About Me
I am a linguist per se of sorts.
Pace some trends against it, i tend to think that all nonchomskyian streams of thought on natural language are but tiny brooks running toward the huge and deep ocean that Chomskyian cogitation on natural language is. It will take another couple of hundred years before that is superceded by another such ocean. That as you can see would be another tectonic shift. Till then we sit on his shoulders to be able to see ahead.
Am an incurable rationalist, a fanatical pluralist-democrat, a cosmocratic anarchist, a 'secular fundamentalist' as Mani Shankar Aiyar described himself, an incurably steadfast devotee of a deity called FEJ( see below for an elucidation of this acronym), who wants mankind to tread the path of scientific rationalism.
(The other day man has found a way to turn physical gestures into speech through technology , which only confirms the thesis that what happens inside man in the case of normal language also happens in the case of the speech-challenged, the sign-language people.) Only such a path can take man forward in any meaningful sense. Only such a path can bridge the gap between the poetry of the soul and the prose of reality. Man needs to rid himself of all crap that importunately surrounds him now. This crap includes superstitions. William Blake says superstition is honest conviction. Much though this is true, this doesn't justify harm-causing superstitions for example of flinging infants into boiling oil, human and animal sacrifice of any sort. Man needs to internalise rational beliefs, beliefs based on rational heft, and not led by associated identity categories like caste, religion, race and nation
Man needs to build a new narrative, a rich elegant and decent narrative, bereft of ontology-external variables like caste, religion, race, patriarchy, nation which we talk about in the following paragraphs.
That man is autonomous at a significant level of being is a foundational fact about human ontology. Such autonomy and what is called interbeing coexist. It is from this autonomy that man derives his ontological dignity and self-esteem.
This wholesome respectfully imperious autonomy is well expressed by the pronoun ham literally 'we' in Hindi for singular reference. One can say ham aate hai "I will come" where the subject ham refers to a singular individual. This doesn't happen in English and oeth European languages or even in Dravidian languages. I like it.
Man(u) and his ilk, like supremacists of all hues - caste supremacists, religion supremacists, race supremacists, colour supremacists, IQ supremacists, gender supremacists ... - need to realise this.
Supremacists of all hues in fact belong to the 'mafia of the human soul'
It is also important to note that the combative confrontationist one-upmanship that is on unseemly unsightly display especially in India is a function of these externally foisted identity narratives of Congress, BJP, Hindu, Muslim and so on.
No less importantly, this combative egoistic or solipsist confrontationist one-upmanship runs totally against the grain of scientific rationalist debate and discussion. It is scientific rationalism, coupled with spirituality and FEJ that should become the nose any human aggregate leads its people by. I would any day prefer this set up to a 'prosperous' society characterised by bullet trains, smart cities and what have you but where there are dadri lynchings, torture of women, torture of a Kanhaiyya and other human beings, attacks on churches, where men and women are considered lesser than cows and so on. In fact there is no rational reason to say that pigs, crows, ants, elephants or dogs or any other animal are lesser than cows, nightingales, parrots or peacocks.
The fact is that no animal has any value other than what it is programmed or prewired for by nature, if you understand what i mean.
i am for a ban on the slaughter of all animals or on none.
Once this is realised, it is easy to understand that, whether it is cultural nationalisms like Hindutva, or the hideously irrational ISIS, or triple talaaq (the other day a muslim husband e-mailed his talaaq), or barbaric practices like FGM, or breast-ironing, head-hunting, we need to understand things and either reject or accept them. In almost everything in the world there are right and wrong ways of looking at, and doing them.
The wrong ways are not only wrong but could be deeply dangerous and damaging.
i also think beauty and pleasure are not a sufficient yardstick of art so that there is no reason not to say a much hyped piece like The Death-rite in Kannada is NOT art. A necessary and sufficient yardstick is the deepening of man's sense of being, which, there is no reason to conclude, pieces like The Death-rite in Kannada do!
