Jagat

This kind of quibbling is nonsense. If the goal of the GBC is to manage Iskcon in order to facilitate preaching of Hari katha, then it is service to Srila Prabhupada and Krishna. It is all a question of attitude, not with the activity itself.

This kind of quibbling is nonsense. If the goal of the GBC is to manage Iskcon in order to facilitate preaching of Hari katha, then it is service to Srila Prabhupada and Krishna. It is all a question of attitude, not with the activity itself.

It's time once again to consider the candidates for the annual Stella Awards. The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous but successful lawsuits in the United States. The following are this year's candidates: 1. Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving toddler was Ms. Robertson's son. 2. 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbour ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbour's hub caps. 3. Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn't reenter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000. 4. Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbour's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams who was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun. 5. A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument. 6. Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighbouring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses. 7. This year's favourite could easily be Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's manual that he couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreational vehicles.

vriddhi

<h3>Instruction, not indoctrination</h3> <font class=sh>Public education should teach how to think, not what to think.</font> <font class=body><B class=hm1>A number of different organizations and individuals have, in recent months, raised their voices in protest against what they see to be the inclusion of ideologically motivated material in the school curricula. Whereas differences among political parties understandably lead to different intentions in the exercise of administrative power, the use of authority to rewrite history or to propagate particular religious expressions are clearly outside the realm of mere differences in policy. The text below raises these concerns in a letter to the prime minister of India.</p> <TABLE border=2 cellpadding=5 bordercolor=#000000><TR><TD><font class=body>Shri A. B. Vajpayee Prime Minister of India</p> Subject: <U>New curriculum changes and policy changes in education.</U></p>Dear Prime Minister,</p>We are concerned citizens who have been following recent developments in the education curriculum in India, represented by the new National Curriculum Framework put forth by the NCERT, the new Policy Framework for Reforms in Education, and by recent changes in textbooks in some states. We are deeply concerned about the future of India's education and the effect it will have on future generations. We would like to raise the following concerns.</p><B class=hm1>The Indian Education System must remain free of communalism</p><ul>[*]The communalization of education evident in recent changes in textbooks and in the tone of New Curriculum Framework is alarming. Textbooks in institutions such as Vidya Bharati and Shishu Mandir, the official text books in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan reflect narrow, partisan viewpoints that amount to propaganda rather than to education. The state's role in education is fund the intellectual and moral banks of our nation, not to invest these valuable resources in its own ideology. We call for a review of these textbooks.</p>[*]The non-secular tone of the new framework goes against the secular character of the Indian Republic. Moreover, in significant portions of the texts, history is simply rewritten in ways that distort facts to promote a particular ideology, rather than record the actual events which took place. This isn't scholarship. We demand that an unbiased and rational discussion with education experts, academicians and elected representatives be held before the new framework is endorsed as a truly national policy.</p> Cc: Dr. Murali Manohar Joshi, Minister for Human Resource Development Dr. J. S. Rajput, Director, NCERT</p></TD></TR></TABLE>

INDIA: PREMIER DEFENDS CURRICULUM CHANGES Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee defended his government's decision to introduce a new school curriculum that critics say is biased. "The attempt is to correct history as it is being currently taught," he said. "All these years students were taught incorrect history by the opposition." Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist party, supported the removal of references to archaeological evidence that casts doubt on the existence of the Hindu gods Vishnu and Ram and suggests that beef was served to special guests in ancient India. Hindus consider cows to be sacred. David Rohde (NYT)

