Mosquito-human equilibrium

Dart that gnat: Battle the mosquito with genetic engineering

R.P. SUBRAMANIANTHE INDIAN EXPRESS Friday, December 28, 2001

Why are we unable to eradicate malaria? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that our ecosystem is like a giant, incredibly intricate, spider’s web. Everything in it is connected to everything else, however remotely, and any disturbance at one place is balanced by disturbances elsewhere. This balancing effect is nothing but a manifestation of Braun Principle elucidated by the great Le Chatelier, which states:

‘‘Whenever stress is placed on a system in equilibrium, the system will always react in a direction that will tend to counteract the applied stress.’’

Back in the old days, humans and malarial mosquitoes coexisted in a delicate, if painful, equilibrium. The mosquitoes bit humans and gave them malaria; the humans swatted the mosquitoes; and thus their respective populations were held in a fine natural balance. And then came DDT. To begin with, the insecticide worked like a charm, killing off the mosquitoes like...well, flies. But within a few generations the little biters became immune to the stuff. So other insecticides were invented, but in due course the insects became immune to these as well. And so it went till a stage has come about today when mosquitoes are not only impervious to the most lethal chemical cocktails we throw at them, but are actually lapping them up with the unholy glee of a thirsty citizenry celebrating the lifting of prohibition.

To add insult to injury, these very chemicals and the noxious wastes resulting from their manufacture are poisoning humans with utmost efficacy, and have fouled up our farmlands, rivers and atmosphere. As for malaria, it continues to plague us with undiminished vigour. We do not notice it so much only because there are a whole lot of other diseases which do not permit human beings to live long enough to be killed by the malarial parasite.

In a nutshell, what has happened is that with the advent of insecticides, humans proceeded to slaughter mosquitoes in vast and unsustainable numbers, thereby placing stress on the mosquito-human equilibrium. The ecosystem has therefore reacted so as to counter the stress, in accordance with the aforementioned Braun Principle. Mosquitoes have developed immunity to insecticides and increased the virulence and variety of the viruses they carry so as to knock off humans at a proportionately higher rate, thereby restoring the balance.

Is there no escape from the clutches of this dreadful Principle? Actually, genetic engineering could supply a solution, Because the mosquito-human balance cannot be eliminated merely by eliminating mosquitoes, the answer lies in somehow providing the mosquitoes with an alternative supply of nutrition (namely, human blood) so that they no longer need to depend on us for it. On conditions of anonymity, a young biotechnologist put it succinctly: ‘‘We need to create a different bunch of suckers for the little suckers to feed on!’’According to him, advanced cloning techniques could provide a steady and uninterrupted supply of mosquito-attracting human clones. These creatures, tentatively named Anophilians, could be settled under carefully monitored conditions in mosquito-infested areas of the planet, and their numbers fine-tuned so as to maintain the existing mosquito-human ratio, while keeping the real human being quite untouched by the insects.

However, some scientists warn that with the establishment of this new mosquito, humankind itself could become redundant in a vital sphere of the ecosystem and thereupon proceed to undergo rapid and irreversible degeneration in physique and intellect, ending with the extinction of our species. Other scientists argue that this process of decay has begun anyway with the advent of MTV, virtual pets and SMS. And so the debate rages on. In the meanwhile, though, it is advisable that we keep malarial mosquitoes at bay by perfecting our swatting techniques.

The sacred and the profane

Gurcharan Das

The Times of India Sunday, February 21, 1999

The Infinite is never far in India. A few years ago I visited the Madras museum in Egmore. While I was admiring a Chola bronze, a middle-aged South-Indian woman came behind me and, without self-consciousness, placed a vermilion mark on the Shiva Nataraja. At first, I was appalled, but then, I realised that we live in two different worlds. Mine was secular; hers was sacred. For me, it was a 900-year-old object of beauty, for her, it was God. Mine was an aesthetic pleasure; hers was a divine darshana.

Suddenly, I felt embarrassed by my petty concerns and my niggling mind. I am struck by the contrast of our lives—the fecund richness of her sacred world, and the poverty of my weary, sceptical, feeble existence. This is where our empty secularism has gone awry. We have lost the holy dimension in our lives. We are quick to brand her superstitious, illiterate, and casteist. She is, in fact, far more tolerant and accepting of diversity because she is capable of seeing God everywhere.

In my world of museums, concert halls, and bookstores, there is plenty of search for beauty, but there is no place for the holy. The answer for an authentic life, I think, lies with the woman in Madras, in whose attitude lies the possibility of a fullness and wholeness of being.

Divinity in a stone
Sudheendra Kulkarni

The Indian Express Sunday, October 09, 2005

On a morning walk along a pot-holed road which was being re-laid, I saw a group of labourers who were about to begin their day’s work. It was obvious that they belonged to a migrant clan of stonebreakers, engaged by the construction contractor. It was also obvious that they were poor, very poor. Tented huts on the roadside, open-air kitchen with the barest of utensils, a baby cradled in a cloth-sling — it’s a common sight at construction sites in India.

What struck me was that before the team began the day’s work, a woman performed a small puja on the stone, smeared it with the auspicious yellow and red powder, broke it with a ceremonial strike and then everybody went about their respective tasks. I asked the woman why she did it. In her own earthy Marathi, she replied, "This is not a mere stone for us. There is divinity in it. This stone feeds us. It also makes your cars run smoothly on the road.

Sachin in a Ferrari

If you rob the idols, you ruin the temple. Stars are key to cricket’s future, don’t knock them out LOKESH SHARMA The Indian Express Thursday, August 15, 2002

Two questions repeatedly asked are, why does everybody support only cricket, and why is there no money for other sports? There’s one, very simple, answer. A cricket star earns well, lives well and is loved by everyone if he doesn’t lose his balance along the way. These stars are the wheels of an entire economy: administration, advertisers, sports goods manufacturers, marketing agencies, broadcasters, television channels, commentators and journalists and so on. They attract audiences to the benefit of the entire industry.

Yes, cricketers can earn lakhs — a couple of crores, maybe — in match fees. So do many middle-level MNC executives. But they usually don’t set pulses racing, adrenaline flowing across the country and through the world. The cricketers do; they are the reason people support a game. Take away the purse of these cricketers and you stand to rob the entire cricket economy. Children are inspired seeing Sachin in a Ferrari; how will they react if he rides a motorcycle? Take away the idols and you ruin the temple.

Peddling angst

SEVANTI NINAN

Sometimes I marvel at the existentialist dilemma of the thinking Indian. By definition he is a worrier, particularly if he does not have to worry about where his next meal is coming from. Instead, he or she worries about the great unwashed who do have to worry about survival in general. He worries about where this country is headed. And if he is creative, he can often make a nice enough living doing so, and feel somewhat morally superior to the non-worriers who do not let poverty or unrest get in the way of going about making money, spending it, and rearing a brood of angst-free pappus. All of us who pay periodic and collective homage to the notion of public service broadcasting belong to this category of angst-ridden worriers, and we've been at it for decades. The Hindu Sunday, Sep 01, 2002

Save Education from Academics

by Dr. Anil Wilson

The Times of India Saturday, June 15, 2002

That the Indian Brain is among the finest in the world is now an acknowledged fact. Alas the same cannot be said of the Indian Heart. How else can we explain the situation where our colleges and universities, full of the best academics with the highest possible degrees, are yet hotbeds of petty intrigue, trivial jealousy, and meaningless mistrust? Somehow all that goes into the head does not percolate down to the heart. The most essential element of education osmosis (the process whereby the stuff in the upper chamber would get diffused into the entire system and expressed through ones behavior and relationships) does not take place, resulting in a blocking of the arteries and a highly constipated clogging in the cerebrum.