This deepening, i submit, is a function of rationalist cerebrality. Pieces like The Death-rite in Kannada are cerebrally indigent so that they effectively and efficiently lead the reader up the moral, social, epistemological and civilisational garden path.
They have no rational heft, and so no artistic heft either. It is surprising that man has gone along with such irrationalisms for so long.
Philosophies and isms like Existentialism, Radical Humanism, Gandhism etc can not be at variance with Rationalism. They could only be rational ways of looking at life and the world. Even here, it follows, everything may not be rational; Gandhism, for example, is not all rationally hunky-dory, although Gandhi, along with people like the Buddha, was a game-changer for mankind, one who partook of the eternal, one who defeated or transcended Time. We need to discard all irrationalisms, including those in Gandhism. About his views on industrialisation, on sex, race (he thought South African blacks were inferior to the 'aryan' indians in South Africa) and caste, one tends to ask,
'Why, Bapu?'
But i agree with the essential thrust of Meera Behn, the erstwhile Miss Slade's averment:
"Earlier there was Christ and then the Buddha, now we have a Gandhi."
It is clear that names like Hindu, Mussalman, Jew, Sikh, Shinto, Kshatriya, Kuruba, Devanga, Jesuit, Seventh day Adventist, Protestant etc are eminently superficial labels. The content of which these are labels is subject to the eternal human values of Freedom, Equality and Justice. In case the content is at serious odds with these values, these packages are not worth writing home about. In other words these values are paramount in any human group. Anything in any human group that is at variance with these values is a form of organised hypocrisy. Only and ONLY this axiological triad is holy. FEJ (Freedom, Equity, justice ) is the only trinity that one should guard, and see that everyone adores and does his liturgy, scriptures and temples on.
Only on this understructure can a structure of a beautiful human ethos be erected.
i am in other words saying quintessentially there is nothing like moral relativity. i can't think for the life of me a human ethos that supports slavery, for instance. Slavery as a socially sanctioned practice but about which people of the ethos are happy doesn't exist.
Women in Islam must have been feeling strongly about male polygamy and triple tallaq prevalent in Islam but it is only now they have made bold to express their visceral dissatisfaction with these. This has started happening about for instance FGM, Female Genital Mutilation, prevalent among the Bohras of India. i had en email recently from a bohra woman who said FGM is being done even now secretly.
These practices violate FEJ, a cardinal of human ontology, which is the same as violating human ontological dignity. That these practices have had social sanction MEANS virtually nothing, much like caste for instance in India has had social sanction.
A very tiny example of this we saw in the Bihar assembly elections held in 2015. Identity narratives like caste and religion were relegated to the background. People want, quite rightly, filling up of and evolution of ontology-narratives, pretty much like in the 2015 Lok Sabha elections. Salutes to the Bihar voter.
In fact there is nothing nonredundantly 'sacred' in any human group except as allowed and defined by this three-facer, it seems to me.
The point basically is in this bottomline axiological space of FEJ, the soundness of, and the power thereof, of ideas is the ONLY OPERATIVE thing. Anything including what is called 'sacred', over and above these, viz, FEJ and the soundness of ideas is, noticeably conspicuously, vacuous and superfluous. Man can jolly well be without these. Mysticism is okay. Spirituality is okay. But religion, caste, nationhood and constructs of their ilk are not quite okay because these are identity badges foisted on man from outside him.
The sanctum sanctorum of FEJ embedded in an overarching space of scientific rationalism (sourced through 'nous' , the metaphysical principle of reason/intellect) and spiritualism are all human societies are about, or should be about, it seems to me. Everything else is either extra, redundant or simply trash. i assume, like a liberal democracy, like a market-driven economy as opposed to a state-driven or licence-raj driven economy and so on, this also is an idea beyond challenge in the world of ideas.
Humanism is an integral part of this scientific rationalism: a persuasive example is the case of a colleague of mine who was rendered virtually cognitively disabled because of an accident. By letting him continue in the govt job with paid stay at home, the government only acted rationally, and not humanely, it seems to me. A separate case for humanism outside scientific rationalism is ill-founded.
