By: BS Murthy
As a corollary, it can be said that without saying as much, Dr. Bhagwat had debunked the diabolical chātur-varṇyaṁ mayā sṛiṣhṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśhaḥ (v13, ch4) and such divisive verses from the eminently egalitarian Gita that were blue-penciled in the author’s Bhagvad-Gita Treatise of Self-help sans 110 inane interpolations, published way back in 2003. Be that as it may, before the veracity of the Sangh Pramukh’s “If some pundits citing scriptures are talking about ca... It was this Double Hindu Squeeze affected by the Dalit and Shudra Cards which enabled the Nehruvian forces to retain their political dominance in the post-colonial India for over six decades that was till Narendra Modi managed to unify some sections of the Shudras under his party’s Hindutva flag in 2014 only to add more such in 2019. What with the Hindu consolidation leading to the 2024 hustings is ever on the raise, the unraveled Nehruvians, driven by their craving for ...
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By: BS Murthy
Instead of bashing the Manu Smriti a la flogging the dead horse riding a blind ass, it pays the mankind to discard the redundant chaff to nourish itself on the pristine grain in Manu’s ancient granary. However, the moot point is whether or not Manu can be exonerated on the grounds that his original composition was subsequently fouled by caste prejudices and vested interests, and it seems to be the case.
It all began thus:
1.1. The great sages approached Manu, who was seated with a collected mind, and, having duly worshipped him, spoke as follows:
1.2. ’Deign, divine one, to declare to us precisely and in due order the sacred laws of each of the (four chief) caste...
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By: BS Murthy
In the ‘in vogue’ Bhagvad-Gita’s philosophical discourse could be found some ritualistic postulations in chapter 3, titled karma yoga, which, are nothing but innovations of Manu’s stipulations in that regard. Likewise, Gita’s Cycle of Creation, in chapter 8, akshara parabrahma yoga, follows Manu’s course. It is worth noting that at the end of each of its eighteen chapters, it is asserted in the Gita that it is the quintessence of the Upanishads and the Brahmasutrās, and as argued in my critique supra, one-hundred and ten verses in it are latter-day interpolations bereft of the Upanishadic and Brahmasutric connotations. What is more, while some of those smear its inclusive philosophy with sectarian postulations, which echo Manusmritic caste discriminations that are inimica...
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By: BS Murthy
No less than Narendra Modi, India’s erudite prime minister, had attributed the self-disparaging Indian character to its thousand years of slavery, that too on the floor of the Indian parliament. And it’s no wonder that Asaduddin Owaisi, the Islamist revivalist in the Indian remnant, promptly contested the said proposition. Needless to say, while Modi echoed the lament of the Hindu nationalists, albeit in a politically correct vocabulary, Owaisi sees the Muslim invasion o... Wonder why the thoughtless Hindus should indulge in making such ridiculous claims even as their ancestors had left a host of unimaginable accomplishments, acknowledged by the world at large, for their feel good - the invention of zero, value of pi, and the decimal system in mathematics, and the discovery of ‘precession of the Equinoxes’ in astronomy, just to name a few. It is in this context, this excerpt from the ‘Cheiro’s Book of Numbers’ is noteworthy.
The ancient Hi...
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By: BS Murthy
No wonder then that at the critical juncture of India’s sunder, the Hindu elites - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect – moulded in a century-old Macaulay brainwash to totally disregard their religion and develop a near contempt for their culture, were naturally devoid of any dharmic wherewithal to guide Bharat in a proper post-partition sanatana direction. So, the by then rootless Hindu masses too... For starters, India that came under the Islamic onslaught in the early 8th Century culminating in the Mogul rule over it in the late 15th Century carries the oldest extant civilization on earth. Then, at the beginning of the 17th Century, the British landed in the sub-continent as spice traders to end up pitching their colonial tents under the British Raj upon which the sun had never set that was until the mid 20th Century. That was when the clamor of the Musalmans for a...
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By: BS Murthy
Poetic pain of an unpublished author I wasn’t poor, being not rich
Life was fine, thanks to hope
All that changed, owing to muse,
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By: BS Murthy
A satirical poem on God's creation Told God man In Genesis One
Him He created in form of His
Not when asked as how He did
Thought He fit in Genesis Two
To tell He used the dust for that
But to change tack after that,
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By: BS Murthy
This essay seeks to analyze the motives behind the false propaganda about India's alleged religious intolerance towards its minority Muslims and the Christians as well as the duplicity of the Indian left-liberals who undermine the Indian national interest. However, while the Musalmans, fearing that the western education would lead to the dilution of Islamic faith among their wards, avoided Macaulay like a plague, the Hindus embraced him willy-nilly giving up their ‘haughty’ indifference to other faiths end ending up with ‘naive’ indulgence towards them. What is worse, from the Hindu point of view, the Macaulay education, over time, succeeded in making them have a dim view of the sanatana dharma of their progenitors and ske...
