Progressive India Quotes

The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.— from Bhagat Singh's prison diary, p. 124

Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law. Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love. All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.' If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been. All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.

But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.

India can progress only by the reinforcement of the women.

Development is, ultimately, the progress of human freedom and capability to lead the kind of lives that people have reason to value.

The Rakshasa," said Percy pedantically, "are a different breed altogether from our vampires. Much in the same way that poodles and dachshunds are different breeds of dog. Rakshasas are reviled in India. Their position as tax collectors is an attempts by the crown to integrate them in a more progressive and mundane manner." Rue said, "Oh, how logical. Because we all know ordaining someone as a tax collector is the surest way to get them accepted by society.

Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

The main obstacle to further progress on the resource curse is China, and to a lesser extent India.

Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?

India is at one with the most puritan faiths of the world in her declaration that progress is from seen to unseen, from the many to the One, from the low to the high, from the form to the formless, and never in the reverse direction.

India is at one with the most puritan faiths of the world in her declaration that progress is from seen to unseen, from the many to the One, from the low to the high, from the form to the formless, and never in the reverse direction. She differs only in having a word of sympathy

Perhaps the attitude for us to take towards our many failures is the one adopted by Gopal Krishna Gokhale towards those of the Moderate nationalists: Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.9

that ugly truth about Manto, the man: that for all his love of Indian multiplicity, he went to Pakistan. He even tried convincing Chughtai to go. ‘The future looks beautiful in Pakistan,’ he said to her, ‘We’ll be able to get the houses of people who’ve fled from there. It’ll be just us there. We’ll progress very quickly.’ When I read this, I had trouble holding the two Mantos in my mind. It seemed impossible that the creator of Manto, the narrator and fictional presence, so immersed in the variety of India, seeming so much to rejoice in it, should also be the author of that remark, with its sly wish for homogeneity, for the place where ‘It’ll be just us.’ Chughtai, for other reasons, was also disgusted.

We live in a world where value of creativity is measured by commercial success, and copyrights are mere instruments of financial benefit, not creative progress

History bears witness to the vital part that the ‘prophets’ have played in human progress—which is evidence of the ultimate practical value of expressing unreservedly the truth as one sees it. Yet it also becomes clear that the acceptances and spreading of that vision has always depended on another class of men—“leaders” who had to be philosophical strategists, striking a compromise between truth and men’s receptivity to it.

Tolstoy’s most lasting influence was in India. He and M. K. Gandhi had begun a correspondence in the early years of the twentieth century, with Gandhi referring to himself as Tolstoy’s ‘humble follower’. Many of their beliefs have close affinities – the doctrine of non-violence, for example, and the belief that the kingdom of God exists within man. Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance, together with his abhorrence of Western ‘progress’, owe much to Tolstoy, although his engagements in the political arena do not. And it is in the East, particularly India, where the liberal democratic tradition continued longer, that Tolstoy’s ideas remained alive.

Holding that religious tenets were not immutable, Syed Ahmed Khan emphasized the role of religion in the progress of society: if religion did not keep pace with and meet the demands of the time it would get fossilized as in the case of Islam in India.

The origin of the caste system, formulated by the great legislator Manu, was admirable. He saw clearly that men are distinguished by natural evolution into four great classes: those capable of offering service to society through their bodily labor (Sudras); those who serve through mentality, skill, agriculture, trade, commerce, business life in general (Vaisyas); those whose talents are administrative, executive, and protective-rulers and warriors (Kshatriyas); those of contemplative nature, spiritually inspired and inspiring (Brahmins). “Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin);” the Mahabharata declares, “character and conduct only can decide.” 281 Manu instructed society to show respect to its members insofar as they possessed wisdom, virtue, age, kinship or, lastly, wealth. Riches in Vedic India were always despised if they were hoarded or unavailable for charitable purposes. Ungenerous men of great wealth were assigned a low rank in society. Serious evils arose when the caste system became hardened through the centuries into a hereditary halter. Social reformers like Gandhi and the members of very numerous societies in India today are making slow but sure progress in restoring the ancient values of caste, based solely on natural qualification and not on birth. Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove; India, too, with her versatile and invulnerable spirit, shall prove herself equal to the task of caste-reformation.

When I walked out of the temple to reclaim my leather chappals, I found they had been polished. I couldn’t help but marvel at Sikhism: the most practical, pragmatic, and progressive of religions, built on selfless service and sacrifice. And yet, being a Sikh has never been easy.

Kashmir is India’s greatest moral and political failure. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality and violence. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty and secular ideals. Since 1947, the Indian state has responded to the political aspirations and the social and the legal demands in Kashmir through militarisation, repression, and indiscriminate violence, including, at various times, the denial of democratic rights, the manipulation of elections, and the murder and imprisonment of its political leaders.

The death knell for silver's monetary role was the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when Germany extracted an indemnity of £200 million in gold from France and used it to switch to a gold standard. With Germany now joining Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, and others on a gold standard, the monetary pendulum had swung decisively in favor of gold, leading to individuals and nations worldwide who used silver to witness a progressive loss of their purchasing power and a stronger incentive to shift to gold. India finally switched from silver to gold in 1898, while China and Hong Kong were the last economies in the world to abandon the silver standard in 1935.

प्रजासुखे सुखं राज्ञ: प्रजानां च हिते हितम्‌ । नात्मप्रियं हितं राज्ञ: प्रजानां तु प्रियं हितम्‌ ।।   Peoples happiness should be King’s happiness. Welfare of people is King’s welfare. For a king, there is no task which is only individualistic and pleasurable to him only. It is king’s utmost duty to look after progress and welfare of people of his country.

