BS Murthy

                                          The Gita ‘As It Is’ - A Travesty of Caste It is a safe bet to say that while most might have heard about Bhagavad-Gita, hardly any would have read it (much less apprised it as can be seen here) though it contains no more than seven-hundred verses that is not counting the unnumbered opening one in its thirteenth chapter! Not only that, this, possibly, over-two-millennia-old classic could be the only epic in the world that is admired without application of mind and debunked with understandable misunderstanding as it, as it is, sanctions the inimical caste divisions in the Hindu polity as opposed to the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran that seek to inculcate unity amongst the respective communities.   The sore point to those at the rough-end-of-the-caste-stick in the ‘in vogue’ Gita (short description of the Bhagavad-Gita) is God Krishna’s a...

  Long before the advent of the Torah, not to speak of the Bible and the Quran that followed it, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad had it that “.. since he (man) created gods who are better than he: and also because, being mortal, he created immortals, it is his higher creation. Whoever knows this, comes to be in this, his higher creation.”   However, in the latter-day N ā r ā yana Upanishad, the ‘mortal man’ sought to control the ‘immortal god’ he himself had created thus: “daiva d ē nam jagat sarvam, / mantr ā d ē nantu daivatam, tan mantram br ā hman ā dē nam, / br ā hmano mama d ē vata.”   It’s on god that hinges all / Mantras rein in that godhood Controlled are those by Brahmans / Making them our own angels.   Going by the pur ā n ā s , not only the Brahman rishis and maharshis maneuvered gods through yagnās ‘n yāgās but also were wont to curse them when offended. In time though, as if god gained an upper hand in his tussle with man, Lord Krishna, i...

                                                  State of Art   The Indian legend has it that goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi respectively bestow wealth and learning on earth. It was the belief that both the goddesses would never bless the same soul. Such was their mythical rivalry that each would deny her munificence to the one under the other’s patronage. In the popular perception, the phenomenon of the rich merchant and the poor pundit was supposedly the manifestation of the goddesses at odds. Thus the merchant accumulated wealth nevertheless contributing to the commerce while the pundit enriched society through his knowledge, himself remaining impoverished. Nevertheless, both seemed reconciled to the enmity of their respective patrons in heaven as they got their share of recognition on earth. This divine separation of commerce and arts that was the no...

  Ernst Röhm, the boss of Brown Shirts, whose rough shoulders carried Adolf Hitler into the German Chancellery, was keen to induct them into the Wehrmacht that was set to replace Reichswehr . However, the Fuehrer, whose vision was to develop a world-beating armed force, saw no role for Röhm’s riff-raff in its professional setup. But as the rebuffed deputy could unleash his Storm Troopers on his regime itself, the real politic constrained the Nazi numero uno to usher in the Night of the Long Knives but for which, the rights and wrongs apart, the Third Reich wouldn’t have had such a formidable army with the Panzers at its helm.      That was in the early thirties of the last century and now in the nascent twenties of the current one, India’s West Bengal faced a Röhm moment as Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool supremo, led her party to a resounding victory in the assembly polls, however, fouled by her personal loss at the hustings. Thus, while Narendra Modi, the Pri...

  Badn ām-Gita’s Spoiler Slokas The Bhagavad-Gita was eulogized as “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue” by the 19 th Century Prussian philosopher William von Humboldt but Vijay Mankar, the Ambedkarite of the day, avers that it is a rotten work deserving to be thrown into a dustbin for “it advocates inequality of man based on caste, stigmatizes women as an inferior kind and legitimizes violence”. Neither Humboldt was alone in praising the Gita for he had the illustrious company of many a Western thinker such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, only to name a few, nor Mankar lacked company to castigate it as a book of bigotry, for Ambedkar the Dalit intellectual, who piloted the Indian Constitution, was unsparing about it. Whatever, t hese extremely divergent opinions about this antique work continue to persist to the hurt of the Hindu polity what with some perceivi...