After reading the recent article in the New York Times on corruption in the IPL, I went over to Amit Varma’s blog, India Uncut, to see if he had any comments on Lalit Modi et al. I didn’t find anything right off, but instead a reference to yet another Twitter controversy that I’d missed, in this post.
A journalist with IBN Live, Sagarika Ghose, had posted a few Tweets (for example) lamenting that a group of what she called “Internet Hindus” had attacked her for comments she had made: “Internet Hindus are like swarms of bees. they come swarming after you at any mention of Modi Muslims or Pakistan!”
Other journalists have also picked up on the phrase. Here is an interesting column by Ashok Malik in the Hindustan Times that picks up on the critique. Amit also linked to a column by Kanchan Gupta defending the “Internet Hindus” here, along the lines of “screw the pseudo-secular MSM,” though I personally wasn’t all that impressed by the overblown rhetoric. (Call me an Internet Skeptic.)
Actually, Amit Varma’s own comments on the phenomenon of extremism on the internet seemed wisest to me:
If Ghose was, indeed, bothered by trolls, she would have done well to keep in mind the old jungle saying, ‘Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.’ The internet empowers loonies of all kinds by giving them a megaphone–but no one is forced to listen to them. The noise-to-signal ratio is way out of whack on the net (Sturgeon’s Law), and any smart internet veteran will tell you that to keep your sanity, you need to ignore the noise. Ghose, poor thing, had tried to engage with it.
We all know that people are more extreme on the net than they are in real life. The radical Hindutva dude who wants to nuke Pakistan on the net will, in the real world, sit meekly at Cafe Coffee Day arguing the relative merits of Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. (link)
Yes, exactly. Varma goes on to discuss Cass Sunstein’s recent study on “group polarization,” and has some thoughts on what that might mean for India-Pakistan relations. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
Meanwhile, here is my own humble contribution. There is indeed such a thing as an “Internet Hindu” — by which I mean, someone who expresses extreme views online while living a very moderate or even secular lifestyle in the real world. But there are also Internet Muslims, Internet Sikhs, Internet Christians, and Internet Marxsts — all of them potentially irksome if you say something they don’t like. Hindus do not have a monopoly on saying extremist things online.
I’m really not interested in having a discussion along the lines of “who are the worst offenders?” if it’s at all possible not to go down that route. (Pretty please?)
Rather, I would be curious as to whether we could use this as an opportunity to reflect on the issue of “group polarization” Varma mentions, and how and whether the habit of talking to people on the internet is a factor in magnifying differences. How have your own views and habits changed as a result of being on the internet, talking about issues related to the Indian subcontinent? What are some positive effects, and what are some negatives?
I would like to push that astrophysicist analogy a little. Even if the astrophysicist won’t put statistics in her resume, you can see her application of statistics in her papers. And if the application is wrong, people can call her out on that, and she will have to engage with her critics to show that her application of statistics is right, or it is justified.
The question about Romila’s knowledge about Sanskrit/Pali/Prakrit is based on how she interprets ancient texts to substantiate her arguments. People are claiming that some of her interpretations are wrong, and these interpretations suggest an inadequate understanding of Sanskrit.
The response to this, I would think, is a refutation of the critics’ claims, by showing why her interpretation of the words/phrases is justified. Claiming “I know Sanskirt”, or “I passed the Sanskrit exam” would not get her off the hook, any more than “I know statistics”, or “I passed the statistics exam” would get the astrophysicist off the hook.
One reason for this is that skills like statistics (and Sanskrit) can be “outsourced”. These days most scientists don’t really need to “know” statistics, you can get away with what test you need to do, and how to do it using a software. Or a collaborator can do it. So having a statistical analysis on a paper doesn’t mean the lead author “knows” stats.
You could make the same case for Sanskrit. It is a skill essential for a historian of India, but to what extent you “know” it, and can use it, is open to discussion. The only way to settle that discussion is to show your skill in practice, with a close engagement of the critics’ interpretation.
Turning up your nose is not the way to settle an argument. If you are a good academic, that is.
Yoga, don’t forget to add us doctors to that list. Medicine the interface between science and humanities.
My lasting memory of formal history education is memorising a ‘guidebook’ called Kundra and Bawa (anyone remember it?), with the sole intention of outscoring the competition. I wasted precious hours of my life, like so many others, internalising junk like the dimensions and layout of Birbal’s house in Fatehpur Sikri, and the exact date of numerous minor battles. Rote learning with an unbelievably high noise to signal ratio and the overwhelming emphasis on facts over analysis. Towards the early nineties, many more middle class Indians began to become aware of the strengths of their own own heritage, and many traditional activities, eg learning a classical art form, which would previously have been considered uncool gained wider respectability. Nothing unnatural, this resurgence of cultural pride was just an expression of the increasing confidence that we felt as a society, after all the years of idolising all things foreign. This roughly coincided with the advent of the internet, and many educated Indians began re educating themselves from this vast and open mine of information, and formulating their own independent world view. Many of us reached the conclusion that our story was not exactly like it had been taught to us, and there were many competing narratives to choose from. This is different from revisionism, where the entire official narrative is changed. This was a personal, independent enquiry. Free from preconditioning, a large number came to conclusions that put them at odds with people like Ms Ghose, who is a product of our formal liberal arts system, which has strong Marxist leanings in India. That there would even be a difference of opinion on what she probably believes to be the one true belief system makes her paint us all as ‘Internet Hindus’. It is an act of cognitive dissonance. In reality the ‘Internet Hindus’ are a large, heterogeneous group, with widely ranging views and sensibilities which converge on certain basic issues,like patriotism and cultural pride (which can,like all other views,be overexpressed by the less nuanced).What rankles her, more than the actual views of her detractors,I suspect, is the fact that those whose views people of her background had lampooned and ridiculed for years are now engaging her as an intellectual equal, and not behaving like the conveniently inarticulate ‘khaki knickerwallahs’.