The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51

The Musalman, remaining faithful to his religion, has not progressed; he has remained stationary in a world of swiftly moving modern forces. It is, indeed, one of the salient features of Islam that it immobilizes in their native barbarism, the races whom it enslaves. It is fixed in a crystallization, inert and impenetrable. It is unchangeable; and political, social or economic changes have no repercussion upon it. " Having been taught that outside Islam there can be no safety; outside its law no truth and outside its spiritual message there is no happiness, the Muslim has become incapable of conceiving any other condition than his own, any other mode of thought than the Islamic thought. He firmly believes that he has arrived at an unequalled pitch of perfection; that he is the sole possessor of true faith, of the true doctrine, the true wisdom ; that he alone is in possession of the truth—no relative truth subject to revision, but absolute truth. " The religious law of the Muslims has had the effect of imparting to the very diverse individuals of whom the world is composed, a unity of thought, of feeling, of ideas, of judgement.

Ambedkar knew that while there were enough influential Hindus – such as Jawaharlal Nehru – who were behind progressive legislation, among the Muslims the liberal contingent was nowhere near as strong. The government, he said, could not be so ‘foolish’ as ‘not to realize the sentiments of different communities in this country’. That was why the code at present dealt only with the Hindus.

India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.

If the hope of progress is an illusion, how—it will be asked—are we to live? The question assumes that humans can live well only if they believe they have the power to remake the world. Yet most humans who have ever lived have not believed this—and a great many have had happy lives. The question assumes the aim of life is action; but this is a modern heresy. For Plato contemplation was the highest form of human activity. A similar view existed in ancient India. The aim of life was not to change the world. It was to see it rightly.

..There will be the direct weakening effect, but much worse will be the inner psychological conflict between those who wish to reunite her and those who oppose this. New vested interest will be created which will resist change and progress, a new evil Karma will pursue us in the future. One wrong step leads to another; so it has been in the past and so it may be in the future. And yet wrong steps have to be taken sometimes lest some worse peril befall us; that is the great paradox of politics, and no man can say with surety whether present wrong-doing is better and safer in the end than the possibility of that imagined peril.

The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past,—it is like a rich mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the dead. It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress, its face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation, and came to believe it. In India, I know, a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying all its resources of self-deception to turn it into a matter of boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.

It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated industrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu. The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. ‘Arguably

His reading habit was so varied that in his early teens, he was reading both Maxim Gorky’s Mother and the detective thrillers (Jasoosi Duniya) of Ibn-e-Safi. The detective thrillers—be it Indian or American pulp fiction—were a big favourite for their fast action, tight plots and economies of expression. He remembers the novels of Ibn-e-Safi for their fascinating characters with memorable names. ‘Ibn-e-Safi was a master at naming his characters. All of us who read him remember those names . . . There was a Chinese villain, his name was Sing Hi. There was a Portuguese villain called Garson . . . an Englishman who had come to India and was into yoga . . . was called Gerald Shastri.’ This technique of giving catchy names to characters would stay with him. The wide range of reading not only gave him the sensitivity with which progressive writers approached their subjects but also a very good sense of plot and speaking styles. Here, it would be apt to quote a paragraph from Ibn-e-Safi’s detective novel, House of Fear—featuring his eccentric detective, Imran. The conversation takes place just outside a nightclub: ‘So, young man. So now you have also starred frequenting these places?’ ‘Yes. I often come by to pay Flush,’ Imran said respectfully. ‘Flush! Oh, so now you play Flush . . .’ ‘Yes, yes. I feel like it when I am a bit drunk . . .’ ‘Oh! So you have also started drinking?’ ‘What can I say? I swear I’ve never drunk alone. Frequently I find hookers who do not agree to anything without a drink . . .’ This scene would find a real-life parallel as well as a fictional one in Javed’s life later. Javed

He wrote an angry summing-up of the manifold ways in which the West subjugated weaker countries; caustically titled ‘On the New Rules for Destroying Countries,’ it could just as easily have been written by al-Afghani. Liang described the endless subtle ways in which European merchants and mine-owners had progressively infiltrated and undermined many societies and cultures. The essay detailed these methods, which included cajoling countries into spiralling debt (Egypt), territorial partition (Poland), exploiting internal divisions (India), or simply overwhelming adversaries with military superiority (the Philippines and the Transvaal). ‘To those who claim,’ Liang wrote, ‘that opening mining, railroad and concessionary rights to foreigners is not harmful to the sovereignty of the whole, I advise you to read the history of the Boer War.

Japan is pretty good for disaster footage,” Alfonse said. “India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinkings, et cetera. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hookup. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we’re not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They’re standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny.” “You’re saying it’s more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters.” “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.” “I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.” “Feel bad,” he said.

In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which are economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, which the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddishm, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.

