Anand's Second Book - Back Cover (Proposed)

Here's some text composed with the help of an A.I.

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In a desperate attempt not to be taken to be merely another "pretty face" and tired of the label "the Indian Leonardo Di Caprio", Anand Manikutty has come out with a second book of poetry. In this book, or his upcoming third book, he may, potentially, discuss among other things, his secret on how he almost got to talk to Jennifer Lawrence, how he came within three feet of Clint Eastwood once, and how his first crush was Laura Dern in Jurassic Park. What he has done in this book is to upstage the estimable Indologist Wendy Doniger, who is possibly really a Martian. No other explanation will suffice as to how she came to write a book called "The Hindus: An Alternate History". This Martian Hypothesis is not discussed in this book, but "potentially will be" a "later" book of poetry. 

Maybe you have come not to be floored by an Awesome Book on Indology, but about How To Talk To Anybody. How did a guy like Anand who comes from a fairly ordinary middle class Indian background get to talk to Rick Wagoner, Tarun Khanna, John Kerry, and so on and so forth? How did this guy who was clearly not born with a silver spoon in his mouth come to be able to talk without fear to almost anybody? Well, we do have some stuff on How To Talk To Anybody With Ease in the Author's Introduction, but this book - let's be serious - is about a political science model that has important things to say in the field of Indology.

"There's a new pretty face in Indology", says Anand. "And that new pretty face is me. Maybe."

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and has no idea this is even going on. All she knows is that Anand had a series of discussions with her on her book "The Hindus", at the end of which she admitted that Anand was higher in a certain attribute X as compared to her. (I don't want to say what that X is.) Maybe something to think about. But really, you want to think about how there was a time when Indians were really looked down upon even in the Land of the Free, and how a very small number of people even worked to combat that attitide. If for nothing else, one must acknowledge the work pf early aindologists like Doniger. It would be really unfortunate if, after all these years, we cpuld not bring ourselves to at lewst do the right thing, and just acted with decency.

Or maybe you may want to think about how Anand has been called the "Indian Leonardo Di Caprio". ("Does anyone know if Leonardo Di Caprio can even speak Hindi? All because he is from California, Anand gets compared to Leo. There really is no justice in this world.")  But that seems to be the sort of pointless, ridiculous garbage that comedians like to talk about. Compare the garbage that Russell Peters spouts (For example: "Indian people and Chinese people cannot do business together." There literwlly are hundreds.and hundreds of years of history wherw these two countries did precisely that.) When viewing things from the perspective of Native Indians, we will be absolutely led to believe -every- -time- that it is the work of Indologists which has really helped India not be perceived as a "Civilization On which the Sun has Set." Even if they make mistakes, they are not doing for the sake of a few laughs. Rather they are in it to shed light on an ancient civilization. When you look at the Internet attacks on Audrey Truschke of late (one person threatened her with rape; another with murder), one is again reminded of the nastiness of internet discourse today. Of course, thanks to stand up comedians, the stereotyping of Indians (who were until twenty years ago treated as a mostly unknown quantity in America is now complete.

Tired of comparisons with Kumail Nanjiani ("I am not just a pretty face!", says Anand. "I will succeed where you failed, Wendy Doniger! I will write a book on India from the point of view of the women, the gays and the previously ignored. The subaltern, if you will. The Other."), Anand is now trying to one up all of Beverly Hills' intelligentsia. (And, then, in a California accent, Anand continued. "Like, you know, the underprivileged. Kumail Nanjiani has nothin' on me. I, like Trump, am, like, really very good looking." I mean - "good at Indology.")  Not you, Tom Cruise. We are not talking about you. We know Xenu and Scientology are the only way the world makes sense to you. We won't be too hard on you.

It is one thing to be called "the Indian Leonardo Di Caprio". And that itself is bad when one is trying to create a unique identity for oneself in the writing world. But it is another thing to be called "the Indian Leonardo Di Caprio" after being called "the Indian Martin Gardner." That really is something. That hurts.