<center><h3>Resurrecting India’s True History </h3> By Hari Chandra </center> http://www.sulekha.com/hoppercomments.asp?pg=2&cid=281778 This is with reference to “Hijacking India’s History” Op-Ed piece by Kay Friese published in The New York Times of Dec 30, 2002. India’s identity battles are nothing new, but recent archeological evidence seems to be unnerving quite a few of yesteryear history gatekeepers and their apologists – the so-called secularists, who have for long enjoyed the establishment backing up until the mid-nineties. Kay Friese’s ranting Op-Ed is typical of the paranoia that has gripped the self-appointed history gatekeepers in India in recent months - more so after the riots that followed the Godhra carnage in Gujarat, where a train car full of Hindu women and children were burnt alive by fanatic Muslims. India’s Hindu nationalists have a rightful quarrel with the official history, which has for long been guided by colonial masters with their own agendas, racial, regional, religious, and otherwise. Post-1947 after the partition of India and the end of the British rule, the mantle was passed on to the Congress party, which under the Nehruvian socialistic order dominated the society for 45 of the last 55 years. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was an agnostic and a Fabian socialist. He never cared about India’s Hindu identity, and was more interested in the social engineering that was to accompany his socialistic ideal, which proved to be nothing but an illusion. His vehement opposition, despite popular Hindu sentiment, to the rebuilding of the Somnath Temple as resurrection of civilization pride after India’s independence is a case in point. Somnath, one of the most revered pilgrimage sites of Hinduism was plundered and destroyed by Mohammed Ghazni as many as 17 times between 1001 A.D and 1027 A.D., and evokes civilizational trauma as well strong nationalistic feelings across India even today. Despite being a suave and sophisticated intellectual, Nehru and the Congress Party fully exploited the dynamics of vote bank politics, which tended to divide Hindu vote into caste/region based categories, while keeping the Muslim vote unified by pointing an accusing finger at the Hindu society - this despite the fact that India retained its multi-religious and pluralistic character after Partition in 1947, while Pakistan became an authoritarian Islamic republic. It is under this setting that historians of the socialist, communist, and the neo-Macaulay variety came in handy for the ruling Congress Party to cover-up, distort, and pervert Indian history out of its geographic, cultural, religious, social, and political setting. The aim was to ensure that the Hindu votes do not consolidate under one political umbrella, even as Muslims are courted as a ready-made vote bank. Also, to use history to show that the Hindu culture is itself was an outcome of invasion by Aryans, who displaced the indigenous people. A perfect cover to justify subsequent barbaric invasions by Islamic plunderers and the rapine British rule by comparing them to the Aryans, and in projecting Indian culture to be an outcome of benign outside influences rather than the uniquely indigenous Hindu cultural traditions. Specific to the issues raised by Kay Friese, rewriting history is nothing new, and is nothing wrong particularly in light of new facts that can be ascertained with the help of science. The Aryan Invasion Theory – a favorite of professional secularists – is largely based on philology of Indo-European languages, and was dated around 1500 BC by Max Mueller. The dating of the theory was arbitrary, and was acknowledged by Max Mueller himself later. Etymologically, according to Max Muller, the word Arya was derived from ar- "plough, to cultivate" - meaning an agriculture background and indicating a more settled, peaceful, and civilized society rather than a conquering people of nomads and hunter-gatherers that the Aryans were projected to be. Surprisingly, the roots of Aryan Invasion Theory are not found in any oral, written, or archeological record of India, but in the European political discourse and more specifically, the German nationalism of 19th the century. Using philological basis, a theory was constructed, whereby a homeland of the Aryans was posited to be in the southeastern Europe or Central Asia. This homeland concept was further buffeted with a supposed invasion on horses and chariots that was then tied up domestication of horse referenced in Vedic literature. As a coup de grace, the Aryan Invasion Theory was considered proven by claiming that the domestication of the horse took place at around 1500 B.C, and that the horse provided the military advantage that enabled the Aryans to conquer the indigenous people of India. A major flaw of the invasion theory is that it is all based on philology and has nothing to support in terms of archeology. Oral traditions were posited in a time, place, and setting of the secularist historian’s choice, but there was nothing in terms of physical evidence to support it in India or elsewhere. Second, the Harappa/Mohenjadaro civilization excavations with large amounts of physical evidence that point to a highly evolved people are posited as belonging to the indigenous people, but there seems to be nothing that can be said of them in philological terms. Third, if the Aryans destroyed the indigenous civilizations, there seems to be no evidence of this in the Harappa and Mohenjadaro excavation sites, which largely appear to be abandoned than destroyed. Fourth, geographical as well as astronomical references in Vedic literature are largely confined to India and match with events in the third millennium B.C and earlier, and not circa 1500 B.C as per the Aryan Invasion Theory. Fifth, there is no reference in the Vedic or the Post-Vedic literature of any conquests of Dravidians, the indigenous people who were supposed to have been driven out by Aryans. More importantly there appears to be no Aryan-Dravidian divide in the historical, cultural, literary and religious traditions that can be brought to evidence. That the Aryan Invasion Theory was no more than a figment of colonial imagination seems to be troubling the professional secularists given their intense politicization of the debate and complete obfuscation of evidence that has been unearthed in recent years. So great is their aversion to reality and Hinduism that a tribe of secularist historians led by Romilla Thapar issued a declaratory statement that no more archeological excavations be done lest they confuse history, and hurt the feelings of the minority community - a case of acute paranoia to say the least. There is no way to reconcile the philological assumptions and the anomalies and inconsistencies that crop with the Aryan Invasion Theory. The alternate Indus-Saraswati civilization theory on the other hand posits that the Aryans were indigenous people, and the original habitants of the townships along the Indus, Ravi, and Saraswati rivers, and that no invasion from outside took place during the Vedic times. Post-Vedic invasions did occur, and are well documented and are backed up with substantial evidence. This theory is backed by evidence, which is at least consistent, scientific and can stand up to critical scrutiny. The archeological evidence is quite wide in range: satellite remote sensing and infra-red imagery of the long lost Saraswati river; Radio-isotope confirmation of the water from underground aquifers that fed the Saraswati river; carbon dating of the archeological evidence of numerous human settlements along the Saraswati river tracing along Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat in North India; forensic archeology of the Harappa Horse seals; and the philological connections of the Vedas with the archeological evidence. Enhancing further these findings are the discoveries of the submerged cities at Dwarka and Gulf of Cambay in Gujarat, excavation sites at Lothal and Dholavira in Gujarat, and Ropar in Punjab, underwater archaeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu, and off Musiris in Kerala, among others. Instead of casting aspersions on Hindu nationalists via civilization history, religion, and politics, it would have been prudent if Kai Friese did his homework not just about Aryan Invasion Theory but also about India’s medieval as well as contemporary history. As for religious freedom, Article 25 of India’s constitution guarantees free profession, practice and propagation of religion. However propagation does not automatically mean conversion, and religious conversion via force, economic inducements, fraud or allurement robs this very freedom to choose. This issue was specifically addressed by the Supreme Court of India in a 1977 verdict, whereby it held that the word "propagate", in the context of religion would mean to transmit, carry forward, diffuse or extend a particular religious belief or practice. But there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one's own religion. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, which are native to India, Islam and Christianity originated in a foreign land, with a cultural and philosophical tradition that is inimical to Hindu tradition, which believes in the brotherhood of all humanity irrespective of region, race or religion. Islam came into India on the cutting edge of a sword with unheard of barbarity that saw plunder, destruction, rape, slavery, and forced conversion in its wake. While there is a belief that Jesus Christ visited India during his missing years, and it is a fact that Christianity came to India via St. Thomas in 52 A.D., Christianity’s growth in India was largely due to missionaries, who had the backing of colonial rulers be they French, Portugese, or the British. With respect to Gujarat, the Congress Party, secularist historians as well as the secularist media refuse to acknowledge what happened at Godhra was uncalled for, and also that the ensuing bloody riots for all the violence were brought under control within three days with the deployment of the Indian Army. Instead of having a balanced approach, and taking the state administration to task for the security lapses as well as relief efforts, they chose the ruling BJP party, and more specifically the party’s chief minister in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and demonized him to no end. Additionally, Hindu Gujaratis were portrayed as arsonists, bloodthirsty killers, and rapists, and only the Muslims as hapless victims. This secularist appeasement of the minorities resulted in a fierce backlash that resulted in the BJP getting two-thirds of the legislature seats in the December 2002 state elections by appealing to Hindu pride, and targeting Islamic terrorism in Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir as well as other parts of India. No wonder India Today magazine, a leading journal, in its Dec 30, 2002 issue rightly observed in its editorial: Gujarat “election was held in the backdrop of two riots, one bloody, the other pure sophistry. In the latter, professional secularists and the conscience-keeping industry sought out the darkest entries from the glossary of hate to describe the crime of the Hindu – Holocaust, fascism, Hitler…They rhapsodized the ghettos of victimhood, and, forever scavenging for a cause, they found a self-serving monster in Modi. The election exposed their pretence. “Secularism doesn’t mean a repudiation of religion. In this country, secularism in practice meant romancing the minority and demonizing the majority. The professional secularist always needed a bogeyman, the usurper of the ideal and a ghettoized victim. Gujarat provided a perfect situation. The Hindu was the bogeyman. The post-Godhra Hindu to be precise. Godhra itself couldn’t have provided the stereotypes – there the victim was the Hindu. So Godhra was just a crime. No adjectives from the history of hate were required to magnify it. The anger of the majority is as much a reality of the times as the anguish of the minority. The so-called secularists refuse to admit it. This election has corrected them.” Unlike many countries, India’s civilization heritage as well memory transcends several millennia and is a product of its timeless and peaceful coexistence of the Hindu society. And unlike other religions, Hinduism is a religion without any fundamentals – the concepts of exclusivity, chosen people, racial superiority, conversion, religious head, and religious dogma via a book, edict or revelations are alien to Indic tradition. Hinduism is more of a philosophy with full freedom of thought and action, with each individual pursuing liberation of the soul via the medium of truthful self-discovery. In a true sense, Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion, a notion that has been attested to by the Supreme Court of India as many as three times in recent years during the Hindu versus the professional secularist legal battles. Kay Friese’s shoot-and-scoot allegations against Hindu nationalists do more harm than good as they distort the identity and ideological debate currently underway in India. Let India and its people decide who and what they are rather than get judged by an amateur and immature outsider

