Of people prancing about in Khaki shorts

As I had promised, this post will be about indpride.com, a site which by its name ostensibly claims to be about Indian Pride (a good thing) but is actually a chauvinistic Hindu Pride site spewing hate-filled nonsense (a bad thing). As a secular Hindu,(something that the creators of this site do not like) this pisses me off no end. I’d like to limit my views about this blot on the internet to a single post, but I doubt that I can. The sheer amount of crap on this website is mind boggling, and the creators of this website, or as I prefer to call them, jackasses, have done a fiendishly perfect job of mixing truth with half truth with fecal matter.

I will start at the “Did you know” page. These pages are usually fun, because they contain stuff that I usually do not know and knowledge is a good thing. But this “Did you know” page, like the rest of the page contains crap of epic proportions. The dissection of the crap follows:

India gave to the world the days of the week and their names. The names prevalent in India like Ravivaar, Somvaar, Mangalvaar, etc. were adopted by the west in the same sequence and were directly translated to other languages like English where you have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. 

Wrong.
Sunday The name comes from the Latin dies solis, meaning "sun's day": the name of a pagan Roman holiday.
Monday
The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon monandaeg, "the moon's day". This second day was sacred to the goddess of the moon.
Tuesday
This day was named after the Norse god Tyr.

Go here for the rest.

Pandit Onkar Nath, the great musician, appealed to all Gujarati young men as far back as 1949 to join RSS. When RSS workers needed some money to liberate Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Lata Mangeshkar gladly gave a charity performance for them in Pune.

Fascinating? Um no. Interesting? Uh, not quite. I have no clue why this is up here. Here however is what I do know about the RSS, they wear dorky Khaki shorts and march around with sticks and stuff, they have way too much political influence and they object to Valentine’s day (The last is due to envy at other people having better social skills than them, I suppose).

Christmas is not the celebration of the birth date of Christ. Different researchers place different dates for the birth of Christ but there is virtual agreement among scholars that December 25th is not the birth date of Jesus Christ, but an annual pagan festival celebrated in honor of the sun which was too deeply entrenched in popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence. The pagan festival with it's [sic] riot and merrymaking was so popular that Christians were glad of an excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit and in manner. During the first three centuries we find no trace of any feast for the birth of Christ.

Again, what is this doing on indianpride.com? They decided that they’d have a party on the twenty fifth of December. You have a problem with it why?

An intensive research conducted by Zenab Banu of Gujarat on the cause and effect of communal riots since 18th century (which was a topic of her Ph.D. thesis), wherein she had analyzed and documented major Hindu-Muslim riots spread over 250 years, shows that in over 95 % cases the riots were initiated by Muslims. Her thesis has been published in a book entitled 'Politics of Communalism' (1978). 

There are fifty-seven nations in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Not one is yet a democracy.

Well I suppose that having dissed Christianity, the natural segue was to start dissing Islam. And since this is a right wing Hindutva site, Islam certainly has them getting their panties all in a bunch.

St. Francis Xavier, after whom many educational institutions are named in India, feverishly declared, “When I have finished baptising the people, I order them to destory [sic] the huts in which they keep their idols; and I have them break the statues of their idols into tiny pieces, since they are now Christians. I could never come to an end describing to you the great consolation which fills my soul when I see idols being destroyed by the hands of those who had been idolaters,” (from The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, 1993, pp 117-8).

What does this teach us boys and girls? Religious extremism is bad. Unless it’s us. In that case it is right and good.

After partition, when the Maharaja of Kashmir was harbouring the idea of retaining Kashmir as an independent kingdom, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had sent Guru Golwalkar of the RSS to convince the Maharaja to join India. After discussions with Guruji, the Maharaja was convinced and agreed to sign the Instrument of Accession to India. 

This certainly rings true. I’m sure the fact that the Pakistani army was invading had nothing to do with the ruler’s willingness to sign. It was the sight of Whatshisname prancing about in his shorts that convinced the poor Maharaja.

When the Europeans newly arrived in America in 1492, they took the natives to be devils and for about forty years it was legal to hunt down the natives like animals. It was only in 1530 A.D. that the Pope relented and declared that American Indians were human!

Just to keep with the theme of Indian Pride I suppose. I guess that others’ acts of inhumanity make us more humane. ”We’re bad but they’re nasty.”

