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Wendy Doniger's The Hindus:An Alternative History

         I have read this book ( from cover to the last chapter ).  It is a fantastic book, that gives the chronological view of Indian history from the day the Himalayas formed to the 20th century. I would recommend people to read this as an academic book. Wendy does a great job of  summarizing the different influences on Hinduism over such a long time (from Vedic times to present).  Most of  the reviewers of this book on Amazon are offended by the irreverent tone of the book. It is not a summary on the Hinduism, it does not tell what Hinduism means etc.  Personally i feel the book is a misnomer, it should be have been  an alternate history of the India.

           

              Best parts of the book are the chapters that deal  prior to 10th century AD.  It is a great read on how the vedic sacrifices got sanitized/sterilized over a 3000 year period. It was bit unsettling to read the part on Ashwamedha yagna etc. Lot of  criticism seems to be coming from people who never heard such a thing and then discover that such a thing is part of their heritage. They seem to completely ignore and start bashing the author on pointing out this ugly thing in their own books.  

              I have personally believed, (prior to reading this book) that the violent nature of the vedic sacrifices were toned down by Hinduism in response to the rising tide of Buddhism and its patronage by early Mauryan emperors. Wendy says that kings gave equal patronage to all religions including Hinduism and Jainism.  

            

           Why horse is so central to the Vedic sacrifices? Horse as the divine/fertility giving animal and its importance throughout history to the present age. ( Where as horse it self is a foreign animal to Indian climes ).  If horse is such an important animal, why IVC period did not have any reference to this animal ? Why Bull ( Harappan Bull ) vs Vedic Horse. This dichotomy is completely explored in this book.

    

               Another important theme in the book is vernacular influences on the classics such as Mahabharata and Ramayana.  You can clearly see the feminism views in Mahabharata during Draupadi's  ward robe mal function and her questioning the existing gurus and elders, it was expertly captured in a Telugu movie called Pandava Vanvasam.  This book argues, almost convinces that it is difficult to see the original influencer in the classics. Does sankrit absorb the Prakrit influences like Pali and southern influences like Tamil etc.  We are taught that Samkrit is the root for all Indian languages except Tamil. ( This seems to a complete dubious claim as linguists debunked it in recent times ) 

             One more fact is Mahabharata was translated in to Telugu by 3 poets. It was started in 11th century by Nannaya bhatta and languished there for 2 centuries(he died after finishing 2 and half chapters), before Tikkana picked it up in 13th century. I have always wondered why some one in between did not continue writing it. The answer seems to the religious strife between Veera Shaivas and Veera Vaishnavas ( Dwaitha Vs Adwaitha ).  You can think of it as present day  Hindu vs Muslim riots.  So no one dared to write a story without offending the other side. Tikkana him self started his book by invoking both gods ( Hari Hara ) in his first poem and gave equal importance to both of them.  This gap is well explained in the book as the culmination of Bhakti movement in South and how it turned violent.

                 

             Anyway, it is a fascinating read if you don't believe in sanitized history that just handed to us in our books by the so called historians. She brings a different in my opinion more palatable view of  making sense of completely un-related stuff in a more logical way.

  

               One of my pet projects is to read such a book on Buddhism, Why did it vanish from the land of its birth ? May be Wendy can help here.

Review of Shiva trilogy

         
               It is winter in North East. There is this long break of  2 weeks for Superbowl.  It is that time of the year where things are bit slow. I was looking for a book in fantasy genre and found this Shiva trilogy by accident. 

           As per ths book, Ram Rajya is a wet dream of statists.  It gives the impression that Ram's rule is complete Orwelian or Totalitarian in nature. The book also tries to re-inforce same staid statist ideas as golden standard of rule again and again.  The author's scholarship is questionable. There is no suspense or surprise in any of the pages. There is no character development.  I was hoping to have complete picture of  Shiva by the end of the book, but i could get only a vague image (  It is like seeing NTR's face in every god's image in indian calendars).  There is no character development on any of the main roles. How their past shapes present actions etc. All you get is very generalized ( romba over the top characters)  that fit a popular/narrow  bollywood narrative.

