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What is it about Shree Rama that still endears his revered personality & actions, making him so beloved that his image has been stamped firmly on the Bharatiya mind as the ultimate ideal of human existence beyond thousands of millennia ?
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So universal is his appeal that it cuts beyond time & space spanning across all the countries that were touched by Hindu civilization. Perhaps no other greater human Ideal has inspired so much as a warrior, husband, brother, son & king.
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Shree Rama motivates by example - as the one who leads by showing how to achieve realization, not only in material manifestation, but also by establishing the essential & radical premise for the mental evolution of the human spirit through successive stages towards the Divine.
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And perhaps what endears him most to us is that he leads by showing this divine evolution is possible while living as a householder who has to face all the challenges & difficulties of life, relationships, society & desires, yet overcome them all by being established in truth.
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As Shree Aurobindo says - To destroy Ravana & establish Ramarajya was his mission to enable the future possibility of an order that represents the sattvik civilized human being who governs his life by reason, higher emotions, & moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, & harmony
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He came to establish this Sattvik ideal of a superior human mind in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal Mind & the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life, in other words, the Vanara & the Rakshasa. And his triumph paved the way.
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This is the meaning of Rama and his life-work & it is according to that ideal that he fulfilled it. It was not his business to play the chivalrous Kshatriya with the formidable brute beast that was Bali, it was his business to kill him and get the Animal Mind under his control.
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It was not his ideal to be perfect, but to represent sattvik man as a faithful husband & lover, a loving & obedient son, a tender & perfect brother, father, a friend to all - of outcaste Guhaka, of animal heros Sugriva, Hanuman, of vulture Jatayu, & even of Rakshasa Vibhishan.
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In all this he proved to be brilliant & striking, not out of forced duty but with a harmonious completeness. Above all he chose to exemplify & establish ideals on which highest society & its stability depend, truth & honour, sense of Dharma, public spirit & the sense of order
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He was dedicated to truth & honour, much more even than to his filial love and obedience to his father. Yet even for love of family, he sacrificed his personal rights as the King elect & fourteen of the best years of his life going into exile in the forests.
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This spirit & sense of public order for greater good of society was the supreme civic virtue for an evolving humanity. Because at that time maintenance of an ordered community, not separate development & satisfaction of the individual was the pressing need for human evolution.
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By sacrificing his own happiness & domestic life to ensure social order & justice, he represented the first moral sense of higher civilization, which is undervalued by today’s individualistic sentimental morality of the modern human who can afford to have lesser morality.
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Today we can afford to have lesser morality because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order. No other figure could represent this harmony of civic responsibility & personal integrity as brilliantly as Shree Rama
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It was Rama’s aim to make the world safe for the ideal of the Sattvik human by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rakshasa menace. Humans today seek much more than the Sattvik ideal but Rama shall forever be the hero who established the basis of Dharmic Civilization.
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This thread was inspired & guided primarily by Shree Aurobindo’s description of the significance of Shree Rama as a great Avatar guiding human evolution. It was modified significantly by me for the sake of clarity & simplification.
In Feb. 1824, Ram Mohan Roy wrote a letter "Prospects of Christianity" to Harvard's Henry Ware where he recommended bribing "outcast" Hindus to convert & of his offer to send "as many" Hindus as possible to a Christian neighbor, to convert Hindus with a salary of Rs. 8 per month.
The letter titled "A Letter on the Prospects of Christianity & the means of promoting its reception in India" was a reply to Unitarian Christian preacher Rev. Henry Ware of Harvard who sent him a list of questions to work out a strategy on how Hindus of India could be converted.
Ram Mohan Roy discussed how Hindus were refusing to convert to Christianity & made recommendations to promote it. His suggestion was to establish English schools as a sneaky way to introduce Christian ideas so that the minds of Hindus could be prepared for eventual conversion.
One of the biggest myths is that Mughals invented the miniature school of painting in India. But Akbar under whose rule miniature "Mughal" painting supposedly developed had 17 eminent court artists - out of which a whopping 13 were Hindu, due to their superior artistic skills.
