The Hindu Right

re:#172 by harimau
I read your post with interest. I agree to what you say in principle about brahmins. This brahmin Vs rest debate always amazes me. I always find it difficult to believe that brahmins, being such an insignificant minority from aeons of time, could have had the means to sudue a majority, unwilling populace. Unlike the aristocracies of Europe, brahmins in India did not have any army to suppress the rest of population. How could brahmins so completely dominate every aspect of life then?
The answer lies in the fact their power flowed out of their knowledge base. In the remote past, such a knowledge included vedas, astrology and the like. All these were much in demand. Even a king would like to know what was the best time to wage a war against his enemy and (in the absence of other scientific data at the time) often turned to a brahmin priest for counsel. Brahmins became indispensable as they interpreted the scriptures. Did they prevent the non-brahmins from learning scriptures? No. I know that, barring the shudras of the time (who were often prisoners of war), the rest could always get an education in Gurukula (the school system of that time).
However, few would have the discipline to go thr` the studies. Mastering one Veda took an average of 7 years! Some mastered 2, or 3 and few mastered all 4 vedas (in the north, we still find the surnames dwivedi, trivedi,chaturvedi for this very reason). This was not everybody`s cup of tea and required discipline and a kind of commitment that few possessed. Brahmins were expected to do this and they did it and were respected for their scholarship.
The society of the time gave the brahmins their exalted place and the same society now bemoans the brahmin dominance!
The british did nothing to change the equation. They were here to rule and not for social work. They found brahmin class ready to fit the slot and took them.
To this day, what distinguishes a brahmin from others (at least true in the south indian context) is their discipline and obsessive desire for learning.
sridhar

HaramiU

What`s wrong with being code ``coolies``? Aren`t they making an honest living? Is it the brahmin in you that has to sneer at other people?

HaramiU

What`s wrong with being code ``coolies``? Aren`t they making an honest living? Is it the brahmin in you that has to sneer at other people?

HaramiU

Arguments, what arguments? Remember the dictum never to argue with a fool, I`m a strict adherent to it. But I`m cool enuff to let U know what`s wrong with U so U don`t continue to make a fool of Urself. See Ur so stoopid U didn`t even figure out the thing about the diaper. What U bin doing with all that overworked headcheese leaking out Ur ears, lickin it, mofo?

HaramiU

Arguments, what arguments? Remember the dictum never to argue with a fool, I`m a strict adherent to it. But I`m cool enuff to let U know what`s wrong with U so U don`t continue to make a fool of Urself. See Ur so stoopid U didn`t even figure out the thing about the diaper. What U bin doing with all that overworked headcheese leaking out Ur ears, lickin it, mofo?

#170 unkalji

``[One is the misdeeds of past rulers which may or may not be correctible depending on how much a corrective action would affect the present-day ordinary citizens.]

``In that case, if Brahmins were the recipients of unjustified largesses from various Hindu kings, they should not be penalized just as you all claim that ordinary Muslims should not be penalized for the misdeeds of their sultans. It is not as if the Muslims refused to accept highly paid positions or went on some non-violent civil disobedience action against the jizya. So if the brahmins were complicit by their silence, then so were the ordinary Muslims.``

Brahmins and other FCs directly benefited during the british raj and it is the perpetuation of that privilege the quota system is supposed to attack. The privileged, mughal wannabe muslims saw what was coming & got their own country. The erstwhile warlords who owned large swathes of land saw their landholdings diminish in independent india. All of this is corrective action.

What you are advocating tho is that ordinary muslims (most of whom are poor) be punished for whatever the muslim sultans did. A very different animal.

``[The second is the societal discrimination and backwardness of a people which can be corrected now. If a section of a society enjoys a privileged position to the detriment of others then, in a democratic society, the morally correct thing to do would be to deny continuation of that privilege. Given that there are a limited number of govt-funded college seats and government jobs, and that a section of society has had no history of education for it to qualify on merit alone for college seats, it makes sense to have positive discrimination.]

``YOU are now confusing two issues. One is getting an education and jobs based on merit and skills. The other is societal discrimination. The fact that a brahmin wouldn`t give you water doesn`t mean that he got his education in the absence of merit. And exactly what was the education that the brahmins had till the British started schools in India? ``

Again you`re obfuscating. There indeed are segments that hate brahmins for historical reasons just as you hate ordinary muslims. While their interests may coincide with the policy behind quota system, the two are not the same. The quota system had the support of policy makers such as Rajaji, who was hardly a self-hating brahmin. The FCs formed bulk of the administrative and other services during and immediately following the end of the raj. The quota system is designed to even the playing field so that it`s not just the IAS officer`s son who enters the service. Or only a doctor`s son who becomes a doctor and so on. It`s nice to talk about competing purely on the basis of merit but a peasant`s son coming from a rural government school has to be a genius to be able to enter a professional college compared to a student coming from an urban school who can benefit from coaching classes in the evening. Most of the time the peasant is a BC and the urbanite, an FC. This certainly would have been the situation in the absence of the quota system.