The Academic, therefore, does not manage to graduate on to becoming an Educator. Academics are a useful species, no one may deny. Yet their habitat needs to be restricted strictly to research centres located in remote hill-hideouts, away from colleges and universities where the more earthy and mundane of the human species should dwell. What we need in colleges and universities are more of Educators and less of Academics. There was indeed a time when Academics were also Educators who were not content with what went on in the classroom alone but made strenuous efforts to make positive interventions in the very lives of their wards. Their key motivating factor was concern and their target was the entire human being.

Then, somewhere along the line, due to a series of ill-conceived approaches to the process of pedagogy and education, the Academic perched himself higher than the Educator. Thus, to be an Academic is the ambition of most luckless souls who do not manage to get into management, finance, administration or fashion. A pitiful few aspire to be Educators, for that would reveal the triviality of their ambition in life! Those who interview young people constantly find that among the miniscule few who look to teaching as a career, it is teaching in a college or a university - never in a school, perhaps because it is popularly believed that it is in colleges and universities that academics congregate, while schools need educators.

hus, today, we have a surfeit of Academics who may well be likened to hit-an-run-artists. Occasionally, between seminars and conferences, they rush into the classroom (generally late by a few or more minutes because they were giving finishing touches to the latest book that must meet the publishers deadline); deluge the students with the most brilliant lectures, frown on any hapless creature who reveals his/her intellectual poverty by daring to ask a question, refuse to respond to queries because “how can one come down to the level of the students?” rush off even before the bell is rung to prepare for the forthcoming seminar that must be attended as this would pave the way for an invitation to the next one which is being held in some exotic location.
Marks can't be the sole indicator of meritThe Academic as hit-and-run artist leaves behind a host of bleeding victims who do not know where to turn for succour and help. Such victims would indeed be lucky if in the faculty there survives an old-fashioned Educator.

She will not only tend to the victims, take them to the canteen or even her own home, feed the body and the soul, laugh and joke with them (a serious anathema to the Academic who believes in the "High Seriousness of Study"), and in general seek to get involved in the fundamentals of her pupil’s life and concerns. Thus an Academic addresses, in terms of academic ability, the HCF (Highest Common Factor) in a class whereas the Educator caters to the LCM (Lowest Common Multiple). Thus while the endeavour of the Academic is to cover the syllabus, the Educator seeks to uncover it. Thus an Academic has no use for his students outside the classroom while for the Educator, old-fashioned that she is, the entire world of her pupil is her classroom.

A student’s behaviour, outside the classroom is none of the Academic’s business, while the Educator, misguided soul, will go out of her way to make it her business. This may fetch her momentary unpopularity but will earn her long-run respect. The Academic does not want this because he knows that "in the long run we are all dead". The heavy emphasis on an Academic approach to education has effectively curbed the Educator’s point of view. The unfortunate consequences of such a situation just cannot be missed.

• There is the inordinate emphasis on acquiring skills and information with the corresponding inability to find measures to translate these skills and information into knowledge and wisdom.
• There is the obsession with marks as being the sole indicator of merit. And this, in the face of the fact that the wide-ranging social and economic disparities in our country militate against any such simplistic connotation of the term merit.
• Due to such a blinkered approach to education there is no scope for developing a mechanism that addresses some basic issues about what constitutes good education and what place such constituents could have in our appraisal systems.

While there may be indices (however unsatisfactory) to determine the literacy levels that a candidate has attained, there appears to be no mechanism for indicating the educational attainments of a student in terms of the core values that any reasonable educated person is expected to have. Fundamental tools of education like basic problem solving, responsiveness to universal human values, appreciation of responsibility, peer relationships, sense of discrimination and discernment, and other such intangibles, have no place in our evaluative processes. Thus we confuse skills with knowledge, information with wisdom, teaching with learning, high grades with talent, degrees with competence, and fluency with the ability to think afresh. There is a general devaluation of sports and extra-curricular activities in colleges and universities.

The Educator as an Academic is a typical product of the Industrial Age. Education, particularly higher education today, is dominated by the assembly-line syndrome that characterised the Industrial Age. This can also be seen in the similarities between mass-producing industries and most educational environments: five-day week, seven-hour day, careful division of labour for both teachers and students, a strong emphasis on conformity and a corresponding suspicion of originality, a total dependence on the sequential curriculum process, and most of all, the overwhelming concern for the product rather than the process. As we move from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age, there is a newfound questioning of sequential curriculum process and the assembly-line syndrome.

We have come to realise that learning is fitful, episodic, explosive process of inquiry, where the process is as important as the product. Such learning is not taking in information. It is a fundamental shift in vision, awakening intuition, whereby we re-create ourselves, re-perceive the world and become a part of the re-generative process of life. The Educator will be back in business and Education will be rescued from the clutches of academics. Hopefully.

The pathology of success

AVIJIT PATHAK

The Indian ExpressWednesday, June 05, 2002

The prevalent system of education does not inspire the child; nor does it help her discover the possibilities she is endowed with. Instead, with examinations and associated classification of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, it processes, hierarchises, and eventually eliminates people. Not surprisingly, every year around this time — particularly after the Class X and XII Board examination results — many vibrant minds are told that they have failed, that they are incapable of pursuing life’s important projects. Although we can hear fragments of this violence, manifesting in psychic disorder and suicide, society at large does not seem to be interested in listening to those who have failed. Because it condemns failure, it does not have the the courage to see the pathology of success.

Success is celebrated and glorified. Newspapers and television mythologise the narratives of success; schools want success stories to sell their products; and parents want the success of their children to establish their social superiority. Success assures instant entry into one of the IITs, eventual migration to the US, acquisition of a green card, smart spouse and limitless prosperity! Indeed, the goal of education, it appears, is not the comprehension of the universe — its natural laws, its cultural complexities, its aesthetics and beauty. Instead, the goal is to achieve success that can be quantified, graded and packaged.

Real knowledge requires patience — the ability to enquire, comprehend and analyse. But success requires merely a strategy — how to memorise, and write ‘objective’ answers in an allotted time, how to reduce, say, the principles of magnetism and electricity, Tagore’s poetry, Gandhi’s Dandi march, the glaciers in high mountains and the symmetry of geometry into a ‘course-material’, a CBSE puzzle to be solved within 150 words! No wonder, such an unimaginative form of learning kills the spirit of joy and rigour.

Success, as a result, has no relationship with creativity. It is difficult for those who have failed to speak of the hollowness of success. Because they have already been wounded; their self-confidence has been crippled. To fail is to be deprived of one’s language. To fail is to devalue one’s own worth. As a result, those who fail begin to accept the system, and relate their failure to their ‘innate deficiencies’. But then, it is absolutely important that those have failed begin to rethink and act in an altogether different fashion.

• First, let them see the deeper meaning of failure. Failure is by no means the end of one’s life-project. Failure is a turning-point, a new beginning. Failure is a moment of rigorous self-introspection. Ironically, the privilege and arrogance of success makes it difficult for the ‘toppers’ to undergo such a self-reflexive exercise. Failure softens and humanises the person.
• Second, failure is also the beginning of a quest for a new possibility. One has failed in the exam strategy; one has failed in what is being taught as physics, mathematics or history. But one has not failed in life. Because no young person can fail in life; life has just begun. One who has failed in the Board exam is possibly a good poet, a good singer, a good mechanic, a good nurse, a good farmer, a good social activist or a good worker. That is why, for all those who have failed, it is an opportunity to rediscover their hidden potential — something they have repressed because of the examination pressure, because of the social stereoptype that good guys are those who became either engineers or doctors.

