Tharoor writes, in his book "Why I'm a Hindu'-
Hinduism is also unusual in seeing God, Man and the universe as co-related.
This is nonsense. Brahma Sutra says there is reciprocity of meditation between worshipper and worshipped. But there is no interdependence. There may be synchronization (i.e. like Liebniz's Occassionalism) for 'materialist' Purva Mimamsa but there can be no 'correlation'.
In which type of esotericism does 'correlation' arise? Gnostic theurgy- i.e. Magic.
The reason all World Religions reject 'correlation' or 'interdependence' between Creator and Creation is because this licenses any and every type of Magic and Superstition. I prayed to Christ for a BMW but didn't get one, so I'll try sacrificing my first born to Ba'al. Maybe that's the God I'm correlated with.
We are dependent on other people for some things vital to ourselves. But, so long as we have sufficient 'theory of mind' or 'emotional intelligence', our interactions are governed by protocols involving reciprocity of a cognitively complex or psychologically deft or dexterous type.
As the philosopher Raimon Panikkar
Whose Dad was a Nair, like Tharoor, and who wrote vacuous shite in the Sixties- as did Aubrey Menon whose Dad too was a Nair. But, hey!, everybody was writing vacuous shite in the Sixties more particularly if, like Panikkar, they were Catholic Priests drummed out of Opus Dei or not actively involved in the Vatican Bank or other such splendid anti-Communist initiatives.
has explained, in Hindu thought, God without Man is nothing, literally ‘no-thing’;
Fuck off! God without Man is still the Creator of the Universe in which Man may appear only to be 'cancelled.' Pannikar had shit for brains. That's a good thing if you want to teach at Harvard Divinity School or become a Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Barbara. Pannikar was actually less shite than Raghavan Iyer who had preceded him there by about a decade. Come to think of it, Tharoor is less vacuous than Pico Iyer. But that's not saying much.
Man without God is just a ‘thing’, without meaning or larger purpose;
said a fuckwit teaching useless shit in Amrika-ka
and the universe without Man or God is ‘any-thing’, sheer chaos, devoid of existence.
Wow! Chaos is devoid of existence is it? Who knew?!
In Panikkar’s explanation, nothing separates Man from God: ‘there is neither intermediary nor barrier between them’.
Which is why you mustn't jerk off coz your jizz is bound to get in God's eye.
So Hindu prayers mix the sacred with the profane:
No they don't. Hindu prayers are purely sacerdotal though no doubt they, like anything else, coud be subject to a profane, not to say pornographic, hermeneutic
a Hindu can ask God for anything.
Only in the sense that a Christian or Muslim can do so
Among the tens of thousands of sacred verses and hymns in the Hindu scriptures are a merchant’s prayer for wealth, a bankrupt’s plea to the divine to free him of debt, verses extolling the union of a man with a woman, and even the lament of a rueful (and luckless) gambler asking God to help him shake his addiction.
No. These are uncreated, context less, portions of Divine Revelation. Different hermeneuts may interpret them differently. Parrikar, as a Christian priest, may have chosen an interpretation which showed his Daddy came from a primitive country while his Mummy, thanks to Franco, was much more advanced.
Prayer and worship, for the Hindu, are thus not purely spiritual exercises: they enhance the quality of his life in the material world, in the here and now
This may be true of votaries of Voodoo. It isn't true about Hinduism- at least for Brahmins. Tharoor, as a Nair, may say 'look, our people only pretended to follow Smarta Religion or Advaita Philosophy. Parrikar, whose Daddy was Nair, reveals the truth about us. We think Hinduism is about exchanging prayers for material benefits. At any rate, that's why I'm a Hindu.'
2 comments:
What is your take on sambhandam? I've seen people, usually catty ezhava converts or tamil ethnonationalists, use it to dunk on nairs, calling them servants of brahmins, and to be honest, it does look like that from the surface. Do you have any more novel interpretation of that whole setup? From what I can tell, nambus were kind of useless, they didn't really do anything except laze around their estates (and abuse their children), while it was nairs and nasranis who ran the show. But then what value did anyone see in the nambus for them to occupy that prestigious status when nairs or whoever could've just knocked them off? I've read that when nambus first went south, there was a subset that was trained in combat. Or maybe that was the nairs bodyguards they hired. It's not clear. Whatever the case, at some point nambus just became figureheads. But how the nairs dominated all the ezhavas and others and why they protected the nambus, I don't understand. Weird place, Kerala. Women there are hawt, though. Some fine as fuck nairs/nasranis. Unfortuantely, they're aggressively endogamous due to them being ethnocultural groups wishing to preserve their heritage. Also, for 'brahmin's sluts', nairs tend have a lot of 'tude towards everyone else incl. brahmins (at least those from the rest of the country). Rather chauvinistic people who look down on nearly everyone and aren't afraid to hide it.
The South had 'matrilocality'- i.e. inheritance through the female line- which was good in that men could engage in oceanic trade and spend more time campaigning. This also meant that a Namboodri son-in-law was not taking land outside the family. Moreover, the Nair girl could choose the one she liked and get rid of him if he wasn't up to the mark. The other thing was that the number of Namboodris would be restricted because younger sons could only marry Nairs. Thus there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. The poet Shelley was inspired by a book 'Empire of the Nairs' by a fellow Old Etonian which painted a picture of Kerala as a paradise for women. However, this was a cruel system to Namboodri girls- there was a big scandal at the beginning of the century. It is said that MGR's father was one of those affected and that is why he went to Sri Lanka. Furthermore, 'matrilocality', though good at conserving land ownership wasn't great for 'capital formation'. By the 1920s, Nairs wanted reform as did Namboodris- some of whom became Communists. One factor was that immigrant Iyers were getting ahead. The old aristocratic ways had to go. One big mistake made by CP Ramaswamy Iyer had to do with mishandling of food situation during the War. Neighbouring Districts did better. This laid the basis for Communist mass base there. The one thing about Mallus outside Kerala is that they have great team spirit and desire to get things done. This was very noticeable in Delhi where to get anything done you had to run 'from Pillai to Pillai'. They are a brilliant people but reliance on remittances is a mistake. They are enriching foreign places by their hard work and enterprise while the ancestral houses are empty and thus not yielding tax revenue for the state.
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