I remember visiting with a famous Indian Marxist poet in Mumbai. I questioned him why Indians, with such a great spiritual heritage and thinkers with cosmic vision from the Vedic Rishis onward, could be so enamoured of a simple materialist like Marx, who was a second hand thinker imitating Hegelian thought, which itself was spiritually naive? He replied, on the contrary, that he thought Hindu philosophy was a kind of double speak and mumbo jumbo which destroyed rational thinking and bound people to superstition and backwardness like the caste system.

Yet his comments revealed a glaring contradiction in his personal life. He lamented that for all his leftist writings and scholarship, his own wife was still a devotee of Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita was her favorite book.