>It would have been quite a pleasure to hear some one say, "yes, there is
>a lot of garbage in Gita, but there is also a lot of good stuff in it."
>What I am reading, instead, is an effort to give divine interpretations
>to even the most outrageously offensive verses in it.
First of all, I have no intentions of pleasing or displeasing anyone including
you and myself. Absolutely there is no effort, nor was there ever any need of
effort required to give any divine interpretations, because BhagavadGita is
in itself "Song of the Divine", sung by no other than Lord Krishna Himself!
>The interpretation that the reference to "women" is to some
>pollution, the reference to vaisyas is to greed or materialism, the
>reference to sudras is to some lethargy, yes, I read these in desperate
>interpretations.
>The more outrageous the original meanings, the more divine the modern day
>interpretations!
But why? Contempt before thorough investigation is unscientific and irrational.
It is as ludicrous as one after few hundreds of centuries from now, disputes
that only women had any "fair"ness and men were totally "unfair", because in
the great age of 20th century, women were still being referred as "fairer sex"
and men were conspicuously never even once called as "fair sex" and he figured
out the archaic meaning of 20th century's word "fair" !!! The profundity of
thought, and the rich depths of the philosophy that Gita addresses can never
be accurately captured within the ambit of our limited terminology, without
patiently trying to follow all the nuances and getting atleast a glimpse of
the spirit in which it is expounded.
According to what Vyasa penned, or better Vinayaka scribbled it! -
the "Sudra, Vaisya, women" were not decided by birth but by actions and
temperaments. But the contorted practice of casteism is the creativity of the
latter times' selfish monsters. Vyasa himself was son of a fisher-woman and how
could he calumnate a sect of people ?
It is only a tribute to the amount of wool-gathering the words like
"women, vysya and Sudra" accumulated later on and continuing till now, which
is so pervasively deprecating that, it is no wonder that the original meaning
of those words sound like jarringly divine interpretations!
Regards,
-Srinivas Nagulapalli