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Between Ears, Not Legs

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______________ Nithin Sridhar ______________ Her lap is a sacrificial altar; her hairs, the sacrificial grass; her skin, the soma-press. The two labia*(lips) of the vulva are the fire in the middle [Brhad-Âranyaka Upanisad, 6.4.3] This man (ama) am I; that woman (sâ), thou! That woman, thou; this man am I! I am the Sâman; thou, the Rig! I am the heaven; thou, the earth! Come, let us two together clasp! Together let us semen mix, A male, a son for to procure! [Brhad-Âranyaka Upanisad, 6.4.20] (1) W henever the issue of love, nudity, sex and Hinduism comes into picture, we usually get to see one of the following reactionaries: (a) The West in general and its scholars studying South Asia [for example RISA (2) ] in particular, and their Indian counterparts who consider Hinduism to be a mix of voodoo and pornography; or (b) The Hindu orthodoxy which thinks sex is taboo. Now let's examine how valid these perspectives are. Hindu purushartha s: Purushartha means "objectives of a hum

Cheers Versus Jeers

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Both sides in the debate are perverts betraying mid-life crisis [ Click on the headline to read an exposition on mid-life crisis ] T here are a whole lot of things that look odd in the prevailing debate over what apparently is a non-issue: Should ‘cheerleaders’ be banned from prancing — or, is it dancing? — during the matches of the Indian Premier League? Blaming a certain minister from the Congress party in the Maharashtra Government or a certain politician from the opposition in the state, the BJP, would shift the focus away from the greater malaise that the authorities in this country suffer from. If not for raising such controversies, how many of us would know that some Mehtre and some Gadkari existed in this world numbed by an overdose of events whose importance in public perception varies in degrees as distinct as fingerprints of individuals? How many Indians outside West Bengal have heard of Subhash Chakraborty, Kshiti Goswami, Nandgopal Bhattacharya and Pratim Chatterjee? Polit