THE FOUNDING PROPHET of modern antihumanism was Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). For three decades a professor at the British East India Company’s East India College, Malthus was a political economist who famously argued that human reproduction always outruns available resources. This doctrine served to rationalize the starvation of millions caused by his employer’s policy of brutal oppression of the peasants of the Indian subcontinent. The British Empire’s colonial helots, however, were not Malthus’s only targets. Rather, his Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798 and later expanded in numerous further editions) was initially penned as a direct attack on such Enlightenment revolutionaries as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who advanced the notion that human liberty, expanding knowledge, and technological progress could ultimately make possible a decent life for all mankind. Malthus prescribed specific policies to keep population down by raising the death rate:

Now, I suggest four tests to judge whether the Government is progressive, and, further, whether it is continuously progressive. The first test that I would apply is what measures it adopts for the moral and material improvement of the mass of the people, and under these measures I do not include those appliances of modern Governments which the British Government has applied in this country, because they were appliances necessary for its very existence, though they have benefited the people, such as the construction of Railways, the introduction of Post and Telegraphs, and things of that kind. By measures for the moral and material improvement of the people, I mean what the Government does for education, what the Government does for sanitation, what the Government does for agricultural development, and so forth. That is my first test. The second test that I would apply is what steps the Government takes to give us a larger share in the administration of our local affairs—in municipalities and local boards. My third test is what voice the Government gives us in its Councils—in those deliberate assemblies, where policies are considered. And, lastly, we must consider how far Indians are admitted into the ranks of the public service. A

Not long ago, Malthusian thinking was revived with a vengeance. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote Famine 1975!, and in 1968 the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted that by the 1980s sixty-five million Americans and four billion other people would starve to death. New York Times Magazine readers were introduced to the battlefield term triage (the emergency practice of separating wounded soldiers into the savable and the doomed) and to philosophy-seminar arguments about whether it is morally permissible to throw someone overboard from a crowded lifeboat to prevent it from capsizing and drowning everyone.10 Ehrlich and other environmentalists argued for cutting off food aid to countries they deemed basket cases.11 Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, discouraged financing of health care “unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.” Population-control programs in India and China (especially under China’s one-child policy) coerced women into sterilizations, abortions, and being implanted with painful and septic IUDs.12

Sarjomdih, which for about sixty years was another nondescript dot on a map. That part of the Chhotanagpur area which is now formally known as the Purbi Singbhum district. Sarjomdih, where most of the population is Santhal and the rest are Munda; all of them are followers of Sarna, the aboriginal faith of the Chhotanagpur area. Saijomdih, which stands atop the mineral-rich core of the Indian subcontinent. Sarjomdih, outside whose southern frontiers a mine and a copper factory were established, where the Copper Town sprang up, and which was now gradually threatening to swallow all of Sarjomdih. Sarjomdih, which bore the repercussions of development, the nationalization of the mine and the factory, the opening up of two more quarries, and the confiscation of the villagers' properties so roads and living quarters could be built. Sarjomdih, whose men were given jobs as unskilled laborers in the mines and the factory in return for their fecund land. Sarjomdih, which is a standing testimony to the collapse of an agrarian Adivasi society and the dilution of Adivasi culture, the twin gifts of industrialization and progress. Sarjomdih, which within sixty years acquired all the signs of urbanity, just like the Copper Town: concrete houses; cable television; two-wheelers; a hand-pump; a narrow, winding tarmac that everyone called the 'main road'; and a primary school...

The government doesn’t care if our kids learn to think or learn for the sake of learning, as long they learn to love their country, and grow up and pay taxes. How much of what we learnt in 10 years of our schooling actually comes handy in our day-to-day lives? Why can’t we learn useful skills, like cooking, in school that actually come in handy when it comes to survival? Does schooling need to last for 10 years? Is it possible to complete schooling in 7 years? Nobody knows and schools have done a great job at not letting us ask questions. We live in times where we cautiously invest 4 years in undergrad schools or 2 years in B-schools in the hope that we acquire strong skills or at least secure a job. Schooling, as it exists, is a 10-year course that neither helps us get a job nor imparts a skill and unfortunately, it is compulsory. Half the jobs that exist today won’t even exist 10 years from now. That’s how fast the world is progressing. We still ask our kids to learn when Shah Jahan was born. It is a joke that at the end of these 10 years, we are expected to choose a career in science, commerce, or arts when school education hardly helped us explore ourselves. Some of the world’s greatest artists, athletes, inventors and scientists are from India. Unfortunately, they are all engineers and tragically none of them know about their talents. The biggest reason for this tragedy isn’t the society, parenting, coaching or anything else. The school is the reason and they too are all eventually victims of the same century-old schooling system. In the legendary words of Kevin Spacey from Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” and our school is our society’s biggest devil.

The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.

Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.

India Version 2.0 was now up and running. Indians championed their nation as a global superpower, expounding its potential to overtake everyone as the fastest-growing economy. Yet for all its advances and progression, this was still a country where, in a village in Orissa, a 2-year-old boy could be married off to a dog called Jyoti to ward off evil spirits and ease the bad omen of his rotting tooth.

The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment. Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.

Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.

Stories, Vishnu, are like snarled threads, each connected with the other, and it’s very tempting to want to tell them all at once. But time, linear, progressive, maddening time, won’t let me.

That's the power of the open-source approach to intellectual goods. Even if Monsanto had wanted to control the world's gran, the company would never have succeeded: farmers save and share seeds, and in countries like Bangladesh and India national seed-breeding programs have been instituted to make sure people can get seed they can afford. There are open-source grains and cheap public seed banks in many developing countries.

