And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

I was reading about Stanford’s accommodation culture when one detail stopped me cold. Some students, the article noted, claim to be devout Jains in order to escape the mandatory meal plan. Jainism, one of India’s oldest religions, forbids harm to living beings. That includes insects. In many traditions it excludes root vegetables, because uprooting a plant kills it. It is an ethic of extreme restraint, discipline, and care. The students claiming it, by the author’s own admission, are not Jain. They are optimisers. This is not a small lie. It is a revealing one.

Jainism is not a universalist or missionary religion. It is an ethnic faith, bound to specific mercantile communities in western India. Jains are few in number, highly endogamous, and disproportionately wealthy. Historically, they did not migrate en masse to the West, not because they were excluded, but because they did not need to. Capital, status, and security were already at home.

There are very few Jain Americans for precisely this reason. That matters, because it makes the Stanford claim implausible on its face. What is being invoked is not a living religious community with institutions, elders, and accountability. It is a hollowed-out abstraction, detached from its social reality and redeployed as a bureaucratic key.

Jainism here is not belief. It is paperwork.

The Stanford story is often framed as a policy failure: too much empathy, too little scrutiny. That is true, but it misses the deeper issue. These institutions no longer assume good faith because they no longer cultivate it. They assume rational actors responding to incentives. And that is exactly what they produce.

What is striking is not that students game the system. Young people have always done that. What is striking is the ease with which a religion centred on reverence for life can be reduced to a consumer upgrade.

Jainism is not performative. It is punishing. It demands limits on diet, movement, work, and even thought. Historically, it produced people who accepted moral cost as the price of ethical seriousness. To invoke it casually in order to eat better food is not merely cynical. It is symptomatic.

Elite Western institutions now operate in a language of claims without cost and identity without obligation. Disability becomes a credential. Trauma becomes currency. Religion becomes a checkbox. None of this requires belief. It requires fluency.

The system cannot challenge this without undermining itself. You cannot interrogate anxiety without seeming cruel. You cannot question a religious claim without risking litigation. So the institution retreats into procedure, and procedure becomes the only ethic left.

An honour deficit.

People with real disabilities are quietly crowded out. Serious faith is trivialised. Shared resources are treated as prizes to be captured. And no one involved feels shame, because shame requires a moral horizon beyond optimisation.

What this episode also reveals is the direction of cultural flow. For two centuries, the West assumed it exported civilisation and others absorbed it. That assumption no longer holds. India—Bharat in the civilisational sense—is now exporting not just people or capital, but ethos. Its religions and moral grammars are circulating globally, often stripped of context, sometimes abused, but no longer ignorable.

Jainism appearing in a California dining hall is not an accident. It is evidence of reach. We are entering a world shaped not by one civilisation, but by several large, irreducible ones. India, China, Islam, Africa, and Latin America operate as civilisational blocks too large and rooted to be flattened into Western categories. They do not need Western validation to exist.

Orthodox Christianity occupies an in-between position. It is no longer fully Western, but not yet fully post-Western either—junior in power, but quietly separating from liberal theology toward its own civilisational self-understanding.

The mistake Western institutions keep making is assuming these civilisations can be sampled without consequence. That you can borrow an ethic without its discipline, a religion without its cost, a moral language without its social obligations. That worked when the West set the terms. It no longer does.

Jainism does not dissolve when exported. It exposes the thinness of systems that treat belief as preference and morality as paperwork. When it collides with those systems, the problem is not Jainism.

It is the host civilisation discovering that it no longer defines the rules of meaning. That is the deeper discomfort behind the Stanford story. Not that students cheated. But that a non-Western civilisation showed up, uninvited, and revealed how unserious the moral architecture had become. A university that cannot distinguish between sacrifice and convenience, between belief and paperwork, is not educating leaders. It is training managers of decline.

But every now and then I hear that BJP-aligned governments or officials are removing eggs from school meal programs due to cultural sensitivities. I get that, but is there a good argument from this from a utilitarian/nutritional angle? Children at critical ages need protein and fat, and perhaps I’m wrong, but India still seems to have a lot of nutritional issues in a lot of is population. These kids are the future, and honestly, this seems like the cultural forces are shooting society in the face.

If Marin county or the Irvine School District unveiled this I wouldn’t care. With enough money and care you can design a vegan diet with balance and supplementation to be healthy. But this requires care and execution, and I see many American with lots of money who don’t pull it off well judging by their physique and fatigue.

What’s the deal? It’s true that the Chinese eat everything, but sometimes I wonder if the Indians eat nothing.

