Terra Incognita

About damn time!  And Pawlenty signed the certificate, even though he was wishy-washy on whether he would.

The event was well covered by journalists.  The Hindu, Deccan Chronicle and the Times all had stories on it.  Anand Grafti has pictures in his photostream.  The DC also had a counterpoint article written by a correspondent (Indian newspapers have this annoying habit of printing articles with no author).

Chennai Daily Photo has more.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and its when most Gay pride events take place around the U. S. and the world.  Chennai held its first Gay pride march yesterday and I was there.  Unfortunately my camera’s battery ran out near the beginning, so I’ll link to whatever else I find, but here are the pictures I took (they may appear in the NIE in the next few days, but we’ll see):

It’s a lot more professional looking than it used to be.   I’m sure the wayback machine has a picture of what it used to look like, but the computer I’m using is being difficult.

The former child actor turned professional creationist Kirk Cameron wants to print another edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species with a brand new introduction written by Ray Comfort, one of the most proudly ignorant people around.

The introduction is 56 pages long, and most of it is just Ray rambling about how DNA couldn’t have been formed by accident, trying to make an analogy that “the book you’re reading couldn’t have formed by accident.”  I’m sure he’s been told hundreds of times before that books and coke cans and buildings and airplanes or any of the things he’s used this argument with are INANIMATE MAN MADE OBJECTS.  Of course they have designers.  Humans, on the other hand are living beings which can naturally reproduce with variation.

He also quote-mines geneticist Francis Collins to make it look like Collins supports his cause of teaching creationism (he doesn’t).

Comfort lies blatantly on page 16 when he says we still haven’t found transitional fossils which Comfort calls “transitional forms.”  Lies!  He also retells the Archaeoraptor episode which, while embarassing for National Geographic, did not fool the scientific community.

Cameron and Comfort have lots of time since on page 21 Comfort brings up Ida which was a big deal last month, even though scientific debate on Darwinius is still going on.

Comfort even brings up the complexity of the human eye as evidence for creationism even though that’s been moot for decades (see Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker).

On page 30, Comfort appears to debunk the idea that Darwin was a racist, which Ken Ham has tried to do (Darwin was not).

Okay, now Comfort is really starting to piss me off.  He quotes Mein Kampf on page 34 as if Hitler believed in Darwinian evolution.  He didn’t.

After this, Comfort starts pushing Christianity and telling me to consider my sins and etc. and goes into stories that have nothing to do with Darwin.

On page 50 Comfort discusses other religions, saying Hindus believe that “if you’ve been bad, you’ll come back as a rat or some other animal.” (wrong!).  He then says that Buddhists believe there is no God (Some do, some don’t) and says that the real problem is my having sinned against God and “the reality of hell.”  Right, whatever Ray.

When Comfort bashes Islam, he goes into a discussion about works and how Muslims believe that those who do good works get to go to heaven and tries to say this is wrong.  I still don’t understand why Christians like Comfort have such a problem with this concept.

Comfort then ends by encouraging you to convert to his version of Christianity.  Creationism is stupidity proudly and on purpose, but reading it makes you stupid too.

I think we need to find Ray a real job, don’t you?

There are 22 official languages in India.  Some of them are distinct languages with rich cultural history like Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.  But others are a little more confusing.

Hindi and Urdu, for instance, are largely identical with the big differences being that Urdu is written in stylized arabic script and Hindi is written in Devnagari script.  And Urdu borrows more of its vocabulary from Arabic and Persian while Hindi borrows more from Sanskrit. (There’s a memoir coming out soon about learning Hindi that looks promising)

And Hindi is an official language in nine Indian states and three territories, while Urdu is officially recognized by four and one territory (Delhi) and is the official national language of Pakistan.

Punjabi is similar to Hindi, and after independence, Punjab was split in half betwen Pakistan and India.  There was an agitation to create a state for Punjabi speakers called Punjabi Saba which comprised the modern day states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haranya.  Punjabi is the most common language in Pakistan.

And then there is Konkani.  It’s the official language of Goa, and the communities who speak it are largely Christian.  Yet, it’s nearly identical to Marathi, which is the official language of Maharashtra which is largely Hindu.

We’re going to have to blow up the moon

Would you miss it?

(Austin Powers movies predict the strange future)

 So I’m waiting for a book event to start, and I pick up a copy of “The Little Magazine,” a journal that looks at contemporary social and political issues in India.  The issue I pick up is a few months old, since it refers to the upcoming elections in India that concluded May 16th.  Even so, I bought the copy and I haven’t been able to put it down since.

