The Only Kind of Criticisms That I Face From the Educated Illiterates

 

The Only Kind of Criticisms That I Face From the Educated Illiterates

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

Yesterday, Koenraad Elst was in my house in Mumbai the whole day (before retiring to his hotel), and I saw him off today morning as he left to catch his flight for Hyderabad. He apparently put up a tweet later today showing a photo clicked by a visitor who had come to meet him in my house:

 

I was sent the above tweet by a well-wisher, along with another tweet, immediately tweeted, by one of the countless bird-brains who inhabit the twitter jungle, in response to Koenraad's tweet:

 

 

One of the, as I said, countless tweets of the countless bird-brains who infest twitter. Certainly not deserving a particular response from my side. But it set me to thinking, in the context of what Koenraad tweeted and what this bird-brain tweeted, about the unchangingly fixed pattern of utterly vacuous thinking that the educated illiterates — and most particularly the brown-skinned  bird-brains out to score brownie points with their western academic idols — indulge in when it comes to any kind of discussion on the AIT-OIT question. It may be noticed in this particular case that the particular bird-brain in question (I think I have had occasion to refer to this particular specimen earlier also) follows a pattern, that I have described in a previous article, of adopting a Sanskrit or Vedic sounding name: bharadvāja/Vritrahan!

In political parlance, especially in the favorite language of the older leftists, people of this kind were described as "running dogs" of some particular ideology or vested interests. A more polite phrase used by the Hindu side is "brown sahibs/sepoys" (an appellation which I believe some of the persons concerned even accept with pride).

 

But it is not simply in order to indulge in what (left with nothing else to say) some of my critics accuse me of, i.e. "ad hominem", that I am writing this article. I want the reader to understand the exact intellectual level of the discourse indulged in by people who criticize the OIT, and in fact my version of the OIT in particular and the data and evidence presented by me: the few critics who pick out particular points to criticize are always answered by me in full in my articles with data and facts (note the criticism on particular words like kavi cāyamāna, vadhryaśva, bṛbu, ibha, pṛthu-parśu, etc.), or the particular western academics who have given more detailed critiques of my work and have been answered point-by-point by me in my articles particularly addressed to the criticism of each individual one of them (Witzel, Fournet, Hock, etc. etc.). In every case, the critics have been completely routed: some of them, and their fans, may not agree, but the reader can check for himself.

However, an overwhelming majority of the critics indulge in criticism in the air. Note in this particular case: "not produced anything substantial to pass the gates of academic standards ever" and "zero credible knowledge in comparative IE linguistics".  My request to such gutless critics is: "if you have guts in your b…s, give specific points and don’t just indulge in this kind of waving imaginary swords in the air. You have an absolute right to be a textbook-worm or a running dog, but then please bark out some particular point which can be debated instead of just hiding behind the śikhaṇḍi of generalisms and personal name-calling".

Even those who grudgingly accept that I have made many valid points end up in such generalisms, by saying they "do not fully agree with" or "do not fully accept" or "are not fully convinced" by my case. They don’t seem to realize that the AIT-OIT discussion pertains to facts and data, and subjective "interpretations" of those facts and that data are only secondary to the actual facts and data themselves. Talking in the air with phrases like "I think", "I feel", "I believe", etc. (or the negative forms of these phrases) is perfectly valid if you are discussing things like the truth-value of particular concepts in religion or philosophy or the state of the afterlife. When discussing the AIT-OIT question, what counts is point-to-point explanations and refutations of particular data, not personal opinions, status-citing and name-dropping. But this is absolutely all that the AIT side can produce, and in fact that it has in its armory.

I used the example of this fool in this article, and inadvertently gave him free publicity that he does not deserve, only to point out that the days when crooked people could stonewall discussions, or pull them off at a tangent from serious scrutiny, with the help of such tactics, are over. It may take some time for such half-witted people to comprehend this, but it is time for the neutral and objective reader to learn to distinguish between data and bluster. And time also for people who discuss these issues seriously to stop indulging these vermin.