Vamsee Juluri > Quotes

“Rebuilding India is the mandate that India might have given its new leader. But rebuilding Hindu civilization is something that every one of us must be doing,”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Hinduphobia comes from Left and Right in the US; an achievement in itself, for there is probably no other issue on which Left and Right agree in Western discourse except on bashing Hinduism.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“We have all our lives to prepare for death. In peace, we do so well; we leave our ties only when we are content, when we have fulfilled our duties and our legitimate pleasures. In war, nothing is correct, everything is out of place and time.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Saraswati's Intelligence

“Wendy Doniger, by the way, and as we shall see later in this book, compares the wanderings of the Vedic people to that of the cowboys who destroyed the Native Americans; and, for good measure, the Nazis during World War II.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Hinduism is sensibility renewing itself again and again.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“the present moment in India is not about pride and posturing, of trying to prove our past is greater than someone else's past, much less about trying to prove our religion is better than someone else's religion. It is simply about returning to the core of our civilizational self-understanding, which is to respect intelligence, and let it guide our actions and affairs.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“You are an achievement.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“We pray not for unverifiable pleasures in the afterlife. Not for material gain in this, but just for the wisdom to know happiness, light, and joy; for the wisdom to know truth.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“If you are a parent of a Hindu child, there is one more question you need to ask yourself too: if you, or your children, do not find intelligent answers for these questions, will your Hinduism still remain when they grow up, or when their children come?”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“But if the kind of things that they write about Hindus as truth were written about women, blacks, gays, Muslims, or any other community today, they would be laughed out of their offices for their bizarre 18th century racism.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“We do not locate our beginning with the birth, or death, of any one founder, real, imagined, or mythologized. We do not locate our beginning with any one place on the planet, or up in the sky. We do not really have a sense of where we are from, in the sense of a piece of land. We do not locate our beginning with any kind of a diagnostic manual of debts and deaths, nor do we enforce its meaning on us through vast bureaucracies. In”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“It maintains one shrill, moribund, position: if you are not with us, you are a fundamentalist. If you say our work is flawed and ignorant, you are a fundamentalist.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“The Onion, another magazine like the one above, publishes a bizarre, violently pornographic cartoon of Ganesha amidst an orgy of saints and deities of various faiths. It is presumably a statement against the protests ignited by a You Tube movie offensive to Muslims. What Gautama or Ganesha had to do with that, we do not know. It's an American magazine, by the way, the country whose government took forever to figure out that the cow-protecting people were their friends and not the Bin Laden-protecting regimes next door.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Violence is the foundational mythology of what was once Western, and what has become now, global modern thought.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“We have come from an intellectual tradition concerned with nature and life rather than dogma and ritual. We have come from a worldview in which the cruelty, destructiveness, and sheer unsustainability of today's world should be obvious. Yet, we do not speak, for we do not remember.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“We Hindus stand accused of being the Nazi-like conquerors of India. We Hindus stand accused of being fundamentalists--despite having assured peace to numerous minority faiths in India for centuries, and despite having supported a secular idea of a nation even after partition.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Truth, after all, was like water. It stayed true only because it could bend. But”
― Vamsee Juluri, Saraswati's Intelligence

“Hinduism perhaps is always better lived first, and then understood; like any path of wisdom and spirit. Hinduism is often described as a way of life rather than a religion, perhaps, for that reason. We do not begin with a theory or doctrine that we then try to bend the world to conform to. We are, one might say, ‘spiritual anarchists’. We are ever evolving, ever free. Our constraints on occasion have been responses to history and circumstances rather than our own effort to impose our will onto others; in our philosophy, we have no Others, no reviled category for non-believers. We can be atheists, and Hindu. We can be monotheists and polytheists. But in all our freedom, we do, still, have a sense of a center of gravity; and that is the sense of You, Alone, around which we have created all our philosophy, culture, art, science, and indeed civilization too.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“You can ignore or reject a narrative, but defying a discourse has consequences for you, usually harsh and coercive ones.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Writing Across a Cracked World: Hindu Representation and the Logic of Narrative

“Why is it that our history books do not tell us the truth of who we are and what we are?”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Western writers, scholars, artists and politicians conjured up a morbid and false fantasy about Hinduism as a violent, superstitious, and barbaric religion, and its people as evolutionary inferiors.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Mama dehi karaavalambam.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“A narrative is like a story written in sand. A discourse is like a story set in stone.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Writing Across a Cracked World: Hindu Representation and the Logic of Narrative

“we have survived and come this far not because of some brutish physical might, or capacity for cruel and annihilating destruction, but because our civilization's reverence for intelligence has underscored its attitudes to nature, culture, human agency, force, restraint, and, some might say, its destiny itself.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“God is one. We say that. And yet we say that without insisting there is only one God.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“A billion people on this earth still call God by the same names that people did thousands of years ago. What exists on this earth unchanged for that long? What religion exists on this earth for that long, when so many people have distorted religion and dragged it down from being about love and freedom to being about hatred, coercion and war? Hinduism could have been wiped out a long time ago. * But it wasn't. You are here.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“It was the intelligence, simply, of a civilization that began its days in prayer before the rising sun asking the divine not for a good kill in a hunt, not for death to enemies, not even for some mythical paradise in afterlife, but only for--intelligence.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“idiosyncrasies”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“A Hindu who knows two Indian languages or has lived in two different regions, for example, might know a little more about Hinduism's diversity than say a Hindu who knows only one.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence

“Hinduism can be about raudra, but not krodha.”
― Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the Return of Indian Intelligence