The focus is on the Ramayana, the great epic of India and its place within Indian society and politics.  The main party of the opposing coalition, the BJP, has used Rama as a political symbol.  Rama is the hero of the epic and is the perfect man (he is also an avatar of Vishnu).  He was born in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, where the Babri mosque was built by the first Mughal emperor, Babul, in the 16th century.  Hindu nationalists destroyed the building after decades of protest on December 6, 1992 and brought the BJP and Hindu nationalism into the national spotlight.

The problem with nationalism, as the essays show, is that it only presents one version of the story, and seeks to ignore all others.  To the nationalists, Rama is the embodiment of Hindu virtues and the Babri mosque was a perversion on sacred land to them.  It was a symbol of the fact that India, the land of Hindus, had been ruled by Muslims for centuries which is something they had to stomp out.  I can’t remember where I first read this, but apparently one of the arguments that the Muslim League (lead by Muhammed Ali Jinnah) used to justify creating Pakistan was that Muslims had ruled Hindus for centuries, and that Hindus would use their position in a majority state to enact repressive laws against them, so a seperate had to be created for their protection.

The NDP, the BJP led coalition, lead the government in the late 90′s and early 00′s, but its political future dwindled after its relative inaction reguarding the massacre in Gujarat in 2002.  There, a bus full of Muslims was torched by Hindus which began days of rioting on either side.  The bus was returning from Ayodhya where the Muslims had held an annual protest against the building of a temple atop where the Babri mosque once stood.  A temple dedicated to Rama.

Now, it is more isolated than ever after it lost more races in the last election and is now considering its future. 

As the BJP considers its future, the writers in “This Little Magazine” consider the meaning behind the Ramayana, which is a national epic in that it is revered by all of India.  The other Hindu epic, the Mahabharata (wherein the Bhagavad Gita is found) takes place entirely in the northern part of the country. The Ramayana involves Rama travelling from Ayodhya to Lanka (now Sri Lanka) to rescue his wife, Sita, from the clutches of Ravana.

Every Hindu culture has its own retelling of the story.  In Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and other countries that were conquered by Hindu empires, it has its own version.  In each retelling, the story is essentially the same, but certain details are added or omitted.  There’s even one retelling called the Ravanayana in which Ravana asks Shiva for immunity from death by nature,man or animal.  It is granted, but he grows tired of his earthly existence and asks how can he be killed.  Shiva tells him he can only be killed by a God, and so he asks Vishnu to send an avatar of himself (Rama) to Earth to kill him.

R. Parthasarathy, a Tamil playwright, has an essay on the Ramayana told by Kamban.  It is in Tamil, but it is read all over India for the colorful poetry and philosophical insight.  I haven’t heard of this one and I can’t find a copy of it anywhere (maybe Ames has a copy of it which I’ll read when I get back).  Kamban imbues the work with his own views on religion and philosophy while keeping true to the characters.  He puts an amazing spin on the blind men and an Elephant parable with this (from Parthasarathy’s essay):

Kamban’s view on religion is reflected in his description of one incident, where the women of Mithila rush to their balconies for a glimpse of the handsome young Rama on his way to the court of Janaka. And the women, charmed by the sheer beauty of Rama, cannot take their eyes off whichever part of his body their eyes first fall on – some stare at his feet, some his shoulder, some at his hands, and so on – but not one sees the full figure.  No one sees the fascinating prince of Ayodhya.  Kamban uses this imagery to declare that just as women of Mithila see only one physical aspet of Rama and not his whoe figure, the sectarian views on God of different religions fail to comprehend the oneness of the ultimate principle.

In another essay, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a Bengali writer, columnist and literary scholar, describes how patriarchal values have been placed on Sita – she is forever faithful to Rama, never succombs to Ravanas temptations and asks her mother, the Earth, to swallow her up when it she is banished and seperated from Rama at the end.  And yet, women across the subcontinent have retold the epic from Sita’s point of view.  Their songs of Sita reflect the powerlessness of women in patriarchal societies which Sita embodies.

Dev Sen desribes how in women’s retellings of the epic, Rama is depicted as weak-willed and uncaring.  She also says that tribals in India have portrayed Rama as the embodiment of the Brahminical feudal system while Sita is a child of nature (literally) just like them.  The Pardhans desribe physical intimacy between Sita and Rama’s younger brother Lakshmana instead of an innocent relationship between a man and his sister-in-law.

The BJP is stuck in a hard place.  They want to stay a national party and attract minority groups.  But they also have nationalist allies like the ones mentioned above, or Shri Ram Sena, the ones who beat women in Mangalore earlier this year.  Or Varun Gandhi.