The very first day a genuine scholar sits down to check Nehruvian history-writing against the facts, the empire of the JNU professors is finished. Be… - Koenraad Elst

A prastha is an open space, a clearing in the forest where you go and settle, a “colony”. Thus, a vanaprastha, an elderly person who withdraws from society, is “one who goes and settles in the forest” or “one who has the forest as his colony”.

A historical view of caste, by contrast, concedes candidly that caste was intertwined with Hinduism for long, but equally shows that caste was initially absent and only intruded in stages. Hinduism can flourish all while letting caste wither away. That may satisfy at least the more fair-minded among Hinduism’s critics.

As everyone knows, the New York Times is a secularist, anti-Christian and pro-Israeli paper. That should give it a fair amount of common ground with the Hindu nationalists, yet in reality we find the New York Times to be as hateful in its reporting on Hindu nationalism as are more obviously hostile media emanating from Islamic or Christian-missionary circles... in the Hindu-Muslim conflict of the past decade, the New York Times has consistently supported the Muslim side and amplified all the Muslim propagandist story lines. ... Yet, when the Christian missionaries launched a slander campaign against the Hindus in the winter of 1998-99, and even when their allegations had been refuted in official investigations, the New York Times retained its usual anti-Hindu bias, effectively supporting the missionaries.