Is metempsyhosis 'cheap talk'?

This is a link to Joanna Jurewicz's paper speculating on the presence of a doctrine  of metempsychosis in the Rg Veda.
She gives an interesting treatment of  the familiar 10.16.5-
5 Again, O Agni, to the Fathers send him who, offered in thee, goes with our oblations.
Wearing new life let him increase his offspring: let him rejoin a body, Jātavedas.
(Giffiths trans.)
 basing herself on the work of the Sri Lankan antropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere who stresses the ubiquity of the concept of reincarnation in 'small scale' societies and the manner in which it shores up ethnicity and diachronic identity.
However, in my view, the opposite point might, in the Hindu context, be more usefully be made- viz. reincarnation is systematically sublated, ethnicity is systematically sublated, diachronic identity is sublated, by something arising out of  the potential for Universalization that exists in a transactional view of the world.

The Vedic funeral is of particular interest because it shows how- as in the modern Economic theory of externalities- no transaction is between two parties alone, all partake of it and all are thereby transfigured. What is conserved is symmetry properties of the system as a whole and it is this conservation alone that makes it meaningful to speak of karma and dharma.
In Judaism, similarly, the concept of ibbur- that is 'partial incarnation'- has the effect of conserving halachah (the law) even by halachah vein morin kein (the law which if known forbids the action it otherwise enjoins).

Does bodily resurrection at the eschaton, give flesh to a 'costly signalling' halachah whereas is it the case that ibbur is just a cheap talk variant?
Similarly, does the notion of samadhi imply that karma kanda is a 'costly signalling' Yoga while Raja Yoga is just cheap talk?
Yes, in my view, if cognitive linguistics is correct. No, if language, as something which has evolved, is in essence reverse mereological.

The Vampire of Veluvan

The Vampire of Veluvan

  The old German lived in a Buddhist dharamshala on the edge of the old town.  Not far, but the flat rate fare wouldn't stretch to it. The trip would cost extra. What to do? These are disturbed times.

    I disdained to haggle. The tonga driver's face grew longer. He had misjudged me. “It is a bad place,” he temporized, sizing me up slyly. “Good people do not go there.”
   ‘So,’ I thought to myself- ‘some prostitutes are lodged in the dharamshala. No big surprise. Since the riots, the pilgrim trade has dried up. No doubt, the lodge keepers have found a way to appeal to a different type of customer’.
  ‘I’ll pay what you like.” I said sharply- “Just name your fee and stick to it. Mind it,no tamasha later on!”
  “No, Babu, you don’t understand.” the tonga wallah was placatory. My flash of temper had convinced him I was harmless. “It is not a good place. Unlucky. There has been talk.”

                                  “Some bad characters hanging around?” I asked.
   “No! They are too scared. It is something else. There are some foreigners there. They are old…really, too old.  What can I tell you? It is not a good place. You are young and fit.  Why risk?”
            “All right,” I said quietly, “We will go and come back quickly. It is for my work.”
  
   The dharamshala was in a deplorable condition. The lodge keeper had fled the previous year. An enterprising Jain youngster came round on his three wheeler to sell the elderly pilgrims some basic items.  He seemed a smart enough fellow. I was surprised to see that he stocked Japanese (or perhaps Korean) magazines and noodle packets. 
   Initially, he was polite and solicitous but abruptly lost interest when I mentioned who it was I had come to see. Apparently, the old German didn’t spend money here. Instead, some Sadhus, belonging to the Natha order, came to see to his needs once every fortnight or so.  

No, nobody knew why the naked Sadhus should want to look after the old foreigner.

    I stopped probing.  Ever since the riots, the townsfolk had become wary of the nanga Sadhus with their tridents and matted hair.
    The elderly Ambassador, whose memoirs I was editing, had mentioned that the old German was a Knight of Malta. He was some sort of relative of the Spy Master Gehlen.  The story I had pieced together was that he had initially been sent to Nepal on charitable work for the Sovereign Order. After the fall of the Ranas, he reappeared in Rangoon as a student of Buddhism. There are some articles he wrote for German magazines available on the internet. I don't read German, but gather that he was an admirer of U Nu. 
  After Ne Win's coup, he resurfaces in Sihanouk’s Cambodia, but, in ’65, after that puissant Prince’s deal with the Communists, he receives a sort of bedraggled entrée at the court of Sikkim’s  Gyalmo- the beautiful American blue-blood, Hope Cooke.  From there, around the time of the fall of the dynasty, the German went away to Sri Lanka. Then- the  Karmic Ouroburos of that Edenic isle having swallowed and spat him back up again- some twenty years ago, he returned to India and settled in this little pilgrim town. The Indian Government seems to have turned a blind eye to his remaining in India.  Perhaps, if he had really converted to Buddhism, he had become stateless. The Knights of Malta are a Catholic order. They would have withdrawn his passport.

   My other reason for thinking there might be a story here was because I had come across his name in a book on ‘Hitler’s High Priestess’ the French savant, known as Savitri Devi, who inspired Serrano and Evola and, now, a whole host of neo-Nazis who, strangely to my mind, have done little to build upon her foundations to secure the recognition of Hitlerism as a bona fide religion.
   My first visit to the old man did not go well. He was completely hairless, hunched, and naked. He shouted at me, in Hindi, to go away. There were two European women there- both over 70. They looked terrified. I hurriedly left.

   Later, more ashamed of my lack of savoir faire than from any higher motive, I sent over a note explaining my interest.  To my surprise, I got back a rather beautifully handwritten invitation to dinner at a local restaurant- ‘Gaylord’, I think, it was called.  The D.M, a friend of a friend, was kind enough to lend me his ‘lal batti’ car. To be frank, I was nervous about staying out late in a town so recently scourged by riots.

  Von Gehlen was very thin, perfectly bald, with creased but surprisingly pink and healthy skin. He introduced himself in good English with a degree of gentility but spoiled it by asking if I could pay for the meal. Before I could reply, he added that he had already ordered himself an expensive brandy.

  With an affectation of Teutonic bluntness, I let him know that money was not a problem. However, he continued to harp on the subject.  ‘I am too old,’ he said simply, ‘you will have to pay. If not in money, then by presenting your arse for the kicks that our good host will surely shower upon you. You see, I am too old. They worry they will have the corpse of a white man on their hands. That is the only thing that restrains them. Otherwise, they are wild beasts.’

   I called the waiter and told him to take the old man’s order. I myself would have to leave shortly- so let the bill be kept ready for me.  
   “Sahib, you came in the ‘lal batti’ car?” the waiter turned out to be the proprietor. A milder looking man could scarcely be conceived.  Far from wishing to hand out thrashings to deadbeat customers,  he had his own tale of woe to tell.  But, by this stage, I just wanted to escape. This trip had been a waste of time.

  The old man was enjoying his brandy. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave, I would have felt sorry for him. He was in his eighties. This might be his last occasion to eat in a restaurant- not fancy by any means, but, perhaps, the best this little town could offer.
  

   Simply to give him face, I muttered a couple of questions about Savitri Devi and Julius Evola and Ambassador Serrano and so forth.

   He immediately assumed an air of bemusement- did anyone take those cranks seriously? 
 

   I remembered that the German word ‘krank’ means a sick man, rather than a nut-job.  Heidegger’s comment on Celan- ‘Celan ist krank heillos’- came to mind.  For some inexplicable reason, I spoke my thought aloud.

 “Celan” he said, correcting my accent, “You like his poetry?”
   “Too deep for me” I said truthfully.

   Perhaps, it wasn’t very tactful to bring up the meeting between the Jewish poet and the Nazi philosopher. Let the old man enjoy his brandy.
   “Yes.” said the old man, “He had depth. Unfortunately, the River Seine had more. Who would have thought it?”
   “Were you in Sri Lanka during the Black July pogrom?” I surprised myself. It wasn’t a question I had intended to ask.
   “What? Yes... I suppose so. I saw some killings myself. The villagers had got hold of a  Strassenvalze- do you say road roller? So they used that on the children and the old people and the too stupid to run away. You are…Tamil?”
   I was astonished. Could the German be reading my mind? I’d read that thing about the steamroller in a book by R.D Laing. The great psychiatrist was in Sri Lanka to learn some advanced meditational technique to slow down Time- that single, spokeless, Strassenvalze wheel of King Menander's otherwise non-existent chariot- and freeze the elusive moment which, the Buddhists maintain, is the only reality. 
   It occurred to me, I would have said Milinda- not Menander- and, suddenly, the brandy tasted vile.
 I asked the proprietor to hurry up with the main course.

