Is metempsyhosis 'cheap talk'?

This is a link to Joanna Jurewicz's paper speculating on the presence of a doctrine  of metempsychosis in the Rg Veda.
She gives an interesting treatment of  the familiar 10.16.5-
5 Again, O Agni, to the Fathers send him who, offered in thee, goes with our oblations.
Wearing new life let him increase his offspring: let him rejoin a body, Jātavedas.
(Giffiths trans.)
 basing herself on the work of the Sri Lankan antropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere who stresses the ubiquity of the concept of reincarnation in 'small scale' societies and the manner in which it shores up ethnicity and diachronic identity.
However, in my view, the opposite point might, in the Hindu context, be more usefully be made- viz. reincarnation is systematically sublated, ethnicity is systematically sublated, diachronic identity is sublated, by something arising out of  the potential for Universalization that exists in a transactional view of the world.

The Vedic funeral is of particular interest because it shows how- as in the modern Economic theory of externalities- no transaction is between two parties alone, all partake of it and all are thereby transfigured. What is conserved is symmetry properties of the system as a whole and it is this conservation alone that makes it meaningful to speak of karma and dharma.
In Judaism, similarly, the concept of ibbur- that is 'partial incarnation'- has the effect of conserving halachah (the law) even by halachah vein morin kein (the law which if known forbids the action it otherwise enjoins).

Does bodily resurrection at the eschaton, give flesh to a 'costly signalling' halachah whereas is it the case that ibbur is just a cheap talk variant?
Similarly, does the notion of samadhi imply that karma kanda is a 'costly signalling' Yoga while Raja Yoga is just cheap talk?
Yes, in my view, if cognitive linguistics is correct. No, if language, as something which has evolved, is in essence reverse mereological.

The Vampire of Veluvan

The Vampire of Veluvan

  The old German lived in a Buddhist dharamshala on the edge of the old town.  Not far, but the flat rate fare wouldn't stretch to it. The trip would cost extra. What to do? These are disturbed times.

    I disdained to haggle. The tonga driver's face grew longer. He had misjudged me. “It is a bad place,” he temporized, sizing me up slyly. “Good people do not go there.”
   ‘So,’ I thought to myself- ‘some prostitutes are lodged in the dharamshala. No big surprise. Since the riots, the pilgrim trade has dried up. No doubt, the lodge keepers have found a way to appeal to a different type of customer’.
  ‘I’ll pay what you like.” I said sharply- “Just name your fee and stick to it. Mind it,no tamasha later on!”
  “No, Babu, you don’t understand.” the tonga wallah was placatory. My flash of temper had convinced him I was harmless. “It is not a good place. Unlucky. There has been talk.”

                                  “Some bad characters hanging around?” I asked.
   “No! They are too scared. It is something else. There are some foreigners there. They are old…really, too old.  What can I tell you? It is not a good place. You are young and fit.  Why risk?”
            “All right,” I said quietly, “We will go and come back quickly. It is for my work.”
  
   The dharamshala was in a deplorable condition. The lodge keeper had fled the previous year. An enterprising Jain youngster came round on his three wheeler to sell the elderly pilgrims some basic items.  He seemed a smart enough fellow. I was surprised to see that he stocked Japanese (or perhaps Korean) magazines and noodle packets. 
   Initially, he was polite and solicitous but abruptly lost interest when I mentioned who it was I had come to see. Apparently, the old German didn’t spend money here. Instead, some Sadhus, belonging to the Natha order, came to see to his needs once every fortnight or so.  

No, nobody knew why the naked Sadhus should want to look after the old foreigner.

    I stopped probing.  Ever since the riots, the townsfolk had become wary of the nanga Sadhus with their tridents and matted hair.
    The elderly Ambassador, whose memoirs I was editing, had mentioned that the old German was a Knight of Malta. He was some sort of relative of the Spy Master Gehlen.  The story I had pieced together was that he had initially been sent to Nepal on charitable work for the Sovereign Order. After the fall of the Ranas, he reappeared in Rangoon as a student of Buddhism. There are some articles he wrote for German magazines available on the internet. I don't read German, but gather that he was an admirer of U Nu. 
  After Ne Win's coup, he resurfaces in Sihanouk’s Cambodia, but, in ’65, after that puissant Prince’s deal with the Communists, he receives a sort of bedraggled entrée at the court of Sikkim’s  Gyalmo- the beautiful American blue-blood, Hope Cooke.  From there, around the time of the fall of the dynasty, the German went away to Sri Lanka. Then- the  Karmic Ouroburos of that Edenic isle having swallowed and spat him back up again- some twenty years ago, he returned to India and settled in this little pilgrim town. The Indian Government seems to have turned a blind eye to his remaining in India.  Perhaps, if he had really converted to Buddhism, he had become stateless. The Knights of Malta are a Catholic order. They would have withdrawn his passport.

