The Eternally Stupid Politics of Religion

The latest examples of the eternally stupid politics of religion come in the call to give official status to the Bhagavad Gita and a dump on Hinduism by the new Hindi language Epic channel.

The first is stupid because the Gita is so far above the government’s poor power to add or detract that giving it official status is somewhat like endowing it on the sky.Those pushing for it do it only to discomfit the proponents of minority faiths.

It does not matter that their targets are people who try to subvert Hinduism with niggling malicious propaganda such as the Yam Kise Se Kam Nahi sitcom on the Epic Channel.

The show presents Yamraj, the god of Death in the Hindu pantheon, as a narcissistic, corrupt dimwit using his power to get his wife things like furniture, a microwave, a refrigerator and a high-definition television set.

Given that depiction, the title of the series takes on an additional layer of malice, for it slimes all other Hindu deities. (The images that appear with the title include none from another tradition.)

With media reports announcing that another Yamraj sitcom is in the works for another channel, it is necessary to ask why some people seem to have decided to make that unlikely deity a figure of fun.

I think it has to do with Yama’s role in the Katha Upanishad, which explains one of Hinduism’s cardinal beliefs, that death is merely a door to another life.

As I noted in an earlier post, that teaching, long derided as absurd by the missionary faiths, has been validated by science, making nonsense of the Heaven-Hell carrot and stick essential to keep their followers in line.

Presenting Yama as a clown is the first step to closing the minds of the faithful to a destabilizing truth.

So who are the people behind Yam Kise Se Kam Nahi?

The producer is one David Polycarp. The “creative” brain is a Debbie Rao.

Polycarp used to be with the Disney Channel. He is now a partner with Vasant Valsan in Troublemaker Productions, the company responsible for this atrocity.

Epic is described as “India’s first genre specific channel,” whatever that means.

Epic went on air on 16 November 2014, and from what has been on offer so far it seems the channel will rely on a mix of the Mahabharata serial, cloak and dagger "history" (the Mughal era Siyaasat) and docudramas about real events.

As that potent mix of content can shape Indian opinion on key aspects of national life it is important to know who is behind the venture.

According to a report in Hollywood Reporter, Mukesh Ambani in his personal capacity owns a quarter of the Epic Channel; the Mahindra Group is reported to own a similar share. No mention of the remaining 50 per cent.

From that information I would jump to the conclusion that there is a directive foreign element in the venture. Indian corporate biggies are extremely vulnerable to pressure from the managers of their assets abroad, and when told to provide camouflage they are in no position to demur.

Based on that leap, I predict the channel will soon be airing a slew of the BBC productions rewriting our history and subverting our national consciousness.

As our Intelligence agencies and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry have little capacity to police this cultural front, and as Indian mass media have long been bribed into a comprador role, nongovernmental organizations must take on the task of raising public awareness.

The danger is not confined to television; it comes also from the teachings of mysteriously rich Babas, Sants and Gurus in command of armed thugs.

This should not be viewed as a purely Hindu concern, for Indians of all faiths are affected by the malicious few.

But Hindus have to play catch-up in terms of paying attention to what is being said and done in their name.

To begin with, they might set about systematically examining the content of the extremely low cost and well produced books that purport to contain English translations of ancient Sanskrit works. Those I have read contain much gibberish and seem to be an exercise in misinformation.

Even seemingly prestigious publishers should not escape inspection. For instance, The Times of India's translation of the Bhagavad Gita subverts some key teachings; the Introduction is incredibly obtuse. (Reading it made me think of the Jain recensions of the Ramayana that turn the plot upside down.) 

In undertaking all this Hindus should discourage politicians from coming to their support: our religion has survived thousands of years on its own formidable strengths.

NYT Blog: Why no Indian Steve Jobs?

The New York Times blog on India has an item asking, “Where’s India’s Steve Jobs?” The writer, an Indian journalist by the name of Samanth Subramaniam who seems to cater mainly to foreign magazines, admitted it was perhaps a “hollow, even narcissistic, question" because "Brazil hasn’t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries around the world.”  But he proceeded to address it anyway.

In doing so he did not hazard a personal opinion on the matter but noted several from a supposed expert, a business consultant on “knowledge societies,” who blamed India’s failure to produce a Steve Jobs on the inadequacy of our educational system, the years of “flirtation” with socialism, and the incapacity of the Indian economy to support success on so grand a scale.

The piece is a textbook example of feel-bad journalism.

First, consider the false presumption that Indian entrepreneurs have failed to innovate spectacularly.

As Raghunath Mashelkar pointed out in his excellent book Reinventing India (Sahayadri Prakashan, Pune, 2011, 403 pages Rs.499. jadanghadan@gmail.com), there have been many cases of huge success.

There is Narayana Murthy’s Infosys, founded in his small apartment with Rs10,000 in capital, growing to a valuation of Rs. 60,000 Crores and vaulting into the front ranks of the global Information Technology industry.

There is Mumbai’s Dabbawala tiffin delivery system, a daily miracle of business organization without parallel anywhere in the world.

There is Dr. Kurien’s “white revolution” that helped make India the world’s top milk producer and Dirubhai Ambani’s soap company that emerged from a Mumbai chawl to become India’s largest business conglomerate.

There are the anonymous scientists of C-DAC who developed an indigenous supercomputing capacity in three years after Cold War politics denied India access to the Cray XMP-1205 in the 1980s.

There is the Indian Space Research Organization, overcoming the same Cold War restraints to design and build domestic capacity from scratch, making India one of the leading nations in the field.

As Mashelkar's book noted, innovation has also thrived outside the organized sector and without government support. When the National Innovation Foundation set up three years ago under his chairmanship organized an annual competition, it received over a thousand submissions the first year and 16,000 the second year. The winners included illiterate and semi-literate people. An illiterate farmer won with a disease resistant pea he had developed, another with a cardamom variety that now accounts for 80 per cent of the crop in Kerala; a high-school dropout got an award for building a complex robot.

 The problem in India is not that we lack success stories but that we do not celebrate them and do not see ourselves as winners. Despite awards ceremonies to recognize excellence and the occasional programme on successful people, our mass media focus consistenly on the negative. Even in reporting the grand and glamorous success of the Indian film industry, the largest in the world, they emphasize the negative. Their label, Bollywood, focuses on the monkey-see-monkey-do aspect of Indian films, ignoring their homegrown verve and grace. Can you imagine the Japanese media labelling their film industry Jollywood? Or the Chinese describing their’s as Chollywood?

The other side of the mass media projection of India as a semi-comic failure is a consistent promotion and celebration of the meretricious foreign. Our major television channels are slavishly imitative of Western trends, with much of the programming lifted from British sources. People are so used to this that few are aware of how bizarre it is, or indeed, how subversive. HBO India is running a month-long programme of James Bond movies sponsored by Tata Manza, with daily email updates on “Bond Girls” delivered to your computer.

The “HB007” promo promises to trace the “evolution” of the “licensed to kill” operative over the years. I am pretty sure it won’t include any reference to the real-life license to kill that Britain exercised in India, targeting not oversize “Bond villains” but Indian freedom fighters, with vast collateral damage. The death toll, if we include the punitive “man-made” famine of 1943 in Bengal and the engineered Partition “riots,” runs into the millions.

As Mashelkar says, the problem “is not the Indian mind but the Indian mindset.”