Seriously? writes:
If you’re looking for an Indian to go out of his way to proclaim love for Christians and Muslims, you’re not going to find one. My Brahmin Hindu mother has four best friends, whom she spends all hours of the day talking to: two Pakistani Muslims, a Sikh, and a white Christian. No Hindus. She has no need to go around showing this off to prove her tolerance.
What you’re asking for is unreasonable. Indians don’t run onto the streets, trumpeting their respect for other groups of people. No one does. It’s true some Indian American communities are insulated, but much less than Muslim and East Asian ones.
You guys kind of remind me of newly converted high school atheists, who, upon hearing not everything they’ve been told about Christianity has been accurate, go out of their way to make Christians (in this case Indians) much worse than than they really are. It’s all really just an angry reaction to what you perceive as a lie.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the lost tribes of Israel, the Parsis, etc. who found refuge in India. I’m sure you can also imagine few other places, much less Europe, would have absorbed these diverse groups and accepted them so fully.
There’s no denying that, while not all Indian Hindus are tolerant, India has been much more tolerant than other civilizations have been. India may very well have been the first truly multicultural society on Earth.
Think about it, India has all the major religions (along with many minor ones), perhaps a hundred different ethnic groups, all coexisting. It’s been that way for thousands of years and still is now. Now think about Pakistan which was once the same way, where all the other major religious groups have since been all but wiped out.
But I guess when you found out that India wasn’t entirely the land of peace, and there have been a few attacks against Muslims, you suddenly brandished this next to meaningless piece of information. You wanted to make Hinduism and India look as bad as Christianity and Islam do. It’s understandable, but both wrong and an exercise in futility.
Not at all. I have known about attacks on Indian Muslims for years. I was always suspicious of Hindus and Indians, but I let it pass because I am a liberal and we are supposed to love everyone.
My close friendships with a couple of Indian Hindu Brahmins were very eye opening. Very nice guys, good people, but Hindutvadis and Indian nationalists. They hate the British, Pakistan, Muslims, Christianity, the White man, Europeans, European civilization, on and on.
There was a rage there that was very hard to describe. And they believed the most profoundly anti-scientific non-theory, like rejection of IE and the Aryan Migration Theory. They tossed about all sorts of antiscientific tripe. They both supported the caste system to the hilt, while saying it didn’t exist anymore, while railing against reservations.
Before that, I knew a few others. I had a good relationship with a couple of Hindu guys from Delhi who worked for me, except the programmer grossly oversold his abilities to me in a typical Indian fashion. His brother was so profoundly classist that I had to school him on how that was not cool in the USA to act so classist like that. He arrogantly dismissed my concerns.
I knew a Hindu woman from Pune who hated the US and Pakistan. She was kind of a trip though. Always bugging me to send her dirty pics. I kept sending her dirty pics, but she said they weren’t good enough. She wanted pics of me fucking various women, but to tell the truth, I didn’t have any! She was pretty kooky and emotional.
Every Hindu I ever met was stark raving nuts on the subject of Kashmir. They all insisted that all Kashmiris loved India and that the whole problem was Pakistan stirring up shit among content and happy Kashmiri Muslims. I told them that Kashmiris themselves wanted to go free and be independent and not join either country, and they all acted like I was speaking Greek. They were brainwashed worse than a North Korean, and this was in the world’s biggest democracy.
Then I met a lot of Hindutvadis on the Net and that was a real eyeopener. Then I read a lot about US programmers losing their jobs to Indians and the hatred these Hindus had for the White West, and that was really eye-opening too.
The rage, really the impotent rage, of Indian nationalists and Hindutvadis is very frightening and reminds of other ultranationalists the world over and throughout history. Honestly, Hindutvadis remind of me Nazis in the 1930′s.
They done us wrong! We are getting back at them!
I’ve met only a few Hindus here in the US. Mostly I have met Sikhs, who I am starting to think are just Hindus are disguise! Mind you, I made some Sikh friends here of a sort (one was one of my physicians, a Sikh nationalist), and some of them were ok. The best and most progressive Sikhs are the Sikh nationalists – the rest of them are just typical backwards and reactionary Indian nationalist types, little different from Hindus.
The more I dug into the Sikhs, the more I figured out they are just as backwards and barbaric as the Hindus. Really disappointing.
The few Hindus I met here were odd. A couple were doctors. They could be very, very friendly until you asked them something about their country. Then they got very bizarre and suspicious, shut up immediately and often left the room.
One guy was a physician. Between visits, I looked up his name and it turned out he was some mid caste from Andra Pradesh. Next time I saw him towards the end of the visit, I asked him if he was from Andra Pradesh, and he flipped out, said yes and left the room. Then he turned cold and hostile when we had to have some dealings afterwards. He acted like I was an enemy spy.
The few regular Hindus I have met around town are Gujaratis (Patel) and Punjabis, and they are profoundly arrogant. I do not know why. They get incredibly weird if you ask them anything about India, and even weirder with me because it’s obvious that I understand the place more than 98% of Goris.
Not that I let Islam off the hook. I already think that Islam is backwards, barbaric and reactionary. But many Muslim societies are quite stable and even prosperous. There is little crime or social disorder. Things work, in an odd way.
It’s really up for grabs which religion is worse – Islam or Hinduism. Both are reactionary, backwards, sexist and barbaric. Hinduism tosses in feudal to make it a full monte.
Islam is expansionist and treats minorities very poorly, but Hinduism doesn’t treat minorities well either. Prejudice against Muslims in India is profound. There are routine pogroms and mass murders committed against Indian Christians. Sikhs were treated to a near genocide a couple of decades ago. Hindu tolerance leaves much to be desired. Further, as Hinduism hardly accepts converts, it doesn’t even absorb minorities via conversion, which is at least one nice thing about Islam.
Secular Muslim societies, now under attack all over the Middle East, worked very well and were very tolerant towards minorities. Much more tolerant than Hinduism.
Of all religions, Hinduism cares about human beings the very least of all. It’s quite possibly the most backwards and barbaric remaining ancient religion. We can theorize this as all ancient religions seemed to resemble Hinduism in their polytheism, nature worship and caste system.
Monotheistic Judaism was advance upon Hinduism, but as a tribal religion that hardly accepts converts and preaches hatred for those outside the tribe, it’s still an ancient tribal religion in some ways similar to Hinduism. It’s a typical tribal anti-universal religion.
Monotheistic Islam which held out the branch of conversion to all of humanity was an advance upon amoral and casteist Hinduism. There is also a socialist feature to Islam, and at its root, it is a law and order religion par excellance. No Muslim was above any other Muslim; all were part of the ummah.
Monotheistic Christianity represented a further advance upon Islam, holding out the branch of conversion to all of humanity. Heathen were to be loved and saved, not declared war on or converted by force. Modern Christianity preaches pacifism and no longer converts by force, which was never common anyway. Christian pacifism was an advance upon militaristic Islam, and Christian socialism went beyond the rudimentary socialism of the Koran.
At the end of the day, I just feel that there is something terribly wrong with Indian people in general and with their whole society. It’s fucked up something bad.
And as long as that’s going on, I am going to continue writing about it.