Many of man’s identity-narratives are adventitious socially foisted categories and are outside his ontology-narrative:
caste, religion and nationhood.
These are outside his biological-narrative i.e they are not part of his DNA.
Identities like those driven by physical characteristics like race, skin-pigment, height, the shape of one’s nose/bum, IQ etc are indeed parts of his DNA, and YET are outside his ontology, simply because these are outside his choice/tether/control.
As Siddaramaiah, one of a few differently-wired Chief Ministers of Karnataka, an Indian state, said on 14.11.2013, "I didn't apply to be born into my sheep-rearing sheep-grazing caste."
This is true of all categories that are outside man's ontology broached above:
- One doesn't apply to be born a Christian, Muslim, Shinto, Hindu, Sikh, Jew etc.
- One doesn't apply to be born an Indian, Bangladeshi, Algerian, Thai etc.
- One doesn't apply to be born a moron, a genius etc, a dwarf, a black, a person with a great voice etc., a male, a female, an LGBTIQ etc.
One could be a HIMU (Hindu-muslim) because of a union between a Hindu and a Muslim. One could be a ChriHi( a cross between a Hindu and a Christian) or a MuChri( from a Muslim-Christain union), a SiShi( Sikh-Shinto) and so on. These are man-made and hence barriers between man and man, unlike spirituality and mysticism.
These are schismatic unlike spirituality and mysticism.
We also need to realise that this deity called FEJ feeds only on life-affirmers life-nourishers like honesty and truth. Human dignity and an exploitation-free ethos are the inevitable consequences of this trinity. Traditional Gods could very well be answering to man's psychological need for tension-free security. It is however clear that the wild-goose chase of such constructs hasn't inevitably resulted in an evil-free, exploitation-free human-dignity-upholding human cosmos.
FEJ will lead per force to such a heartening evil-free state of society. FEJ is the only path forward to mankind's joyous survival and sustained existence on planet earth. Only such a realisation could create the platform of synergy, cooperation and understanding, which is the only way man could make life livable and lovely on mother earth.
(Perhaps concomitantly, i am also against all tinsel frippery and hubristic triumphalism, the kind you see glaringly in the sports arena and elsewhere.)
Statements like
"Modern science is the manifestation of real religious spirit for it seeks to understand the truth by sincere effort" (Vivekananada) and
"Science has reached a point where certain basic mysteries cannot be solved without resorting to the one thing that spirituality has always specialised in: consciousness"(Deepak Chopra)
are not problematic to the pursuit of truth and reality through the route of science and rationalism.
Human consciousness and whatever you want to say about it and spirituality are not at odds with scientific rationalism.
The sanctum sanctorum of FEJ in an overarching space of scientific rationalism and spiritualism is the unavoidable foundation of man's unending and expanding future, it seems to me.
Man will otherwise spend a lot of time in destructive rage, avoidable hate, violence and fratricide. The massacre in Rwanda in 1994 in which 8 lakh people perished is but one example of the incurably formidable, but man-made and therefore eminently avoidable, divide between man and man. It s now ISIS which is doing this, unable to see that this barrier of religion between man and man is man-erected.
i am intrigued by man's unnaturally hostile disposition to fellow humans.
In a recent cricket match the opposing team needed a run for victory while the batsman needed a run for a century. Given that they couldn't possibly deny the rival team victory, imagine what the bowler does! The bowler bowls a deliberate no-ball to deny the batsman a hundred!
Another example of this streak is the changed equation between Meitheis and the other communities in Manipur, a northeastern state of the Indian republic. Meitheis, who are of the same Mongoloid extraction as Nagas and Kukis, were converted into Hinduism after they resisted Ahom kings, the social baggage of caste of Hinduism making its way. It is quirky, amusing, painful to see them practising untouchability with the other natives of Manipur.
There are a couple of things that we need to note about god, things that were true a thousand years ago, true now and will be true a thousand years hence.
a. There is NO cause-effect sequence denting God.
