Brown Pundits

I have read the annhilation of caste by Ambedkar in my teens,read Gandhiji’s Harijan ,one copy, where he answers to some perverse people who justify untouchability .I have read the horror stories of human sacrifices in parts of India coming from parts of Hinduism. And I have been revolted beyond measure and have at various times felt the sheer horror of it all. And I have abandoned Hinduism, I gave up my traditional faith, I have for various other reasons including personal ones come back to it, but in a different way. With more a sense of nyaya/vaisheshika, the need to rid oneself of delusions. I think untouchability, caste violence and violence in general against women, many of these are horrors we still live with and if One cannot get rid of these horrors in 150 odd more years. or not make very significant progress, then one must end it for it is not good and is not defensible. It has the right to flourish as that had been hijacked by historic forces. If it doesnt work in the end, then it must end too.

I once began reading the book of arundhati roy,” listening to the grass hoppers”, even after I had become atheist, I was in depression , and the book made it much worse, I didnt finish that book, I still have it somewhere. If there is nothing to be salvaged knowing all the worst there is, then there is nothing there to value any of it. But one shouldnt be ignorant. And make choices on that. There is something in its philosophies, if not vedanta, then nyaya, if not nyaya, then bhakti, if not bhakti, then yoga, if not yoga, then , karma yoga. Or may be a combination of many. It has a richness in its diversity, whether it be ramanuja who took a shudra as his guru,invited him to his home for meals and was not there when he did come, his wife served but later washed the home and bathed herself, and ramanuja on returning didnt like this, many such incidents pushed him to become monk instead tried to work to bring this to end.

There are problems in all people, in him and others as well, but this here points to atma stuthi(conscience) and sadachara( ethics of good people from all classes) , while these methods were hierarchically less in value compared to texts, They in time as more texts were written led to movements of various gurus possible.For ethical learning could happen with out the texts from the good people as well. This was the one good escape route for more general ethical learning that played a part in bhakti movement. While it is interesting that the earliest dharma shastra apastambha sutra was better than the later manusmriti, for it put mutually agreed ideas superior to vedas, for he considered “dharma and adharma do not fly around declaring this is righteous and this isnt, even gods and demi gods cannot declare so.”

As patrick olivelle says, apastambha argued that parts of vedas are lost and one can only infer from the behavior of people to find the true ideal dharma , so one must learn from customs of men and women. On the other hand manusmriti doesnt like reasoning to be the sole basis for declaring moral issues either. So while Hinduism over time began to value different opinions, it didnt find “reasoning” to be the primary source to discover this, Inspite of nyaya being a recognized tradition.

Good to see one of the greatest Lahoris honoured in Pakistan. It’s time Pakistan start to own its history (in a collaborative not confrontational way). I liked his saying though:

A big ‘thank you’ to the boys at ISI & other instruments of authoritarian enforcement for helping with publicity for my book ‘Reimagining #Pakistan.’ Remember, release is on April 9. A case a day will be really good 🙏 https://t.co/EwGgBZtGo7

— Husain Haqqani (@husainhaqqani) March 21, 2018

Is Husain Haqqani one of the best living Hindustani leaders?

Religions have many aspects to it,what matters for growth is that it comes down to being able to take criticism. If criticism leads to complex arguments, then depending on the nature of those arguments one can make progress, provided they can atleast temporarily keep the religious side interested with the belief that they do have a chance to come through.  So there has to reach a (seemingly) stable equilibrium between the critics and the believers. If this isnt possible then religious believers might find it difficult to sustain belief.

Islam truly is poor in its resources compared to other religions, it is precisely for this reason for its comparative poverty in its expression. Because it is anchored to Mohammad. we need to first find a way to compare between different religions, our understanding of this phenomena of “religion” has been shaped  largely due to christian/western worldview and its impact on how other systems of belief are perceived.Reason why we have many new world isms (Shintoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Sikhism,Jainism, Buddhism). So lets compare instead by many making different criteria to see where they stand.A kind of card, too many red cards and that religion is the worst. On inequality, Hinduism is worst, on freedoms to criticize , Christianity/Islam are worst, on use of violence for conquest, Islam is again the worst with concept of “Jihad”,so is Christianity. political ambitions,theologically for expansion bringing them into conflict with others, Christianity,Islam are worst.Just look around for christian and Muslim expansion in last 1000+ yrs by both.   Finally we can come to the central pillars of religions which have founders, Jainism Mahavira,Buddhism Buddha, Christianity Jesus,Sikhism ,Islam Mohammad. Continue reading Islamoskepticism or Islamophobia

My MIL posted this is in the family whatsapp group (I think the bit about income tax is exaggerated but at any rate with the amount of Sindhi Billionaires I’m hoping some Sindhi luck will rub off on me LOL/iA). I’m sharing it to BP:

Did you know that Continue reading Happy Cheti Chand

Abdul Majeed Abid

Yeh fasal umeedon ki hamdam,

Iss baar bhi ghaarat jaye gi,

Sab mehnat subhon shaamon ki,

Ab kay bhi akaarat jaye gi

(This crop of aspirations

will be ruined once again,

the toil of day and night

will be wasted another time.)