<h3>India to offer dual citizenship to 20 million</h3> Associated Press New Delhi — The Indian government will enact a new law to provide dual citizenship to nearly 20 million people of Indian origin who live abroad, newspapers reported Monday. The change in citizenship laws will be announced at a conference of people of Indian origin that begins in New Delhi later this week, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani was quoted as saying in the Hindustan Times newspaper. People of Indian descent who are citizens of countries that allow residents to hold dual citizenship — such as Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia — will be given preference, Mr. Advani said. People of Indian descent who take on Indian citizenship would be able to purchase and own property and real estate in India. However, they will not be allowed to vote or run for office. Because of security concerns, Indian citizenship will not be automatic but will be decided on an individual basis, Mr. Advani said. "They will first have to apply and their application would be considered on the basis of reciprocity," he is reported to have said. The government will formally announce the changes in India's citizenship laws on Jan. 10 at an international celebration of people of Indian origin to begin Thursday in New Delhi. Around 1,500 people of Indian descent, mostly from the United States, Britain, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, will participate.

I am very sad to hear this news. The few contacts we had with Jaya Radhe were always very pleasing. She obviously left a good impression on everyone she came into contact with. I offer my prayers for her. The best we can do, I guess, is to repeat her name!

Guest: we don't know who you are either!

I have this book. It is not so clear to me that Charan Das "surrendered" that way. Krishna Das Babaji accompanied Bhaktivinoda to Puri and acted as his secretary.

The term "pure devotee" is used in Bengal to mean someone following the regulative principles. I wouldn't make too much of it.

This thread came to a halt with the statement that "Sva-likhita-jivani" is a doubtful work. It is not. These doubts are a smoke screen for the doubters.

Rael is in Canada because of strong anti-cult laws in France. He's kind of a Hugh Hefner figure--lots of babes, free sex, etc. It's Playboy meets E.T.

Atmaji, I would never argue with you. I hate it myself, but what can I do? You are a good person and I like you very much. Please forgive me my disputatiousness.

Even the gopis had doubts when Krishna left them. Doubts may be about method not substance.

<center><h2>Hijacking India's History</h2> By KAI FRIESE</center> NEW DELHI -- New York Times, Dec. 30, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/opinion/30FRIE.html While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat. The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands. Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history. Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. — that appears without a single date. The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will have to be devised." More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives. The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success. The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.) In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners." But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin. After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity? They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them." He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was. Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.