When someone materializes any concrete object in his palm, or brings about someone's death simply by willing it, the stance to take is that if and iff in such cases the cause-effect chain is genuine and real, then man doesn't know the nature of this chain.
Remember Marquis de Sade, who said,
There is no God. Nature sufficeth unto herself.
b. God has nothing to do with the affairs of the world.
The facilely tension-free and cowardly argument that it is NOT God's job to face evil and injustice in the human habitat and to do away with it, is all the more reason not to be unduly concerned with God.
In a Hindi film titled 'doo aankhee baaraa haath' two lines of a delectable lilt affirm,
"Since it is You(=God) who has given us birth,
it is You(=God) who has our sufferings to bear".
Absolutely spot on!
sambhavaaami yugee yugee, Sanskrit for " I (=God) will happen in every age (=every time evil surfaces in this world)", which are God Krishna's words to Arjuna in the Bhagavadgeeta, has never happened and will NEVER happen.
Bhagavadgeeta by the way is an admirable scientific handbook of life except for its interpolated parts of the origin of shudras and women, parts that need to be erased.
c. There has never been any proof - empirical or argumentative - that God is the author of this universe. In case He is the author, then b above applies viz that He is duty-bound to take care of all of His creation.
For example,
The indestructible, transcendental, living entity is called Brahmn
and His eternal nature is called Self. This supreme personality of
godhead, who is greater than all, is attained by unalloyed devotion.
He is all-pervading and everything is situated in Him.
(Bhagavad gita 8,3:22)
or
The absolute truth is indestructible. Being indestructible, it is
eternal. Being eternal it is self-existent, it is infinite. Being
infinite it is vast and deep, it is transcendent and intelligent.
It is because it is vast and deep that it contains all existence.
It is because it is infinite and eternal that it fulfills all existence.
In vastness and depth it is like the earrth. In transcendent intelligence
it is like heaven. Infinite and eternal, IT is the Infinite itself.
(Tsesze)
do not make sense if there is no rational argumentation that backs them. i don't know of any argumentation to back it.
Is one to take them just because they are written somewhere is the Q.
There is presumably a no-man's land, 'a sweet spot' between skepticism and credulity. That is, about God, for example, one is not convinced by existing evidence but still one stays open because maybe one hasn't understood the argumentation. One wonders if there is such a 'sweet spot' about the existence of God. There isn't, it feels to me.
There is no reason not to say that while the worship of God is fine, the existence of God, like the arts and literature, is a piece of cultural mythology : every argument about it is an opinion. It has never been a research finding or an irrefutably, intellectually rigorous discovery. But liturgy and worship are nonetheless man's psychological need.
Man has tended to make tradition, of which this notion called God is a part, a compulsive and repetitive cycle, which is incorrect.
"One who has nothing but tradition to brag about", says Thomas Overborn, "is like a potato. His best part is underground."
Thomas Overborn (Speaking Tree, Jan 14 2014),
In fact man must free himself of all compulsive opinions, likes and dislikes and habits. That clearly is the only inclusive and wholesome way forward. From here it is only a small step to the Jiddu Krishnamurthyian averment that a real thinker is free from the known. From here it is only another small but significant step to the position that one who has no desire sees without seeing, hears without hearing, knows without learning...
One must distinguish between the past and tradition. As Confucius said, one should study the past and divine the future. But tradition is not a live possibility: it is a dead tree, which might have grown a thousand flowers. Take some of these flowers, that still have live power, absorb them and move on.
It is no one's brief that one should take tradition lightly. It should be everyone's brief on the other hand that sound powerful thoughts, wherever they are from, should be welcome.
But to take a fussy, nonclinical, confrontationist, schismatic, hateful, i-score-points-over-you attitude is delightfully wrong.
