Modernity is not about an immature rejection of habits or tradition

[Occidentalism by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit (NYRB)
Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s unfinished critique (Boston Review)
The Third Eye and Two Ways of (Un)knowing: Gnosis, Alternative Modernities, and Postcolonial Futures: Makarand Paranjape, Professor of English, JNU, New Delhi
• India and Europe by Wilhelm Halbfass
More Recent Articles Search Science, Culture and Integral Yoga]

[Modernity is a basket of aspirations interlinked in the subtleties of an expanding mind, from gender equality to bakeries to highways to English medium schools to elections to a thirst for newspapers in unknown small towns. Modernity is not about an immature rejection of habits or tradition... It is a paradox of secular India that one definition of secularism has become the right of minorities to retreat into conservatism. Politicians accept the consolidation of communal identity as the inevitable antidote to insecurity, but that is a dangerous diagnosis. It implies a helplessness on the part of the State in eliminating threat and seeding educational and economic opportunity. Will India ever have a Muslim Code Bill? - The Siege Within - M J Akbar The Times of India: 31 May 2009]

M.J. Akbar, who carried the Standard of modernity to the youth of Hindustan through the pioneering Sunday weekly, laments about the state of modernity and secularism in India. One more shortcoming is that free discussion on metaphysical matters is being stonewalled. Cosmological or ontological hypotheses, instead of being scrutinized under scientific or philosophical lenses, are pushed beyond discourse which is the reason of their losing legitimacy outside the strict theological domains.

Makarand Paranjape, elsewhere, waxes eloquent on supra-rational cognition, but without personally accessing such a realm, it's all hogwash. [TNM]