We need to sexify, Indology, folks. And no, Anil Kapoor, I don't think you could do it! No, I don't think so at all. I think Anand could do it. But not Anil Kapoor. Because Anil Kapoor is really not the kind who could build an A.I. And building an A.I. and/or coming up with bizarre theories is essential to succeed in the world of Indology. Either one or the other.

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I don't even know if a guy has ever referred to himself as "a pretty face", and since I do think the A.I. makes a garbled mess of things at times, I will let that comment stand. This is the best I could retrieve out of the mess of comments the A.I. made. Trust me - you don't want to see what the A.I. actually came up with. The comments about Wendy Doniger are all accurate, however. 

Indeed, I have always found Wendy Doniger pretty reasonable in her responses to my comments. Despite all the vitriol thrown at her, I would also like to note here that she does not hit back at her critics in kind. In fact, if you read the section on whether there is bias in the field of Indology, I argue that Wend Doniger's work actually benefits people who are Native Indians. All this vitriol thrown at her is actually quite misplaced.

but here's the thing: I actually started writing this book thinking that it would be nice to write a book positively acknowledging Prof. Wendy Doniger's contributions to Indology. When someone has worked for more than five decades in a particular area, it is always nice to send them off with a nice acknowledgement of their work. That was the actual agenda. There was never an agenda to attack anyone. In fact, I don't attack people. I may disagree with people's conclusions. I may respectfully note my disappointment that people did not come to certain conclusions on issues. But I don't get involved in ad hominems.  I also get personally attacked less than other researchers. This may be because I seldom attack other people. I am Mr. Clean.

In fact, I even have A.I. software to keep things clean. Now, here's the thing. I am going to be really quite blunt here, the most important aspects of the Mughal Empire have already been discussed and described in great detail. To use some terms from the field of Intellectual Property Law, such questions as whether Aurangzeb was a good emperor or not has already significant coverage in the Prior Art. Indeed, if one wanted to critique Wendy Doniger, one would say that most of the questions Wendy Doniger deals with are fairly minor in the overall picture. Since the Prior Art is so cluttered, the incremental addition made even by researchers such as Wendy Doniger are "minor increments" to the "Prior Art". They are like inventing a new plastic folding wrap for a foldable treadmill. This sort of work just about qualifies even as innovation.

On the other hand, if you read carefully papers in economics and the social sciences, you will hear a whole story being revealed piece by piece. Take the story of the Native Indians. Few people realize that the reason why India was considered wealthy up prior to the British Raj is that GDP and population were proportionate to each other prior to the Industrial Revolution. India was wealthy as a whole, but that was because it was a country with a large population to begin with. However, the bigger the GDP, the more power a country possessed because Thus, Native Indians, that is, people with at least 75 percent ancestry from South Asia, were quite powerful as a group. The coming of the British Raj changed this upward trajectory, however. Due to various reasons including the practice of mercantilist policies in India, the lack of investment in infrastructure and the lack of investment in education, India began falling behind. Capitalism/mercantilism has not been kind to many parts of the world, including Africa and South America, and the Native Indians of the Indian subcontinent have been particularly severely affected.

But what does the future hold for Native Indians? Work in economics and the social sciences is often exciting because it often uncovers aspects of Indian history that are not particularly well appreciated. A funny thing happened while I was preparing the material on biases in Indology academia. I came up with a new political science model. This model turned out to be far more interesting than these debates on biases in the field of Indology which have raged on for years. Furthermore, since And here's the other thing: you don't need to know a whole lot about me to understand this political science model. You just need to know that, in this book, I introduce a new theory of political science which answers some questions that, I think, you will find fairly interesting. In this book, you will find out:

• Why are so many countries in the Middle East in a state of war or internal conflict?
• Why are there so few Muslim actresses in Hollywood?
• Why is there a strong case for the restoration of the Gyaanvaapi Mosque in India to a temple?

   [stuff deleted] [Work In Progress] [Most of thi s text was written with the help of A.I., please note - not all of it has been cleaned up]