It is heartening to realise that it is not JUST the Richard Dawkinses (the late) Christopher Hitchenses, Daniel Darrets, the Sam Harris's who recently demolished Deepak Chopra, or the Indian Charvakas who have come to realise this, but a whole lot of youngsters have begun to think seriously about this. Punit Malhotra, for example, has this to say:
...i hate God. and hate the fact people that believe
in God. i am a complete atheist. Till the age of
19, i used to believe in God and visit Siddhi vinayaka
temple., but then slowly started questionIng why
a small child should suffer from cancer and
hardened my belief that praying three times
a day was a waste of time. My parents would be
upset if i didn't sit in on a puja, so now i sit down,
but i don't believe in God...
(Punit Malhotra in TOI 13, nov 2013, Mysore Times: p 1 and 4)
He needn't have said 'i hate God' though! Why should one hate God? It is neither necessary nor desirable to say it, or to do it. The question doesn't in fact arise!
d. Conceding there is something like ESP, telepathy and clairvoyance, there is something wrong with the idea that only a few individuals CAN see and feel God. i remember at a wedding in Mysore, after some formalities the priest told the bride and the groom that "God has listened to your submission and one could go ahead and perform the solemnization rites now."
It doesn't take much intelligence to see that the priest was talking through his hat.
Who are we kidding?
As the redoubtable Hitchins said, rejection of religion may not end all of man's problems, but espousal of scientific rationalism will afford justice to all. There is also some talk that people like Richard Dawkins might know evolutionary science but not religion. There is nothing so arcane and secretive about religion that human intelligence can't get to know it.
Finally, what atheism really is may not be elucidated better than Jug suraiya (TOI April 7, 2014):
"...the long history of atheism in many widely different cultures, testifies to the most rigorous ethical philosophy, based not on the preexistence of any supernatural divine agency but on the interdependent web of compassion that joins all living beings together under an empty sky that promises neither paradise nor punishment. For atheists, there is no God-given heaven or hell. We create our own heaven or our own hell, not in the hereafter, but here on earth, in our lifetime, by the compassion we give our fellow-beings and which we receive in return, or which we withhold and which is withheld from us. In the atheist credo the only sacrament is compassion, the recognition that the individual life that we call our own is precious only in so far as we accord the same value to the life of all other beings, including beings who oppose our religious and political beliefs.
Atheists are the ultimate free thinkers..."
The only glitch that i can think of in the formidably elegant picture of scientific atheism is the emergence, in the transition between primates and hominids, of consciousness including free will and self-awareness ( and language ?) and ethics, all of which are internal to man. Are these also part of natural evolution?
Over to Richard Dawkins!?
There are three kinds of equation between man and God vis-a-vis the world:
a. God as the author of the universe, the uncaused cause, the self born creator.
b. God as man's skewed understanding of sensory data, the delusion.
c. God as an imagined construct, the illusion.
A definitive answer to the above Q about the origin of human consciousness will clinch one of the above three positions.
Evil social practices tend to be justified in terms of the Blakian idea that superstitions are 'honestly and deeply held convictions'. The bottomline it seems to me is to separate harmless, even if blind, beliefs from blatantly life-harming practices, like flinging babies into boiling oil and so on. The superstition of not driving on if a cat crosses your path is pretty harmless. Nadal's superstitious gesture of feeling his inner wear every time he serves in a Tennis match is delightfully harmless, innocuous. But human and animal sacrifices are not. And rolling half-naked on the leftover remains of a meal eaten by members of a certain caste as people do in India, is simply obnoxious, simply because of one of the three facets of our three-faced God, one of the three givens of human ontology, viz equality.
The irrational streak in man needs to be reined in before erasing it!
It is facile to characterise superstition as 'honest conviction' or faith as 'spiritualised imagination'. But it is absolutely necessary to mull the full range of their implications. For example none under the sun knows what happens to the other party in the process of the worship of gods. The nonsalutary implications of these characterisations should open our eyes.
As Richard Dawkins says, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”
Indians in particular will do well to follow what the arguably greatest human to spring from the Indian soil, the Buddha says,
a. You don't travel the path unless you become the path yourself
b. i don't believe in a destiny that falls on men however they act. but i do believe in a destiny that falls on men unless they act.
