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Rajya – a draft

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Notwithstanding the opinions of the author on the divinity of Rāmacandra as an avatāra of Nārāyaṇa or his opinions on the status of the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas(since I will stick to tradition here),this is still a good piece.

Heterodoxian's avatarThe Heterodoxian

The foremost selling points of democracy and universal suffrage are that it provides for stable, just governance, freedom of the populace, equal rights, equal power and thereby peaceful power transition, along with a platform to resolve differences through bipartisanship rather than through open conflict.

The US perhaps comes closest to India among all democracies in terms of population and diversity. They ended up being so polarized within a hundred years of its founding that it resulted in the nation splitting up and the two sides going to war with each other. Disagreement was resolved through conquest. Within a few decades of implementing universal suffrage and the loss of a common binding cause (the Cold War), the US again became severely polarized – the most it has been since the Civil War era according to Jonathan Haidt’s data. Worse, the two sides seem intent on demonizing the other side rather…

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The Lord of Arasavalli,a painting

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The deity

…A painting in the maṇṭapa (of Sri Sūryanārāyaṇa)

The image in question: The deities in here are(spelt in Harvard-Kyoto conventions)

  • Sūryanārāyaṇa
  • Piṅgala,Daṇḍin(Citragupta,Yamarāja)
  • Mahāśvetā(between Sūryanārāyaṇa’s feet)
  • Uṣā and Pratyuṣā(the two archer Goddesses at the side,also called the Māricī-s)
  • Surya’s charioteer Aruṇa
  • The seven horses
  • Brahmā and Śiva at the sides (the central Aditya being implicitly identified with Viṣṇu)

More can be noted here for those interested in an introduction https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/a-note-on-the-pantheon-of-the-indian-saura-tradition/

A friend’s remarks on Sanskrit being taught at schools-its current state,with my remarks from personal experience at the end

abhinnah_api1 Comment

School Sanskrit curriculum was not a shot of encouragement but an inoculation against ever being interested Sanskrit.

Vapid, uncool content. Completely unnatural language teaching methodology. Not even a viva voce requirement.

Leaves the student with zero skills, no feeling that this could have any juice in today’s world, and no interest and, if anything, disdain after getting away with an easy score.

Pseudo ‘Sanskrit’ subject was merely a way for the Nehruvian Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb walas to cheat the 3 language formula system – the same tehzeeb gang who opposed the proposal for Sanskrit as national link language and voted for Hindi. Most other Indians had to actually learn another Indian language (Hindi) as part of the 3 language formula, but these guys cheated and got away with a high scoring zero-skills cop out.

Those tehzeeb walas choose Urdu via Bollywood to give them cultural juice in today’s world.

From personal experience,having learned Sanskrit from classes VI to X(including both the classes),you basically get the level of a sloppy version of just only the vākya vyavahāra book of the first level(as taught by Sri Vempati Kutumba Shastri) and that itself will get you more than 90% in the Sanskrit CBSE exam of class X. And that too will get lost/eroded to nothing within a year of non practice. This is the state of Sanskrit teaching as I have seen and experienced it. If you want people to actually like and respect Sanskrit at schools,the methodology must change a lot.

On reading gay stuff into mileus where such concepts did not exist

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https://crevicesinmysoul.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the-gay-angle-in-padmaavat/

 

This is not to say men who were attracted to men did not exist. They have existed since at least the dawn of agriculture in humankind. The definition of gay=attracted to men(and a community that defined itself like that) arose in only the 1920s-1930s Anglo-European world. Before that,there were people attracted to men in the US who would fuck straight men(or as the slang went, ‘trade’). Then people who had feminine mannerisms,and dressed such. Men who fucked other men. None of them came under that modern ‘gay’ label(as defining oneself/having an identity based on the sex one is attracted to). I am basing this on my reading of Foucault and George Chancey’s Gay New York:Gender,Urban Culture and the making of the Gay male world 1890-1940.

Secondly,I would find it grossly wrong to elevate a engendered in a situation like that-Would you endorse buying someone as your property,cutting off his balls and using him as your toy for sexual satisfaction?That’s essentially how the relationship began. There are better gay icons/icons with ambiguous sexuality in the past to look forward to,like Walt Whitman,etc.

The devī of the 15th śloka of the Saundaryalaharī

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Inspired from here https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/trikas-para-devi-in-saundaryalahari/

 

This very same devī is mentioned in the Kashmirian Pañcastavī thus(from the 7th or 8th śloka of its first canto,Laghustavī)

वामे पुस्तकधारिणीमऽभयदां साक्षस्रजं दक्षिणे
भक्तेभ्यो वरदानपेशलकरां कर्पूरकुन्दोज्ज्वलां।
उज्जृम्भामुजपक्त्रकान्तनयन स्निग्ध प्रभा लोकिनीं
ये त्वामऽम्ब न शीलयन्ति मनसा तेशां कवित्वं कृतः॥

Aruṇa-sarasvatī(of the 16th śloka of the Saundaryalaharī)

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Here our Acharya is actually invoking the eight armed Goddess: with bow, arrow, noose and spear (mistranslated; should be goad/a~nkusha) (that go with Kameshvari) in four of the hands and with varam, abhayam, aksha-mAlA and book (that go with Sarasvati) in the other four hands. This is the aruNa-Sarasvati with eight hands, talked about by our elders.
Translation of Kañcī Paramācārya’s discourses on the Saundaryalaharī(link to the part in question). 

The image below is an outline, imagine Her to be of the colour of the red sun in the morning. (The sunrise pic isn’t mine.) 


Roles

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https://twitter.com/RetiredSOBL1/status/898550030516105216

This same propaganda he is talking about—a similar flavour is being peddled to our kids in the US . Brahmins,males are the roots of all the evils in the world(of course it’s obvious it’s just a byword for Hinduism)(Not withstanding most of this girl’s assertions being untrue and stereotyped—here the stereotype is the social scientist/Indologist’s stereotype,hence progressive and right).

https://twitter.com/pallavi_rao/status/898070654553030656

A sample of Anglospheric/Anglospheric-inspired propaganda internalized noted in the above tweet series of this Rao girl.

https://twitter.com/RetiredSOBL1/status/898552433147695104

In India,they are being continuously run down by the force of the law[minority ones get the exemption]. See government takeover of temples,etc. And laws like Devendra Fadnavis’ anti-boycott law make it more difficult to have autonomy to expel hostile elements(realitycheckind’s phrasing).

Bad arguments

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Tunku Varadarajan, I want you to argue to Jews that they should give up worshipping Yahweh alone because ancient Israelite relgion was polytheistic and see what they say. That’s how scholarly,yet bad,your arguments are in this article of yours.

More on this have been dealt by better folks than me elsewhere.