Yes, those who have failed ought to be told that they have not really failed. But who would tell them this alternative story? The success-oriented/ middle class/ competitive/ consumerist society abhors failure. Yet, there are dissenting voices. Maybe, a true educationist is feeling restless, and trying to evolve an alternative pattern of learning. Maybe, a parent is waiting eagerly to find a companion who too has a similar quest for new education. Maybe, there are potential rebels even among those who have failed. Perhaps one day all of them would come together, and alter the prevalent system of life-negating education.

Neat People vs. Sloppy People

By Suzanne Britt

I’ve finally figured out the difference between neat people and sloppy people. The distinction is, as always, moral. Neat people are lazier and meaner than sloppy people.

Sloppy people, you see, are not really sloppy. Their sloppiness is merely the unfortunate consequence of their extreme moral rectitude. Sloppy people carry in their mind’s eye a heavenly vision, a precise plan that is so stupendous, so perfect, it can’t be achieved in this world or the next.

Sloppy people live in Never-Never Land. Someday is their métier. Someday they are planning to alphabetize all their books and set up home catalogs. Someday they will go through their wardrobes and mark certain items for tentative mending and certain items for passing on to relatives of similar shape and size. Someday sloppy people will make family scrapbooks into which they will put newspaper clippings, postcards, locks of hair, and the dried corsage from their senior prom. Someday they will file everything on the surface of their desks, including the cash receipts from coffee purchases at the snack shop. Someday they will sit down and read all the back issues of The New Yorker.

For all these noble reasons and more, sloppy people never get neat. They aim too high and wide. They save everything, planning someday to file, order, and straighten out the world. But while these ambitious plans take clearer and clearer shape in their heads, the books spill from the shelves onto the floor, the clothes pile up in the hamper and closet, the family mementos accumulate in every drawer, the surface of the desk is buried under mounds of paper, and the unread magazines threaten to reach the ceiling.

Sloppy people can’t bear to part with anything. They give loving attention to every detail. When sloppy people say they’re going to tackle the surface of a desk, they really mean it. Not a paper will go unturned; not a rubber band will go unboxed. Four hours or two weeks into the excavation, the desk looks exactly the same, primarily because the sloppy person is meticulously creating new piles of papers with new headings and scrupulously stopping to read all the old book catalogs before he throws them away. A neat person would just bulldoze the desk.

Neat people are bums and clods at heart. They have cavalier attitudes toward possessions, including family heirlooms. Everything is just another dust-catcher to them. If anything collects dust, it’s got to go and that’s that. Neat people will toy with the idea of throwing the children out of the house just to cut down on the clutter.

Neat people don’t care about process. They like results. What they want to do is get the whole thing over with so they can sit down and watch the rasslin’ on TV. Neat people operate on two unvarying principles: Never handle any item twice, and throw everything away.

The only thing messy in a neat person’s house is the trash can. The minute something comes to a neat person’s hand, he will look at it, try to decide if it has immediate use and, finding none, throw it in the trash.

Neat people are especially vicious with mail. They never go through their mail unless they are standing directly over a trash can. If the trash can is beside the mailbox, even better. All ads, catalogs, pleas for charitable contributions, church bulletins, and money-saving coupons go straight into the trash can without being opened. All letters from home, postcards from Europe, bills and paychecks are opened, immediately responded to, and then dropped in the trash can. Neat people keep their receipts only for tax purposes. That’s it. No sentimental salvaging of birthday cards or the last letter a dying relative ever wrote. Into the trash it goes.

Neat people place neatness above everything else, even economics. They are incredibly wasteful. Neat people throw away several toys every time they walk through the den. I knew a neat person once who threw away a perfectly good dish drainer because it had mold on it. The drainer was too much trouble to wash. And neat people sell their furniture when they move. They will sell a La-Z-Boy recliner while you are reclining in it.

Neat people are no good to borrow from. Neat people buy everything in expensive little single portions. They get their flour and sugar in two-pound bags. They wouldn’t consider clipping a coupon, saving a leftover, reusing plastic nondairy whipped cream containers, or rinsing off tin foil and draping it over the unmoldy dish drainer. You can never borrow a neat person’s newspaper to see what’s playing at the movies. Neat people have the paper all wadded up and in the trash by 7:05 AM.

Neat people cut a clean swath through the organic as well as the inorganic world. People, animals, and things are all one to them. They are so insensitive. After they’ve finished with the pantry, the medicine cabinet, and the attic, they will throw out the red geranium (too many leaves), sell the dog (too many fleas), and send the children off to boarding school (too many scuff-marks on the hardwood floors).

Yeah! Go Sloppy!

The dhania factor

Santosh Desai The Times of India - Saturday, July 10, 2004 
Paisa vasool. The ultimate Indian idea of good value; not to be confused with miserliness. 

Paisa vasool means that the purchased item was worth its price. It indicates a satisfaction in extracting every drop of consumptive liquid from each paisa. When you wring the act of consumption dry, and leave no discernible residue, it is then that you feel the warm after-glow of paisa vasool.

Our compulsive need to re-cycle things is a pointer to this need. Long before eco-trendism placed the idea of re-cycling on its current pedestal, the Indian has recycled. Not only re-cycled bur re-soled, re-collared and refilled disposable lighters with an injection. Selling raddi is an art form with the price as well as getting the raddiwalla to weigh accurately being high skills. Old clothes are exchanged for utensils, old bottles are sold, with scotch bottles commanding a wholly explainable premium. Old shoes used to be re-soled and all trousers had margins that could accommodate growing children.

A common sight in smaller towns is a handkerchief worn to protect the collar as is the ubiquitous purane kapdon ka doctor who specialises in coaxing a few more years of life from a recalcitrant garment flagging in spirits.

A corollary is our inability to throw anything away. Lift any mattress inside any home in India and you will see a proud collection of plastic bags lovingly gathered over a period of time. We hoard plastic spoons, grow plants in ice-cream tubs and buy insatiably large quantities of Pet jars in promotions. When we buy a TV set, we are actually buying a TV set, the thermocole that it comes packed in, the outer carton and any miscellaneous clips or pins or plastic pouches that accompany it.

A necessary skill for every housewife is that of bargaining because that ability is the most tangible way in which she converts her almost visceral need for value into everyday reality. She has that unique ability to have saved up that crucial little while having tended to her family's needs with very little to start with.

The skill lies in economising on the right thing and displaying largesse on a few critical occasions. It can be argued that this picture is changing as middle class India moves towards greater affluence. While this is true to some extent, it is important to recognise that the mindset governing consumption is not changing all that much.

Take the example of the way housewives buy vegetables. Regardless of whether she stays in an affluent neighbourhood or in crowded flats, she must get her dhania and hari mirch free. It has nothing to do with affordability; it is about sneaking in additional value helping make the transaction fulfilling.

Getting the right value then becomes an issue of fairness: of being asked for the theek daam, of knowing that one has not been taken for a ride. Of feeling re-assured that no consumption juice remains in the discarded object.

This ability to see utility in all its dimensions in any object and to not rest till every ounce of it is exhausted, has perhaps more to do with the ingrained cultural memory of scarcity, than with a real need for economy. We may not mind paying more, but our paisa must always be vasool. [Santosh Desai Times of India, June 12, 2004 Fly...]

