Inner Metamorphosis

As we near the prana prathistha of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, the usual suspects are wailing hoarsely and unabatedly. It’s pointless to argue with those wearing ideological blinkers.  However, for the sake of fence-sitters and believers, I would like to respond to some of the rhetoric doing rounds.  BJP has strategically placed the inaugural date to win Elections 2024.  An observation so brilliant that even a school kid can guess that!  Everything a political party does is motivated by the desire to win elections. They build roads, infrastructure, and public facilities for this very reason. They promise subsidies, and free bus transport (eg, Karnataka and Telangana) to win elections.  Are you going to condemn these welfare schemes just because they’re politically motivated? Are you going to stop using roads built by a party you dislike?  BJP is dividing the nation for political gains. It’s the other way round. People used BJP to achieve their goal of Ram Mandir...

Of the many reasons we celebrate Diwali, one of the chief is the return of Shri Rama to His home after 14 years of exile. Consider our good fortune that we will see Him back home, back to his Ayodhya, after over 500 years of exile. This is the story of unyielding persistence against insurmountable odds. This is a saga of civilizational yagna against repeated assaults, two waves of Abrahamic attacks, and then from a 'secular' state that has been as much a stranger to its roots as its foreign rulers were.  I shudder to think about the kind of upbringing that results in statements like: " Shri Rama wouldn't have wanted to build his temple this way". "This is not my Hinduism". "Shouldn't we focus on economy instead of a mandir?". "Why rake up the unpleasant past? Let's look at future." It cuts a sorry figure that many of our own think this way. It only reflects how poorly conversant they are with the epics. Consider the stratagems...

The concept of Dharma is not adequately understood by Hindus themselves, not to mention others. Dharma is not a set of do’s and don’t’s or a simplistic evaluation of good and bad. It requires considerable intellectual exertion to even begin understanding Dharma, let alone mastering its use. Is Dharma Translatable? Few words of a language cannot be faithfully translated into another without injuring its meaning, context & spirit. English translations of Dharma are blurred and yield words like religion, sense of righteousness, discrimination between good and bad, morals and ethics or that which is lawful. All these fall short of fully grasping the essence of Dharma. Every language has an ecosystem of words, categories and grammar which allow a user to stitch words together to maximum effect such that meaning permeates the text without necessarily being explicitly explained at each point. Sanskrit words such dharma, karma, sloka, mantra, guru etc., now incorporated in Eng...