   My other reason for thinking there might be a story here was because I had come across his name in a book on ‘Hitler’s High Priestess’ the French savant, known as Savitri Devi, who inspired Serrano and Evola and, now, a whole host of neo-Nazis who, strangely to my mind, have done little to build upon her foundations to secure the recognition of Hitlerism as a bona fide religion.
   My first visit to the old man did not go well. He was completely hairless, hunched, and naked. He shouted at me, in Hindi, to go away. There were two European women there- both over 70. They looked terrified. I hurriedly left.

   Later, more ashamed of my lack of savoir faire than from any higher motive, I sent over a note explaining my interest.  To my surprise, I got back a rather beautifully handwritten invitation to dinner at a local restaurant- ‘Gaylord’, I think, it was called.  The D.M, a friend of a friend, was kind enough to lend me his ‘lal batti’ car. To be frank, I was nervous about staying out late in a town so recently scourged by riots.

  Von Gehlen was very thin, perfectly bald, with creased but surprisingly pink and healthy skin. He introduced himself in good English with a degree of gentility but spoiled it by asking if I could pay for the meal. Before I could reply, he added that he had already ordered himself an expensive brandy.

  With an affectation of Teutonic bluntness, I let him know that money was not a problem. However, he continued to harp on the subject.  ‘I am too old,’ he said simply, ‘you will have to pay. If not in money, then by presenting your arse for the kicks that our good host will surely shower upon you. You see, I am too old. They worry they will have the corpse of a white man on their hands. That is the only thing that restrains them. Otherwise, they are wild beasts.’

   I called the waiter and told him to take the old man’s order. I myself would have to leave shortly- so let the bill be kept ready for me.  
   “Sahib, you came in the ‘lal batti’ car?” the waiter turned out to be the proprietor. A milder looking man could scarcely be conceived.  Far from wishing to hand out thrashings to deadbeat customers,  he had his own tale of woe to tell.  But, by this stage, I just wanted to escape. This trip had been a waste of time.

  The old man was enjoying his brandy. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave, I would have felt sorry for him. He was in his eighties. This might be his last occasion to eat in a restaurant- not fancy by any means, but, perhaps, the best this little town could offer.
  

   Simply to give him face, I muttered a couple of questions about Savitri Devi and Julius Evola and Ambassador Serrano and so forth.

   He immediately assumed an air of bemusement- did anyone take those cranks seriously? 
 

   I remembered that the German word ‘krank’ means a sick man, rather than a nut-job.  Heidegger’s comment on Celan- ‘Celan ist krank heillos’- came to mind.  For some inexplicable reason, I spoke my thought aloud.

 “Celan” he said, correcting my accent, “You like his poetry?”
   “Too deep for me” I said truthfully.

   Perhaps, it wasn’t very tactful to bring up the meeting between the Jewish poet and the Nazi philosopher. Let the old man enjoy his brandy.
   “Yes.” said the old man, “He had depth. Unfortunately, the River Seine had more. Who would have thought it?”
   “Were you in Sri Lanka during the Black July pogrom?” I surprised myself. It wasn’t a question I had intended to ask.
   “What? Yes... I suppose so. I saw some killings myself. The villagers had got hold of a  Strassenvalze- do you say road roller? So they used that on the children and the old people and the too stupid to run away. You are…Tamil?”
   I was astonished. Could the German be reading my mind? I’d read that thing about the steamroller in a book by R.D Laing. The great psychiatrist was in Sri Lanka to learn some advanced meditational technique to slow down Time- that single, spokeless, Strassenvalze wheel of King Menander's otherwise non-existent chariot- and freeze the elusive moment which, the Buddhists maintain, is the only reality. 
   It occurred to me, I would have said Milinda- not Menander- and, suddenly, the brandy tasted vile.
 I asked the proprietor to hurry up with the main course.

“I heard you were a Knight of Malta.”
“In another life… another, do you say habilitation?|”
“No, we don’t say that. Do you mean incarnation? Another birth?”
“No. Habilitation. A course of higher studies. Do you have such things here?”

   “Yes, we abound in it. In India, possession of a PhD qualifies you for better treatment in Jail. All the apprentice gangsters have PhDs. You may have seen them busily completing their habilitations during the recent riots. ”

“So, there is progress. Good. And you yourself are…”
“Not a PhD. Don’t worry. The restauranteur will get paid in money, not kicks.”
‘So, you are not an academic. Perhaps, a journalist?”
“No. Definitely not a journalist.”
“But political.. you ask about Savitri Devi and that old paralytic- Julius Evola…”

  “He was paralyzed? I somehow thought he was a mountaineer like …urm... y'know, the British poet, the enemy of Yeats at the Golden Dawn... y'know...the guy who persuaded Ananda  Coomaraswamy to try a bit of wife-swapping...sorry, the name was on the tip of my tongue....” 

