WORLD INTHAVAARAM, 2023–36

About: the world this week, 3 September to 9 September 2023; Invasion; The G20 in India; Sanatana Dharma; Barbie; and the Rolling Stones.

Everywhere

Invasion

In what is easily one of the worst attacks in months, in the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian missiles struck a market in a Town in eastern Ukraine killing 17 people.

The attack on Kostiantynivka, in the region of Donetsk left about 32 others wounded. Kostiantynivka is close to the front lines around the city of Bakhmut and most often loaded with military personnel.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive enters its fourth month and the war, started by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, is only getting bloodier. The United Nations has said that more than 9500 civilians have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

G20 in India

The Group of Twenty Nations-G20–2023 Summit, is being held in New Delhi on 9 and 10 September 2023. It is the first such summit to be held in India as well as in South Asia. It will be chaired by India’s Prime Minister under the current G20 Presidency of India, as well as it being the hosting country.

World Leaders, from across the globe will arrive to discuss: Green Development, climate finance & LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment); accelerated, inclusive and resilient growth; accelerated progress on sustainable development goals (SDG), technological transformation and digital public infrastructure; women-led development; and multilateral institutions of the 21st Century.

Significant outcomes are expected after multi-level meetings and discussions.

Key participating countries are the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, China, Japan, Italy, Australia, European Union.

New Delhi is being spruced-up and ‘culturally decorated’ to receive participants, and serve them the ‘taste of India’.

In a first, the invitations for the G20 were sent out in the name of the ‘President of Bharat’, which created a frenzy ‘country name change’ speculation in the media. In the Constitution of India, Bharat is an alternate name and was always used when the Government communicated in Hindi.

Sanatana Dharma

This week the buzzword in India — on almost everybody’s tongues — was the word ‘Sanatana Dharma’. Everyday someone was offering a definition and social media was flooded with tons of them.

‘Sanatana Dharma’ is the name by which, what is now known as the religion of Hinduism was known before words such as ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ even came into being. There was no need for any other name, as over 3000 years ago, as it was ‘the way of life’ and perhaps the only religion around-after religion as we know it today, was defined. Sanatana Dharma encompasses a wide range of beliefs, practices, and traditions that have evolved over thousands of years.

Sanatana Dharma means ‘eternal or absolute duty’ and is transcendental and universal. It is the absolute set of duties or religiously ordained practices incumbent upon all human beings, regardless of class, caste, or sect. In general, Sanatana Dharma consists of virtues such as honesty, not harming living-beings, purity of thought and action, goodwill, mercy, patience, forbearance, self-restraint, generosity, and asceticism. Sanatana Dharma is the same for everyone.

While Sanatana Dharma is the ‘ideal and absolute’ duty — call it spiritual — of a person, there are other duties that one needs to engage in, to sustain himself in life according to his inherent characteristics — call it material- which is bundled under what is called Varnashrama Dharma or ‘One’s Own Duty’.

Varanasharma Dharma depends upon the intrinsic nature (svabhava)-social classifications-and the situation or stage in life (svadharma) of a person.

These two Dharmas — Sanatana and Varnashrama — are not be confused with one another: one is universal and eternal; while the other is ‘personal and internal’.

As one goes through life, the potential for conflict between the two types of Dharma will occur and how to go about it in any particular situation is beautifully explained in the Bhagavad Gita. E.g., between the duties of a skilled warrior fighting a war to establish good over evil and the general injunction to practice not-harming or non-injury on the battlefield, one’s own duty must prevail.

Now, what’s this thing about one’s nature, caste, class, and the kind?

One’s personality manifests in the outside world of the living, depending upon the domination of one or more combinations of three basic types of intrinsic qualities in all of us, called ‘gunas’: The Good — called Sattvik (Sattva); The Passionate — called Rajasik (Rajas), and the Dull- called Tamasik (Tamas). No person ‘exclusively possesses’ any one of these gunas and they are present in each one of us in various degrees.

