I really doubt this. Kissing in public is highly frowned upon for heterosexuals only and there will be a shitstorm if gay couple found openly kissing. Take this incident, happened in September 2014 in Mumbai/Bombay, two couples were harassed by police just because they hugged publicly[0]. Police harass couples all the time if they found indulging in PDA. Read this BBC news report for instance[1].

Wiki [2] says: "Public display of affection is regarded as unacceptable in India. Kissing and hugging are taboo."

[0] - http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-couple-harassed-fined...

[1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7871304.stm

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_display_of_affection#Ind...

You have not been frequenting the right places then. Come to Bombay, come to Delhi, its a frequent sight outside the gay bars, more so in Bombay than Delhi. Have to admit that the first time I saw it I was indeed caught by surprise.

In some places you might get beaten up (yeah even possibly by the cops), or have acid thrown at your face (this punishment is reserved exclusive for women and applied mainly when they cut across caste or religious boundaries). According to many in the the current ruling political party, such acts of violence are eminently condonable and justified.

As I said, it is very high variance place, I am firmly in my thirties now and yet I never stop learning / experiencing something new about my country as I travel. The key is to cut across those invisible boundaries. Come to the North East its a whole different country, different value system different culture.

Given that you posted about Bangalore current events, I am sure you know of that sri ram sene idiot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Ram_Sena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramod_Muthalik

EDIT: Yep!! some downvotes on all of my comments on this thread. Those took a while to come, I am expecting more. The belief system that I am complaining about does have their champions, and at politically significant levels.

I downvoted you because mentioning how you've been downvoted is quite possibly one of the most dull things you can say on HN.

I downvoted you to agree with this sentiment.

Just the way white people saw native Indians as Savages it is easy for western eyes to perceive India as a very bad land but that is not the case, despite its flaws it is an extremely tolerant society with ability cope with very diverse way of living. Before the savages of west discovered that the idea of gender is not binary and can have multiple hues, that is how ancient Hindu thought described gender [1]. One of our major God is half man half women and entire mythology is replete with all sort of possible genders.

[1] http://swarajyamag.com/featured/hinduism-and-homosexuality/

While I somewhat agree with the gist of your post, you might want to reconsider this broad brush with which you're painting both modern "western eyes", and particular bunches of white people who genocided nearly an entire continent a few centuries ago.

Substitute nazis/jews/"German eyes" if you don't get what I mean (going to assume I'm excused from Godwin's law when the implied atrocity was in fact larger than the Holocaust).

Consider the California textbooks which paint Hinduism as worst savages. There is not even passing mention that the cool things like Yoga and Meditation are Hindu practices on the contrary outright false stories which I believe were put in my missionaries are taught as "Hinduism".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_textbook_controversy...

In fact I am in complete agreement with the following characterization, quoted from the wikipedai page you linked to.

  Dan Golden of the Wall Street Journal described the
  effort of the two Hindu foundations, as similar to those
  by Jewish, Islamic and Christian foundations. Each group,
  claims Dan Golden, vie for changes in texts for elementary
  and secondary schools to cast their faiths in a better
  light or in sensitive manner before children.

I find a treasure trove of interesting things in the Hindu body of thought, yoga is not one of them, sorry. An over sold, over marketed artifact used to catch the gullible. To me striking things about its body of thought are its philosophical roots, the fact that they have been thinking deeply about such questions since antiquity, that not believing in any form of god is in complete harmony.

That said, for people coming from an Abrahamic religion, its a difficult thing to grasp. Hinduism is not 'a religion' if one goes by the notion of a religion in Abarahamic religions. It is worse than trying to map git commands to subversion. Its a very different beast, it is a meta religion (or more accurately a diverse collection of a very large body of thought and introspection, originating from a geographical region and built over time time, that visitors clubbed into a single pool because they werent sure what to make of it). It is more like a religion factory pattern for building your own religion that includes questions you should keep visiting in that process, and a more fundamental one, why at all (and when) should one even consider building one. It lays down thought processes, questions that one should consider and critique when one is forming ones own parameterized religion. People get confused whether they are talking about the polymorphic class or the object instance.

