,
11 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Here's a blast from the past which is relevant even today. @RajivMessage in one of his timeless pieces where he conducts "A Dialogue with the Indian Left". bit.ly/2k9vkk4
I would like to present some ideas, such as the following, that are part of my personal on-going thought process.
I start by asking why “left” and “right” often seem to be positioned as mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories in the case of India, and why various hybrids and entirely new frameworks are not appearing.
In a recent essay I have posited that religious conflict stems from historical fixations rather than ahistorical spirituality. When historically unique claims become necessary conditions for a religion’s survival, it gets boxed in.
Given the Abrahamic history-centrisms, change often consisted of destroying the old historical narrative and replacing with a new one. This led to discontinuous “advancements” in the west.
Indians have always been assimilating foreign influences and incorporating them into Indian culture, while at the same time, also exporting Indian culture and thought.
I do not support amending history for political purposes. For instance, I consider both Aryan migration-into-India and the opposite (migration out-of-India) to be too simplistic, and neither is provable with existing data.
I do not approve that traditional Indian science should be labeled as “Vedic Science”. Yet there is considerable unacknowledged history of Indian science based on physical hard evidence – in metallurgy, civil engineering, medicine, mathematics, etc.
What is the left’s concept on India as a nation state? Without compromising their ideals, are Indian leftists open to question their uncritical loyalty to western idioms and politics, and to their stances against Indian nationhood?
What do Indian leftists think of re-introducing yoga into Indian education (from where it remains banished on the grounds of being “anti-secular”), considering that 18 million Americans spend an estimated $27 billion annually to learn and practice yoga?
A good liberal arts education in the west is usually built on a solid foundation of the Western Classics (combining Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian), because these texts are said to equip a young mind not only to understand the past of his/her great civilization