CITY CITY BANG BANG Weekly Column Remembering the swing January 27, 2014
Who amongst us has had enough of the playground swing? Among the smaller pleasures of life which one coveted and never quite got enough of when growing up, was time at the swing. Of course, you could make do with the slide, the see saw and if you were desperate, the jungle gym but what…Read more » Also posted in Columns Read More About the Book

Perilous prospects

By K.N. Panikkar

The Hindu Monday, Nov 17, 2003

In recent times, Indian society has witnessed the emergence of an anti-liberal and authoritarian ethos in almost all social, cultural and political practices. It is well pronounced in the field of education, both in content and organisation. The changes in the education system mainly target two areas.

• First, the content of the curriculum in order to redefine the character of the nation in religious terms. Privileging the indigenous system and knowledge are its defining characteristics. It appears to be a part of a revivalist agenda, which essentially seeks to indigenise the system by foregrounding the knowledge linked with Hindu religious tradition, which though historically important may not have much relevance in contemporary times. The indigenisation, however, is not the same as incorporation of indigenous knowledge, which is necessary and desirable.
• The second feature of the changes is enclavisation, which is an inevitable legacy of colonialism. There is an overwhelming section of the population that is deprived of higher education for social and economic reasons. In a country like India only the state can provide them the opportunity. Most Indian universities have become stagnant pools, starved of funds and facilities and are unable to keep abreast with the explosion in knowledge taking place in almost all fields.

An enclavised, commercialised and communalised system of education, rapidly gaining currency, can be countered only by strengthening the public system, the revitalisation of which depends upon a variety of issues, more important among them being quality assurance, democratisation and autonomy. None of them is on the agenda of the state, even if they form the themes of officially sponsored seminars. The ground reality obtaining in most institutions, however, is totally inadequate to ensure even minimum quality.

Intellectual Treason

by Meera Nanda

New Humanist Jan 07, 05

Unless we understand the ideological mechanism of this sacralisation of politics, we will not be able to combat the ongoing coups against secularism under nominally secular democracies.As a student of the history and philosophy of science, I have been watching with concern how modern science itself — perhaps the single most powerful force for secularisation — is being re–coded as sacred, either as affirming the Bible or the Vedas, or as ‘lower knowledge’ of ‘dead matter’, in need of spiritualisation. As an old–time partisan of the Enlightenment and scientific temper, I have been watching with concern as my fellow intellectuals and activists, in the United States and India, who identify themselves with social justice, anti–imperialism, women’s rights and sustainable development, have themselves paved the way for re–enchantment or re–sacralisation of science.

Contemporary theories of physics, evolution and biology were wilfully distorted to make it look as if all of modern science was converging to affirm the New Age, mind–over–matter cosmology that follows from Vedantic monism. ‘Evidence’ from fringe sciences was used to support all kinds of superstitions, from vastu, astrology, ‘quantum healing’ to the latest theory of Vedic creationism. Science and ‘Vedas’ were treated as homologues, as just different names of the same thing. Orwell’s Big Brother would’ve felt right at home!Another sign of doublespeak was this:

• On the one hand, the BJP and its allies presented themselves as great champions of science, as long as it could be absorbed into ‘the Vedas’, of course.
• On the other hand, they aggressively condemned the secular and naturalistic worldview of science — the disenchantment of nature — as ‘reductionist’, ‘Western’ or even ‘Semitic’ and therefore un–Hindu and un–Indian. Science yes, and technology yes, but a rational–materialist critique of Vedic idealism no — that became the mantra of Hindutva.

Why this over–eagerness to claim the support of science? There is a modernising impulse in all religions to make the supposedly timeless truths of theology acceptable to the modern minds raised on a scientific sensibility. Contemporary Hindu nationalists are carrying on with the neo–Hindu tradition of proclaiming Hinduism as the universal religion of the future because of its superior ‘holistic science’ (as compared to the ‘reductionist science’ of the West.) Besides, it is easier to sell traditions and rituals, especially to urban, upwardly mobile men, if they have the blessings of English–speaking ‘scientific’ gurus.Granted, this business of Vedic science had been going on before anyone had ever heard the word ‘postmodern’. But this Hindu nationalist appropriation of science has found new sources of intellectual respectability from the postmodernist, anti–Enlightenment turn taken by intellectuals, most radically in American universities, but also in India. What do I mean by postmodernism and how did it play out in India?

Postmodernism encompasses a wide variety of theoretical discourses, touching on everything from literature and history to architecture. What unites them is a suspicion of universal knowledge. Modern science, being the ideal type of such knowledge, naturally became a target of postmodernist critics. Sure, there were many critics of this universal science, including prominent scientists themselves before the advent of postmodernism, but their criticisms were leveled at the abuses of science, not at its logic. As disillusionment with the military–industrial complex grew in the West in the wake of the Vietnam war and civil rights struggles, the top–down model of development in India led to a radical critique of science, in which its claims to objectivity and universality were questioned.

In India well–known public intellectuals Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva, Shiv Vishvanathan, Claude Alvares and others condemned modern science as being innately barbaric, violent and even genocidal because of its reductionism and its imposition of western interests and values in collusion with westernised Indian elite. But the critique of science and technology that emerged out of the so–called ‘Delhi school of science studies’ was not limited to uses or abuses of science: it questioned the content and methodology of science as we know it. No one can deny that there are alternative, culture–dependent descriptions of nature: the world is full of a vast variety of such descriptions. Given this diversity, can we not say that modern science provides us a closer, a more approximate representation of nature which is more adequately supported by evidence and logic? Not so, according to its critics, because the standards of truth and falsity are also relative to the ‘form of life’ of a culture. They justify developing a science in accord with the Vedic cosmology as an attempt to decolonise the ‘Hindu mind’ of western, Semitic–monotheistic influences.

Indeed, scholar–activists sympathetic to the Hindu worldview, including Rajiv Malhotra and Koenard Elst routinely cite the writings of Ashis Nandy, Ronald Inden and even Gayatri Spivak as allies in a shared project of understanding India through Hindu categories. Like the postmodernist supporters of ethno–sciences, they do not deny that modern science has discovered some truths about nature. But they declare them to be lower–level truths, because they merely deal with dead matter, shorn of consciousness. Notwithstanding all pious declarations of the ‘death’ of the Newtonian world view of matter obeying mechanical laws, the fact is that any number of rigorous, double–blind tests have failed to show any signs of disembodied consciousness or mind–stuff in nature: matter obeying mindless laws of physics is all there is.

But in the Vedic science discourse, the overwhelming evidence for adequacy of matter to explain the higher functions of mind and life are set aside as a result of ‘knowledge filtration’ by western–trained scientists. Take the example of the emerging theory of ‘Vedic creationism’ (which updates the spiritual evolutionary theories of Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda). Its chief architects, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, claim that Darwinian evolutionary biologists and mainstream biologists, being products of the western ontological assumptions, have been systematically ignoring and hiding evidence that supports the theory of ‘devolution of species’ from the Brahman through the mechanism of karma and rebirth. All knowledge, they claim, parroting social constructivism, is a product of interests and biases. On this account, Vedic creationism, explicitly grounded in Vedic cosmology is as plausible and defensible as Darwinism, grounded on the naturalistic and capitalist assumptions of the western scientists. Vedic creationism is only one example of ‘decolonised science’.

Postmodernism represents a treason of the clerks which has given intellectual respectability to reactionary religiosity. With the best intentions of giving marginalised social groups — especially if they were women and if they belonged to the non–western world —the right to their own ways of knowing, western academics, in alliance with populist Third Worldist intellectuals, have succeeded in painting science and modernity as the enemy of the people. Rather than encourage and nurture a critical spirit toward inherited traditions, many of which are authoritarian and patriarchal, postmodernist intellectuals have waged a battle against science and against the spirit of the Enlightenment itself. As the case of Vedic science in the service of Hindu nationalism in India demonstrates, this misguided attack on the Enlightenment has only aided the growth of pseudoscience, superstitions and tribalism. read/post comments

Karnak and Luxor

A visit to Egypt can be a humbling experience. Big is really "massive" in Egypt, like the pyramids of Gizeh and the temples of Karnak and Luxor with their huge columns and obelisks. Napoleon's scholars calculated that the limestone blocks in the three pyramids of Gizeh were sufficient to build a wall one foot wide and 10 feet high around the whole of France!

