The Hindu View of life

Below are some important quotes from the book 'The Hindu View of Life' By Dr S Radhakrishnan, the first President of India and a renowned scholar and philosopher

The material of this slim book was first delivered as a series of lectures in 1926 at Oxford.

pg 4
While fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion from another, Hinduism sets itself no such limits. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer experssion to inward realisation. It is an insight onto the nation of reality (darshana) and / or the experinece of reality (anubhava).

pg7
The Hindu attitude to the Vedas is one of trust tempered by criticism, trust because the beliefs and forms which helped our fathers are likely to be of use to us also; criticism because however valuable the testimony of past ages maybe it cannot deprive the presentt age its right toinquire and sift the evidence.

pg9
Hindusim is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, subtly unified mass of spiritual thought and realisation. Its tradition of the godward endeavour of the human spirit has been continuously enlarging through the ages.

If a tradition does not grow, it only means that its followers have become spiritually dead.

pg 10
Contact with the highly civilised Dravidians led to the transformation of vedism into a theistic religion

pp11-12
If religion is experience, the question arises, what is it that is experienced? No two religious systems seem to agree in their answers to this question. .........Religious experience is not the pure nvarnished presentment of the real in itself, butis the preentment of the real already infleunced by the ideas and prepossesions of the percieving mind.

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Gaza numbers

Escape Escape to where the mind does not count To when a smile is in tune To where mixing is matching And forest sounds talk to river gurgles And numbers fade and flow and fly.

Leaving Home - a documentary on the Delhi based band, Indian Ocean

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A Critique of Randomised Control Trials in Poverty Alleviation Last week, Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the Nobel for Economics for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” and for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. This experimental approach is based on so called Radomised Control Trials. Simply put, in such experiments, a randomly selected group of individuals (randomization is a method of removing bias) receive an intervention whose efficacy is being tested. Changes that result in the conditions of this random experiment group is compared with those in another ‘similar’ group of individuals (referred to as a ‘control group’) that was not provided the intervention. The difference in outcomes is directly attributed to the intervention. The RCT as a scientific research method is primarily widely practiced in clinical research to test the efficacy and safety of new pharmaceutical products/tr...

'People-work'

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