Being different

Introduction:

Teaser: What is up with your hair? What is that mark on your forehead? And what is with this sanskrit mumbo jumbo? Can’t you be like everyone else?

Clicking on the above picture will take you to Rabbi Shergil’s rendition of “pagri sambhAl jaTTa”.

Being different? In what way?

  • One may value identifying oneself closely with the 5k + year old hindu stream of thought.

  • As part of one’s culturally distinct way of being/ path of self cultivation, one may express myself in Sanskrit verses, don a shikhA, wear the sacred thread (yajnopavitam), mark my body in several places with hindu symbols, do rituals, speak incantations in private and public etc..

  • One may refuse to mistranslate and mangle important hindu thoughts in languages that have no equivalent word. One would rather refuse categories of western thought systems (eg: worship, religion, God, heaven, sin, caste..) and use hindu terms like karma, dharma, puNya, pUja, jAti, varNa, naivedya, prasAda etc..

    • No - religion is NOT dharma, Abhraham’s God is not a deva or brahman, idol (as understood by abrahamists) is not mUrti, caste is neither jAti nor varNa.
    • Similarly, li~N case in Sanskrit is not just the “potential case”, “Past perfect” is not the liT case is sanskrit.
    • Similar is the case with some imported sanskrit words. A “puNDit” is not any old expert guy, yoga is NOT an exercise sequence,
    • Besides the immediate problem of misunderstanding, this eventually leads to the same miscommunicated concepts being taught to our anglophone kids. They will then mistakenly think of it as correctly representing the views of their forefathers.

  • One may rather wish “Happy holidays” or “Happy Newtonmas” rather than “Eid Mubarak” or “Merry Christmas” - given serious problems with the Abrahamisms.

  • That apart, one may occasionally encourage few other close ones to not hide their hindu-ness and to wear it with courage and satisfaction.

Threats to distinctness.

Assimilation by the Borg

  • Hindus face huge social pressure (explicit or implicit) to hide their practices - both in corporate India and abroad. Hindu practices are often considered “uncool” by “cool” peers.
    • Male hindu-s in such situations have long abandoned externally visible hindu markings, and females have recently joined them.
    • Examples: USA16.
  • This goes beyond exterior appearences - in that it affects behavior. Soon enough people from families that never consumed meat or liquor have no problems eating beef.

Not being able to wear a saree to work, feeling that wearing a tilaka or sporting a shikhA is unprofessional *is* a big deal. “Dress like us” is same as saying “pretend that you are like us”. This is state of affairs reminds me of the borg.

Clicking above will present the famous borg threat.

Dissimulators

Elsewhere, alien thought systems dissimulate themselves as being “more or less the same” by adapting some distinctive practices of another culture. This phenomenon is called “inculturation”, and it is a dangerous thing. Eg: Christians in southern India wearing saffron clothes of the hindu saMnyAsin, maybe learning the sacred dance of bharata, all the while retaining alleigence the Nicene creed and the foreign church.

Assimilation by celebration

  • Valentine’s day: I have nothing against free love or a day of love or a month of love. kAmotsava, if brought back to its 8th century splendor, will be a great accomplishment for the oft-constipated state of contemporary hindu culture. But please spare a thought to the bastard whose name is applied to celebrations of love. From a common hagiography of valentine: “Valentinus replied that all of the idols around the judge’s house should be broken, the judge should fast for three days, and then undergo baptism. The judge obeyed and as a result, freed all the Christian inmates under his authority.” Isn’t the beautiful invisible kAmadeva, with his sugarcane bow, bee-line-bow-string and flower arrows a better patron for such festivities?
  • The current conception of Santa Claus is just fine- it would be wise to use him as a deity while explicitly stating his pagan roots. St. Nicholas is not.

Why be different? Barriers and cohesion

Being different is a natural consequence of some very valuable distinctive practices which refine “practicing hindus” and make them happier (samskAra-s).

A strong sense of identity and belonging are very valuable emotionally. They tend to color the weights you place on different goals, your values, notions of good and bad..

Besides, it is natural. Mental divides (“us, as different from them”) are an essential part of being human (a part of a more general phenomena observed in social animals). But we are all richer if we can celebrate difference, rather than demand uniformity. An analogy to music would help. Some people like beethoven, others like rap, still others like R&B.

Contrast/ defence from less satisfying inimical thought systems.

Our distinctive practices help us defend our superior memes from inimical ones.

Particularly, in the case of hindu-s vs abrahamists case:

  • Consider the Abrahamistic narrative of human condition. It goes like : “God demands obedience. Man showed disobedience. That is why he is in trouble. Earth is not sacred, but was made *for* man’s consumption.” (Eg: Nicene creed angle explained in hindi here.) That really is ***far less*** appealing than the dhArmika drive towards the purushArtha-s or even mokSha. This contrast is lost if we go about dissimulating as abrahamists.
  • Abrahamist pluralism is a facade - their accommodation of hindu thought and behavior is limited by the 10 commandments or something like the Nicene creed. The end result is tolerance (at best) - not mutual respect - from their side.
  • Also, historically, the abrahamisms and their institutions have been deadly for polytheistic cultures.

This insistence on practice is an essential feature of many a sect (Mormonism WP, Modern Orthodox judaism WP). “What I read from Eric Kaufmann and Michael Blume is that in first world industrialized countries the optimal strategy for growth is what they call “preach and breed” i.e., missions in the early days to form a core group of committed members, followed by erection of some barriers against the outside secular world, and maintenance of a high birth rate. " (WP)

Won’t it lead to ghettoization?

They may form ‘ghettos’ as you may say, but it does not stop collaboration in building bridges, writing code, doing mathematics or running companies. You don’t need to require everyone to wear low hanging jeans and “shake the bootie”. It is probably not so much a matter of focusing on the difference as it is on not focusing on the irrelevant.

Where can I read more?

Rajeev Malhotra’s speech here, here.