          It was the British occultist, Aleister Crowley, whose name had slipped my memory.
The old German was peering at me intently. Suddenly, he grinned.
Could he, not just read my mind, but actually disorder my thoughts?

    But no, why should he bother? He was busy with his brandy. He had already achieved his objective. He had established his ascendancy.  Put simply, I was spooked and I would stay spooked. I might as well just pay the bill and go home. Chalk it up to experience. Old Germans living in derelict dharamshalas are still no objects for pity or, worse, the sort of fuzzy-minded mystagogy some middle class Indians still occasionally go in for.

 “Did you know Evola, in Germany, during…urm.. your military service?”

   I had remembered that Evola was hit by a shell that paralyzed him while working for the SS in the last days of the war.

Except, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually known that.

Thought transference?

Was I tapping into the German's private portal to the collective Unconscious?

“He was in Vienna. I was on the Eastern Front.”
“That must have been…”
 “Glorious? Yes. War is glorious... to the young. For a fit man who is young.” 
He looked pointedly at my thick eyeglasses. 
“Perhaps, you know the poem by Tyrtaeus…”
“That lame school teacher? He was before my time.”
“Since he lived a few centuries before Alexander- I suppose he must have been!”
The old man grimaced. “All soldiers are contemporaries.”
“The Buddha was not a soldier.”
“Is that what they teach you nowadays?”
He blinked at me happily, like a lizard in the sun.
"Forgive me. I did not know. It explains so much.”

    Karma, I thought- or thought that I thought- for, perhaps, the German was putting these thoughts into my head... Still, either way, I had brought this on myself. The truth was, I just wanted a bit of local colour, I had no interest in the man himself. There was a slot, in my new novel, for an old European aristocrat living in an Ashram or dharamshala in some little town- perhaps in the Himalayas…actually, definitely, the Himalayas… and he’d say wise things in a German accent and maybe quote Novalis… no, Holderlin- the God within us always lonely & poor- or better yet, Heidegger on Holderlin- the poet's blighting illness as Being's recovered future from which our salvation will come as a god-… and… and… I don’t know, the whole thing would have been kind of mystical with a bit of a sentimental undercurrent and, well, kind of sophisticated.
   
   Instead, I was stuck playing the role of the pretentious, bespectacled, Babu upon whom this elderly Hitlerite hooligan could practice his mind games while leaving me to pick up the tab. 

            I called for the bill. “I’m sorry, I have to go… the District Magistrate lent me his car.”

    Von Gehlen ignored me. I was relieved. What if he really was a hypnotist, like Aleister Crowley? Or, worse a vetala, a vampire- there had been unexplained deaths in the vicinity of the dharamshala…- where better for a vampire to hide himself than a riot plagued Pilgrim town?

    I was out of my depth. I don’t do Horror. Well, Dracula maybe- but this was shaping up to be H.P effing Lovecraft! How get out of it? Got to let my lower middle class, N.R.I, instincts take over. When you look into the abyss- thus sprach Neitzche- take an effing snapshot on your camera-phone, otherwise, the abyss will look back into you. 
    Maybe I should take a snapshot of the menu- which by a typesetter's error translated ' Athithi Devo Bhavah' as 'The Guest is Cod"- or find some billboard with a hilarious example of Indian English I could post up on my blog. 
                                        I never actually did take a snapshot of the menu.
              Just that zikhr-e-sukhan- the mere memory of my blog- was enough to save me.

“Will you visit me again?” the old man was crying. “No one comes. No one comes. The abbot said he would send me V.I.P visitors. I would conduct lecture tours. My books would be published. That was 20 years ago. They have forgotten me. Everyone has forgotten me.”

    I asked the driver to turn on the siren. “Sahib,” he said, “It is against regulations. Lal batti can only be turned on for official business.”
   “Arre, it is for your own safety I am telling!” I replied, “There is a vetala behind! I was clever to trick. But, why take chances? No backchat, just drive fast, I say!"

Manmohan Singh slaps Sharad Pawar.

Followers of this blog well know of its unstinting admiration for Manmohan, aka Man Mountain, Singh. Recently, outraged by Sharad Pawar's opposition to Sonia Ji's new Food Bill, Manmohan has manned up, done his press-ups, applied some Grecian 2000 to his beard and gone and slapped the NCP leader.

Well done, Manmohan. Always thought you had it in you. Now kindly put the smack down on Amartya Sen.

Harvard sacks Subramaniyam Swamy

Subramaniyam Swamy is a Mathematical Economist. In other words, an idiot. Anything he writes about Politics or Culture or the Law is bound to be egregiously and recklessly false, mischievous, and fatal to any cause he holds dear.

