Friday, December 28, 2007

Arun Shourie Article - Hindutva and radical Islam: Where the twain do meet

Impartial, just and perfect - Match this!

 

(Indian Express)Hindutva and radical Islam: Where the twain do meet

Arun Shourie

Posted online: Friday, December 28, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST


Your Hindutva is no different from Islamic fundamentalism’ — a fashionable statement these days, one that immediately establishes the person’s secular credentials. It is, of course, false, as we shall see in a moment. But there is a grain of potential truth in it — something that does not put Hinduism at par with Islam, but one that should, instead, serve as a warning to all who keep pushing Hindus around. That grain is the fact that every tradition has in it, every set of scriptures has in it enough to justify extreme, even violent reaction. From the very same Gita from which Gandhiji derived non-violence and satyagraha, Lokmanya Tilak constructed the case for ferocious response, not excluding violence.
From the very same Gita from which Gandhiji derived his ‘true law’, shatham pratyapi satyam, ‘Truth even to the wicked’, the Lokmanya derived his famous maxim, shatham prati shaathyam, ‘Wickedness to the wicked.’

In the great work, Gita Rahasya, that he wrote in the Mandalay prison, the Lokmanya invokes Sri Samartha, ‘Meet boldness with boldness; impertinence by impertinence must be met; villainy by villainy must be met.’ Large-heartedness towards those who are grasping? Forgiveness towards those who are cruel? ‘Even Prahlada, that highest of devotees of the Blessed Lord,’ the Lokmanya recalls, has said, ‘Therefore, my friend, wise men have everywhere mentioned exceptions to the principle of forgiveness.’ True, the ordinary rule is that one must not cause harm to others by doing such actions as, if done to oneself, would be harmful. But, the Mahabharata, Tilak says, ‘has made it clear that this rule should not be followed in a society, where there do not exist persons who follow the other religious principle, namely, others should not cause harm to us, which is the corollary from this first principle.’ The counsel of ‘equability’ of the Gita, he says, is bound up with two individuals; that is, it implies reciprocity. ‘Therefore, just as the principle of non-violence is not violated by killing an evil-doer, so also the principle of self-identification [of seeing the same, Eternal Self in all] or of non-enmity, which is observed by saints, is in no way affected by giving condign punishment to evil-doers.’ Does the Supreme Being not Himself declare that He takes incarnations from time to time to protect dharma and destroy evil-doers? Indeed, the one who hesitates to take the retaliatory action that is necessary assists the evil to do their work. ‘And the summary of the entire teaching of the Gita is that: even the most horrible warfare which may be carried on in these circumstances, with an equable frame of mind, is righteous and meritorious.’

Tilak invokes the advice of Bhisma, and then of Yudhisthira, ‘Religion and morality consist in behaving towards others in the same way as they behave towards us; one must behave deceitfully towards deceitful persons, and in a saintly way towards saintly persons.’ Of course, act in a saintly way in the first instance, the Lokmanya counsels. Try to dissuade the evil-doer through persuasion. ‘But if the evilness of the evil-doers is not circumvented by such saintly actions, or, if the counsel of peacefulness and propriety is not acceptable to such evil-doers, then according to the principle kantakenaiva kantakam (that is, “take out a thorn by a thorn”), it becomes necessary to take out by a needle, that is by an iron thorn, if not by an ordinary thorn, that thorn which will not come out with poultices, because under any circumstances, punishing evil-doers in the interests of general welfare, as was done by the Blessed Lord, is the first duty of saints from the point of view of Ethics.’ And the responsibility for the suffering that is caused thereby does not lie with the person who puts the evil out; it lies with the evil-doers. The Lord Himself says, Tilak recalls, ‘I give to them reward in the same manner and to the same extent that they worship Me.’ ‘In the same way,’ he says, ‘no one calls the Judge, who directs the execution of a criminal, the enemy of the criminal...’

Could the variance between two interpretations be greater than is the case between the Lokmanya’s Gita Rahasya and Gandhiji’s Anashakti Yoga? Yet both constructions are by great and devout Hindus. Are ordinary Hindus nailed to Gandhiji’s rendering? After all, at the end of the Gita, Arjuna does not go off to sit at one of our non-violent dharnas. He goes into blood-soaked battle.

The comforting mistake

The mistake is to assume that the sterner stance is something that has been fomented by this individual or that —in the case of Hindutva, by, say, Veer Savarkar — or by one organisation, say the RSS or the VHP. That is just a comforting mistake — the inference is that once that individual is calumnised, once that organisation is neutralised, ‘the problem’ will be over. Large numbers do not gravitate to this interpretation rather than that merely because an individual or an organisation has advanced it — after all, the interpretations that are available on the shelf far outnumber even the scriptures. They gravitate to the harsher rendering because events convince them that it alone will save them.