Philomena, sorry to nitpick, but statistics is a required subject for most scientific disciplines where one is expected to publish and critically appraise evidence. I am a doctor, and even I had to pass a statistics module in my fellowship exam.
PS. Thank you all for the brilliant discussion.
Philomena, sorry to nitpick, but statistics is a required subject for most scientific disciplines where one is expected to publish and critically appraise evidence. I am a doctor, and even I had to pass a statistics module in my fellowship exam.
Sure, but there is a huge debate out there on what it means to “know” statistics, and how many scientists actually know what they are doing when they apply what they have learned. See this article, for instance, which claims that more than half of published findings are false because of the improper application of stats. So when someone, such as the PLOS article author, says you have applied stats wrongly, the right response is to show why your application is right. Saying stats was a required course and you have passed it doesn’t cut much ice.
And as with stats, so with Sanskrit.
@Philomena
Meant to ask earlier, are the Marxists you spoke about earlier in a position to steer leaderships positions.
(P.S. I will never ever have a chance to speak to the types of Marxists you referred to … the Marxists in my friends circle are more of the “wow.. Arundati Roy ROCKS!, & btw does this dupatta go with my Che T-shirt” variety)
But that’s just it, Philomena–what are the standards for determining fact v. fiction? If it’s not statistics, if it’s not cliometrics, if it’s not sanskrit, then what is it? An example of the problem is one history book that described the persian Sassanid empire as “a shield that protected the supple creeper of culture that was the Gupta empire. So long as this was in place, the Gupta empire could prosper.” This is clearly an asinine statement because anyone who knows anything about the Gupta empire knows that crown prince Skandagupta crushed the invasion of the Huns–sending them back into Persia, which resulted in the death of their Emperor Piruz and wreaked havoc on that empire. Additionally, it is meant to perpetuate the “effeminate hindoos” motif that the British so studiously nurtured. How did this escape peer review?
Saying that you have professional training doesn’t by itself mean that what you write is free from fallacy. At the core of academia is logic. Simply because a historian has had “training” or maintaings “position” doesn’t mean the layperson should throw reason out the window and blindly accept.
No, they have given up on the “party”, but still consider themselves Marxists. There are many such people in Kerala, and probably Bengal as well.
One interesting trend I have noticed is that in the evolution of ideas, many people (such as Jyotsana) move from Marxism to Hindu/Buddhist philosophy, but almost never the other way round. And there are many people (again, like Jyotsana) who join, but then move away from, the parivar organisations. The organisations are then considered merely useful, but not inspiring. The Marxists I mentioned have similar views of the party. They will support the party’s positions when they suit their views, but are usually critical of the party in general. Usually these are people from the older generation, who became Marxists because they really believed that Marxism could provide lasting solutions to humanity’s problems. But there are some young people as well. Also, artists.
I would like to get a Nagarjuna T-shirt! 😉
Honestly medical research consists of some of the shoddiest statistics I’ve seen outside of journalism. It’s not so much that the methodology is bad, it’s just that people get a broad survey of how to apply a test or run a regression, but they never actually learn the underlying theory and, consequentially, don’t understand its limitations or the extent of its implications. They end up drawing conclusions that are either too broad or not really supported by the data as well as they think they are. A lot of times people just look at the P value and decide that means something and usually it doesn’t. I made a habit of reading W.M. Brigg’s blog and he set me straight on some misconceptions I suffered from. Sure his politics are a little iffy, but he knows his stats and does a good job of illustrating how common studies make conclusions that data doesn’t really support.
The separation between academic and political is not clean-cut. History textbooks present caste, for example, in a manner that helps backward caste parties to press for reservations without any exit policy. Why should history be seen as academic at all? Why should there even be such as a job as a professor of history? Why not simply put them on the think-tank staff of a political party. Or on the op-ed staff of a newspaper?
It seems the conversation has moved towards a discussion of Indian philosophy. Someone in the previous comments spoke of how the study of Hinduism had been relegated to the Religious Studies departments with the concomitant ignorance of the incredibly rich philosophical thinking which was undoubtedly more than just the day dreaming metaphysics of Orientalist scholarship. I think the best thing I have read speaking specifically to this issue of Indian philosophy to this issue is the Smith University philosopher Jay Garfield’s essay ” Philosophy, Religion, and the Hermeneutic Imperative” in his book Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. Check it out in Google Books.
If it’s not statistics, if it’s not cliometrics, if it’s not sanskrit, then what is it?
Oh boy, we are getting into some serious epistemology here! 🙂
In the sciences, there is actually a rather good metric — control. If your experiment/model/hypothesis allows the control and manipulation of some phenomenon, then your version is considered fact. This is closely followed by coherence, where your story accounts for almost everything that is known about a phenomena, and/or is predicted by existing accounts.
The first metric doesn’t work for interpretative domains like history, so the second is what is followed. However, for domains like history, coherence is impossible to achieve, as the possible interpretations are orders of magnitude higher than in science. So the only option is to build up systematic-looking accounts, and then try to fend off alternate interpretations. This fending off can take many forms, one of which is to try and portray alternate interpretations as illegitimate (because they are not from Boston/Ivy, or are by bankers/engineers, or come from another discipline etc).