Harvard has finally given him the sack over an article where he says-

'India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors are Hindus. Even Parsis and Jews in India have Hindu ancestors. Others, who refuse to so acknowledge or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration can remain in India, but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected

representatives).'

There is only one person in India to which the above stricture applies- Sonia Gandhi. But, she has been popularly elected whereas Swamy has lost his seat. She has formed a Government which has been returned to power and whose legitimacy is unquestioned. 

There is no Muslim who does not acknowledge that they are descended from idolators. According to Islam, the father of Abraham, himself, was an 'aatish parast' fire-worshipping idolator. Swamy knows all this very well. The Jews weren't always faithful to Jehovah- if not a Holy Cow, they had a Golden Calf. No Jew, and therefore no Christian, denies that he or she is descended from idolators. True those ancestors may have lived far away but, don't you know, entire world plus many other planets were conquered by Emperor Bharata? Francis Wilford said Britain itself was nothing but the Sweta Dwipa of the Puranas. Thus everybody in the world is descended from Hindus because G.o.I, as well as Swamy defines Hinduism as any and every species of animism, shamanism, idolatory or vodoo practised by anyone not of an Abrahamic Religion. That's why, BJP MP's have to convert to Islam just so as to legitimize their second marriage even though both Polygyny and Polyandry are normative within Hinduism.

Swamy knows all this. His brother-in-law is Jewish, his wife Parsi, his son-in-law Muslim and his sister-in-law Christian. Yet reckless disregard for the truth has become his trademark, his one asset. These supposed Mullahs who deny they are descended from Jahil idolators don't exist, not even in Swamy's fevered imagination. The whole thing is a rhetorical flourish. If he had written instead 'Only one person shouldn't hold elective office in India- Sonia Gandhi.' people would have laughed at him. After all, even if Sonia Ji weren't an MP, she'd still be running the Govt. She could get her maid-servant elected and save herself the bother of visiting her constituency.

Swamy is a Tamil Brahmin. This is what he proposes ' Implement Uniform Civil Code, make Sanskrit learning compulsory and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India as Hindu Rashtra in which only those non-Hindus can vote if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors are Hindus. Re-name India as Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors are Hindus.'

Does Swamy seriously think that the people of Tamil Nadu will sit quietly by while some idiot Brahmin forces them to learn Sanskrit? Does he not remember how the Tamils in Sri Lanka reacted when their Govt. tried to make Sinhala compulsory? Is he utterly mad?

No. He's an economist from Harvard, They're all fuckwits who shouldn't be let out in public without a minder for their own safety.

Still, Swamy's sacking by Harvard may yet redound to his credit. Perhaps, we will now get some plain speaking from him about the scandal that is National Income Accounting and Developmentalist chicanery.

Veena Malik vs. Chief Justice Katju.

The Pakistani media is up in arms because Veena Malik has appeared nude in an Indian magazine with I.S.I stamped on her arm.

The Indian Media, however, have said nothing about Chief Justice Katju's much more shameful and embarrassing public 'uryani', despite the fact that he is now their overseer.

I think, as part of Indo-Pak confidence building talks, Katju should be forced to pose nude for the Daily Jang with RAW stamped on his backside. In exchange, Veena Malik may kindly be appointed Chairman of the Press Council of India.
Provided, of course, she keeps her clothes on. Katju's uryani should suffice for the whole sub-continent.

Katju is racist and misogynist for holding India to be 'an Urdu-Sansrkit culture.

Chief Justice Katju is a Kashmiri Brahmin. He comes from good, in the sense of deeply parochial, people, who so long as they steer clear of Populist Politics, don't necessarily fuck themselves up big time, indeed, occasionally,  should  they genuinely apply themselves,  they can do well as barristers or brokers or bagmen- if not, or seldom, as peerless scholars. 


Now, I've no doubt Katju is a nice guy but he's real stupid and ignorant. Compare him to people like Chief Justice Gajendragadkar or Anantanarayananan- equal masters of Sanskrit and English and their own mother tongue-  and one becomes aware of the steep fall in the quality of the Judiciary arising out of (for those recruited from Katju's crooked, supposedly India conserving, 'Universal Culture'- as opposed to people who are or are prepared to be Judges coz Judging- i.e. rationality-as-impartiality-  is their metier) the dramatic fall in their real wage.