“I heard you were a Knight of Malta.”
“In another life… another, do you say habilitation?|”
“No, we don’t say that. Do you mean incarnation? Another birth?”
“No. Habilitation. A course of higher studies. Do you have such things here?”

   “Yes, we abound in it. In India, possession of a PhD qualifies you for better treatment in Jail. All the apprentice gangsters have PhDs. You may have seen them busily completing their habilitations during the recent riots. ”

“So, there is progress. Good. And you yourself are…”
“Not a PhD. Don’t worry. The restauranteur will get paid in money, not kicks.”
‘So, you are not an academic. Perhaps, a journalist?”
“No. Definitely not a journalist.”
“But political.. you ask about Savitri Devi and that old paralytic- Julius Evola…”

  “He was paralyzed? I somehow thought he was a mountaineer like …urm... y'know, the British poet, the enemy of Yeats at the Golden Dawn... y'know...the guy who persuaded Ananda  Coomaraswamy to try a bit of wife-swapping...sorry, the name was on the tip of my tongue....” 

          It was the British occultist, Aleister Crowley, whose name had slipped my memory.
The old German was peering at me intently. Suddenly, he grinned.
Could he, not just read my mind, but actually disorder my thoughts?

    But no, why should he bother? He was busy with his brandy. He had already achieved his objective. He had established his ascendancy.  Put simply, I was spooked and I would stay spooked. I might as well just pay the bill and go home. Chalk it up to experience. Old Germans living in derelict dharamshalas are still no objects for pity or, worse, the sort of fuzzy-minded mystagogy some middle class Indians still occasionally go in for.

 “Did you know Evola, in Germany, during…urm.. your military service?”

   I had remembered that Evola was hit by a shell that paralyzed him while working for the SS in the last days of the war.

Except, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually known that.

Thought transference?

Was I tapping into the German's private portal to the collective Unconscious?

“He was in Vienna. I was on the Eastern Front.”
“That must have been…”
 “Glorious? Yes. War is glorious... to the young. For a fit man who is young.” 
He looked pointedly at my thick eyeglasses. 
“Perhaps, you know the poem by Tyrtaeus…”
“That lame school teacher? He was before my time.”
“Since he lived a few centuries before Alexander- I suppose he must have been!”
The old man grimaced. “All soldiers are contemporaries.”
“The Buddha was not a soldier.”
“Is that what they teach you nowadays?”
He blinked at me happily, like a lizard in the sun.
"Forgive me. I did not know. It explains so much.”

    Karma, I thought- or thought that I thought- for, perhaps, the German was putting these thoughts into my head... Still, either way, I had brought this on myself. The truth was, I just wanted a bit of local colour, I had no interest in the man himself. There was a slot, in my new novel, for an old European aristocrat living in an Ashram or dharamshala in some little town- perhaps in the Himalayas…actually, definitely, the Himalayas… and he’d say wise things in a German accent and maybe quote Novalis… no, Holderlin- the God within us always lonely & poor- or better yet, Heidegger on Holderlin- the poet's blighting illness as Being's recovered future from which our salvation will come as a god-… and… and… I don’t know, the whole thing would have been kind of mystical with a bit of a sentimental undercurrent and, well, kind of sophisticated.
   
   Instead, I was stuck playing the role of the pretentious, bespectacled, Babu upon whom this elderly Hitlerite hooligan could practice his mind games while leaving me to pick up the tab. 

            I called for the bill. “I’m sorry, I have to go… the District Magistrate lent me his car.”

    Von Gehlen ignored me. I was relieved. What if he really was a hypnotist, like Aleister Crowley? Or, worse a vetala, a vampire- there had been unexplained deaths in the vicinity of the dharamshala…- where better for a vampire to hide himself than a riot plagued Pilgrim town?

    I was out of my depth. I don’t do Horror. Well, Dracula maybe- but this was shaping up to be H.P effing Lovecraft! How get out of it? Got to let my lower middle class, N.R.I, instincts take over. When you look into the abyss- thus sprach Neitzche- take an effing snapshot on your camera-phone, otherwise, the abyss will look back into you. 
    Maybe I should take a snapshot of the menu- which by a typesetter's error translated ' Athithi Devo Bhavah' as 'The Guest is Cod"- or find some billboard with a hilarious example of Indian English I could post up on my blog. 
                                        I never actually did take a snapshot of the menu.
              Just that zikhr-e-sukhan- the mere memory of my blog- was enough to save me.

“Will you visit me again?” the old man was crying. “No one comes. No one comes. The abbot said he would send me V.I.P visitors. I would conduct lecture tours. My books would be published. That was 20 years ago. They have forgotten me. Everyone has forgotten me.”

    I asked the driver to turn on the siren. “Sahib,” he said, “It is against regulations. Lal batti can only be turned on for official business.”
   “Arre, it is for your own safety I am telling!” I replied, “There is a vetala behind! I was clever to trick. But, why take chances? No backchat, just drive fast, I say!"

Manmohan Singh slaps Sharad Pawar.

Followers of this blog well know of its unstinting admiration for Manmohan, aka Man Mountain, Singh. Recently, outraged by Sharad Pawar's opposition to Sonia Ji's new Food Bill, Manmohan has manned up, done his press-ups, applied some Grecian 2000 to his beard and gone and slapped the NCP leader.

Well done, Manmohan. Always thought you had it in you. Now kindly put the smack down on Amartya Sen.

Harvard sacks Subramaniyam Swamy

Subramaniyam Swamy is a Mathematical Economist. In other words, an idiot. Anything he writes about Politics or Culture or the Law is bound to be egregiously and recklessly false, mischievous, and fatal to any cause he holds dear.

Harvard has finally given him the sack over an article where he says-

'India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors are Hindus. Even Parsis and Jews in India have Hindu ancestors. Others, who refuse to so acknowledge or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration can remain in India, but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected

representatives).'

There is only one person in India to which the above stricture applies- Sonia Gandhi. But, she has been popularly elected whereas Swamy has lost his seat. She has formed a Government which has been returned to power and whose legitimacy is unquestioned. 

There is no Muslim who does not acknowledge that they are descended from idolators. According to Islam, the father of Abraham, himself, was an 'aatish parast' fire-worshipping idolator. Swamy knows all this very well. The Jews weren't always faithful to Jehovah- if not a Holy Cow, they had a Golden Calf. No Jew, and therefore no Christian, denies that he or she is descended from idolators. True those ancestors may have lived far away but, don't you know, entire world plus many other planets were conquered by Emperor Bharata? Francis Wilford said Britain itself was nothing but the Sweta Dwipa of the Puranas. Thus everybody in the world is descended from Hindus because G.o.I, as well as Swamy defines Hinduism as any and every species of animism, shamanism, idolatory or vodoo practised by anyone not of an Abrahamic Religion. That's why, BJP MP's have to convert to Islam just so as to legitimize their second marriage even though both Polygyny and Polyandry are normative within Hinduism.

Swamy knows all this. His brother-in-law is Jewish, his wife Parsi, his son-in-law Muslim and his sister-in-law Christian. Yet reckless disregard for the truth has become his trademark, his one asset. These supposed Mullahs who deny they are descended from Jahil idolators don't exist, not even in Swamy's fevered imagination. The whole thing is a rhetorical flourish. If he had written instead 'Only one person shouldn't hold elective office in India- Sonia Gandhi.' people would have laughed at him. After all, even if Sonia Ji weren't an MP, she'd still be running the Govt. She could get her maid-servant elected and save herself the bother of visiting her constituency.

Swamy is a Tamil Brahmin. This is what he proposes ' Implement Uniform Civil Code, make Sanskrit learning compulsory and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India as Hindu Rashtra in which only those non-Hindus can vote if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors are Hindus. Re-name India as Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors are Hindus.'

Does Swamy seriously think that the people of Tamil Nadu will sit quietly by while some idiot Brahmin forces them to learn Sanskrit? Does he not remember how the Tamils in Sri Lanka reacted when their Govt. tried to make Sinhala compulsory? Is he utterly mad?