It is this tectonic shift in the Hindu mind, a shift that has been going on for 200 years, which is being underestimated. The thousand years of domination and savage oppression by rulers of other religions; domination and oppression which were exercised in the name of and for the glory of and for establishing the sway of those religions, evinced a variety of responses from the Hindus. Armed resistance for centuries... When at last such resistance became totally impossible, the revival of bhakti by the great poets... When public performance even of bhakti became perilous, sullen withdrawal, preserving the tradition by oneself, almost in secrecy: I remember being told in South Goa how families sustained their devotion by painting images of our gods and goddesses inside the tin trunks in which sheets and clothing were kept. The example of individuals: recall how the utter simplicity and manifest aura of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa negated the efforts of the missionaries, how his devotion to the image of the Goddess at Dakshineshwar restored respectability to the idolatry that the missionaries and others were traducing... The magnetism of Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi... Gandhiji’s incontestable greatness and the fact that it was so evidently rooted in his devotion to our religion...

Each of these stemmed much. But over the last 200 years the feeling has also swelled that, invaluable as these responses have been, they have not been enough. They did not prevent the country from being taken over. They did not shield the people from the cruelty of alien rulers. They did not prevent the conversion of millions. They did not prevent the tradition from being calumnised and being thrown on the defensive. They did not in the end save the country from being partitioned — from being partitioned in the name of religion...

There is a real vice here. The three great religions that originated in Palestine and Saudi Arabia — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — have been exclusivist — each has insisted that it alone is true — and aggressive. The Indic religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism — have been inclusive, they have been indulgent of the claims of others. But how may the latter sort survive when it is confronted by one that aims at power, acquires it, and then uses it to enlarge its dominion? How is the Indic sort to survive when the other uses the sword as well as other resources — organised missionaries, money, the state — to proselytise and to convert? Nor is this question facing just the Hindus in India today. It is facing the adherents of Indic traditions wherever they are: look at the Hindus in Indonesia and Malaysia; look at the Buddhists in Tibet, now in Thailand too. It is because of this vice, and the realisation born from what had already come to pass that Swami Vivekananda, for instance, while asking the Hindus to retain their Hindu soul, exhorted them to acquire an ‘Islamic body’.

Instigating factors

We can be certain that his counsel will prevail, our secularists notwithstanding,

The more aggressively the other religions proselytise — look at the fervour with which today the Tablighi Jamaat goes about conversion; look at the organised way in which the missionaries ‘harvest’ our souls;

The more they use money to increase the harvest — whether it is Saudi money or that of Rome and the American churches;

The more any of them uses violence to enlarge its sway;

The more any of them allies itself with and uses the state — whether that of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan — for aggrandisement.

Nor is what others do from outside the only determinant. From within India, three factors in particular will make the acquiring of that Islamic body all the more certain:

The more biased ‘secularist’ discourse is;

The more political parties use non-Hindus — Muslims, for instance — as vote banks and the more that non-Hindu group comes to act as one — ‘strategic voting’ and all;

The more the state of India bends to these exclusivist, aggressive traditions.

It has almost become routine to slight Hindu sentiments — our smart-set do not even notice the slights they administer. Recall the jibe of decades: ‘the Hindu rate of growth’. When, because of those very socialist policies that their kind had swallowed and imposed on the country, our growth was held down to 3-4 per cent, it was dubbed — with much glee — as ‘the Hindu rate of growth’. Today, we are growing at 9 per cent. And, if you are to believe the nonsense in Sachar’s report, the minorities are not growing at all. So, who is responsible for this higher rate of growth? The Hindus! How come no one calls this higher rate of growth ‘the Hindu rate of growth’? Simple: dubbing the low rate as the Hindu one established you to be secular; not acknowledging the higher one as the Hindu rate establishes you to be secular!

Or M.F. Husain. He is a kindly man, and a prodigiously productive artist. There is no warrant at all for disrupting all his exhibitions. I am on the point of sensibilities. His depictions of Hindu goddesses have been in the news: he has painted them in less than skimpy attire. I particularly remember one in which Sita is riding Hanuman’s stiffened tail — of course, she is scarcely clad, but that is the least of it: you need no imagination at all to see what she is rubbing up against that stiffened tail. Well, in the case of an artist, that is just inspiration, say the secularists. OK. The question that arises then is: How come in the seventy-five years Husain has been painting, he has not once felt inspired, not once, to paint the face of the Prophet? It doesn’t have to be in the style in which he has painted the Hindu goddesses. Why not the most beautiful, the most radiant and luminous face that he can imagine? How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?

‘In painting the goddesses, he was just honouring them,’ a secular intellectual remarked at a discussion the other day. ‘It was his way of honouring them.’ Fine. It is indeed the case that one of the best ways we can honour someone is to put the one skill we have at the service of the person or deity. But how come that Husain never but never thought of honouring the Prophet by using the same priceless skill, that one ‘talent which is death to hide’?

