Protests in India: Who Will be the Final Victim of this Anger?

INDIA-1-blog480On December 16, a 23 year-old woman was brutally gang-raped, within an inch of her life, in a public bus with an illegal license that was driving through the streets for half an hour, unnoticed. Like Khaled Mohamed Saeed and Mohammed Bouazizi, this young anonymous woman has become the emblem of an angry nation. For students in New Delhi, this was the last straw. Their anger is justified.

Their reaction is dangerous and misguided.In the past year and a half, educated Indians have been willing to come out on to the streets to demand  harsher punishment and more severe laws. As a nation, we are angry. We have been angry for a terribly long time. Unfortunately, we have not directed our anger towards the construction of responsible social values. Instead, in the course of our anger, we are demanding the construction of a brutal and violent tyranny that will only continue to serve those who are in power at the cost of the powerless.

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Sanskrit 2012

sanskrit_03232012This January, roughly 2,300 years after the composition of Pāṇini’s definitive Sanskrit grammar, scholars congregated in New Delhi to present papers on the massive and enduring cultural system represented by the language. The World Sanskrit Conference, a triennial event that brings together two worlds: one in which Sanskrit serves as the language of imagining truth, beauty and power, and one in which Sanskrit is an object of study and fascination. It confirms that these two worlds are less discontinuous, historically and geographically, than they might seem. Continue reading Sanskrit 2012