[Winning in] India is essential. For GE, winning with India requires a new business model, one in which we are “local” in every sense of the word. That means migrating P&L responsibility and major business functions [like R&D, manufacturing and marketing] from a centralized headquarters to an experienced in-country team that is closest to the action and uniquely in touch with local customers and capabilities. Shifting power to where the growth is, putting more resources, more people and more products in the country, and integrating all elements of the GE product and services pipeline makes good business sense. This new One GE in India approach will speed progress. With an integrated team, we can develop products and services designed specifically to meet local needs and, potentially, for export to other markets. Since we’ve changed the model in India to align with the market more directly, there’s great excitement. It gives us entirely new opportunities to develop more products at more price points. This will help open up access to large, underserved markets in India, China, Brazil, and Africa while also fueling innovation that opens a door into new markets in the more developed regions of the world. The establishment of a new business model in India is an important step and I am eager to see it take off.

Bharatendu’s ninety-eight-verse speech ‘Hindi Ki Unnati Par Vyakhyan’ (Lecture on the Progress of Hindi) at the inaugural meeting of the Hindi Vardhini Sabha in Allahabad established his standing as leader of the Hindi movement. More diatribes against Urdu would follow from Bharatendu, but he did not live to see the result of his efforts. He died in 1885 at the age of thirty-five. The year 1893 saw the establishment of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Banaras, the most influential body for advocating use of the Hindi language and the Devanagari script.

To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows: Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.29

However, in Jainism there is a system of extensive worshipping of all sorts of deities, which present residual sacrificial elements.23 In Christianity worshipping has been defined in terms of the imitation of Christ, with positive external mediation, which is fundamental to the idea of Christians’ involvement in worldly matters. As a matter of fact, there are historical sources that speak of connections between Jainism and Judaism, which remain underexplored and which are simply fascinating. The most striking evidence is given by Frazer, who reports the presence of versions of the judgement of Solomon, which is so central to Judaeo-Christian tradition, in Jainist texts.24 Although non-violent in nature, Jainism has eventually relapsed into a patriarchal caste system of Hindu Brahmanical heritage which is so widespread in India and which still represents a form of exclusion, of symbolic and actual outcasting.25 This is ‘structural violence’, i.e. radical injustice. Moreover, as was suggested at a recent COV&R meeting, the history of religions and societies in Asia testifies, from a descriptive standpoint, that Hindu and Buddhist cultures and states have not been without violence, as is commonly believed, pretty much in the same way as has happened with historical Christianity.26 What I gathered in that conference is that all these religions are fully aware, from a normative standpoint, of the injustice of violence and I fully acknowledge that the Easter traditions have contributed in making those societies less violent. They know that the human being should withdraw from anger, resentment, envy, violence, but they are not fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism. They know what sacrifice is, and they progressively tried to forbid it. The difference that I see between them and Christianity is that the latter was able to formulate in the Gospels and unmask in a full light the anthropological mechanism of mimetic scapegoating and sacrifice.

For the young Turks, soon to assume power and build a nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Japan provided clear inspiration. These envious outside observers of Japan’s progress did not see the extreme violence of the country’s makeover. Nor did they notice the trends towards conformity, militarism and racism that were later to make Japan a ominously successful rival to Europe’s imperialist nations- by 1942, Japan would occupy or dominate a broad swathe of the Asian mainland, from the Aleutian Islands in the north-east to the borders of India, after booting out almost all the European masters in between. For many Asians in the late nineteenth century, the proof of Japan’s success lay in the extent to which it could demand equality with the West; and, here, the evidence was simply overwhelming for people who had tried to do the same and had failed miserably.

The progress of Asia’s two giants, China and India, can be neatly encapsulated by the imagery used to portray them. China is usually characterized as a dragon, aggressive and slightly frightening. India, on the other hand, is often described as an elephant—big and powerful, but also lumbering and slightly ungainly.

Also the fact that those engaged in battle, often (whether willingly or not) experience a heightened awareness of the transitory nature of life and death that prompted some teachers of Buddhism to include conflict as one of the potential areas for spiritual development and progression. Hence implications of martial arts training have been the prerogative condition, for the monks to heighten their spiritual awareness. From its earliest inception within India, the Bodhisattva Vajramukti was regarded as a powerful and potentially dangerous cathartic physical practice, because it dealt directly with the liberation and channeling of primitive energies and instincts. A teacher powerful in both body and mind was necessary to convey its principles and guide its students. These cautions were carried over into China and the resultant Chinese martial arts (Chuan Fa or Kempo) were likewise taught only to monks or devout Buddhists of a suitable disposition. Such cautions as existed both in India and China were often justified.

Dr. John G. Jackson quotes Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie as follows: “From the woolly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the Budda of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommanoacom of the Siamese, the Xaha of the Japanese, and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, and the same, and indeed an African, or rather ‘Nubian’ origin.” Most of these black gods were regarded as crucified saviours who died to save mankind by being nailed to a cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner. Of these crucified saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Quetzalcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or near December 25th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain, commonly by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend into heaven. The parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the BIBLE are so similar that progressive Bible scholars now admit that stories of these heathen have been woven into the life-story of Jesus.

Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger’s trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT. This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more sameness. But I don’t think that’s true. [...] Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Our tourists returning from abroad dwell on the poverty and misery of the great masses in Europe, Asia, Africa. They speak with pride of the abundance which we in America share. They talk of efficiency, sanitation, home comforts, high wages, the freedom to move about and to speak one's mind, and so on. They speak of the privileges as if they were American "inventions." (As if there had never been a Greece, a Rome, an Egypt, a China, an India, a Persia.) They never speak of the price we pay for these comforts, for all this progress and abundance. (As if we were free of crime, disease, suicide, infanticide, prostitution, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, military training, aramament races and the obsession with lethal weapons.)