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By: BS Murthy
Then Modi, on the anti-graft and the national security planks, arrived to wrest the decade-long power from her by busting her anti-national political gang at the hustings. Backed by the public mandate, he set out to do what he could do in his first term to reverse the ant-Hindu gear in the hostile eco-system hitherto nursed by the Nehruvian cliché. So, the sight of him unfurling the Indian tricolor from the ramparts of the Mogul built Red Fort in Maharaja’s headgear was ... However, as time passed by in the ancient past, owing to the mundane distortions in the divine discourse that the Bhagavad-Gita is, the debilitating caste biases and the irrational ritual practices became the new norm of sanatana dharma to the immense hurt of the Hindu society as argued in the writer’s free ebook Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation). So, in time, it fell upon Siddhartha, as Gautam Buddha, to negate the twin evils that...
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By: BS Murthy
Why is This Book Now?
The Manusmriti, the social doctrine of yore, and the Bhagvad-Gita, the spiritual tome in vogue that lay down the discriminatory dharma (duties) of the four social classes (castes) have been the bugbears of the Hindu backward classes. However, to their chagrin, of late, as the latter is being mindlessly promoted even though the former was constitutionally debunked, they began advocating that it too should be dumped in a dustbin.
Ironically, the im... Bhagvad-Gita, often referred to as the Gita, comprises eighteen chapters, which, in all, contain seven hundred slokas (verses) that is not counting the unnumbered opening number of its thirteenth chapter. Though it has gained prominence on its own steam, in fact it is a part of the epochal Mahabharata, which, with over 100,000 slokas, is the longest tome in the world of letters. Moreover, this epic, probably compiled around the third century BCE, whose authorship is attr...
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By: BS Murthy
It can be said that the Gita as it is unmistakably propounds the caste system and unambiguously details the caste characteristics that is besides the earmarked social occupations / obligations of its members. Hence, one should ponder - would have Krishna chosen to reduce Shudras, his own people, literarily that is as Krishna himself was a Shudra, as menials even as Jehovah, having enabled the Jews to come out of slavery, made them his Chosen People! The sore point to those at the rough-end-of-the-caste-stick in the ‘in vogue’ Gita (short description of the Bhagavad-Gita) is God Krishna’s alleged owning the creation of the very discriminatory caste system thus:
chātur-varṇyaṁ mayā sruṣhṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśhaḥ
tasya kartāram api māṁ viddhyakartāram avyayam (Ch 4 v 13)
Well, the plain reading of this Sanskrit sloka indicates that based on the (human) qualities and (mundane) activates he had created the four varna...
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By: BS Murthy
Owing to the all-pervading purānic narrative that is in tune with ¬¬the above, by and large, the Hindu religiosity has come to be steeped in propitiating the gods through assorted rituals and fervent prayers to avert adversity or for self-aggrandizement and /or both. It’s another matter though that in our materialistic time, it has further descended into a religious barter with gods, or worse, of seeking to bribe them that too only after they second man’s bidding!
Hence... Long before the advent of the Torah, not to speak of the Bible and the Quran that followed it, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad had it that “.. since he (man) created gods who are better than he: and also because, being mortal, he created immortals, it is his higher creation. Whoever knows this, comes to be in this, his higher creation.”
However, in the latter-day Nārāyana Upanishad, the ‘mortal man’ sought to control the ‘immortal god’ he himself had created thus:
“daiva dē...
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By: BS Murthy
Adolf Hitler had on his hands the blood of six million gas-chambered Jews besides fifty million soldiers, in the flower of their youth, and thirty million civilians of all ages, who perished in the World War II that he started, but yet he is among the most debated about worldwide. Moreover, Mein Kampf, his autobiography with an anti-Semitic slant is not ostracized either by the book world, but in a stark contrast, uttering the very name of Nathuram Godse, the man who ass... Godse, in his own words, was “Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone,” and that should have...
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By: BS Murthy
Though the dalit tag affords political clout to its desperate classes as a whole, it had failed to buttress the self-worth of its disparate caste groups for in the Indian cultural calculus, caste is intrinsic to the social-worth of its members. Thus, it is imperative to cast a sense of caste-worth in the dalit fold in the ‘Black is Beautiful’ mould for the collective moral upliftment of its member castes. But self-belief being the by-product of the zeal to strive and no... Though slavery was abolished in America way back in 1865, the undying discrimination against its ‘free’ Negroes remained such that even Jesse Owens, who having symbolized the U.S. sporting power in the Berlin Olympics of 1938, had to keep holding the bias end of its racial stick. Though the innate physical strength of Negro biology continued to yield sporting returns in their scores of Olympic medals that buttressed the American athletic glory, their racial plight remain...
