"Corday thought she was helping the Girondins. Brutus thought he was defending the Republic. All were wrong, and disastrously so."

I mentioned Corday as a prime example of someone whose stated justifications for her act (including a written statement penned before the deed) seem entirely plausible and deserving of being taken at face value. Had you been paying some attention, you might have realized that whether or not Corday ended up helping her cause or party or faction was utterly irrelevant.

"Of course I didn't mean that Godse literally resembled Booth, but they had similar motives, revenge against someone who they thought had harmed their class."

Regarding this business of Godse taking revenge on MKG as someone he thought had harmed his class, did you make it up on the fly, or did you read it somewhere? In fixating on caste, and then class, you are making two glaring errors that would be obvious to a reasonably well-informed Indian.

(1) You are ignoring the obvious humongous elephant in the room, namely the question of Islam and its future in the Indian subcontinent. Godse belonged to the RSS and then the Hindu Mahasabha. Both organisations are officially and openly anti-casteist and seek to unite Hindus across caste lines. Both organisations are well-known for voicing suspicion of the loyalty and allegiance of Indian Muslims.

(2) On the question of caste, MKG was the most obvious conservative among prominent figures in the freedom movement in the decades preceding India's independence. While he might have stood for the dignity of all human beings, cynics might say that he was fighting a cunning rearguard action to preserve caste as much as possible - and they might be right. There are many reasons why a Maharashtrian Brahmin might resent the activities of MKG the Gujarati Bania, in the decades before Independence, but loss of caste or class status - past, present, or future - is not something that could reasonably be pinned on him.

There is also a whole lot more that we know, for instance about Godse's social circle, that makes your contention seem ludicrous.

"What I am asserting is that members of privileged groups resented and continue to resent their loss of status."

I see that you have dropped all mention of the Indian constitution, without acknowledging the fact.

You are using 'status' very loosely, - it is unclear whether you refer to notional ceremonial status in a varna hierarchy, or wealth and property, or social prestige, or political power. These are different sources of 'status' in India, and do not go hand in hand.

"Godse is a classic case - a Brahmin who felt he had lost status and was forced to work at a lower caste job, and a boy who was raised as a girl and was consequently attempting to overcompensate by posturing as hyper-masculine."

You know this - how? [I'm asking about Nathuram Godse's inner psychological landscape, not about his having worn a nose-ring etc.]

Godse was the son of a postal worker. He was running a newspaper for the Hindu Mahasabha. If that is a 'lower caste job', it is one that many 'higher castes', or people who expected a job on the basis of their caste status, might gladly have accepted.

"He became RSS but found it not radical enough for him. He had a lot in common with other nutjob assassins like John Wilkes Booth."

He bowed in salutation to his victim before firing the fatal bullets. He made no attempt to escape. Very different from Booth.

"I don't think the justifications murderers offer for their actions should be taken at face value, or maybe for any value, regardless of how articulate they may be."

Off the top of my head - how about Charlotte Corday? Or Brutus?

Is it conceivable that someone who commits a plainly political assassination could have been driven by motives other than personal gain, or simple vanity? I concede that the person may aim to maximize the future prospects of his nation or the community to which he believes he owes final allegiance. He may also find the prospect of high-profile martyrdom more attractive than decades of struggle eking out a slender living.

"Naturally the privileged objected, which is why Gandhi was assassinated ..."

Are you really asserting that M.K.Gandhi was assassinated because the "privileged elite castes" objected to the Indian constitution seeking to wipe out the ways "Hinduism had been used to oppress untouchables and women" and privilege them?

Quick notes: India's Constituent Assembly first met on December 9th 1946. It was reconstituted subsequent to Indian independence and partition in August 1947. The Constitution was adopted on January 26th 1950. Nathuram Godse assassinated Gandhi on January 30th 1948. Godse's lengthy and very articulate courtroom speech, in Hindi, delivered during his trial for capital murder, is readily available. In it he makes his motives for his act abundantly clear. A great deal is also known about Godse's milieu. None of this supports your contention.

" ... I do consider religious intolerance evil ..."

Also, from a prior post, above:

"... India has a constitution that guarantees freedom of religion, explicitly banning promotion of any religion or interfering with the practice of any religion."

I'm not competent to discuss the notion of freedom of religion in the Indian constitution in any detail. I do want to point out that 'freedom of religion' and 'religious tolerance' are not primitive or atomic notions. They do not have universally accepted and agreed-upon meanings. What these terms signify in a particular society is deeply dependent on that society's long-developing culture, present realities and historical experience.

The notion of 'religious tolerance' widely prevalent in India - contemporary nation as well as historical civilization - is radically different from that prevalent in 21st century America. This is exactly what one would expect given the fundamental cultural differences between India and America.

"India can either honor the wise choices of some its founders and become modern, or it can try to go back."

Just what does becoming "modern" entail? What are the irreducible constitutive elements of "modern"-ity?

Further, are "becoming modern" and "going back" the only two options available to Indians (or perhaps, the only two meaningful ways of describing available options)? Could there be other ways?

"Once is a trick, twice is a method, thrice a theorem, four times a theory." The criterion for the presence of a method is generalizability, to other situations, perhaps to higher dimensions. For instance, what is the volume of the 'spherical octahedron' formed by intersecting eight unit spheres centred around the eight vertices of a unit cube?

There are echoes of the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle in your approach which would be more pronounced in the 3-D case. My approach seems to generalise easily, to 3-D at least.

There are many paths to a solution here.

My way was to divide the curvilinear 'square' into four congruent figures, each a 'right triangle' with an arc-hypotenuse.

Each such triangle in turn is included in a sector of a unit circle with angle π/6. The circular sector has area π/12; removing the 'right triangle' on its curved circumference leaves a figure that may be split into two congruent acute-angled triangles. The combined area of these triangles is that of a parallelogram with base (sin π/3 - 1/2) and altitude 1/2.

Thus the area of the curvilinear 'square' is 4 (π/12 - (sin π/3 - 1/2)/2), which works out to π/3 - 2 sin π/3 plus 1.

All in all, well within the capabilities of an Indian ninth-grader (who might even solve it in seven minutes if he keeps his cool)!

I find MT's attitude on the issue of Aryan origins very puzzling. It has to be said on his behalf that his knowledge is vast and encyclopedic, and that the breadth and depth of his interests is astounding. His insights on many subjects and the strength of the arguments he marshals in support of some of his positions have been most impressive. He is a committed and practising Hindu heathen with a deep knowledge of Hindu texts (including the most archaic). At the same time he seems familiar with modern scientific methods across a range of disciplines. He appears to actually read Vedic and has written several articles on textual issues related to the Vedic corpus. As a trained professional biologist and gifted expositor he is fully qualified to explain his point of view to laypeople.

And yet his writings on the questions of Aryan origins have been curiously unsatisfactory. He has not to my knowledge put together a cogent argument for why he believes the available evidence - genetic, linguistic, etc - conclusively proves an Aryan invasion of India. While he holds forth on the paramount importance of discernment, accuses the proponents of Indo-Aryan autochthonism of lacking discernment, and claims that OIT is now dead and cremated, he doesn't seem to have much of real substance to say on the question.

Is MT trying to 'save the phenomena' by hypothesizing an archaic kernel to the RV, composed outside India, in the absence of any evidence that such a kernel exists? This perhaps parallels the concoction of a hypothetical PIE, in the absence of any attestation that such a language actually existed.