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NNBY Paying Tribute to Dr.B.R. AMBEDKAR on 6th Dec at Dikshabhoomi

NNBY Paying Tribute to Dr.B.R. AMBEDKAR on 6th Dec at Dikshabhoomi

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NNBY MEMBERS MEETING FOR 7th NATIONAL YOUTH CONVENTION 2013

NATIONAL NETWORK OF BUDDHIST YOUTH INDIA (NNBY)MEMBERS MEETING FOR 7th NATIONAL YOUTH CONVENTION 2013 IN NAGPUR

— with Nnby Nagpur, Prashant Gedam, Balvinder Singh Mulnivasi, Pranit Savarkar, Nnby India, Prachi Adhau, Ibyc India and Sayuri Moon, Sachin Shendey, Kirti , Krunal Borkar, Aditya Kamble, NNBY India, Tushar Kamble

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NNBY Convention December 2013 Starts From 25Dec

NNBY Convention December 2013 Starts From 25Dec

NNBY is an initiative of Indian Buddhist youth to support each other and underprivileged youth in India to develop their lives and serve society It is run by youth. It is Autonomous, Independent and Creative. It is beyond all Caste Identities. Teachings of Lord Buddha are its Values. It is motivated by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Vision of Ideal Society

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Hindutva: More Dangerous Than Sharia

by FRANK RAJ  http://www.sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?id=2740&cat=26

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races– the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here [India]. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.

"The ultimate vision of our work ... is a perfectly organised state of society wherein each individual has been moulded into a model of ideal Hindu manhood and made into a living limb of the corporate personality of society."

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, 'Supreme Chief', RSS

The Middle-East and India, September 6, 2011

Trying to understand American society and politics without studying religion's role is probably like attempting research on the country’s food habits without considering its fast food addiction.

People in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent were intrigued by the unexpected inclusion of "Shariah" in America’s national conversation a few months back. Amy Sullivan writing in USA Today on June 12 noted how Republican presidential candidates, “felt the need to speak out against the menace of sharia."

Several prominent U.S. politicians got on and sheepishly off the sharia bandwagon.

They might have had more traction with another issue they should probably nip in the bud - right wing Hinduism in America, bent on spreading ‘Hindutva,’ a Nazi inspired philosophy of hate from India. It is the brainchild of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a pseudo religious Hindu organization which controls the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main political opponents to India’s ruling UPA Congress coalition of Sonia Gandhi.

David Briggs, writing in The Huffington Post (4/28/11) in an article titled, “Hindu Americans: The Surprising, Hidden Population Trends of Hinduism in the U.S.,” notes that in “the first effort to conduct a Hindu census in the United States, the Santa Barbara, California-based Institute of American Religion discovered some 1,600 temples and centers with an estimated 600,000 practicing Hindus.”

“For better and worse, however, the latest incarnation of Hinduism in the United States has gone largely unnoticed by most Americans,” says Briggs, adding, “That number could easily rise up to the estimated 1.2 million who self-identify as Hindus.”

In his “Letter to A Young Hindu,” Vijay Prashad, the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, writes: “More than a decade ago, I used the term "Yankee Hindutva" to describe the way Hindu chauvinism came into the United States. Eager to branch out to the Diaspora, the RSS and its subsidiaries ... took advantage of multiculturalism to build their foothold here. Not for the American audience an unadulterated anti-Muslim rhetoric (that would come only in some "safe" spaces, and more aggressively, after 9/11).”

Most Americans do not noticeably relate to other Americans on the basis of their religion as Indians do. My own view is, people are people, not Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, etc. However, not everyone is secure in a plain vanilla human identity - many people must tout a religious face.  

Why isn’t humble, authentic faith in God, rather than being hooked to a religion, an adequate identity?

In India, the caste system still controls people; in America, denominational preferences have polarized many Americans.

In both America and India, the resurgence of a religious right wing is obvious in politics and society, but it is absurd to tar the American right with the same fundamentalist brush. It is poles apart from the Hindu right, which is marked by its dangerous fascist ‘Hindutva’ ideology. The assertion of a native Hindu tradition with a profound spiritual heritage is certainly justified, but its current rabid avatar in the RSS’ saffron color makes a mockery of an ancient belief.

Nonetheless, religion is an addiction in both America and India, and its conventions seem to have made one country very sexy and the other very sleazy. Half of all marriages in Hollywood-obsessed America end in divorce, regardless of one’s religion. And Hindusthan, the Persian term geographically denoting India, is one of the most corrupt countries of the world.

The cliched ‘born again’ label may be despised by many Americans (and others), but American evangelicals are mainly identified for their strong support of socially conservative policies, being pro-Israel, anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, and for sending missionaries worldwide. Not for the murder of minorities on home ground and the unscrupulous fascist politics that ‘Hindutvadis’ are known for in India.

After orchestrating modern India’s first state sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat as recently 2002, when several thousand Muslims and Hindus were massacred, today the Hindu right wing waits for another shot at power, as the main Opposition Party in the Indian Parliament.