ASANA Now I shall instruct you regarding the nature of asana or seat. Although by 'asana' is generally meant the erect posture assumed in meditation, this is not its central or essential meaning. When I use the word 'asana' I do not mean the various forms of asana’s such as Padmasana, Vajrasana, Svastikasana, or Bhadrasana. By 'asana' I mean something else, and this is what I want to explain to you. First let me speak to you about breath; about the inhaling breath-apana, and the exhaling breath-prana. Breath is extremely important in meditation; particularly the central breath-madhyama-pranan, which is neither prana nor apana. It is the center of these two, the point existing between the inhaling and exhaling breaths. This center point cannot be held by any physical means, as a material object can be held by the hand. The center between the two breaths can be held only by knowledge-jnana – not discursive knowledge, but by knowledge which is awareness. When this central point is held by continuously refreshed awareness – which is knowledge and which is achieved through devotion to the Lord – that is, in the true sense settling into your asana. On the pathway of your breath maintain continuously refreshed and full awareness on and in the center of breathing in and breathing out. This is internal asana. (Netra Tantra) Asana, therefore, is the gradual dawning in the spiritual aspirant of the awareness which shines in the central point found between inhaling and exhaling. This awareness is not gained by that person who is full of prejudice, avarice, or envy. Such a person, filled with all such negative qualities, cannot concentrate. The prerequisite of this glorious achievement is, therefore, the purification of your internal egoity. It must become pure, clean, and crystal clear. After you have purged your mind of all prejudice and have started settling with full awareness into that point between the two breaths, then you are settling into your asana. When in breathing in and breathing out you continue to maintain your awareness in continuity on and in the center between the incoming and outgoing breath, your breath will spontaneously and progressively become more and more refined. At that point you are driven to another world. This is pranayama." (Netra Tantra) After settling in the asana of meditation arises the refined practice of pranayama. ‘Pranayama’ does not mean inhaling and exhaling vigorously like a bellow. Like asana, pranayama is internal and very subtle. There is a break less continuity in the traveling of your awareness from the point of asana into the practice of pranayama. When through your awareness you have settled in your asana, you automatically enter into the practice of pranayama. Our Masters have indicated that there are two principle forms of this practice of ‘asana-pranayama’, i.e. cakrodaya and ajapa-gayatri. In the practice of ajapa-gayatri you are to maintain continuously refreshed full awareness-(anusandhana) in the center of two breaths, while breathing in and out slowly and silently. Likewise in the practice of cakrodaya you must maintain awareness, which is continually fresh and new, filled with excitement and vigor, in the center of the two breaths – you are to breathe in and out slowly, but in this case with sound. ― Swami Lakshmanjoo

If America fails in advancement, so will the world, If South America fails in liberty, so will the world. If Mexico fails in passion, so will the world, If India fails in diversity, so will the world.

Masterclass for Humans (The Sonnet) Only the Native Americans are real Americans, Everybody else is an immigrant. Before you tell someone to go back to their country, Start by heading back to Britain yourself. Only Indigenous people are real Canadians, Kiwis, and Aussies, everybody else is an immigrant. Before you yell slurs at an immigrant of today, Start by heading back to Europe yourself. Turkey was transformed by one man, Upon the foundation of thoughts most rational. Before you bring back the days of fanaticism, Start by taking down the statues of Mustafa Kemal. India never had any organized religion, Brahmin barbarians peddled a myth to have control. Before you cremate a secular beacon into safron ashes, Wipe out all memories of Kabir, Ambedkar and Tagore. From discrimination to assimilation, That's how we walk the course of progress. Till every trace of intolerance is history, Keep on struggling against mindlessness.

In the past, Koreans were bound by a caste system nearly as rigid as that of India. Noblemen wore white shirts and high black horsehair hats, while slaves wore wooden tags around their necks. The old class structure drew heavily on the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who believed that humans fit strictly into a social pyramid. Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family. From there began a downward progression of fifty-one categories that were lumped into three broad classes—the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

I felt I was back to where I belonged. An India where success doesn't lie in money. It lies in surviving. The complex India. The difficult India. The corrupt India. The honest India. The oppressed India. The feudal India. A regressive India. A progressive India. It's poor. It's filthy. It’s hard working. It smells of struggle, of co-existence, of sweat. Its diversity, its disparity, the chaos, the conflict. The aspirational India, the ignored India, the defeated India... The real India.

IN MANY RESPECTS, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals. The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people—leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class. As a chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who’d won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt. Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.

Most of all, India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste. In that sense, Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving. He hadn’t originally become prime minister as a result of his own popularity. In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi—the Italian-born widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the head of the Congress Party, who’d declined to take the job herself after leading her party coalition to victory and had instead anointed Singh. More than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party.

these states relate to the progressive age of maturation of a human being. Bala here means ‘child’; a planet in Bala Avastha will have a child-like energy to it, and like a child will not be able to exhibit the full potential of its strength. In fact, a planet in Bala Avastha displays only about one-fourth of the strength that would otherwise be predicted for it. Kumara means ‘youth’ and, like a vigorous youth, a planet in Kumara Avastha gives one-half of its results since, though strength is present, the wisdom needed to direct that strength, which is derived from experience, is usually lacking. Yuva, which also means ‘young’, indicates a young adult who has had sufficient experience to gain some of life’s wisdom. A planet in Yuva Avastha gives full results. Vriddha means ‘aged’ and indicates a planet which has entered its senior, retired years; it gives minimal results. Mrita means ‘dead’; relatively speaking, dead planets produce no results, though every planet does in some way or other give some result. Directional Strength TABLE 4.4 Directional Strength and Weakness of the Planets House Planet’s Strength Planet’s Weakness First (East) Mercury-Jupiter Saturn Fourth (North) Moon Venus Sun Mars Seventh (West) Saturn Jupiter Mercury Tenth (South) Sun Mars Moon Venus A horoscope’s tenth house corresponds to the sector of the heavens that is highest in the sky at any particular moment, while the fourth house corresponds to the sector that is underfoot, i.e. opposite the tenth house below the earth.