In 1895, eight years before the Wright brothers flew their first plane, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade and his wife gave a thrilling demonstration flight on the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai. Mr. Talpade, an erudite Sanskrit scholar, constructed his aeroplane named 'Marutsakha' based on the description of Vimanas available in the Vedas.

The theory of the Ion Engine has been credited to Robert Goddard, long recognized as the father of Liquid-fuel Rocketry. It is claimed that in 1906, long before Goddard launched his first modern rocket, his imagination had conceived the idea of an Ion rocket. However, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade used an Ion Engine to take his plane to a height of 1500 ft. in 1895, many years before Goddard. 

(In my best Darth Vader voice) Impressive. I’d just like, you know, that little thing they call PROOF. Incidentally I have teleporter made from a cereal bar and a pair of dirty socks that I’m looking to sell. Email me.

Only a few years ago, the Chinese discovered some Sanskrit documents in Lhasa, Tibet and sent them to the University of Chandigarh to be translated. Dr. Ruth Reyna of the university said that the documents contain directions for building interstellar spaceships! The Chinese announced that they were including certain parts of the documents for study in their space program.

Um waiter, I’d like to have what that dude over there is smoking.

When the city of Mohenjodaro was excavated by archaeologists, they found skeletons just lying in the streets, some of them holding hands, as if some great doom had suddenly overtaken them. These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on a par with those found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ancient cities whose brick and stonewalls have literally been vitrified, that is-fused together, can be found in India, Ireland, Scotland, France, Turkey and other places. There is no logical explanation for the vitrification of stone forts and cities, except from an atomic blast.

A double order. That there chemical is good stuff.
Honestly even if this were true, do you really feel the need to be proud of the fact that we might have invented the Nuclear Holocaust? “Huzzah, we learnt to blow up our planet three millennia before the Americans and Russians.”

The shrouded Qaabaa at Mecca, the holiest shrine for all Muslims of the world, was once a temple containing 360 different deities which were the object of reverence and worship. Acting upon the orders of Allah, the almighty, Prophet Mohammed waged a jihad or holy war against the worshippers of these deities to gain control over Mecca, after which he destroyed the icons and slaughtered the idolaters. 

Refer comments about looking good by contrast.

Those communities among the Hindus who are called Bhangi, Mehtar, Chookad, Hela, Valmik or Halaal Khor, etc. are actually descendants of brave Kshatriyas, who, inspite of many atrocities by tyrannical Muslim rulers, had refused to accept conversion to Islam. The Muslim tyrants, with a view to humiliate them to such an extent that they would forsake their faith and accept Islam, forced them into the work of carrying the night soil of the begums, keeps, relations, courtiers, etc. 

The horror! Making descendents of the proud “upper” castes do the work reserved for the true “lower” castes. Woohoo, hypocrisy makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

When the World Parliament of Religions passed a resolution a few years ago proclaiming that all religions were various pathways to One Ultimate Reality and called for unity and brotherhood of all religions, the Vatican came out with a prompt rejection of the view and emphatically proclaimed that Roman Catholicism was the only true religion and others could not be accepted to be true.

Yeah dudes, you convinced me way back that Christians aren’t nice folks. You’re now preaching to the choir.

In a recent report, UNESCO pointed out that out of 128 countries where Jews lived before Israel was created in 1948, only one, India, did not persecute them and allowed them to prosper and practice Judaism in peace.

True, probably because there are probably a hundred Jews in the country and you couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm in your shorts-clad hooligans to assault them.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and also in North America. 

Again, and this pisses you off why?

Christianity always associated bathing with vulgarity, lascivious thoughts and bathing in public baths, rivers and lakes, even during summer months, as sinful. St. Agnes never took a bath. St. Marget never washed herself. Pope Clement III issued an edict forbidding bathing or even wetting once [sic] face on Sunday. Since 18th century nuns were asked to take bath with their robes on. In 1736, in Baden, Germany the authorities issued a warning to students against the vulgar, dangerous and shocking practice of bathing.

Yup, youve convinced me, Christians are nasty…AND stinky. And if I read this correctly, um...are you endorsing pubic nudity? So we're decided then, YES to public nudity, NO to Valentine's day.

This was quite an effort. Some of the points I do not discuss because they are correct or at least I think they are (What that means is that I’m too lazy to hunt further for contradictions).

I’ll come back to this glorious bit of the internet in the near future. But expect my next post to rant about people who do not FUCKING flush after they finish using the toilet.