``There was a picture of the three service chiefs in the newspaper the other day. Two, by their names, seemingly are South Indian brahmins ``

You have just made my point for me. The brits recruited exclusively among the so-called ``martial races``. It`s only in independent india that a brahmin could become a chief warrior because recruitment is now down regionwise and the hold of certain sections on military recruitment has been broken.

Ref FakemHakim #: 173

[You need to wear a diaper on your head to stop all the excretions.]

I finally understand why I see all the mullahs wearing a large piece of cloth wrapped around their heads.

Ref FakemHakim #: 173

[Sure your headcheese works, Mr. Homer Simpson. The evidence is all over the place. You need to wear a diaper on your head to stop all the excretions.]

How about answering my questions or rebutting my arguments with logic? Hasn`t been done in a year by the collective might of Pakistanis or affirmative-action Indians.

It is actually easy for me to argue on Chowk when you display all the intelligence of a sea slug.

HaramiU

Sure your headcheese works, Mr. Homer Simpson. The evidence is all over the place. You need to wear a diaper on your head to stop all the excretions.

HaramiU

Sure your headcheese works, Mr. Homer Simpson. The evidence is all over the place. You need to wear a diaper on your head to stop all the excretions.

Re: Dost-Mittar

``...On the other hand, I hope that the Election Commission will deliver a well-deserved slap to Modi and the BJP by declaring that Gujrarat is not ready for a free and fair elections at this time...``

I think that your prayers (and mine) have been answered.

Ref FakemHakim #: 168

[HaramiU

Are you one of those unemployed brahmins with too much free time on their hands that they sit around ans spin their webs all day? You`re one screwed up M *F *!]

Whether employed or unemployed, my brain works all the time unlike yours which seems to be on Prozac.

Ref Maasanamuthu aka Pearl of the Cemetery #: 169

[I realize i`m quite likely wasting my time since the only way you can argue seems to be to cuss& swear.]

The cusswords are more properly reserved for those like Doctor Artist Leader and The Great Intellectual who put funny ideas into your head such as it is better to have entitlements based on birth rather than on merit.

[Will give it a shot anyway.]

I am waiting breathlessly.

[There are 2 separate issues here which you are mixing up for obvious reasons:]

Let us see who is the mixed-up one.

[One is the misdeeds of past rulers which may or may not be correctible depending on how much a corrective action would affect the present-day ordinary citizens.]

In that case, if Brahmins were the recipients of unjustified largesses from various Hindu kings, they should not be penalized just as you all claim that ordinary Muslims should not be penalized for the misdeeds of their sultans. It is not as if the Muslims refused to accept highly paid positions or went on some non-violent civil disobedience action against the jizya. So if the brahmins were complicit by their silence, then so were the ordinary Muslims.

[The second is the societal discrimination and backwardness of a people which can be corrected now. If a section of a society enjoys a privileged position to the detriment of others then, in a democratic society, the morally correct thing to do would be to deny continuation of that privilege. Given that there are a limited number of govt-funded college seats and government jobs, and that a section of society has had no history of education for it to qualify on merit alone for college seats, it makes sense to have positive discrimination.]

YOU are now confusing two issues. One is getting an education and jobs based on merit and skills. The other is societal discrimination. The fact that a brahmin wouldn`t give you water doesn`t mean that he got his education in the absence of merit. And exactly what was the education that the brahmins had till the British started schools in India? It was reciting the Vedas and passing it down through generations. Considering that the Vedas are in extremely archaic Sanskrit not understood today and the words in them are argued about in academic journals as to their meaning, that would be of no use in running the administration of a State. On the other hand, if the brahmins could analyze political situations and thus were useful to kings as advisers and ministers, it must be remembered that there was no Kennedy School of Government that they attended to get those skills. If they spent their time gazing at the stars and understood the laws of astronomy, there was nothing that prevented the Sudalaikkannus from arriving at the same conclusions independently as they lay under the stars nightly. So it is absolute nonsense for you to claim that brahmins monopolized knowledge and denied it to Sudalaikkannu. They denied knowledge of the Vedas to Sudalaikkannu, nothing more. The only jobs they could actually monopolize, as I had pointed out in other posts, were those of the temple priest and astrologer, none of which pays well and for which the Sudalaikkannus are NOT in competition anyway. On top of that, all of your Dravidian gods like Karuppannasamy, Ayyanar and Mariamman who demanded periodic bloody sacrifices of goats were left to the Sudalaikkannus and Sangilikkaruppans and the Valluvar caste provided priestly and astrological services to the non-Brahmins.