This crazy old coot thinks that Sanskrit, as opposed to Tamil or Bengali, was the only language fit for scientific enquiry or rigorous thought. He is wrong. Maths, Medicine and Science existed before and after Paninian Sanskrit.  Look at the epigraphic evidence you worthless fuckwit. Ind's great scholarly lineages and centres of learning evolved before Classical Sanskrit. Jains, Buddhists, Ajvikas, etc, had a considerable and diverse literature in various Prakrits. True, Classical Sanskrit functioned as a sort of academic lingua franca, in the same manner that Arabic and Latin did, but there are important Medical, Legal, Mathematical and other manuscripts written in Pali, Ardhamaghadi, Tamil and so on. Katju's Kashmiri ancestors did propagate something new in Sanskrit for a couple of centuries about a thousand years ago. But, it wasn't Maths or Science, but Tantric psilosophy and Dhvani aesthetic doctrine, neither of which are vehicles for enquiring minds as opposed to corrupt mystagogues. Indeed, Sanskrit verse, especially in polished and allusive form, was highly unsuitable for the preservation of Mathematical or other exact knowledge. The actual working papers and full development of the discourse was probably in the vernacular- Sanskrit prose, or macaronics, can get awfully tangled very quickly- and so, I think, the Sanskrit shite which has come down to us was a sort of prestige publication. Al Biruni, whom I take for an  armchair scholar waxing wise off the labour of his Hindu slaves, and who I don't believe ever visited India, blamed the Indian love of Sanskrit poetry- verbose, witless shite- for the unintelligibility, inaccuracy, and negligible intellectual impact of their works as presented in Classical Sanskrit.  What that old fraud and plagiarist didn't realize was that the Sanskrit versification was done after the thesis had been formulated by the author and that it was memorized by students before proper induction into that field of studies by the instructor.  In that sense, it had a dhvani suggestiveness and leant beauty and grace to a burgeoning and ultimately shared Bildungs-Lebenswelt, so to speak. True, a lot of people in useful professions may have been able to read and even write Classical Sanskrit. What they didn't do is think in it, argue in it, or provide complete prose treatments of their theories in it. Since Classical Sanskrit took more effort to write, the most laborious and worthless type of literary work- viz. euphonious versification replete with allusion and assonance- became its province, not as a stimulus to thought but purely as ornamentation. 


The problem is this sort of glistering Sanskrit chandas tend to get preserved while local language texts are superseded. Most maths work was probably in vernaculars like the yukitbhasa of Jyeshtadeva.
Katju disagrees.
He says-  'Science requires precision. Panini made Sanskrit a powerful vehicle in which scientific ideas could be expressed with great precision and with great clarity and it was made uniform all over India, so that thinkers in one part of the sub-continent could interact with thinkers of another part easily. That was his great contribution.' 

Panini did not endow Sanskrit with precision, if by precision is meant certainty as to the referent. What he did was to make it easy to write correct Sanskrit- according to his own rules. Indeed, only Paninian Sankrit is sufficiently artificial to permit the writing of a book which has two quite different meanings or tells two totally different stories simultaneously.  This is possible because the artificiality of the language encourages ornamentalism such that synonyms grow exponentially by synechdoche. One reason it was easy to write correct Sanskrit was because- once words lost precision w.r.t to the emotional or other valence of the referent- nothing constrained the writer to only expressing a thought which he had actually formulated for himself rather than sacrificing all for euphony.  We, in English, or any actual spoken language, can tell the difference between a grammatically correct but meaningless sentence such as 'Green ideas sleep furiously' because, since childhood, a specific discipline has been applied to us- viz. to avoid talking shite. No such discipline applied to writers of Sanskrit shite. That's why it's shite. 

Greek is still the bedrock for the vocabularies of Medicine and Physics but the Greeks had no Panini who permitted all words to become synonyms. Instead, they had Aristotle, who used observation of Nature to make distinctions between things in the world, to taxonomise things on the basis of genus and species, such that words cease to be synonyms and Thought, to express itself without risk of censure, must refer in a precise way to alternate states of the world. 

What Greek literature teaches Western European Vernaculars is that grammar don't fucking matter. Rigour of thought does. Ornamental euphonious shite is shite only because Ornamentalism is shite, Euphuism is shite. Don't fucking do it. Don't inhale. Just say no. 

What matters is Thought- and Thought, to be worthy of expression, must be precise and refer directly and unambiguously to states of the world. You may say- ah! but what about Wittgenstein's similarity to Bhratrhari? Fuck off. Wittgenstien was a fuckwit. He produced not one single Scientific or Mathematical advance. The same goes for any talk of fucking Heidegger, or Gadamer or Derrida and other such fuckwits. Lacan never fucking cured anybody. He was a quack. If their shite is similar to Sanskrit shite- its coz both were and are shite and even if you are a total fuckwit, are you being paid enough to puff that sort of fuckwittery? You're not being paid? You're prostituting yourself gratis? That's just sad, dude.

English, at present, is the International language of Science. Why? Is it because English is more precise than other languages or that it has a scientific grammar? Not at all. English speaking countries dominate militarily, economically, culturally and also in terms of Academic Research.

