STRAIGHT TALKS

Timelines for Hindu heritage and history often have proved challenging to the human mind and are often an expose of the limitations of mind. So too are the details of the appalling tragedies inflicted by greedy Europeans on Hindu civilisation as well as the earlier Muslim rulers. They have cleverly been erased by the invaders along with stupendous hindu achievements. Worse is that today hindu achievements are ridiculed as non existent while anything western is hailed as progressive including adultery. So, it happened to one of the six abodes of Lord Karthikeya popularly known as Lord Muruga, at Tiruchendur. A temple believed to have been carved out of rock on the style of Ellora now appears to be a shade of its wonderful past. The main guilty were the Dutch known today to the world as Netherlands. The Dutch after facing repeated defeats by Portughese were limited to Ceylon. In February 1649, the Dutch attacked Portughese in India and occupied Tiruchendur and Tuticorin. After the

If you were ever revolted by the plethora of roadside statues in India, then credit for this ever rising craze should go to that one man tsunami that brought about that infamous “Statue Culture “ to EV Ramasamy Naicker known as Periyar to his followers. As was usual with Dravidian politics, this focus and obsession of statues  ironically began as an anti idol movement to reason out faith and beliefs of Hinduism to pamper to Islamic and Christian fundamentalists and as admiration of anything western.  Breaking of idols of Lord Ganesha in Salem when Congress ruled Tamilnadu and India during early 1950s didn’t elicit even murmurs of intolerance as Hindus were subdued for over a thousand years and Secular congress was a mere continuation of that colonial British rule that was indifferent and insensitive to majoritarian Hindu sentiments. EVR called Idols as lifeless stones and called out those beliefs of honouring and worshipping them as crass and superstitious. Because of fundamental con