In context of its vast diversity and inclusiveness, Abrahamic religions would feel like that they are the same religion sans minor changes and all the fighting to be much ado about nothing.

Only handful of people like Dr. Arun Shourie, Sitaram Goel, Ram Swarup and Rajiv Malhotra now a days seem to have put some efforts.

"United States police is the most brutal police force which is racist and always uses excessive force. Black teenagers are shot for merely being a suspect of stealing candies from store. It is not uncommon for SWAT forces to break into home of innocents and shoot their dogs for no reason what so ever."

The BBC or Mid-Day type publications print whatever someone else is feeding them.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

Didn't they go around stabbing and strangling people?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_the_New_Testam...

Some inconvenient examples: Between 1290 and 1753 it was illegal for Jews to exist in England. Then until 1846 they had to wear special clothes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England

And when you say "Semitic" you're probably not aware that the Arabs are actually Semitic too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people

And the Muslim religon is very problematic because its founder was a warrior, and the religion texts actually promote the "war for religion" and also that other religions aren't "true."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad

Finaly, Judaism is problematic too, as their belief is that they are "chosen people" by the God who assisted them in wars against all others.

Welcome to the world we live in.

Not so surprising that that Muhammed guy (peace be upon him! (0)) got inspired for his wars. Apparently he was illiterate, but it seems that somebody read him big parts of OT. Muslims believe it was an angel named Gabriel (3), not to be confused with Moroni (4) that appeared in the US. And when we're there, Americans should understand Muhammedans and vice versa, as the US president was directly instructed by God too (5) so much for the Separation of church and state (6).

-----

(0) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad

(1) http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Names_of_G-d/Adonai/adonai....

(2) http://www.bricktestament.com/judges/

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation

(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Moroni

(5) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state

... and that is exactly what scares the shit out of me. This is why I consider history a mandatory reading, more so a critical reading of history, with an eye for the tell tale signs.

Playing with elements of hate and is playing with fire.

You might recall that India and Pakistan were the same country once. Geopolitically they look different now, but I blame that on the butterfly effect of a few good decisions that leaders of India chose to abide by during its formative period (and stupid decisions on behalf of the Pakistani statesmen). What scares me is that this threat of a fascist future in India is not as ludicrous as I would like it to be. A few bad decisions, few people not choosing to stand up and India could be a non muslim version of the state of Pakistan now.

Just for clarification, I bear no ill feeling towards Pakistani people, but they did really mess up their country and to me it seems for no good reason.

We wanted the situation to be fucked both in and between Pakistan and India as we are following from the Roman theories on empire that fostering group enmity makes it easier to impose control, the great game we are still playing today, like spoiled children furious that we lost our toys, despite the fact that these days the stakes are intolerable even if you win.

It used to be that murderous lunatics drunk on power could foster tribal warfare for relatively little long term risk to stuff other than screwing up their own empire if they miscalculated and generally pissing off a lot of people, these days you might end up with vast deserts of radioactive glass. And I suspect we may create a couple of them yet, if things carry on the current trajectory.

The British also helped establish the Saudi and Hashemite kingdoms etc. The Syrian King Faisal (someone I think was a really progressive guy) was also installed by the British in Iraq. And all of this happened after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

In that part of the world where religion is very strong, it's interesting to see that democracy always leads to a theocratic government (except in Indonesia where it's so far successfully been separated) and thus the constant struggle against violence, threats to usurp power and human rights oppression.

"It will form for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

I guess he was right about some of the similarity with Ulster, though perhaps not in the way he intended.

edit - as for democracy leading to theocracy in that part of the world, firstly Indonesia is almost 9,000 km away, and secondly I do not think there has been any recent time where external powers have not been massively fucking about round there, so you cannot really draw any conclusions about this being a feature of the local culture.

The Arab league policy is that granting Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrating them in the population would effectively give Israel carte blanche to depopulate Palestine by driving the population into exile, and so it's strongly frowned upon, with the result that Jordan is the only country who have granted citizenship to a large proportion.