The expertise of the ancient Egyptians in the field of architecture, engineering, astronomy, art, sculpture, writing are all there for us to wonder. What we should realise though, is that these were the achievements of a bronze-age culture. Cutting limestone and hard granite into huge blocks for building and carving sculptures in the round without the use of iron tools is an extremely difficult feat. The beautifully carved hieroglyphics, painted with the most vibrant colours is in itself a work of art. Even more remarkable was the living standards of the kings and ruling classes. Elaborately carved and designed chairs, tables, cots, thrones, chests in cedar and other wood, metal craft, woodwork, pottery, jewellery making, all kinds of crafts were highly evolved at a time when most people of the world still lived in neolithic villages.

Western scholars have been judgmental when they dismissed the civilisations of the east as the cult of the dead and have argued that this obsessive concentration on death rituals was the reason for these cultures remaining stagnant and their ultimate eclipse. However, it is to be noted that western cultures have developed only in the last few centuries, while the great Egyptian civilisation flourished for several thousand years with near continuity in religious beliefs and practices, lifestyle and concepts of kingship.GEETA VASUDEVAN The Hindu Magazine Sunday, Mar 07, 2004 About Us

I am my own reader

Writing seems an entirely self-contained activity, work pursued for its own sake. Actually, the writer sets out on a very personal and solitary quest, involving, at least in its intentions, no one else. I am my own reader. In fact, when writing, I am telling myself things. What the writer is trying to do rather is to make sense of life — for herself and incidentally for the reader. It is a kind of self-communing, of which the reader becomes a part. What is ultimately communicated is a picture of the world as the writer sees it, a picture that comes out of somewhere deep within, often taking even her by surprise. It is almost like hypnosis: things one didn't know were there, things one wouldn't have expressed in ordinary life, emerge. It is also a little frightening, being almost like an emotional and intellectual strip tease; there is a sense of standing exposed and bare under the spotlight.

For a writer, as I said, writing is the thing. But in exploring ideas, in teasing and stretching them, the writer helps readers to see what they have not been able to glimpse on their own. It is the writer's imagination that opens out new worlds to the reader. The imagination is a very powerful tool, it has both muscle and strength. I would compare it, not to the butterfly's flitting, but to the eagle's swoop and soar in flight. There is something daring about the way imagination can go into the dark, leap over a yawning abyss and make connections. It is imagination that allows the artist to get to the inner truth, going beyond the facts, behind the presumed reality. "Poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history": Aristotle's words. It is the writer's imagination that makes it possible for creative writing to have these qualities. SHASHI DESHPANDE The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Jul 06, 2003

I read therefore I am

I see readers, and in their gestures the pleasure, responsibility and power that they derive from reading, that are common with mine. I am not alone. In my adolescence, whenever people mentioned my so-called passion for reading, I would always start to bristle. After all, to be known as a book lover — how grotesque. To my hypersensitive ears, it was like being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world.

Shocking as it may seem, my real "love" isn't so much for reading as for pleasure — it merely happens that learning new things delights me, as do fast-paced stories, imaginative wordplay, and distinctive prose styles. Should I be congratulated for being a self-indulgent hedonist? I certainly wouldn't read books if they were boring, irrelevant and soporific — which is how most high school kids regard the classics of world literature. No, I read for excitement. Everything else is secondary.

It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled and still formidable. Reading gave me an excuse for privacy, my bed late at night became my safest and most secluded place for reading, in that nebulous region between being awake and being asleep. Many nights I would turn on my bedside lamp and try both to reach the end of the book I was reading, and to delay the end as much as possible, going back a few pages, looking for a section I had enjoyed, checking details I thought had escaped me. In fact, I don't ever remember feeling lonely, my books were good company. The psychologist James Hillman argues that those who have read stories or had stories read to them in childhood "are in better shape or have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced... Coming early with life it is already a perspective on life."

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwards. Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. Though I knew myself incapable of making up stories such as my favourite authors wrote, I felt that my opinions frequently coincided with theirs, and (to use Montaigne's phrase) "I took to trailing far behind them murmuring `Hear, Hear'." Later I was able to dissociate myself from their fiction; but in my childhood and much of my adolescence, most of what the book told me, however fantastical, was true at the time of my reading, and as tangible as the stuff of which the book itself was made. The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never, at any price, to be divided. The contents of every book burned within it, blazed from it; located not merely in its binding or its pictures, they were enshrined in chapter headings and opening letters, paragraphs and lines. You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines and reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at the spot where you halted. I think I read in at least two ways.

• First, by following breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page — as when I read Vonnegut, Maugham, O'Henry or Salinger.
• Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinising the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure in merely the sound of the words or the clues, which the words did not wish to reveal, or which I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.

The second kind of reading — which had something of the quality of reading stories — I discovered in Lewis Carroll, Vikram Seth, Vassanji, Tagore and Nabokov. Reading, to me, set one free, it gave one a freedom to explore thoughts and the world outside the context they lived in. This has its retributions in the political world we live in, from the banning of writers like Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen to the censorship of countless authors ranging from Neruda to Gorky over the years. But not only totalitarian governments fear reading. Readers are bullied in school yards and in colleges as much as in government offices and prisons.

Almost everywhere the community of readers has an ambiguous reputation that comes from its acquired authority and perceived power. Something in the relationship between a reader and a book is recognised as wise and fruitful, but is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding, perhaps because the image of an individual curled up in a corner, seemingly oblivious of the grumblings of the world, suggests impenetrable privacy and a selfish eye along with a singular secretive action. "Books, you have too many books!" my mother would exclaim in frustration. I remember being called a dreamer once by a maternal uncle when he saw me reading, as if my silent activity contradicted their sense of what it meant to be productive or alive.

The popular fear of what a reader might do among the pages of a book is as ageless a fear as men have of what witches and alchemists do behind locked doors. The recent attack by vandals at the Bhandarkar Institute in Maharashtra, is yet another example of destruction of information, of books that demonstrators have no idea about in terms of value and content. Their pillaging convinced no one. Thus reality — harsh necessary reality — was seen to conflict irredeemably with the evasive dream world of books. Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.

Told that we are threatened with extinction, we, today's readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Like the act of reading itself, the history of reading jumps forward to our time — to me, to my experience as a reader — and then goes back to an early page in a distant foreign century. It skips chapters, browses, selects, re-reads, refuses to follow conventional order. Paradoxically, the fear that opposes reading to active life, that urged my mother to request me from collecting way too many books that might not amount to much, recognises a solemn truth: "You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over," writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in The White Castle, "but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand the book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and , with it, understand life as well." PRIYA BALASUBRAMANIAM The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 01, 2004

My Passage to Many Indias

The Coexistence of Multiple Realities ALEXANDER M KADAKIN

The Times of India THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2004

But even before I stepped on the Indian soil, India was ever present in my dreams and imagination. Indeed, even at that nascent age as a scholar of India, it dawned on me that it would be wrong to presume that there was one India. There exist several ethereal and material Indias, blending into each other and simultaneously coexisting in time and space, more often peacefully than not, but at times conflicting. I kept coming to India, each time for a higher post in the Embassy, interacting with more and more Indian friends and familiarising myself with ever new facets.

