Category: People

The 2008 Post on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Some readers have been asking, “Atanu, when will you write more about SSRS?” As luck would have it, I got an email from someone who has actually met the man. He wrote me a very nice email saying that he has read all the SSRS posts patiently and then proceeded to inform me that he disagrees with me. That is not the least surprising as I am sure that an overwhelming majority of people won’t agree with me on anything of substance. That’s because my point of view is different from that of the majority, and the difference in the point of view is the result of differing life experiences. I merely state my opinion and note the differences and move on. Differences are good because otherwise it would be rather boring if we all had the absolutely same opinion.

Anyway, here’s my response to the gentleman, for the record.
Continue reading “The 2008 Post on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar”

Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974)

Just a few days over a century ago Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland. Among the people whose sojourn on this material plane overlapped mine and whom I admire, Bruno (as his friends and family called him) is up there with a select few. I consider him to be one of my spiritual teachers in the sense that his work has nourished my spirit over the years since I first read his words and then later watched his BBC production of The Ascent of Man. I still have the tattered book with me which I had acquired about 25 years ago and every now and then re-read to enrich the soul and receive solace after a long immersion in the dismal science.
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Was Nehru a Dictator?

There’s an interesting discussion going on at The Acorn which got started following an article by Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times. The Acorn says:

Just as it is wrong to blame the United States for Pakistan’s failure, it is wrong to credit Nehru with India’s relative success. Assessing Nehru’s role in India’s development requires the space of several books. But one would think it reasonable to credit several hundred million ordinary people of India for doing little things right that contributed to their country being where it is. It is also reasonable to blame a small number of people for doing big things wrong that left India much behind what it could have been.

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Tom Friedman on the List

Readers of this blog know for a while that good ol’ Tommy is one of my favorites. So when I stumbled upon a list of “50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005” and found him listed at number 7 squeezed between number 6 (Michael Jackson) and number 8 (Judith Miller), I was thrilled. He’s in good company — Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, and George W Bush come in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively in the list.
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Lee Kuan Yew on “India’s Peaceful Rise”

Lee Kuan Yew begins an article in Forbes.com with:

Even though the [Indian] economy’s annual growth rate has been 8% to 9% for the last five years, India’s peaceful rise hasn’t led to unease over the country’s future. Instead, Americans, Japanese and western Europeans are keen to invest in India, ride on its growth and help develop another heavyweight country.

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SSRS Asks

“Does the breath have any religion,” asks His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Is the air we breathe around us Muslim, Christian, or Hindu?”

No, I did not make it up. That is what is reported in a recent rediff article. The questions are so profound that I found myself moved to ask such questions. Mine are modest efforts, naturally, as I am not blessed with the immense holiness of SSRS. I am sure that you can also add to the list I present here.
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Hell’s Angel

Teresa the Merciless
Teresa the Merciless

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the will and the means to wreak havoc and cause misery. The Catholic Church is exhibit A. It has a shining history of centuries of wholesale murder and it has not deviated one bit from that unholy crusade to this day. Its most celebrated foot-soldier — nay, general — in its war against decency and humanity was Mother Teresa. Christopher Hitchens called her (among other things) the Ghoul of Calcutta. I call her Teresa, the Merciless.

Here’s Hitchens (from one of his live debates): Continue reading “Hell’s Angel”

India Been Liberal Had

Yoda editor must have been of the column Ashok Desai by Telegraph in of Aug 15th.

Sayeth Desai:

If instead of the Hindu rate of growth of 3.5 per cent, India had achieved 6 per cent in 1950-80, we would have been twice as rich as we are today. But we have lost even more in terms of distribution of growth than of growth itself. We would have been even richer in terms of consumer goods. We would have worn better and cheaper clothes, and owned more white goods that take the daily toil out of people’s lives. Our villages would have received cheaper and more widely available electricity; with that electricity and their labour, they would have produced consumer goods at a fraction of the present cost. There would have been far more non-agricultural employment in rural areas. Instead of 5 per cent, we would have generated 25 per cent of world trade; all the nations of the Indian Ocean would have been closely tied to us by trade and investment. All we have to boast about today is our democracy; if we had been liberal for sixty years, we would have been a world model for lifestyle.

Quite a fine piece of analysis. Marred by the idiotic characterization of India’s dismal growth rate of 3.5 percent per year as the “Hindu rate of growth.” It was Nehru, Chacha Nehru and his band of clueless retards, that imposed socialistic state planning that doomed India to its retarded growth rate. Neither Nehru nor his bunch of moronic cabinet drew their inspiration from Hindu scriptures or Hindu ideology. The rate of growth of India during the Congress rule was not enforced by Hindu thought or Hindu philosophy. Hinduism is not an economic school of thought and it does not speak to state planning nor does it advocate socialism. The “Nehru rate of growth” has nothing to do with Hinduism or any other religion for that matter other than the religion of socialism.

Piece I have said my.

Happy Birthday, Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo was born on this day, Aug 15th, in 1872.

Among the intellectual and spiritual giants born in this land, Sri Aurobindo has a special standing. Go read about Sri Aurobindo and lament the fact that dwarfs rule the land today.

Here’s Sri Aurobindo on Indian spirituality:

Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects. The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality. [Wikiquote.]

Yet Another SSRS Letter

In a few days, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living will be right outside my door for an entire week. The AoL is having a huge gathering not just within Magarpatta City but in the common area in front of the building I stay in. I will have a bird’s eye view of the proceedings from the balcony of my 11th floor apartment. Lucky me.

SSRS’s followers continue to send me unsolicited mail. Lucky me once again.

They don’t seem to understand that I express my views on my blog; I don’t write emails to people I don’t know forcing my opinion on them. So if they want to express their views, there are dozens of options in terms of blogs. They should avoid sending me mail. Else I publish their idiotic rantings just to underline my case that some of SSRS’s followers are brainwashed retards that don’t have a clue and are clearly unable to comprehend written material.

Here’s one that I got yesterday, posted in its entirety for the record.
Continue reading “Yet Another SSRS Letter”