From ‘Holy Warriors. A Journey into the heart of indian fundamentalism’ by Edna Fernandes

In 1750, the Afghans swept in to capture [Kashmir]……It was said that they cut off heads with the abandon of a child plucking flowers from a stem. It was of little consequence to them that the majority of those they killed were fellow Muslims. In their desperation, the Kashmiris turned to ….Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh ….. accompanied by Raja Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu, his forces galloped in to defeat the Afghans…..

The Sikhs viewed the kingdom as strictly business …….And like different grades of cattle, the Kashmiris had different prices on their heads. ‘Murder of a native by a Sikh is punished by fine to the government of from sixteen to twenty rupees, of which four rupees are paid to the family of the deceased if a Hindu; and two rupees if he was a Mohommeden.’

Saint Francis Xavier ……….. the ultimate crusader, the man who brought the Inquisition to India….. the blunt instrument of Christian fundamentalism and an institution of terror that left scars imprinted on Goan society to this day. Its aim was to stop new converts to Christianity from slipping into the ways of their old religion ……stripping out the Hindu ways and replacing it with a pure, unadulterated Catholicism. It was a brutal process. Yet centuries on, the majority of the ancestors of these converts venerated Francis Xavier and loved him still.

Mario had that very Goan temperament of vivaciousness underscored with a melancholy brooding. It was very Latin and yet very Indian at the same time.

[Mario Miranda]….said …… ‘….What Goa needs is a Tennessee Williams to write it all down, about a centuries old way of life that is collapsing in our very lifetime. Goans are a vanishing tribe. I tell you, in forty years, the old Goan identity will not exist.’

……some of these early Jesuits relied on coercion, iconoclasm and in the final resort the violence of the Inquisition, to force Goans onto the righteous path …..

….. [the Nagas] ….. are a handsome people, and gentle in nature, despite their fearsome reputation as warriors. They have none of the typical India garrulousness, and a restrained dignity that reminded me a lot of the people I’d met during a visit to Mongolia ten years ago.

‘If we worship in the temple, he would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals, that would irritate him. If we worship cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her. He was tooth and nail opposed to our way of life in all aspects – religious, cultural, social etc. He had imbibed that hostility to the very core. His number also was not small. Next to the Hindu’s, his was the largest.’

-          M. S. Golwalkar, writing about the Muslim in India in his book Bunch of Thoughts, which is widely seen as a mission statement for Hindutva.

Former RSS leader M.S.Golwalkar, a black-bearded yogi known simply as Guruji, said in his writings that Hitler was an inspiration:

‘To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.’

From ‘At Every Breath, A Teaching. Stories about the life and teachings of Swami Chinmayananda’ by Rudite Emir

Radhika ….had brought her small infant to Swamiji and asked “How do I teach him to become a good human being?”

“You don’t have to mold him or teach him anything,” was Swamiji’s reply. “You just keep improving as a person, and he’ll be fine.”

“There is God. There is no doubt about it. Yes, I have seen Him, but not in form. God is not a form. God is a state of consciousness. In order for the average man to conceive of the idea, a form is given. Our national flag is not the form of our country. It represents our country. Similarly, God in various forms, whether it is the cross or the crescent of Krishna, represents a state of consciousness to be reached.”

“When unwanted thoughts come to torture you, don’t try to hold them back. Don’t suppress them! Instead, shine a very bright spotlight on them. They will shy away from so much attention and scurry away out of view!”

“Soar beyond the mind,” ………. Don’t try to make a dark room bright by shoveling out darkness with a shovel, he said. Instead, simply bring in the light.

“Its very difficult to control one’s senses: seeing, hearing, touch … Even one single sense is very difficult to control, even one sense at a time. Look, sex involves all the senses at once: touch, sight, smell ….thats why it’s the last one to go. It’s natural that that’s the most difficult urge to master.”

He said that when the mind grows sluggish in this way, the seeker must give it some tapas [austerity practice]: deprive it of food or give it a cold shower. The mind will straighten out and get back into shape, he said…..

