreams of. It is our duty to preserve the native practices if we intend to keep the dream of plurality real. 

A. Sudarshan
YB-ET

Marrying goodness with religion

It is impossible to express in limited words, the kind of physical and mental devastation that people of Chennai experienced due to the recent floods. It is equally impossible to express in limited words the kind of help that the affected received.  

Human brain has evolved in such a manner that when it is in stress, it yearns for social support and is soothed when it receives help. The natural extension of this evolution is that, it responds with compassion when it hears a cry for help.  Therefore, when Chennai was flooded with water, it was flooded with help too. The response was as organic as the calamity itself. 

The very basis of human civilization is built on this twin platform of ‘need’ and ‘response-to-the-need’. Our elders named this beautiful system as Dharma and the process of giving as Dana. A little child only keeps receiving all the time, be it food, material, care or love. As the child grows and become mature, she takes the role of the giver. In a Dharmic society the giver outnumbers the receiver. Those performing the act of Dana, in such a Dharmic society, consider the needy to be a child who needs to be taken care of. One cannot rest seeing the other suffer.  An effortless practice of this compassion transforms to something higher than that in spiritual life. For instance, a 70 year old renowned Tamil musician, Ilayaraja, who has scored recently for his 1000^th film; while being involved in relief operations, said, “We are in no position to help anyone. All we can do is help ourselves. How can one hand give to the other? When I help others, I feel I’m only helping myself”. This ‘giving’ is beyond ‘Dana’. This ‘consciousness’ is beyond ‘compassion’. It is ‘Samvedana’; experiencing the suffering of others as one’s own.  

Any rational person with a social life, would vouch, that, for the feeling of compassion to occur in oneself, there is no need to be religious or to adhere to a set of doctrines. For that matter, it is not even necessary to be a theist, furthermore a believer of a particular God. 

But for some reason, in our country, we have this unique habit of binding all human actions with religion. Trying to explore the reason why we do so, the answer may not be very difficult to arrive at. Swami Vivekananda points out that each Nation has got a personality much like each individual. He says every nation has a principal note around which every other note comes to form the harmony. In a lecture, he says, “In one Nation, political power is its vitality as in England, artistic life in another, and so on. In India, religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the whole music of National life; and if any Nation attempts to throw of its National vitality, the direction which has become its own through the transmission of centuries – that Nation dies if it succeeds in the attempt”.

Only time can answer whether Indians in the pre and post Independence times internalised this idea or not. But those who enslaved us must have seriously reconciled with the grand idea. “Reconciled”, is a purposefully thought out word here. Out of recognition and reconciliation of an enemy’s strength will arise a strategy to defeat the very same strength. Knowing very well, that the people of India, knowingly or unknowingly, marry all human actions with religion; the opposite camp made use of the trait to their advantage. They took our education in their hands. They set the tone for our religious discourse. The thus enslaved Indian mind fell in the trap. The result was quite amazing. Our own intelligentsia continued doing the same marriage, but with a little social-tailoring. The slavish Indian mentality would feel no good about any good deeds of the society while it would attribute all negative actions to our religions. Therefore, superstitions, caste and untouchability became part of our religion, so much so, that these words started defining any discourse on Hinduism.

A 21^st century free thinking Indian might be tempted here that this logic must have been applied to other societies as well, namely the Christian and Islamic. But the free thinking Indian mind would be intelligent enough to quickly come to terms, that too much cannot be expected from the enslaved Indian. The logical ends followed. The same slavish mentality would blatantly ignore any of their negative deeds while it would attribute all positive actions to their religions. Therefore, service and compassion became the exclusive characteristics of Christian missionaries. To cut a long story short, it took more than 50 long years for cinema in independent India, to depict that a non-Christian could ever run an orphanage. The startling statistics on the service activities of Hindu organisations that come to light year after year from the Hindu Spiritual and Service Fair organised in Chennai, is a proof of what was kept hidden in public discourses for so many years.

