It is Sunday, time for lightening up. Or so I thought. What follows is
funny in a way but deeply disturbing in another.

You might remember the creation of a fake website on Dalits, created by
some right wing (Hindutva) elements in the US, all centered on one
Texas web master. That happened as soon as we exposed the anger voiced
by Dalits at the Jan. 12 meeting of the State Board of Education
against their excision from CA textbooks, proposed by two Hindutva
Foundations.

Well , once more, our Hindutva friends have tried their hands at
still more of this duplicity. First, they sent out an appeal to sign a
FAKE online petition "in favor" of this list and of me, in 2
versions. The first version
<http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?drwitzel&1>
has gathered exactly one vote, that of the FAKE originator, whom they
call Arun Bernard Vajpayee, in memory of the grad. student who had
alerted this list about the imminent danger of getting Hindutva edits
approved by the State Board of Education on Nov. 9. (Why `Bernard`? Oh
well, they make him a Christian...)

The second one
<http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?Indology&1>
has some 19 votes by now: all fake, including among others the
Grammarian Panini (c. 350 BCE), signing in from heaven, and A. Hitler,
signing in from the opposite side. But also including the names of some
scholars who signed our Nov. 8 letter to the Board: clear fake &
defamation.

Then, they tried to show that my teaching is beyond the pale. This was
announced, where else, in the chauvinistic IC list by my special
friend Arun Gupta, prof. of some sort of technology (I forget) in CA,
who has not forgotten that I teased him half a decade ago for his
bragging about Indian technology institutes. Touchy, eh? Googling, as
he constantly does, and then authoritatively quotes on IC, he must have
been scouring the net (just like V. Agarwal) for any mentioning of my
name... Nothing else to do, Arun?

He `judiciously` wrote in <IndianCivilization@yahoogroups.com> no.85748:

"
<http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=805226>
Too small as sample to be meaningful, however. "

Well, the sample then was exactly 3 people who wrote about my recent
course in Vedic Sanskrit. One of them gave me 5 times straight "1s"
--that is the worst rating. He also merely listed the course as
"Sanskrit," not with its correct name. And, he added the comment
"{pathetic professor."

Sure enough, the comment was picked up on IC -- by whom else but the
omnipresent Dr.K., list owner S. Kalyanaraman (actually, PhD in
business administration, received at Manila, Philippines).
In IC 85755, he wrote:

``There is one comment: Pathetic professor. How is this commonly
understood? I don't think it is warm praise. Maybe the rater is
feeling sorry...?``

Now, it gets really interesting.

Within a few hours of that fake posting on ratemyprofessors.com, this
particular entry was listed as "under investigation" and a few hours
later, the whole entry had disappeared. Obviously, the administrators
of ratemyprofs.com check on fake entries, as this one clearly was.

(We may assume that, after posting this note here, many more attempts
at posting to ratemyprofs.com will be tried. If so, I will give the
correct number of students in that class!).

All of which again teaches us something that we already know: just as
they have done to Romila Thapar for many years, Hindutvadins will go
to any lengths to smear their opponents. (Well, with nine entries
today, the site looks quite different by now :-).

The IC list has been dead silent on the matter ever since the fake
entry disappeared. Just as in the case of the fake Dalit web site we
exposed.

Also, though they avidly read and quote every half word from this list,
nothing has appeared either of my correction to their reporting of my
recent discussion at a Dharma meeting at Harvard, which they have spun
and re-spun in amusing ways.

Here the best attempt, of course quoted from IC (originally posted in a
small Indian American paper). Enjoy:

``Over 80 people turned up on a cold evening last Friday to applaud
young Krishna Maheshwari , a mere "acccountant" (an Untouchable,
worse than an "engineer" in Witzel's IER caste system) as he
effortlessly destroyed the great Wales Professor of Sanskrit in fair
debate at his own claimed subject at his own university. Witzel was
left blathering and waving yellow notes out of textbooks and
shouting abuse in total disarray. And through all this, the Petition
authors have proved the simple truth that they wrote: that they are
true well-wishers of Harvard. They seem to have no intention of
being provoked by the IER's hate antics.``

Haroons' tales (Kathasaritsagara/Brhatkatha)...

In spite of so much bluster, happy weekend!
M.W.

__________________________________________________
If you give me six lines written by the hand
of the most honest of men, I will find something
in them which will hang him.

(Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main
du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi
le faire pendre.)
Cardinal Richelieu, Minister of Louis XIII
(Quoted: January 1641, in "Mirame")
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University
1 Bow Street , 3rd floor, Cambridge MA 02138
1-617-495 3295 Fax: 496 8571
direct line: 496 2990
<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/>
< http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/>

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