To put yourself on a frequency of hits of an internet site is like what the ancient Hindus called walking on an Asidhaarrekha or walking on the cutting edge of a sword. For some reason unknown to me, the manager and editor of boloji.com chose this path. Whether it was to alert the public and recruit it to the affirmation of his pet peeve or personal philosophy, I do not know. I am totally unaware of the financial and egotistic benefits, which the editor derives, nor do I really care about it.

My philosophy is that once you have donated an article to a site (unfortunately with our Indian Hindu caste baggage) , it is like giving a vessel to a deserving Brahmin. It is not the job, right or privilege of the donor to decide the utilization of the gift by the donee (whether it is for Sandhya or cleaning the rear end after ablutions), as long as one thinks that the donee is a good person. What I have been noticing over many years, since I started writing at this site almost on a weekly basis over ten years ago, is a decreasing frequency of hits and visits.

Now some of this maybe because of the kind of articles, the sight offers, and in all fairness, from what little I know, the editor has tried to offer money to writers that he thought would be appealing to readers, and tried to get interactive responses from readers. But though wizened by his personal experiences in business dealings with his compatriot Indians, he has persisted in the hope of altruistic emotions of Indians. Many years ago, I gratuitously and perhaps even cynically warned him against it, knowing the basic selfishness of Hinduism even in its quest for salvation. The very failure of Buddhism, particularly of the Mahayana type, in which Boddhisatvas delay their own Nirvana to facilitate the nirvana of the average ignorant common man, to catch on in India (like the repeal of higher Medicare Part B premiums in America dependent on taxable income in America) is a heavy indictment on the character deficiency of India and Indians. I tried to raise the issue some weeks back. I proclaimed my lament loudly, if not resonantly in my article to Terminator Fans – some weeks ago.

So now we come to the beautiful song and ghazal from the second Devdas.

Jise tu qabool kar le wo sadaa kahan se laun, which I urge every intelligent and curious reader to access on youtube to understand the basic economics of love and websites, and get off your can and post an opinion, even anonymously, and not be intimidated by fear, neutered by indifference or mentally euthanized by ennui or selfishness. This is what has led to the current demise of a responsive and effective honest US government. The petty security that Indians bank on by their education and 100,000+ dollars income is a mere jaggery to your elbow, unreachable, to entice you while leaving you vulnerable to discriminatory persecution, so replete in American history from the Aliens and Sedition Act, the Chinese exclusion act, the Italian exclusion act, the Palmer raids, the Mccarthy terror, the pogrom against immigrants, the incarceration in Guantanamo, the sanction of torture at clandestine sites and the arbitrary incarceration and assassination of American citizens, currently, to make you reflexive house niggers, grateful for lesser terror, to a dominant oligarchy bent on exploiting your greed, desire for security, and ignorance, just like the Brahmins did to the rest of you for thousands of years in India.

Below is my letter to a friend asking me about Vedas, Vedic and Vedanta. I urge you to get interactive. If you don’t do it, perhaps there may be no website for me to propagate my views, but that is not the purpose of my call to awaken you. I am like Cato, the younger. I am never less alone than when I am by myself. This is not a boast of my superiority, just a confession of my schizoid multiple personality disorder.

Here is my answer to a friend’s query about Hinduism.

The Vedas are mainly the books of knowledge (mainly three and later, the fourth Atharva). Vedic, the derived adjective refers to pertaining to the Vedas and is the standard English suffix "ic" added to it like terrify, terrible , terrific or concentric, analytic, electric. Vedanta, being the compound word (samasa in Sanskrit) from Veda+ Anta = Vedanta and refers to the end portion of the Vedas which are the Upnishadas, which literally means sitting at the feet of and I sincerely hope it was Platonic and not as implied in the classic Hindi story of Chitralekha.

To really understand the stuff, it all begins with the mother of North Indian and European languages (Proto-Indo-European, P-I-E) in which the root of the word (most nouns from Panini's Dhatupada) is the verb "vid" which in P-I-E meant to see. To see is to know and in Sanskrit, the primary meaning is to know and the secondary meaning is to see. The Vedas are at least 3500 years old, so any separation of meaning in sister languages must predate that. In Sanskrit's sister Latin, the verb vid means to see as in Vide Infra (see below) or Caesar's famous words, Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered) and from the Latin, we get the English words Video and Vision and their derivatives.

The significance of Veda and Vedanta is great in Hinduism, which evolved over time. The original version with a lot of mumbo jumbo began with the chief deities being Indra with his Vajra (Zeus with thunderbolt, Norwegian - Thor with hammer) and Varuna (Ouranos or Uranus, the chief Titan, father of Cronos and grandfather of Zeus). These we know from the Treaty signed around 1500 BCE by the Mitannis in Syria, after defeat by the Hittites (then in Turkey) where they swore to uphold the terms, swearing by Indra, Varuna and Ashwini Kumaras (Ashwa= horse). Incidentally the Mitanni capital (still unfound) was called Vasu-Khanni, a compound word (meaning rich land). We still use those words in Sanskrit and Gujarati as In Vasu+Dha, giver of riches and Khani-Ja, meaning mineral or born of the land. There is much controversy about the migration of the Aryans but the defeated Mitanni, who also put great stress and pride in equestry (In 1600 BCE, Kikkuli, a Mitanni royal horse trainer wrote a treatise on the colors, breeding and training of horses, hence Ashwamedha Yagna), which derives from the Sanskrit Ashwa.