(Faiz, Montgomery Jail, 1955)

The year 2007 was eventful in Pakistan’s recent history. Political upheaval coupled with a rise in terrorism and a lawyers’ movement for the restoration of the judiciary gripped the country for most of the year. Musharraf, the military dictator, had forcibly removed the Chief Justice of Pakistan — sparking a movement led by lawyers across the country. Amidst all this kerfuffle arose a new band called ‘Laal’ with their song ‘Umeed e Seher’ (Hope for a new Dawn). The song became a sort of anthem for the lawyers’ movement alongside slogans against military dictatorship. The song was based on a poem written by Pakistan’s foremost progressive poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the band consisted of young academics who openly declared themselves Marxists. One of the band members was the General Secretary of a Communist Party in Pakistan. A communist party in Pakistan? That seems like an oxymoron, does it not?

Continue reading Pakistan, communists and a stained dawn

New Delhi: Some Indian High Commission officials out for shopping in Islamabad’s main business district were aggressively followed and abuses hurled at them, the Foreign Ministry complained to the Pakistan government today. 

This is the second incident of Indian diplomats being intimidated and harassed over the last three days, Foreign Ministry sources said in New Delhi.

An Indian diplomat and his family on their way to a restaurant in Pakistan were chased by two men on a motorbike on Thursday this week, hours after India had called “harassment the new normal for Indian High Commission personnel in Islamabad”.

Pakistan: Land of the Impure Continue reading Indian Diplomats in Pakistan harassed

My wife alerted me to this shocking 20 second clip:

Such an extraordinarily offensive question by Rajdeep Sardesai. He basically asks Kareena if she’s educated and whether she was intimidated in joining the Pataudi family, who apparently are Rhode Scholars & Oxford. A few obvious observations:

(1) I was at the memorial conference for Pataudi Snr in London a few years ago. The handlers had to ask the press not to focus on Kareena, who was there with Saif & Sharmilla. She’s like the Ash of the Bacchan family, her star eclipses the family she’s married into entirely (that’s why Amitabh omits her quite obviously and Shweta/Ash have a hate-hate relationship).

Where is Ash in this tribute? Continue reading Shocking Sexism towards Kareena Kapoor

Why tribalism wins ?. For this we need to consider what would be the alternative of tribalism?. Individualism. However individuals collaborate to achieve goals . The act of collaboration leads to competition between different kinds of ideas . Here there is big difference between complicated ideas which require deep study which cannot be done over short period of time and simple ideas which require less study. The more complex an idea, the less numbers of people shall be able to follow and the simpler an idea, its easy enough to get many to support them. It should also be easier to get many to debunk them as well. But here we end up with cognitive biases of the mind. No matter the ease with which one might debunk the simple idea, one might still not win the case for the complex idea precisely because it is complex, one might debunk it in favor of another simple idea. This leads to evolution of rhetoric, branding, a way to compress very complex set of ideas into simple enough ideas that can gain support .

In all this, we are now faced with the logistics of how ideas are disseminated , the fidelity with which they are disseminated, all options are made available, how well are all options equally explained. All this requires commitment of workers. So, the requirement of nuance, the logistics of the entire exercise, the need to motivate workers , the simple minded ideas and rhetoric one needs to deploy to win over others to one’s side , especially if one’s own ideas are too complex. This leads to a need for improvisation, rhetoric, taking advantage of cognitive hacks of our minds.
And once these methods are put in place, this machine becomes self sustaining, the use of cognitive hacks will keep getting deployed. All this lead to dominance of tribes over individualism.As it will be the efficiency of how these are run that shall decide the success.

Individualism also leads to spectrum of different positions. As Steven Weinberg once put it, “Without religion, good people will be good and bad people bad, with religion, to get good people to do bad,that takes religion”. As simple as this might sound, One might discover that the personalities of these “good people” might diverge from each other as well. If so, one might find that these good people might further divide themselves as their individual exploration space would be different from each other, their cognitive capacity, their methods of reasoning and subjective experience might all differ. The narcissism of individualism leads to the bizarre culture of validating people for discovery of their personal truth , popularization of phrases like “speaking your truth” comes to the mind. The narcissism of individualism will lead to a culture of much internal bickering and be taken over by the more tribal groups, whether they be internal or external.

Truth is not easy to find for all. At some point one has to go by trust due to the impossibility of one individual gaining perfection in diverse fields .Even in one field, one is far away from experts. This is true at both at the level of knowledge but also at the level of governance. The requirements of building systems of governance to scale leads one to also trust large numbers of people as part of the system. The constraints alone make Tribalism seem necessary. Add to it the divergent thinking styles of people to it along with diverse beliefs of people, how can it not be the case that tribalism would win. Once a tribe is formed based on certain markers, it becomes self sustaining and change the world in unique way in consonance with those tribal markers.

The difference is one therefore as to how an eco system of tribes tame themselves over time and evolve strategies of not trying to out compete each other to harmful effects but to help enable each other and to also solve the trouble of freeloaders .

In absence of clear cut answers one can only go by heuristics and methods to help us. In science and math, it is the consistency of methods, experiments that helps us. They act as guard rails .  We need to educate people about guardrails, one such guard rail could be skin in the game and belief in progress in incremental steps, experimental groups one can track over period of time and test for intervention  rather than to force experiment on everyone with no way to convince others that one’s ideas are indeed true.