RMF Summary: Week of June 13 - 19, 2011

June 13

Thanjavur a Cultural history by Pradeep Chakravarthy and Christian Fabre Ganesh has a very useful informational post: I request people to visit this link and watch the interviews of Pradeep Chakravarthy on NDTV Hindu... Pradeep Chakravarthy is the Principal, Infosys leadership institute who has been using the age old teachings inscribed by our great kings in the temples they have built as lessons to up one's leadership quotient. Here's one article by him in Outlook business April 02,2011. Those who are in India, should get hold of Outlook Business, June 25,2011 edition. His second such article using the wonders of Krishna Deva Raya  of Vijayanagara Empire, is penned in it. Also Outlook business has a small review of an autobiography called THE HOLY CEO: An autobiography authored by Christian Fabre alias Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta. Here's the excerpt from the review from this link ... June 13 Polish University To Set Up Tamil Chair !? [Given the explanation in "Breaking India"] I am suspicious... Polish University To Set Up Tamil Chair ...  [If anybody has an update on this, please post in comments section and/or RMF]

June 13

Indian Bishop in charge of Asian Evangelization is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize A similar effort is on in Pakistan where the Roman Catholic Church has planted a "nun" to serve the poor (read "the remaining Hindus" numbering 4 million) of... Here is a followup link by Manas. June 14 Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum is mentioned in "Breaking India On page 228, 232: "In 2006, a `Religious Freedom Day' was organized on Capitol Hill in Washington by the right-wing Christian fundamentalist, Senator Rick.. June 14 American tourists on 'conversion drive' asked to leave Times of India reports: American tourists on 'conversion drive' asked to leave: Three US women tourists were asked to leave the country following complaints that they along with local pastors were trying to convert "poor families" to Christianity. KOCHI: The fear of proselytization by Christian missionaries has gripped the southern most state Kerala yet again... June 14 A decade old fight against US govt anti-Ram bias put into school textbook Rajiv Malhotra: In the 1990s, when Lynn Cheney (Dick Cheney's wife) was head of the US National Endowment of Humanities, it gave a grant to Syracuse Univ's famous anthropologist to develop a school text on teaching Ramayana. This was widely promoted as a good way to teach multiculturalism, One of the lesson plans in that text was an anti-Ram song which was to be enacted in classes. Ram is accused of being an Aryan oppressor of Dalits and Dravidians, killing of Muslims and violence against women. Infinity Foundation led a protest against this material... A copy of this letter appears at the end of this post below. June 15 The duo "father-daughter" and the book! M. Deivanayagam has been so happy for the prominence given to him and his daughter in the book. He has brought out 4 page coverage including the scanned copy...

June 15

US Christian evangelistic network gets FIPB nod to launch channel in US Christian evangelistic network gets FIPB nod to launch channel in India May 5, 2011 http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k11/may/may22.php MUMBAI:...