The Sattvik are the highly evolved: scholarly, intellectual, pure, honest, wise, engaged in continuous study and learning, pursing knowledge and truth, maintaining equanimity at all times, and being noble in their dealings. They recognise different living beings as expressions and manifestation of the one and the same truth — oneness of the World. A Sattvik person serves the world in a sense of self-fulfilment and inspired joy.

The Rajas are the restless, wanting to conquer the world with their physical and mental powers, valour, ambition, and desire for material success and ownership. They recognise plurality of the world by reason of separateness. They are constantly undertaking tasks of heavy toil involving great strain and face the consequent physical fatigue and mental exhaustion of their activities.

The Tamasik are the dull, unreasonable, lazy, and prone to inactivity. They consider the world as existing for their pleasure alone, failing to recognise anything existing beyond their ego. They are self-centred, generally fanatical in their path and devotion, and in their views and values in life. They hardly enquire, question, or try to discover the cause of things and happenings. They have no regard for the consequences of their actions. They surrender their dignity, capacity, and subtle facilities all for the sake of pursuit of a delusory goal in life, and instant gratification.

Based on the inner mental make-up of a person — not always determined by heredity or accident of birth -it became a practice to classify and prescribe different duties or tasks for each person, in ancient times. Again, not based on the texture of a person’s skin, the colour of his hair.

The predominantly Sattva, with a little Rajas and minimum Tamas, were called Brahmanas-the spiritual and learned, the Priests, the Gurus; the predominately Rajas, with some Sattva and a dash of Tamas, were called the Kshatriyas — the Kings, Rulers, and Warriors; the predominately Rajas with less of Sattva and some Tamas, were called the Vaishyas — the businessmen, merchants, craftsmen, landowners; the predominantly Tamas, with a little of Rajas and only traces of Sattva were called the Sudras — the common unskilled workers, servants, peasants.

In medieval times we did not have medical, engineering, law or other degrees and this classification was an intelligent means of choosing people for gainful employment. The four classifications or castes were never intended to be ‘walled structures’, but a means of putting a person to work based on his inclinations and attitudes to draw out the best in them.

Unfortunately, down the ages, the classifications lost much of their meaning and have come to signify a heredity birth-right in society, a mere physical distinction that divided society into castes and sub-castes. And people built walls around their caste groupings, as superior, inferior; and later another outside the caste system called ‘untouchables’ crept in, which was never meant to be. For. e.g., a true Brahmana is necessarily a highly cultured Sattvik person with almost perfect mastery of his mind and control of his senses. And can raise himself to the highest levels of self-control by meditation and other ‘rightful’ means. One cannot be a Brahmana or obtain the qualities by birth alone, without striving and deserving.

Dharma is often translated as ‘duty, religion or religious duty’ and yet its meaning is more profound, defying concise English translation. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit root ‘dhri,’ which means ‘to sustain.’ Another related meaning is ‘that which is integral to something. For e.g., for the sake of illustration, the dharma of sugar is to be sweet and the dharma of fire to be hot. Therefore, a person’s dharma consists of duties that sustain him, according to his innate characteristics. Such characteristics are both material and spiritual, generating two corresponding types of dharma, as elaborated in the preceding paragraphs.

Sanatana Dharma came to be called Hinduism when the Greeks who invaded northwestern India under Alexander The Great designated the people living on the banks for the River Indus (River Sindhu in Sanskrit) as ‘Indoos’ or ‘Hindus’.

Going further, and nearer home to the present times, the Supreme Court of India said the following about the Hindu Religion:

“Unlike other religions in the World, the Hindu religion does not claim any one Prophet, it does not worship any one God, it does not believe in any one philosophic concept, it does not follow any one act of religious rites or performances; in fact, it does not satisfy the traditional features of a religion or creed. It is a way of life and nothing more”.

