On Wednesday 28 Mar 2012 5:01:51 am Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:50 PM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: > > The former conforms to dharma, the latter is adharma.
> > With India's historical disdain for the humanities, neither historian > nor sociologist was around to fully record or explain the scale of the > destruction. Srini this is wrong. The history and and sociologuists merely wroet out their biases and paid no attention to the Indian tradition of historical continuity my mens of an oral tradition. I am not sure if I have posted this on Silk before but my grandfather had a book called the "Living Races of mankind" published around 1905 or so I gues. Here are two scanned pages that show the crap that westernized educated Indians (and that included my grandfather) were fed. http://i1116.photobucket.com/albums/k566/bennedose/LRM-intro-ii-part.jpg This one classified human races as possibly being as different as chmpanzes and gorillas. this is what your grandfather was possibly fed. Mine certainly was. http://i1116.photobucket.com/albums/k566/bennedose/LRM-263part.jpg Read it all: "The gross corruptions" of the Vedic Aryans was due to their intermingling with "black heathendom" These sociologists cooked up an Aryan invasion theory. The Aryans had to win over someone. That "someone" were the Dravians. Thse "Dravidians" who were orignally considered "black heathendom" were given an identity and a cooked up grievance which led to the political changes that you see today with TamBrahms - who make up much of SilkList being driven out of Tamil Nadu by what can only be called a racist anti-Brahmin polity. > > One look at the classics will tell you that it was a sin against > tradition to cross the oceans, or travel other than when forced by > trade or religion. Thus as a classical society India has always been > ill prepared to deal with personal mobility. Not true. Mobility was quite OK all the way into Africa and the far East. The trading links with those areas, and the temples of Angkor Wat suggest no such restriction in the remote past My own grandfather, the owner of the book whose pages are scanned above was himself ostracized for going abroad, and the habit finds mention in mathematician AK Ramanujam's biography. But this was a more recent Brahmin reaction to threats that they faced. Clearly not all Brahmins gave a damn about such threats. I have some interesting anecdotes about how my grandfather showed the middle finger to thse types. > In the socialist years, > if you moved across the country it was usually for a government job, > and the State played parent and guardian to its favorite sons, if it I think you are leaving out about 3000 years of history of free movement here. > Dharma vs adharma is phrasing it unhelpfully. India needs to learn to > cope as a nation Dharma says: Your duty when you are young is to acquire an education. After your education, you must work, get maried and have children. That is your duty to society. It is also your duty to look after your children and elderly paretnts After those duties are done you can have your freedom to do what you like. Note that the young people who are featured in the article posted by Deepa (Life and Love in Bangalore) fall into the folowing pattern: First they get married and stay together (dharma). then they have kids (dharma). Then they want to look after and educate their kids (dharma). They are then stressed by the demads of moden society and are coping by using available measures to cope. they are stressing themselves and spending money, but are doing quite well from the dharma point of view. In the old days children in India would have been sent to boarding school - but that was true only for a small westernized Indian elite. For the poorer people, the illiterate and "black hethendom" teh lady of the house would have done her househiold duties and helped with the family business/vocatio, but she would have help at home from aunts, cousins, daughters. The concept of "women of leisure" where the man worked and earned wnough to keep everyone fed was true only for the wealthy. My own social class fell in this category. My mother, aunts and all lady relatives were "women of leisure" who could attend ladies' club parties and weddings But we had servants. the "maid servant" was not a woman of leisure. She had to work_and_look after her kids. She must have faced the same issues that were faced bu the people in the article that started this thread. But the stories that get featured in the media are not new - they are just touching our social class now. That's all. shiv