No. He's an economist from Harvard, They're all fuckwits who shouldn't be let out in public without a minder for their own safety.

Still, Swamy's sacking by Harvard may yet redound to his credit. Perhaps, we will now get some plain speaking from him about the scandal that is National Income Accounting and Developmentalist chicanery.

Veena Malik vs. Chief Justice Katju.

The Pakistani media is up in arms because Veena Malik has appeared nude in an Indian magazine with I.S.I stamped on her arm.

The Indian Media, however, have said nothing about Chief Justice Katju's much more shameful and embarrassing public 'uryani', despite the fact that he is now their overseer.

I think, as part of Indo-Pak confidence building talks, Katju should be forced to pose nude for the Daily Jang with RAW stamped on his backside. In exchange, Veena Malik may kindly be appointed Chairman of the Press Council of India.
Provided, of course, she keeps her clothes on. Katju's uryani should suffice for the whole sub-continent.

Katju is racist and misogynist for holding India to be 'an Urdu-Sansrkit culture.

Chief Justice Katju is a Kashmiri Brahmin. He comes from good, in the sense of deeply parochial, people, who so long as they steer clear of Populist Politics, don't necessarily fuck themselves up big time, indeed, occasionally,  should  they genuinely apply themselves,  they can do well as barristers or brokers or bagmen- if not, or seldom, as peerless scholars. 


Now, I've no doubt Katju is a nice guy but he's real stupid and ignorant. Compare him to people like Chief Justice Gajendragadkar or Anantanarayananan- equal masters of Sanskrit and English and their own mother tongue-  and one becomes aware of the steep fall in the quality of the Judiciary arising out of (for those recruited from Katju's crooked, supposedly India conserving, 'Universal Culture'- as opposed to people who are or are prepared to be Judges coz Judging- i.e. rationality-as-impartiality-  is their metier) the dramatic fall in their real wage.


This crazy old coot thinks that Sanskrit, as opposed to Tamil or Bengali, was the only language fit for scientific enquiry or rigorous thought. He is wrong. Maths, Medicine and Science existed before and after Paninian Sanskrit.  Look at the epigraphic evidence you worthless fuckwit. Ind's great scholarly lineages and centres of learning evolved before Classical Sanskrit. Jains, Buddhists, Ajvikas, etc, had a considerable and diverse literature in various Prakrits. True, Classical Sanskrit functioned as a sort of academic lingua franca, in the same manner that Arabic and Latin did, but there are important Medical, Legal, Mathematical and other manuscripts written in Pali, Ardhamaghadi, Tamil and so on. Katju's Kashmiri ancestors did propagate something new in Sanskrit for a couple of centuries about a thousand years ago. But, it wasn't Maths or Science, but Tantric psilosophy and Dhvani aesthetic doctrine, neither of which are vehicles for enquiring minds as opposed to corrupt mystagogues. Indeed, Sanskrit verse, especially in polished and allusive form, was highly unsuitable for the preservation of Mathematical or other exact knowledge. The actual working papers and full development of the discourse was probably in the vernacular- Sanskrit prose, or macaronics, can get awfully tangled very quickly- and so, I think, the Sanskrit shite which has come down to us was a sort of prestige publication. Al Biruni, whom I take for an  armchair scholar waxing wise off the labour of his Hindu slaves, and who I don't believe ever visited India, blamed the Indian love of Sanskrit poetry- verbose, witless shite- for the unintelligibility, inaccuracy, and negligible intellectual impact of their works as presented in Classical Sanskrit.  What that old fraud and plagiarist didn't realize was that the Sanskrit versification was done after the thesis had been formulated by the author and that it was memorized by students before proper induction into that field of studies by the instructor.  In that sense, it had a dhvani suggestiveness and leant beauty and grace to a burgeoning and ultimately shared Bildungs-Lebenswelt, so to speak. True, a lot of people in useful professions may have been able to read and even write Classical Sanskrit. What they didn't do is think in it, argue in it, or provide complete prose treatments of their theories in it. Since Classical Sanskrit took more effort to write, the most laborious and worthless type of literary work- viz. euphonious versification replete with allusion and assonance- became its province, not as a stimulus to thought but purely as ornamentation. 


The problem is this sort of glistering Sanskrit chandas tend to get preserved while local language texts are superseded. Most maths work was probably in vernaculars like the yukitbhasa of Jyeshtadeva.
Katju disagrees.
He says-  'Science requires precision. Panini made Sanskrit a powerful vehicle in which scientific ideas could be expressed with great precision and with great clarity and it was made uniform all over India, so that thinkers in one part of the sub-continent could interact with thinkers of another part easily. That was his great contribution.' 

Panini did not endow Sanskrit with precision, if by precision is meant certainty as to the referent. What he did was to make it easy to write correct Sanskrit- according to his own rules. Indeed, only Paninian Sankrit is sufficiently artificial to permit the writing of a book which has two quite different meanings or tells two totally different stories simultaneously.  This is possible because the artificiality of the language encourages ornamentalism such that synonyms grow exponentially by synechdoche. One reason it was easy to write correct Sanskrit was because- once words lost precision w.r.t to the emotional or other valence of the referent- nothing constrained the writer to only expressing a thought which he had actually formulated for himself rather than sacrificing all for euphony.  We, in English, or any actual spoken language, can tell the difference between a grammatically correct but meaningless sentence such as 'Green ideas sleep furiously' because, since childhood, a specific discipline has been applied to us- viz. to avoid talking shite. No such discipline applied to writers of Sanskrit shite. That's why it's shite. 

Greek is still the bedrock for the vocabularies of Medicine and Physics but the Greeks had no Panini who permitted all words to become synonyms. Instead, they had Aristotle, who used observation of Nature to make distinctions between things in the world, to taxonomise things on the basis of genus and species, such that words cease to be synonyms and Thought, to express itself without risk of censure, must refer in a precise way to alternate states of the world. 

What Greek literature teaches Western European Vernaculars is that grammar don't fucking matter. Rigour of thought does. Ornamental euphonious shite is shite only because Ornamentalism is shite, Euphuism is shite. Don't fucking do it. Don't inhale. Just say no. 

What matters is Thought- and Thought, to be worthy of expression, must be precise and refer directly and unambiguously to states of the world. You may say- ah! but what about Wittgenstein's similarity to Bhratrhari? Fuck off. Wittgenstien was a fuckwit. He produced not one single Scientific or Mathematical advance. The same goes for any talk of fucking Heidegger, or Gadamer or Derrida and other such fuckwits. Lacan never fucking cured anybody. He was a quack. If their shite is similar to Sanskrit shite- its coz both were and are shite and even if you are a total fuckwit, are you being paid enough to puff that sort of fuckwittery? You're not being paid? You're prostituting yourself gratis? That's just sad, dude.

English, at present, is the International language of Science. Why? Is it because English is more precise than other languages or that it has a scientific grammar? Not at all. English speaking countries dominate militarily, economically, culturally and also in terms of Academic Research.

Ancient India needed a lingua franca. Some artificial system like that of Panini would, in all likelihood, been the solution to the co-ordination problem. However, because Panini's solution allows stupid fuckwits, like Katju, to think they are thinking just because they are writing or speaking grammatically, the solution was decidedly sub-optimal. 

 He says- 'Bengali and Tamil have only stories, novels and moral literature (like Thirukkural) but they do not have any discussion on mathematics, law, medicine, etc. Sanskrit was the language of people with an enquiring mind, who enquired about everything, and therefore there is a whole range of subjects which have been discussed in Sanskrit. '
This is racist. This Kashmiri Pandit, whose ancestral vocation was Sanskrit related, is telling us Tamils didn't have enquiring minds. If by chance their minds suddenly become enquiring, immediately they become Sanskrit speakers. 
The Chief Justice is also a misogynist. In Classical Sanskrit plays, women speak Prakrit. This shows they don't have enquiring minds. They are stupid. 


