[Published on India-forum.com on 03/27/2007] I will take up some of the general points, which I think are relevant to the Indian American community at large. First, let me say…
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1. In this talk, I would like to focus on the two attitudes that I have towards your project. It is not that I have ambiguous feelings; no, I have…
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[Original Dutch article published on Sep 30, 2003; English version is due to google translate and some minor changes] Edward Said is dead. Last Wednesday he lost his battle with…
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There are multiple kinds of interpretation. For instance, there is interpretation of symbols in a domain like Physics: μ (in elementary optics) is “interpreted” as the refraction index of a substance. We use a…
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The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the…
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Two caveats. One: the commentary is very, very short. To write down all the things I want to say about this citation requires a long paper and not a brief…
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Assume that you get a Ph.D student who wants to do medical research. He comes to you and tells you that he wants to find out an answer to the…
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[From What do Indians need: a history or the past] Let me begin with the following dialogue between a Swiss-German and a young Balinese (from Bichsel, Peter, Der Leser, Das Erzählen: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, 1982,…
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I Question: “Certainly that Brahman == self-awareness == Atman is also a matter of direct experience, not of intellectual reasoning?” Let me first begin with reason and then drift towards…
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Some Swamiji claims: “One cannot experience the Atman is the witness, it is what experiences.” Obviously, this is a very rough and approximate formulation. This statement is both wrong and right…
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