jabdakhata

I started this blog for East Vs. West and then I cam across the writings of Romain Rolland, the great European philosopher of early 20th century who was also an Indologist. Here are few excerpts from his book Prophets of the New India. "The age-long history of the spirit of India is the history of a countless throng marching ever to the conquest of supreme Reality. All the great peoples of the world, wittingly or unwittingly, have the same fundamental aim ; they belong to the conquerors who age by age go up to assault the Reality of which they form a part, and which lures them on to strive and climb ; sometimes they fall out exhausted, then with recovered breath they mount undaunted until they have conquered or been overcome.But each one does not see the same face of Reality. It is like a great fortified city beleaguered on different sides by different armies who are not in alliance. Each army has its own tactics and weapons to solve its own problems of attack and assault. Ou...

It is an age old wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism that desire gives rise to anger, anger gives rise to hatred and violence and therefore downfall of the person. Therefore desire is the root cause of all evil, including suffering in life and the best recourse is to do your duty respectfully without desire for results. Hitler had a desire, he wanted to the ruler of this world. He thought Jews were responsible for all the problems that Germany faced. His anger and hatred for Jews resulted in a catastrophic world war, which ultimately brought down Europe and imperialism. Upanishads give a beautiful parable. You are on a journey, embarked on a chariot, which is your body. The fives senses are five horses which are pulling you in different directions. The harness is your mind to control your senses, the charioteer is the wisdom who can take you to your destination. Question is, whom do you trust and give control? If you give control to your senses, you'll run amok, directionless, and...

An Agatha Christie whodunit is a sheer pleasure for anybody who loves mystery stories. It reduces stress appreciably as it leaves you less time to ponder on your present woes and miseries and problems. Be it a cold winter morning or a windy day, a warm summer evening or a rain washed afternoon, you can always recline in your easy-chair or sofa or even sit outside in the porch drinking tea or coffee, or smoking your favorite brand of cigar, and read the exploits of the Belgian detective with his little grey cells, egg shaped head and characteristic mustache. Agatha Christie in one of her books rued the fact (through her another famous character Ariadne Oliver) that once you have put up a character you cannot change the same, as readers who have taken to that character will never accept any change. Therefore Poirot cannot come out of his idiosyncrasies. What can Poirot, the eccentric Belgian teach us? Of course, apart from his unique ways of detection of solution to a problem, sitting i...

Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. This natural law is also true of civilizations. In distant past different civilizations flourished in the east and then gradually those civilizations faded away. The dawn of awakening happened in West and East went into deep slumber under the covers of dark night. But sun is now leaning towards horizon and once again east is seeing faint lights of dawn. It will have to wake up, get out of its slumber and be active, once again. Once again the beautiful chants should fill in the crisp air of dawn. East and West share a unique relationship. When Jesus was born, three wise men from the East visited the Lord. They saw in the stars the sign of a great man with a mission. By then East was at the peak of its glory, with so many civilizations in so many countries flourishing and fading away - Indus Valley, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, India, China, all extending their great influence all over the world. Then faint dawn showed in...

How do we account for the differences in culture, religion and ethnicity? It seems that like a great river which orginates from a snow clad mountain and then distributes itself into many tributaries and distributaries, this great ocean of humanity has divided itself again and again and has permeated many different civilizations, just like rivers and rivulets do. Just as all the tributaries and distributaries of the great river meets at sea, so will this vast ocean of humanity converge somewhere, despite all the differences, despite all intolerance and hatred and violence. It will converge in a vast ocean of supreme consciousness, of grand unification, therein lies its destiny. What is Difference? What is the meaning of religion and cultural difference? On a larger scale, it is nothing. Ramakrishna Paramhansa described this difference using a beautiful parable - Imagine a big sweet water pond, having several steps in various directions. On one side somebody is drinking water and is cal...

I saw the plight of thousands of passengers stranded owing to the volcanic eruption in Iceland and was saddened. However this is an instance which is denoted as "Act of God" or "force majeure", airlines cannot be blamed for this. But what if passengers are stranded owing the problems of the airlines? They are supposed to compensate, but do they? I recount one of my own experiences here in this context. While returning from Toronto, I had a connecting KLM flight from Amsterdam. Because my original KLM flight got delayed I missed this connection in Amsterdam. The lady at the counter could not help. No hotel accomodation was provided, only a meal voucher of Euro 10 was handed (poor beggar, he won't need more than this!), no upgrade was provided despite plenty of miles on my flying blue card to justify one, and I was given two straight choices, either spend the night in the airport and board the next day's flight, or get yourself rebooked in another flight which...

NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for the uninitiated) is another mammoth instrument of corruption in the hands of the political class. This scheme, which ensures a minimum wage to the rural labor, is flawed because it has no output, direct tangible benefit in the form of asset creation. It just disburses tax payers’ money to rural daily wage earners. But given the pathetic condition of our delivery mechanism, only a pittance of the billions of dollars actually reaches the rural masses. Rest of the money is conveniently pocketed by political parties who have floated the scheme, and their middlemen. This scheme is supposed to have contributed in insulating Indian economy from global financial crisis by creating demand and purchasing power at the bottom of the pyramid. Even if this is considered true, isn’t the Government encouraging reckless spending through this scheme? Given the fact that rarely the benefits of savings and investments reach the rural people who actuall...

Is the evolution over or has it just begun? According to sage Aurobindo we are on an eternal voyage of spiritual evolution, transforming ourselves from a human with limited consciousness to a super human with super consciousness. The physical evolution from pisces to birds to reptiles to mammals and higher form like human beings was the basic layer of evolution. If the goal of human journey is to identify oneself with the vast oneness (what is refered to as divinity, Brahman, God or cosmic energy in various contexts), how close are we to achieve that goal in this strife ridden world? However one point is that even though strives and tensions are ways of human lives, they have considerably reduced from the past and we are talking about historical ages, viz. the middle ages when we used to have warfare at the drop of a hat. So does that mean world is now a better place?, I am not sure, because one thing is that weapons are now deadlier than ever and war mongerers are very much the...