This strategy worked well before the Internet, but is not that effective now. A swarm on the web can develop an alternate story that is more widely accepted than the official version, or can pick serious holes in your carefully constructed account. But because these alternate stories are also interpretive, the establishment one sort of wins by default if it just responds with a snooty face. This works only to a point, because there are always people in the establishment who disagree with the dominant position, and are seeking to undermine it.Particularly graduate students.
That, dear friend, is my best answer to your question — when nothing works, get good grad students! 🙂 They will definitely run over the establishment at some point, but that may not necessarily lead to your own story becoming the replacement. In other words, the only way to change an interpretive account is to understand the process by which the stories are constructed, then join the practice, and change the stories from inside.
Yoga, Sure there is a lot of shoddy material being published by doctors out there. I am an NHS doctor, and for an average doctor, statistics is just a tool to interpret evidence based medicine. A junior doctor studies statistics, and then learns to implement it by participating in ‘journals clubs’ and the like where they present and appraise scientific papers in the presence of a group of colleagues who then give them feedback on their performance. Research background is increasingly becoming a very important (if not the most important) discriminating factor in selection to higher specialist training. For most specialties, an academic MD or PhD is a strong CV requirement.
For most research trials here, the lead researchers would therefore be people with years of academic research background, and the trials would be implemented under the close supervision of, and within the framework of the NIHR. The whole process is amazingly rigorous, and being being a strictly audited government funded exercise, largely free from the corrupting influence of Pharma money. . All health professionals, including nurses and allied professionals like physiotherapists playing any role in a research trial have to undergo a ‘good clinical practice’ course run by the NIHR.
When it comes to implementing evidence based practice, there are strict guidelines on the best available practice, formulated periodically by a local group of experts, and influenced strongly by recommendations of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence Any departure from these guidelines either has to be privately funded, or has to go through a special, rigorous NHS funding application process. So, the average doctor may get away with a basic knowledge of statistics, but process of research itself is fairly well regulated by the system. Sorry for boring you with the nitty gritties. This is off topic, I guess.
Jyotsna,
Thank you for sharing your personal history. I had meant to ask you on many previous threads about how you gained the immense knowledge you have on Indian history and Hinduism. Now I know 🙂 Like you, I have moved from a pro-Congress to a pro-Communist to a Hindutva approach that now helps me feel more complete, more intellectually fulfilling and more self-respecting. Although there’s an ongoing debate between my husband and I about how best to explain my religious views on Facebook: As an Atheist (since I understand the non-existence of god) or as a Hindu/Sanatan Dharmi (since all my philosophies, including that of Atheism have been deeply influenced by the self-development and intellectual rigor promoted through Sanatan Dharma).
Mythili,
You can be an atheist and be a hindu, a polytheist and be a hindu, a monotheist and be a hindu, and a monist and be a hindu– i suppose you can just say you subscribe to the school of Carvaka/Lokayata (one of of the old nastika schools).
Yajnavalkya: you’re the other person I’d love to know the background of: what informs your knowledge on Hinduism? I find your comments extremely insightful
I did state “Carvaka” as my religious views for a while, but then I realized that (1) I don’t subscribe to the materialism theory inherent in the Carvaka school of thought (2) No one even knows what I’m talking about.
Facebook is just an example. But from a big-picture perspective I guess, my question is, how do you describe yourself in quick tidbits that define you, while at the same time ensuring that people knew what you were talking about. Being vegetarian and an Indian girl who married at 25, I am inherently prone to stereotypes – people are likely to assume I must be religious, conservative, traditional, none of which really define me. Facebook or other avenues – like the clothes you wear, the accent with which you speak, the schools of thought you claim to belong to, are really a statement or signals to people around you on how you should be viewed.
The reason I like saying I’m “Atheist” when there’s only a one-word answer to religious views as opposed to a long discussion is that I’m closest to the traits society associates with “atheist” – logical-thinking, scientific, well-thought out etc
My husband on the other hand argues (and I see his POV- and hence am confused) that I’m doing a disservice to Hinduism. Because if people like me don’t call ourselves Hindu, others will not understand the inherent schools of thought, coolness, plurality within Hinduism. And the religion would never get its due – because there are too many like me ready to disassociate ourselves. I guess it’s a similar argument that Shukla made against Deepak Chopra about his lack of attribute for Yoga to Hinduism.
Having grown up in the Bible Belt I used to dodge the question since I always knew what came next. I think part of my pugnacious attitude about haranguing people for misunderstanding or misrepresenting Hinduism is derived from having to deal with the derision as a child and not having the education in my culture and religious background or argumentative ability to defend myself. (The other part just stems from my tendency to be a contrarian bastard in general.)
Nowadays my response depends on the person asking the question. I’ll declare Hindu with crowds that are prone to going “Oh really? That’s so interesting?” But better educated crowds, which usually have a lot of atheists or other people who hold religious ideas with some measure of skepticism I prefer to filibuster by answering their questions with another question such as “That depends. What do you mean by ‘religion’ exactly? Are you referring to my affiliation with any organized group? Or are you referring to the theological and philosophical schools of thought that I subscribe to?”
So I guess that would signal to most people that I should be viewed as a smug prick who is best ignored. Oh well.
