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Guruforum is Thrilled and Disappointed!

When Guruforum was started on the net, there were practically very few active sites on Narayana Guru. If you did a keyword search on Guru in 1996-97 period on alta vista (the best search engine that time) you would have got one or two hits at the most. Now it is all changed. There are sevral sites on Guru, several others sites contain information or references to Guru.

In recent days we have noticed one thing. Many people abroad (Keralites and foreigners alike) have realized the importance of Guru's message. Narayana Guru's name is mentioned in many research articles about the general social development of Kerala, some of them pointing out Guru's movement as the single most important radical event which changed the social structure of Kerala. There are also many Malayalees abroad, irrespective of caste and religion (thereby doing true justice to Guru!) proudly quoting Guru's message. Guru's words have been even quoted by a site which has developend Malayalam Transliteration scheme.

On the other hand, we are disappointed that we got very few readers responses from Kerala itself! This is in spite of the fact that every Keralite is educated and talking about computers and internet all the time! A handful of people wrote to us from Kerala and a few more from the rest of India. But many more responded with letters from abroad! Ironically enough we never received a single letter or comment from any of SNDP units or from an SN College! This is totally disappointing! In Kerala everyone has satellite antennae and cable TV, proportionally and numerically as much as any developed country. It seems to us that everyone is spending (wasting?) time watching movies and cricket 24 hours/day???

Thrilled!

Guruforum has already references to the sites and articles on Guru. Here we give examples some more of those places we normally do not expect to see Guru. The following is the home page of Madhuri Malayalam Transliteration Software developed by Binu Thomas Melodom, Binu Anand and Konda Reddy. Guruforum is extremely happy to see that the developers have put Guru's words at the top of their site as an example of how to write Malayalam Font using their software!

Another related site on Varamozhi Scheme (developed by Cibu C John, uses a sloka from Mahakavi Kumaran Asan's Nalini as an example.

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Yet another page which applauds Sree Narayana Guru's reformation is the great image site of Seby Varghese, Trichur/San Fransisco, where he says that Guru changed the "lunatic asylum" of Kerala into the least caste ridden state in India. Here is part of the page:

Sitting in remote places and busy with their work in the United States, none of these people had to mention Guru at all especially when the occasions were not related to Guru. But they did remember Guru because of the great impact Narayana Guru had on the minds of these people. Many of the NRIs realize the importance of Guru's words of equality and social justice, when they come across various social and religious inequalities practiced in societies supposed to be far advanced than us! Guru was far ahead of his times. His message like that of Budha is timeless!

Authors on Kerala Model of Social Development, Bill McKibben and Richard Franke as well as critics of the model like Joseph Tharamangalam have all acknowledged the great impact of the reformation started by Sree Narayana Guru. Of these, "The Enigma of Kerala" by Bill McKibben has gone in great detail about Guru's early activities and its impact on shaping up the positive side of the Kerala Model, and has been greatly read, quoted and recited in other forums.

"Kerala: Development without Wealth", a chapter in a soon to be co-published book by Future Generations and Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Taylor-Ide and Carl Taylor say :"Also adding to the expansion of religious tolerance was the respect enjoyed by the large, low-caste Esheva community arising from the reputation of their religious reformer Narayana Guru. His influence had led to the opening of Hindu temples to all castes. This forward-looking social base became the source of a progressive people’s movement in the late nineteenth century. Initially the movement was launched to fight caste-based oppression within Hinduism, but over time it expanded to broader social-justice issues as peasants and city workers joined to campaign for social emancipation and egalitarian structures."

Rajeev Srinivasn, an IIT/Stanford educated software specialist and a rediff columnist, has this to say: "But the pivotal figure in the transformation of Kerala's caste landscape was Sri Narayana Guru, who preached a message of self-help, self-improvement, and self-esteem for the disadvantaged castes. A devout Saivite monk and scholar, the Guru's goal was not to destroy Hinduism, but to purify it and improve it; he suggested to the lower castes that they appropriate Hinduism: that it was theirs, too -- Hinduism belongs not just to upper castes. Today, Kerala's different castes coexist more or less peacefully."

On NRI's biography of our own K.J.Yesudas reads as: "The name Yesudas means servant of Christ, but he has not limited himself to any one god. Sree.Narayana Guru's message, One caste, One Religion and One God for all Humans is his matra for life."

Having seen some positive examples from the Web now we have the difficult task of facing the unpleasant reality from Kerala!

Disappointed.

As mentioned earlier Guruforum never got any comments from notable organizations, Colleges (SN Colleges, at least) or persons (with a handful of exceptions) from Kerala. Anyone searching Guru's name on the popular search engines like Google or Yahoo are sure to hit the site. But the response has been disappointing. The newspapers which had published elaborate inaugurations of various 'xyz' sites on the web (which do not live more than an year, of domain subscription fee) failed to notice our site.

We wonder what people in Kerala are thinking and doing! What priorities do they have? Gulf, Money, marriage, dowry ..., pseudo-nationalism like changing Trichur to Trissur(?), Secure Govt Jobs what not!!! The recent strikes of Govt employees probably give an idea about the state of mind of the Malayalee in Kerala today!