The truth is Classical Sanskrit, in the hands of Katjus's ancestors, became a resource for the fabrication of Tantric texts which supposedly endowed magical powers on the elite practitioners of its sordid and absurd rituals.  Yet Katju thinks this sort of Sanskrit was 'the language of people with enquiring minds'. Why? The fuckwit thinks people with enquiring minds want to gain super-powers for themselves while letting the country go rot. This is not true. People with enquiring minds know, a priori, that reading some worthless Sanskrit shite and fucking your daughter don't make you God. It just won't happen. Katju won't believe me. People like him think they have 'enquiring minds'. All they enquire after is how they can give themselves a leg up and grab more power and prestige for themselves. That's what minds are for. What is worth enquiring about is power, pelf and privilege for oneself alone, nothing for the Common Weal.  But, so what if some fucking Tantric actually gains God like powers by fucking his daughter or feeding on corpses or whatever? The guy remains a fuckwit who won't use his powers for any good for the rest of us. And what's the point of being a God if you can't do anything for suffering creatures? 
For Katju and his ilk, enquiring minds are greedy only to posess Sanskrit of this Kashmiri Tantric sort and Urdu of the sycophantic 'please, please Laat Saab, increase my pension by reducing the share of my cousins because the back of your hand is the qibla of kisses and the palm of your hand is the ka'ba of hope'.
Vernacular languages, like Tamil, Bengali, Gujerati and so on are bound up with a country to which all its speakers owe loyalty. If the country progresses, all are better off. On the other hand, if your Uncle becomes a Tantric God- I should say demon rather- he will fuck you up and he will fuck up the place where you live. Same goes for if this Uncle manages to suck up to the new Governor. His gain is your loss. Worthless artificial, euphuistic macaronic, languages like Katju's Sanskrit or Urdu are a menace to the Common Weal.
Read Valmiki Ramayan, or Bhagvad Gita by all means. They aren't Tantric shite. They are pure poetry because they are genuinely profound and seek to advantage all equally- not confer magical powers on some fuckwit who has sex with his daughter or chews corpses by night.


There is not a single book, written in Sanskrit, on Maths, Medicine, Law, or any other field, published in the last 200 years, which isn't a great steaming pile of crap compared to stuff in Tamil, Bengali and other such languages.  True, Shyamji Krishna Varma started out as a Sanskrit orator, but the point about him is that he abandoned that worthless vocation for Herbert Spencer's Sociology and Revolutionary Politics. Varma had an enquiring mind. Katju has shit for brains. Compared to him, the syphilitic whores of the Indian Journalistic community start looking quite smart.
For the generation born after Independence, English has utterly eclipsed every and any Indian language. Not because English is more 'scientific' or 'logical' or 'moral' or 'refined' but because every official Indian language is way more 'scientific' and 'logical' and 'moral' and 'refined' and scholarly and noble and, in consequence, is suitable for nothing by pi-jaw, hypocrisy and lies. Not being able to read an Indian language, even your own mother tongue, is a good thing because it protects you from the shite the netas and their ideological stooges spout. In the 1940's there was a Marxist historian, living in Moscow, who made a point of writing in Hindi. Since then, there is not a single serious Academic, working in any field, who writes exclusively in an Indian language. Indeed, it is now compulsory to submit an English version of one's dissertation to get a Phd- a vital qualification for a career criminal because its possession automatically qualifies one for better treatment in jail-  in every subject save vernacular literature.


We can't adopt English as our National language because many of our people who know it and are in positions of authority are demonstrably the most worthless cunts in history. But, English aint the shite spouted by Katju. And that other, non Katju, English is the English everybody in India wants to know. Nobody wants to know Urdu or Sanskrit unless they already know non-Katju English or are just fucked in the head.
Sanskrit Mimamsa, of Katju's sort, is utter stupidity. So is learning Paninian Sanskrit. That is why Sankaracharya, in his Bhaja Govinda, condemned it as sheer foolishness. Katju is a fuckwit of truly epic proportions. Sanskrit is dead. No one who quotes it is not a fool or a knave or both. 


Katju thinks he belongs to the 92% of Indians who are immigrants. Urdu, however, unlike Sanskrit, was born in India and thus not an immigrant. This places it on a higher footing than Tamil, which is merely regional. True, Katju says Munda speakers belong to the 8% of Indians who are not immigrants. However, they speak an Austric language which, therefore, must be an immigrant (otherwise, Katjus thesis that people never emigrate from India is contradicted). Urdu alone is a wholly Indian language. A great injustice has been done to this true son of the soil by all these immigrant languages, like Tamil. The State of Jammu and Kashmir has adopted Urdu as its official language.  Those stupid Tamils- lacking enquiring minds because they reject Sanskrit- should take the hint and kindly follow suit. 
This is the fugugly fellow below.

Where precisely did you immigrate from you worthless pile of shite? Could you kindly fuck off back there? 


You get 2000 dollars a month and think 2000 dollars a month worth of deeply janitorial thought.
For example-
'Unlike Hindi, Urdu is a language with real 'dam'. '
If you write poetry in Hindi it is bound to be shite. Write in Urdu and you have a chance. Real poets write in Urdu. If they don't know Urdu, they're fucked.
I see. So, Harivansh Rai Bacchan wrote shite did he? How come his books outsold Urdu shite? Katju won't tell us.
Tagore wasn't a poet- why? He wrote in Bengali, not Urdu. Iqbal was a poet. He was descended  from Kashmiri Brahmins and wrote crap in Urdu, while priding himself on his un-idiomatic Persian. However, only his English prose is without blemish and not utterly risible.


Still, Katju has a point. Iqbal used Urdu to build and unify a Nation. Not India but Pakistan. You are in  the wrong country dude. But you already know that because you are a self-professed immigrant. 


Like Ghalib, who genuinely was an immigrant, Iqbal considered Urdu a deeply second rate language. Incidentally, the best novelist in Urdu, Abdullah Hussein, switched to English. Why? Urdu wasn't his mother tongue and, by the 70's, it was clearly fucked. 
Faiz, for whom Farsi was a mother tongue, started writing crap English verse. Why? Urdu was played out- or rather it was a neverwozzer.
Serious poetry was always written in Persian. However, the Persians consider only Amir Khusrau- who wrote in Hindvi, not tarted up Urdu- a true poet. 
Kashmir's Nund Reshi- because he didn't know either Persian or Sanskrit or Urdu, did not have an enquiring mind nor did his poetry have 'real dam'.


What Sanskrit and Urdu have in common is that they appeal to deeply provincial fuckwits who get a thrill out of feeling superior to other people. Neither language is difficult to learn and one can say really trite things in them while still feeling you're being terribly profound.


Katju's real thesis- though he doesn't know it- is that India should break up. Nothing holds it together. At least, nothing worthwhile. 
India does not have a 'Sanskrit-Urdu' culture. Both languages have been shown to be worthless shite. Nobody believes God will grant your prayer if you can talk to him in Sanskrit. Nobody still thinks their Urdu ghazal will win them a pot of gold from the Sultan.  Those days are gone.


Sanskrit, at one time, served as a sort of link language but it is utter shit and nobody, literally nobody, writes anything in it. Urdu too, very briefly, held a sort of prestige. But, it's shite. Arabic is worthwhile. Persian is worthwhile. Urdu is third rate. The point about Urdu, in the old days, was that it was a stepping stone to Persian as Persian was a stepping stone to Arabic. Now, Urdu is not needed. You can learn Arabic and Persian directly and not have to struggle to rid yourself of your Urdu accent and infelicities of style.


Official Urdu or Hindi or Tamil, etc, is just a direct translation of Bureaucratic English into a stilted jargon.  But, instead of mastering that crap, why not just learn Maths and functional English- or Globish as a French Academic has named it?


Why be part of a country whose Chief Justice is a racist, misogynist, fool who can't frame a logical argument to save his life? 
India is a country where, if Katju-style sententious stupidity is allowed to get the upper hand, not 92% but 100% of the population will want to emigrate. The only practicable way this can happen is if India is officially designated as having boundaries as small as the Vatican State. Which part of New Delhi should it enclose? Obviously the chiddiyaghar- the zoo, Katju- teach your Sanskrit Urdu culture to the animals. I hope they eat you.