From ‘the art of thinking clearly’ by rolf dobelli

….cheerfulness – according to many studies, such as those conducted by Harvard’s Dan Gilbert – is largely  a personalily trait that remains constant throughout life. Or as social scientists Lykken and Tellegen starkly suggest, ‘trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller.’

W. Somerset Maugham …. ‘If 50 million peope say something foolish, it is still foolish.’

Warren Buffett ….. ‘What the human being is best at doing, is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.’

….old adage …. ‘ Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.’

‘When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra.’ Which means… investigate the most likely …..before you start diagnosing exotic …….

‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,’ wrote Blaise Pascal.

Mark Twain: ‘If you have nothing to say, say nothing.’

Daniel J Boorstin ….. ‘The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.’

‘If your only tool is a hammer all your problems will be nails,’ said Mark Twain…..

From ‘The Yogi. Portraits of Swami Vishnu-Devananda’ by Gopala Krishna

Don’t try to suppress the sexual feeling ……But we can sublimate it……. When you do asanas, when you do pranayama, when you do japa regularly and with the right diet, without onions and garlic and certain roots which over stimulate the nerves, then sublimation will take place little by little. That’s when the energy starts moving to the upper chakras (psychic energy centers) and reaches the brain. This same sexual energy will now form a creative force, a positive spiritual force. That’s why you see halos around the heads of sages and saints; it is the ojas shakti emanation. If a person has even partial control of the sexual energy, his face is different. He will never get wrinkles. The skin gets very dry and wrinkled when too much of the energy is wasted and made gross in the sexual act.

…..yoga says that flexibility of the spine and flexibility of the mind are interrelated. If you keep the spinal column flexible, you’ll have a flexible mind ……

The Science of Seven Cultures

for Quick Evolution of the Human Soul

by

H. H. Sri Swami Sivananda

….Health Culture

Eat moderately. Take light and simple food. Offer it to God before you eat. Have a balanced diet.

Avoid chillies, garlic, onions, tamarind etc. as far as possible. Give up tea, coffee, smoking, betels, meat and wine entirely.

Fast on ekadasi days (once a fortnight). Take milk, fruit and roots only. Practice yogic asanas or physical exercise for fifteen to thirty minutes. Take a long walk or play some vigorous game daily.

Energy Culture

Observe silence for two hours daily and four to eight hours on Sundays.

Observe celibacy according to your age and circumstances. Restrict the indulgence to once a month. Decrease it gradually to once a year. Finally take a vow of abstinence for life.

From ‘Heights of Madness. One woman's journey in pursuit of a secret war’ by Myra MacDonald

“India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay”

-          Shashi Tharoor in The Great Indian Novel

“This world was more wonderful for than I had ever known before.

And I seemed to grow greater myself from the mere fact of having seen it. Having once seen that, how could I ever be little again?”

-          British explorer Francis Younghusband on the Karakoram

I thought of Vikram Singh, of how I had gone to see him seeking the sordid drama of war and had come away instead thinking of the ghosts he talked about with quiet dignity. I remembered a poem I had read many years before by D. H. Lawrence about how he had seen a snake in Sicily and foolishly failing to respect its beauty and its power, chased it away. “And I have something to expiate”, he wrote. “A pettiness”.

Crows, considered auspicious in Hindu mythology, are believed to be the only birds present at Creation. They are the carriers of omens, seers of the future. They know the secrets of immortality and of hell. When the Siachen war started, they were still there, for soldiers told me that the only living creature they saw during their long, lonely months were crows.

This once undiscovered place had acquired the dejection of tourist towns that are unsure how to behave when the tourists are not there. It felt lonely and abandoned. Youths in cheap jackets and jeans wandered aimlessly in small groups, occasionally stopping to try to speak to me with an irritating sense of entitlement.

The helicopter was so tiny that is seemed surprised to be in the air …..