Ancient India needed a lingua franca. Some artificial system like that of Panini would, in all likelihood, been the solution to the co-ordination problem. However, because Panini's solution allows stupid fuckwits, like Katju, to think they are thinking just because they are writing or speaking grammatically, the solution was decidedly sub-optimal. 

 He says- 'Bengali and Tamil have only stories, novels and moral literature (like Thirukkural) but they do not have any discussion on mathematics, law, medicine, etc. Sanskrit was the language of people with an enquiring mind, who enquired about everything, and therefore there is a whole range of subjects which have been discussed in Sanskrit. '
This is racist. This Kashmiri Pandit, whose ancestral vocation was Sanskrit related, is telling us Tamils didn't have enquiring minds. If by chance their minds suddenly become enquiring, immediately they become Sanskrit speakers. 
The Chief Justice is also a misogynist. In Classical Sanskrit plays, women speak Prakrit. This shows they don't have enquiring minds. They are stupid. 


The truth is Classical Sanskrit, in the hands of Katjus's ancestors, became a resource for the fabrication of Tantric texts which supposedly endowed magical powers on the elite practitioners of its sordid and absurd rituals.  Yet Katju thinks this sort of Sanskrit was 'the language of people with enquiring minds'. Why? The fuckwit thinks people with enquiring minds want to gain super-powers for themselves while letting the country go rot. This is not true. People with enquiring minds know, a priori, that reading some worthless Sanskrit shite and fucking your daughter don't make you God. It just won't happen. Katju won't believe me. People like him think they have 'enquiring minds'. All they enquire after is how they can give themselves a leg up and grab more power and prestige for themselves. That's what minds are for. What is worth enquiring about is power, pelf and privilege for oneself alone, nothing for the Common Weal.  But, so what if some fucking Tantric actually gains God like powers by fucking his daughter or feeding on corpses or whatever? The guy remains a fuckwit who won't use his powers for any good for the rest of us. And what's the point of being a God if you can't do anything for suffering creatures? 
For Katju and his ilk, enquiring minds are greedy only to posess Sanskrit of this Kashmiri Tantric sort and Urdu of the sycophantic 'please, please Laat Saab, increase my pension by reducing the share of my cousins because the back of your hand is the qibla of kisses and the palm of your hand is the ka'ba of hope'.
Vernacular languages, like Tamil, Bengali, Gujerati and so on are bound up with a country to which all its speakers owe loyalty. If the country progresses, all are better off. On the other hand, if your Uncle becomes a Tantric God- I should say demon rather- he will fuck you up and he will fuck up the place where you live. Same goes for if this Uncle manages to suck up to the new Governor. His gain is your loss. Worthless artificial, euphuistic macaronic, languages like Katju's Sanskrit or Urdu are a menace to the Common Weal.
Read Valmiki Ramayan, or Bhagvad Gita by all means. They aren't Tantric shite. They are pure poetry because they are genuinely profound and seek to advantage all equally- not confer magical powers on some fuckwit who has sex with his daughter or chews corpses by night.


There is not a single book, written in Sanskrit, on Maths, Medicine, Law, or any other field, published in the last 200 years, which isn't a great steaming pile of crap compared to stuff in Tamil, Bengali and other such languages.  True, Shyamji Krishna Varma started out as a Sanskrit orator, but the point about him is that he abandoned that worthless vocation for Herbert Spencer's Sociology and Revolutionary Politics. Varma had an enquiring mind. Katju has shit for brains. Compared to him, the syphilitic whores of the Indian Journalistic community start looking quite smart.
For the generation born after Independence, English has utterly eclipsed every and any Indian language. Not because English is more 'scientific' or 'logical' or 'moral' or 'refined' but because every official Indian language is way more 'scientific' and 'logical' and 'moral' and 'refined' and scholarly and noble and, in consequence, is suitable for nothing by pi-jaw, hypocrisy and lies. Not being able to read an Indian language, even your own mother tongue, is a good thing because it protects you from the shite the netas and their ideological stooges spout. In the 1940's there was a Marxist historian, living in Moscow, who made a point of writing in Hindi. Since then, there is not a single serious Academic, working in any field, who writes exclusively in an Indian language. Indeed, it is now compulsory to submit an English version of one's dissertation to get a Phd- a vital qualification for a career criminal because its possession automatically qualifies one for better treatment in jail-  in every subject save vernacular literature.