             On top of  all these obvious flaws in the book,  it is highly plagiarized.  Most of the  fights or formations are straight cut and paste from Chinese/Japanese  movies of the past. Tortoise formation etc.etc. Another glaring cut and paste job is from a book called Giver. In Giver, a  totalitarian system lets you assign the professions based on your abilities ( obviously decided by the elder council). His Maika system is borrowed from this book verbatim.  It is fine to borrow a concept and expand on it, but the author tries to extol its virtues, where as the concept itself is  totally hated else where. ( I don't  know how he justifies it as a great system, it is not as per the universal value judgement ).

                 It was a torture to read this crap, I will not be reading the rest of the books in this series. I will also not recommend any one to read this.
                

College athletes deserve paycheck

         On the eve of  Superbowl 48,  Joe Theisman opined that College athletes need to be paid a grant or salary apart from their scholarships. I agree with Theismann that colleges rake in billions of  dollars on the backs of these talented players.  This problem is huge in football.  There are only 32 teams in NFL. NFL gets it players from colleges using the draft system. This system is heavily tilted towards NFL. NFL gets talented players ( trained ) for zero investment. Colleges make money and pay their coaches in multi-million dollar contracts. Both NFL and Colleges benefit from this exploitative system.

          

           There are many solutions to this problem. One solution is to bar the colleges from making any money out of the NCAA tournaments.  Handover the college tournaments to a for profit  organization that conducts these tournaments and pays the colleges and the athletes. ( Athletes can decide either to take full scholarship or pay the schools from their earnings, if they decide to take scholarship, then the school gets his/her part of earnings ).  Since NFL gets trained athletes at no cost, make them pay for that athletes school costs. NFL makes so much money without any investment, they should have some skin in the game for taking college athletes from the colleges.

          Another solution is completely bifurcate athletes from students. A college is supposed to impart the real life training for the students, so that they can use them later for productive purposes. An athlete's routine is complete opposite to a student's routine. Athletes need more physical training and they should have  professional trainers for fitness. Students do not need professional trainers, they need lecturers and professors who can teach them.  So make all the college athletics departments as associations with the colleges and pool them in a minor league system. Each coach/athlete gets paid under this system.  These departments are independent of colleges and they are associated in name only, they may share few resources like stadiums , training facilities etc. 

Hunger games

just started reading this book, got to finish before the movie.

So far i could clearly see the influence of Ayn Rand's Anthem on this book. I remember reading anthem in a single sitting. It was a fast mover like this book and the characters are very similar.

Do you get the same feeling ?

Django in Hugo?

For a fleeting second, I observed a 2 fingered guitarist playing jazz in the movie Hugo. Is he Django Reinhardt ? One of the greatest guitarists of all time. I have a special connection to Django.

This connection is no way musical. I have zero talent in music. It is thru a SW framework called Django ( named after the great Django )

No Fun League ( NFL)'s hypocrisy

We all know that NFL has strict rules and regulations on players and coaches. Most of the times the establishment gets free ride. I mean establishment of coaches, owners and league officials. When a player makes dumb mistake, every one calls them out. This is so glaring during the NFL matches. None of the commentators called out on dumb mistakes made by coaches/officials.

Now we know that Greg Williams the Defensive Coordinator for Saints flouted so many league policies. He was running a $POT that awards dirty plays (i.e. plays that harm opposing players ). The whole intention here is to cause physical injuries. Is this criminal ? I think so.

As usual Williams will apologize profusely and the NFL will have very light penalty of a paltry sum. Why this double standard? when players like Vick and Burress do mistakes, they are penalized years for their mistake. They did not have intention to kill or cause bodily injury to any one. The number of years of incarceration effectively shortened their careers.

In this case a well known official from a super bowl winning team runs a $POT. IMHO he should be punished very harshly and should be banished from NFL Let us see what NFL does ?