I find the "only self-realized souls" etc. argument a bit problematic. At some point we make a subjective decision about who is such a self-realized soul and go on from there. The Bhaktivinoda quote given above shows that we cannot abdicate the use of our intelligence no matter how wise our gurus. Thought is progressive, which means we have to build on what our gurus have given us and not simply preserve their ideas like "prisoners" in jail, or like pickles in a jar. Whether the Vyasa Puja is a place to publish such things is an interesting question. The Vyasa Puja publication is one that has further reach amongst the devotees now than ever before. I imagine that the editorial board makes some decisions about what is permitted. But if the VP is being used in this way, it is likely because there is no other adequate forum for devotees to discuss matters of this sort. On the other hand, as an expression of one's personal relationship with Srila Prabhupada, it is perhaps honest to express one's doubts in this way. These comments have made me interested in the Vyas Pujas as a literary form. Sounds fascinating. I wonder if anyone has a complete collection.

What makes people think that doubts stop at initiation? Initiation is some kind of brain-turning-off-mechanism? Initiation is about committing to a specific spiritual path.

Just to add that any religion that has a really wide base must have put a little water in the wine. This is the sociological theory of sect and church.

That is a tough question, because we generally associate authoritarian thinking with all religions. However, the most rigid authoritarianism ultimately proves counterproductive when the objective is to accomodate large groups of people. Even in traditional societies, where intense social homogeneity would combine with religion to prevent excessive variety, there is still a need to accomodate the more worldly, less practitioners within the fold. Catholicism and Islam allowed the creation of many orders of renunciates with their own rules, to allow for more individualized interpretation of spiritual life. Catholicism also permits a lot of cultural variety. The challenge of modernity brings a lot of friction into all religions, which to some extent or another are all based on a "great" revelation or series of revelations. Those who relativize these revelations are subject to becoming totally secular and are always under suspicion. Currently, the tendency in Protestant Christianity is to split up, with liberal and conservative factions divorcing, or people walking with their feet to other denominations that more closely embody the conservative or liberal ideology of the individual. Catholicism has done the best job of keeping a wide variety of opinions within the same institution, but the current pope has done much to alienate liberals. It's touch and go for him, though, because the current power base of the church is more and more in the third world, which is very conservative on moral issues. So that's a real juggling act. A powerful liturgy goes a long way to keep unity.

We are all understanding according to our own conscience. Thus, "mental concoction" is going on everywhere. The acharya is one who manages to make his all-encompassing vision of things meaningful to others. A vision that is only useful for the person that has it is legitimate for that one person. If he is not capable of making this vision meaningful to anyone else, then he is not an acharya, even though he may achieve a level of self-satisfaction. A successful religion can tolerate a wide variety of dissent about doctrine. Already in Iskcon, we see that there is a certain amount of interpretation going on--the question of women, gays, the infallibility of the guru, etc., are some issues that come to mind. In certain cases, it can be seen that there are sizeable minorities or even majorities that have taken positions arguably opposed to those espoused by Srila Prabhupada. Though controversies are often expectably heated and on occasion can lead to schisms, a successful religion with pretensions to universality generally seeks accomodation by relativizing such controversial issues under overarching points of common faith. What these are can also be a matter of debate, but I don't doubt that if I say that in Krishna consciousness "mahavakyas" like krishnas tu bhagavan svayam, jiver svarupa hoy nitya krishna das, harer namaiva kevalam would be accepted as central; the issue of women's intelligence far less so. Things like varnashram, furthermore, need long, sophisticated reflection. My personal hope is to one day see a tolerant unity amongst Vaishnavas across the spectrum. At present, however, Iskcon is still pretty much in the immediate post-charismatic phase and may never get out of it (as often happens). By this, I mean the charm of fundamentalism has not yet worn off. Jagat

