Balagangadhara

Here is a new book by S. N. Balagangadhara and Sarika Rao: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’? US version can be had for $12.00; Indian version for Rs. 349. Here are the UK, Candian , EU versions. Any questions, comments are welcome and you can post it onhttps://groups.io/g/TheHeathenInHisBlindness This book tries to answer a question that is also its title. This book shares some of the results of …

1. In this talk, I would like to focus on the two attitudes that I have towards your project. It is not that I have ambiguous feelings; no, I have two distinct feelings. On the one hand, I am convinced that you will not reach your goal because such a goal is unreachable. Not only that. Your goal is undesirable and best abandoned. On the other hand, if you strive with integrity, clarity and passion …

[Original Dutch article published on Sep 30, 2003; English version is due to google translate and some minor changes] Edward Said is dead. Last Wednesday he lost his battle with cancer. The influence of this Palestinian writer in all areas of the social sciences of the last quarter century is immense. Many will remember him from Delhi to Dar Es Salaam, from Paris to Chicago; many will also write …

There are multiple kinds of interpretation. For instance, there is interpretation of symbols in a domain like Physics: μ (in elementary optics) is “interpreted” as the refraction index of a substance. We use a more or less analogous notion of “interpretation” in Chemistry, Mathematics and so on. In logic, we speak of “interpretation of variables” like p, q, etc. Here, it means that the letters …

The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the past. This is partly the result of how Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three Semitic religions) look at themselves and their own past: everything they claim about their past (the Flood, …

Two caveats. One: the commentary is very, very short. To write down all the things I want to say about this citation requires a long paper and not a brief mail. Two: I have not checked either the citation or the reference (Brihadaranyaka upanishad - I.iv.10). I assume that both are accurate. This (Self) was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as “I am Brahman.” Therefore it became …

Assume that you get a Ph.D student who wants to do medical research. He comes to you and tells you that he wants to find out an answer to the burning question about why people get sick. Would you be able to guide this student in answering his question or give one answer to it? Your answer would be: it depends. You would also further say to him, ‘choose a particular disease, choose a particular …

You say that you experienced Shakti as an emanation of a force that is overpowering and palpable; you also say that you felt the ‘presence’ of Shakti strongly. These two sentences make one think that you felt the presence of the force. In that case, there are only two routes open to us: (a) either reject that we have knowledge of the world which forbids linguistic utterances from infusing material …

Two points should be kept in mind before using these examples: (a) the examples illustrate that the distinctions are not unknown to an English language-user (b) the distinction does not require denying the knowledge that we have about the world. These merely indicate that the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘existence’ might be worth a serious investigation. A possible set of examples: Not Real but …

Chairman Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning. Actually I’m the odd man out. We have success stories. We have spiritual leaders; we have an extraordinarily organizational leader in front of us. And now I have to do an exam. You see, normally I take exams in the university. Now I have to do an exam. The exam is this I must move you from these wonderful stories, success stories, good stories, to …

It is advisable to get into a discussion about this question only after one knows what ‘supererogation’ means and how it has been discussed for centuries. In the Greek ethics (especially as Aristotle formulated it), the notion plays a very crucial role without it being related to a normative sense of duty. With the Catholics, especially as Aquinas gave expression to it, a normative notion of duty …

When you provide a moral criticism of someone, you are saying that such a person is morally wrong. If you bracket, for a moment, my writings and talks on the subject, then you see that no moral criticisms are possible without using a normative language. About realizing moral ideals: do you know any way of showing how some or another event in the world is not an ‘imperfect’ realization of the …

Note: For a broader application and context, please read this paper: translation, interpretation and culture The word ’temple’ is not used in English to refer to a place where false gods are worshipped. It is used to speak of “the temple of Solomon” (the king Solomon of the Jews) too and there is no suggestion in the western culture that the Jews worshipped false gods. Your friend is providing you …

9.32 Bhagavadgita māṃ hi pārtha vyapāśritya ye ‘pi syuḥ pāpayonayaḥ striyo vaiśyāstathā śūdrās te’ pi yānti parāṃ gatim The situation is a bit more complex. The word ‘yoni’ here does much more work than one assumes. All the four are born from ‘Yoni’ but yet are distinguished in terms of punya and paapa. The last two are earnt by the organism in question: ‘svayaarjita’, suggesting that being a …

(a) Paolo Friere, a Brazilian educationalist, has spoken about such a phenomenon at length in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He calls it as an ‘internalisation of the oppressor by the oppressed’. Whether we use Paolo Friere’s terminology or the much later one of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, the problem is the same: both name the phenomenon without explaining it. In and of itself, not such a big problem …

Perhaps, one of the ways to test whether your search is taking you in the right direction is by seeing whether it solves a well-known paradox, or explicates it in a novel way. If after research, your hypothesis leads you to a well-known discussion in theology (but lacks the latter’s sophistication), then you could be on an uninteresting track. In certain phases of thinking, unbridled speculations …

Let us suppose that some school or another in India also prescribes uniform to its students. A Sikh boy and a Muslim girl enroll. They wear the colors of the school, including the right colored turban (or, if the Sikh kid is too young, his hair tied up in a knot) and the right-colored head scarf. From what I know of the Indian schools, most schools (including the fellow-students) would let the …

We can all accept the fact, I suppose, that some thing or another is a religious symbol to someone when s/he belongs to that religion whose symbol it is. In this sense, the Cross (for a long period of time), the figure of the Prophet Mohammed (also for a long period of time) and the star of David (in the course of this century) are symbols that carry religious significance to the Christians, …

It would be interesting to answer the question of whether or not The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a religious story by testing against ‘religion is an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos’. Does the Lord of the Rings give an account in which the causal and intentional explanations for the happenings in Middle Earth fall together? One of the problems in testing a scientific theory and …

I keep teaching my students the need to unlearn: unlearn the desire to ‘show off’ their erudition; unlearn shallowness and so on. I am more than convinced that whatever we have learnt about human beings can be formulated in a jargon-free language and in a simple manner. There is no need to appear ‘mysterious and profound’; nor is there a need for exhibiting one’s erudition or ‘critical …