On the other hand, if the Brahmins didn`t want to interact with you socially, it is their God-given right to be left alone. If they denied you water on a hot summer day, they equally didn`t ASK for water from you if they were thirsty. If they didn`t give you their daughters in marriage, they didn`t ASK to marry your daughters either. They were an endogamous tribe as much as a Mudaliar, Chettiar, Thevar, Pallan or Paraian is. The Chettiars, Mudaliars and Thevars are even more conscious of untouchability TODAY than a brahmin is. To blame the lot of a Pallan or Paraian on a brahmin is to simply pass the buck. To say that the brahmins provided the justification for societal discrimination against them is to merely whitewash the sins of the Mudaliars and Chettiars. If you guys were so enlightened, why didn`t you lead a movement for the admission of the Dalits to temples? Even that was done by brahmin leaders.

This brahmin-bashing was used to demand that the British not leave India just like anti-Hindu propaganda was used by the Muslim League to demand that they would prefer continued British rule to independence. I am not at all surprised that people like you are currently finding common cause with Pakistanis; after all, your political ancestries rest on a common philosophy of unwillingness to compete on an equal playing field.

If you claim that the brahmins got their brains wired for the 21st century by honing the learning process and hence the non-Brahmins need special privileges and this justifies the ``affirmative action`` laws in India, please read my answer to your next comment.

[This has happened in other areas as well. The indian military no longer recruits only in the ``martial races``. In the business world, there are brahmins competing with traditional merchant castes.]

There was a picture of the three service chiefs in the newspaper the other day. Two, by their names, seemingly are South Indian brahmins (despite the fact that you guys nowadays seem to be upgrading your names from Maasanamuthu). Tell me that they got their jobs because Vajpayee is a brahmin. By the way, those guys wouldn`t give their daughters in marriage to the Vajpayee clan because South Indian brahmins don`t intermarry with North Indian brahmins; in fact they don`t intermarry outside their native language group and don`t intermarry with other subsects of brahmins in their own language group of which there are a dozen.

So what prevented the ``martial races`` from ascending to the position of Chief of the Army Staff or Chief of the Naval Staff? Why didn`t their brains get wired through centuries of warfare? Or, are you going to finally admit that you guys just can`t compete, won`t compete, and damn the logic?

[I would agree with you that it trivializes education to have so many engineering ``colleges``, which are nothing more than a building and a few computers. I think it would benefit everyone if there were fewer ``colleges`` and more technical schools where students learned crafts of various kind.]

Don`t worry. These are nothing but trade schools that teach coding in C++. They served a useful function by exporting a large number of their alumni to the US as code coolies. I can tell you that they can`t do anything but code. I am working on a software project here and the project team is simply incapable of designing a record structure for a simple straightforward file. I have to specify the EXACT record and cannot depend on them to design it based on the requirements discussions I have had with them.

One of the questions I was asked was: how did you come up with this approach to the problem at hand? I suppose I could have been unkind and said that it is because I am a brahmin and hence I have more analytical ability than them.... I merely said it is based on my 15 years of experience.

HaramiU

Are you one of those unemployed brahmins with too much free time on their hands that they sit around ans spin their webs all day? You`re one screwed up M *F *!

#138

unkalji,

``Of course, if you are one of the OBCs and you get to benefit by a quota programme, then logic goes out the window. If now you profess sympathy with the Muslims as one of the downtrodden, you can hope to increase your supporters without having to share any of the reserved positions with the Muslims; the ultimate case of having one`s cake and eating it too.``

I realize i`m quite likely wasting my time since the only way you can argue seems to be to cuss& swear. Will give it a shot anyway.

There are 2 separate issues here which you are mixing up for obvious reasons:

One is the misdeeds of past rulers which may or may not be correctible depending on how much a corrective action would affect the present-day ordinary citizens.

The second is the societal discrimination and backwardness of a people which can be corrected now. If a section of a society enjoys a privileged position to the detriment of others then, in a democratic society, the morally correct thing to do would be to deny continuation of that privilege. Given that there are a limited number of govt-funded college seats and government jobs, and that a section of society has had no history of education for it to qualify on merit alone for college seats, it makes sense to have positive discrimination.

This has happened in other areas as well. The indian military no longer recruits only in the ``martial races``. In the business world, there are brahmins competing with traditional merchant castes.

I would agree with you that it trivializes education to have so many engineering ``colleges``, which are nothing more than a building and a few computers. I think it would benefit everyone if there were fewer ``colleges`` and more technical schools where students learned crafts of various kind.

HaramiU

Are you one of those unemployed brahmins with too much free time on their hands that they sit around ans spin their webs all day? You`re one screwed up M *F *!