François Gautier Quotes

I have never hidden behind a pseudonym to say what I think. I have been one of the rare western journalists to defend Hindus. I have done it openly, in my own name, with dedication and courage and that has cost me a lot.

When I first went there I discovered an entirely new approach of looking at life. It was as if I had sudden awakened from deep slumber.

Kalaripayat, literally "the way of the battlefield, still survives in Kerala, where it is often dedicated to Mahakali. The Kalari grounds are usually situated near a temple, and the pupils, after having touched the feet of the master, saluted the ancestors and bowed down to the Goddess, begin the lesson. Kalari trainings have been codified for over 3000 years and nothing much has changed. The warming-up is essential and demands great suppleness. Each movement is repeated several times, facing north, east, south and west, till perfect loosening is achieved. The young pupils pass on to the handling of weapons, starting with the "Silambam", a short stick made of extremely hard wood, which in the olden times could effectively deal with swords. The blows are hard and the parade must be fast and precise, to avoid being hit on the fingers! They continue with the swords, heavy and dangerous, even though they are not sharpened any more, as they are used . without guard or any kind of body protection; they whirl, jump and parry, in an impressive ballet. Young, fearless girls fight with enormous knives, bigger than their arms and the clash of irons is echoed in the ground. The session ends with the big canes, favourite weapons of the Buddhist traveller monks, which they used during their long journey towards China to scare away attackers.

Then, one of the devotees quietly started humming a bhajan, maybe as ancient as the city of Kashi itself:"Om namah Shivaya, Om namah Shivaya "; and soon all of us joined him softly, so as not to break the magic spell of the silent silver night. After a moment, Sri Sri closed his eyes and seeing him totally absorbed, perhaps in some mystical realm, touched our soul as nothing else could. There was an atmosphere of stillness and serenity. In a corner, a girl started shedding quiet tears of ecstasy an elderly man joined his hands in a silent prayer, a wordless gesture of deeply felt gratitude; everyone shone with intense inner joy, bliss and wonder. As for me, to my surprise, the constant chattering in my mind had become quiet; my soul soared high in the air. Only this perfect moment WAS.

Being married to a "daughter of India" is a natural complement of my being in this country for 30 years. My roots are very much in this country, even though I remain a Westerner.

American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer was able to prove in 1991 that the majority of archaeological sites of the so-called Harappan (or Dravidian) civilisation were not situated on the ancient bed of the Indus river, as first thought, but on the Saraswati. Another archaeologist , Paul-Henri Francfort, Chief of a franco-american mission (Weiss, Courty, Weterstromm, Guichard, Senior, Meadow, Curnow), which studied the Saraswati region at the beginning of the nineties, found out why the Saraswati had ‘disappeared’ : « around 2200 B.C., he writes, an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and famine » (Evidence for Harappan irrigation system in Haryana and Rajasthan -Eastern Anthropologist 1992). Thus around this date, most inhabitants moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and Sutlej rivers.

Indians today live in a country where mullahs can preach secession, while Hindu gurus revered by millions of Hindus are the target of ridicule, media attacks and police assaults.

Finally, Westernisation through television and advertisements, is sweeping across India, and this may be the greatest danger, as westernisation has killed the souls of many Asian countries.

At the end of the interview, I was won over and I understood that this man, who never puts himself forward and seemed most humble, had cultivated kindness and compassion since his early childhood, tirelessly drawing from the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.

In Tripura, for instance, there were no Christians at independence, the maharaja of the state was a Hindu and there were innumerable temples all over the State. But from 1950, Christian missionaries (with Nehru’s blessings) went into the deep forests of Tripura and started converting the Kukis. Today, according to official figures, there are 120.000 Christians in Tripura, a 90% increase since 1991. The figures are even more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there were only 1710 Christians in 1961, but 115000 today, as well as 700 churches! What to say of Mizoram and Nagaland, where the entire local population is Christian! The amount of money being by poured by Christians into the North-East is staggering: The Saint Paul’s school of Tripura, for instance, gets an 80 lakhs endowment per semester. Which Hindu school can match this ? No country in the world would allow this. France, for instance, has a full-blown Minister who is in charge of hunting down "sects". And by sects, it is meant anything which does not belong to the great Christian family, particularly if it has Hindu "pagan" overtones…

We know that the Greek Demetrios Galianos had translated the Bhagavad-Gita and French philosopher and historian Roger-Pol Droit writes in his classic “L’oubli de l’Inde” (India forgotten) “that there is absolutely not a shadow of a doubt that the Greeks knew all about Indian philosophy”. Alain Danielou quotes Clement of Alexandria who admitted that “we the Greeks have stolen to the Barbarians their philosophy”. And even William Jones, the XVIIIth century linguist of British India, noted that “the analogies between Greek Pythagorean philosophy and the Sankhya school, are very obvious”. German philosopher Shroeder had also remarked in his book “Pythagoras und die Inder” that nearly all the philosophical and mathematical doctrines attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India, particularly the Sankhya school.

There must be at least three hundred foreign correspondents posted in Delhi, which should vouch for a variety of opinion. But if you give them a subject to write about - any subject - say Ayodhya, the RSS, fanatic Hindus, secularism, or Sonia Gandhi, and you will get two hundred and ninety eight articles which will say more or less the same thing, even if it is with different styles, different illustrations and various degrees of professionalism. This is not to say that there are no sincere western journalists who write serious stories which do homage to India’s greatness and immense culture; but they are usually the exception.

This year, most of the sources have dried in Almora and there is hardly any water, when the summer is still far away. “It’s because of Global Warming”, we often hear. There is some truth in that, but what our friends do not say, is that unknown to the Indian general public, there has happened over the years a massive deforestation of the Himalayas. In Almora for instance, gone long ago are the oak and indigenous forests and in the twelve years I have come, I have not seen any afforestation done in the surrounding hills. Even worse, the locals could not care less ! Not a day passes by in the area where we live, without one of the few pine trees left being surreptitiously felled down and even the poor mimosas do not escape the villagers’s wrath. “It’s because they feel the forest belongs to the Government and not to them”, says a local NGO. Is it ? But we have witnessed the same phenomenon in Auroville, Tamil Nadu: every time the local villagers are angry after the foreigners there, they cut the trees planted for their benefit ! No doubt the Government of India, which allowed the massive deforestation of the country after Independence, is the main culprit; but in the Kumaon hills, there are also literally thousands of NGO’s, doing woman empowerment, village empowerment, this empowerment, that empowerment, this khadi, that khadi… But bare for two or three of them such as Chirag, Arohi, or NTGC, nobody does tree planting. “It’s the Forest Department’s fault, they are too corrupt”, many NGO’s claim…

"Muslims are bullies and Hindus cowards," Mahatma Gandhi once said. He was right -- at least about Hindus.

SRINAGAR, May 30, Election Day. It's a small Hindu temple on the banks of the river Jhelum, lost amongst the hundred and one mosques of Srinagar. Its entrance is heavily guarded by BSF forces and it is protected by sandbags on all sides, as it has been hit recently by a rocket fired by militants. Inside, a handful of Kashmiri Pandits are still trying to preserve this sacred place, where a natural lingam is said to have emerged 3000 years ago and where their forefathers have worshipped for 20 generations. "We were once 30,000 in this district of Srinagar," remembers Shyam, a Hindu priest, "but today we are only two hundred. All our brothers and sisters had to flee. Our houses were burnt, our women raped, our sons killed". Shyam and his friends offer us a cup of tea and some biscuits and we leave this temple which seems to be doomed, wondering why nobody ever reports about it.