The Crusade against “Liberals” Promotion of Hinduism went hand in hand with an incessant fight against “liberals,” a highly derogatory term in the mouths of Hindu nationalists, which they use to refer to academics, NGOs, and journalists that do not adhere to their ideology. Bringing Universities to Heel—the Case of Jawaharlal Nehru University Universities with a “progressive” reputation have long been a Hindu nationalist target, but tensions further intensified after 2014. They have been subjected to two types of interference. First, the government appointed men from the Sangh Parivar or fellow travelers to head them with the task of reforming them. Second, the RSS student wing, the ABVP, could finally try to call the shots on university campuses with the government’s blessing. This dual strategy is most clearly apparent in the treatment inflicted on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This institution, known for the excellence of its teachers—especially in the social sciences—had drawn bitter Hindu nationalist criticism as soon as it was founded in the 1960s due to the leftist leanings of many teachers and some of its main student organizations.97 In 2016, the Modi government appointed Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar vice-chancellor of JNU. This electrical engineering professor had been teaching at the nearby Indian Institute of Technology until then, and he had allegedly played an active role in Vijana Bharati, an organization under the Sangh Parivar umbrella that aims to promote indigenous Indian science.98 He brought about drastic budget cuts—academic spending was almost halved over three years99—and a decline in student recruitment, while systematically hampering the activities of student unions and faculty opposed to the RSS. The political disciplining of the campus took various routes, such as the harassment of professors who were openly hostile to the Sangh Parivar.

The Upanishads have minutely classified every stage of spiritual advancement: - Jivanmukta ("freed while living") - a siddha ("perfected being") has progressed from the state of jivanmukta ("freed while living") to that of: - a paramukta ("supremely free" - full power over death); the latter has completely escaped from the mayic thralldom and its reincarnational round. The paramukta therefore seldom returns to a physical body; if he does return, he is: - an avatar, a divinely appointed medium of supernal blessings on the world. An avatar is unsubject to the universal economy; his pure body, visible as a light image, is free from any debt to Nature. The casual gaze may see nothing extraordinary in an avatar's form; but, on occasion, it casts no shadow nor make any footprint on the ground. These are outward symbolic proofs of an inward freedom from darkness and material bondage. [...] Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Patanjali were among the ancient Indian avatars. [...] Agastya, a South Indian avatar. - Mahavatar (Great Avatar) - Babaji's mission in India has been to assist prophets in carrying out their special dispensations. He thus qualifies for the scriptural classification of Mahavatar (Great Avatar). [...] Babaji is ever in communion with Christ; together they send out vibrations of redemption and have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age. The work of these two fully illumined masters is to inspire the nations to forsake wars, race, hatreds, religious sectarianism, and the boomerang evils of materialism.[...] Only one reason motivates Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity wit ha concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never vouchsafed a glumpse of Divinity in the flesh, he would remain oppressed by the heavy mayic delusion that he cannot transcend his mortality. - pg305-310, Chapter 33, Babaji, Yogi-Christ of Modern India

Indeed, this confusion of fundamental values with superficial tastes is one of the strangest but most important fetishes of globalization. In reality non-Westerners superficially emulate Westerners and sometimes have as much money as Westerners. They use the same technology as Westerners. They echo the same political sloganeering as Westerners. Yet they are hardly political Westerners at all. About half the planet prefers communism, theocracy, and monarchy in the Middle East, autocracy in Turkey, a vestigial caste system in India, and all sorts of non-Democratic -isms and -ologies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. And yet so often we romanticize the antithesis of America abroad, while caricaturing or ridiculing America’s traditional manifestations at home.

I heard many foreigners and not a few Indians complain about the corruption that adhered to every aspect of public and commercial life in Bombay. My few weeks in the city had already shown me that those complaints were often fair, and often true. But there's no nation uncorrupted. There's no system that's immune to the misuse of money. Privileged and powerful elites grease the wheels of their progress with kickbacks and campaign contributions in the noblest assemblies. And the rich, all over the world, live longer and healthier lives than the poor. There is a difference between the dishonest bride and the honest bribe, Didier Levy once said to me. The dishonest bribe is the same in every country but the honest bride is India's alone. I smiled when he said that because I knew what he meant. India was open. India was honest. And I liked that from the first day.

Of India he (Sir John Strachey) had pronounced (and in reissues of "India: Its Administration and Progress" continually repeated) that nothing by that name existed. "This is the first and most essential fact about India that can be learned.

Linlithgow identified the obstacles to progress as Indian political stupidity and British political dishonesty, but he was himself a master of the ability to say something which meant very little, and to decorate it with qualifications like ‘in the light of the then circumstances’, and ‘subject to such modifications as may seem desirable’.