Hinduism does not have a founder. It is a fusion of various traditions. To put it in another way, it is like ‘free’ Linux software — say, with Sanatana Dharma at the core — around which ‘other systems’ are developed and built, each one freely choosing a path accordingly to his nature. This unlike, say ‘licensed’ Microsoft software, which is strictly walled and controlled. Sanatana Dharma, that is Hinduism, predates the word ‘secular’ and in many ways is all-embracing, all-accepting, and truly modern.

Hinduism is believed to be one of the World’s oldest religions with scriptural texts dating back to over 3000 years: the Vedas is one of them. Also in contention is Zoroastrianism, founded in Persia (now Iran), and Judaism — the foundation of all other Abrahamic religions and the oldest monotheistic religion (rising from Moses’ Ten Commandments). Next we have Jainism, which originated in India; Confucianism with roots in China and believed to be in existence for over 2500 years; then we have Buddhism, again originating in India, about 2500 years ago.

Polytheism, although not one specific religion is perhaps the oldest form of practiced religion often occurring in pagan practices that aimed to worship a plethora of Gods. The earliest forms were seen in Egyptian myths and recorded on Sumerian tablets. Example are the multiple Gods of Ancient Egypt, Greece and of the Roman Empire.

For religion to emerge, be used, and spread they should be a human civilization, right?

Most scholars place the earliest cradles of civilization in modern-day Iraq (Mesopotamia), Egypt, India (Indus Valley), China, Peru, and Mexico, beginning between approximately 4000 and 3000 BC. These ancient complex societies formed cultural and technological advances, several of which are still present today. A great many of the details of modern life, have origins that go back for thousands of years to the ancient cultures in their respective regions.

With this background, if a responsible person holding political office in India, says Sanatana Dharma should be eradicated like we do mosquitoes, dengue, and the kind, he must definitely be out of his mind. And very uneducated, un-evolved, and wholly drowned in Tamas.

Barbie

The movie Barbie, which released world wide in July 2023 has officially become the year’s biggest box office hit, after the doll’s big-screen earnings overtook the Super Mario Bros. Movie movie’s total.

Barbie has now made over USD 1.38 billion (bn) globally, which has taken it past the USD 1.36bn earnings by the ‘Super Mario Bros. Movie’. Barbie has also helped the United States summer box office reach the USD 4bn mark for the first time since the pandemic.

The ‘Super Mario Bros. Movie’ is an American computer-animated adventure comedy film based on Nintendo’s Mario video game franchise. It is produced and distributed by Universal Pictures, directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel. The film is about brothers Mario and Luigi, Italian-American plumbers who are transported to an alternate world and become entangled in a battle between two fantasy Kingdoms.

Rolling Stones

This week, the Rolling Stones announced their first album of original music is 18 years, called ‘Hackney Diamonds’. The band, who formed more than six decades ago said it ‘heralded a new album, new music, new era’. The album will be the first since the death of the band’s drummer Charlie Watts in August 2021.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood — the surviving core of the band — announced the new Album with clips of a new song, ‘Angry’ this Wednesday at an event in Hackney, London. Hackney Diamonds will feature 12 tracks and be released on 20 October 2023, preceded by the lead single, Angry.

The new album will feature Steve Jordan in Watts’ place, a drummer the band knew from ‘way back’ and who filled Watts’ place on tour. Said Sir Mick Jagger, “Of the album’s 12 tracks, most are with Steve, but two are tracks we recorded in 2019 with Charlie”.

American Actress Sydney Sweeney famous for the TV series ‘The White Lotus’ and ‘Euphoria’, features in the up-beat music video for the song.

Over the week, I listened to the song and saw the music video with Sydney Sweeney sprawled all over in an extremely edgy leather crop top busier, paired with sexy star cutout pants. She rides in the back of a red Mercedes-Benz convertible on Sunset Boulevard, writhing and playing air-guitar on the hood of the car. It’s an absolute blast — I had my tongue hanging out for more! The Stones are definitely on a roll.

More rolling stories coming-up in the weeks ahead. Dance with World Inthavaaram.