Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the Leader of the Conservative Party. Just prior to these titles, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is the senior Minister of the Crown within the government of the United Kingdom, and the head of His Majesty’s Treasury. Rishi Sunak was born in the port city of Southampton to immigrant parents with high levels of education. He graduated with a First from Lincoln College, Oxford. His younger brother is a psychologist, and his younger sister lives in New York and works “as chief of strategy and planning at the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies.” Education and achievement are clearly important to the Sunaks.
Rishi received a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University in California, USA. He worked as an analyst for the investment banking company Goldman Sachs. In 2009, Rishi joined several former colleagues in California to launch a hedge fund called Theleme Partners, with $700 million in assets under their management. I do not know what “Theleme” means, but Thelema is the esoteric and occult philosophy and religious movement founded by Aleister Crowley in the early 1900s. Crowley’s system begins with The Book of the Law, and the central axiom is, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Good old Horos-of-the-Loincloth plays his Sun-role in the system as Ra-Hoor-Khuit, wearing the head of a hawk and carrying a wand to send out energetic Magick rays for those who seek to find their True Will and align with it. Yoga, meditation, and rituals are used to achieve that alignment.
Also in 2009, Rishi married Akshata Murty, the daughter of a billionaire businessman, N. R. Narayana Murthy, who has been called the father of the Indian IT sector. In 2005, Murthy co-chaired the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Murthy has invested in Sunak’s business endeavors. Rishi and his wife own at least four homes, two within London, one in the English countryside, and a penthouse apartment on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California. Rishi likes flashy cars and bespoke suits. (That’s “custom made” for us Yanks.) We cannot possibly know how he is perceived by others, but we do know what we’re told by official publicists. His image is carefully crafted to project a sincere family man, conservative patriot, and party loyalist. So good-looking, his publicist tells us, that his nickname is “Dishi Rishi”.
Because political theatre is part of the Disneyland “reality” we’re born into, let’s not bother much with his successes and failures in that arena. Right now, he is not faring well in the polls, and because of the way the UK government is designed to function, he decides, within a set framework, when the next general election will be held. He has put that off for now and can continue to stall on that until at least January of 2025. Perhaps he enjoys politics more than hedge funds and is hanging in there until the polls shine more brightly in his favor. Regardless of the public’s perception of what he has achieved or failed to achieve, by the metrics that matter, Rishi is doing well:
· He stands with Ukraine and offers generous support for this sad little country’s fight against the Big Bad Bear.
· “Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.”
· He wants the UK to be “the safest and greatest country in the world to be LGBT+”. Most of his statements have been described as “anti-trans” by activists, but he is doing a shrewd balancing act. That will be the best any politician can do until such time as they are spared the bother by some draconian hate crime bill.
· He talks a good game on lowering immigration, but to please his masters, immigrants still pour in.
· The feather in Rishi’s cap? At the UN Conference of the Parties COP26 in Edinburgh, Scotland, he announced The Forest & Climate Leaders’ Partnership (FCLP), which looks to me like a giant, multi-country slush fund. This was launched at COP27, and Rishi said, “For far too long the world’s forests have been undervalued and underestimated.” If you think a Rainwater Tax for the water that falls on your land from the sky up above is outrageous, just wait till any leaf that blows on your lawn is taxed.
In this Redux of a talk that Alan Watt did on January 25, 2006, one of the topics that he touches on is the creation of religions, and how the different regions of India were given different forms of a religion over time. Everything is carefully crafted, so that which has the best chance of capturing people’s imaginations will take root.
There are three foundational texts of Hinduism, the Vedas (of which there are four), the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. By some accounts, the Vedas (“Books of Knowledge”) is Hindus most ancient and sacred scriptures. The Vedas contain hymns, chants, explanations of rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies, and magical prayers, charms and incantations. The Upanishads deal with self-realization, yoga, meditation, and the transmigration of souls.
The Bhagavad Gita (“song of God”) is a 700-verse scripture in Sanskrit. The Gita is a dialogue between the incarnate god Krishna and a human hero, Prince Arjuna. This conversation takes place on a holy field before the start of the Kurukshetra War. Arjuna is reluctant to engage in a war against his friends and relatives. Krishna counsels Arjuna to follow his own calling, which as a warrior, is to fight and kill.
Hinduism has changed drastically over its long history. When Islam entered India, people were exposed to the idea of one God, who was formless. Islam also brought with it a rejection of idolatry and hierarchy. The texts have all been translated and re-written numerous times. There are many interpretations of individual hymns, and the foundational texts themselves. Devdutt Pattanaik is a mythologist and writer from Mumbai, India, who also speaks and writes on Hindu sacred lore, legends, folklore, fables, and parables. He estimates that in the 1980s, even before the internet had fully taken off, there were more than 3000 translations in nearly 50 languages. But the translations appear to agree that after the lengthy dialogue between God Krishna and Warrior Arjuna, Krishna’s advice can be summed up thusly, “Yatha-ichasi-tatha-kuru" -- Do what you please.
Bhagavad Gita: “Yatha-ichasi-tatha-kuru" -- Do what you please.
Aleister Crowley’s Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
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When Rishi Sunak was sworn in as MP of the House of Commons, he swore his oath on the Bhagavad Gita.