Word: indianism
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...little sign of taking hold again. Indeed, the idea that a religion associated with passivity and otherworldly mysticism might offer a solution to their problems would seem hopelessly quaint to many people in Bihar and other troubled parts of the Buddha's homeland. As a friend once told the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, the Buddha was one of those "luxuries India could not afford." Mishra, however, has decided that the opposite is true: that the Buddha still matters to the India of interminable job lines and violent crime. That's the message of his latest book, An End to Suffering...
...Step One of Mishra's effort to rehabilitate the Buddha for his homeland is to rediscover Prince Siddhartha?the man who became the most famous Indian of all time while meditating under a fig tree in Bihar. Going back to the earliest Buddhist documents, Mishra recreates the scene in eastern India in the 6th century B.C., when a young aristocrat who has abandoned his wife and fortune, stumbles through Bihar searching for a way to end misery in the world. Restless, curious, lonely and sometimes arrogant, Mishra's Buddha is an ordinary man confronting problems that face ordinary...
...emphasis on curbing desire, might be an answer to India's problems?but nothing in his book offers much hope that the religion will make a large-scale comeback in its native land. What Mishra does point out with great clarity is the colossal new challenge that faces the Indian state?the hunger for a better life now unleashed among millions of Indians, who will never again be satisfied with the way things used...
...problems is that if you tell untrained people, 'Listen?there's a tsunami coming,' half of them go down to the beach to see what a tsunami looks like." PHIL MCFADDEN, chief scientist at Geoscience Australia, an agency that monitors earthquakes, on the difficulties of issuing tsunami warnings in Indian Ocean countries...
...look at Indian history, there has always been a division in our society. The present divide between rich and poor is similar to the caste system. Partly because of the Indian government's policy of indifference toward population control, the educated rich and the middle class are practicing birth control more than the uneducated poor. As a result we find the poor are growing faster in number than the rich or middle classes. It is unfortunate that the Indian government has yet to develop a policy of one child per family, which would save this country from a disastrous population...