Incidentally- this is you on Ghalib-

Eemaan mujhe roke hai, kheeche hai mujhe kufra kaaba mere peeche hai, kalisa mere aage”

i.e. “Faith is stopping me, while atheism is pulling me forward.  Kaaba is behind me, the Church is in front.” Here the word `Kaleesa’ only ostensibly means `Church’, but its real meaning is modern civilization.  Thus Ghalib, like many Urdu writers, is opposed to feudal civilization and commends modernism. So, Katju- you think you know Urdu but can't understand one of the oldest tropes in Islamic literature. You think, the Church, for Ghalib, represented progress and the Ka'aba backwardness. I see.  Fatwa time anyone? You think you know Sanskrit Mimamsa, but can't reason worth a damn- what is wrong with you? Oh. I see. You didn't take bribes as a Judge. So your owe it to the Public to explain that your failure in this respect was entirely due to feeble-mindedness rather than lack of 'Urdu-Sanskrit' culture. Well done thou good and faithful servant. Now depart in peace. By which we mean- shut the fuck up.

Debbie does Dharamsala- Tibetan Tulkus & Tantric Sex Slaves.

As a kid in Sikkim, my Mum often warned me about White women. They were probably anthropologists who might mistake me for a pygmy of some as yet undiscovered tribe and try to have sex with me. In Papua New Guinea, or Irian Jaya or some such place, an American Anthropologist had tracked down an tiny wrinkled old man in the Jungle and begun raping him while claiming to be married to him. The Indonesian army managed to drag her off him and repatriate her to the U.S. True, Hope Cooke and George Orwell's friend who married Kazi Lendup Dorjee, weren't actually guilty of rape. But, they weren't feminist academics either. At least they didn't write serious feminist books.

Not so, June Campbell who became a Buddhist nun and slept with some smelly old man. This was a clear case of abuse because ...urm... he was a Tibetan monk rather than some random dude from the homeless shelter and she wasn't drunk off her head or only doing it coz she lost a bet or something. The question that Feminism must face is why smelly old fuckwits from far away places still want to stick their dicks into vaginas?

The answer it turns out is 'because of the deep Power ditopology of the 14 dimensional interaction of the Patriarchical peristalsis of the Post-Kristevan Chora and all men are shits and gimme tenure already.'

This is from the article in the Independent previously linked to- my comments in bold.

' To outsiders, the Rinpoche was one of the most revered yogi-lamas in exile outside Tibet.  To outsiders, the Ratcathcer or whatever was some  smelly old fuckwit charlatan refugee from some place nobody every heard of. As abbot of his own monastery, he had taken vows of celibacy and was celebrated for having spent 14 years in solitary retreat. Smelly homeless guy was a Doctor or Witch Doctor or whatever back in his smelly old homeland but basically the guy was a smelly homeless dude of some foreign sort so DON'T GIVE HIM A FUCKING BLOW JOB. Among his students were the highest-ranking lamas in Tibet.  This smelly old dude who kept getting BJs off our June had students as perverted as himself amongst the highest ranking perverts back wherever.  "His own status was unquestioned in the Tibetan community," said Ms Campbell, "and his holiness attested to by all." 

The inner circles of the world of Tibetan Buddhism - for all its spread in fashionable circles in the West - is a closed and tight one. As opposed to Ms Campbell's. Her claims, though made in a restrained way- 'Debbie does Dharamsala' not having quite the right ring-  in the context of a deeply academic book subtitled "In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism", provoked what she described as a primitive outpouring of rage and fury. "I was reviled as a liar or a demon," she said during a public lecture last week at the non-sectarian College for Buddhist Studies in Sharpham, Devon. "In that world he was a saintly figure. It was like claiming that Mother Teresa was involved in making porn movies."

But it was not fear of the response which made her wait a full 18 years before publishing her revelations in a volume entitled Traveller in Space - a translation of dakini, the rather poetic Tibetan word for a woman used by a lama for sex. It took her that long to get over the trauma of the experience. "I spent 11 years without talking about it and then, when I had decided to write about it, another seven years researching. I wanted to weave together my personal experience with a more theoretical understanding of the role of women in Tibetan society to help me make sense of what had happened to me."

Frankly, the amazing thing is that the smelly old dude in question wasn't totally bent and didn't weep tears of blood on being confronted by a vag. 

Monasteries just aren't good places for heterosexual males to spend their whole fucking lives. They're great for butt sex or no sex, but if what your genes want you to do is to get with a vag, then they can seriously fuck you up.

But, Campbell's Monk didn't get her preggers- so still kind of missing the point about vaginas, Holy Tibetan dude.  What makes them super special is that's where babies come from. And trying to help your kids with their Homework will soon disabuse you of any notion you might have that you're  'enlightened' or don't need to a second mortgage on your after-life to pay for College what with the way tuition fees keep going up.

 For which, personally, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Maryada Bhakti and Gandhian Politics

(an extract from my novel- 'Samlee's Daughter'- full text on Google Books)


Pandayji- the old Gandhian politician I’d met - had an instructive history.

His ancestors had been prosperous farmers with a sideline in swordsmanship. Then, after the extirpation of ‘Pandy’s rebellion’ in 1857, the menfolk met their death being blown out of the mouths of cannons, while the women and children were cast adrift to sink or swim as best they might. Few survived the ensuing hardships.

In Pandayji’s ancestral village, there was a pious old widow who had memorised the entire Ramcharitmanas of Saint Tulsi Das. She took charge of a couple of the children and set up as an itinerant reciter of the Holy Epic. But, times were hard. People looked on strangers with dislike and suspicion. The musclemen of surviving landlords were particularly prone to attack first and ask questions later. Putting a few helpless refugees to the sword seemed a cheap price at which to prove one’s loyalty to the Crown. Thus, the old woman, and her child assistants, found themselves obliged to retrace some of Lord Rama’s own wanderings- having to keep to forested regions and tribal redoubts rather than taking the high road which ran through prosperous agricultural areas and wealthy urban centres.

Pandayji’s father had a sweet voice and soulful expression. One day, in Chitrakuta, a wealthy merchant, who had come there on pilgrimage, heard him recite the following couplet to some Bhil tribesmen who had gathered at the roadside to barter the wild honey they had gathered-

Beda bacana muni mana agama te prabhu karunaa aina

Bacana kiraatanha ke sunata jimi pitu baalaka baina.

(He whom neither Vedic Recitation, nor Yogic Meditation, can wholly address

Heard the words of His Bhils as a Father hears his child’s cry of distress!)

The old merchant was enchanted by the boy’s simplicity. He proposed to take him- the V.C.R not yet having been invented- into his own household. Having been brought up to believe Truth to be identical with Lord Rama’s name, the lad did not hide his antecedents from the merchant. But, thankfully, times had changed. Queen Victoria had taken over from the East India Company. Thus, the merchant could assure the lad that no disaster would befall if the son of a ‘rebel’ entered his household. Later, the old merchant was on his deathbed. He called the boy to him and asked him to name a parting gift. The boy said, ‘I don’t want you to build me a hermitage or to send me to Benares or any other such place. Rather, give me the management of one of your oil shops.’ The merchant said, ‘What’s this? You- a Brahmin- wish to become a teli? Remember what Banarsidas said- PaRta Baman BhaT, Bania baiTey huT- ‘in studies the Brahmin is top, the Bania just minds his shop’. Consider the matter properly and do not persist in your request. I will give you money so that you can travel to all the sacred Teerths of Hindustan and perfect your knowledge. That is the better course.’

But, the boy was adamant. Having known, in childhood, nothing but the hardships of the road, he yearned for security. The pot bellied oil merchants he had seen, himself a half-starved minstrel lad, seemed to him to be the very type of Lord Kubera- god of riches.

Thus, Pandayji’s grandfather became a shopkeeper. Oddly enough, he prospered. In time, a son was born to him. He sent the boy to the English Medium High School. The lad grew up to become a lawyer who enjoyed good revenues. The son of this lawyer was Pandayji. From the start, great things were expected of him. The boy would go to London and qualify as a Barrister. His father was a mere pleader in a small moffusil town. His son, however, would rank with the great advocates of the day. Perhaps, while in England, he might even pass the Indian Civil Service exam. In any case, he would be a pukka Sahib.

Pandayji was a small, nervous, child. Nothing in him remained to remind that his ancestors had once been excellent soldiers- praised even by the British for their consummate swordsmanship.