As for online profiles, at first I left it blank. But I believe it was one of our own luminaries who encouraged us to be the change we want to see in the world. I also decided that life’s too short to be spent being bashful or apologizing for who I am. This is America after all. That’s not what we’re about.
Mythili,
Thank you for your kind words–but really, others rather than myself are far more worthy of them. To answer your question, my parents and grandparents are most responsible for whatever knowledge or awareness I have. I can’t really take credit for innate curiosity, and even still, those around me took the time to encourage it and sate it. And although metal mickey et al would probably bracket me under the convenient label of “internet hindu”, the reality is that I am a product of north american public schools and the bal vikas system (both of which are avowedly plural and global in outlook). At the end of the day, culture can only survive if people find it worthy of maintenance, which is why an accurate, non-partisan history (neither skewed to the right or left, and yes I have seen bias in both), since it teaches what we did right and what we did wrong. More than anything else, it teaches us why we matter. And to paraphrase no less a liberal (in the classical sense) than Christopher Hitchens, globalization is really only interesting if we all have something to add to it. Sadly, it is my opinion that the narratives that were devised in the colonial period were designed to do precisely the opposite. I think it is possible to be pro-women’s empowerment, pro-dalit empowerment, pro-poor empowerment, and still have an innate pride and respect for your culture. Too often we find ourselves with the nonsensical paradigm that these all must inherently conflict.
As for Carvaka, I suppose the best counterargument would be that no less an authority than Chanakya is associated with the school. Though it is uncertain whether he himself was an atheist, his Arthashastra has scathing remarks about astrology and those who follow it. Given the fact that Carvaka is critical of brahmanas, it is likely that Chanakya did not subscribe to everything in that school. He did however explicitly honor Brihaspati, who is closely identified with lokayata, and yet, as the preceptor of the gods, Brihaspati was naturally concerned with more than just material pleasures.
Fundamentally, the advancement of dharma was the singularly most important goal for a kingdom in Chanakya’s opinion. To him, materialism was not centered on sensual indulgence (though he did not admonish this practice either and only recommended balance and self control for the king). However, he did recognize that in order to pursue dharma, one must have the material means available to do so. To quote him: Sukhasya moolam dharmam, dharmasya moolam artham, arthasya moolam rajyam, rajasya moolam indriya vijayam (Happiness originates in dharma, Dharma originates in wealth, Wealth originates in power, and true Power comes from victory over the senses). This is why I feel you can reconcile your rationalist views even atheist views, without being concerned with the emphasis on materialism. My opinion is that the materialism being prescribed is a practicality that recognizes that the pursuit of enlightenment and righteousness isn’t possible if someone doesn’t have the means to hold the fort against barbarians and protect his people. In fact, there are saints who actually chastise those seeking enlightenment on an empty stomach. Material consciousness doesn’t automatically equate with hedonism.
On the point of atheism, to be fair, I think there are many rationalists who do believe in God, although the attempts to prove God’s existence invariably fall to Neti Neti, resulting in nonacceptance by skeptics. And even still, I think there are those who ultimately decide upon atheism due to personal tragedies that could conceivably shake up even the most fervent of devotees. I don’t think any of us should judge either way (I am not saying you are). Reason and theism need not be mutually exclusive, nor must they completely intersect. In light of that, perhaps the school of Nyaya would be more appropriate since logic is at its very core. What’s most interesting about Nyaya to me is that in many Indian languages, it nyaya has actually accrued the additional meaning of “justice”, making it that much more relevant.
Finally, I think your point about Chopra is valid. If people think hinduism is only emblematic of dogma and meaningless trappings of piety, that is what it will be. In reality, knowledge, inquiry, “consciousness,” and self-reflection are at the very core of the tradition (hence the popularity of vadana in earlier periods). I suppose whether or not you choose to identify as a hindu is ultimately up to you. I just don’t think that being a hindu means that you only have to be certain things, be from a certain caste/varna/jati, or subscribe to certain views. We hindus are, if anything, a very market-friendly people, especially when it comes to the market place of ideas…
Best
Mythili, Your appreciation encourages me. Thank you very much. Although I must say that the little reading I have done has simply opened my eyes to the vastness of the Indic traditions.
In moving away from Marxism I am not the first. Few know that the RSS and the Communist Party of India were at one time small tents within the Congress. Other leftists within the Congress, JP, Lohia, Patwardhan and several others over the years rejected Marxism. And in the case of JP made a clean break with Communists after the latter became collaborators and handmaidens of the Brits during the Quit India Movement. Ram Manohar Lohia famously called Marxism the “last weapon of Europe against Asia”. But some like old guard Communists went the other way, although most of them drew inspiration of some sort from Advaita all their lives, they became almost doctrinaire Communists in the end. Gandhi took many years to be accepted by the Communists, although the worst caricatures he was subject to dissipated to a large extent by the late 70s. In 2004 on the occasion of its party congress, the CPI(M) paid rich and handsome tributes to Mahatma Gandhi, emphasising that it was the 70th anniversary of the Dandi March.
