Salute to Malala for taking a bullet in her head. Threats of that bullet heading her way had been lingering for years. Kudos to her family, who felt that since she was doing the right thing — writing about life under the rule of Pakistani Taliban and campaigning for the education of girls, something perhaps the government of Pakistan should have supported — for standing by her political aspirations.

The bullet that hit her head has missed the bigger point Malala was making — the courage to stand by her convictions. Even as her father waits for her to regain consciousness in a military hospital, he said the shooting will not stop Malala or him from doing what they have been.

Shooting Malala goes not only against the law of the land in a nation struggling to come to terms with state terrorism that has now imploded and is now targeting its own people, but against Islam itself. “We will focus on our work with more strength,” Malala’s father Ziauddin told Reuters. “If all of us die fighting, we will still not leave this work.” Now we know where Malala gets her rebellious streak from.

This, dear readers, is the power of faith — this is faith. It goes beyond any religion, belief system, cult, creed, gender. It has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with its deeper, inner workings. To me, Malala is not only the voice but the act of spirituality, she is a greater Muslim than all the Taliban put together can ever aspire to be.

Over the next few days I will be tracking Malala’s recovery on my Twitter handle @gchikermane. Do join in. And if you believe in prayers, this is the time to direct them for her recovery.

The Malala story:

The New York Times: I want an access to the world of knowledge: Malala. An amazing insight into her work.

The Dawn: Those who really deserve condemnation are us Pakistanis as a people. I apologise to Malala for a society who has forgotten to apologise. Half of it is busy frantically convoluting scenarios to explain away this cowardly act and hold on to the delusions upon which they construct their politics and fire their oh-so-revolutionary rhetoric; while the other half, like me, are sinking (or being sunk) into a sticky puddle of apathy and cynicism. Both are a far cry from what Malala was. Nay, is!

The Guardian: Malala Yousafzai: Pakistan Taliban causes revulsion by shooting girl who spoke out. Attempt to kill activist Malala Yousafzai, 14, could be ‘watershed’ moment that turns public tide against militants and extremism.

Huffington Post: Malala Yousufzai, Pakistani Teen Activist, Shooting Sparks Outrage.

The Telegraph: Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old who stood up to Taliban thugs, is a rare beacon of hope in Pakistan.

The Dawn: “No matter where the terrorists may escape, we will bring them to justice,” said interior minister Rehman Malik. “We have identified the gang which carried out the attack (on Malala Yousafzai) … and we also know when the terrorists arrived in Swat.”

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” Albert Einstein wrote in this highly-prized January 3, 1954 letter to Eric Gutkind in response to his book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. “No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

The enthusiasm with which this idea has been hijacked by people who have gloriously worn the crown of protecting this great faith to push their retrograde and outlived political agendas, is unbelievable. Such actions belong to those who have little or nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with power grabbing, currently through a headline-hunting media. The good news is that the global press has lost interest. The bad news is that preventing the film from reaching our terminals and iPads, India is, once again, playing communal politics and leading this onslaught on freedom.

Muslims, who cry that not only the Prophet’s face has been shown (not allowed under Islam), he has been depicted as a thuggish womaniser, and so the 55-year-old Egyptian-American filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula must be killed, need to get real. “I issue a fatwa and call on the Muslim youth in America and Europe to do this duty, which is to kill the director, the producer and the actors and everyone who helped and promoted the film,” Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, a Lebanese cleric said.

Coming 23 years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa that Salman Rushdie be executed because his book, The Satanic Verses was “blasphemous” and seven years after the Prophet’s cartoons in a Danish Newspaper and the resultant furor, there seem to be larger forces at play behind Islamic fatwas that meet the eye. So, on the one side we have a filmmaker whose creative effort has been to provoke. On the other, a  reaction that’s brazenly out of proportion to the alleged “insult”. Caught in the crossfire are the rest of us.

Nakoula is clearly a mischief-maker. That he wasn’t aware of what his film would do can’t be accepted — just as free speech is an idea we fight for, there is no way he wouldn’t have known the repercussions and the international fame it would have brought to him and his preposterous film. However much I detest his film, Nakoula must get international protection.

But Salman Rushdie is as legitimate an author as can be. Before even beginning to shrug him and his work off, fence-sitters must read this autobiographical excerpt on how he lived through the deplorable and barbaric fatwa imposed on him by Khomeini. There is no justification, whatsoever, for such a fatwa. In fact, there is no justification on smothering any idea, howsoever irritating it be. On the other side, this one fatwa has contributed more to the rise of anti-Islamic ideas and virtually desecrated the religion than any number of books, cartoons and films ever can hope to. It has given the impression — faithfully being accelerated today — that Islam is a religion of violence, it is intolerant.