Pandayji’s one great passion was to sit at the feet of his grandfather- now quite senile- and hear the words of Saint Tulsi Das’s masterwork. In his mind, the child loved to dwell on the forest route the Holy Family had taken during their exiled wanderings. Grandfather- who was scarcely aware of what was happening in the next room, let alone the great Political currents sweeping the subcontinent at that time- was a mine of information regarding the customs of the forest tribes. Actually, his information was out of date. Victims of merciless exploitation, their long slide into moral degradation had already begun. Once proud descendants of those whom the Supreme Lord most delighted to listen to- there seemed nobody left to hear their cry for redress.

When Pandayji was only thirteen or fourteen, his father sent him to Patna to attend a prestigious High School there. This was the boy’s first experience of travel. The sights he saw along the way corresponded very little to what he had come to expect from listening to the Tulsi Ramayana. Something had gone wrong- very wrong- but what exactly? Everywhere you looked people’s faces bore the mark of disillusionment and despair. The first great popular convulsion in this Province, since the days of ’57, had ended in confusion and humiliation. People from different communities had started to look upon each other with dislike and suspicion. Nobody could understand what had gone wrong. The dream of restoring the Golden Age had vanished like smoke. The words of Tulsi Das, describing Ramrajya (i.e. reign of Lord Ram), seemed like a cruel mirage to mock the common man’s thirst for Justice, for Understanding, for Compassionate and Constructive Leadership.

Danda jatinha kara bheda jahan nartaka nrtya samaaja

Jeetahu manahi sunia asa Raamacandra ken raaja!

(Much prattles the Machiavellian parrot of Stick & Carrot, Divide and Rule

But Love’s plural dance of Ego-conquest was Ramrajya’s only tool!)

Discussing these ideas with fellow students in the City of Patna, Pandayji felt himself growing more and more perplexed. On the one hand, it seemed a very difficult thing to emulate the scholarship of the great lawyer-politicians- like Rajendra Prasad- who dominated the Independence movement. On the other, the dream of Ramrajya had already become fatally entangled with the figure of the new Mahatma- who, though a big Barrister from London, had abandoned the big Cities- and soirees with Governors and Viceroys- to come to benighted Champaran to hear the cries of the distressed people there.

Caught in this dilemma, Pandayji followed the path of least resistance- at times courting arrest, on orders from the Congress High Command, at others setting up a swadeshi shop or some such patriotic enterprise. His father’s attitude to him was ambivalent. Sometimes, he would curse him- especially when the lad came back, sunburnt and dust begrimed, from walking tours of rural regions- and say to him ‘seems you’re no better than a starving kushi-lava minstrel, shamelessly begging from house to house in remote villages! I was a fool to think you could ever to amount to anything. Just consider my position. Hasn’t our family suffered enough already at the hands of the British? Let other people sacrifice for now.

‘Why are you staring at me like that with your big owlish eyes?

‘Go! Go to your ‘Mahatma’. He is the only one you consider worthy of veneration. Why this hypocrisy of coming to touch my feet? Go, go die in a ditch- but spare me this play-acting!’

Pandayji showed a gift for organisational work from an early age. He excelled in grass-roots activism, walking from village to village and subsisting for days on end on just a handful of parched grain. While in prison, he showed assiduity in serving the leaders and seeking instruction from them. His physical appearance, however, was unimpressive. He was seen as a loyal lieutenant, nothing more. Yet, precisely for this reason, he was given a Ministerial post in the first Congress Ministry in the Province. Suddenly, his father saw him in a new light. After all, the boy was still very young; more senior people had been passed over for his sake. Yet here he was, with a chauffeur driven car and White Men- ‘Heaven born’ I.C.S. officers, mind you!- taking orders from him. The boy was a prodigy! He would found a dynasty! Temples would be built to offer shradda oblations to his forefathers!

But, Pandayji could not be flattered or brought round to his father’s new view of him. He had taken the oath of celibacy for National Service. Father implored him to get married, with tears in his eyes, but the young man was adamant. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough, Pandayji was back in jail, the times having changed their colour once again. The War years were ones where the liberal I.C.S officers, and Whitehall appointed lawyer-politicians, took a backseat. The Nation was ruled by the stick. The mailed fist of the militarised police, abetted by a vast network of spies and informers, struck terror into the hearts of the People. Thus, Pandayji’s father died believing it didn’t matter, after all, that his race would die out with his son. It seemed inconceivable that the dark night gripping India would ever be dispelled. Things might change but only for the worse. In his heart of hearts, Pandayji too, perhaps, came to believe this. After all, Scripture itself declares- this is Kali Yuga^[1]!

Though equally disillusioned by the manner in which Independence- that flotsam ‘gift’ of an Ocean too heavily freighted with the overflow of American Commerce- came to be claimed by cliques and fantasists but for whose existence the whole panoply of the Raj would have long since melted away; Pandayji continued to serve the Party loyally. In the late fifties, once the bubble of Nehruvian euphoria had burst, he was even called to the Centre to occupy second tier Ministerial posts. Since he was neither corrupt nor nepotistic, he could scarcely serve the country in any higher capacity. Nevertheless, I am pleased to report, his superiors’ confidence in him was not entirely misplaced. Pandayji was utterly unimaginative, invincibly ignorant, purposelessly puritanical, endlessly vacillating, and hopelessly addicted to random acts of petty spite directed against the hapless heads of Government officers appointed to serve under him. In short, he approached the Platonic ideal of the Gandhian politician. The masses revered his ilk with good reason. Gandhism, it seemed, was the panacea ordained by God to baffle the bullshit of the Bureaucrats and cause them to curse their proximity to Power. Indeed, so exactly did these two sacred castes, bequeathed by the departing British, cancel each other out and render each others’ existence a burdensome futility, it seemed plausible that the common people might at last breathe free, piss wherever they wanted, and revel unrestrainedly in their own swinishness.

But, Pandayji saw, such conditions must not be allowed to endure. A firm hand was needed. By the grace of God, the times eventually became propitious. In the Sixties- following the Army’s defeat and Nehru’s death- it finally seemed safe to drop the demeaning pretence of engaging with ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ so as to allow the purity of Gandhian pessimism to stand forth, like a naked flame, to receive the dazzled obeisance of a People now properly penitent for having dared dream Freedom their own Prize for having severed the dread coils of Colonialism’s Ethos swallowing Ouroboros.

‘Bhava bandhana te chuţahin nara japi jaa kara naama

Kharba nisaacara bandheu naagapaasa soi Raama.’

(‘If at the very mention of His name, even the bonds of Egotism fall away

‘How could puny snakes hold Him shackled?’ asked Garuda^[2] in dismay)

It is the inescapable lot of mortal creatures to remain caught in the toils of Maya. But, the illusion of struggling against Maya, too, is simply part of His play. When Garuda goes to Kakabhushundi- to get an explanation of how he could have fallen into the illusion of thinking he’d himself helped in the Freedom Struggle- even that all-wise crow is obliged to confess that Maya, indeed, is all powerful, all-pervasive. He too fell into its trap when he approached the infant Rama and tried to take the dust off His feet. The mischievous imp simply scampered hither and thither squealing with delight. How could this be the Universal Lord?

Actually, Kakabhushundi had been a low-caste man who- this being Kali Yuga- had pretensions to acquire the Wisdom of Gnosis. Indeed, Kali Yuga is the topsy-turvy time when Depressive Gandhism, Manic Globalism, Paranoid Marxism, Disassociative Free Marketism, Genocidal Religious Fundamentalism, Logocidal Academic Feminism, and every other sort of arrant Chauvinism and utterly Nihilistic nonsense, can most flourish because everybody evinces an irrepressible urge to adopt that position, or aspire to that office, they are, of all people, most ludicrously ill-adapted to uphold and from which they will inevitably work the worst mischief in their power.

However, Kali Yuga being an epoch when the very rococo extravagance of all beings’ self-delusion exhausts the irony of Maya by turning everything into its own parody; it also follows that Kali Yuga is the most favourable period to be born into because one can gain the ultimate reward of liberation from Transmigration without any exertion whatsoever.