Some of us are now saying that there is no god, should be no religion, caste etc. and there is no soul, universal soul and stuff, but imagine the Buddha saying these things as long back as 300 B.C.
As for evil and capital punishment, the argument that the state has no right to take away the life of any individual, no matter what he/she has done doesn't wash in the face of the counterquestion of whether any individual has any right to violate the dignity of, rape, torture and kill any individual! There is absolutely no doubt that the evil-doer must pay some social and personal price for his misdeed. There is no rational reason for not saying the price should be his right to continue living on planet earth.
Nirad Chowdhury has reported that he found a bottle of champagne on his door steps one morning placed there by an admirer of his. We would like this to happen in every human group naturally, as a matter of course. FEJ will per force bring about such a state of affairs sooner or later. The ONLY way out is within. The only way forward is within.
What Arvind Kejrival of the AAP party in India is seeking to do is to get to substance bypassing form when form is bereft of any meaning, as in the case of Delhi police etc. People who characterise him as 'item girl' etc don't know what they are saying!
It is said AAP doesn't know anything about wealth-creation and that it should know how to handle grey as grey is a part of life.
This misses the point, it seems to me!
i spent the best part of my career at an institute called the Central Institute of Indian Languages situated at Mysore in the southern part of a country called India, superannuating as a Professor in Dec 2011.
PhD in Linguistics (Title: A Case Grammar of Kannada)
i have some more of my papers lined up for uploading.
i will upload them by and by.
The Bounds, and Life-breath and the Truth, my English translations of Kannada novels HADDU and APOOSHANA have been published by Partridge India.
Google them!
In fact man must free himself of all compulsive opinions, likes and dislikes and habits. That clearly is the only inclusive and wholesome way forward. From here it is only a small step to the Jiddu Krishnamurthyian averment that a real thinker is free from the known. From here it is only another small but significant step to the position that one who has no desire sees without seeing, hears without hearing, knows without learning...
One must distinguish between the past and tradition. As Confucius said, one should study the past and divine the future. But tradition is not a live possibility: it is a dead tree, which might have grown a thousand flowers. Take some of these flowers, that still have live power, absorb them and move on.
It is no one's brief that one should take tradition lightly. It should be everyone's brief on the other hand that sound powerful thoughts, wherever they are from, should be welcome.
But to take a fussy, nonclinical, confrontationist, schismatic, hateful, i-score-points-over-you attitude is delightfully wrong.
It is heartening to realise that it is not JUST the Richard Dawkinses (the late) Christopher Hitchenses, Daniel Darrets, or the Indian Charvakas who have come to realise this, but a whole lot of youngsters have begun to think seriously about this. Punit Malhotra, for example, has this to say:
...i hate God. and hate the fact people that believe
in God. i am a complete atheist. Till the age of
19, i used to believe in God and visit Siddhi vinayaka
temple., but then slowly started questionIng why
a small child should suffer from cancer and
hardened my belief that praying three times
a day was a waste of time. My parents would be
upset if i didn't sit in on a puja, so now i sit down,
but i don't believe in God...
(Punit Malhotra in TOI 13, nov 2013, Mysore Times: p 1 and 4)
He needn't have said 'i hate God' though! Why should one hate God? It is neither necessary nor desirable to say it, or to do it. The question doesn't in fact arise!
d. Conceding there is something like ESP, telepathy and clairvoyance, there is something wrong with the idea that only a few individuals CAN see and feel God. i remember at a wedding in Mysore, after some formalities the priest told the bride and the groom that "God has listened to your submission and one could go ahead and perform the solemnization rites now."
It doesn't take much intelligence to see that the priest was talking through his hat.
Who are we kidding?
As the redoubtable Hitchins said, rejection of religion may not end all of man's problems, but espousal of scientific rationalism will afford justice to all. There is also some talk that people like Richard Dawkins might know evolutionary science but not religion. There is nothing so arcane and secretive about religion that human intelligence can't get to know it.