Every year during those decades I was attentively putting my ear to the barahmasa song performed by India's nature. There followed Indian winters, insufficiently refreshing by Russian standards, but still uncomfortable especially for those who do not have a safe shelter. Indian springs, joyful at the start until they transform into a scorching blast furnace of the summer heat. Every time I witnessed the monsoon I felt reborn in a new avatar, thus getting a somatic self-explanation for the theory of reincarnation. Implanting the various shades of the seasons into my soul, experiencing them during North-South and West-East travels, I have to admit - geographically and climatically the vast India is as surprising as her polylingual and polyethnic multiplicity. I was struck by India's weightless architecture haunted by ghosts and phantoms, rid of history's yoke. No other country has such palaces with timeless architecture. India's culture, unlike currencies, is not convertible.

I could not help processing through my soul everything I was associated with - from the Himalayan saga of the Roerichs to the Nehru-Gandhi family's tragedies and triumphs of Aeschylean or Shakespearean magnitude.

My India spoke to me in various languages which, luckily, I could understand - be it the polished English of Indian diplomacy or the "Hinglish" of informal chats, the "Hirdu" of Hollywood movies or the chaste and refined Hindi of Doordarshan. At times, it could be an intellectual discourse or a soporific pravachana, a shriek of pain or boastful self-praise. I listened to all those voices and often wondered whether they belonged to a single whole or to a polyphonic chorus. Not only the voices. Hi-tech luxuries carried on a bullock cart, agricultural revolution and the ancient plough, jhuggis side by side with glittering skyscrapers, haute couture shows watched by shabby dhoti-clad manufacturers of things fashionable, ahimsa ideals and bloody clashes - could all this coexist in a single flacon? Or even within an individual who could imbibe the 21st century ideas and razor-edge technologies, at the same time ready to fight for the identification of an ancient site? Should I call it contrasts or contradictions? Are these features self-excluding? Are there many Indias?

It took me time to realise that my India is remindful of a human body with its seats of power and intellect and various indriyas. Sometimes the body is guided by reason and sometimes by mere emotions. It might feel rigid in the morning, become more elastic by daytime, get overexcited by evening, and frustrated by night. It fights its own ups and downs, tides and ebbs, high spirits and the blues. It looks different if observed from various angles, and is familiar and mysterious, gorgeous and shabby, pure and impure, and, eventually, it could be either cherished or ruined. I have visited many other countries, but I reserve this metaphor for India exclusively. Or may be this is one more thing that I have mastered in India — to speak by sidhantas and drishtantas: is it a better way to make oneself clear, or to conceal one's thoughts? In any case, it is certainly an acquisition to be packed into my diplomatic luggage and carried back.

To go on with the body, it may, like any human one, be healthy or ailing, beautiful or disgusting, may be mistaken about its own state and feel in good shape being at the same time unaware of a terminal ailment that has already taken roots in it. Still, really challenging is that it possesses a soul which generations of scholars have been trying to comprehend and explicate to others. But this soul encompasses such an enormous variety of traits from the heights of virtue to the depths of vice that the moment one feels capable to form some well defined knowledge, an event comes up to the surface that wholly contradicts the previous notion. Myself hailing from the country which, as our classic poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev said, "cannot be understood by reason but can only be believed in", I have the similar feeling for India though, I must confess, in both cases the strength of reason and belief has been, more than in one case, put under severe test.

How more profound is India's traditional world, where each stone is a hierophant, a sign of the presence of the sacred in our world. Every sunrise here becomes a cosmogenic drama, every woman - an embodiment of the tantric principle of Shakti whose presence is the source of the world's very existence, and could be manifested right up to the election Lila. Behind the exterior forms specific only of India there hides the sublime universal paradigm of the traditional conscience which is totally opposite to the modernistic one, at the same time far more vibrant and wholesome. In purely modern phenomena one sees the same movement of the spirit that one can get from traditional doctrines. The craving of human soul for sacral archetypes is unquenchable, and archetypes are easily juxtaposed with new age constructs. The sacral and the profane coexist.

Once Russian astronauts told me that from the outer space India resembled a human heart. I wish that the hearts of Russia and India forever beat in unison between themselves and the outside world at large.

To paraphrase the great philosopher, Mircea Eliade, have these years made me learn better the magic formulae of this great Indian alchemy? Yes and no. My diplomatic status was both of help and an impediment. It offered and denied me a number of opportunities. Many Indias have escaped my attention. Many voices I was not able to hear and many developments unable to grasp much less to foresee, as India seems to be specially designed by the Vidhata to defy all prognoses and theories, especially in politics - oh no, I've promised. My heart remains here but all my Indias will travel back along with me, needing no extra space in the plane. And new ones will appear when I return. Or is there only one India reinventing, multiplying and reproducing herself many times and each time anew?

Women and religion

By C.S. LAKSHMI

Women's engagement with religion has always been taken as a part of being feminine. Really staunch atheistic women have existed only in the Self-Respect Movement. A woman who decides not to observe the rituals and customs dictated by religion has always been seen as a harbinger of conflict, disorder and pain within a family. This is because, for a woman, religion is not just something linked to a god but a cultural practice that she is supposed to preserve. Despite the influence of the Self-Respect Movement, one of the important duties of a married woman is to continue the worshipping tradition of the family she is married into.

In the women's movement, it was generally assumed that those who fight for the liberation of women cannot be believers because the rituals that are a part of religion and the meanings attached to the rituals bind women in many ways and degrade women in unacceptable ways. Moreover, engaging with religion also meant accepting the divisions in the society based on caste and religion.

But in many of our households, certain symbols of religion casually lay around as cultural objects in the form of a terracotta goddess whose name one had forgotten, bought from a small village temple or a lamp which one's mother had lit all her life, an unusually carved Ganesha, brass Deepavali lamps handed down by the family, a brass candle stand or a rough wooden cross carved by a village sculptor or a Ravi Varma painting of Rama's coronation.

One still found it difficult to step on a book. One did enjoy Carnatic music, bhajans, Christmas carols, some festivals like Id, Pongal, regional new year celebrations, Christmas or Deepavali which meant new clothes, tasty food (even if the women had to slog cooking it), the smell of sugar cane and jaggery permeating the house, the fragrance of a cake cooking in the oven, the flavour of spicy mutton and milk pudding with cardamom boiling on the stove and the smell of flowers and fruits which change the atmosphere in the household for a while. Many of us who had discarded the ritualistic part of a festival did enjoy the food that we cooked or the family cooked or the neighbours sent over.

Over the years, we understood that while religion and the identity it imposed was not acceptable to us, faith was something deeply personal and that so long as faith did not make you look at the other with hatred, so long as it was not imposed on the other to create hierarchies, it was not harmful. However, we did stay away from groups openly professing a faith or a religion. We were still trying to grapple with the issues religion raised when the demolition of Babri Masjid happened and we realised that what was demolished was not just a religious structure but the very foundation of harmony that had been built over the years. Ochre was no more just a colour. Nor was the trident a wall decoration. The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 07, 2005

Gandhi fought against foreigners and the natives

The Mahatma's Case AMULYA GANGULI

THE TIMES OF INDIA Teusday, October 4, 2005

Even after conceding that Gandhi fathered the nation, Swagato Ganguly has blamed the Mahatma (The God That Failed, Oct 1) for much of India's ills. Yet, in the admission of his fatherhood lies the key to understand the Man of the Millennium. A basic feature of Gandhi's life and politics was that he was not just a freedom fighter like Nelson Mandela. Even as he opposed the British, Gandhi wanted to ensure that the Indians were ready for their freedom. It has to be remembered that the most harmful effect of colonialism was not economic exploitation, but cultural subjugation.