None of which is true. It is simply that vested interests have taken a narrow and conservative view of the religion. This view has now got political legitimacy in Islamic nations from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iran and Saudi Arabia. And it is not that they are only targeting other faiths — the status of women in these countries is unequal, if not outrageous. The centuries-ago, warlike context of the creation of Islam has been transposed on a time when religion itself is getting outdated.

Neither Nakoula, nor his mischief, nor fatwas are going to end — the fruits of instant fame are just to ripe to be avoided. Religious fundamentalism is on the rise and will continue to flower as one government after another — with India leading the brigade — cows down before vested interests in the name of security, growth, emancipation, upliftment, votes. At a policy level, religious fundamentalism is going to be a major challenge before man — how do deal with a fuzzy thing called faith without hurting a tangible idea called body.

But evolution will not stop simply because of fame-seekers or blasphemy-victims. Progress through science, technology and social institutions that protect individual rights is the new dynamic, the change-agent — the rajasic surge of humans. In this evolution, religion is a static dogma, holding people back — the tamasic retreat of nature that refuses to change. At some point, religion will have to embrace destiny and commit suicide. Until then, it will remain fragile.

Let’s smother every new thought-shoot
Ideas are our biggest enemy
Heads carry that virus — off with them

Let’s kill
So our masters get legitimacy
Let no death pass without maximum impact

Let no silly ideal
Of any dumb religion
Come in the way of our metals

Let’s kill Americans, Indians, Indonesians
Let’s decimate Hindus, Muslims, Christians
If needed, let’s burn civilisation in the name of our god

Let no shred of reason or tendril of love
Block our lofty sojourn
Towards complete annihilation

Let’s go on and on and on
Until all sights, sounds, senses
Are reflections solely of our beliefs

Let us then rest
In the kingdom of our god
But keep weapons well-oiled — the enemy lies within

—

From Bombay to Benghazi, 26/11 to 9/11, religion to race, discourse by death is becoming the new medium of protest. On the 11th anniversary of September 11, it is disturbing to see how we are taking violence of the malevolent in stride. Unlike freedom fighters, whose inner spirit was guided by a sense of something larger than life, religion-based violence has little to do with ideals. It is the crude hijack of attention by vested interests willing to kill to make a political statement. This must end.

So must religion.

Yesterday, a set of seven books landed on my desk. Targeted at the young, they are positioned as an introduction to learning the language. Broken into three parts, this set looks promising enough for me to finally take the plunge into the world of Sanskrit. The first part (Sanskrit is Fun is in three volumes) takes us till sentence construction. The second (The Story of Rama is in two volumes) and third (The Stories of Krishna) are in two parts each. Here, storytelling is merged into learning the language. You can find all seven books on this badly-designed page.

“By the time learners have completed these books it is expected they would have a good basic grasp of the Sanskrit language, its vocabulary, structure and grammar,” says Satya Vrat Shastri, honorary professor at the Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies at JNU. “These books may well dispel the notion that Sanskrit is a difficult language.”

My lessons begin tomorrow.

I’m clearly destined to learn this sacred language. Two days ago, this delightful piece landed on my Twitter. In Why I’m Studying Sanskrit, Justin Erik Halldór Smith talks about his adventures in learning this “month-long ultra-intensive spoken Sanskrit course at the University of Heidelberg”. His treatment of the subject is worthy of a person schooled in the guru-shishya parampara.

“Only in India will a Western philosopher find a complete and autonomous counterpart of his own tradition,” he wrote. “And yet, I have colleagues in Canada and America who still believe that there is no philosophy in India, that speculation about truth and being in India is merely superstition. In order to eradicate their ignorance, the West needs philosophers who are mediators. The West needs philosophers who are competent in both traditions. I would like to be such a philosopher.”

There is clearly a mantric quality to this language — you only need to listen to a pundit reciting shlokas correctly to feel the words move within you, become you. When done with correct intonation, I find the result very often to be something spiritual, they touch something deep within me. As a scientific language, the language carries a precision that goes beyond words. And spiritually, it towers over all.

“The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the development of language,” Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Secret of the Veda. “Even in its outward features it is less fixed than any classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of forms and inflexions; it is fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use of cases and tenses. And on its psychological side it has not yet crystallised, is not entirely hardened into the rigid forms of intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi is still a living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is not yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent and former of ideas. It carries within it the memory of its roots, is still conscient of its own history.”