Yes, this is proper. This questioning is very proper. How should we read Prabhupada's books? Here is Bhaktivinoda Thakur's answer. See how many of Devamrita's questions are answered here:<blockquote>…most readers are mere repositories of facts and statements made by other people. But this is not study. The student is to read the facts with a view to create, and not with the object of fruitless retention. Students, like satellites, should reflect whatever light they receive from authors and not imprison the facts and thoughts just as the Magistrates imprison the convicts in the jail. Thought is progressive. The author’s thought must have progress in the reader in the shape of correction or development. He is the best critic who can show the further development of an old thought; but a mere denouncer is the enemy of progress and consequently of Nature. "Begin anew," says the critic, "because the old masonry does not answer at present. Let the old author be buried because his time is gone." These are shallow expressions. Progress certainly is the law of nature and there must be corrections and developments with the progress of time. But progress means going further or rising higher. Now, if we are to follow our foolish critic, we are to go back to our former terminus and make a new race, and when we have run half the race another critic of his stamp will cry out: "Begin anew, because the wrong road has been taken!" In this way our stupid critics will never allow us to go over the whole road and see what is in the other terminus. Thus the shallow critic and the fruitless reader are the two great enemies of progress. We must shun them. The true critic, on the other hand, advises us to preserve what we have already obtained, and to adjust our race from that point where we have arrived in the heat of our progress. He will never advise us to go back to the point whence we started, as he fully knows that in that case there will be a fruitless loss of our valuable time and labor. He will direct the adjustment of the angle of the race at the point where we are. This is also the characteristic of the useful student. He will read an old author and will find out his exact position in the progress of thought. He will never propose to burn a book on the ground that it contains thoughts which are useless. No thought is useless. Thoughts are means by which we attain our objects. The reader who denounces a bad thought does not know that a bad road is even capable of improvement and conversion into a good one. One thought is a road leading to another. Thus a reader will find that one thought which is the object today will be the means of a further object tomorrow. Thoughts will necessarily continue to be an endless series of means and objects in the progress of humanity. The Bhagavata, like all religious works and philosophical performances and writings of great men, has suffered from the imprudent conduct of useless readers and stupid critics. The former have done so much injury to the work that they have surpassed the latter in their evil consequence. Men of brilliant thoughts have passed by the work in quest for truth and philosophy, but the prejudice which they imbibed from its useless readers and their conduct prevented them from making a candid investigation. Two more principles characterize the Bhagavata—liberty and progress of the soul throughout eternity. The Bhagavata teaches us that God gives us truth as He gave it to Vyasa: when we earnestly seek for it. Truth is eternal and unexhausted. The soul receives a revelation when it is anxious for it. The souls of the great thinkers of the bygone ages, who now live spiritually, often approach our enquiring spirit and assist it in its development. Thus Vyasa was assisted by Narada and Brahma. Our Shastras, or in other words, books of thought, do not contain all we could get from the infinite Father. No book is without its errors. God’s revelation is absolute truth, but it is scarcely received and preserved in its natural purity. We have been advised in the 14th Chapter of the 11th Skandha of the Bhagavata to believe that truth when revealed is absolute, but it gets the tincture of the nature of the receiver in course of time and is converted into error by continual exchange of hands from age to age. New revelations, therefore, are continually necessary in order to keep truth in its original purity. We are thus warned to be careful in our studies of old authors, however wise they are reputed to be. Here we have full liberty to reject the wrong idea, which is not sanctioned by the peace of conscience. Vyasa was not satisfied with what he collected in the Vedas, arranged in the Puranas, and composed in the Mahabharata. The peace of his conscience did not sanction his labors. It told him from within, "No, Vyasa! You cannot rest contented with the erroneous picture of truth which was necessarily presented to you by the sages of bygone days. You must yourself knock at the door of the inexhaustible store of truth from which the former sages drew their wealth. Go, go up to the fountainhead of truth, where no pilgrim meets with disappointment of any kind." Vyasa did it and obtained what he wanted. We have all been advised to do so. Liberty then is the principle which we must consider as the most valuable gift of God. We must not allow ourselves to be led by those who lived and thought before us. We must think for ourselves and try to get further truths which are still undiscovered. In the Bhagavata we have been advised to take the spirit of the Shastras and not the words. The Bhagavata is therefore a religion of liberty, unmixed truth, and absolute love. The other characteristic is progress. Liberty certainly is the father of all progress. Holy liberty is the cause of progress upwards and upwards in eternity and endless activity of love. Liberty abused causes degradation, and the Vaishnava must always carefully use this high and beautiful gift of God.</blockquote>Kundali Das has elaborated on this quotation effectively in the Our Mission series. I heartily recommend this series of books as a penetrating critique of fundamentalism as it has manifested in Iskcon specifically, but which is by extension applicable to anti-rational religiosity wherever it appears.)

