Quick notes: Sanskrit connection | Coaching hub...

• Similarities Between Sanskrit and Lithuanian: Video explores some of the commonalities between Sanskrit and Lithuanian.
Here's a post from 2011 on this topic.



• Crushing blow to Breaking-India forces: Governor vetoes California's caste discrimination bill

We dedicate this victory and the #vetoSB403 to our hero Milind Makwana our Dalit American sweet brother who died in the cause fighting the imposition of #SB403 on the Indian Americans pic.twitter.com/PCw5TDjwBd

— castefiles (@castefiles) October 7, 2023




• Kota: From Coaching Hub To Suicide Cluster. "After 12 hours of study a student gets depressed and feels humiliated when s/he fails in the periodic tests. The coaching institutes should evolve a better teaching system to make studies stress free".



• Canada panics as Indian students look elsewhere for education. International students from India contribute $19bn+ to the Canadian economy.

Canada Panics as Indian Students Look Elsewhere for Education

Following 🇨🇦 PM Justin Trudeau's allegation of Delhi involvement in the murder of a Khalistani separatist, diplomatic relations between the countries have hit an all time low - threatening Canada's education… pic.twitter.com/hI2SV9tmjR

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) October 6, 2023




• Canada apologizes for awarding one of its highest honors to Nazi soldier



• Different kind of Vikas: Some 47 percent of the 'garden city' of Singapore is now covered in vegetation. The city-state champions natural ventilation, tree-lined streets and more energy-efficient buildings. This policy is supported at the highest levels of government, making Singapore the greenest metropolis in the world and a laboratory for the city of the future.
Meanwhile Bangalore succumbed to car-dependence and lost its charm.

Quick notes: "Edible" insects | TB vaccine...

• More pandemics: The EU will soon permit the sale of locusts, crickets, grasshoppers, and mealworms as food across the continent.



• TB Vaccine: Countries with universal BCG vaccine programmes have much lower mortality rates from Covid-19. "We have known for decades that BCG has non-specific beneficial effects, in that it protects against diseases other than the one for which it was created". . . 'Use BCG vaccine immediately'.



• Beggar-thy-neighbor: Aussie hospitals grapple with shortages after Chinese-owned companies there emptied vital medical supplies and exported them to China.



• Leftist media parroting CCP propaganda:

That NYT?

+Ran articles about irrationality of worrying about the pandemic
+Opposed the travel ban
+Now blaming the administration for not having stiffer travel ban https://t.co/4NNOpkeO1V pic.twitter.com/czrGEeI6Lu

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 6, 2020




• CCP Propaganda: China floods Facebook with ads blaming Trump for c-virus. State news outlets have bought numerous ads extolling China's response to the pandemic and attacking the mistakes of the US



• In the Vedic church none is religiously great or small: Yajurveda 26-2 clearly enjoins all learned persons to preach the Vedic truths to all, the  Brahmanas, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, the Shudras, the Chandalas, the degraded and the forlorn. Dwijas, the twice-born alone are not entitled  to study the Vedas. The shudras and even women are equally entitled to read the Vedas. Persons like Kavish Aylush a Shudra by birth, vide Aitareya Brahmana 11-19 and women like Lopa Mudra were the seers of the meanings of Vedic texts and their names are from times immemorial attached to the Vedic verses. In the  eyes of God all men, high or low, are equally entitled to God's gifts and  bounties, say air, water, sunshine and His Knowledge. 

  All men and women may study the Vedās. It is what God desires. See Yajurveda 26, 2. pic.twitter.com/OMYYLF9Udg

  — Naohisa Yokoyama (@YokoyamaNaohisa) April 10, 2019

  
  

  The Greatest Hindus in World are not The Hindus in India or USA but the Dalit Hindus of Pakistan. Even when they are Denied Food to Survive, They Cling to Our Religion! SALUTE TO THOSE DALIT HEROES!@narendramodi @madhukishwar @amitmalviya @SanjeevSanskritpic.twitter.com/CznJ3usftA

  — Slasher🇮🇳 (@USlasher) April 1, 2020

  
  


• Wikipedia or Trashpedia? Since Vedic wisdom and Yoga are much the fashion across the world these days, racists and Eurocentrists must show that these were brought from Europe by migrants who then occupied India..  We need an online encyclopedia where the edits are by real people. India needs to have a strategic vision on internet technologies. An Indian version of the Wikipedia which is edited responsibly should be part of that vision.



• Solar tiles in driveway: Solar driveways could power entire households.
  

Quick notes: Drone tech | Dalit karsevak...