Gandhi's first battle was against this conviction of inferiority which enabled a few Britishers to rule over many Indians. His objective was to instil a sense of self-respect among Indians by making them feel proud of their Indianness. As William Shirer, the author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich writes in his book on Gandhi, when he called on the Mahatma, he found him sitting on the floor plying the charkha. Gandhi asked Shirer whether a chair should be brought for him, but Shirer declined and sat on the floor. The episode is symptomatic of Gandhi's politics. He wanted to demonstrate that Indians sat on the floor (and ate with their fingers and had their own dress codes) and were not ashamed of their customs. If the whites wanted to join them, they would have to do so on these terms, and not the other way round.

It is this attitude which made him discard western clothes and tell journalists, who asked him how he felt meeting the King in Buckingham Palace in his meagre attire, that the monarch was wearing enough for both of us. Arguably, in his endeavour to emphasise the distinctive Indian personality, Gandhi took his anti-western stance too far, to the dismay of Tagore and Nehru. But, then, the Mahatma was not a man of compromises. It has to be remembered also that, to him, the fight with the British must have seemed an endless struggle. Gandhi, therefore, fought on two fronts against foreigners and the natives. And the latter had not only to be taught to be self-reliant and worthy of respect by weaving his own clothes but also by cleaning the latrines, a lesson which the country doesn't seem to have learnt even now.

Gandhi may have also calculated that to make his non-traditional attitude towards untouchabi-lity acceptable, he would have to identify himself closely with eternal India through his dress, religiosity and austere lifestyle. An obviously anglicised person such as Nehru wouldn't have been able to do this. In the process, Gandhi had no alternative but to turn his face against western civilisation, a yet to be attained good idea. Had he praised industrialisation and preferred allopathic medicine, he would have been a charlatan to the masses. His was a canny strategy to topple an empire, leaving the future to take care of itself. The writer is a political commentator

Tolerance, acceptance and sympathy.

A SINGLE event helped create a timeless mystique around Swami Vivekananda. This was his address at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893. Even to this day, his address is seen by many as a turning point in Hindu re-assertion and revival. Contemporary votaries of `soft' Hindutva, from A.B. Bardhan to A.B. Vajpayee, swear by the spirit of his message in Chicago. Liberals, leftists and communalists are joined together in appropriating the legacy of Vivekananda as put forth in this address. What was so special about this piece of oration delivered to the `Sisters and Brothers of America'? In a masterful way, Vivekananda addressed three major concerns of nineteenth century India: Hindu identity, Hindu nationalism and an equal `dialogue' between Hinduism and other faiths.

At the outset, Vivekananda categorically asserted the pre-eminence of Hinduism by calling it `the mother of religions'. This claim of superiority rested on the fact that Hinduism was that religion which had taught, and continued to teach, the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. Not only did Hinduism believe in tolerance but it also accepted all religions as true. It had never persecuted, either with sword or pen, and, in fact had given shelter to persecuted sects. Its message was the surest antidote to sectarianism, bigotry and fanaticism. In one deft stroke, Vivekananda defined Hinduism's equation with all other faiths: They were mere children in relation to the `mother of religions', and also were participants in an eternal seminar, where the `tutor' was Hinduism and the `tutees' were all other faiths...

Having dwelt on the theme of tolerance, Vivekananda now started taking other faiths to task. All other religions, asserted Vivekananda, suffer from the fatal flaws of faith in a Personal God, sectarianism, bigotry and fanaticism. This assertion flowed from his formal definition of religion:
Religion is not talk, or doctrines or theories, nor is it sectarianism. Religion cannot live in sects and societies. It is the relation between the soul and God; how can it be made into a society? ... Further, all religions, with the sole exception of Hinduism, depended on the historical veracity of their founders or prophets. This invariably led to conflict. Tearing apart the prophetic tradition, he debunks the very motives of all prophets (with the exception of the Buddha). All prophets were moved by external motives to expect reward from the outside, meaning the material world. Their actions were not unselfish. Their language may have been highly evolved but their intentions were highly suspect...

It was against this background that Vivekananda proposed his theory of Hindu tolerance. It fits in uneasily with his earlier typology of all other religions, except Hinduism, as participants in a process of eventful perfection. The idea of Hindu superiority was also implicit in Vivekananda's attempt to propose such a theory. The first rhetorical step in positioning a theory of Hindu tolerance was, therefore, to refrain from judging other faiths. According to Vivekananda, we tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, argued Vivekananda, then it must be `according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else'. It was important, therefore, to learn to look at the duty of others through their own eyes and never judge the customs and observances of others through the prism of our own standards. This was the very foundation upon which the edifice of tolerance stood. Hinduism, says Vivekananda, was built on a similar foundation, or to put it more correctly was the foundation itself...

Hinduism was the repository of such tolerance, acceptance and sympathy. The first step towards this admirable goal was to feel that oneness. Once this was accomplished, we would be able to transcend our limited phenomenal world and become immortal. Vedanta allowed this sense of oneness while promoting an infinite variety and variation in religious thought. Therefore the Vedanta lays down that each man should be treated not as what he manifests, but as what he stands for. Each human being stands for the divine, and, therefore, every teacher should be helpful, not by condemning man, but by helping him to call forth the divinity that is within him.

The lofty flights of Advaita were, therefore, of little help to Vivekananda in forgetting the past. History cast its shadow on the whole idea of oneness and fellow-feeling. Hindus must build churches and mosques in India, asserted Vivekananda, despite the hatred, brutality, cruelty, tyranny and the vile language of the Muslims and Christians. He hoped that such proactive love would ultimately win. Yet, Vivekananda could never take that all-important leap into rejecting sweeping racial and religious stereotypes. When he says Muslims, he meant all Muslims, and so with Christians. (The subtlety of the idea of rejecting English rule but not the English had to wait for more than a decade for Gandhi to formulate it.)

Vivekananda derived the idea of a common universal faith from Sri Ramakrishna. In a speech delivered in New York, and subsequently published under the title, My Master, Vivekananda speaks of Sri Ramakrishna's attempt to know the truth of all other faiths ... ... Vivekananda did not experience this oneness of faiths like Sri Ramakrishna. His attempt remained confined to the intellectual plane and lacked the intensity of living another man's faith with one's `whole heart'. Between Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, the disparity in method to arrive at the same conclusion made all the difference. Like Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna was after all the pure sort, unencumbered by history or context, but immensely rich in experience. Vivekananda was like Paul, the thundering sort, who had to spread the light quickly and effectively. He understood well that religion was not an intellectual activity but an act of realisation. But he was often impatient. Hinduism as a tolerant and all-embracing faith remained for him an aspiration, never an experience. Excerpted from Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Penguin Books India, Viking, Rs. 350.

Friends across faiths

Humra Quraishi

Last spring, I visited a gurudwara for the first time in my life. Why not earlier? I was apprehensive: Would a Muslim be welcome? Contrary to my fears, the experience turned out to be a happy one. It was so peaceful and tranquil in the gurudwara. I was there for an hour with Sikh friends. And then, it struck me how little we know of each other's faiths. What was holding us back? Most of us are happy to consume misleading myths of different faiths. Often I've been told that I don't 'look' like a Muslim. Asked to explain, they admit rather sheepishly that the general impression they have of Muslims is that of a woman covered by a veil, with a bunch of children in tow... At various stages in life, I've had to give explanations and counter-explanations to convince people that Muslims are no different than the rest.