THAT COUNTRY OR SOCIETY CAN NEVER PROGRESS, WHICH IS NOT PROUD OF ITS HISTORY AND CULTURE.

It has become a matter of great distress to me to see from day to day some of these newssheets which are full of vulgarity and indecency and falsehood, day after day, not injuring me or this House much, but poisoning the mind of the younger generation, degrading their mental integrity and moral standards. It is not for me a political problem but a moral problem. How are we to save our younger generation from this progressive degradation and the progressive poisoning of their mind and spirit?

The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and Philo, the Zend-avesta and the Kabalah, and the Sacred books of India and Egypt; and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical speculations, which had formed the larger portion of the ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those of the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which the Neo-Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident. Emanation from the Deity of all spiritual beings, progressive degeneration of these beings from emanation to emanation, redemption and return of all to the purity of the Creator; and, after the re-establishment of the primitive harmony of all, a fortunate and truly divine condition of all, in the bosom of God; such were the fundamental teachings of Gnosticism. The genius of the Orient, with its contemplations, irradiations, and intuitions, dictated its doctrines. Its language corresponded to its origin. Full of imagery, it had all the magnificence, the inconsistencies, and the mobility of the figurative style. Behold, it said, the light, which emanates from an immense centre of Light, that spreads everywhere its benevolent rays; so do the spirits of Light emanate from the Divine Light. Behold, all the springs which nourish, embellish, fertilize, and purify the Earth; they emanate from one and the same ocean; so from the bosom of the Divinity emanate so many streams, which form and fill the universe of intelligences. Behold numbers, which all emanate from one primitive number, all resemble it, all are composed of its essence, and still vary infinitely; and utterances, decomposable into so many syllables and elements, all contained in the primitive Word, and still infinitely various; so the world of Intelligences emanated from a Primary Intelligence, and they all resemble it, and yet display an infinite variety of existences. It revived and combined the old doctrines of the Orient and the Occident; and it found in many passages of the Gospels and the Pastoral letters, a warrant for doing so. Christ himself spoke in parables and allegories, John borrowed the enigmatical language of the Platonists, and Paul often indulged in incomprehensible rhapsodies, the meaning of which could have been clear to the Initiates alone.

The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.

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We have lost the light and it's almost dark. This means that we'll have to work through the night, which will slow down our progress.

A Fearful Demagogue SAVARKAR AND THE MUSLIM QUESTION AS I SUGGESTED in the introduction, only a kaleidoscopic view gives us the full picture of Savarkar’s life and thought. This is particularly important when approaching the development of his anti-Muslim views, which have over the last century become the normative views of the current Hindu right wing. In this chapter, I will weave together not one, not two, but six different strands of Savarkar’s anti-Muslim braid.1 The first strand is the Gandhi-helmed anticolonial nationalist movement in India in the post-World War I period when the colonial government put out yet another “reform” package. The second is the Caliphate as a theory, mourned ideal, and practice in its last iteration in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. The third takes us to the debates in India about the Caliphate, referred to as Khilafat in India, and, relatedly, the discussions of the proposed hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan in India among Muslim intellectuals, leaders, and businessmen.2 The fourth strand returns us to Turkey and Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. In the fifth we follow, in summary, the progress of the Indian Khilafat movement (the only such movement in the world). The sixth is the immediate cause for Savarkar’s expostulations, namely his anger about Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement. Savarkar, from house arrest, attacked virtually every iteration of the ideas and events laid out above—the idea of the Khilafat, the movement and its leaders, Gandhi, Muslims, and all Hindus who supported Khilafat. While he did not criticize the reform package, he insisted that Muslims were taking advantage of it. Once I trace the trajectory of each of these strands, I will move on to what Savarkar had to say about the Muslim question. I do this for two reasons. First, the strands allow us a broader look at the regional, national, and global context that framed Savarkar’s views. Second, Savarkar’s views about Muslims build on all of these strands, especially the way in which the Khilafat movement revealed for him the fundamental disloyalty of Muslims to India. But this was not all, for he came to see Muslims as a monolithic community that was defined as much by its proclivity for violence as by its foundational claims for a distinctive—and exclusive—political sovereignty of its own. In both cases, he felt lay extraordinary dangers for Hindus.

He visited several towns in the United Provinces, before moving on to the Punjab. Then he moved south, where, in the first week of April, the AICC met at Vijayawada. In attendance was an Andhra Congressman named P. Venkayya, who for several years had been pressing Gandhi to adopt a ‘national’ flag for the nation-in-the-making. This time too Venkayya made the same proposal, but in the design he offered, Gandhi ‘saw nothing to stir the nation to its depths’. Then Lala Hansraj of Jullundur suggested that the spinning wheel should find a place on the Swaraj Flag. Gandhi was struck by the suggestion, and asked Venkayya to give him a design containing a spinning wheel on a background of saffron (denoting Hindu) and green (denoting Muslim). The enthusiastic Venkayya produced a design in three hours. Gandhi looked at it, and realized that a colour was also needed for the other religions of India. He suggested white be added to the saffron and the green. For, ‘Hindu-Muslim unity is not an exclusive term; it is an inclusive term, symbolic of the unity of all faiths domiciled in India. If Hindus and Muslims can tolerate each other, they are bound to tolerate all other faiths.’ Gandhi further suggested the order in which the colours should be placed: white first, next green, finally saffron, in progressive order of numerical importance, ‘the idea being that the strongest should act as a shield to the weakest’. Eventually, the white was placed in the middle, between the saffron and the green, the two major religions symbolically surrounding and protecting the others.