They became nomads, measured their wealth in cattle and migrated to Iran and India. In Iran, Zoroaster (Zarat+Ushtra meaning old or yellow+camel) named the main God as Ahur Mazda (Asura Maha). Ancient Persian is so similar to Sanskrit that anyone knowing Sanskrit well, can read and understand the holy books of the Parsis (Zend Avesta and Gathas). Incidentally you may remember that the Hindu myth says that the rishi Kashyapa had two wives Diti, whose children were collectively called Daityas and the other Aditi (the mother of gods), whose children were called Adityas. Both had the same father. Zoroaster, who first conceived of the Devil, which he gifted to Buddhism (as Mara) and Christianity (as Satan) called the devil, Ahirmanyu (Sanskrit -Abhiman or pride, but better still in Greek, Hubris which leads to the birth of a Nemesis which led to Satan's fall from heaven like in Milton's epic poem). Zoroaster's generic name for all demons was "Devas", the ones the Hindus worship.

The other branch of Aryans, who came to India in multiple waves, refined their language and called it Sanskrit (perfect creation) and wrote a standard and generative grammar. In religion, they emphasized chanting (mantras) and rituals (brahmanas) which formed the first and middle part of the Vedas. The more philosophical ones and some composed in the forest (aranyakas, the more metaphysical monotheistic philosophical distillation of the polytheistic mumbo jumbo, in the Upanishadas which form the end of the Vedas and hence Vedanta). You must understand that the Vedas were not written down for another 1000 years, just memorized, so you can't give a single date for the whole stuff.

Somewhere, along the lines, still in BCE,  they merged mentally and sexually with the native, but more civilized Dravidians (with drainage systems in Mohen-jo-Daro, which we are still missing in modern India) and adopted their god who is depicted as a male with a horned headgear and exposed priapism (like the Egyptian God Min) and named him Pashupatinath or Mahadeva. Hence the origin of Linga, Yoni and phallic worship. They than formulated a trinity from their original one god (Brahman, the creator who constituted the Advaita or non-dualistic philosophy, became Brahmaa, Vishnu, a former minor god was promoted to preserver and the newest acquisition by merger, the fierce Pashupatinath became Shiva, the destroyer. Eventually the formerly most worshipped and powerful female or fertility deities, which had been dethroned used the suffragette and feminist pathway to get a place in the pantheon, as Devis and hence the all encompassing form of Shiva, as Ardhanarishwara in the beautiful carvings of Ellora, matching those of Abu Simbel in Egypt. (the hermaphrodite form produced by the mating of Hermes and Aphrodite in Greek mythology).

During all this period, the Brahmins and to a lesser extent the Brahmakshatriyas, used their knowledge to exploit the superstition, prejudice and ignorance of the public, just like in American elections, to become rentiers, like the Pope selling pardons. The first rebellion was in the Gita as a Karmayoga or salvation by action and 1500 years later by the Bhaktimarga of Meera, Surdas, Tukaram, Chaitanya, Nanak etc (Lutheranism was a rebellion against Catholic saints and endorsed by the capitalist Barons, who resented the feudal rabble taking too many days off from work to honor saints.) In the last 500 to thousand years with colonization by foreigners, poverty and ignorance, a myriad more gods, demons, spirits and saints have crept in, as I remember being taken to a temple near Ghashiram's pol, when I had measles as a child and my mother and grandmother ate cold unrefrigerated stale food for two days to improve my health to the detriment of their own, just as the doctors bled Washington with leeches and hastened his death.

So my advice is beware of Hindu Wisdom or Caveat Emptor, because there are no  regulators in Hinduism, which is even worse than regulators like the SEC, FASB, FDIC, FSLIC, ECB and the Federal Reserve, who generated the sub-prime and European crises. Now you know that religion, like life, language and script has its own ontogeny and phylogeny, as your biologist wife will confirm. It is unregulated Islam, a gutter religion like most, if not all, that allows any and every lunatic to have a following and issue a Fatwa justifying suicide bombing, the last resort of the genuinely or imaginary oppressed, and the crazy, against perceived or genuine neo-liberal colonialism and imperialism.

And finally, here is another controversy deserving of an acrimonious debate for those who are unafraid to speak the truth. The cop out by America on rearming Taiwan for fear of Communist China and the debt we owe to it is already constraining US foreign policy and making us a banana republic. In addition our knuckling under to Israeli blackmail regarding a Palestinian State shows the extent to which US politicians are held hostage to financial support from an affluent Jewish Lobby to the point of betraying the interests of the US and even a mad and fanatic Israel and its unthinking rabid supporters.

Now let us see whether we are going to see some Indians with a spinal column have the guts to participate and express their opinons, whatever they be dissenting or agreeing or simply continue their existence for mere economic security as we did in apartheid South Africa and reveal what kind of sensible and pragmatic, but selfish unprincipled scum buckets we are, like our prime minister Manmohan Singh, more interested in personal aggrandizement, than the good of the nation.