We can't adopt English as our National language because many of our people who know it and are in positions of authority are demonstrably the most worthless cunts in history. But, English aint the shite spouted by Katju. And that other, non Katju, English is the English everybody in India wants to know. Nobody wants to know Urdu or Sanskrit unless they already know non-Katju English or are just fucked in the head.
Sanskrit Mimamsa, of Katju's sort, is utter stupidity. So is learning Paninian Sanskrit. That is why Sankaracharya, in his Bhaja Govinda, condemned it as sheer foolishness. Katju is a fuckwit of truly epic proportions. Sanskrit is dead. No one who quotes it is not a fool or a knave or both. 


Katju thinks he belongs to the 92% of Indians who are immigrants. Urdu, however, unlike Sanskrit, was born in India and thus not an immigrant. This places it on a higher footing than Tamil, which is merely regional. True, Katju says Munda speakers belong to the 8% of Indians who are not immigrants. However, they speak an Austric language which, therefore, must be an immigrant (otherwise, Katjus thesis that people never emigrate from India is contradicted). Urdu alone is a wholly Indian language. A great injustice has been done to this true son of the soil by all these immigrant languages, like Tamil. The State of Jammu and Kashmir has adopted Urdu as its official language.  Those stupid Tamils- lacking enquiring minds because they reject Sanskrit- should take the hint and kindly follow suit. 
This is the fugugly fellow below.

Where precisely did you immigrate from you worthless pile of shite? Could you kindly fuck off back there? 


You get 2000 dollars a month and think 2000 dollars a month worth of deeply janitorial thought.
For example-
'Unlike Hindi, Urdu is a language with real 'dam'. '
If you write poetry in Hindi it is bound to be shite. Write in Urdu and you have a chance. Real poets write in Urdu. If they don't know Urdu, they're fucked.
I see. So, Harivansh Rai Bacchan wrote shite did he? How come his books outsold Urdu shite? Katju won't tell us.
Tagore wasn't a poet- why? He wrote in Bengali, not Urdu. Iqbal was a poet. He was descended  from Kashmiri Brahmins and wrote crap in Urdu, while priding himself on his un-idiomatic Persian. However, only his English prose is without blemish and not utterly risible.


Still, Katju has a point. Iqbal used Urdu to build and unify a Nation. Not India but Pakistan. You are in  the wrong country dude. But you already know that because you are a self-professed immigrant. 


Like Ghalib, who genuinely was an immigrant, Iqbal considered Urdu a deeply second rate language. Incidentally, the best novelist in Urdu, Abdullah Hussein, switched to English. Why? Urdu wasn't his mother tongue and, by the 70's, it was clearly fucked. 
Faiz, for whom Farsi was a mother tongue, started writing crap English verse. Why? Urdu was played out- or rather it was a neverwozzer.
Serious poetry was always written in Persian. However, the Persians consider only Amir Khusrau- who wrote in Hindvi, not tarted up Urdu- a true poet. 
Kashmir's Nund Reshi- because he didn't know either Persian or Sanskrit or Urdu, did not have an enquiring mind nor did his poetry have 'real dam'.


What Sanskrit and Urdu have in common is that they appeal to deeply provincial fuckwits who get a thrill out of feeling superior to other people. Neither language is difficult to learn and one can say really trite things in them while still feeling you're being terribly profound.


Katju's real thesis- though he doesn't know it- is that India should break up. Nothing holds it together. At least, nothing worthwhile. 
India does not have a 'Sanskrit-Urdu' culture. Both languages have been shown to be worthless shite. Nobody believes God will grant your prayer if you can talk to him in Sanskrit. Nobody still thinks their Urdu ghazal will win them a pot of gold from the Sultan.  Those days are gone.


Sanskrit, at one time, served as a sort of link language but it is utter shit and nobody, literally nobody, writes anything in it. Urdu too, very briefly, held a sort of prestige. But, it's shite. Arabic is worthwhile. Persian is worthwhile. Urdu is third rate. The point about Urdu, in the old days, was that it was a stepping stone to Persian as Persian was a stepping stone to Arabic. Now, Urdu is not needed. You can learn Arabic and Persian directly and not have to struggle to rid yourself of your Urdu accent and infelicities of style.


Official Urdu or Hindi or Tamil, etc, is just a direct translation of Bureaucratic English into a stilted jargon.  But, instead of mastering that crap, why not just learn Maths and functional English- or Globish as a French Academic has named it?


Why be part of a country whose Chief Justice is a racist, misogynist, fool who can't frame a logical argument to save his life? 
India is a country where, if Katju-style sententious stupidity is allowed to get the upper hand, not 92% but 100% of the population will want to emigrate. The only practicable way this can happen is if India is officially designated as having boundaries as small as the Vatican State. Which part of New Delhi should it enclose? Obviously the chiddiyaghar- the zoo, Katju- teach your Sanskrit Urdu culture to the animals. I hope they eat you.


