The Dubious Term Called Westernization - VII

I have argued before that any knowledge if it has to be learnt or a person has to use his/her brain then that knowledge is individualistic. It can't get any identity. However, this simple logic seems to elude Hindutvites. Unfortunately, India produces too many of them and they are set to mess up Indian education system(though unsure what we have is worthy of preserving) since now they are in power.

I was thinking about this phenomenon among many non-Christians world over. Can we come up with a solution which when not diluting the modern scientific knowledge also ensures that it doesn't instill a sense of alienation or inferiority complex among rationally challenged non-Christians?

The greatest danger of dumbing down of the education is in the field of social sciences. However, it's the achievements of some Europeans in physical sciences that has created alienation or inferiority complex among right wingers. One can find the evidence of that in Muslim preacher Dr, Zakir Naik's claim that, "the West is true when it comes to science and technology but we are true when it comes to religion".

The people behind development of knowledge and the regions where they got support and help to promote it aren't very important when it comes to imparting that knowledge to completely different set of people and regions where such people in the past and knowledge were either actively suppressed or never encouraged.So, we can create fictitious names and regions. Albert Einstein can be some Ramesh from Gujarat or some Saranya from Tamil Nadu depending upon the regions. Of course, caste and religious sensibilities have to be accounted for.

 I believe respecting a scientist or a philosopher is just an extension of patriarchal or feudal thinking or its internalization. We can take inspiration from Gandhi's words, "One shouldn't hate sinners but the sins". It's a brilliant non-hierarchical and in turn non-patriarchal thinking. Extending that we can say, "One should never respect/love/worship saints/scientists/thinkers but respect/emulate their deeds".

So with this we can address identity question of most of the physical and social science fields. However, there still is a problem with the study of history. I would think history should be only available as a research field. Anyway, majority don't learn anything in history classes and is very evident in the way  it's being easily twisted. So, remove history from school curriculum.

These studies should be taught in a way that they should show how the scientific Indian (or vernacular) school of thought has triumphed over other Indian schools of thought.

Eventually, students would know the truth. However, normal people who aren't bothered about 'westernization' may not care at all. But it would be tough for people with right wing disposition to suddenly reject everything that they thought was part of their identity throughout. 

Soft Hindutvites' Caste System

Very amusing!

• Stephen: Is there still a caste system over there?
• Tharoor: There is a caste system.
• Stephen: I wish we had one.
• Tharoor: Well, if they invented the caste system today, I’m sure that talk show hosts would be right on the top.
• Stephen: Oh, yeah.
• Tharoor: Absolutely. Because it was a profession-based thing. It goes back three thousand years, and essentially the people in the so-called unclean professions were the bottom of the caste system …
• Stephen: So, I would be a Brahmin over here.
• Tharoor: Oh, you would be a Brahmin!
• Stephen: Are you from the Brahmin caste?
• Tharoor: No, I’m not, actually.
• Stephen: You’re not?
• Tharoor: Nope.

Source:

No Fact Zone

Random Thoughts: Human tendency - II

I sort of think these are the mistakes people make while believing in stereotypical notions about god/religion, nationalism etc...

1. Generalization of exceptions that confirm their biases. Going as far as claiming those are better than scientific understandings.

2. A complete ignorance about being privileged and thus promoting their identity and their status as natural order of things.

3. Sidestepping glaring problems by only providing lip service as those don't hurt them (could be short sighted -> is that ableist? Am I allowed to use it since I'm short-sighted?).

City planning - 1

How should a city be developed? It should be planned in such a way that a future generation would be able to destroy everything easily and rebuild it from scratch.

Random Thoughts: Human tendency

There are many analyses of human regressive behaviours that in spirit try to explain but in reality legitimize  them. There could be is-ought fallacy in their usage but I feel many don't get it. One of them is;
In group identity:
    A research finds some kind of ingroup identity behaviours which would then used by others to explain hereditary castiest and racial behaviours. However, if you go through those studies there are many caveats for such behaviours. It depends on gender(mostly male specific) and other factors. If one observes caste, more than anything innate, it depends on societal factors like pride and shame, monetary and social profit. If one studies the caste associations and groups then one can observe imbalance in their camaraderie factor. These factors are something that need to be eliminated in a civilized society. However, people attributing the caste feelings to in-group love, forget that fact that they are legitimizing the factors which are inhuman. Even if their intention was to spread in-group love to whole of humanity, they fail to understand the implications of their words.

Some others:
- It's all bell curve
- It's all survival of the fittest
- Everything is like religion

Reference:
1. http://bantwal.blogspot.in/2010/01/individual-moral-man-i.html

Original father of Dravidian Speakers - VII

Maybe 'appa' became derogatory word in Malayalam not because of Nair tradition of 'Sambandham', where 'appa' was a ritual father and not a biological father. The reason could be very silly. A dish common in Tulu and Malayalam region is called 'appam', a rice pancake puffed in the middle and the tapering sides, in southern Malayalam region, whereas, 'aapa' in Malabar region (or only in Kasaragod). In my opinion, when southern Malayalis for some weird reason turned 'aapa' into 'appam', children started making fun of 'appa' and 'appa' and father appa went out of favour.