<h3>Pakistan: a catastrophe in waiting</h3> By EMRAN QURESHI Saturday, December 21, 2002 – Globe and Mail Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan by Mary Anne Weaver. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pages, $38.95 Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones, Yale University Press, 352 pages, $46.50 Fifty-five years ago, Pakistan was a secular, industrializing Third-World nation showing promise for the future. It has since stumbled very badly, and is today a hotbed of Islamic militancy and now, much to its shame, the new home of al-Qaeda. Political scientists and foreign-policy analysts increasingly describe Pakistan as a failed state with nuclear weapons. Pakistan, after Sept. 11, is the front-line state in the fight against terrorism. Not coincidentally, it is also the very source of the terrorists that it fights. Mary Anne Weaver, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has travelled regularly to Pakistan for nearly two decades, and in Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan she provides depressing vignettes of a traumatized Pakistani society. Weaver attributes the manifold miseries that afflict that tormented land to the U.S.-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad that took place in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Pakistan was the staging area, the base for the struggle against the Soviets, and after the Soviets were vanquished, tens of thousands of Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis were available for other violent struggles. Today, these violent struggles are playing out on the embattled landscape of Pakistan. Weaver interviews retired U.S. General Anthony Zinni, at one time the head of U.S. central command and a close friend of Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Zinni sketches three possible worst-case scenarios for Pakistan: military hard-liners come to power, religious hard-liners come to power, or the state disintegrates. Owen Bennett Jones, a former Islamabad-based BBC correspondent, explores in Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm how rapacious ruling elites and a powerful army have brought the country to the precipice of disaster. By coincidence, both authors narrate the riveting tale of how Musharraf seized power. In 1999, Musharraf, then chief of staff for the Pakistani armed forces, was returning to Karachi from Sri Lanka on a civilian airliner. The Airbus was crowded with schoolchildren returning from a trip abroad. The Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, fired Musharraf, and would not let the flight land at the Karachi airport. Further, the airport runways were darkened and fire trucks placed on them. The plane circled above, desperately short of fuel, landing only when Musharraf's fellow officers seized the airport. Democracy has had an attenuated life in Pakistan. In 1981, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power and had the democratically elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto hanged on trumped-up charges. In 1988, Zia died in a mysterious plane crash. Bhutto's daughter, the charismatic Radcliffe- and Oxford-educated Benazir, won the elections that soon followed. It was a bittersweet moment for Benazir Bhutto, the first female head of a Muslim nation. Sadly, she quickly squandered it all. Weaver describes how, in power, Benazir acted like a vindictive feudal lord and was indulgent of her grossly corrupt husband (John F. Burns of The New York Times alleged that he siphoned off nearly $1-billion from the public treasury). Wealthy industrialist Nawaz Sharif, her successor, was not much better. Democracy in Pakistan today lies mortally wounded as a result of venal, autocratic "democrats" sparring with an equally corrupt but more powerful Praetorian Guard. One calamitous result of Zia ul-Haq's dictatorship was the rise and funding of right-wing religious seminaries (madrasas) across Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad. The madrasas provided the cannon fodder for that war and "educated" their successors, the Taliban. Bennett Jones recounts how General Zia also sought to provide the fig leaf of religious legitimacy for his regime by entering into an alliance with a marginal Islamist party, the Jamiat Islami (JI),and its founder, Maulana Mawdudi. (Mawdudi was an influential cleric whose writings, circulated throughout the Muslim world, have contributed to retarding its intellectual development.) Further, Zia ul-Haq placed thousands of JI activists into the judiciary, civil service and army. He was bitterly resisted by the intelligentsia of Pakistan, and the prisons were overflowing with thousands of dissidents. However, Zia did not go entirely unnoticed in the West: His regime received billions