Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Quick notes: Biopiracy, Diet issues...

  • Biopiracy: India blocks Colgate patents for spices. Thanks to the traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) database, created in the last decade to fight biopiracy.


  • A meatless argument: Both NPR and NYT have usually been liberal when it comes to coverage of the disastrous implications of a global meat diet for the environment, not to mention animal lives. When it comes to India though, not only have these environmental and animal ethics aspects been ignored, but a wholly insulting edifice of distortion and disdain has been erected on that silence about what “diet” issues are all about. Using the cliched and colonial trope of starving children, we are offered one more lesson in how Hinduism is somehow responsible for all that is wrong in India today.


  • Britain Does Owe Reparations - Shashi Tharoor:



  • Macaulay's children:

    Quora: Why do Hindu seculars in India fight for other religions while they abuse their own religion?

    Maria's Wirth's Answer: This is a long story that started in 1835 when a politician called Thomas Macauley pleaded in the British Parliament to replace the Sanskrit gurukuls in India with English education. He argued that if Britain wants to successfully subdue Indians, they need to be cut off from their culture. Macauley got his way.

    From then on, the Indian elite had to send their children to English medium schools, if they wanted them to make it in life. Naturally, the kids didn’t hear much about their own great culture and whatever little they heard, was negative. And since they didn’t learn Sanskrit, they could not check it out for themselves.

    Ironically, this happened at a time, when the European elite had discovered Sanskrit and India’s wisdom and were stunned by its depth. This discovery contributed to the so called era of enlightenment in Europe which resulted in a separation between state and Church.

    Yet Indian children were taught from mid-19th century onwards, how great and accomplished Britain was. It suited the colonial masters to have “educated natives” who held them and their lifestyle, including their religion, in high esteem. In return, they, especially those who had converted to the western religions, were allowed to feel superior to the ‘superstitious Indian masses’.

    Brainwashing works. And Indians proved that it lasts even over several generations. Those who abuse their own religion are generally “Macauley’s children” who feel proud that they are fluent in English and don’t realize that they have been uprooted in the interest of their former masters.

    These people never delved into the rich Indian heritage. Yet in spite of their ignorance, they claim that India has nothing to offer. They don’t really claim it: they shout it, so that any opposition to their view cannot be heard. Of course this is not a healthy state of affairs, but it plays out often on Indian news channels: Macauley’s children (or should I call them ‘anti-Hindu brigade’?) accuse and insinuate about Hinduism what the British convent schools had taught them. And of course they have a very favorable view of the “western religions” and are ever ready to support them.

    These people, so far at least, dominated the institutions, including those who are responsible for school syllabi and sadly the bias against their own tradition got perpetuated even in independent India.

    “Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated  man with honour and equality” 5th graders learnt in West Bengal, as Arun Shourie pointed out in his Eminent Historians Page 68

    This is taken from my article. here is full article: Dalai Lama: “India has great potential to help the world”




  • First ever Sanskrit animatics film!:


4 comments:

san said...

I once had a Jain roommate in university. Jains are all vegetarians, but he used to eat eggs. So I thought that eggs are acceptable to the vegetarian diet. You mean they're not?

Personally, I don't see why people can't have the freedom of choice to eat what they want. Why do we want to dictate to others what they should eat? What one chooses to put in one's own mouth is one thing, but to decide what others should be able to put into their mouths? Why is that a good thing?

I thought we had some nice Hindu libertarian views on the site, but so then why try to promote a theocratic nanny state that tells people what they can or cannot eat? Is that a good idea? Removing eggs from the menu is basically saying that you cannot be allowed to eat eggs. So now eating eggs is evil?

This is why separation of religion and state is a very important idea.

Pagan said...

"Removing eggs from the menu is basically saying that you cannot be allowed to eat eggs".
Not true. Not at all. Removing it from anganwadi meals doesn't mean you are not allowed to eat eggs.

Pagan said...

Heart disease and the gut microbe... from the same NYT

karyakarta92 said...

Eggs were not "removed" from the Madhya Pradesh Anganwadi mid-day meal scheme. They were never present on the menu to begin with. The state government of M.P declined permission to a proposal to add it to the mid-day meal. Permitting it would have amounted to imposition of Eggs on those who did not want it, that too using taxpayer money. People are free to buy and eat eggs in their own homes with their own money. There is no prohibition on eggs - contrary to the propaganda of Kancha Ilaiah and his brainwashed clones. Eggs or Beef cannot be imposed, force fed to anybody who does not
want it. India is not Afghanistan under the Taliban!