(this matters to all of us because a massive number of working age people in the next few decade are going to be Indian, and we need them to be as healthy as possible)

This is just factually wrong from what I know. The standard narrative I was taught is that the shift toward vegetarianism was driven by non-Brahmin-led religious movements, in particular the Sramanic sects like Jainism and Buddhism (that seem to have had a Kshatriya and Vaishya “class” base). Rather, post-Vedic Brahmanic ritualism was changed by the influence of these movements, with the Brahmin caste becoming followers and expositors. This probably aligns with the idea that much of late Indian Buddhism was actually incorporated into Advaita, so the idea that Buddhism is a “daughter” religion of Hinduism is actually not correct.

Now, it is totally true that today militant vegetarianism is often correlated with upper castes and is instrumentalized in an exclusionary manner.  But that is the endpoint and operationalization of vegetarianism, not its root. The original commenter was making a political and rhetorical point, so truth was pretty irrelevant. But those of us who value truth need to periodically bring up pedantic aspects because otherwise the lie becomes truth, and that is true perversion.

In fact, if we discount the smaller states (Northeast excluding Assam and Goa) and consider the rest, we are left with only three provinces across the country where the meat-eating percentage on a weekly basis is in excess of 80 per cent – West Bengal, Assam and Kerala.

It seems possible that the higher fraction of meat-eaters in UP vs. the other major northwestern states is probably largely the function of the higher fraction of Muslims.

At least Samosa has some protein in comparison to the Pakora, which is basically fried batter (delicious as it is).

I tend to prefer Desi Khans above all else however I have actually taken to eating a steak or another grilled meat just to complement my meal.

This isn’t to revisit older tropes about vegetarian Hindus and meat-eating Muslims but the only protein source I can think of is daal and milk products.

A Pakistani on Instagram once remarked that his favourite cuisine is Arabic food. I immediately took offence since Mughlai cuisine is so much more complex. But his reasoning did make sense that in the balance of health and taste Arabic food was a clear winner.

Interestingly one of our young relatives (at the age of 6) has decided to go completely vegetarian. The family are completely Westernised and meat-eating but the young chap refuses to eat any meat (he wants to give up jelly beans because it has animal products).

It’s gotten to the point that he scolded his mum for buying a leather bag because it’s made from animal hide and while on a car journey he started to meditate. He’s naturally very rambunctious and mischievous but it’s just an interesting exercise in “spontaneous vegetarianism” (we were all eating lamb chops and chicken but he was just sticking to daal).

His mother had to pack all these “mithai”, full of ghee, just to make sure that he met his calorific intake. In a way Indian food is catered to meet calorific loads rather than nutritional values. Nomadic food on the other is just an exercise in how to cook different types of meat. Of course these cuisines are pared with occupational types and we aren’t nomads & farmers anymore.

Awesome! This #map shows the population density of the 1.4 billion cows that live on our planet. Source: https://t.co/0n5fek1fA8 pic.twitter.com/tT5psAopuY

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) July 27, 2018

I have been wondering this the past week is that how and why did India become vegetarian. Was it simply a theological quirk or were there some geohistorical reasons for it (the cow was such an economic necessity that it made sense to forgo protein). Was it also an Aryan feature or Dravidian or does that question make no sense?

Another thought that came to mind was that would ancient Indians have been wealthier had they been avid meat-eaters. If there had been lesser resources to go around the population densities would have been lighter perhaps but of course this pales in comparison to bad leadership.

As an aside I definitely concede the fact that more often than not local leadership is almost always better for the population than foreign dynasties. Therefore Hindu dynasties probably were better for India than Muslim ones simply because India was home for the former. The Mughal’s great accomplishments were in art and architecture, which may be very well for posterity but didn’t make them a match for the modern age in contrast to the Safavids who built Iran into a successful nation state.

I would hazard that Ashoka was probably a better Emperor of India than Akbar simply because the former gifted the world India’s most successful export, blue-eyed Buddha (believe it or not the Buddha had blue eyes). We sometimes forget that Buddhism probably ranks as India’s greatest accomplishment in the wider world; it transformed all Eastern religions and became the dominant philosophical paradigm for so much of the ancient world. It’s reflective of Western bias that Indian academics and historians are more concerned with ancient India’s influence on the modern West; the Mitanni were a footnote in history compared to the great accomplishments of Indic civilisation in the East.