Mohandas Gandhi died for standing against these right wingers; he was proud of his own Hindu convictions, but he innovated with notably Christian influences, and Jainism, Buddhism and Islam.

Knowing how he rejected the Hindu right, it is distressing to see many middle class Indians reject the Mahatma’s spirituality, by consenting to the same political ideology that took his life.

Growing up in India, many of my closest friends were Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs; only much later did I discern that religious militancy exists in all religions. Fundamentalists carry their baggage with them wherever they go. It is intriguing how a mere suffix to a word subverts what people believe in. One cannot link violence to Buddha or Christ, but you can find fanatics in Buddhism and Christianity, like you can in Islam and Hinduism.

The danger in India is real: If the fascist BJP plays its cards right, it  has every opportunity of coming back to power in India, in 2014.

Is it Sharia that should give Americans cause for concern, or should they keep an eye on Hindutva as a potential Trojan Horse in America?

Amy Sullivan points out that, “politicians who cry 'Sharia!' are engaging in one of the oldest and least-proud political traditions - xenophobic demagoguery. One of the easiest ways to spot its use is when politicians carelessly throw around a word simply because it scares some voters.”

American filmmaker Nina Paley who received death threats from the Hindu right in America for her animated movie, Sita Sings The Blues, is quoted by Saumya Arya Haas, in The Huffington Post, (7/25/11) as saying, “It's like calling the Ku Klux Klan "Christians." Calling Hindutvadis "Hindus" is especially misleading in the U.S., where people are mostly unaware of violent nationalist groups in India. Last I checked, Hinduism wasn't a religion of hate and intolerance. Hindutvadis' motives are political, not religious, and they hide behind a religious label. Not only does this confuse many Americans into thinking they have some legitimacy, it also, over the long run, harms real Hindus, who are nothing like Hindutvadis.”

Her movie, an adaptation of the epic "Ramayana" mythology, is a feminist interpretation of the epic loved by Hindus. Paley made the film biographical by including her own failed marriage.

Commenting on the opposition to the film’s screenings, Haas, the Executive Director of Headwaters/Delta, warns, “While I support anyone, of any or no faith, who wants to screen and discuss the film, this is a game-changer. These are Hindus being shut down, and shut out, by other Hindus. This no longer about an American filmmaker interpreting the Ramayana, or a feminist perspective on ancient texts. This isn't about colonialism or cultural appropriation. It's about a controlling group trying to bully their opinion into being the only opinion.”

*   *   *   *   *

"My claim to Hinduism has been rejected by some because I believe [in] and advocate non-violence in its extreme form. They say that I am a Christian in disguise. I have been even seriously told that I am distorting the meaning of the Gita when I ascribe to that great poem the teaching of unadulterated non-violence.

"My religion is a matter solely between my Maker and myself. If I am a Hindu, I cannot cease to be one even though I may be disowned by the whole of the Hindu population.

"I still hold the view that I cannot conceive politics as divorced from religion. Indeed, religion should pervade everyone one of our actions. Here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe."

Mohandas Gandhi

[Courtesy: The Washington Times]

September 13, 2011

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Hindu-India's Demi-God Mohandas Gandhi: "Sexual Weirdo, Political Incompetent, Racist Self-Promoter ...

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947.

From Refrance - http://www.sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?id=2296&cat=11

Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist - one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.

For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj ("self-rule"), India could have achieved it many years earlier if ­Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful.

With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi's uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India's 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called "a maniac"), wrecked any hope of early independence.

He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country's 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi "devious and untrustworthy." Between 1900 and 1922, Gandhi ­suspended his efforts no fewer than three times, leaving in the lurch more than 15,000 supporters who had gone to jail for the cause.  

A ceaseless self-promoter, Gandhi bought up the entire first edition of his first, hagiographical biography to send to people and ensure a reprint. Yet we cannot be certain that he really made all the pronouncements attributed to him, since, according to Mr. Lelyveld, Gandhi insisted that journalists file "not the words that had actually come from his mouth but a version he ­authorized after his sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts."

We do know for certain that he ­advised the Czechs and Jews to adopt nonviolence toward the Nazis, saying that "a single Jew standing up and ­refusing to bow to Hitler's decrees" might be enough "to melt Hitler's heart." (Nonviolence, in Gandhi's view, would apparently have also worked for the Chinese against the Japanese ­invaders.)

Starting a letter to Adolf ­Hitler with the words "My friend," Gandhi egotistically asked: "Will you listen to the appeal of one who has ­deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?" He advised the Jews of Palestine to "rely on the goodwill of the Arabs" and wait for a Jewish state "till Arab ­opinion is ripe for it." 

In August 1942, with the Japanese at the gates of India, having captured most of Burma, Gandhi initiated a ­campaign designed to hinder the war effort and force the British to "Quit ­India." Had the genocidal Tokyo regime captured northeastern India, as it ­almost certainly would have succeeded in doing without British troops to halt it, the results for the Indian population would have been catastrophic. No fewer than 17% of Filipinos perished under Japanese occupation, and there is no reason to suppose that Indians would have fared any better. Fortunately, the British viceroy, Lord Wavell, simply imprisoned Gandhi and 60,000 of his followers and got on with the business of fighting the Japanese.

