Tattva

Part 2/2 of a first person account of the Epic 62-day struggle to get a land grant for the Lord Amar Nath (Shiva) Shrine located near Jammu city, India. Read Part 1 in the December 2009 edition.

As we reached a large square, and we began to think that we would arrive at the rally grounds shortly, we heard gunshots, and in seconds after that, our eyes began to burn and tears flowed profusely. We realized that we were being tear-gassed by the authorities in the hope of dissipating the peoples’ movement. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Hindu mind represents  humanity’s oldest and most continuous stream of conscious intelligence on the planet. Hindu sages, seers, saints, yogis, and jnanis have maintained an unbroken current of awareness linking humanity with the Divine since the dawn of history, and as carried over from earlier cycles of civilization in previous humanities unknown to our present spiritually limited culture.”

–Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri), author on Hinduism, Yoga, and Ayurveda 

 “India was trampled over, fought over. Now are people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India. The movement is now from below. It has to be dealt with. It is not enough to abuse these youths or use that fashionable word from Europe, ‘fascism’. There is a big, historical development going on in India. What is happening in India is a new historical awakening. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.”

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932 - ), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.  

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier time disfigured, defaced, you know that they were not just defaced for fun: that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions. And I would like people, as it were, to be more reverential towards the past, to try to understand it; to preserve it; instead of living in its ruins. The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. The ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

-VS Naipaul, Nobel Laureate Literature 2001

The Hindu has an extraordinary power of combining dogma and free thought, uniformity, and variety. Utmost latitude of interpretation is allowed. It is also to point out that from the Upanishads down to the writings of Tagore in the present day literature from time to time enunciates the idea that the whole universe is the manifestation of some exuberant force giving expression to itself in joyous movement

Sir Charles Eliot (1862-1931), a famous scholar and linguist of Oxford.

She has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim in universal history the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time and to hold her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity.

Sylvain Levi (1863-1935) on India. She was a French scholar and Orientalist who wrote on Eastern religion, literature, and history.

If I was asked what is the greatest treasure which India possesses and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly that it is the Sanskrit language and literature and all that it contains. This is the magnificent inheritance and so long as this endures and influences the life of our people, so long will the basic genius of India continue. If our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great Epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata), India would cease to be India.

-Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of Bharat post 1947

“The Hindus pictured the universe as periodically expanding and contracting, and gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable time span between the beginning and the end of one creation. The scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering; it has taken the human mind more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) is an Austrian-born famous theoretical high-energy physicist and ecologist and the author of The Tao of Physics.

“Our youth must be made to feel proud of being born in the great lineage of rishis and yogis. If we have to live up to their legacy, we must live as Hindus, we must appear as Hindus and we must make ourselves felt by the whole world as Hindus.- Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973).”

Popularly known as Guruji, was the second chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was the force behind the formation of many organizations of the Sangh.

 ”India is the land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.”

– Mark Twain is a celebrated American writer.