Rajiv Malhotra’s Infinity Foundation has announced the publication of three new books

1. “Emerson and the Light of India: An Intellectual History”, by Robert Gordon. National Book Trust, India.
2. The Experience of Meditation, by Jonathan Shear. Paragon Press,
   USA.
3. Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness by Don Salmon and Jan Maslow. Paragon Press, USA.

In his announcement, Rajiv has some interesting information about the second book.

One of the important outcomes from my interactions with Shear over the years has been an incredible treasure trove of evidence on how Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation got co-opted into Herb Benson’s “Western Science” and into Father Keating’s “Christian Centering Prayer”. Both these appropriations are based on TM by erasing the source tradition.

In the case of Father Thomas Keating, the Hindu source was seen as a sort of threat to Christianity’s claim of having developed meditation internally, with no positive help from the heathen others. In Benson’s case, by ignoring the TM origins of all his “scientific findings” he was able to launch himself as a “Western pioneer of mind science”; then this secured him a lucrative and powerful position with Templeton Foundation where he has been facilitating the migration of these scientific findings into Christian frameworks; and now he is established as the “originator” of the new complementary medicine in US research, hospitals and medical colleges. All this and much more will be elaborated in my forthcoming U-Turn Theory book.

In 1993, novelist David Leavitt, known as a “gay writer” for his early novels and story collections, wrote the book While England Sleeps which was inspired by Stephen Spender’s autobiography World Within World. The book had some explicit sex scenes which did not go well with Spender and so he sued. The publisher eventually removed those passages.

In 2007, he has returned back with the same theme with a book titled The Indian Clerk, and the protagonists this time are Godfrey Harold Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujam and the book is about their relationship. Leavitt’s speciality is in writing a rare type of literary fiction in which he takes people who really existed and plays around with the facts. His second speciality is in writing explicit sex. This would be like Jeffrey Kripal meeting Harold Robbins, but with the defence that it is  historical fiction.

Alice claims to be easing his culture shock, while Hardy hopes to develop his mind. In both cases, however, their fascination has a sexually predatory edge: Hardy “cannot deny that it excites him, the prospect of rescuing a young genius from poverty and obscurity and watching him flourish. … Or perhaps what excites him is the vision he has conjured up, in spite of himself, of Ramanujan: a young Gurkha, brandishing a sword.”

The real G. H. Hardy famously called his association with Ramanujan “the one romantic incident in my life,” and Leavitt’s Hardy makes the same claim. But what he makes of their relationship is much more subtle than a love affair. Initially frustrated by the young genius’s tendency to pursue several ideas in an associative fashion, Hardy eventually realizes he has come in contact with a mind that expands his notion of their discipline. At the same time, the relationship brings Hardy — emotionally as well as sexually closeted — into the messy realm of human friendship, where even the most well-intentioned attempts to rescue another adult can result in further injury.[Lust for Numbers]

Here is an idea for historical fiction: While flying from Bangalore on a trip to observe the Ram Sethu, David Leavitt ‘s plane crashes and he gets stranded in a farm somewhere near Erode. As days pass he realizes that no one will rescue him from the paste and colored-paper  exotic East, in which brave Englishmen battled natives for the cause of empire. Soon the lone donkey in the farm starts looking very attractive.

I don’t think Leavitt will object because it fiction after all.

According some experts of Hinduism in American academia, Ganesha’s trunk is a “limp phallus”, Devi is classified as the “mother with a penis”, Shiva is “a notorious womanizer” who incites violence in India,  Sri Ramakrishna is a pedophile who sexually molested the young Swami Vivekananda, bindi is a drop of menstrual fluid and the “ha” in sacred mantras is a woman’s sound during orgasm. These scholarly works, peddled by powerful academic cartels who make our own eminent historians look like Winnie the Pooh, have been passed on as interpretations of Hinduism in schools and colleges, thus brainwashing future generations of students. Some of these scholars are also on the editorial committees of encyclopedias and thus misinformation is easily passed around without much dissent.

William Wilberforce, the 18th century British politician in a speech in the House of Commons talks about an incident in which some abusive pamphlets against various religions were released by missionaries in India, but found that the natives were tolerant and “even the grossest imprudence could not rouse them to anger”. When something you hold sacred is denigrated with an agenda, there has to be reaction against it, not the Iranian way of dealing with Salman Rushdie or Sambhaji Brigade’s way of dealing with the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, but by exposing faulty works through research.