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Jawaharlal and Jinnah had announced the founding of two new kinds of democracies. Democracy, which is the last stage of human progress.

one important limit on the pace of social progress in rural India is that higher castes are unwilling to perform traditionally untouchable work, even as more and more Dalits reject these forms of employment.

Mysore, one of the greatest princely states, was famously progressive and more industrialised than any other part of India. In Baroda, the British did its people a favour by deposing a Maharajah who spent his time commissioning carpets of pearls, and installing in his place a young prince who would earn the love and respect of his subjects by far-sighted policy. In the 1940s, the ruler of Jaipur imported a minister from Mysore and sought to replicate its successes in his desert principality, starting schools, abolishing purdah, and so on. And, of course, in the south there was Travancore, guided by a line of fairly enlightened rulers into the higher echelons of progressive governance, winning appreciation from all quarters.

Then I told him, ‘Injustice, Poverty and Discrimination is faced by a lot of Indians, and also majority, the fact is that if you “Minority” stop thinking yourself as a part of “Minority” and start thinking as the part of India, and proceed together for it’s good, then only “Minority” and majority would progress altogether.

If we place an honest, though less wealthy person on a higher pedestal than a corrupt, yet rich individual, we will have contributed to India’s progress. And

Peoples happiness should be King’s happiness. Welfare of people is King’s welfare. For a king, there is no task which is only individualistic and pleasurable to him only. It is king’s utmost duty to look after progress and welfare of people of his country.

It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

In fact, it had almost reached a solution on two occasions during its long and tragic tenure—first, when the Australian jurist, Sir Owen Dixon headed the five-member UN Commission for India and Pakistan, and second, when the Tashkent Declaration was signed. The first was frustrated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the second was set at naught by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, both of whom reached the highest positions in Indian life and politics. Unfortunately, the exit of the BJP government after the 2004 elections proved a major setback in resolving the Kashmir issue. The new United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government did not want any interference in conducting the Indo-Pak dialogue. The Committee almost suspended the excellent, results-focused work it was doing although we kept appealing to the Hurriyat not to backtrack on the agreements achieved.

The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings.

Discontent is the spur of progress.

Tolerance or intolerance can be attributed as the single most important factor in understanding the psychology of any society, viz. a viz., its attitude towards peace, progress and growth. Author (One Vs All: Beware Mr.Prime Minister, It's India Impossible)

Oh, would that I had died the way the Sikh did! I can not go forward. I shall not submit to being made to see more clearly than I do. Yet, if I turn back I am self-confessed coward! Furthermore, how can I turn back! How shall I reach India, alone, alive? As a corpse I should no longer interest myself. And if I should succeed in reaching India, I should despise myself, because you and Jimgrim treated me as fellow man and yet I failed you. On the other hand, if I go forward they will teach me the reality of things, of which already I know much too much! It has been bad enough as failed B.A. to stick my tongue into my cheek and flatter blind men-- pompous Englishmen and supine Indians--for a living. I have had to eat dust from the wheels of what the politicians think is progress; and I have had to be polite when I was patronized by men whom I should pity if I had the heart to do it! And I could endure it, Rammy sahib, because I only knew more than was good for me and not all of it by any means! I do not wish to know more. If I saw more clearly I should have to join the revolutionaries-- who are worse than those they revolute against! It is already bad enough to have to toady to the snobs on top. To have to agree with the snobs underneath, who seek to level all men to a common meanness since they can not admire any sort of superiority--that would be living death! I would rather pretend to admire the Englishman whose snobbery exasperates me, than repeat the lies of Indians whose only object is to do dishonestly and badly but much more cleverly what the English do honestly and with all the stupidity of which they are capable!

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Obama’s teacher at Harvard Law School and friend since then, has sought to hide his association with Obama. “I am a leftist,” he later told an Obama biographer, “and by conviction as well as temperament, a revolutionary. Any association of mine with Barack Obama . . . could only do harm.” Unger advocates what he terms “world revolution,” a basic takeover of financial institutions and their reshaping to serve global economic equity. For instance, Unger calls for “the dismembership of the traditional property right” in favor of what he calls “social endowments.” Most remarkably, Unger calls for a global coalition of countries—supported by American progressives—to reduce the influence of the United States. He calls this a “ganging up of lesser powers against the United States.” He specifically calls for China, India, Russia, and Brazil to lead this anti-American coalition. Unger says that global justice is impossible when a single superpower dominates. He wants a “containment of American hegemony” and its replacement by a plurality of centers of power.

Not surprisingly, my number-one rating goes to India. Its scale and underinvestment in infrastructure and its urbanization trends give it phenomenal potential. Add to that the first apparently progressive, pro-business government in its history, led by Prime Minister Modi, and India is off the charts in terms of investment potential. India is the only major emerging country to reach new highs over its 2007 peak because of this.

India’s tradition of debate and an open spirit of enquiry is critical for its economic progress,

Despite the carving out of Pakistan (and what is now Bangladesh) in the name of political Islam, and the secessionist insurgency seen in Kashmir due to similar motivations, so-called secular India did not adopt common personal laws. This happened even though Nehru changed, and rightly so, the Hindu personal laws by passing the Hindu code bills in 1955–1956. While the Hindu laws were made progressive, Muslim laws were left untouched.