Later on, born as a Brahmin- but a bigoted upholder of the Saguna (embodied Theism) form of worship- Kakabhushundi refused to listen to his Guru’s Upanishadic teaching regarding the Self-identity of all beings with Nirguna (Formless) Brahma. For this sin, he was cursed to become a crow. However, since he had already secured the promise to always remember the Lord, he was in nowise discomfited. Nevertheless, it would be utterly foolish to attribute to Saint Tulsidas the opinions (in particular relating to the caste system) of a crow (no matter how wise, or devastatingly witty a self-parodist of servile maryada bhakti^[3].) Indeed, we should remember, when Indra’s own son approached the Holy Family in the shape of a crow, he was not able to stop himself from pecking Sita’s foot, causing blood to flow. This is the correct explanation for the portions of Tulsi Das we find objectionable. Rather than ignorantly criticising him, we should understand his gentle purpose and seek to pluck out the beam in our own eye.

Anyway, leaving such bogus breast-beating aside, and returning to the story of Pandayji; I think he was, like many upper-caste Hindus of the Gangetic belt, not without a quite puzzling degree of self-knowledge. This being so, it remains a mystery to me as to how, though aware of his own unutterable futility, he could nevertheless continue to operate in so cynical and soul-impoverishing a manner without being overwhelmed by bitterness or giving way to insuperable despair. Indeed, it seems to me, such Hindus from the heartland possess a sort of conjugal ease with their own alienated ethos, and a wholly unreflecting access to the Unconscious, which appears utterly enigmatic to people from other regions. This is because, if I may be allowed to venture an opinion, our imagined as more uninterrupted Moral Imperium, or heart’s hysteresis of a less hiatus spotted History, has structured our Unconscious according to the rules of a very rigorous (though bogus) soteriological grammar. One consequence of this is we have to really struggle to achieve artistic originality. By the same token, we succumb more completely to ‘the Devdas complex’- i.e. we can degenerate into drunkards, not to say something worse, the moment the credal underpinning of our Ego-architecture is challenged- as happens when our ‘Choice’ is denied- while the Hindus from the heartland continue to go through the motions though ‘running on empty’. The only explanation I can think of for this phenomena is that the Bhramin/Shraman polarity or balance- i.e. the syzygy between the pious householder and the celibate mendicant- was more thoroughly interpolated with nonsense during the Muslim period. Thus, the heartland Hindu inherits from the celibate (who, rejecting all carnality requires no specific incest-censor) an unproblematic access to his unconscious which in turn permits a greater tolerance for Cynical or Nihilistic engagement. We, on the other hand, do not possess this ability to function under conditions of radical cognitive dissonance. This being so, we are in greater danger of ‘engulfment’ psychosis. Anyway, these are just some random ideas I’m throwing out to give a sort of intellectual veneer to this section. To get back to the story- Pandayji was a not entirely unwilling victim of the ‘Kamraj plan’- i.e. the Machiavellian scheme whereby Ministers were rotated back to the Districts to engage in Party work. Pandayji was a tireless grass-roots activist and made his mark in more than a dozen constituencies straddling the U.P /Bihar border. People respected him because he hadn’t enriched himself by so much as a single naya paisa and was quite unspoilt by his years in office. Indeed, it was as though he’d emerged from a time capsule. Increasingly, he appeared even more backward and simple than the villagers he visited.

In the late Sixties and Seventies, Pandayji remained loyal to the Old Congress. The fact that his super-human efforts on their behalf- efforts which won him the veneration of the common people- did not sway a single vote and that he himself lost his deposit in the ‘Indira wave’, sparked by Nehru’s daughter’s espousal of the call “Remove Poverty!”, came to him, I imagine, as a humiliation not entirely untinged with relief. The fact was- as, dim glimmeringly, he’d himself become aware- somewhere along life’s way he had carelessly mislaid the knowledge of how to die. Maya, for him, had become a snake devouring its own tail. Mara^[4] had swallowed Rama, but, still, while the savour of this last irony lasted, his ‘Choice’ yet held and though that lila was hard labour, nevertheless, for so sedulous in destroying its own prizes in advance, it remained the only game in town. This being the case, he quite naturally sided with J.P. Narayan when that veteran salesman of hair-straightener to ‘Negroes’ and Wobbly proponent of ‘Total Revolution’ called for the ever renewed overthrow of the democratically elected Socialist Government so as to put a democratically elected Socialist Government in its place. Deeply grateful, as were all the other great Gandhians, to be given the chance to return to the jail cell that was his sole justification and glory; Pandayji came in contact with a new type of, lower middle class, activist belonging to Right-Wing Communal parties- Democracy then doing to them what the British had been too wise to. But, such was the degeneracy of the times, the sacred name of Gandhi- and the Name, says Tulsi, sublating sabdabrahma, thereby throwing opening the gates of Freedom, is ontologically higher than even Absolute Being- had been usurped by an Evil Demoness who openly spoke of obliterating our Holy Indian and Wholly Indian poverty! Thus it was entirely meet that, in this extremity, joined should be the hands of all true votaries of that ineffable name- whether the rebellious virodha bhaktas^[5] who had thought it worthwhile to cut down that malaya^[6] tree, or those whose servile maryada bhakti for him had merely made his assassination appear so woefully dilatory and grudging a measure- but then this, indeed, is Kali Yuga!

Nor does the irony stop there for, just as the River Sarasvati mystically joins the confluence of the Holy Ganga and Jamuna, so too did our most exalted intellectuals gush to greet this phenomenon as Hinduism’s coming of age!

Brahma Gyaana binu naari nara kehahin na doosari baata

KauRi laagi lobha basa karahin bipra Guru ghaata!

(Now, Everyman, Everywoman, but vies for the high Advaitic strain

Tho’ for a farthing’s favour they’d chop their own Guru in twain!)

This being the case, and all being equally deluded by Maya, what, after all?, was the difference between the demand for the restoration of Ramrajya- in which nobody would feel like a minority community- and that for Ram Janmabhumi^[7]- in which everybody feels they alone are being persecuted- Government curries favour only with the rival community who really ought to fuck off back where they came from, etc, etc, etc.

In any case- since the Nehruvian phallic dream, of endlessly sprouting factory chimneys, no longer needed its Gandhian fig-leaf- new alliances were necessary.  Ultimately, of course, it would all end in the cul de sac of paranoid eco-feminist ravings, but India is a backward country- i.e. very rapid Progress is still all too palpably possible- and so, though dogs bark how they may, the caravan yet moves on.

In jail, Pandayji formed new networks and evolved a new political strategy. Henceforth he’d be a Political godfather- a king-maker. Returning to his old stamping ground, Pandayji built up dependable vote-banks amongst key vested interest groups, and strategically significant single-issue voting blocs, in constituency after constituency. These vote-banks would be loyal to him personally. He was masterful in his use of the four Classical political tools- Saam, Daam, Dhand, Bhed- i.e. persuasion, bribery, the big stick and ‘divide and rule’ by the sowing of dissension- but, in addition, there was the legitimating power of his own impeccably Gandhian antecedents. This, however, was of most utility to those whose manner of life fell farthest short of Gandhian values. Thus, this apostle of the Ahimsa was mightily venerated by the wrestlers’ akkras to whom he stood patron. Similarly, the prostitutes’ kothas gloried greatly in being protected by this saintly celibate. As for the Tavern keepers and Country Liquor tekedars- his respectful behaviour towards them won them over to a continual chanting of his praises- as though he himself were the reincarnation of Tulsi Das, who, being a humble maryada bhakta himself, bowed with equal sincerity to both sinner and saint. Indeed, the comparison is far from blasphemous, as is shown by my translation,- which, though not literal, I nevertheless present to you as being not wholly misleading- of the following couplet from Tulsi’s masterwork-

Bahuri sakra sama binavaun tehi

Samtata suraanika hita jehi

For Wine’s charms, to the Wicked, are, as to Woden,Valkyries

Merit the Evil such obeisance as might Indra most please!

Anyway, leaving aside such Religious ramblings, I must tell you, Pandayji never again made the mistake of putting all his eggs in one basket. Instead he backed candidates from rival parties, rival communities, especially in contiguous constituencies. Since, in Kali Yuga, things can only get worse; Pandayji had dedicated himself to impeding all parties equally with his spasmodic, tepid and purely tactical, support; and to perpetually stalemating the tournament by being the puppet master of a few well-chosen pawns on both sides of the board.