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By: BS Murthy
Needless to say, the copy (from other constitutions) and paste (in the Indian Constitution) work of the so-called framers of our constitution, comprising of the Semitic-naïve caste Hindus and a well-informed, though embittered dalit, as argued above, needs a pragmatic overhaul, for which the level of Hindu awareness about the Abrahamic outrage against their sanātana dharma has to raise to self-respecting heights of Himalayan proportions, hopefully. Muhammad Ali Jinnah got what he wanted for Indian Musalmans though in time, their Quranic zeal turned Pakistan into a Rogue State. What of India, the product of an irony of a partition in that while some Musalmans walked away with one-fourth of its land, others stayed back to nurse their separatist dogma in its truncated bosom?
While the Hindu nationalists lamented about the loss of their ancient land, the Musalman intellectuals were alarmed at their reduced numbers vi...
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By: BS Murthy
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes “Hindutva ('Hindu-ness'), as an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values" and India’s Apex Court had ruled that “Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism ...”. However, it can be said that their lordships erred in assuming that there is something called Hindu fundamentalism, religious or cultural, ... Leaving the West to its self-destructive Islamapologian ways, a closer look at India would reveal how the fear of the Hindu Theocratic State is unfounded to say the least. True, the Islamic fundamentalism could usher in theocratic states in many Muslim countries owing to the religious fervour of the believers for the adoption of the oppressive sharia and other depressive Islamic laws that Islam enjoins them to abide by. But when it comes to Hinduism, there are no such re...
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By: BS Murthy
Cingireddi Narayana Reddy (29 July 1931 – 12 June 2017) was an Indian Telugu-language poet and writer. Reddy had produced over eighty literary works including poems, prose-plays, lyrical plays, translations, and ghazals. He was also a professor, lyricist, actor, and Rajya Sabha politician. Reddy was awarded the Jnānpēth Award by the government of India in 1988, and he served as the Vice Chancellor of Telugu University 1
So to savour
Cināre’s verse,
Goes Jnānpēth
To Hanumānjipet.
2.
Hi, Sastryji
Cināre greets,
Brings that warmth
To Dwana’s heart.
3
Beckons as Dwana
Ever he grants,
Cināre’s love
It’s Dwana’s pride.
4
Takes he mike
It sings his tune,
Glued to seats
All sit spellbound.
5
‘Rise as thou
Cavils if world
‘Grow sky-high’,
Is Cināre quote.
6
In...
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By: BS Murthy
It is for the Shudras to realize that in reality, the Bhagvad-Gita was the pristine work of their progenitors that in time got polluted by the others, and it is time for them to reclaim it albeit by ridding it of its obnoxious insertions as was done by the author in his Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of Self-help sans 110 inane interpolations. In so far as the misconception about Gita’s advocacy of violence is concerned, as and when the interpolative issue is settled, rid of the... The Gita eulogizers, in its present-form, must ponder over as to how these verses of inequality in the revered work jell with the much touted Hindu ethos of vasudhaika kutumbakam (world is one family). In so far as the Gita’s admirers among the Whites, it can be said that having internalized the Semitic religious ethos of the God’s alleged partiality towards certain races and also given the prevalence of slavery in their societies, they saw nothing perverse in the ineq...
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By: BS Murthy
The self-account of an improbable literary journey of an Indian novelist, playwright, short story, non-fiction 'n articles writer, translator, a 'little' thinker and a budding philosopher in ‘Addendum to Evolution: Origins of the World by Eastern Speculative Philosophy’ that was originally published in The Examined Life On-Line Philosophy Journal, Vol. 05 Issue 18, Summer 2004. Whenever I look at my body of multi-genre work in English, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not for my mother tongue Telugu, touted as the Italian of the East, has no linguistic connection with it whatsoever.
To start with, I was born into a land-owning family in Kothalanka, a remote Indian village, of Andhra Pradesh to be precise that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from the sub-continent, but much before the rural edu...
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By: BS Murthy; Gopi Lagusani, Illustrator
Lured by the pitch - All marriages are made in heaven but some are delayed on earth: We endeavor to hasten them all - Priya goes to Renuka Marriage Bureau.
Scanning the prospects, when she spotted Venu, whom she slighted long ago, she rushes to him to bring about a dramatic encounter.
What brought about Priya’s change of heart to seek her former suitor and how Venu responds to his old flame’s fresh overtures lend suspense to their romance in this eclectic novella. Part 1
ALL MARRIAGES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN BUT SOME ARE DELAYED ON EARTH:
WE ENDEAVOUR TO HASTEN THEM ALL.
So read the billing at Renuka Marriage Bureau.
Rushing to Venu, Priya reread the same.
‘Oh, how fortuitous!’ she thought excitedly as she walked up to her car. ‘So, I could wed him now. Going by his photograph, he looks handsomer than ever; if anything, that streak of grey hair only lends him an aura of its own! It’s as well that he doesn’t dye his hair as most ...
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