Not muslim

[kimba1]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Raped-5-year-old-girl-dies-in-central-India-4475157.php




I know many folks from india who gladly joined islam because of how people are treated in india

[Xavier_Onassis]

I really doubt that many Indian Hindus join Islam out of outrage, or for any other reason. Conversion to Islam is very rare in India, since it means separating yourself and your family from the caste into which you were born. It is rather like you deciding to become Korean.

I suspect that rapes are simply being reported more often now that Indian society has decided to officially disapprove and prosecute them rather than to ignore them. India has a billion people. There will always be a lot of evil stuff to report.

[kimba1]

I never asked what caste these guys are but the subject of freedom to  better oneself did come up a lot. meaning if the caste is low enough the loss would be pretty minimul by leaving. maybe not Korean but to be American . think of it this way india has lots of computers and because of the family you was born in you and you future family will never get to use them. islam at least won`t bar you from learning to do call center work.

looks pretty attractive .

[kimba1]

also I read several reports on this and one of the factors is the girls was a lower caste so the concern is not so great. the media outraqge was triggered when the attacks spilled over to more extreme levels. a man was attacked and tourist. these attacks are likely very isolated but in our technological world simply cannot be ignored by the police anymore.

[Xavier_Onassis]

When the Muslims arrived in India as conquerors, they were unable to convert the locals, just as the Buddhists and Christians would also be unable to do. The locals most likely to convert, of course, were the Shudras the common laborers, and the untouchables. So Hindus regard Muslims in the same way the regard the Shudras and untouchables: people who have stupidly denied that there is a cycle of rebirth in which the worthy die and are reborn as higher caste people. The resentment is like that of Americans have for people who crowd in line, except far greater.

The Muslims dislike the Hindus because of their denial that there is one God, that there is One True Faith, that there will be some sort of Apocalyptic End of Time, and their insistence that there is a cycle of reincarnation that goes on forever. And of course, the idea of caste is also alien to the Muslims, who consider (at least in theory) that all souls are equal. Indian Muslims also are divided into castes, but their castes have no standing among Hindu

To the Hindus, India is the center of creation, and it is illogical and anti-patriotic to leave India on pilgrimages to Mecca.

The traditional view of Hindus is that if one crosses the Dark Water (ie the ocean), one loses their caste entirely. Gandhi was born in Gujarat, then went to England for a law degree, then spent time in S. Africa. As such, he was already seen as a radical by a lot of Hindus, since he had crossed the dark water.

In South Africa, Gandhi's clients were wealthy Indian Muslims. There was also a large group of Hindu coolies who did menial labor. Gandhi saw them all as Indians, and united them to stand up for their rights as citizens of the British Empire. The result was the Brits stopped importing Indians to South Africa.

Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu who hated his preaching that Muslims and Hindus should be legally considered as equals.

It is probably safe to say that Indian immigrants to the US are not typical Indians. Many might be the children of Indians who belonged to different castes and/or spoke different languages and communicated in English.

Castes are divided into subcastes, and then divided by region. There are over a thousand castes. Hence the immense popularity of matchmakers. It is quite hard to match up eligible couples otherwise.

[kimba1]

At least one caste could really benefit not being hindu


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html

It's illegal in india but that didn't really help much.

It reminds me of job of the bible except the reward comes after you die.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I imagine that there are some pretty good reasons why untouchables do not become Muslims. You have to be a Hindu to understand Hinduism, of course. I imagine that a lot of untouchables actually believe that they do in some way deserve to be untouchables. It is an improvement from other life forms, after all.

From an economic perspective, a guy like Cletus Spuckler, the trailer trash character on the Simpsons, might seem to an impartial observer who was not familiar with the US, to be better off by opting to be an Episcopal or a Unitarian, since demographically these sects are better off than fundamentalists or hard-shelled Baptists. But we know that poor, uneducated Americans do NOT tend to join the churches of the well-to-do. The same could well be true for untouchables.

There is a caste system present even among Muslims in India and Pakistan, by the way. perhaps Mohammad might not have approved, but he is dead and gone and not from the subcontinent. 

[kimba1]

I believe a president was dalit. So only in less prigressive spot do these treatment still exist

[Xavier_Onassis]

I believe a president was dalit. So only in less prigressive spot do these treatment still exist.

=========================
That is true, but the election was because the Party decided to run him rather than someone else, and he got most of the party's traditional votes, plus I imagine nearly all of the Dalit vote. Indian politics is quite complicated, and unlike those of any other nation. Politics always makes strange bedfellows, and in India it makes for the strangest.

Most of India consists of "less progressive spots".  The country is still quite rural. Unlike China, India never had either a revolution or a cultural revolution. It is much more diverse as well. The dominant religions of China (Confuciunism, T'ao, Buddhism) are more based in logic than the Indian religions: Hinduism is based on myths and fables. Faith seems to play a greater role in India than in China.