Yes very much so. The initial condition and the differential equation were not that different for the two countries. The trajectory however turned out to be drastically different. The statesmen in charge during its formative period did not take steps which would have otherwise made such a scenario less likely. Small changes in courses of their actions early in its history, a decision here and there had major influence on how the country would shape up. They were not thinking ahead.

It was a mistake to put religion in the center of politics. It was a mistake to cultivate this identity of the wronged population. Likewise for the now popular narrative of competing to be the better muslim, the roots of that narrative go farr back in time. Although Zia is the popular choice to ascribe the blame to, it had started way before. Bhutto (the father and the golden liberal boy) was for example very much in the business of deciding who is a true Muslim and who is not, deciding that Ahmadias are to be persecuted for not being pure enough Muslims, passing parliamentary laws to that effect. Check out why does Abdus Salam's grave in pakistan says

   "...became the first <defaced> Nobel laureate for his work in physics".

If Indian politicians play the same game, the consequences would be no different. We would get a non-muslim pakistan.

> And still you are more worried about fascism in India!

Yes and for a reason, because history does rhyme.

> Muslims in Pakistan regularly kill minorities

Perhaps you have a very cherry picked view of Indian history... since when has Hindu's in India not killed minorities. It seems to be a mandatory right of passage to take charge of national politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots_in_India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India

For those who are not very familiar with India, if you look closely you will see that some regions are regular and repeat offenders in post independence India whereas others are not affected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion

And when a state has a lot of people who believe sharia law should be the law of the land, the courts and politicians have to grapple with what are essentially 6th century moral and legal ideas. And not just 6th century in fact, but made by one of the only prophets who commanded an army, and went to war, and wrote things like this:

http://www.islamawakened.com/quran/8/67/

"It is not fitting for a prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he hath thoroughly subdued the land. Ye look for the temporal goods of this world; but Allah looketh to the Hereafter: And Allah is Exalted in might, Wise."

You'd be hard pressed to find Old Testament prophets speaking this way or being described in this way. In fact, the Jews are admonished for "killing their prophets" who basically went around speaking.

So the "differential equation with initial conditions" analogy is very much a big factor.

Judaism formed to have an exclusionary character - it's hard to become a Jew, and so the Jews were always a minority, never ambitious to make the whole world Jews.

Christianity formed with a "peaceful proselytizing" character, for one thing because when it formed the apostles were the ones being persecuted and they didn't have the power to raise an army and convert people by the sword.

Islam on the other hand was formed that way and the political character of Islam is hard to defeat by populations full of sharia law-abiding, devout muslims. Disestablishment of the Church took a long time, but ultimately there is far less in Christianity that says the Church and Government must be one. In fact, statements like this emphasize the separation of Church and State:

http://biblehub.com/mark/12-17.htm

So yeah founding conditions matter, and I think that's why you see so many Islamic states and why there are more Muslims around the world living in democratic countries who truly believe that if their society was transformed from a democracy into an Islamic state, everyone would be better off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYAcLudBbhg

Personally I think Islam is not alone. I think various forms of socialism (Communism, Nazism) are also like "mind viruses" or group memes that tend to want to take over the government. If you look at it epidemiologically, certain ideas simply take over the population (the vector of transmission is almost always primarily young men, especially in bad economies or situations, e.g. hitler youth, or hamas, or vietkong, etc.) and states built around these ideas are intolerant and squash dissent. In my opinion, the greatest political danger lies in ideologies whose proponents obtain power.

My point was that there have been many bloody wars fought by Hindu rulers motivated primarily / singularly by political ambition. Thus I find this much popularized universally pacifist portrayal of Hinduism a little dishonest. Short of political ambition, the subcontinent was rich in resources enough that there were no compelling reasons for large conquests and colonization of others. Had that not been so, no one knows how that would have played out.

Tim Cook says I'm gay -> it's difficult to be Gay in India -> It's not just Indian Muslims who are Anti-Gay, and by the way Indian (or is it Hindu?) society has lot of other faults -> Hindu rulers had fought wars, and some other thing about Hinduism is dishonest