Vikram’s Talking Points

This is my product of the year. I was looking for a good karma-repellent. The other products on the market just didn’t smell that good, or worse, exaggerated their claims.

Happy New Year

Navya Shastra has issued an apology, on behalf of the global community of Hindus, to India’s former untouchables.

Ah, it had been a while since I attended a "family party," that peculiar term Diaspora Indians use to describe their intra-tribal gatherings. For my parent’s generation that arrived in the 1960s, the cliques comprised Indians from all over the desh and some Pakistanis as well. Those were the days when seeing an Indian on the road actually got one excited. (Now the Diaspora has burgeoned enough that regions, castes, even sub-castes have their own "associations," which I predict will be obliterated once the children decide that arranged marriages are for those turkeys who can’t get any action on their own.)  

Everyone looks older. You glance nostalgically at your "favorite aunties" whose exquisitely painted toes you once spied on in the revelatory moments between sashaying sari-steps. You sit with the uncles who used to mock the Gods as they got sweaty sipping their Dewars. Now they’ve gotten all religious on you; some even encourage you to "study a little." (Oh uncles, if you only knew how intense I am about the whole dharma thing; I often wonder if I’m an old sanyasi trapped in a middle-aged body.) One uncle - a quondam cigarette wholesaler - zips daily to the Brooklyn Hare Krishna temple for morning puja, having found the flute-playing God after losing his savings in the tech bubble. He sings some Surdas too, and not at all badly. The Punjabi host uncle  tells you that he lucubrates daily over the Granth Sahib to "prove" the Sikh Gurus were really Hindu. Obsessive codger! When you politely doubt the thesis he reveals a two-volume set of the holy book and whispers like Yoda from dog-eared pages. Another uncle, Rolex ice coruscating on the wrist, translates for yours truly, but you couldn’t be bothered about all that just then.

All the "kids" (peculiar term for thirty-somethings) talk up their achievements and show off their cute little progeny. You remember the pairs that used to run off to do the naughty-naughty; now they mesh freely, spouses in arm, as if nothing ever happened. A few of them have gone astonishingly fat; some have a touch of grey in the beard; some still get flushed and tipsy on the first beer. The food, thankfully, is as good as ever; though you spoon one too many dahi vadas into the elegant plastic bowl. You lament about the ones that passed on, mostly old uncles to heart disease, but also one of the kids in a rikshaw accident. Strange, all that: life and its seasons; the karmic peculiarities that bring people into the world for a passing murmur; endings.

You look at your father who looks back at you and smiles. Yes, you resisted coming, cursed your mother for guilting you into it; but for a moment, laughing with old friends, dancing with your daughter in your arms, you cannot help but feeling happy.

In a significant judgement, the Orissa High Court rules that Dalits have a right to enter any Hindu temple:

“Every Hindu, irrespective of his caste, has a right to enter any Hindu temple which is open to other persons professing the same religion,” a division bench of Chief Justice Sujit Burman Roy and Justice M M Das observed.

Emancipatory, enlightened, epochal even - if this was the 18th century, yes? Ruling addresses concerns raised in Navya Shastra press release.

You Wrote from Los Angeles

"In the stores here, in hotels, across the streets,

Indians and curs are measured with the same yard-stick;

‘Niggers’ ‘Blacks’! This is the abuse they fling me

And deep in my heart a thousand scorpions sting me".

Reading all this, I felt so damn good!

Now you’ve had a taste of what we’ve suffered

In this country from generation to generation . . .

-Daya Pawar, 1974 

(Translated from Kannada by Graham Smith.)

In his Hindu column, diplomat-grandee and belles-lettrist Shashi Tharoor agrees that Malyalees are the most cosmopolitan of all Indians:

"Already in the 1920s Malayalis were exposed to Impressionism, Dadaism, Post-impressionism, Cubism etc. through the writings of Kesari Balakrishna Pillai," says Mr. Sreetilak. "A Malayali who reads at least one Malayalam newspaper and one good magazine is likely to have at least heard the names of Garcia Marquez, Saramago, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, all of whom are available in Malayalam translation." Most non-Malayali professors of literature, he avers, are ignorant beyond their Shakespeare and Eliot. Debatable, perhaps, but hard to disagree that Kerala is undoubtedly more intellectually cosmopolitan than any other Indian State taken as a whole …

Harvard’s Hindu students have founded this spiffy new journal. With the Pluralism Project’s Diana Eck as advisor, it’s bound to be a high-quality affair.. 

Swadharma - Harvard’s Hinduism Journal

Afro-centric site Amonhotep believes this Vietnamese Shiva (10th century, C.E.) is evidence of an African presence in Asia.

Meera Nanda, snarky atheist who blames everything that ails India -nationalism, illiteracy, obsurantism, Delhi belly- on Hinduism, is out with a new book that takes on religious fundamentalism in the United States and back in the desh. 

While I have not have the pleasure of reading it yet, she has apparently reworked Theraveda Buddhism into a "religion of reason" that will propel India’s superstitious hordes into an era of enlightenment. Good luck with that, Meera.

The Hindu : Book Review : In defence of secularism