Oooooooooooooh he’s handsome!

I’ll be your Laxmi if you be my Chand! (rhymes with lund – hee hee hee)

Ek chandani raat Sardarji ke sath

Sheetal chaya ke neeche Bahut sundar kala paccha ke peeche!

It can be difficult for them to adjust in either direction.

Just talk to any ISKCON or OSHO or Pondicherry Ashram kid.

The Gaudiya Vaishnavas consider the Bhagavat Purana to be a commentary of Vyas’s Vedanta Sutra – wherein nirguna concept is elaborated.

Anyway, as far as westerners taking up eastern religions, we do have to sort out almost on a daily basis what is essential to the actual practice (sadhana) and what is just cultural baggage parading as essential to the sadhana.

Sadhana is meant to rid one of samskaras (cultural conditionings), but often we see westerners trying to shed one cultural conditioning only to take up another, in the name of sadhana itself, erroneously thinking that the eastern cultural conditionings will somehow benefit them spiritually, whereas they do not.

I’ve seen the same phenomena but in the opposite direction amongst some Desi christians in India who are very much influenced by American style christianity.

I guess culture and religion are interlinked until one reaches the higher levels of spiritual attainment, like the avadhutas.

Thanks for the link to the Oberoi book. Looks interesting. Just the book I have been looking for ever since I bumped into this intriguing paragraph from Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind.

“[George] MacMunn believed that the army had actually played a role in strengthening the Sikh faith and community; by not admitting “unbaptized” Sikhs for example, “it is the British officer who has kept Sikhism up its old standard.” In fact, British recruiting had insisted on taking only those Sikhs who looked (to the British) like Sikhs, selecting, only unshorn Khalsa Sikhs for army service. And as Bernard Cohn has demonstrated, the almost canonic status of the Sikh turban owes its current importance to the development of special Sikh codes of regimental dress; the marker of an ethnic regiment became the sign of a modern religious community across the world.”

Harjot Oberoi’s book The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition is a particularly worthwhile read, should you ever be interested. I don’t agree with all he concludes but it is a valuable work, and set the cat amongst the pigeons of certain Sikh ideologues when it was published a decade or so ago.