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California Textbook
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News flash: Indian-American parents have been working with California School authorities and textbook publishers for some years to improve what their kids are being taught about their heritage. In early November, they had just completed a set of small corrections to middle-school textbooks, when the whole process was derailed by a dung-throwing mob attack by so-called ?Prominent Academics? The duly-appointed committee, guided by the ?CRP? Professor- Emeritus Bajpai, were tossed out and superseded by a secretly-appointed ?Super-CRP? consisting of persons of blatant bias and hatred against the community.
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Cal Tech Professor Saffman remarked in the Preface to his book on Vortices that ?one cannot be a Scholar and a Researcher at the same time? ? but he was thinking of people who were actually one or the other. Come to think of it, no Scholar would claim to be a Scholar when s(he) is functionally illiterate in the language of the field of Scholarship. Let me now imagine the possibility that Witzel, Farmer and the rest of their mob are Researchers....
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Europeans have been steadily abandoning Christianity. Church attendance has fallen dramatically. Both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches have been worried because if Europeans desert Christianity, its Third World adherents would follow suit. How does one then revive Christianity in Europe....
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In years to come, the Indian community in the U.S. will face a major challenge from American pluralism. This is the first time a powerful community of pagans has to be accommodated within the American society. The NRI community is well-educated, well-to-do and proud of its cultural traditions. At the same time, the representation of the Indian traditions in the U.S. educational system shows a pathetic level of understanding. I will argue that recent events like the California textbook controversy point to a profound problem: the American model of pluralism is unable to accommodate these pagan traditions. This is the case, because its structure has emerged from a co-existence of Protestant denominations. Maximally, the resulting model could encompass other variants of the religions of the book: Catholicism, Judaism and Islam. Incorporating the pagan traditions of India, however, will require a fundamental rethinking of American pluralism....
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This letter was mailed on Martin Luther King Day in 2007. No response was received from Harvard. Now this is an open letter to the Provost of Harvard published on October 2nd, 2007 on the Gandhi Jayanti Day to be recognized by the UN as the International Peace Day. Persecution by pen of any group is a form of violence that needs to be exposed and curtailed. Harvard needs to take a lead in this effort....
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Heading the list of important people in the California textbook saga ? like the cloying Abou ben Adhem -- is the remarkable Michael Witzel. A German-speaker from a Germanic enclave in Poland, Witzel is a tenured professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Some people have labeled Witzel a Nazi because of his ethnic origin, but of course I condemn that. It is clearly despicable to be prejudiced against someone simply based on their roots, although Witzel himself is not averse to this sort of attack on Indians....
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The alert reader may wonder why certain academics are so caught up in the increasingly discredited 'Aryan' Invasion Dogma. First of all, for those who claim to be 'rational' and opposed to faith, it must be anathema to support something that is based on the Christian Bible. Second, since they extol the virtues of the 'scientific method', it must be jarring to support something that is inherently unfalsifiable, thus violating a fundamental tenet of a valid scientific theory....
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In the schoolbook situation, there is an entire institutional setup that supports Witzel. Therefore one has to fall back upon the 'hidden agenda' theory. Why all this histrionics? One possible answer, by Occam's Razor: to maintain the fairytale of the 'Aryan' Invasion Pipedream, which, according to one of its acolytes, posits that "tall, fair, handsome 'Aryans'" from Europe and Central Asia came "thundering down the Khyber pass in their horse-drawn chariots". And why would anybody care about this archaic detail of where Indians originally came from? What matters is who is in India now, one would think....
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During the ongoing controversy over the inaccurate, stereotyped, derogatory depiction of the culture and religion of Hindu in sixth grade textbooks in California, Professor Madhav Deshpande, an instructor of Sanskrit at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) told the Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Golden (Defending the Faith. New Battleground In Textbook Wars: Religion in History Hindu, Islamic, Jewish. WSJ, January 25th, 2006 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113815619665855532.html ) that he opposed the attempts of Hindu Americans to correct the negative coverage of their faith. His views were stated in the following words ....
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Absence of ethics in politics and political patronage are front-page news in Pennsylvania or Washington DC, but they appear to be the norm in the California State Board of Education. Several media articles have appeared about the controversy surrounding the revision of California Middle School textbooks. Few have tried to explain how a simple effort to correct errors that the SBE described as "embarrassing", could turn into such a disdainful treatment of an American community, in violation of due process and equal opportunity protections of US laws. The answer perhaps rests with Mr. Alan Bersin, Secretary of Education, Member of the Board of Trustees of Harvard University, and member of the State Board of Education. Hindu American community is outraged that their school-going children are being discriminated against. ...
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