June 15

What we could learn from Mormons about higher education  God's MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders ... June 16 Re: Gandhi and the Khilafat N. S. Rajaram: I  I have discussed it in my book Gandhi, Khilafat and the National Movement: A revisionist view based on neglected sources. A version is available here. June 17 Huffington Post: How Evangelists are inventing "Dravidian Christianity" Rajiv Malhotra: Please read my latest Huffington Post blog, comment on the blog itself, and pass it to friends. June 17 Ramakrishna and Islam Vijaya Rajiva writes: Re: Kanchan Bannerji's quote from Christopher Isherwood's Life of Sri Ramakrishna(1963). Isherwood borrowed from the earlier work by Romain Rolland The Life of..  ...It is interesting to note that Max Mueller also wrote a Life of Ramakrishna. Max Mueller's interest was brought about by his association with Keshab Chunder Sen of the Brahmo Samaj (influenced by Christianity). As Breakingindia points out : MM's motives in studying Sanskrit etc. had an ulterior motive, the conversion of pagan India to Christianity. Vijaya Rajiva has a followup on this. June 17 This thread covers a debate on the Ramakrishna Mission and sameness and elicited a lot of feedback. We will try to cover this in-depth in a separate post. RKM and sameness - debate I have been following the discussions concerning Christianity and Hinduism, especially the last one by Jataayu. I agree with him that the widespread grassroots... This is an intriguing post, so I'm including this post by Chitra in this summary! June 17 Scottish bill would criminalize sectarianism in football It was announced just this morning over the BBC that Scotland is proposing introducing laws that would make inciting sectarian violence connected with football... The thread below also produced a lot of comments. June 17 Even in the USA, Baptism had difficulties... Amritasyaputra discovers: Just read on internet: "Baptisms in the Southern Baptist Convention (USA), the nation's largest Protestant denomination, have dipped to their lowest point in 60 years..." In Germany, the number of members is actually decreasing. Everywhere people have enough of it, so they export it to the innocent foreign countries.... Koenraad Elst responds: "No, people in the West who have had enough of Christianity, do not export it to foreign countries. Not today, at least. In the colonial age, the militantly secularist French Third Republic (1871-1940) promoted Catholicism in its colonies to forge ties of loyalty to France (as against their native society as well as Protestant Britain, Holland, US etc.) among the natives. But that is kind of long ago. Hindus would do well to outgrow the anachronism in their view of the West...  ...Remember that the EU elites refused to have a reference to Christianity in the preamble to the EU Constitution. Now that Hungary has included such a reference in its own new constitution, reactions in EU circles were very hostile... ... To be sure, the Church has ways to get around this hostile attitude: they simply clothe their projects in the language of social justice and human rights. On that condition, most powerful circles in the West will still support the agenda of those who want to break India... ...At any rate, ex-Baptists and ex-Catholics are *not* dumping their rejected religion on India. Only the committed believers are promoting the mission. ... The claim that ex-Baptists send Baptism to India, stems from the long-standing Hindutva refusal to think ideologically, preferring to reduce everything to matters of nation vs. nation... Church history should teach you this much: all your hectoring about the mission as a "Western" strategy, though it had a point during the colonial age, is oblivious to the Church's tradition of shifting alliances. When US power collapses, and when Baptist pews in the US fall empty, the Baptist missions in India's Northeast will readily write their American origins out of the record, identify with Naga or Mizo etc. nationalism, and then continue to weed out the remnants of Hinduism with renewed zeal. And all these brown- and yellow-skinned Baptists will have a good laugh at the silly Hindus who keep on wailing about "white Christians". " Rajiv Malhotra disagrees with K. Elst on a point: "I disagree with Koenraad that Europeans are not exporting christianity. Breaking India discusses details of how and who is doing this. The Lutheran Church in Europe is covered in detail as an example and there is also a whole appendix devoted to this. Let us not quibble about whether this is state or church; it is European institutions doing it. I had an extensive discussion with evangelists from Finland in south India last year. This group pretending to be "tourists" were rather shocked when I asked them point blank "are you missionaries" after they told me the name of the village they were headed to. They were exceedingly nice and pleasant in their characteristic style, very well educated. In fact, countries like Finland give a formal status to Christianity. Germany gives a portion of tax collected to the church. Though the public at large is secular the church is rich in assets and ambition, and this is externalized. The Scandinavians have had a lot of interest as mediators in Sri Lanka where their missions are rampant."  N. S. Rajaram agrees with K.Elst on a different point: "Koenraad is absolutely right about Hindus not making friends. Even people like me are turned off by the indifference and being taken for granted. When Jayalalithaa won the TN election, several Christian leaders went and congratulated her and greeted her. No Hindu leader did, except Narendra Modi, and he too as a fellow CM. Hindu leaders should learn to be more outgoing and reduce their whining."  Prahalad adds: "certificates of de-baptism" are gettin popular and we ave every reason to make them popular! http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1891230,00.html Raj Kashyap is less enthused: "This is the typical unanalyzed overexcitement that we can see among Hindus. Just because one denomination reports a drop in number of baptisms, it really does not mean anything for us. We will only end up wasting our time which we should be focusing on serious issues - we have already lost a lot of time..."  June 17 Fwd: A talk on 'Breaking India' in Hosur Tamil Sangam Srinivasan notes: Reestablish the Indian Integrity Speech given in Hosur Tamil Sangam on12.June, 2011. in Tamil on Breaking India ,and the following is based on rough notes by a... June 17 Inventing the 'Dravidian' Race - Excerpt from 'Breaking India' Excerpted with permission from Malhotra, Rajiv and Aravindan Neelakandan, "Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines," Amaryllis... June 17 Research paper: Exporting Christianity: Governance and Doctrine in t Chitra provides a link: An academic research paper worth reading. Has lots of data and statistical models. ... This thread below got lots of feedback. Check it out in the form by clicking this link. We will try to cover this in a separate post.  June 19 "Jesus in India" thesis is a form of inculturation like St. Thomas m I dont personally believe in the jesus-in-india thesis. it is entirely speculative and based on one-sided evidence. But many indians like to believe it. THIS...   June 19 Book Review by UCLA Prof. Sardesai Prof. Sardesai has given permission to publish, copy and distribute the following review. Book Review: Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines, Bhopal, India, Amaryllis, 2011. This is a very important book both for students of Indian politics and society in the post-Independence era. It is also important for Westerners, particularly Americans, who are interested in the preservation and strengthening of the Indian polity,  more so as a thriving democracy, the largest on the planet. If the policy-makers in the Western capitals, including Washington D.C. are working for  India to emerge  strong and united as a bulwark against arising China, they should closely read this tome, as providing  substantial and irrefutable evidence of a  section of its citizenry working to contrary purposes of breaking India to facilitate the proselytizing of its Hindu population,... June 19 Foreign Policy Magazine on: Faith in the Market A few years ago there was a front page article in the Foreign Policy Magazine ...