If you want to understand this spiritual quality of the language, listen to some chants at Vedavichara to know how deep the words can sink. Warning: if it’s pop music you’re searching for or even melody, stay away; if it is a soul-stirring recital of mantras with qualities that go beyond the mind, this is your destination.

And yet, why is Sanskrit is close to extinction, with a few brave scholars still studying, researching or living this sacred language? Politics could be the reason. As the transfer of power moved from the entrenched to the downtrodden, and perhaps as a rebellion to the atrocities of the past that limited the language of the few, by the few and for the few, it lost its contact with the soul of India. Millennia later, the language is paying the price for its hijack.

In his outstanding treatise The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (you can read Chapter 1 here), Columbia professor of south Asian studies and former professor of Sanskrit Sheldon Pollock argues that Sanskrit was never the vehicle for memories or life experiences. Do read the book to get a political insight into the language.

“Sanskrit was never bound to the land, to the village, or to any specific regional community,” he writes. “Indeed, when Sanskrit was finally constituted as the vehicle for political expression in inscriptions, the business of land or village — the specifics of a grant or endowment or bequest — came increasingly to be done in non-Sanskrit languages, especially in south India and Southeast Asia. Given such traits, Sanskrit in precolonial India has sometimes been analogized to postcolonial English, as being in some fundamental sense “inauthentic” (a judgment with respect to consciousness) or “illegitimate” (a judgment with respect to class location).”

With politics changing and a transfer of power happening not only to the weak and vulnerable within India but from the West to the East globally, for any Indian scholar, writer or policymaker, learning Sanskrit becomes important to negotiate the emerging landscape — we can’t wade in the deepening and widening waters of global ideas without knowing who we are.

Hiding behind anonymity, the vicious have successfully been able to get our sisters and brothers from the northeast regions to leave Karnataka and Mumbai in search of safety. In earlier cases, the same anonymity has allowed criminals banned from trading on stockmarkets to manipulate prices on stock exchanges. Go on some of the older posts on this blog and you’ll see the abuse against me: not a disagreement, not an argument, not a reasonable articulation — just plain abuse.

All this happens while sitting behind anonymous emails, anonymous Twitter handles and anonymous postings. I doubt if anyone of them has the courage to stand before me and repeat the same words. Behind anonymity, the hostiles think they’re free to post abuse, publish defamatory posts, and even try and mould public opinion. Like all ills, it is the hostiles that drive change through their excesses — from stronger airport security to business firewalls.

But apart from cowardice of the malevolent, there is a deeper reason why anonymity is needed. In the inner evolution of man, the planes of the being are segregated. As a result, someone with a strong mind may not be able to deliver the strength of that idea to those around him — he could be an introvert, shy or plain fearful.

Even in the highest citadels of social sciences research or on the cutting edge of technologies, it needs more than a strong mind to get an idea accepted by peers or the boss. You need a strong vital to push that idea through the wall of ignorance. A few millennia ago, a strong physical was enough. But the barbarian within us remains and expresses itself through the power of the vital force. Watch a politician speak or debate a point with an intellectual and you’ll see the force.

As man evolves, beyond the body, he does so in layers — not necessarily in the following order but around the same direction. Since Indian psychology is still to emerge from the confines of Western psychology, there is very little literature available. But a paper by Matthijs Cornelissen of the Indian Psychology Institute explores the idea with great depth.

In Types of knowledge and what they allow us to see, Cornelissen shows (in figure 6) the movement of knowledge. So, from the inner physical, through the three layers of vital (lower or svadhisthana; middle or manipura; higher or anahata), the four layers of the mind (expressive or vishuddha; thinking or ajna; spiritual or shasrara; higher; and illumined); to finally intuition and beyond.

It is entirely possible for the mind to be developed to an exceedingly high level of sophistication and complexity — an idea that Western psychologists term close to madness — and still be of little ‘utility’ to society because of a weak vital that can’t help express it to a wall of cynics. For such souls, social media is a god-sent. Sitting quietly behind a computer or a hand-held, they can comment, critique and question the world around them.

It would be a tragic to take this only tool of free expression away from them. But in the interests of a largely-barbaric civilisation or at least to tame the few barbarians in an increasingly-refined culture, you could consider the death of anonymity as a little tax that we pay to keep the monster of abuse at bay — until, that is, we move to the next stage of spiritual evolution.