Thank you Philomena for your detailed and good-natured response. Given my innate propensity to be verbose, I’ll try and sum up in a paragraph or less:
What happens when access to graduate students is contingent upon subscription to the establishment position? Though obviously not an academic himself, Rajiv Malhotra has described this very practice. If the establishment controls endowments, and grant allocation is contingent upon board approval, and board approval is contingent upon peer recommendation, and peer recommendation (and degrees) is contingent upon toeing the establishment line, what is an ambitious, rational person (with mouths to feed) to do? Perhaps it is for this very reason that only an outside-in approach may work…
Oh and Mythili, I neglected to mention how my parents encouraged this interest: Amar Chitra Katha. I know it’s been much maligned on these pages, but I think it does serve to inform young people about their culture in more easily digestible doses. For the “secular” among ye, there are favorable accounts of Akbar, and for the really “secular”, perhaps Tinkle is your best bet. For those leaving childhood and entering the teeny bopper phase, “Am I a Hindu?” by E.D.Viswanathan was an excellent primer.
Some comments that Ms. Ghose and others have received are indeed nasty and abusive. I would like to point out that she has responded with equally nasty abuse (e.g. gutter snipe, retard etc.). The abuse, to be very fair is not a one way street.
In addition to the crowd that indulges in crass abuse, there is a significant twitter crowd that asks questions of Ms. Ghose and other leading media personalities that are very critical, but without abuse. These media personalities almost never reply to any of those questions. On the other hand, they have created a huge song and dance about the abusive tweets. Having made such a hullabolo about these few abusive tweets, they just dismiss any question that is critical of them as coming from these nasty Internet Hindus. To sum it up, this IH bruhaha has become a way to dismiss, in fact a way to invalidate, any critical opinion.
Straight up, I am one of those Internet Hindus. Who are these Internet Hindus? There is no cohesive group that meets at secret places, decides on a strategy and roams on the internet hunting for the likes of Ms. Ghose. There are a lot of people like me who are deeply skeptical of the role played by MSM and its extremely partisan nature, a view that you may or may not agree with. The demigods of Indian media are not used to their biases being questioned, so instead of answering any of our criticism ( I realize they have no obligation to do this) they just try to invalidate us.
Re: comments 117-119, etc.–we do need to have a sense of history, but, really–neither Gandhi nor Akbar nor Marx are good models for the future, so I’m not really sure what is the relevance of your details at the end of the day. Aren’t those all fatally failed models? Can we talk about the details of how to actually make things work in India? I am sick of the chaos–do any of those three offer a solution? I don’t think so! I would pick an Indian Cameron.
Returning to the topic, and following on Ankits line, one reason why Internet Hindus are so vocal is that the other side of the coin is even louder. And they dominate MSM. And they are not removed despite tremendous gaffes , bad practices and blatant lies … things that would get a journalist fired in the US are basically considered business as usual in India. The reason ultimately is that the MSM in India today as as inbred as it gets, and is with rife with nepotism. So instead of even basic self policing, they defend their members even in terrible positions.
For example, Sagarika Gosh should have been canned after her reporting in the Mumbai Carnage, especially after it became clear that the live coverage of the army actions (despite several pleas to desist) were being followed word by word by the terrorists (as the army were fearing would happen), leading directly to the death of army personnel and hostages. Instead of serious self recrimination, though the MSM patted itself on the back and
Even worse for Internet Hindus, these folks also are hard left and many members of this inbred cabal running the communist parties, and/or part of the parasitic ruling elite. If Internet Hindus are indeed making the lives of the likes of Gosh less pleasant, that is a good thing… they are basically doing what the MSM itself should have done.
Here’s a sample of the connections between various MSM figures. The source here has a much longer list. The list itself has been doing the rounds in various forms with some examples longer, some with tighter couplings, etc, but they basically make the same point
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?/topic/2209-nexus-between-entities-influencing-india/
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is niece of Prannoy Roy (CEO of NDTV)
Prannoy Roy sits Council on Foreign Relations’ International Advisory Board. Mukesh D. Ambani also sits on CFR’s International Advisory Board. Mukesh is MD, Reliance Industries Ltd.
Prannoy Roy married to Radhika Roy Radhika Roy is sister of Brinda Karat (CPI(M)) Brinda Karat married to Prakash Karat (CPI(M) – General Secretary)
Prakash was part of debating club in Madras (Chennai). N.Ram, P.Chidambaram & Mythili Shivaraman were part of this group. This group started a magazine “Radical Review”.
CPI(M)’s senior member of Politburo and Parliamentary Group Leader is Sitaram Yechury. Sitaram Yechury is married to Seema Chisthi. Seema Chisthi is the Resident Editor of Indian Express Burkha Dutt works at NDTV
Prabha Dutt was mother of Burkha Dutt. Prabha Dutt was a chief reporter for Hindustan Times.
Rajdeep Sardesai was Managing Editor at NDTV Rajdeep Sardesai married to Sagrika Ghose Sagarika Ghose is daughter of Bhaskar Ghose. Bhaskar Ghose was Director General of Doordarshan. Sagarika Ghose’s aunt is Ruma Pal. Ruma Pal is former justice of Supreme Court. Sagarika Ghose’s another aunt is Arundhati Ghose. Arundhati Ghose was India’s permanent representative/ambassador to United Nations.
Rajdeep is now Editor-in-Chief at CNN-IBN CNN-IBN is a tie up between GBN (Global Business Network) and Turner International. GBN is a Network 18 company. CNN is one of Turner International’s asset. Sagarika also works at CNN-IBN as senior editor and as an anchor
….snip snip…..
Have you not been getting the memos? I’ll add you to the list. Expect your trishul and assorted regalia to arrive in the mail shortly.
Here is a gem written by Sagarika Ghose a long time ago. I am pretty sure she would like to forget it now…
http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/liberty.nsf/(docid)/A90F876EE5F3CA51E5256BFF001D9000
(she is speaking about the ex-president of India, A P J Abdul Kalam.)