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Artists like Baswan, Lal, Daswanth, Kesu, Mukund, Haribans, Jagannath, etc. from castes like Kahar, Kayastha, Chitera, Silavat & Khati, show Hindus from all castes were the creators of the best "Mughal" miniature paintings, but the credit was given to Persians in Mughal courts.
It is said that Mughals like Akbar appointed Persian painters to teach Hindu artisans how to paint on paper, but even before Mughals entered India in the 1520s, the Malwa school was producing intricate miniature paper paintings of scenes from Bhagwat Puran & other Hindu epics.
Siraj ud-Daulah impregnated Madhavi, his own Hindu official Mohanlal's pretty sister. Terrified that his grandfather Alivardi Khan would find out, Siraj tied his newborn baby to a horse’s back & shot an arrow at its leg to ensure the horse would bolt wildly & kill the baby.
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A panicky Madhavi begged her brother Mohanlal to save her baby. Mohanlal immediately rode off, somehow managing to stop the horse & rescue the infant. Mohanlal, a Kashmiri Pandit, was shocked by Siraj’s action & left Murshidabad with his sister Madhavi & her baby for good.
Alivardi Khan heard the news & discovered why Mohanlal had left. He knew Mohanlal was a loyal & trustworthy asset for the kingdom. So, he shrewdly decided to stall his decision at any cost by putting the condition that if Madhavi converted to Islam, he would let her marry Siraj.
Chaitra Shukla Pratipada is NOT just regional.
Ugadi - Yug (era) + Adi (new start) or Samvatsarādi is the 1st day of Hindu lunisolar New Year & the day when Sri Brahma created the universe
Gudi (flag) + Padwa (Pratipada) refers to ancient Vedic Indradhvaja festival on this day
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Also called Samvatsārambha-utsava it was when rituals of eating Neem, offering cool drinks, offering oil to Brahmans & women, reading omens, presenting gifts to scholars, listening to the almanac were all specified in Sanskrit texts Sāmrājyalakshmīpițhika & Jayasimhakalpadruma
On this day, Vedic Indra-Dhvajapūja (Śakrācā) festival was celebrated where Kolams were decorated, auspicious Maņgalāśāśana was recited & the decorated red banner (Dhvaja - Gudi) was raised on a bamboo staff or wooden post to honor Indra & start the new year on an auspicious note
Imagine if Be****liity, pedo, necro, sexual slavery, marital r@p3 - were NOT punishable by legal code. Such legal code from the authoritative Islamic Hanafi lawbook Al-Hedaya STILL guides Sharia in courts & is taught to scholars in Madrasas in India TODAY.
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Over 90% of Muslims in India, Pakistan & Bangladesh follow the Hanafi school of Islamic law. Their most authoritative text is Al-Hidaya by Al-Marghinani (12th c.). Hidaya is the primary guide for Hanafi law in Sharia courts & several years of study are devoted to it in Madrasas.
The Hidaya says that If a man has two wives one of which is an INFANT & the other adult & if the adult wife feeds her breast milk to the baby wife, then both wives become prohibited to him. This clearly shows that by law, pious Momins can “marry” even milk drinking infants!
Time to bust your pathetic LIES portraying barbaric Mughals as syncretic saints celebrating Holi. Your own source Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri itself proves Eid-e-Gulabi/Aab-e-Pashi is NOT Holi but a Persian festival called Ab-i-Pashan held in in Persian months Khordad/Tir (June-July) 🧵
Mughals who never identified as Indians but identified with Islamic Persian culture used the Gulab Pash - an elongated rose water vase with a perforated sprinkler. Akbar introduced the festival Ab-i-Pashan in Tir/July to his court, where Gulab Pash is used to sprinkle rose-water.
In his autobiography Tuzuk-i-Jahangir, Jahangir clearly refers to celebrating the Persian festival Gulab Pashan on the 13th of the month of Tir (July). This simply CANNOT be Holi which is celebrated in March - Jahangir himself mentions later that "Hindu" Holi is held in March.