However the reason why I think India never really matched China in national identity, sovereignty and political cohesion (even when the Chinese were ruled by foreigners they still managed to maintain their cultural coherence to a very great and recognisable extent) is simply because of caste. The greatest faultline in South Asia, after creed, is caste and that made Indian society vulnerable to foreign despots. The court of Mughal Kings is littered with Brahmins and Rajputs and let’s not forget Urdu was an invention of Khatris and Kayasths. The Brits didn’t only come up with divide and rule; the fissures were inbuilt Into Indian society.. The Sikhs achieved the dominance they did was because they welded a caste-light community to achieve assabiyah, which the different children of Brahma frankly eschewed from time to time. This is something to thank Pakistan and the Muslims; they are such a galvanising force for Hindu society to reconsolidate and shed away such internal divisions..

Interesting Links:

Food Writer Becomes A Butcher To Better Understand The Value Of Meat

Pakistan elects first non-Muslim in modern history to general national assembly seat

Only catastrophe truly reduces inequality, according to a historical survey

They are the neo-Brahmins.  Also it is the Bharatiya Jain Party (BJP).

Generally the Brahmin class has provided teachers, doctors, lawyers….people who fight with words not swords (that was reserved for Kshatriyas or Khatris). Brahmins are also not noted to be in the top economic bracket (money is in the hands of the Vaishyas or Baniyas).

Brahmins have not been either numerous or durable as rulers (there have been probably more and more long lasting Shudra rulers). Jawaharlal Nehru, who had immense contempt for religion (specifically Hinduism) nevertheless was probably the longest reigning Brahmin.

Meet Amit Shah – a Jain – the newly minted president of BJP. Jains were recently declared to be a minority by the past Congress-UPA regime (as a last-ditch vote-catching measure). Shah is expected to continue the tradition whereby India has been specially alert to the sensitivities of minorities. It is another matter that what is nectar to one community is poison to the others (see below).

As far as policies go Jains are as strict as any of the famous sons of Abraham. They also have immense wealth and they have the ear of the political establishment. Amit Shah is credited with the BJP victories in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – critical for Mission 272 (parliamentary majority). It was Shah who memorably told the Jats of Muzaffarnagar that “this election is a fight for honor and revenge.”

In Europe there has been considerable tensions of late between the left-liberals (aligned with animal rights groups) and Jews/Muslims over kosher/halal rituals. The fight is over stunning animals before they are gored. The multi-culturalists say (with some justification) that only people who are perfect vegetarians can proclaim their moral authority on this matter, everyone else is a hypocrite and an Islamaphobe (also anti-semite).  

By this logic, Jains who introduced the concept of ahimsa to the world, have all the moral authority to over-ride objections of the filthy meat eaters….

Interestingly enough, vegetarianism is one area in which the Dharmic religions can all agree to put up an united front against the Desert religions. All our Sikh friends choose to eat vegetarian when dining out since they are actually forbidden to consume halal food.  

The only Hindus who will have serious objections to veg-only strictures are the denizens of un-India (TM)- Kerala, Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Perhaps they should be labeled apostates and barred from visiting Varanasi and Palitana.

Welcome to the land of vegetarian Iftars. Hope you enjoy the experience.
…………
Parimal, a nondescript neighbourhood in Palitana, near Bhavnagar, in
Gujarat, is much sought after for the Jain pilgrimage town’s few
Muslim-run non-vegetarian eateries. But it’s eerily deserted on what
should have been a bustling, cheerful iftaar evening.  

Kababs and chicken
lollipops are displayed promisingly on the menus of the stalls but the
kitchens that roll them out have been shut down since the Gujarat
government promised to look at Jain leaders’ demand that the pilgrimage
town be made a vegeta­rian-only zone. 

The stall-owners are suspicious,
reluctant to talk, and refuse to give their names. A seething resentment
fills the air. “There’s nothing for us to celebrate this Ramzan,” says
Haji Ghulam Ali, offering us goodies from the vegetarian entree to his
humble iftaar meal. He’s the only one willing to be quoted. “Our
business is hit, we’re on the verge of bankruptcy, and we can’t even eat
our regular food!”


 
The government notification hasn’t yet come into effect. But in
Palitana, it’s already futile—and generally has been difficult—to find
non-veg food. The carts that used to sell omelettes and boiled or
scrambled eggs around the town’s mosque and cemetery, on the outskirts,
have vanished. 

Interestingly, this region is predominantly meat-eating.
“As high as 55-60 per cent of the population are non-vegetarians—not
just Muslims, but Kolis, Sindhis and Dalits also,” says Pravin Mishra,
an Ahmedabad-based filmmaker, artist and columnist. The Jain presence is
in a few thousands, largely a floating population of pilgrims and
ascetic, peripatetic monks and nuns. In contrast, Muslims constitute 25
per cent of the resident population. It will be worst hit if
vegetarianism is enforced.