The column also illustrates the leftwing retreat from real science – where lies and cant are more easily exposed.
Ghose is a moron. Her awareness of facts is just as poor as her facility with the language.
I remember watching one debate that she was moderating – the debate was on the Vande Mataram Controversy. In supporting the cause (of not standing up for Vande Mataram) pleaded by a muslim fundie – she kept on repeating that ” Indian constitution guarantees right to action” or “freedom of action“. She repeated this crap more than once and even concluded the “debate” with this nonsense.
I guess she is good enough for Indian audience – most of the young middle class is too busy to give a rats arse about issues. They are just happy to align themselves with likes of Ghose and pretend to be elite.
wunderbar, thanks for that link to the Ghose article. One doesn’t know where to begin after reading that. 🙂
She is at once communalist, casteist, sexist (both against men and against women), ageist (aren’t these writers fond of all those words that end in -ism and -ionization?) disrespectful to Abdul Kalam and many more things.
She quotes Nehru: “Scientists can’t live in an ivory tower. If Science gets divorced from morality and ethics then it may be used for evil purposes. The scientific spirit must be essentially one of tolerance and the realisation that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.â€
She might also want to substitute “humanities worshippers or “soft subject”-philes” for scientists and look in the mirror. Her entire article is divorced from morality and ethics and she has the arrogant attitude that she has a monopoly on truth because she quotes on Australian writer.
If this is the standard of her thinking and writing, no wonder she gets flak (although it shouldn’t be as nasty as she has been in this particular piece).
I wonder how she feels about using all this Twitter and internet technology and TV technology that allows her to do her job? Does that make her a fundamentalist?
DizzyDesi, when is Arundhati Roy going to be indicted for treason? Faster, please!
heh heh. but apparently dizzy desi thinks otherwise for the lefties with the secret handshakes. i hope he has a good tinfoil hat.
ghose is an ass. but so are kanchan gupta and arnab goswami. it’s just the general quality of the pool and the level of thought they put into their stuff.
let’s also not forget to indict prannoy roy for the unforgivable sin of marrying her mother’s wife. dizzy desi is on to the plot!
maybe dizzy d can get you a tinfoil hat too. or maybe you can split the cost of a nuclear bomb shelter given the apocalyptic threat that you think you seem to face.
there’s a fantastic clip on youtube of jethmalani tearing her a new one. quite hilarious.
what is an ambitious, rational person (with mouths to feed) to do?
I have two responses to this. One is that “good” graduate students can overcome all these barriers, and have done it successfully in other fields. The thing to keep in mind is that academics is all about construction, everything there (field, institutions, resume, manner of talking…) is carefully built up over many years. The joke goes that academics caress their resume when no one is looking, because it is their sculpture. The way to overcome a dominant edifice is to build another, better, one, and that will take many years. Writing on the Internet is not the way to go about doing this. It is a good start, but that’s about it. Malhotra is throwing money at chairs in the US and fancy conferences, what he should actually be doing is funding grad students and developing academic centres/institutes/departments in India that can start the building process going.
Two, I am not entirely sure whether changing the dominant academic story should be a central focus. The Marxist focus on writing history their way, and influencing textbooks, is based on their general focus on centralization of resources, channels etc. And this was a good strategy in a resource and channel-limited era. Those conditions don’t hold anymore, so even if there is a dominant academic story, its influence is limited, provided there are many channels outside. So the ambitious, rational person’s best option, in my mind, is to keep many narratives going. And keep traditions and practices alive, so that people can learn by experience, rather than just reading.
In fact, in such a scenario, people will look at the different narratives and practices, and take away what they think is best. But, in the process, they will also take away something very important, which is that there are no absolute narratives. From a philosophy standpoint, that is a much better outcome than a general acceptance of some standard narrative that is “objective”. At the end of the day, what you are would like to see is not a population that “believes” in some narrative, but a population that is seeking to improve the(ir) human condition. A general distrust of narratives is a better starting point for this than a belief in a standard one.
Gotta go now, good discussion everyone! Except for that network thing Dizzydesi posted.It exists, but that is a given, the actual details is not very relevant.
The standard one is mostly meant to be a shared mythology among a society. Intellectually we know at this age that the founding fathers were motivated as much by profit and an extreme sense of entitlement as they were by enlightenment principles, but emotionally most still conceive of them in their idealized forms as heroes. It’s healthy for kids to have those kinds of national heroes and that sort of unifying mythology. It’s only partially about who they really were, but it’s mostly about what they stood for and what we need them to be. For that you need a standard account for people to go by that’s constructive and true enough to be accurate for the layman, if not necessarily the complete and nuanced picture that the scholar or historian should understand. As you get older then you can start introducing the complexity and nuance and have people questioning the premises, but they need to be rooted in something before they can go about doing any sort of analysis. As Tagore said, “Liberation from bondage to the soil is no freedom for the tree.â€
last!
Dizzy,
That laundry list tells us what? There is an elite and it looks out for itself before it the common folks.
