RMF Summary: Week of February 4-10, 2011

The first post on the Rajiv Malhotra Forum for his books 'Being Different' and 'Breaking India' appeared on February 4, 2011.

February 4 (All new threads)

express india article on launch

The original link below is dead.
http://expressbuzz.com/cities/chennai/hindus-feel-persecuted-dayananda-saraswath\i/244943.html
 However, I've found other sites that provide a gist of this article that contains a statement by Sri Dayananda Saraswati on the launch of Rajiv's previous book 'Breaking India'.

BI is available in India at Flipkart.com:
http://www.flipkart.com/breaking-india-rajiv-malhotra-arvindan-book-8191067374
It is also available at amazon now. The kindle edition sells $9.99 and is a steal, to be frank.

There were a couple of other comments on BI the same day:

Breaking India: the evangelical traps and gears

Breaking India: What China wants too.... To underscore how extremely topical the book "BreakingIndia" is, see below news article from Times Of India. Looks like the Chinese too... February 7 Ram Jethmalani's comment to me today Rajiv Malhotra: Today, Mr. Ram Jethmalani gave me the following comment with permission to quote him. It pertains to the central issue the book asks readers to ponder, namely: Who ought to be given minority privileges in India and by what criteria? Mr.Jethmalani said: "If a governing power outside India supports a local Indian minority, that minority ceases to be a minority because the reasons for which a minority attracts exceptional or sympathetic treatment disappears. The justification for special minority rights ceases." The book argues using numerous specific examples that many "minority" identities that are linguistic (e.g. Dravidian), socioeconomic (e.g. certain Dalits) or religion based (e.g. certain Christians) are in practice functioning as branch offices of foreign nexuses. February 7 Cho Ramaswamy's talk at book launch. Excerpts Cho Ramaswamy, a Tamil writer and journalist noted for his fiercely independent thinking, made the following remarks at the book launch event: "It is high time, that right thinking persons set right the history and the cultural thinking of the people of this country, particularly people from the south, because here much of the damage is being done. Fortunately, people who have been decrying Hinduism, who have been in the name of secularism, have been denigrating Hinduism, those people are exposing themselves now in a very big way... February 7 Talk by Gurumurthy at Chennai launch Excerpts Gurumurthy, a public intellectual in Chennai, said: "This work is long overdue. There have been a lot of efforts to expose the kind of machinations that's going on to pervert our nationalism, pervert our past, pervert our great heroes, pervert even our spiritual personalities like Thiruvalluvar. Questioning is Thiruvalluvar a Christian? And the entire Saiva Sidhantha is being perverted as a by-product of Christianity. You can understand the extent of damage that this kind of perversions can cause. In a society where there is no organized efforts to counter these things. We are not an organized society, that is our strength. We are not an organized society, that is our weakness. Organized societies collapse and collapse very easily. Societies which are not organized, like us, they do not collapse, they decay. So we should not allow our society to decay for want of initiatives... February 8 Swami Dayananda Saraswati's talk at Chennai book launch, Feb 3, 2011 Excerpts I am very happy that I could be here for releasing a very significant book. Perhaps every one of us could be writing a chapter in it, because it is a book echoing our own thoughts on different occasions. When we come across a news item in the local newspaper, we feel enriched, we feel frustrated, we feel helpless. We want to voice your feelings and there's no outlet. We can identify in this book's pages the voice of our own feelings. Each one can relate to the book. It is a well-researched book on important topics covering a wide range of issues that affect our own psyche as a human being and as a person committed to dharma. As a person committed to truth, justice, then as a person committed to Vedic Dharma, committed to this nation, and as a living organism - you have a range of topics, and each one is discussed objectively. It contains enough background of very painful, tedious, painstaking research... What an amazing first day of posts on RMF. We get to hear from Sri Dayanananda Saraswati, Ram Jethmalani, Gurumurthy, Cho, and of course Rajiv Malhotra.