But the monks spearheading the movement say it’s not a matter of
numbers. “Palitana is like the Mecca or Kashi of Jains,” says Virag
Sagar Maharaj, a leading monk. He invokes Jain lore. Palitana has been
visited by all 24 Jain tirthankars. The Shat­runjaya hills are clustered
with 3,000 temples and 27,000 statues. There’s the symbolic ord­eal of
3,600 steps, a 3.5 km climb that takes two to three hours. 

Jains come
here to pray for moksha. 

The sentiment runs in laity too. “It’s the
centre of our faith,” says Shireesh Kotari, international president of
the Jain Social Groups Inter­national Federation. And Janki Shah, owner
of a textiles company in Ahme­d­abad, says, “It’s one of our holiest
shri­nes—our shashwata tirtha. We believe that, whatever happens,
Palitana will never vanish from the earth. It is eternal.”


 
They draw on the concept of ahimsa, a central tenet of Jainism: you
are not meant to hurt anything, not even a fly. “It’s not merely about
preventing people from eating non-veg food. Our movement is based on the
concept of Jeevdaya and is primarily against animal slaughter,” says
Virag Sagar Maharaj. 

Although he does not justify it, sociologist
Gaurang Jani says the demand for a no-meat zone in Palitana is linked to
the strict vegetarianism Jains practise. And Vidyut Joshi, former
vice-chancellor of Bhavnagar University, says, “I guess some ethos of
the Jain religion has to be maintained at its biggest pilgrimage
centre.”


 
The posters outside the ashram of Jambudweep, a subsect of the
Shwet­ambar Jains, talk of 2,000 animals butchered every day in
Palitana, 60,000 monthly and 7 lakh annually. They demand a “hinsa,
kasaai, vyasan mukt Palitana”—sanitised of violence, butchery and vice,
that is. It’s an organised effort. Each of the 68 butchers in town has
been identified by name—and the kind of animals he slaughters. 

The
Jambudweep group claims this is the first step in their rehabilitation.
It offers butchers  a compensation of Rs 9 lakh and eatery owners Rs 5
lakh. So far, 15 butchers—the campaigners have agreeme­nts on notarised
stamp papers as proof—have agreed to give up their profession.

But Muslim residents of the Parimal area say the promises aren’t being
made good.  And, compensation or not, it’s difficult to uproot oneself
from a place or give up a trade. In Gujarat, there are hardly any
non-Muslim butchers, so the demand for vegetarianism will mostly hit one
community. Mishra says it’s a case of religion being used as a
political and electoral tool. 

But it’s not just Muslim butchers; the
Sikligar Sikhs, who breed pigs and trade in them, are also under the
Jains’ scanner. Palitana looks like a starting point. Virag Sagar
Maharaj wants to take the movement forward in all of Gujarat, and later,
Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. “The whole
world,” he resolutely says, “should become ahimsak.”

 
What is unfolding right now is clearly a clash of faiths and opposing
ways of life. “It seems all about ‘My faith is bigger than yours’,
which defies the spirit of secularism and acceptance,” says Mishra.
Ironically, the temples atop the sacred Shatrunjaya hills tell a
different story. They reflect a history of peace and togetherness, of
cultures and religions in harmony. At one of the holiest Jain sites
here, there’s the Muslim shrine to Angar Pir, at which childless couples
of every religion—including Jains—have been seeking  blessings since
time immemorial.

 
All is not well within the Jain sect itself. There has been dissent
amongst Jain monks too. One group accuses the other of being taken in
too easily by the promises made by the administration. Monks are even
being accused of having pocketed money meant for rehabilitating
butchers. “It’s a stunt,” says Divya Shek­har Maharaj, a monk who has
distanced himself from the movement, though he himself practises a very
rigorous form of vegetarianism. “They have promised a lot but nothing
has happened.”

 The proposal has led to sharp criticism from civil society. “Ritual
slaughter is as much an act of faith for Muslims and Hindus as animal
protection is for the Jains,” says Aakar Patel, a columnist. “To ask
another faith to change to what you think is right is an imposition and
fundamental intolerance.” 

