BEING DIFFERENT

Being Different : An Indian Challenge To Western Universalism''Rajiv Malhotra''s insistence on preserving difference with mutual respect - not with mere tolerance - is even more pertinent today because the notion of a single universalism is being propounded. There can be no single universalism even if it assimilates or in the author''s words digests elements from other civilizations'' - Kapila Vatsyayan In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism thinker and philosopher Rajiv Malhotra addresses the challenge of a direct and honest engagement on differences by reversing the gaze repositioning India from being the observed to the observer and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view. In doing so he challenges many hitherto unexamined beliefs that both sides hold about themselves and each other. He highlights that while unique historical revelations are the basis for Western religions dharma emphasizes self-realization in the body here and now. He also points out the integral unity that underpins dharma''s metaphysics and contrasts this with Western thought and history as a synthetic unity. Erudite and engaging Being Different critiques fashionable reductive translations and analyses the West''s anxiety over difference and fixation for order which contrast the creative role of chaos in dharma. It concludes with a rebuttal of Western claims of universalism while recommending a multi-civilizational worldview.EARLY INDIANS : The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (Updated Edition)Who are we Indians? Where did we come from? To tell us the story of our ancestry journalist Tony Joseph goes 65000 years into the past – when a band of Homo sapiens first made their way from Africa into the Indian subcontinent. These were the First Indians. Citing recent DNA evidence he traces the subsequent large migrations of modern humans into India – of a people related to early farmers of Iran who mixed with the First Indians at the latest between 5400 BCE and 3700 BCE and of the ‘Arya’ between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE among others. As Joseph unravels our past he takes head-on some of the most controversial and uncomfortable questions of Indian history: Who were the Harappans? Are north Indians genetically different from south Indians? When did the caste system emerge? A hugely significant book Early Indians bravely puts to rest several fierce debates on the ancestry of modern Indians.