of dollars in U.S. aid, and then Secretary of State George Shultz eulogized him as a "great fighter for freedom." The legacy of these policies still haunts Pakistan. Weaver estimates that roughly 40,000 madrasas now dot the Pakistani landscape, preaching an intolerant Saudi Wahabi and local Deobandi interpretation of Islam. Madrasa graduates are unfit for gainful employment; worse, they have imbibed Saudi Wahabi doctrinal intolerance toward Pakistan's other Muslim sects, especially Shiites. In recent years, Shiites have been attacked in ever-increasing numbers during the holy month of Ramadan and at mosques. More ominously, these madrasas provide the cadres for a dozen or so private Islamist armies, some with close ties to Osama bin Laden, and which are capable of overthrowing the state. To further deprive the reader of sleep, Weaver retells the chilling tale of bin Laden's repeated attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. He met on several occasions with one of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists, Bashiruddin Mahmoud. Mahmoud, a radical Islamist, had repeatedly travelled back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan on what he described as "charitable" work. U.S. officials were sufficiently alarmed at the possibility that bin Laden might acquire technology for a "dirty bomb" that CIA Director George Tennet was dispatched to Islamabad, where he met with Musharraf to discuss this threat. Far too often, naive Western commentators assume that religious radicals have widespread popular support. They do not. In one well-known incident, Pakistani Taliban students who attempted to interrupt a soccer match at the Peshawar stadium (the players were apparently provocatively dressed in shorts) were literally beaten back by outraged spectators. Their support is far thinner than presumed, and based primarily upon coercion, fear and violent intimidation. Weaver makes the point that the Taliban-like policies pursued by radical mullahs have very little support within the broad populace, who would rather continue watching television and listening to catchy Bollywood tunes. The future for Pakistan can best be described as bleak. The Economist called the recent Pakistani election farcical, a rigged result that provoked indignation and hostility across wide swaths of Pakistani civil society. Militant Islamists with ties to the Taliban, who have never before received popular representation, did dangerously well, especially in the North-West Frontier province and Baluchistan. On top of that, al-Qaeda seems to have relocated successfully in Pakistan. Weaver asserts that the recent outburst of murderous assaults -- a church in Islamabad, car bombings in Karachi and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -- bear the telltale imprint of al-Qaeda. Moreover, Pakistani militant organizations that were previously preoccupied with murdering Shiites have formed a loose alliance with al-Qaeda. It is against these unyielding odds that Musharraf attempts to bring order out of chaos, and rebuild the shattered Pakistani economy. Approximately 55 per cent of the Pakistani populace is illiterate. But the lion's share of the state coffers goes to the armed forces -- one-third to one-half of the budget. Bennett Jones points out that for Pakistan to develop and prosper, the budget and power of the armed forces must be shrunken over time and devolved to its citizenry. That is, simply put, democracy must flourish. Alas, that is unlikely to happen any time soon. Mary Anne Weaver's superb reportage helps us to understand the grievous wounds that afflict Pakistan. Her account deserves the highest praise. Owen Bennett Jones masterfully explores the historical, institutional, ideological and class forces that have created the fine mess that is today's Pakistan. One might reasonably ask what could possibly be worse than this present situation? Imagine these very mullahs with their fingers on the launch buttons of nuclear devices while watched across the border by a belligerent militant Hindu nationalist government of nuclear-armed India. If ever there was a scenario for nuclear armageddon, this is it. Pity the nation and fear for the future. Emran Qureshi is the co-editor of the forthcoming The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy.

How does "sampradAya-virodhaH" translate as "sectarianism"? The usual word is "sAmpradAyikatA". Bhaktivinoda's words here translate as "opposition to the sampradaya", which from his other writings I would interpret to mean opposition to the Madhva/Gaudiya connection. Of course, BVT wrote his own commentary to this verse in Bengali, to which I do not have access. Thus, though the sentiment of this post suits me, I have a strong doubt that this is Bhaktivinoda's original intention.