• Drones to wipe out Pak terrorists? India interested in acquiring US UAV that killed Iranian general. . . . India to buy $2.6bn of US military gear ahead of Trump visit



• Farmers want Modi to avoid unfair trade deals with Trump: The US farm bill 2019 allotted $867 billion as subsidy for American farmers whereas Indian farmers get relatively meagre support.

Allowing import of chicken legs, milk, apple, almond and walnut from America will hit Indian agriculture already reeling under a terrible agrarian distress. These imports will decimate India's poultry industry, hit dairy sector n hill farmers. @PiyushGoyal https://t.co/557V1kjP4H

— Devinder Sharma (@Devinder_Sharma) February 14, 2020




• Jaswant Singh, Mogappair, Chennai: This Tamil-speaking Sikh engineer created a home forest in Chennai




• Dalit Karsevak's bitter reality check: In Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s village, low caste people joined the RSS in large numbers: “Of the fifty or so children who attended the shakha in my village, most were OBCs—Kumhar, Jat, Gurjar, Mali and so on. He was part of the first attempt at building the Ram temple, in the context of the Rath Yatra in October 1990. Then, he was “exhilarated”, chanting “To die for Ram-ji is such an honour…”. He and his Rajasthani comrades in arms were taught “how to evade the police” and were “told that implements to destroy the structure – hoes, spades, crowbars – would be provided by locals at Ayodhya”.
  
  As the train started to slide out of the station, all the important functionaries slid out of the train.. I saw how one by one, the big folk, the industrialists, the sangh pracharaks, the leaders of VHP and BJP, all excused themselves. Having wished us well, they went back to their homes. Only people like me remained—impassioned Dalits, Adivasis, other young people from the lower castes, and a few sadhus and sants. To take charge of us, some lower-order functionaries tried to put us at ease, don’t worry, these people have other contingents to see off and then they’ll follow us directly to Ayodhya. They were never to come. They were sensible people and went back to their homes. I understood that sensible people always use us, we who are driven by passion; they push us into battle and return to their safe little coops. 
  
  However, Bhanwar Meghwanshi did not draw any conclusion from this episode but went to Ayodhya as a disciplined foot-soldier. But soon after, Bhanwar Meghwanshi fully realised the resilience of caste in the RSS on another occasion: while he had prepared food for Sangh parivar members who were touring his district, they refused to come to his home for eating; instead they took the food with them in order to save time and, they said, feed the village where they going next – but they threw it out on the road. Bhanwar Meghwanshi was shocked:  How can the Sangh do this to me? They don’t believe in untouchability, in caste discrimination, they believe all Hindus to be one, they talk of a united Hindu society, and then this kind of hypocrisy? 



• Macaulay's children: Karnataka school to lose licence for levying fine from students speaking in Kannada



• Aabid Surti: India's water warrior.

One man is dedicated to conserving India's water pic.twitter.com/SGwcXUE1SP

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) February 16, 2020




• Dani P K: The Kerala kid whose 'zero angle' goal went viral

Quick notes: Next Pakistan, Spaced repetition...

• Betrayal as state policy: Turkey is turning into the next Pakistan 



• “Spaced Repetition”: The scientific, efficient way to learn languages.



• Investigate the RBI: When questions were raised how Harshad Mehta functioned, the RBI blamed everybody except the RBI. If you start an honest investigation, the first stop is the role of the RBI.  If you are not going to investigate the RBI now, we are putting our banking system into turmoil.... The system has been designed carefully to ensure this is not audited or even when audited not much comes out and even some one points out something, the officials within the system connive to bury the matter.



• A bear and tiger fight at Tadoba Reserve in Maharashtra: Maybe a friendly, not much blood




• China dangles carrots to lure foreign talent: The talent pool at Zhongguancun Science Park has over 10,000 foreign hires. The goal is to attract top-notch scientists and their innovation teams from all over the world.



• Right priorities: China is beating back traffic in its most congested cities. More than half of the top 30 most-congested cities in 2016 saw a decline in the time drivers spent in rush hour traffic one year later.



