The greatest shock that I ever faced, probably after the event of my actual birth, was my coming face-to-face with the United States of America. It was a four-sear-long wrenching of my Self from everything that it knew to be true about life and living and people and relationships. Of course, I figured out how to cope, perhaps even thrive, but there's no denying that I have spent the next twenty-five vears of my life trying to un-wrench myself.
It was not the good people I met that I had a reaction to, but the very fundamentals of the life they had accepted as normal and desirable even. The sheer disconnects, the subsequent absence of wholeness, the rootlessness, the rampant cynicism and the casual irreverence, all ultimately triggered something visceral in me that I, presciently, at that time, started to describe in my research as 'inauthenticity'. That entire world seemed 'made-up'. Politeness and legality were the band-aids that attempted to paper over the loss of understanding of one's place in the world. And, in that 'made-up' world, nothing organic was ever afforded the honour of being 'real'. It seemed always that the 'system' was looking for ways to 'position' every phenomenon, pin it down and then market it. Life was constantly forced to yield to Lifestyle. The deification of Choice seemed to have something to do with this. If everything could be, and perhaps should be, chosen, then the windows of reality themselves start to hinge on a very, very flimsy framework of personal (and ultimately corporate) whim.
Like many young people, dimly conscious of a sense of irreparable loss, I started to search for a sense of belonging in something whole, first in foreign cultures that seemed 'alive' and then in causes that seemed to be 'vital'. That twenty-year-long journey took me through Rock'n'Roll, Latin America, Rural India, Environmentalism, Organic Farming, Sustainability, New-Age, Intentional Communities and Un-Schooling.
Though I have put a lot of skin in this game, I finally realized, in my mid-forties, that living in a mud house among still-rooted and traditional rural folk meant nothing if all I was doing was basking in the glow of their authenticity. Where the hippies of the West with their burned bridges, a Hindu does not have to look was mine? 1 glimpsed, through a two-decade-old haze, a kernel of truth. Unlike one of us. It is we who have turned away. Our ancestral tribes still exist, as do our for belonging out-there, because belonging is already in-here, ready-made for each Kula Devaras, our panpaadugal and traditional duties.
Surprisingly. or perhaps not so inheritance, came the respect for everyone else's. I saw, consciously for the very surprisingly, with that recognition of my own first time, that it is in this peculiar Mutual Respect grown out of commitment to one's own inheritance, that the foundation for the building of wholeness tests.
to see both This vision is not only polytheist in essence, but also, in its ability the One in the many and the many in the One, it is actively Sanatani. In that epiphany, the Marxist lens that had been foisted upon me in my unconscious youth, lay shattered. I knew then also that merely watching a drama unfold is not a sufficient show of love-it is in the playing of one's role in the drama that love manifests. Participation is essential and, though improvisation is allowed, there is also the ancestral role that has to be honoured so coherence and transmission of the divine script can be achieved.
It is in the absence of this complex understanding that the modern mind starts to see our fall from divine grace as inevitable. And because our minds constantly seek to rationalize experiential reality, that fall from grace eventually comes to be seen as desirable, and we begin to embrace our own disintegrations as our true natures. It is this cultural abyss that a vast majority of modern people inhabit today.
For my fellow travellers, a summing up of this insight might strike a chord. Two roads diverge in the wood... true, but counter to what the zeitgeist insinuates, there is a jolly good reason why one was less travelled. Our forebears, in their wisdom, knew that it was a path that led away from the recognition of Inheritance and that it is from the recognition of Inheritance that the principles of Mutual Respect and Participation emerge, from which, eventually, a re-conception of the ideal of Stewardship can manifest. This is the basis of all true culture. The ground under the Banyan tree, where our civilizational drama unfolds may be magical, but it does not exist by magic. It needs us to maintain and water it.
In July 2021, The South Asia Scholar Activist Collective along with Audrey Truschke of Rutgers University, published online their Hindutva Harassment Field Manual.
In September 2021, co-sponsored by departments and centres of more than 53 universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton-the Dismantling Global Hindurva Conference was held online. No doubt it would have been held in a brick-and-mortar building on the premises of Syracuse University (the organizer), if COVID restrictions had not then been in place.
In September 2023, the Progressive Writers' Association organized the Santana Ozhippu Maanaadu or Eradicate Sanatana Conclave in Chennai.
The words Hindutva and Sanatana used in the above examples are merely placeholders for the Hindu people. Pagan-haters (including brainwashed people of Hindu origin) cannot openly say anymore (due to political correctness) that they wish harm upon us simply because the Abrahamic scriptures urge them to do so, instead they resort to verbal gymnastics to hide their true long-term intentions: "Oh, Hinduism and Hindutva are not the same", "Oh, Sanatana Dharma only refers to the 'caste system'", "Oh, Hinduism is nothing but Brahmanism" etc.
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