BHAGAVAD GITA, AGAIN

Ancient wisdom needs modern scrutiny

While I was often attacked for my stance on Bhagavad Gita, the recent podcast by Swami Revatikaanta reaches a new low in these attacks. It is not just the humiliating and patronizing tone of his attack (I speak of things about which I don’t know anything, and Swami ends with an invitation to participate in his course to learn more…). Swami shows a clip from my improvised podcast with Piers Morgan[1]; here is a brief résumé of my written argumentation:

“Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has angered many Indian movie-goers due to the reference of Bhagavad Gita during an intimate scene. Many have taken to Twitter, wondering how the censor board cleared the scene. A statement from Save Culture, Save India Foundation said: ‘We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist. A scene in the movie shows a woman makes a man read Bhagavad Gita aloud while getting over him and doing sexual intercourse.’[2] My reaction to this reaction is exactly the opposite one: Bhagavad Gita advocates a horrible ethics of military slaughter as an act of highest duty, so we should protest that a gentle act of passionate love-making is besmirched by a spiritualist obscenity. In order to find our way in the ongoing mess, we should do something like this: bring out the horror which sustains the ‘spiritualization’ of carnal passion.”