RMF Summary: Week of November 14 - 20, 2011

November 15

Shashi Tharoor tweets Rakesh shares:

"Some disturbing tweets from MP, Shashi Tharoor. This is exactly what Rajiv refers to in BI in much detail as well as in Being Different. Tweets below; @ShashiTharoor Shashi Tharoor Fascinating 2see Indianization of Christianity 1st hand. Many Kerala Hindu symbols&rituals (eg aarti) incorporated in worship. Xian kirtans! @ShashiTharoor Shashi Tharoor Festival's songs,dances, costumes& trappings are totally local &services are in Malayalam. Indigenization is clearly the key2 universality. This Indianization of Christinaity, as Tharoor calls it, is nothing but a guise for proselytisation..." Priyadarsi responds: "The other model is Protestant proselytisation in North-East where converted tribal population takes to western costumes, lifestyle, drinking and music at the expense of their own cultural moorings. Religious conversion thus entails a cultural conversion as well. Is that model - of the two- more preferable because it is easily identifiable? ...." Rajiv's comment:  "...An open, explicit threat is better for us as we know where we stand. Also it does not distort our culture for our own folks whereas the inculturation gets re-exported to those who are still within dharma and start blurring the distinctions. This is the reason for writing BEING DIFFERENT. Tonight is a large function with 2000 people in coimbatore for this book as well as the tamil edition of Breaking India. Swami dayananda Saraswati had me give an hour long talk to his Vedanta students doing a residence 3 year course in his ashram at Anaikati, who loved it and there was a nice exchange afterwards. Half his class are non-Indians. I hope the videos got captured well."  November 15 My 2 cents towards BEING DIFFERENT (This post is not about the promotion of my blog and readers may ignore all other content in the link). Respectfully, ... November 17  An old by Muslim Scholar Ali Mazrui on Western Universalism Devendra shares: "Here is a 10-year old essay (rather a talk) by Ali Mazrui, an UK-based African Muslim scholar that has similar breadth of ideas as Rajivji's "Being Different". http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/world_lectures/mazrui_lect.sht\ ml This essay also needs careful rebuttal as it imagines a world with only Muslims and the West, ignoring contributions by all others, Hindus and Buddhists." Rajiv response:  "I disagree that it has a similar breadth of ideas. It is not a dharmic gaze as mine is very explicitly. His is typical post colonial scholarship of which there is a vast genre. My book explains why I find postcolonialists insufficient and a problem: They use western secular theories to critique the west, i.e. it amounts to a wstern self-critique. So a whole lineage of Indians in postcolonial studies have written hundreds of such books. But they lack understanding of dharma metaphysics so its not a purva paksha from a dharmic lens. They are mimicking what many leftist westerners like Noam Chomsky (who serves as one of their idols) has already written. So its anti-western, often mixed with a tingle of pro-Palestine and anti-Israel/US politics. But where's the dharmic metaphysics in it? Ironically, such Indians are anti-Hindu to the core. What metaphysical ground do they stand on from which to gaze at the west?" "   November 17 Short blurb on one point made in BD http://news.in.msn.com/business/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5600575 <http://news.in.msn.com/business/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5600575>...