From rao@sunrise.Stanford.EDU Thu Dec  6 10:40:56 1990
Return-Path: <@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU:rao@sunrise.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 90 19:37:01 PST
From: rao@sunrise.Stanford.EDU (Subbarao Kambhampati)
To: rao@cs.stanford.edu

Path: portia.stanford.edu!shelby!sunrise!rao
>From: rao@sunrise.Stanford.EDU (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Antal, Tiruppavai, Marghazi [and asthitwa and aesthete]
Summary: on secularism and aesthetics
Message-ID: <481@sunrise.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Dec 90 02:40:54 GMT
References: <38261@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Lines: 45


In article <38261@nigel.ee.udel.edu> siva@cis.udel.edu writes (about Andal)
while talking about Andal and Dhanurmasa
>
>In my more youthful rational-atheist-secularist days,
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>I resented being woken up thus before dawn,
>since my house is less than 10 feet from one such temple.

In Peddapuram, where I lived most of my pre-university life,
Dhanurmaasa is a beautiful time of the year. The unrelenting summer is
a thing of past, and as the delicate cold breezes of the approaching
winter waft through the pre-dawn air, a few die-hards take processions
through the streets singing devotional songs.  As we wake up to those
strains of passing "Nagara Samkeertanam," the loud-speakers at the
Venkateswara Swami temple down the road would start off, as if on a
cue, with the familiar recordings of MSS and Ghantasala. 

I loved those broadcasts and those "Nagara Samkeeratanams" of
Dhanurmasa in those innocent days of concrete theism of a personal god
and religion.  And I think I still do--even though the concrete belief
is replaced by skeptical agnosticism and secular humanism.

We may, as we grow old, reformulate our notions of "asthitwa."  Your
reformulation might be different from and diametrically opposite to
mine.  And yet, it is not necessary that this should affect our
aesthete.

So, I feel a twinge of sadness when I see otherwise reasonable people
fall into the familiar trap of equating secularism and agnosticism
with an absence of aesthete, and a lack of appreciation for finer
emotions of human existence.  I wonder, mayhaps those misguided
equations act as self-fulfilling prophecies...

>Siva  (siva@cis.udel.edu)

Rao [Dec  5, 1990]
-------

  "It is infinitely satisfying to know that innumerable universal truths
     were evident to the very first sentient beings on this planet.
   It is also very tempting to believe that everything known to those
     first sentient beings *were* universal truths."