Dear Jayamohan,
Twenty years ago, during a discussion about your endeavors in the Tamil intellectual arena, I observed that you were attempting to challenge the rigidity of the Tamil intelligentsia. This is because, for the past 100 years, the Tamil mind has been conditioned to function in two distinct ways. One is complete surrender and blatant bhakti, and the other is practical atheism and materialism. You are expressing something very strange to the Tamil mind.
You expressed yourself as an Advaitin or Vedantin. You were trying to explain that Advaida and Vedanta are forms of pure logic and reasoning. But for a Tamil mind, they cannot understand this, because they knew only two kinds of spiritual and intellectual outlooks. One is devotion and surrendering, and another is material logic and atheism.
Therefore, presenting yourself as an irreligious Advaiti is a kind of suicide. You will be considered a rationalist while you are rejecting the taboos and faiths of religion. On the other side, you will be judged as a religious person if you try to expose the voidness of our earthly materialism. You may not find any kind of support from any side; rather, you can find a lot of enemies on all sides’.
But for the past few years, through hard work and continuous writing, you established yourself as an Advaiti, with pure reason. You have started an institution to teach Advaita, and you have a big circle around you. I congratulate you for your achievement, thanking you.
Rajan Prabhakaran
