Baffling move

Baffling move
Kudos to UP chief minister Mayawati for her forthright statement that strong action should be taken against officers committing irregularities in the implementation of MNREGA. What is baffling to the layman is why single them out and what is their crime when irregularities committed by officers in other
departments of the government are overlooked?
—KRP Gupta, via emailLook at heritage

Look at heritage
This is with reference to the story ‘Don't mess with us’, threatens khap mahapanchayat (DNA, April 14). A defiant assembly of 36 khap panchayats from Haryana, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi demanded that the Hindu Marriage Act be amended to ban marriages in the same gotra (clan). But do these 'cultured' upholders of the so-called Bharatiya sanskriti know that ancient India never made bones about endogamy? The word gotragaman (sex in the clan; gaman as in sexual intercourse) was prevalent in the Vedic era and Mahabharat has 26 direct/indirect references to sexual relationships among the same family members.

Kunti's fascination for her half-son Sahdev was so flagrant and embarrassing that her son Yudhishthir and Bhishma had to admonish her (5th stanza, 4th canto, Aranya Parv). The Sanskrit poets of ancient India never condemned incest or gotra-based marriages or liaisons. The legendary Sanskrit scholar Monier Williams, who died a Hindu, studied almost all the old Sanskrit texts and concluded that there were more than 700 instances of mother marrying her own son or having sex with him, innumerable cases of father ravaging his own daughter or brother-sisters having a swell (pun intended) time together! The point is when such self-proclaimed custodians talk of vansh, gotra, parivar and desh, do they ever bother to have a look at their own history and heritage?
—Sumit Paul, via email

Magnanimous gesture
The edit piece ‘Indo-US ties' (DNA, April 14) does the tight-rope walk quite successfully in trying to create the feeling, particularly among the many distrustful cynics, that our PM's meeting with Obama did indeed have its gains, though minimal, in the form of the assured access to Headley and the mild diktat to Pak to bring the perpetrators of 26/11 to justice. Not yielding to Pak pressure for a civil nuclear deal was perhaps a bonus. Given the exalted status that our neighbour enjoys as an indispensable strategic ally, the US cannot be expected to do startling things for us. In such a scenario, it will be prudent on our part to work these little gains to our advantage, as you rightly point out.
—V Subramanyan, Mumbai