“A pundit who gets considerable space in the Ramayana, called Javali, not only does not treat Rama as God, he calls his actions foolish.” He argues that there’s no afterworld, and that scripture was written by clever people to rule over others.
doubt is part of our heritage
Conversation
India has many sources of culture, heterodoxy goes back far
“Hinduism” is a relatively recent concept
Buddhism was the dominant religion for nearly a thousand years
“Ancient India cannot be fitted into the narrow box where the Hindutva activists want to incarcerate it”
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(Jabali was a nihilistic rationalbro in the Ramayana?? I really need to reread it)
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Ashoka, Buddhist emperor 300 BCE, outlined need for tolerance, the richness of heterodoxy, the principle of honouring your political opponents
(Amartya does leave out the bit where he first slaughtered 100,000+ people for conquest before becoming this sweet friendly man)
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Apparently Akbar (Muslim emperor) was also defending tolerance and the need for the state to be “equi-distant from different religions” in the 1590s, while “the Inquisition was in full swing in Europe”
GIF
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(Life is so funny. I’m tweeting this while I’m on a train, and there’s an Indian couple sitting next to me, arguing loudly about their different interpretations of what happened at a party. You really can’t make this stuff up. 😂)
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Amartya talks about how “rampant, exasperating elitism” asserts that dialectics is only for the affluent, and how it encourages cynicism
He quotes a poor, barely literate villager he met in 2004: “It is not very hard to silence us, but that is not because we cannot speak.”
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He also makes an interesting point that there’s this dumb narrative, sometimes done in a good-faith, trying-to-be-helpful way: this narrow dichotomy of (I paraphrase) shallow rationalistic western intellectuals vs eastern mystics and peasants of great, wise unquestioning faith
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“We are able to talk at some length.”
(*glances nervously at *)
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata [...] are engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas & alternative perspectives. [...] masses of arguments & counterarguments spread over incessant debates & disputations
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Longest speech ever delivered at the UN was by Krishna Menon, on the subject of Kashmir.
POTUS Eisenhower described him as a “menace”.
“My English is better than yours. You merely picked it up, I learned it.” Ooooh I felt that one 😂 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._K._Kri
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Replying to
Fuck. I've been looking for a way to BM native speakers for years, and this has been here this entire time?