Monday, July 09, 2007

Hindu Renaissance

It seems Hindus are destined to take fault for every possible ill in our society. Now, considering more than 85% of our population is Hindu so,it is quite obvious that Hinduism or at least, Hindus are responsible for social problems. But what bothers me is that Hindus are the victims here. Victims of bloody and torcherous history. The situation that they are facing today is the result of constant warfare and invasion for last thousand years. How come Hinduism that bore the brunt of Islamic genocides and plunders and lost 1/3 of its population to Abrahmic religions, stands on trial for everything that is bad in India? Isn't there a tiny possibility that the ills we are facing are caused because our society cocooned itself in order to survive from continuous invasion?

Worst thing is that modern day politics dictates Hindu sects like Sikhs, Jains and neo-buddhists to consider Hinduism as main threat to their existance. One reason is our political system since independence (thanks to Mr. Nehru) made joke out of Hinduism. Hindus are compartmentalized and marginalised in their own land. The imprints of extrimely biased education system are quite evident on Hindu mind as we don't know our history. We don't know meaning of our traditions and our heritage. That's why we are usually on the backfoot when sects like Sikkhism, Jains and Buddhists attack Hinduism with blatent lies.

Still worst, our insecurity oozes out whenever faced with Islamic terrorists and Christian. We suddenly start parroting alien concepts like secularism and conveneantly misinterprit the spirit of sarva-dharma samabhaav.

With such a non-confidense and lack of knowledge, are we going to survive in next century?

I agree that we should embrace these enstranged children of ours more tightly. They are slinging mud at us only because they gain political profits out of it. But most of believe that that somehow someone will take care of problem and that ain't going to happen for sure. As more and more Hindus make economic progress as their priority numaro uno and rightly so, I think we are going to witness further dip in Hindu traditions, Hindu population and awareness for Hinduism before we see possible resurgence. Swami Vivekananda said that unless a person is sure about his/her two meals every day, he/she ain't going to think about Hinduism. (Of course, Muslim people are opposite but that's why Hinduism and Islam is two opposite ends of spectrum.)

Coming back to economics, right now majority of Hindus are worried about their income. They are working really really hard for making more and more money and then spending as much as possible on luxuries. It is understandable. This is probably the first time that Indians, in general, are seeing so many opportunities to progress. But the flip side is that either they ignore their religious traditions or young generation grow ignorant of their religious background. But as they grow economically stable, I hope that 'Hindu gene' will kick in and they will start working towards betterment of Hindu society. One can see similar thing happening withNRI's. They are econmically stable and financially rich. That's why we see more awareness amongs them about problems faced by Hinduism and more probability of NRI's working towards betterment of Hindu society. It's going to take at least half of a century for economic progress to encompas all most billion Hindu people, but do we have that much time? We are going to face another onslaught of Islamic and Christian terrorism within next 20 years. In the mean time our political system will be more minority appeasing, more corrupt and will be admantly anti-Hindu. How are we suppose to face this?

There are three kinds of people, one who blessed with absolute ignorance. Second who think someone will take care of problems and that 'someone' doesn't include them. And, third who believe that Sanatan Dharma faced with such problems before and came out triumph. True, we faced with similar kind of problems before. For the sake of convenience, I will divide Hindu history into three broad parts. First one, before Islamic invasion, second one, from Islamic invasion till independence and third time period is since independence. During first part the greatest threat we faced was from Buddhism. This closest relative of ours literally gobbled us from inside out. All though, Buddhism emerged as more refined version of Hinduism sans rituals, later on it tried to disown Hinduism and stumbled badly. Things never looked bright for Buddhism since then. But Buddhism held mirror to Hinduism and unwittingly, end up strengthening roots of Sanatan Dharma. Islamic invasion was absolutely brutal and bloody. This kind of religious ferocity and unprecedented violence was something Hinduism never witnessed in its a-historical past. Though it took few hundred years for Hinduism to regroup and fight back. These efforts weren't exactly coordinated and missed quite a few golden opportunity(we lost one third of our population and one third of our land to Islam) but Hinduism still survived. We are still majority in Indian subcontinent.

That was that. It all happened in past. All this was result of sacrifices made by innumerable souls. Some we know like Shivaji or Maharan Pratap and some we don’t know like Khokars of Afghanistan or Raja Harpal Dev of Devgiri or Ahoms of Assam. But the most important thing that was common among all these people was they were ready to sacrifices their life for the cause. And, they knew who their enemies were. Not only this ‘sacrifice for cause’ thing is missing in present generation, we have absolutely no clue about our enemies either.

Let me finish this blog by giving an example -: Christian missionaries put together a study in which they figured out how much money it takes to convert a Hindu? They divided that part according to regions, castes, education and language. And, with this study (I am not saying this study is statistically correct) they know where to push for further prosyletization. So, they using their capitalistic mindset to ‘harvest’ more souls.

How’s that? How are we supposed to counter this with stupid caste and regional politics?

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