Gandhi claimed that there was "an exact parallel" between the British ­Empire and the Third Reich, yet while the British imprisoned him in luxury in the Aga Khan's palace for 21 months ­until the Japanese tide had receded in 1944, Hitler stated that he would simply have had Gandhi and his supporters shot.

Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce's "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and ­Labour, his passionate love for his people."

During his 21 years in South Africa (1893-1914), Gandhi had not opposed the Boer War or the Zulu War of 1906 - he raised a battalion of stretcher-bearers in both cases - and after his return to India during World War I, he offered to be Britain's "recruiting agent-in-chief." Yet he was comfortable opposing the war against fascism.

Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how ­implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa.

"We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of ­Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the ­Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized - the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa's Natal province, ­Gandhi wrote of how "the Indian is ­being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir," someone, he later stated, "whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and ­nakedness."

Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do."

That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry ­Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.

Gandhi's pejorative reference to ­nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to ­independence, he encouraged his ­17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her "nightly cuddles" with him.

After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong ­personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: "Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience."

Yet he could also be vicious to Manu, whom he on one occasion forced to walk through a thick jungle where sexual assaults had occurred in order for her to retrieve a pumice stone that he liked to use on his feet. When she returned in tears, Gandhi "cackled" with laughter at her and said: "If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy."

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908.

"Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love ... such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

They were parted when Gandhi ­returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during ­wartime - though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always ­before my mind's eye."

Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women." You could even be thrown off the ashram for "excessive tickling." (Salt was also forbidden, because it "arouses the senses.")

In his tract "Hind Swaraj" ("India's Freedom"), Gandhi denounced lawyers, railways and parliamentary politics, even though he was a professional lawyer who constantly used railways to get to meetings to argue that India ­deserved its own parliament. After ­taking a vow against milk for its ­supposed aphrodisiac properties, he ­contracted hemorrhoids, so he said that it was only cow's milk that he had ­forsworn, not goat's.

His absolute ­opposition to any birth control except sexual abstinence, in a country that ­today has more people living on less than $1.25 a day than there were Indians in his lifetime, was more dangerous.

Telling the Muslims who had been responsible for the massacres of thousands of Hindus in East Bengal in 1946 that Islam "was a religion of peace," Gandhi nonetheless said to three of his workers who preceded him into its ­villages: "There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed."

To a Hindu who asked how his co-religionists could ever return to villages from which they had been ethnically cleansed, Gandhi blithely replied: "I do not mind if each and every one of the 500 families in your area is done to death." What mattered for him was the principle of nonviolence, and anyhow, as he told an orthodox Brahmin, he believed in re­incarnation. 

Gandhi's support for the Muslim ­caliphate in the 1920s - for which he said he was "ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends" - Mr. Lelyveld shows to have been merely a cynical maneuver to keep the Muslim League in his coalition for as long as possible. When his campaign for unity failed, he blamed a higher power, ­saying in 1927: "I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but God was not ­satisfied. God did not want me to take any credit for the work."

Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the ­crucial moment when they were ­demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding."

Gandhi's first Great Fast - undertaken despite his belief that hunger strikes were "the worst form of coercion, which militates against the fundamental principles of non-violence" - was launched in 1932 to prevent Untouchables from ­having their own reserved seats in any future Indian parliament. Because he said that it was "a religious, not a political question," he accepted no debate on the matter.

He elsewhere stated that "the abolition of Untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former Untouchables."

At his ­monster rallies against Untouchability in the 1930s, which tens of thousands of people attended, the Untouchables themselves were kept in holding pens well away from the caste Hindus.

Of course, any coalition movement ­involves a certain degree of compromise and occasional hypocrisy. But Gandhi's saintly image, his martyrdom at the hands of a Hindu fanatic in 1948 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s adoption of him as a role model for the American civil-rights movement have largely protected him from critical scrutiny. The French man of letters Romain Rolland called Gandhi "a mortal demi-god" in a 1924 hagiography, catching the tone of most writing about him. People used to take away the sand that had touched his feet as relics-one relation kept Gandhi's ­fingernail clippings - and modern biographers seem to treat him with much the same reverence today. Mr. Lelyveld is not immune, making labored excuses for him at every turn of this nonetheless well-researched and well-written book.

Yet of the four great campaigns of Gandhi's life - for Hindu-Muslim unity, against importing British textiles, for ending Untouchability and for getting the British off the subcontinent - only the last succeeded, and that simply ­because the near-bankrupt British led by the anti-imperialist Clement Attlee desperately wanted to leave India anyhow after a debilitating world war.

It was not much of a record for someone who had been invested with "sole ­executive authority" over the Indian ­National Congress as early as in December 1921.

But then, unlike any other ­politician, Gandhi cannot be judged by ­actual results, because he was the "Great Soul."

Andrew Roberts's "Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War" will be published in May, 2011.

[Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal]

March 29, 2011

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The Society and Culture of Ancient India PPT

The Society and Culture of Ancient India PPT By - http://www.justbegood.net/E-Learning.htm

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