Gandhian ideals are plain stupid; Bankim and Sri Aurobindo are superior mentors

ParsaReport: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar a morally guilty man, third rate thinker WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2013

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should show intellectual and moral courage to denounce Savarkar as the Hindutva ideologue and look for superior mentors if they can reach out to any. Perhaps, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Sri Aurobindo, though it will not be easy to reduce these two literary giants to the vulgar and crude formulations of Hindutva ideology. The sensitive Maharashtrians who take pride in Savarkar are insulting themselves and the Maharashtra tradition. They should look to Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak was a conservative but he was a great leader.

He respected Gandhi even when he dismissed Gandhi's moralism as quixotic. But in the 1919 Amritsar Congress session he fought a losing battle with Gandhi and saw Motilal Nehru and Chitta Ranjan Das supporting Gandhi. Apparently, he told the senior Nehru and Das that they will move away from Gandhi's populist politics. And this from the man who was a populist leader in his own time, and that was his battle with the liberal Gokhale…

Gandhi was an anti-intellectual and he was in his own way a very unreconstructed Hindu traditionalist. One of the best critics of Gandhi was Bhim Rao Ambedkar and his lecture on Gandhi, Jinnah and Ranade is a classic piece showing the stupidity and egotism of Gandhi and Jinnah as leaders. So there are ways of debunking the Gandhi myth, but Savarkar did not have the intellectual sophistication to do that. That is why he resorted to the morally despicable manner of getting ridding of Gandhi…Gandhian ideals are plain stupid in political and historical senses. What was good for Gandhi could not be good for India. So, we can and we must differ with Gandhi… Posted by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr at 9:18 AM  

Janus-faced justice - Bronwyn Leebaw at The Immanent Frame

One of Philpott’s goals in *Just and Unjust Peace* is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” more »

On the Necessity of Esoterism Gagdad Bob at One Cʘsmos

Before embarking upon our journey into Meditations on the Tarot (which seems to have gone out of print again), I'd like to begin with a discussion of the meaning and purpose of esoterism more generally, since so much of it can appear a little dodgy, as if we're just deepaking the chopra rather than engaging in the Eternal Science (or the science of eternity).

However, it has always been understood that, for example, scripture is susceptible to multiple levels of meaning: the literal or plain meaning; the allegorical, or implied meaning; the conceptual meaning; the moral meaning; the more abstract and esoteric meaning; etc. more »

Experimental Life and Ordeal’s Necessity from An und für sich by danbarber

I take Spinoza’s insistence on necessity, over against contingency, as an antagonism toward standard Christianity, with its themes of exemplarity and incarnation. Nothing can be an example of anything else because everything is equivocal; nothing can be prior to anything else because everything is univocal. The univocity of every different thing thus stems not from a muting of difference’s equivocity, but from an affirmation of the necessity of everything in its difference. In other words, univocity has to do with necessity; the refusal of analogy, with its contingency, is inseparable from the affirmation of necessity. In fact, we might think of this insistence on necessity as forming its own kind of reading practice: one must read whatever happens as necessary; if one reads what happens as contingent, then one has failed to understand what happens.

National Seminar on Myth, History, Tradition and Modernity in Indian English Drama

A three-day UGC Sponsored National Seminar on Myth, History, Tradition and Modernity in Indian English Drama 4-6 Feb., 2013 Department of English, Govt. Autonomous Post Graduate College, Chidwara, Madhya Pradesh Contact: Dr. More

Indian English Drama: Thematic Reflections - Galaxy PDF - Quick View Indian English drama got some innovative thematic concerns which were able to ... Karnad's wide handling of history, myth and folklore to tackle contemporary issues has been widely appreciated by .... tradition with modernity. That is why the ...

Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation of Indian English Drama PDF - Quick View Mar 1, 2012 – The Criterion. Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation of Indian English Drama ... grounded in the tradition of the past and it is of real life presented in a fictitious manner. This has led ... It is a history told in a story. According to ... Although modernity has invaded, Indians have not left their culture and tradition.

Aurangzeb New Delhi Theatre Workshop presents Indira Parthasarathy's AURANGZEB directed by KS Rajendran on 1st February 2013 at 6:30 pm at LTG Auditorium. Tickets: 9811232072

Shahjahan lives in the past, Dara in the future, and Aurangzeb in the present. Aurangzeb’s success is the triumph of pragmatism but he has to pay dearly as we find him in the last scene sitting not on his Peacock throne but beside it on the floor. His loneliness becomes his tragedy. The play ends with him asking himself he question: ‘Am I a devout Muslim or a fanatic?’ He is left awaiting the judgement of history.