Dealing With the Gandhi Within
Gandhi arouses strong reactions in Indians. Some love him, declaring him to be the greatest man who ever lived, next only to Buddha. Others hate him too much, calling him the person who deluded India with promises of pseudo-secularism. What is the truth? And was Gandhi the only one to be blamed. Was Hindu society also a culprit? Read this article to know the answers and solutions to these problems.
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KYC – Know Your Civilization: Recognizing the Distinctive Soul of India
In this brilliant and searing piece, Sargun Kaur combines personal experience and penetrative insight into civilizational problems. She explores her own journey of de-colonization of the Hindu psyche, through four defining works. Through these works and her understanding of them, she affirms how India should be imagined or looked at by our younger generation.
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The Making of Ramayana – Mark Tully on Ramanand Sagar’s Epic Creation
Ramayana is the dearest story to Hindus. Almost everyone knows it by heart. In modern times, Ramanand Sagar made a serial on it which was aired on Doordarshan. It was a hit like no other in the history of television. Traffic would stop. Shops would shut. Offices would halt, when the serial was going on. People would cry watching it. In hundreds. And yet, the 'secular intellectuals' of that period called it the most heinous production of fascist, Nazi, rightist, mass-murdering Hindus. That is how vicious, anti-people, anti-human left-liberal criticism can get. In this piece, Mark Tully, in his wonderfully pacifying style, tells us how important the serial was to India. How it connected to the very soul of India. As the serial is once again aired in these hard times, let us read what Mark Tully had to say about the audio-visual rendering of the greatest story ever told.
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The Traditional and the Secular Festival
This article compares the traditional and the secular festival and stresses the need to preserve and propagate the traditional festivals. While the traditional festival exhorts the individual to take part in the wider celebration of Nature, Culture and Cosmos, the secular festival drags him deeper into the mire of individualistic ego bolstering. This article discusses the distinction between the two.
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Karma is Not Fate
In this excerpt, Will Durant, the world famous historian discusses the ideas of Karma and rebirth in Hindu philosophy. He also compares it with the notion of fate in the West and tells us how it is different from fate. This is an excerpt from “Our Oriental Heritage”, the first volume of the monumental history of the world by Will Durant.
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Examination of Advaita Spirituality – Dharma vs. Religion – Part 2
Sita Ram Goel in this brief excerpt discusses the principle of Advaita and the concept of spirituality according to Indic culture. He analyzes seven aspects of Advaita and Indian spirituality and also compares it with the Prophetic Monotheistic mindset.
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The Islamic Conquest of India
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
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The Fifth Veda
This is an excerpt from the book “Veda Mimansa – Volume 1” by Shri Anirvan. The Vedanta in reality is the culmination of the Vedic philosophy. It is the exposition of the meaning of the Veda from the standpoint of ‘Knowledge’ (Vijnana). Therefore, it may be said that in order to discover the meaning of the mantras, we have to have a foundation of comprehensive knowledge of the Upanisad, an intimate acquaintance with the Trantra, the Purana and a direct experience of the methods of the Yogic and Tantrik spiritual praxis.
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The Implosion of the Welfare State Model
The simplest way in which the advanced welfare state will lose attractiveness is the looming bankruptcy of the European welfare states. The financial bankruptcy is not anything that even the cleverest planner can avoid. As publicly financial benefits grow, so do the populations who find that they need them. The more people who need benefits, the more government bureaucracy is required. The more people who rely on support from the government and the larger the government, the fewer the people in the private sector who pay for the benefits and for the apparatus of the state. The larger the number of people who depend on government either for benefits or for their jobs, the larger the constituency for voting for ever-larger government.
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The Problem with the Welfare State
This is an excerpt from the book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" by Charles Murray. The book gives two models of society: the American Project and The European Welfare State. The author makes a critique of the Welfare State of Europe, analyzing its inherent unsustainability and internal faults and presents another alternative model which is hinged equally on responsibilities and rights.
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