Incidentally- this is you on Ghalib-

Eemaan mujhe roke hai, kheeche hai mujhe kufra kaaba mere peeche hai, kalisa mere aage”

i.e. “Faith is stopping me, while atheism is pulling me forward.  Kaaba is behind me, the Church is in front.” Here the word `Kaleesa’ only ostensibly means `Church’, but its real meaning is modern civilization.  Thus Ghalib, like many Urdu writers, is opposed to feudal civilization and commends modernism. So, Katju- you think you know Urdu but can't understand one of the oldest tropes in Islamic literature. You think, the Church, for Ghalib, represented progress and the Ka'aba backwardness. I see.  Fatwa time anyone? You think you know Sanskrit Mimamsa, but can't reason worth a damn- what is wrong with you? Oh. I see. You didn't take bribes as a Judge. So your owe it to the Public to explain that your failure in this respect was entirely due to feeble-mindedness rather than lack of 'Urdu-Sanskrit' culture. Well done thou good and faithful servant. Now depart in peace. By which we mean- shut the fuck up.

Debbie does Dharamsala- Tibetan Tulkus & Tantric Sex Slaves.

As a kid in Sikkim, my Mum often warned me about White women. They were probably anthropologists who might mistake me for a pygmy of some as yet undiscovered tribe and try to have sex with me. In Papua New Guinea, or Irian Jaya or some such place, an American Anthropologist had tracked down an tiny wrinkled old man in the Jungle and begun raping him while claiming to be married to him. The Indonesian army managed to drag her off him and repatriate her to the U.S. True, Hope Cooke and George Orwell's friend who married Kazi Lendup Dorjee, weren't actually guilty of rape. But, they weren't feminist academics either. At least they didn't write serious feminist books.

Not so, June Campbell who became a Buddhist nun and slept with some smelly old man. This was a clear case of abuse because ...urm... he was a Tibetan monk rather than some random dude from the homeless shelter and she wasn't drunk off her head or only doing it coz she lost a bet or something. The question that Feminism must face is why smelly old fuckwits from far away places still want to stick their dicks into vaginas?

The answer it turns out is 'because of the deep Power ditopology of the 14 dimensional interaction of the Patriarchical peristalsis of the Post-Kristevan Chora and all men are shits and gimme tenure already.'

This is from the article in the Independent previously linked to- my comments in bold.

' To outsiders, the Rinpoche was one of the most revered yogi-lamas in exile outside Tibet.  To outsiders, the Ratcathcer or whatever was some  smelly old fuckwit charlatan refugee from some place nobody every heard of. As abbot of his own monastery, he had taken vows of celibacy and was celebrated for having spent 14 years in solitary retreat. Smelly homeless guy was a Doctor or Witch Doctor or whatever back in his smelly old homeland but basically the guy was a smelly homeless dude of some foreign sort so DON'T GIVE HIM A FUCKING BLOW JOB. Among his students were the highest-ranking lamas in Tibet.  This smelly old dude who kept getting BJs off our June had students as perverted as himself amongst the highest ranking perverts back wherever.  "His own status was unquestioned in the Tibetan community," said Ms Campbell, "and his holiness attested to by all." 

The inner circles of the world of Tibetan Buddhism - for all its spread in fashionable circles in the West - is a closed and tight one. As opposed to Ms Campbell's. Her claims, though made in a restrained way- 'Debbie does Dharamsala' not having quite the right ring-  in the context of a deeply academic book subtitled "In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism", provoked what she described as a primitive outpouring of rage and fury. "I was reviled as a liar or a demon," she said during a public lecture last week at the non-sectarian College for Buddhist Studies in Sharpham, Devon. "In that world he was a saintly figure. It was like claiming that Mother Teresa was involved in making porn movies."

But it was not fear of the response which made her wait a full 18 years before publishing her revelations in a volume entitled Traveller in Space - a translation of dakini, the rather poetic Tibetan word for a woman used by a lama for sex. It took her that long to get over the trauma of the experience. "I spent 11 years without talking about it and then, when I had decided to write about it, another seven years researching. I wanted to weave together my personal experience with a more theoretical understanding of the role of women in Tibetan society to help me make sense of what had happened to me."

Frankly, the amazing thing is that the smelly old dude in question wasn't totally bent and didn't weep tears of blood on being confronted by a vag. 

Monasteries just aren't good places for heterosexual males to spend their whole fucking lives. They're great for butt sex or no sex, but if what your genes want you to do is to get with a vag, then they can seriously fuck you up.

But, Campbell's Monk didn't get her preggers- so still kind of missing the point about vaginas, Holy Tibetan dude.  What makes them super special is that's where babies come from. And trying to help your kids with their Homework will soon disabuse you of any notion you might have that you're  'enlightened' or don't need to a second mortgage on your after-life to pay for College what with the way tuition fees keep going up.

 For which, personally, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.