‘Has Mr Shourie ever visited Khajuraho?,’ a member of the audience asked, the implication being that, as Hindu sculptors had depicted personages naked, what was wrong with Husain depicting the goddesses in the same style. Fine again. But surely, it is no one’s case that the ‘Khajuraho style’ must be confined to Hindu icons. Why has the artist, so skilled in deploying the Khajuraho motifs, never used them for icons of Islam? The reason why an artist desists from depicting the Prophet’s face is none of these convoluted disquisitions on style.

The reason is simplicity itself: he knows he will be thrashed, and his hands smashed.

Exactly the same holds for politics. How come no one objects when for years a Muslim politician keeps publishing maps of constituencies in which Muslims as Muslims can determine the outcome, and exhorting them to do so? When, not just an individual politician but entire political parties — from the Congress to the Left parties — stir Muslims up as a vote bank. When Muslims start behaving like a vote bank, you can be certain that someone will get the idea that Hindus too should be welded into a vote bank, and eventually they will get welded into one. Why is stoking Muslims ‘secular’ and stoking Hindus ‘communal’?

And yet perverted discourse, even the stratagems of political parties, are but preparation: they prepare the ground for capitulation by the state to groups that are aggressive. And in this the real lunacy is about to be launched, and, with that, the real reaction.

 

Tom Gardner & SELECT COMFORT - "one of the worst stocks I've ever recommended."

I beg to differ on the last one - http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2007/12/27/2-ways-to-profit-from-the-drop.aspx?source=ihptcltpa0000001

Excerpt:

Get rich or die tryin'
We all make investing mistakes. The key is not to make them again.

We've been dealing with this at our Motley Fool Hidden Gems small-cap investing service. Small caps have been among the hardest hit by the recent market swoon, and Fool co-founder Tom Gardner is coming to terms with what he called "one of the worst stocks I've ever recommended."

That stock is mattress-maker Select Comfort, and despite having a quality product, management has been slow to learn from its marketing mistakes and adapt to declining demand. That's putting it mildly for a stock that's down nearly 60% year to date, but in Tom's opinion, the problem is at the top.

Lose and learn
Tom's autopsy of this recommendation has yielded a four-point checklist that should help make us all better investors:

  1. Make sure the CEO at your companies has been pursuing mastery in a relevant industry for more than a decade and demonstrates daily passion for the business.
  2. Make sure the company is taking bold steps that match up with your beliefs about the company's potential. If you come to believe you can do a better job of running the company than its leadership, it's time to sell.
  3. Make sure your company has leadership that in every way demonstrates partnership with each of the constituents of its business -- customer, employee, and, perhaps most important, shareholder.
  4. Make sure you have a diversified portfolio to fall back on if you turn out to be wrong.

 

Check this out

Why you should not invest in Mutual funds?

 

Rather why NOT invest in hedge funds which are better than mutual funds anyways? You will have to read the first question before moving to the second which contains the answer. You can also read the entire interview(3parts) below.

 

An old article on TMF between Rich Smith and John Mauldin(www.2000wave.com.)

Rich: Your letters often refer to a "$1 million net worth" requirement for individual investors to attend such-and-such conference or invest in certain fund. Can you briefly tell us what this requirement is, who sets it, and why you don't seem to entirely approve of it?

John: It's a requirement that originates with Congress, and it basically relates to hedge funds. The rules limit the number of investors in private funds to 99 investors worth $1,000,000 or more or 500 investors worth $5,000,000 or more, with a number of variations for certain types of funds, which can be very confusing to the individual. Take away the net worth requirement and the investor limits, and anyone could invest in a hedge fund, just like anyone can invest in stocks, options, real estate, commodities, and similar "risky" investments. I testified to Congress a few years ago that they should create a new class of regulated hedge fund so that smaller investors could invest on a level playing filed with the richer investor.

Congress also restricts the right of "registered investment advisors" to charge an "incentive fee" -- that's the 20%-of-the-profits take that you hear about all the hedge funds charging their clients. Basically, the rule is that you have to restrict your clients to persons with a net worth of $1.5 million before you're entitled to charge the incentive fee. Now, since hedge funds have to register, the minimum net worth is essentially $1.5 million.

Personally, I think the rule is profoundly unfair. It means the rich get the best deals. I mean, are hedge funds really more risky than stocks, commodities, futures, real estate, or other kinds of investments? And who is Congress to tell people with less than $1.5 million or $5 million, "No, you can't invest your own money in funds the rich get to use?" If Congress said that women and minorities couldn't invest in it, there'd be rioting in the streets. But for some reason, it seems Congress is happy to discriminate against "poor" people and only let the "rich" invest in hedge funds. It's insanity.