According to education consultant Manisha
Modha Patel, no group can treat a town as its private pro­­perty. At
best, proscription of non-veg food can be applied at temple complexes.
Already, since 1999, non-veg food is not allowed within 250 metres of
Taleti, the point from which the climb up Shatru­njaya hills begins. The
road leading to the Shatrunjaya river, too, is a vegetarian zone. Now,
they want vegetarianism imposed in a 9 km radius. “Tomorrow,” says
Manisha, “they may seek a ban on onion and garlic. What if Ajmer decides
to declare itself a meat-only zone?” But Virag Sagar Maharaj counters
by drawing on the example of Haridwar and Vaishno Devi, both vegetarian
zones.


 
What the Palitana movement does prove is the influence of Jains in
Gujarat. They form less than one per cent of the state’s population but
dominate the economic space, and through it wield disproportionate
influence on the social, cultural and political space. Many say the
ascendancy in the ruling BJP of Amit Shah, Modi’s right-hand man, now
slotted to be party president, is adding to their clout. Shah is a Jain.


 
Their dominance has also been creating the misperception that
Gujaratis are vegetarian. Actually, 68 per cent of the population,
according to the last census, eats meat—this includes tribals, obcs,
Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews.


 
Meanwhile, Bhavnagar collector P.K. Solanki says that, at the moment,
the Palitana municipality is inviting objections to the proposed move
and has received 1,980 so far. Legal opinion is also being sought. The
board of the municpality is likely to decide on July 30. The decision
will be forwarded to the state government for appropriate action. Till
then, Palitana remains in suspended animation. And iftaars will remain
dhokla-khakhra affairs.

Eggless, Meatless…

• Haridwar, Uttarakhand. No meat, no eggs, no fishing allowed in the Ganga, no alcohol.
• Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, Yamunotri,
  Uttarakhand. All hotels, guest houses, restaurants and eateries serve
  only vegetarian fare. There are no bars.
• Jagannath Temple, Puri, Orissa. No sale or preparation of meat, fish, poultry, eggs in all restaurants in specific areas around the temple
• Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. No meat, fish, eggs or liquor except in certain parts of the city.
• Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh. No non-vegetarian food, smoking, drinking, no leather objects in the temple vicinity.
• Golden Temple, Amritsar. No meat in the temple complex. No smoking in the city.
• Katra, Jammu. Only pure vegetarian food, not even onion and garlic allowed.
• Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu. Only vegetarian food in the town though it is a major exporter of seafood.

………

Link: http://www.outlookindia.com/printarticle.aspx?291371

……..

regards

Killing
is not right. Killing animals to eat them is not a civilised thing to
do, but carnivores exist in nature and in many places, humans have to
subsist on non-vegetarian food for reasons beyond their control. But
wherever possible, vegetarianism must be practised. Hurting people
physically or mentally, whether by word or action is wrong. Ahimsa is
more important than prayer. Ahimsa should be the central principle of
your faith, but you have to raise your voice against injustice. Then, if
you hurt someone who has hurt other people, it is justified. But the
death penalty is barbaric — it is murder by the state.

So, life should be lived with
compassion and non-violence. I think a lot about life and the way we
live it; I also think about death and how we deal with it. The basic
point is, we don’t know where we come from; we also don’t know where we
go after death. In between, we might know a little about life. 

People
talk a lot about body and soul — I’ve never seen a soul, nor do I know
anyone who has seen one. So for me, death is a full stop. I don’t
subscribe to the theory of rebirth endorsed by Hinduism and Buddhism nor
do I believe in the Judeo-Christian belief in a heaven and hell. Ghalib
said: “We know the truth about paradise but to beguile your mind is not
a bad idea.”
 
When I met The Dalai Lama, I told him I didn’t
believe in God. He threw his head back and laughed, saying, nor do
Buddhists. I often wonder, how only Hindu and Buddhist children relate
incidents from previous births while Muslim and Christian children
don’t. There is nothing unique about death. 
Death comes to all who are
born. So we don’t need to pull a long face when death comes. Of course,
it is human nature to grieve for someone you’ve lost. But that’s no
reason to create a big fuss, wailing and screaming. Nor is there any
need to have elaborate rituals.
 
Death is in the order of
nature — when your time comes, die with dignity. I’m a member of the
‘Die with Dignity’ society formed by Minoo Masani 20 years ago. I can’t
say I don’t fear death — but I’m more concerned about whether it is
going to be a long drawn out painful process.
 
Iqbal wrote: “If
you ask me about the sign of faith/when death comes to him/he should
have a smile on his face.” I’m all for the ancient tradition of
celebrating death. When people over 70 years die, their death should be
marked with celebrations including music, dancing and feasting. It is a
sign of maturity and acceptance of the inevitable. 

regards