That is what Rajiv Malhotra has been doing all these years through his writings on Sulekha. Rajiv Malhotra’s articles on the RISA Lila sparked off many articles which exposed the prejudice behind Hinduism studies. Many Hindu parents who were shocked to read misinterpretations of their religion became activists and the work of this grassroots movement has resulted in the articles compiled in this new book Invading The Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America , edited by Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee. The book, as Sankrant Sanu writes in his review, is also a testimony to rising economic affluence of India and Indians who are now able to use the Internet to challenge established thinking and get books published bypassing the guardians of the establishment.

See Also:Invading the Sacred

National Public Radio  and local affiliates like KQED in San Francisco  bring some of the best interviews and discussions you can hear in American Media. Here are some interviews worth listening.

• The war in Iraq was justified partly based on forged documents which came from Italy. Here is an interview with Carlo Bonini who broke the story.
• What’s the big deal about twitter?
• George Tenet on the war, intelligence and his role.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Randomness and Probability

(For all these links, click on the Listen button to hear the interview)

See Also: Public Radio Links (1), Public Radio Links(2)

National Public Radio  and local affiliates like KQED in San Francisco  bring some of the best interviews and discussions you can hear in American Media. Here are some interviews worth listening.

• Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, on the political crisis in Pakistan.
• Mira Nair on Namesake and herself.
• Walter Isaacson talks about his new book, Einstein: His Life and Universe. See also his article which says why imagination and creativity are important.
• Religion scholars Elaine Pagels and Karen King talk about their new book Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
• Daniel Levitin, former record producer and sound engineer for Columbia Records and Professor at McGill, talks

about the perception of music in the human brain

(For all these links, click on the Listen button to hear the interview)

See Also: Public Radio Links (1)

Next by Michael Crichton, HarperCollins (November 28, 2006),448 pages

In Shekhar Kapur’s first film, Masoom, the character played by Naseeruddin Shah brings home his illegitimate son and  upsets everyone in the family. In Next, scientist Henry Kendall brings home Dave and his wife of fifteen years, Lynn Kendall asks the question, “This monkey is your son?”

When the human genome was decoded, scientists discovered that the genome of a chimpanzee was separated from that of a human being by only five hundred genes. There was then the question of whether humans and chips could hybridize to make a humanzee. While on sabbatical at the National Institute of Health, doing research on autism, Henry inserted his genes into a chimpanzee embryo.

He had expected to fetus to die, but it survived resulting in Dave, a transgenic chimp who could talk. That’s not the only genetic oddity in Michael Crichton’s new work of fiction (except for parts that aren’t). The others who enthrall us include Gerard, the talking parrot, a talking chimp sighted in Java, and turtles carrying fluorescent advertisements on their shells in Costa Rica.

After handling dinosaur’s, nano particles, and global warming, Crichton shows us what is happening in the field of genetics and what the future holds for us. He presents a scary world.
Continue reading “Book Review: Next” →

West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief by Steven Kotler, Bloomsbury USA (June 13, 2006), 224 pages

Some religious rituals like repetitive chanting and rhythmic drumming have been found to produce excessive religiosity, out-of-body experiences and vivid hallucinations. Out of body experiences have been reported not only in religious texts, but also in action sports like surfing, mountain climbing, and motor cycling. Brain scans have found that such feeling are produced when the parietal lobes, the part of the brain that integrates sensory information and determines the spacial location of objects go quiet and portions of the right temporal lobe, which is mainly involved in visual memory, become more active.

SPECT scans of the brains of Buddhist monks during meditation have shown a significant decrease in activity in the right parietal lobe implying that meditation temporarily blocks the processing of sensory information and explains why meditators feel that the self is endless and is interwoven with everyone. In the fifties, neuro surgeon Wilder Penfiled discovered that stimulating the right temporal lobe with mild electric currents produced out-of-body experiences, heavenly music and vivid hallucinations usually associated with near death experiences. All this means that our brains are wired for mystical experiences.