In the mid-eighties, when a new-breed of Computer savvy wunderkind took over Party Election Strategy in New Delhi, Pandayji’s name suddenly resurfaced at high level discussions. Indeed, I believe, some earnest young intellectuals actually lost sleep speculating as to his true ideological motives. But, this was not to last for Democracy, dispensing with its melioristic Maya, was at last ready to revel unabashedly in its own amoral lila. Indeed, Circe’s circus had spiralled out of the control of its Parliamentary ringmasters and so, within the span of a decade,- as Factionalism fractally flourished, and, quite purposelessly, Election followed Election without permitting even a pause for some pretence of Government- Pandayji finally came into his own. People mentioned his name with awe at cocktail parties and political pundits made the pilgrimage to see him before prognosticating on the viability of incoherent and evanescent coalitions whose only historical function was to track the exponential increase in cynicism and despair within the Polity. In this atmosphere, Pandayji flourished as never before. Indeed, he showed astonishing astuteness in his handling of the Media. Many journalists were in his debt for scoops regarding Parliamentary floor-crossings and unlikely Election upsets. They, in turn, vied with each other to bring any bizarre or grotesque new development- not that my anti-Masturbation campaign falls into either category- to Pandayji’s attention. He would make sure he was seen to be associated with the new movement, the new leader, from the very start. Should the movement catch on, or the leader attain notoriety, Editors and Politicians in New Delhi would see, when they called for the clippings-file on the subject, that Pandayji had got in at the ground floor. Thus, far from being passed over as a senile old coot, he was venerated as having a finger on the pulse of the Nation.

This at any rate was what I was told in New Delhi. Of course, I merely mention all this just to show how fatuous those ivory-tower intellectuals really are. Anti-Masturbation is a holy cause- mere mention of whose name can release all sentient beings from ignorance and delusion. However, the magic of Anti-Masturbation can’t begin its beneficent work until and unless the lowest section of Society- I refer of course to the female sex- rises to the challenge. In this context, I would like to clarify something and set the record straight.  This has to do with the fact that, to date, all our International Anti-Masturbation Conferences have very swiftly degenerated into frenzied circle-jerks. I would like to point out that this is entirely due to the utterly criminal failure of women volunteers to come forward in meaningful numbers to confront this problem head on- or reverse into it, or get down on all fours, or whatever posture you fancy.

On the subject of circle-jerks, I know some of you are conservative, deeply attached to hallowed traditions etc, but one mustn’t ‘mourn the plumage and forget the dying bird.’ Moreover, we should consider the Public Relations aspect. ‘Let him who is without spin cast the first stone’ as His Tonyness the very Blairing Prince of Peace said in his Sermon on the Mount (presumably Peter Mandelson).

Anyway, I don’t want to read you a lecture, but a word to the wise never came amiss. Indeed, all I am actually asking is for you to be mindful of the good name of the cause. However, I must in justice to myself observe, it’s no good saying ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ without also mentioning where the good Doctor in question is supposed to send his bill for professional services rendered. The same applies to the Biblical injunction ‘Attorney, go fuck thyself!’ To this end, I feel our grass-roots workers must put more effort into collecting funds and show greater zeal in remitting them to the High Command. Otherwise, this year too, our International Anti-Masturbation Conference will draw unfavourable publicity- not to mention heavy bills for shampooing the Hotel’s carpets and chandeliers, dry-cleaning its Receptionists’ spun-glass hair, clinically disinfecting Peter Mandelson, etc, etc.

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^[1]    Kali Yuga – ‘age of the losing dice-throw’- last of the four epochs of the Cosmic Cycle when Virtue inevitably degenerates. Perhaps the notion derives from a prehistoric custom of periodic redistribution, by lot, of land & cattle between clans & castes. To show equal piety (which means altruism) - though as difficult as it would be for a woman to show equal love to different husbands- in each era (yuga) & dispensation, is praised in Rg Veda.

^[2]    Garuda- the great bird who serves Lord Vishnu (of whom Lord Rama is an incarnation) as his vehicle. Garuda is the enemy of the snakes. He became puzzled that Lord Rama had, seemingly, allowed himself to be bound by the snake-enchantment of Indrajit. Sage Narada sent for him and he cut the bonds and freed his master. However, the seed of doubt planted in his mind greatly troubled him and he only attained deliverance by listening to Kakabhushundi.

^[3]    Maryada bhakti- Devotion to the Lord as Master and evinced by a respectful and deferential attitude to all constituted authority, Social hierarchy etc. Saint Tulsi Das, though a consummate intellectual, was a champion of maryada bhakti. At this juncture, I’d just like to make a point re. Hindu caste system. It’s actually about the need for mental concentration. One minimal sort is needed even for me- untouchable & drunken criminal though I am. However, though not sufficing for Li  Po’s poetic ‘wind-wheel samadhi’- it is enough to gain me ‘heart’s gold of gratitude’ & ‘best of Heavens’- viz. Bhakti. Higher than mine, is the concentration needed for the wage-slave Shudra. Higher yet is that needed for the Vaishya farmer/ businessman. He needs to be constantly alert, making plans against every contingency, maintaining vigilance against vice, improvidence, etc. Higher yet is the concentration of the duelling Kshatriya warrior. One lapse of concentration will get him killed in a micro-second. The Brahman however is non-dual. Thus, the true Bhramin, or meditator, has no external object to focus on. If his concentration lapses, not his mere body- but his soul & the souls of countless others!- is imperilled. This is the highest type of concentration. All (objectively defined) occupations are equally worthy of maryada (respectful worship) & contain Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Sudras, Sutas (bards) etc.  Furthermore, only when Society has to slough off its dead skin like a snake- i.e. when a revolution is needed- will the mass of priests, arisocrats, & entrepreneurs refuse to admit worthy people to their ranks. Under such circumstances we are talking of Godless ‘ethnic or caste-based monopolism’ or a Satanic & chauvinistic ‘apartheid’ which must be destroyed. In all ages & all times- true Bhramins, Kshatriyas & Vaishyas etc. have sided with Revolution because their duty is Revolution. But, the fact is, every individual & class must learn relative importance of different types of mental concentration. Otherwise disaster will occur. Vikshepa (madness or distraction) will consume Society & lead to genocide & cannibalism.Every jati (endogamous occupational or clan group) contains Bhramins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, as well as (mercifully few) people like me. Hereditary concept, though universally valorised under feudal mode of production, is incompatible with Veda, Islam, Christianity etc. Incidentally, I may mention, my own self-chosen ‘Bhramin’ priest is going to a ‘Scheduled Caste’ Guru for instruction re. Vedas. Only when I was atheistically inclined did I oppose (for reasons of Satanic pride & Godless chauvinism) appointment of S.C. priests in great Temples of my ancestral Province. Now, though still evil in my personal habits, I am becoming more like a true scion of ‘Iyer’ family in my opinions & ideology. Thanks go solely to God for this seeming miracle.

^[4]    Mara- Death, Deceit, Evil. The opposite of Rama- Truth, Immortality, the Fatherhood of God.The author of the Ramayana- Sage Valmiki- was an evil man who started chanting ‘Mara, Mara, Mara’. However, by the end he found he was saying ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’. Hence he was saved.

^[5]    Virodha bhakti- (‘oppositional devotion’) form of worship of the Lord that is most effectual in uniting one to Him. It consists in trying to kill Him and do Evil. This follows because Hatred focuses the mind upon its object even more strongly than Love. Ravana is the type of the samrambha yogi, or virodha bhakta, who gained instantaneous liberation by being killed by Lord Rama.

^[6]    Malaya tree- sandalwood tree whose paste is fragrant & has cooling properties. Also the type of the Vaishnava Saint because - ‘ Such brief relief from the blacksmith’s blows/ as work he the bellows, the axehead knows/ To fever’d brows brings sandalwood paste/ Perfuming the axe that lay it waste’ (Adapted from Saint Tulsidas.)

^[7]    Ram Janmabhumi- Lord Rama’s birthplace- the demand for the demolition of a mosque built by Babur, a Turkish conqueror, upon the site and its restoration to Hindu worship. The ‘Hindu’ Right only espoused this call because it appeared that Rajiv Gandhi was stealing their clothes electorally speaking. The notion that there is a Hindu ‘fundamentalism’ centring upon turning Lord Rama into a vengeful Father God is a fantasy whose parroting by naïve academics like Prof. Fred Halliday- but also our beloved Karen Armstrong!- serves only to show up their own provincialism (as well as the criminal failure of British publishers to employ fact-checkers.)