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Beloo MehraMarch 3, 2015 at 10:21 AM
Aah....how could I miss this excellent post?! Anyway, better late than never. The wit, sarcasam and humor of your post is fantastic, and totally on the point. But I have a serious point to make :) Yes, our culture is not weak that it can be so easily shaken by those ill-informed books, non-sensical portrayals in films etc. And I am totally with you on the positives that we should be working on (like not defacing our monuments, protecthing and preserving our heritage temples, encouraging and promoting classical art forms etc.). But I still feel that there is a need for a strong, well-informed, well-articulated defense. I say this because in present times the global discourse on global cultures is still very asymmetric. And culture as a soft power is commonly used for the purposes of international and foreign policy purposes. I am not saying this, many serious thinkers have been documenting this for quite a while now. Of course you would know that I am not speaking of the sort of misinformed and misapplied aggression that protestors of valentines day and those advocating covering up women etc. Every time a book that speaks of Shiv-lingam as phallus (and only that, and nothing else) is used as a textbook in a classroom in the US or anywhere else in the world, a seed for the misperception of Hinduism is planted in young minds right there ! And this is just one small example, there are many such things that happen on regular basis. It is such things that need to be challenged and challenged strongly.
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