Chitra Subramaniam| The News Minute| January 12, 2015| 5.20 pm ISTThe massacres in Paris last week have highlighted many issues. Among them is the hypocrisy of politicians around the world who fund terrorism and cry wolf when it comes back to strike them at the heart of what they profess to believe. Secondly, the extent to which terrorists will go to kill and die in the name of a god no one has seen or heard is history repeating itself and our collective failure to assess this. Finally, the challenge that has come in the form of a gold standard set by Charlie Hebdo that most would like to be part of but lack the courage to do so. France has a long and venerable tradition of satire sometimes bordering on the risqué. Other societies have different ways to be swim against the tide, push the envelope. I can think of Tamil literature and word play. Last week was a blood-soaked one in France. This week in India opens with media reports that Dinanath Batra, a far right thinker with links to the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS) is opposed to sex education in schools till people are ready for marriage which, according to him, is 19 years of age. At the same time, the popular weekly India Today has a cover story where young Indians say sex is no big deal, what worries them more is bad marks in school and not finding true love. Batra is entitled to his views and free to state them. I see them with the same lenses that I have viewed the immaculate-conception which, in my limited reading of the two testaments, is a fine piece of marketing. In addition, the Gregorian calendar which is internationally accepted as a civil calendar or western- Christian calendar is named after the man who first introduced it in February 1582 (Pope Gregory X111) while some others have been around much earlier. Batra has sent in his proposals to the Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry which is currently tasked with developing a new syllabus for Indians schools. Among his suggestions are that the Bhagwat Gita be introduced in schools in an annotated form with a more serious pursuit left to individual choice. . We can all send in our suggestions through groups and organization involved in this exercise. What should worry us more is that Penguin pulped Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindu: An Alternative History for being “offensive” towards Hindus. To achieve his goal to get the book off the shelves, Batra took the legal route against teaching of A.K. Ramanujam’s essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” at Delhi University which was pointed out similar “offensive” content in school books. Batra’s wish list includes primary education in the mother tongue, middle and higher education in Hindi and other languages - this common around the world where English is not the mother-tongue. He calls for six percent of the GDP to be ploughed into education and proposes a system that trains people for a host of services instead of following mindless university degrees which most of us in India do and end up unemployed. He also calls for universities to adopt ten villages in their vicinity so resources and knowledge is optimized. If you look at this without bias, this is how universities around the world create an eco-system. Vedic mathematics, Sanskrit, skill development are all part of Batra’s recipe for schools in India. Assertion of one school of thought does not have to be at the destruction of the other – the fact that Batra is alive (and we wish him the best of health) – and journalists in Charlie Hebdo are not should tell us why reason is the arbiter between faith and fable, guns and words. No human being is a loser for learning more. Nobody with half a brain will tell you that knowledge is dangerous unless it precludes all options except what is prescribed. The News Minute (TNM) did not post the most offensive cartoons from Charlie Hebdo because purpose was to make a point, not a pitch. Our post remains online whereas a few others in India who posted the cartoon have brought them down, much like Penguin’s fear of freedom of expression. People are rarely afraid of freedom. They are generally more afraid of blame. The Charlie Hebdo tragedy must bring new perspectives and new ways of accepting difference. I would not turn to Batra to understand stem-cell or heart transplants but I would order an advance copy of Charlie Hebdo if it carried a caricature of Batra. I am sure Charb, Cabu, Wolinski and Tignou would agree. TweetFollow @thenewsminuteAlso read- “I got sexually harassed by a man. I’m a man" - are Indian men staying silent?Meet the man who transformed a barren island into a forest in Assam