At this juncture, let it be made clear for the fear of reading it completely wrong. The dominant idea of this article is not to prove or disprove who serves and who doesn’t. No, not even to make a case for Hindus, who have been serving the needy even though it hasn’t been featured in popular public discourse. The case is for, and only for, pointing out a sick mentality prevailing in our country, particularly in Hindus and sometimes in others, about their inconsistency in attributing human actions to religion. During the time of Chennai floods, all around the mainstream and social media, photographs of Muslim brothers involved in relief operations spread faster than relief material. The very same set of people who would otherwise delink religion from terror (even though the perpetrators would swear on their religion for their actions), were hell-bent on praising overboard a section of volunteers reaching out for flood relief work. By evolution of Human nature, kindness and compassion, aren't they expected to be kind too? Weren’t they supposed to behave the way others did at the time of crisis, or for that matter the way they themselves did. Or were over-enthusiastic certifiers eager to grab the opportunity to attribute these humane actions to their religion? Let them decide for themselves once and for ever, if they were to attribute human behaviour to religion, they better do it for every other person too. And when they decide to marry the goodness with one's religion, they better do it for every other action too.

This is not an age when the tone for public discourse used to be set by mainstream media with vested interests. The social media encourages open debate and exposes double standards quicker than ever. Let us hear from the terrorist and not the enslaved Indian if it was his hatred towards humanity or religion that motivated his action. Let us hear it from the people rendering service and not the enslaved Indian if it was his religion or the underlying humanity that motivates him to serve. The free thinking modern Indian, would no doubt, do well enough to replace modern Indian discourse with original thinking devoid of enslavement and entrapment. Opportunities are ripe and this is the time to press the pedal.

A.    Sudarshan

YB-ET

Subjugation is what they want, not tolerance

The award wapsis, 'con star' echoing their fears and their wife's fears have all heated up a total non-issue into a hot headliner. Entire mainstream media is abuzz with discussions about the safety of minorities. Hindus with no media to vent their point of view have taken to social media.  The illogical, preposterous and the ridiculous allegations have been rightly rebutted in the social media. While countering these absurd allegations we should also try to find out the reasons for them at this juncture, especially when no big communal tension has erupted in the last sixteen months. Is it to derail the investments which are bound to come due to the initiatives taken by our Prime Minister, by projecting that this land is not safe enough for investments? Is the 'intolerance bogie' a creation of the Pseudo secular Intellectuals as they are not able to tolerate anything other than their ideology? Is it a ploy to veer the voters away especially during the assembly elections from the corruption free and development plank with which the ruling party has almost eclipsed a party which has ruled the country for six decades? Or is there something else which lies underneath the carpet which is too obvious for all of us to ignore?

Let us see some of the actions/decisions by this Government in the last one and a half year. Swacch Bharat programs, Make in India Initiatives, Jan Dhan Yojna schemes, Pahal Yojana scheme, Billions of dollars which are bound to come in as Investments due to the steps taken by Prime Minister are all not mere rhetorics. They are concrete action plans which have already started to materialize. But the signs of a Government which is not just focused on economic development but also keen on safeguarding the interests of the nation's cultural heritage came to fore through the cancellation of licenses of nearly 15000 NGos and announcing a 500 cr package to resettle the kashmiri Pundits. Choking the funds for the NGOs, many of which were actually indulging in nefarious and anti-national activities covertly was one main reason behind all these agitations. The '5star activists' are rattled as their funds are choked and not only that the government is also investigating about their erstwhile activities. The result is the rage which we see in the media. The Jihadis and the missionaries who are behind these NGOs are finding this new turf a difficult one to play on. They are not used to this kind of assertion. The Jihadis and Missionaries have all along toyed with a society which was lacking in self-esteem, confidence and courage. What they actually want and expect is subjugation and not assertion. Even after independence our country seldom showed this kind of assertion as it was ruled by people who were more like proxies to the colonial rulers.

This is a sign of a nation coming out of the shackles. If the rumblings are more, be assured that we are progressing in the right direction.

V.V.Balasubramanian
YB-ET

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