Background :
A close friend of decades prodding you to read / listen to something and ask for your views is such a great moral incentive which nobody would refuse.
The following note is an end product of similar undertaking which this pen pusher rather reluctantly took initially when one received a YouTube link of a conversation / debate between Congress M. P Shashi Tharoor and Supreme Court lawyer and commentator J Sai Deepak, held sometime back, where the focus of the programme was on  Congress M.P. Shashi Tharoor’s book ‘Why I am a Hindu ?’

 The book deals with how Mr Tharoor understands Hinduism, looks at its Great Souls, unpacks political Hinduism and dwells also at the violence committed by its followers and differentiates his Hinduism from that Hinduism practised by who can be called as ‘Bhakts’.

J Sai Deepak, a very popular commentator who has written a few books and also shared his views, dealt with Tharoor’s arguments.

As an aside it needs to be added that J Sai Deepak is one among the new crop of commentators , writers whose interventions very much resonate with what can be termed as ‘rightwing’ . There are few other names  like Vikram Sampath, Sanjeev Sanyal, Anand Ranganathan etc of the same stream, whose arrival on the scene has been a moment of celebration among a section of the media  (https://www.firstpost.com/politics/why-is-left-academia-so-rattled-by-vikram-sampath-sai-deepak-or-sanjeev-sanyal-10433791.html) which is critical of the left and its towering intellectuals.

Here follows the communication with the friend  ]