The creation of a taboo on kinship terms can be very quick. It appears grandmothers of Tulu region no longer like to be addressed as 'grandmother' in local lingo. In Tulu, traditionally, it's either 'dodda' or 'ajji'. However, in its place they are making their grandchildren to call them 'ammamma'.  The other day, my mother said that her friend admonished her for allowing her grandchild to call her 'ajji'. So, it appears once a new kinship term appears, there would be  an active and concerted effort to make the old term obsolete by making it derogatory. In fact, making it derogatory is necessary for suppressing it. If I extrapolate this 'ammamma' in Tulu region to 'appa' in Malayalam region, I would say appa was used widely in Malayalam region once upon a time.

Random Thoughts - Communalism in India

India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is seen as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler both by his admirers and detractors. I don't have any opinion on his supporters' view but I believe his opponents' views are irrational and trivialization. In my opinion, this deviates from the discussion of his actual faults. There are too many contradictions in seeing Modi as another Hitler.

1. Race superiority: 
Modi comes from a lower caste and any claim of Hindu superiority has to transcend many levels obvious contradictions. Also, Nazi Aryan supremacy stems from pseudo-science whereas Hindu supremacy is dependent upon pseudo-history.  At least, pseudo-science is falsifiable. Also, only Brahmins can be the proponents of this drivel. They have succeeded to a large extent by masking Brahmin face of cultural attributes(eg. Gurukul system) as Hindu face. But as lower castes become educated, they are able to question many of them (or at least that's my observation). However, they may still suppress these thoughts because of their hatred against the Muslims.

2. Muslim suppression: 
Will Muslims be the Jews of India? Not just Tamil Brahmins even I have my own reservations on this. There are many aspects of suppression if you go by many Muslims.
- Implementation of Uniform Civil Code(UCC)
- Banning Muslim centric parties like AIMIM and IUML
- Scrapping article 370
- Mob violence against them
The first two are steps in the right direction and the last one is the only true act of suppression. Third point is only restricted to one state thus not really a concern of majority Muslims.

It's a big surprise why male Hindutvites are hardcore supporters of UCC than Muslim women. It's more like they are jealous of Muslim male privilege. I believe that jealousy is valid. Curiously, it doesn't require Central Government ordinance to effect UCC in India. The state governments have full power to enact the law. It's unclear why BJP ruled states haven't done so until now. Since now they have  majority on their own in the central, they are probably in a good position to pass the law. This is probably the easiest one to do as opposing this would be a tall task.

Banning Muslim parties would be another step in the right direction.  Though I believe no such measures would be taken as that could be an existential question for the BJP itself.

Instead of scrapping article 370, I feel similar rights should be extended to all the states of India. I'm for turning India into an entity similar to European Union. Will it have any negative repercussions in Kashmir if the article is scrapped? I don't think so. The situation is already bad, so it can't get worse any further. Also, the two nation theory itself was absurd so any laws built upon it were equally untenable.

That leaves with the only true suppression that is instigating or turning blind eye on mob violence against the Muslims. I assume it could be the case occasionally. However, that would be a far cry from the final solution that the Nazis envisioned. Even though many Hindutvites have that kind of fantasy, they all know it's completely impractical. Thus while the leaders want to derive political mileage, the minions on the ground at the best have the desire for 'showing them their place'. This will become vicious cycle with the Muslims retaliating. Even though Muslim loss would be greater, I would think majority Hindus would soon get tired of these things and any party can't bank on this to rule or gain votes very long.

3. Military adventurism
Continuing with Hitler analogy, let's expect Modi to attack Pakistan. However, whereas for Nazis it was their birthright to rule over others, in case of India, it's just a measure for completing an unfinished job of nation building. I do think attacking Pakistan could be a noble cause. Even if that involves either annihilation of either of them or merging the region of Pakistan back to the Indian union, it should be welcomed. India didn't have its civil war like the one that the USA had. While Americans could kill identity based on slavery, Indians failed to kill religion based identity. But it will be a paradigm shift for the BJP from endorsing mob violence against unarmed minorities to sending an army against a country.

So in my opinion, the Hitler type of actions by Modi can in fact reverse Nazi like conditions in India. The real issues to be addressed are, the danger of anti-intellectualism becoming mainstream, casteist purity and pollution rules like vegetarian bigotism gaining momentum, lower castes being humiliated with goondas as their community leaders and spokespersons etc..