And this elite isn’t what I would call liberal (they wouldn’t know what it meant if it bit them in the wazoo), more like laissez faire an easy going anything goes attitude that any change is OK as long, “as it doesn’t affect our lifestyle or mangle it in any way”. What they see around them and find difficult to accept aren’t problems to be worked through, but inconveniences to be dismissed. “How can we get rid of these things with the least fuss?” It is an inbred circle that feeds off itself and reserves the time of glitterati everywhere for itself. The US MSM which is the least familiar with India goes for the Lowest Common Denominator on any story and asa rule links up with Indian correspondents who think and talk like them. Which is why many of the Sagarika Ghose types become experts on everything for the foreign media. OTOH grass roots US journos who work in India – notably my fellow Clevelander (Go Browns!) Matthew Schneeberger who has lived in Bombay for >5 years and does 1st person reporting for Rediff.com is virtually unknown to the US MSM. The chatter in the Indian MSM is construed as genuine expression of opinions in India and finds its way into policy at least at the individual congressperson’s desk in the US, less so though in UK these days.
There are fair number of fundamentalist Christian and Muslim activists and their supporters in India who have managed to cozy up with these Indian MSM mavens for a variety of reasons. First the Christian groups. Some like John Dayal seem definitely out of place, being a Catholic, because that is not the way his Church works, being very particular about method, ritual, the guidance and authority of institutions etc. But for a variety of reasons (doctrinal debates within the RC Church that have found their way into India, tension between upper caste and lower caste RC in India and the fear that the latter will turn Protestant or even worse Pentecostal/Evangelical/AG) people like Dayal have found a constituency within their Church. And they show their clout by getting US entities to back their actions in India. Where other Protestant Church groups are concerned it is entirely about harvesting souls in India come what may, Project Joshua, Project 10-40 etc., And to keep these activities funded (dollars by the boatload) there needs to be a steady stream of press about what a horrible place India is and how there is no freedom to harvest souls. There is no questioning this whine, no counterpoint to the picture they pain and no opportunity afforded to present the other side. And then we are not even talking here about congregation barons like Ezra Sargunam of hte Evangelical Church of India Chennai, who used to broker bank and railway jobs collecting 1000s for his church in the process. When the Church of S.India started losing congregants to ECI, the CSI itself went extreme and one Bishop’s son turned evangelical! Many of us know about the intellectual poseur Kancha Illiah. How many of us know or care that he has on innumerable occasions, including on TV in discussion with Sagarika Ghose, declared that his prime objective is to wipe out Hinduism by any means possible,? Remember the recent controversy over Franklin Graham or the many Faux Channel blowhards and trash like the WorldNut Daily, and the likes of Coulter and Malkin that have more than once pilloried Islams, Muslims, called for the destruction of mosques etc? How do we react to Daniel Pipes and his writings? So what does the Internet Hindu do when she (Sandhya Jain) won’t be invited to debate Kancha Illiah before Sagarika, or won;t be allowed to talk by Sagarika even if invited (like it happens always with Swapan Dasgupta) and their letters won’t be published in newspapers? Worse still the same bilge is recycled in the US MSM when textbooks are under review or some entity like the USCIRF is discussing “religious freedom” in India. From Dizzy’s lit you can see that some of these mavens and their US based Indian-American collaborators are working with some of the fundamentalist legislators from the US (and others like Santorum who have thankfully been voted out).
Just as some fundamentalist Christian activists have been working with the Indian MSM elite, fundamentalist Muslim activists too have. Again here reasons are similar. One of the problems that India’s Muslim parties (the different factions of the Muslim League) which continue to have an extraordinary hold over the lives of Muslims in several parts of India, have faced in the last 10 years in Southern coastal areas is the decline in job opportunities in the Gulf. For decades these parties have brokered jobs for unskilled Muslims in the Gulf, and collected a tithe of sorts. It has never been easy to break out of the grip of these parties, because their grip extends all the way to the wealthier business families. So whether it is coconut tapper’s son in Manjeri or tanner’s son in Kanpur, the League gets into the act, brokers the deal in some way or the other collecting a tithe and setting up an annuity. Of course Muslims in India aren’t a homogeneous group, so there are some business savvy Muslim communities that have transcended these middle-men – the Bohras, Memons, Ismailis, or even Sunnis with well established business clusters like in TN’s leather land. But what happens when traditional opportunities decline and some people cannot acquire the training necessary to tap new opportunities? In the earlier days it used to be Saudi soft-fundamentalist money that helped set up vocational centers, religious instruction centers etc., and kept underwriting expenses. Jihad groups from Pakistan naturally moved in. From then it is a competition for manpower between the soft-jihad types and hard-jihad types. There is nothing benign about Saudi funded schools as the ongoing controversy over the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax, Va., exemplifies. The Indian MSM elite for reasons best known to itself has provided a forum to every kook for balance or god knows what – including SIMI supporters and the like – who in turn have connected with legislators in the UK or US who represent large Muslim populations. We are not talking of 1000s or millions of constituents who like everyone else (regardless of religion) is busy holding down a job, educating their children, making the mortgage and paying bills. We are talking a of a few who have found a very ingenuous way to get by through “social activism” or some such thing.
What then is the Internet Hindu to do when there is so much detail that is missing in the MSM? Over 50% (some say 75%) of India’s media companies are owned by legislators (almost entirely from the Congress). The DMK family – oops political party – runs newspapers and TV channels – OK GOP owns Faux News or is it the other way round?
