The Right Perspective

UK Elections- Its implications in the US and what it means for the Indian Diaspora  When the polls closed in England at 10pm GMT on December 12 and the media revealed the findings of the exit polls, it reaffirmed what most were expecting. The exit polls predicted a landslide win for the Tories and a crushing defeat, one of the worst in about a century, for the Labour. The Conservative Party, was led by the incumbent Prime Minister Boris Johnson whereas the Labour Party was led by the septuagenarian socialist, (turned 70 earlier this year) Jeremy Corbyn.  The Britons were voting to elect its members of the lower house of the Parliament which then in turn will elect the Prime Minister. Elections were necessitated as the UK politics was bogged down in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Thirty months and 2 prime ministers later, Britain still could not negotiate a Brexit deal.  As the results poured in, the main story wasn’t the handsome victory of the flamb...

NPR, the National Prejudiced Radio: Why Western Media’s Coverage of India and Hinduism is Ignorant and Biased. National Public Radio’s (NPR) liberal bias is not secret.  In his October 2017  New York Post  piece Ken Stern, the former CEO of NPR writes: “Most reporters and editors are liberal – a now dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in media by some 5 to 1, and that comports to my anecdotal experience at National Public Radio.” Similarly, NPR’s official ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin also  admitted to a liberal bias  in NPR’s talk programming. However, the NPR recently revealed another bias – an anti-India and an anti-Hindu bias. The world’s largest democracy’s enterprise to elect its federal government is a  gargantuan exercise .  Spread over 39 days and seven rolling phases, the Indian electoral juggernaut boasts of approximately 900 million eligible voters, 12 million polling officials, 8,000 ca...

Modi 2.0- India's foreign policy and unleashing its power of Cultural Diplomacy While writing in The Brown Journal of World Affairs (Volume 13, No 1, Fall/Winter 2006), Cynthia P. Schneider, a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University and a former Ambassador of the United States to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, mentions the following quote by Thomas Jefferson: “You see I am an enthusiast of the subject of arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to improve their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and procure them its place”. This observation penned by the 3 rd  President of the United States of America for the 4 th  (James Madison) has not lost its relevance even today. As Harold Nicolson (Diplomacy, 1942) puts it, “Differences between in the theory and practice of diplomatic standards are caused by variations in national character...

Who is Killing my JNU Culture?   Inside Photo  ( Graffiti against Brahimins)  JNU students protesting at the admin block of the University     When I joined JNU in 1990, though there were ideological battles, they were not abusive in words or physically violent. That is the JNU culture I pray for     It was the election season in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), my first one there in 1990. I had arrived on JNU campus as a graduate student in Linguistics. JNU had opened a new hostel called Mahanadi. A stone’s throw away from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, this newly built facility was nestled in the quiet serene section of Poorvanchal. It was designated to be a hostel for married couples but due to shortage of hostel accommodation, some of us non-married students were temporarily lodged there. It was so far away from the Ganga Dhaba and the rest of the action that unless you were a resident of this hostel, you wouldn’t ...

The Indic Knowledge Tradition India has always been known as a ‘knowledge society’. Derived from the verbal root ‘vid’ meaning ‘to know’, the Vedas as ‘shruti’, are considered the fountainhead of what came to be known as the Indic Knowledge Tradition (IKT, also knowns as the Hindu Intellectual Tradition). According to the tradition, the ‘rishis’ composed the Vedic hymns, the mantras, out of some outworldly experience-perception. These hymns “were and are always there unchanging beyond our common world of change”, according to N Kazanas. Hence the Vedic mantras are called ‘nitya’ and ‘apaurusheya’ (eternal and not created by humans). IKT’s contribution is immense in almost all fields of intellectual inquiry. For example, physician Sushruta describes rhinoplasty surgery in 600 BCE in his book Sushruta Samhita. Similarly, the so-called Pythagorean theorem first occurs, according to the Fields Medalist mathematician Manjul Bhargava, about 800 BCE in Bauddhayana’s Shulba Sutra. ...

Rama’s exile According to the tradition Bhagwan Rama, along with his wife Mata Sita and his brother Bhagwan Lakshamana, was exiled (vanvasa) for 14 years. That exile, however, was in the Treta Yuga, third of the four Yugas – Satya, Treta, Dwapar, and Kali. The current exile we are talking about started almost 490 years ago in 1528 CE. Zahir ud-Din Babur was the founder (1526 CE) of the Mughal dynasty in India. Two years after he established the Mughal Empire, he ordered a large mosque (called Babari Masjid) built in the holy city of Ayodhya by destroying the existing Bhagwan Rama temple. Situated on the bank of the Saryu River, Ayodhya is considered the birthplace of Bhagwan Rama, one of the most revered gods of the billion strong Hindus around the world. Destruction of Hindu temples is the hallmark of the Islamic invasion of India. Several thousand temples were destroyed and desectred. Several thousand more moorties were vandalized and dismembered. In a two volume book Hindu...

The ghost of Rangeela Rasool On October 18, 2019, Kamlesh Tiwari, a Hindu, was brutally murdered by two alleged assailants in his home office in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (UP). According to the post-mortem report published in several media outlets, Tiwari was stabbed 15 times, mostly in his upper body. There were also two deep cut marks on his neck, an indication that the perpetrators attempted to slit his neck. In addition, he was also shot by a bullet. According to media reports, one of the assailants was allegedly upset with Tiwari because he had announced plans to make a movie called ‘Rangeela Rasool’ (The Colorful Prophet). Prior to this, Kamlesh Tiwari had also said to have made ‘derogatory’ comments about Prophet Muhammad in December of 2015. He was promptly put behind bars by the state government where he spent several months. He was charged with several counts of Indian Penal Code sections. There were large scale protests against him, one of the largest one in Kaliachak i...