Interestingly, I read all of that in a book by a surfer (not web surfer), on surfing, science and the origins of belief. The surfer, Steven Kotler, was making his living as a writer, with the perfect apartment and perfect girl friend and then he got the Lyme disease. On days he could make it to the kitchen from the bed, he would end up standing with a coffee pot in one hand and the tap running not sure what to do next as he had forgotten to do the most basic tasks. He lost his job, woman and his mind and he started thinking of suicide. So he decided to do the best thing possible – go surfing to Costa Azul, Mexico and to his surprise he started feeling better. Then he wanted to know why he felt better.
Continue reading “Book Review: West of Jesus” →

State of Denial by Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster (September 30, 2006), 576 pages

Rumsfeld is a dick

Won’t flow the forces we need

We will be too light

This was a haiku written by Steve Rotkoff, a senior military intelligence officer with 25 years in the Army very early after he was drafted for the Iraq war planning. Rotkoff was not alone with such assessment about the Defense Secretary. When asked about Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Richard B. Meyers put both his hands on a small table and laid his head on it to express his frustration. At one point Rumsfeld stopped talking to National Security Advisor Condi Rice that the President has to step in.

Bob Woodward’s third book in the Bush at War series talks about the arrogance of Rumsfeld, clueless nature of the the folks who managed the war and ends with the constant denial of facts by the President and Vice-President. The book was written based on interviews with Bush’s national security team, key players in the administration responsible for military, diplomacy and intelligence. He talked to people in Defense, State and CIA including the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld.

One thing I have always wondered is how the reaction against Sept 11 attacks transformed into a war against Iraq and who was responsible for it. Once again it turns out to be Rumsfeld. The day after the attacks, it was Rumsfeld who asked Bush on why they shouldn’t go against Iraq as well. Rumsfeld was one person who thought that George H.W. Bush had screwed up badly by not going against Saddam in 1991. Initially George W. Bush puts him off, but later decides to go with the plan, 71 days after the 9/11 attacks.

A think tank consisting of Bernard Lewis,  Mark Palmer, Fareed Zakaria, Fouad Ajami and the likes were gathered secretly and they analyzed the middle east problem and concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. The question then was on what pretext would the war be started and WMD looked like a natural choice. The top intelligence officer for the invading forces, James “Spider” Marks was given a list of 946 sites where intelligence had indicated there were production plants or storage facilities.

The only problem was that the list was outdated. David Kay, who went to Iraq as the inspector after the first Gulf war was sent this time as well and he found that there was no new information on this. Still this did not prevent the President and Vice-President from repeating again and again about the WMD threats to America and its allies. The search teams did not find any WMD and in one instance the “Scooter” Libby calls David Kay in Baghdad and gives him the co-ordinates to search.

Besides talking to a large number of people, Woodward has also reviewed secret documents and secure communication between the leadership in Washington and Baghdad. After analyzing all this information the book is written in such a way that it is a page turner and you get to know a lot about the personality clashes that happened.

George Tenet at the CIA was against the White House. Rumsfeld was against Jay Garner. Condi Rice could not stand Rumsfeld. Then there is a president who doesn’t want to know any details and keeps on repeating that we will prevail. As you read those chapters, you are shocked to see the callousness with which this war was done.

When Jay Garner was replaced with Paul Bremmer and one of the first things he performed was de-Baathification. When he was dissolving the Ministry of Interior, Bremmer did not know that Police reported to ministry. Once that happened, the number of insurgent attacks increased exponentially. Then in a scene which seems inspired from Wag the Dog, President Bush asks Secretary Rice if they should approach Hollywood to prepare a propaganda campaign.

The number of people who grew frustrated with Rumsfeld were not just Condi Rice or the Generals. By Spring 2004, Paul Wolfowitz was frustrated  as he had been trying to get Rumsfeld to take on the training of Iraqi security forces and Rumsfeld was resisting it strongly. Even Laura Bush tells that she thought Rumsfeld was hurting the President.

There are some funny moments when Woodward reveals some secret conversation. After David Kay testifies before Congress blaming the NSC and Rice for the intelligence lapses, he gets a call from Robert Joseph, an NSC Staffer. “This conversation never took place”, Joseph says when he meets Kay, but the whole thing is there in the book.

Reading the book you get the feel that two people could have stopped the war. One of them was Colin Powell, who was at his peak of influence when the war started. According to Senator Carl Levin of Michigan Powell could have told the President that this the wrong course. The other person was President George H.W.Bush. He and Barbara Bush knew this was wrong, but did not influence the President because they thought that it was not ethical and W should make his own decisions.

The last line reads, “With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become”. Even though everything was going wrong in Iraq, the President and Vice-President  and Rumsfeld were in denial. The final chapter of the book is an eye opener when Rumsfeld claims that he is not directly responsible for the deaths in Iraq though he was a micromanager of this war. President Bush was not even willing to acknowledge the fact that no WMD was found.

This scathing critique of Bush and Co. is a must read.