• Chinese Stealth: How China's Geely spent months stealthily building a $9 billion stake in Daimler



• On caste: The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks. In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution --Swami Vivekananda



• Ban Church Superstition:

Church superstition losing ground in America. Burial should be banned in india under anti superstition acts (the superstition is that one will rise bodily, mouldering bones and all, to heaven or hell on so called judgment day and so bones must be preserved) https://t.co/ky3D1UnRxr

— राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) March 3, 2018

Daily Digest

• Why does the universally valid economics work perfectly to depreciate the rupee, but act the other way round on the dollar despite pervasive US current account deficits?  
Globalised dollar, dollarised world by S.Gurumurthy

• UPA’s Food Security Ordinance does not address the fact that our most fertile food-growing lands are being grabbed by the government to hand over to builders or to corrupt corporations to be spoilt by mining or to the industries to be poisoned and polluted. The deliberate annihilation of India’s small farmers is the end of national food security.
Food Insecurity by Vandana Shiva

• Jai Macaulay!
India Ranks as 66th Most Innovative Nation

• Padre's Perversity: Father Leo Koppala, from Andhra Pradesh, was arrested in the US on charges of engaging in sexual contact with a child under 13 years of age.
Indian catholic priest faces sex charge in US

• And Kshatriya pride is gutted
Ramalinga Raju, Digvijaya Singh meet raises eyebrows

Can Bihar Be Turned Around?

Will Nitish Kumar and Biharis be successful in turning around their state? Or will the likes of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his goons bring back their Jungle Raj?

collectives vs. individuals

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

"Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide."

S Gurumurthy also has a book on the theme of a collectivist (i.e. eternal) India vs. the Anglo-Saxon based individualistic constitution.

I don't know if the present Chinese collective is as harmonious as Brooks says it is - it is based on lots of repression and brain-washing

Perhaps a reformed caste system is the best form of harmonious collective. Individuals - and indeed entire castes - would be free to change their collective characteristics, while continuing to bind themselves to the rules of the collective - and collectives binding with each other. All with the glue of a duties-based Dharma

Just the right balance between rights-based democratic individualism and duty-based collectivism

The Untouchable Caste of Japan

Burakumin are an Untouchable caste in Japan.

rajeev in pioneer on caste

apr 29th, 2007

of course, the URL may not last for long.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/agenda1.asp?main_variable=sundaypioneer%2Fdialogue&file_name=dial2%2Etxt&counter_img=2


and the other side of the debate:

http://www.dailypioneer.com/agenda1.asp?main_variable=sundaypioneer%2Fdialogue&file_name=dial3%2Etxt&counter_img=3

Swaminathan Aiyar-Laloo better than Nehru

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Columnists/Swaminathan_S_Anklesaria_Aiyar/Laloo_Yadav_beats_Nehru_hollow/articleshow/1951609.cms
Interesting piece by Swami on how Laloo is bad - but still better than Nehru. This is not as outrageous as it sounds. Sure he has built up a personal fortune by pillaging the state, but certainly not more than the Gandhi family (specially Antonia with her sundry Gandhi Foundations). Laloo has played the politics of freezing caste and pandering to Muslims - but certainly not as badly as Indira Gandhi did - or son Rajiv Gandhi.

The only reason that media folks in Delhi get upset with him is that he does not give two hoots about what they feel - unlike the 'first family' - which is all for the ELM kissing their white bottoms. Having said all that - I still prefer Nitish Kumar and Sushil Modi to Laloo!

Land of the Pure, Land of the Casteless?

Here's an awful story from Nick Kristof which once again highlights the state of justice in the so-called Land of the Pure. Are Islamic countries really casteless, as they claim to be?

Arun Shourie - the other voice on reservations

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4741810258336684534&q=shourie
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/casi/events/16Oct2006_Shourie.htm

Some may have noted the rather long exchange I had with Tambi Dude on quota-based affirmative action on this forum.

I must note that the owner of this platform, Nizhal Yodha has endorsed an NFL-type reservation scheme. I am not sure how it will be applied - I suspect neither is he :-) ; let me say however that I, Ghost Writer, am opposed to the policy being adopted and the fantastically twisted rationalisations used to justify it.

The links to the above two talks will hopefully help, as always with Shourie the research is exhaustive and reasoning is razor-sharp

An interesting point is that a lot of folks who like quota based AA are opposed to the present scheme ; they think 'quotas are good but caste-politics is bad'; Shourie, with considerable skill inverts that paradigm. He shows that caste-politics is what has actually led to quota demands in the first place.

As with everything in life - acute caste-consciousness has not been all bad as it has meant that the so-called backward castes have in asserting their caste-identity, doubly asserted their Hinduness.

Long term - I think that caste-based political mobilization is a movement that will eventually come to a head. It is, like the radicalisation of Shiv Sena in the 70's or the Sikh-separatism of the 1980's - this also is one of India's 'million mutinies'. The only question is the amount of damage that this will inflict on Hindu society in further perverting the institution of caste.