Finally, what atheism really is may not be elucidated better than Jug suraiya (TOI April 7, 2014):
"...the long history of atheism in many widely different cultures, testifies to the most rigorous ethical philosophy, based not on the preexistence of any supernatural divine agency but on the interdependent web of compassion that joins all living beings together under an empty sky that promises neither paradise nor punishment. For atheists, there is no God-given heaven or hell. We create our own heaven or our own hell, not in the hereafter, but here on earth, in our lifetime, by the compassion we give our fellow-beings and which we receive in return, or which we withhold and which is withheld from us. In the atheist credo the only sacrament is compassion, the recognition that the individual life that we call our own is precious only in so far as we accord the same value to the life of all other beings, including beings who oppose our religious and political beliefs.
Atheists are the ultimate free thinkers..."
The only glitch that i can think of in the formidably elegant picture of scientific atheism is the emergence, in the transition between primates and hominids, of consciousness including free will and self-awareness ( and language ?) and ethics, all of which are internal to man. Are these also part of natural evolution? Over to Richard Dawkins!?
There are three kinds of equation between man and God vis-a-vis the world:
a. God as the author of the universe, the uncaused cause, the self born creator.
b. God as man's skewed understanding of sensory data, the delusion.
c. God as an imagined construct, the illusion.
A definitive answer to the above Q about the origin of human consciousness will clinch one of the above three positions.
Evil social practices tend to be justified in terms of the Blakian idea that superstitions are 'honestly and deeply held convictions'. The bottomline it seems to me is to separate harmless, even if blind, beliefs from blatantly life-harming practices, like flinging babies into boiling oil and so on. The superstition of not driving on if a cat crosses your path is pretty harmless. Nadal's superstitious gesture of feeling his inner wear every time he serves in a Tennis match is delightfully harmless, innocuous. But human and animal sacrifices under the guise of oblatory offerings are not. And rolling half-naked on the leftover remains of a meal eaten by members of a certain caste as people do in India, is simply obnoxious, simply because of one of the three facets of our three-faced God, one of the three givens of human ontology, viz equality.
The irrational streak in man needs to be reined in before erasing it!
It is facile to characterise superstition as 'honest conviction' or faith as 'spiritualised imagination'. But it is absolutely necessary to mull the full range of their implications. For example none under the sun knows what happens to the other party in the process of the worship of gods. The nonsalutary implications of these characterisations should open our eyes.
As Richard Dawkins says, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”
Indians in particular will do well to follow what the arguably greatest human to spring from the Indian soil, the Buddha says,
a. You don't travel the path unless you become the path yourself
b. i don't believe in a destiny that falls on men however they act. but i do believe in a destiny that falls on men unless they act.
As for evil and capital punishment, the argument that the state has no right to take away the life of any individual, no matter what he/she has done doesn't wash in the face of the counterquestion of whether any individual has any right to violate the dignity of, rape, torture and kill any individual! There is absolutely no doubt that the evil-doer must pay some social and personal price for his misdeed. There is no rational reason for not saying the price should be his right to continue living on planet earth.
Nirad Chowdhury has reported that he found a bottle of champagne on his door steps one morning placed there by an admirer of his. We would like this to happen in every human group naturally, as a matter of course. FEJ will per force bring about such a state of affairs sooner or later. The ONLY way out is within. The only way forward is within.
What Arvind Kejrival of the AAP party in India is seeking to do is to get to substance bypassing form when form is bereft of any meaning, as in the case of Delhi police etc. People who characterise him as 'item girl' etc don't know what they are saying!
It is said AAP doesn't know anything about wealth-creation and that it should know how to handle grey as grey is a part of life.
This misses the point, it seems to me!
i spent the best part of my career at an institute called the Central Institute of Indian Languages situated at Mysore in the southern part of a country called India, superannuating as a Professor in Dec 2011.
PhD in Linguistics (Title: A Case Grammar of Kannada)
i have some more of my papers lined up for uploading.
i will upload them by and by.