Rich: What is the rationale behind the rule?

John: Lobbyists from the mutual fund industry tell congressmen that hedge funds are too volatile and risky for the average person, who has to be protected. Congress doesn't know any better and so, like useful idiots, they pass the laws they're told to.

So the intentions are good, but the result is most profoundly unfair. If individuals could invest in hedge funds -- which outperform mutual funds with comparable investment styles by as much as 300 to 400 basis points by the way -- then mutual funds would get beaten hands down. Investors would flock to hedge funds in droves because they're simply doing a better job of earning people money, especially in down markets. Mutual funds would lose market share and that is why they oppose such changes in the rules.

http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/05/08/hedge-funds-for-everyone.aspx

http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/05/09/recession-in-2007.aspx

http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/05/10/go-global.aspx

 

 

Worthless rating agencies : Shame on you MCO, MHP & Fitch

Time to recall my favorite phrase from “Apocalypse Now”, “the Horror”, actually, “The greed!” I will give credit to the author Jon C Oggs for having forseen the Enron debacle and how it could have been saved from happening if the “RATING AGENCIES” did what they were supposed to do. “HISTORY REPEATS ALL OVER AGAIN” – reminds me of Santayana’s famous words – “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”

 

However, as I write this, it occurs to me that while I have read history and claim to know it, I still suffer from the trickle-down effects of the handi-works of the bond insurers. Hopefully, congress will pass a law and also break the “conflict of interest” clause. A rating agency CANNOT be answerable to the public…something like the Federal Reserve!

 

Police me, police me police me!

 

~

 

 

The following article captures the greed of Moodys and McGrawHills S&P.

http://www.247wallst.com/2007/12/independent-rat.html

 

Quoting Jon C Ogg’s,

 

I have personally been on the record stating that if certain Enron transactions were structured differently and adequately rated by the debt ratings agencies AHEAD of the fraud realization (even after the fraud that was occuring there) and without some of the certain debt rating triggers and subsequent stock price triggers that the company would have actually survived as an entity. 

 

And the current times have been beautifully captured by this paragraph towards the end,

 

The business model has been flawed, and partly responsible for a portion of the mess in the debt markets right now. "Pay us to assign a rating to you, and we'll give you a fair and accurate rating that will allow investors to decide to invest or not. Then we'll charge the public and subscribers to get access to the research."

 

Another article by the same author, Worthless rating agencies : http://www.247wallst.com/2007/12/worthless-ratin.html

 

Also, I am a wee-bit surprised that Warren Buffett who bought Moody’s(19% share holder) never foresaw the “rating-mess”…isnt life full of surprises?

 

 

 

Thursday, December 06, 2007

MarketWatch article on HankPaulson's Knight in Shining Armor move.

2 interesting comments after an article which described Hank Paulson’s new idea about hard-working, abiding by the rules, smart, save-the-money-buy-when-prices-down bargain shopping citizens are expected to bail out greedy lenders and naïve borrowers…

~~

Why do they insist on singling out subprimes?  Subprimes are less than credit worthy.  They would be better off bailing out credit worthy people who stand a chance of staying in their homes.  Subprimes will always have the highest default rates - that's why they are subprime to begin with. 

And now, the big favor they do them is to trick them into staying in the houses they can't afford, to continue to dump money into an asset that is deflating faster than the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, so they can default on the loan 2, 3, or 5 years from now?  If the government is now labeling teaser rates as "predatory lending practices" (as opposed to a legitimate discount), isn't the government itself now engaging in a predatory lending practice by extending the teaser rates?

I just don't see how this does anything useful.

If the problem is lack of liquidity in the system, this doesn't add any.  If the problem is bad loans on the books that will default, this will only delay not prevent that happening.  If the problem is negative equity due to falling real estate prices, this won't reverse that.  If the problem is inability to convert the subprime ARMS to fixed, affordable mortages, this does nothing.

~~~

This country is really becoming laughable!  We live in a society that refuses to let people be penalized or go through any sort of real pain.  Let's see: You can buy into a huge house or move to a neighborhood you can't afford and the government will bail you out.  You can rack up HUGE credit card and other unsecured debt and the government will let you file for bankruptcy and forgive that debt.  You can have ten kids with ten different guys and we will feed and shelter you.  You can send those same ten kids to school and the schools won't give them an A,B,C, D or F because it will stimigmatize and make kids feel bad about themselves.  In Cincinnati, where I live, you can murder or rape someone and do to  the chronic shortage of jail space get out in two maybe three years!

What is the incentive to being moral and responsible in this country?  There should be real pain and suffering for your stupid a** actions!  We all make mistakes, but ultimately it should be the person who made the mistake to fix the problem or live with the cold harsh consequences. 

 

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