🌺India has changed
🌺Parts of Hindoo India have become more assertive
🌺That looks like fascism to a lot of people
🌺And yes this assertive, aggressive, angry bit of Sanghi angst gets to be violent, stupid, ignorant, cruel and downright anti-Hindu or Hindoo…whatever you want to call it
🌺What these dimwitted dunderheads don’t realise is they are destroying the all-embracing essence of what we now call Hinduism
🌺When all embracing Hinduism becomes all exclusive Hindutva-ism you get Sanghi Sadism
🌺Hinduism is where more than 300 versions of The Ramayana could be written in Urdu
🌺At least 5 in Persian
🌺And at least two in Arabic
🌺Where Muslim actors could play Lakshman and Hanuman in the Ram Leela and the audience could scream “Jai Bajrang Bali/Ya Ali”
🌺Try it now and you will have a conflagration to rival the worst communal riot ever
🌺When a brilliant Muslim writer and poet Dr Rahi Masoom Raza could write the television version of the most popular TV version of the greatest TV show ever B R Chopra’s Mahabharata and be the toast of all India
🌺When the incomparable Naseeruddin Shah could play Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj with the brilliant Om Puri playing Aurangzeb and both are still applauded for THAT unforgettable performance in Shyam Benegal’s Discovery Of India…and now?
🌺Or that most brilliant sequence of the gambling scene parody from The Mahabharata in Jaaney Bhi Do Yaaro; no film maker would even dream of trying it now for fear of some loony organisation threatening to behead or go berserk!
🌺India has changed; and I find it to be somewhat culturally challenged, educationally lacking and completely unaware of how the idea of India is being destroyed!
🌺Take the one dimensional view of The Ramayana…
🌺It’s as if no other Ramayana exists apart from the Sant Tulsidas composed Sri Ramcharitmanas!
🌺That’s the problem in a nutshell
🌺And nothing shows it better than The Ramayana…
🌺There is the Valmiki Ramayana
🌺Then there is the Kamban Ramayana
🌺And then there are 300 more
🌺From Egypt to Iraq to Persia to Afghanistan to Khotan (East Turkestan present day Xinjiang) to Tibet to Cambodia to Vietnam to Thailand to Indonesia to Korea
🌺And within the Indian sub-continent you can keep counting the number of Ramayanas that there are, still read, still revered!
🌺And then there are the Jain and Buddhist Ramayanas
🌺The Jain Ramayan for instance extols all the virtues of Raavan
🌺The Adhbuta Ramayan talks about how Ma Sita herself kills one of Raavan’s brothers after he has killed Sri Ram (Sri Ram is resurrected by Brahma after Sita ji threatens to destroy the entire Universe)
🌺Now that’s INDIA!
🌺Where everything is sacred, everything is worshipped and every version of God is true!
🌺For those who are trying to fit God into a strait jacket you are bound to fail
🌺People far more powerful than you have failed to destroy the very essence of Hinduism (as Vivekananda says “to the Hindu every religion is true”) for over a thousand years!
🌺YOU, and you know who you are, will fail too
🌺The Ramayana in all its different versions has breathed life into all the diverse cultures in India giving each a unique identity even as it has interwoven all of them in a cultural thread that has survived millennia
🌺And as Lord Shiva looks down upon you from the mountain with Parvati at his side, smiles and smokes out the creation of a new world you lot will keep wondering what happened!