Idea of a Nation - VII

"The problem with Ukraine trading its most potent weapons for Russia's promise of good behaviour is now evident," he says.
"Kiev gave up its means of deterring Russian aggression. Now, Ukraine is overmatched in conventional forces and would have difficulty fighting off a Russian incursion."
He argues that current and future nuclear powers, such as Iran, North Korea, Japan, India and Pakistan, should take note: deterrence works.

Via BBC

I was thinking about this since the crisis in Crimea started. I was planning to write a post as Ukraine was another country with two languages and hence not a natural country and even though Russia claims to be a federation, it has an imperial language. But I just don't have enough time to write one.

Random Thoughts - Love_Lust

These fMRI scans show brain regions activated by sexual desire (in blue) compared to love (in pink) in healthy patients. The overlap in red illustrates how a patient’s brain lesion affected the area in the brain associated with decision-making in love.
Credit: Courtesy of Chris Frum and James Lewis/West Virginia University; Robin Weiss/University of Chicago

Via Science Daily

I assume the colours selected to represent love and lust have no significance.

Now we have definitions for love and lust.

Lust: Concrete representation of sensory experiences

Love: Abstract representation of those experiences

I guess it's not just visual experiences. You might lust after or fall in love with people just by reading their words without ever seeing them.

"The current work makes it possible to disentangle love from other biological drives,"

Maternal Ancestry of Malayalis - III

Since I have already decided that my matrilineage migrated via south-west coastal India, I thought of extending that idea to other haplogroups based on inconclusive data on predominance of certain haplogroups in certain regions. However, this method could still be true as Kerala was supposedly one of the last regions to be inhabited in South India.So, it basically was a sink region for different migrations.

M derived Haplogroups:

M25:

M33: From Indus regions to Kerala via South-West India

M2/M2a/M2b - From East via South-East India. Or migrated from Bengal region to Kerala

M3/M3b - From Indus regions to Kerala via South-West India

M5 - From Indus regions to Kerala via South-West India

M64 - From Indus regions to Kerala via SW India

M30 -  From Indus regions to Kerala via SW India

M6 - From Indus regions to Kerala via SW India

M8/M8c - From East Asia or SE Asia and through trade?

C4a1 - From East Asia or SE Asia and through trade?

N derived Haplogroups:

N1d: Via South-West India

B5a: From South-East Asia and through trade

R21: From SE Asia and through trade

R5: From East via SE India 

R6: From North-West via South-West India

U1/U1a - From North-West via South-West

U4 - From North-West via South-West

U7 - From North-West via South-West

HV14 - From North-West via South-West

References:
1. Wikipedia articles on mtDNA M and N
2. FTDNA Kerala project

Random Thoughts - IX_b

It's IT returns time and as usual the topic again comes into discussion. Some of the typical excuses that people give for trying to evade or pay less taxes are;

- Government eats up the money

- See the facilities that I have received. Bad roads, bad roads...

I wonder what percentage of tax money is lost to corruption. I don't have exact numbers. I'm thinking anything between 3 to 20% based on these two articles.

1. Flipping the corruption myth

2. YSR’s ‘sheer size’ of corruption shocked US diplomat

Now taking the worst case scenario, let's say in India we are losing 20% of our tax money to the corrupt officials. So, there are two observations that could be made.

1. Considering the fact 80% of the money is spent on developmental activities but even then it doesn't feel that way with the state of things on the ground, the money collected through taxes and money spent are very low for a country like India. I suppose higher proportion of allotment would have resulted in same percentage of loss to corruption but an effective higher amount for a project.

Only 2.7% of the population pay taxes (direct) and which make up 18-20% of total tax revenue. So possibilities are many. 

2. Considering still 80% of the money goes into developmental activities, individuals can still take heart that not everything is being wasted. The sense of victimhood that they exhibit is a mask or rationalization of their own corrupt self. I mean this point is very obvious without the data but somehow they feel that their passionate defence with raised voice and scandalized tone absolve them off their sins. But I still feel these hypocrites are better than honest corrupts.

Communism and Kerala - VII_a

Now another party, AAP, has banned FDI in retail. As I've already discussed, commerce is one area where the casteist stranglehold is showing no letup. Small scale trading is the least ethical sector where tax evasion is rampant. So, it's a glorious mixture of casteism and corruption.

AAP might get a strong backing from merchant castes for their anti-FDI stance but the communists are losers in every sense. 

My Maternal Lineage

This is a lazy post. My maternal lineage is officially still M* though I have identified it as M64* and now I have forgotten why I had assigned that subclade.

I have 2 HVR1/2 matches in Maharashtra and 8 in Kerala. One of the matches in Maharashtra is a Marathi Jew and all in Kerala are Malayali Jews. Now these two communities lived isolated existence from each other, therefore, migration of my uniparental maternal ancestry from northern Konkan to southern Konkan  region should be very old.

General understanding is that my ancestors moved from Telugu region to Tamil region and from there to Malayali region. It appears not all of them.