So there is this guy (or gal) who worked v.hard thru high school putting in 80 hour weeks, got into a good engineering program, a good US grad school, followed by a good job, and now this person finally finds the time to start reading about the wide wide world. They are smart of course so tracking down the news separating the fact from the hyperbole isn’t hard. And they are appalled at what they read. Their favourite papers, news channels, they find now have been spewing abuse. The anti-IDRF hate campaign was one such eye opener for a lot of IAs. An engg prof and a communication studies prof got together to rip the Prashad-Mathew tissue of fabrication – yes Internet Hindus can write and very well – not all of them study the sciences/engg some of them study the humanities. I talked to a bunch of students at my U about why they should – even if they aren’t going to contribute a penny – at least read about the work Ekal Vidyalaya and AIM for Seva undertake before swooning over Asha and Co. Now at the same U Ekal Vidyalaya and AIM for Seva have benefits being organized – another NGO – Udavum Karangal has quit working Asha.
Just as the late Girilal Jain used to say that secularism in India is a debate among Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs on how to take the tradition forward, a lot of the anti-Hindu activism encouraged by the Indian MSM is unknowingly helping sustain battles going on elsewhere within Christianity and Islam.
ah, the number of unjustified assumptions one needs to unpack in that one sentence…
Let’s try a Miller-Modigliani and drop assumptions
-20 hr weeks + top grad school + great job -80 hr week + OK grad school + great job
You can try many combinations like that. In many of them you are likely to come up with a scenario where smug-smirking Sagarika talking to an IH type gets Good Will Hunted and/or Annie Halled! It’s happened that is why we are talking about it! Forget the case of Witzel being pwned by BB Lal – there is some honor in getting schooled by BB Lal after all – doyen of Indian archeology. But Thapar getting pwned by a Sanskrit-Tamizh scholar who works in the bio sector in San Diego? It happens!
BBB,
India does have a model–I mentioned him above. As for leaders, Cameron??? I think it’s high time India start looking beyond a third rate power on the verge of bankruptcy. What India needs is another PV Narasimha Rao. He was responsible for india’s emergence as a nuclear power (vajpayee was his personal rep at the un conference on disarmament), keeping Kashmir within India, the look east policy, the economic reforms, and realist statecraft. If India is to survive the tyranny of geography she is faced with, she will need another in his mold to play the high stakes game of realpolitik that is being thrust upon her.
Wow, thanks for the great discussion by many of you and w/o a troll attempting to derail it. One of the main reasons why I come to SM is to hear commentators that provide info like this discussion has given. Thanks….
Interesting thread. As I have been called a “soft” Hindutvaadi on this blog in spite of being secular I will say “Internet Hindu” is too broad a brush. That being said I too sometimes lose my patience with people who are said to be my fellow travelers and kind of understand why even people on the Indian secular right (i.e. not the JNU stereotype) like Varma may sometimes feel the need to grossly simplify. Here are some irritants that drive Hinduphilic people like me nuts:
1) Gujurat Denial: Whether or not there are Leftists milking this for all its worth in portraying Hindus as the villains of South Asia, it does not change the fact that the Modi government either abetted these crimes or looked the other way when the mobs extacted “justice”. To own up to that doesn’t prevent us from creating awareness of crimes against Hindus in parts of South Asia where we are the minority (e.g. HAF’s work). If anything we will find more secular Muslims to partner with. This has been an evolution on my part too as I had initially wanted to file this away under “sad but typical two sided blood letting”.
2) Early History of India: Playing word games. The AIT has long since been discredited, but “diffusion theory” is still rock solid and something I accept. It’s only problematic for those of the Internet Hindus that view the Rg Veda as the spring from which ALL of Hindu/Buddhist/Jain tradition flows from. Many of these much excoriated academics actually attribute only the soma cult, spoked wheel chariots/horses, Rg Vedic language and the Rg Vedic pantheon (i.e. Indra, Maruts, Varuna) to Indo-Aryans. They see the later Vedas and heterodoxies as being Sanskrit reformulations of ideas that had been bouncing around the desh before the arrival of Rg Vedic culture. These academics are not DMK flunkies either, they view this diffusion as being characterized more by intermarriage & trade than conflict. If anything Witzel would have EVR spinning in his grave (or his ashes swirling in his urn) as he posits that Austro-Asiatic (and not proto-Tamil) may have been the language of the IVC.
3) Whinging about outsider status (in India !): I fully accept that there is outsize hostility towards Hindus amongst the Indian intelligentsia, but there is little actual harm that these cafe revolutionaries can do. If we can’t capture the imagination of our brightest so they choose positions in academia & the media, perhaps we should accept the status quo. Putting the VHP in charge will guarantee our speedy demise. Actual physical harm to Hindus is largely due to incompetence/corruption in the largely Hindu IPS and if anything minorities suffer more than us Hindus because of this.
It’s been a while since I have posted, so I hope it is understood that these criticisms come from someone who is a proud Hindu
Louie,
E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (although he renounced his jati title he was proud of his jati heritage all his life, the heritage that comes from belonging to a community that migrated to Tamil Nadu from Karnataka and assumed suzerainty) was no great lover of Tamil and more than once called it a kattumirandi bashai or barbarian’s tongue.
To the point, its the Congress, leftists and foreign governments that are milking this for purely strategic purposes. By the standards of this game, it is par for the course in the subcontinent alongwith the Kashmir denial, Bangladesh denial or Sikh denial.
The AIT is being taught in India – and to that extent, it has not been discredited – so this point is moot until the textbooks are updated.
The point about the IPS is true, but then read up above for why guns are trained elsewhere. Like any group the VHP will mobilise for those who advance its interests, but since it is not a political party, it can never be in charge. Since both Congress and BJP pander to the VHP, t is up to the parties to decide how much influence they want to grant the VHP alongside the other religious groups.