In fact, Indian Muslims follow social customs which closely resemble Hindu ones; yet, stereotypical notions and myths continue to circulate, creating differences between communities. Right from childhood, suspicion and apprehension of other religions gets drilled into our little heads. It seems almost as though you would betray the religion you are born into if you entered places of worship of other faiths. Instead, visiting one another's temples, mosques and churches should be part of growing up — this will definitely broaden our perspective just as reading opens our minds and hearts to other horizons. The 13th century Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, made it a point to routinely interact and hold spirited dialogues with the Brahmins. Little wonder, then, he could expound a beautiful philosophy that if the Almighty did not make demarcations between Hindus and Muslims, vis-a-vis the outreach of his bounty like sunshine, water, fruit and trees — then, who are we to create rigid barriers of caste and creed?

In God's eyes, all humans are equal. Differences and conflicts are entirely man-made. The best way to bridge gaps and clear doubts is by having more people-to-people contacts between different faiths. A Tamil friend confided that she had thought, all along, that Islam was a militant and aggressive religion, until she heard Maulana Wahiduddin Khan speak and explain that the word Islam means peace. If only religion was not made out to be such a formidable subject, we would be able to look upon God as a close friend and confidante, whether he lived in a guru- dwara, temple, church or mosque, or even if you prefer to see him in nature — in trees, flowers and mountains, for instance. God, the Creator, cannot obviously be confined to small spaces — he is everywhere. Kahlil Gibran said: "And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles/ Rather look about you and you shall see him playing with your children/ And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightening and descending in the rain/ You shall see him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees...”

God's presence can be sensed everywhere: in the teachings of religions, and simply in every person you come across. Befriend those from different faiths and freely question each other about your respective faiths. This is the best way to clear doubts, most often sown by those who want to divide and misrule. I recently met a Jesuit priest who lives in Ahmedabad. He said to me: "In these days of communal strife make it a point to tell your neighbours and close friends that the essence of each religion of the world is to co-exist in total harmony.” To this, I'll add a few lines from a Bangladeshi friend who provides shelter to stray dogs and cats: "We have two stray dogs and four cats — but they have never fought with one another... they're better behaved than human beings." The Times of India October 26, 2002

Just one diya

More dash than cash: God, in fact, seems to like it simple
RENUKA NARAYANAN

This has to do with grand marble mandirs being considered so vital today. It’s great to strut our stuff as a community, lay up treasures on earth, get ourselves a meeting point that works as belief bazaar, cultural centre and free shrink, plus does brilliant free takeway in biodegradable donas (leaf cups). Even the distant glimpse of a great House of God is electrifying and our highways are lined with shrines that everyone bobs their heads to or halts at for a quick prayer. These visible symbols are important for reassurance, they light up the land with their presence, knit regions through the circuits of sacred geography and give us valid reasons to touch base with interior and outlying corners of the Motherland.

Some of the best stories from religious tradition are to do with temples. Nandanar the beloved Tamil saint pined so hard for a glimpse of Shiva at Chidambaram. Saal Beg, a Muslim devotee of Lord Jagannath at Puri yearned for darshan and wrote the moving song Ahi Neela saila. But with all this justification for buildings, God’s own wishes, if we are to understand our stories correctly, are very modest indeed. Saint Jnaneshwar of Maharashtra says that the Lord is best pleased when worshipped with the flowers of good deeds. Or let’s recall one of Shiva’s nicest names: Asutosh. It means ‘Easily pleased’.

A sprinkling of water, a bel leaf, a flower — these are enough to make the Great God happy, if offered sincerely. Once, when some rakshasas attacked him, he thought they were worshipping Him because they hit Him with branches of bel, and so He blessed them! Take the tale of Kanappa Nayanar, a hunter. He was filled with such love for Shiva that he felt impelled to make an offering as a formal expression of his feelings. In his innocence he spat water from his mouth on the Shivling, threw down flowers from his own hair and laid a fresh kill of deer at the altar. We’re reliably informed that the Lord just loved Kanappar to bits.

With Pitr Paksh going on now (the period of formal Hindu remembrance of ancestors, when no new contracts may be signed, houses or cars bought), it makes sense to remember our soul links. Rather than grand buildings, these stories our ancestors bequeathed us are our real treasure, because they give us a happy, purposeful code of living: It’s not what you’ve got but how you use it that matters! The Vedic people made no temples, only altars that they made and took apart after each yagnya. Let’s cherish our wonderful temples, let’s build new ones by all means. But let’s not forget that baggage-less vision either, or the minimalist chic of just one diya, or just one agarbatti near the tulsi. The Indian Express: Monday, September 30, 2002

Sob Story

Manjul Bajaj

While laughter has long and often been hailed as the best medicine, crying, the other uniquely human attribute has been given short shrift by society. Humans are the only animals who shed tears of emotion. Why do we cry? Are there any physical or health benefits from crying? Plenty, if some researchers are to be believed. Throughout history and in every culture people have cried. Weeping often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalise complex, overwhelming emotions. Scientists feel that weeping is probably necessary because no human behaviour has ever continuously evolved unless it somehow contributed to survival. There are three basic types of tears.

• In healthy eyes, the cornea is continually kept wet and nourished by basal tears.
• The second type of tears is reflex tears that attempt to wash out irritants that may have gotten into the eye.
• The third category, emotional tears, is increased lacrimation due to strong emotional stress or pain. Tears brought about by emotions have a different chemical make-up than those for lubrication.

According to a study by University of Minnesota biochemist William Frey, people report feeling better after a cry. Frey discovered the neurotransmitters leucine-enkephalin (an endorphin or natural opiate-like substance for pain relief) and prolactin (released from the pituitary in response to emotional stress) in emotional tears: The substances were not found in tears shed in response to sliced onions. Studies back the common observation that men and women cry differently. Men cry quietly and their eyes brim with tears. Women, on the other hand, make lots of crying noises as the tears stream down their cheeks. Testing revealed that men weep an average of 1.4 times a month while women cry about 5.3 times monthly. "Until the Industrial Revolution, crying in public was pretty normal, even for men", says Tom Lutz, PhD, "Heroic epics from Greek times through the Middle Ages are soggy with weeping of all sorts. Through most of history, tearless-ness has not been the standard of manliness". The industrial age needed diligent, not emotional, workers. Crying was then delegated to privacy, behind closed doors. People everywhere became more uncomfortable with public tears. Perhaps, it's time to reclaim our tears. A crying club, anyone? The Times of India October 6, 2005

A logic beyond science?

It’s time science and spirituality ended their eternal war.
GAUTAM CHIKERMANE

It couldn’t be without logic—this intricately balanced nature, its geography, its life forms, its civilisations, their interdependence. The laws of nature that physics is discovering existed long before man discovered science. Or defined it. But simply because science today defines itself in one way —it describes a large class of observations and makes definite predictions about future observations—doesn’t mean there’s no logic beyond this definition. Just like the movement, in science, to understanding that it wasn’t the earth but the sun around which planets revolved took two millennia and six scientists to be discovered, from Aristotle in 340 BC to Newton in 1687, maybe there’s some new logic waiting to be unearthed by science that stands beyond its reach today.

We’re on a planet that’s not only rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, but one that’s constantly evolving, with the rest of us trying to keep pace even as we influence this evolution. Discovering ourselves, our physical and psychological drivers, our arts, sciences and everything in between. In the process, going beyond what we know, to what we don’t: mind and its multi-layered depths, soul and its vastness, consciousness and its timelessness, the all-encompassing spirit and its spacelessness. Concepts science can’t recognise as logical as they stand outside the logic of reason and within the logic of, say, intuition.

Education is partly to blame. We find that we have been trained to look only at the surface. Hence, the focus on one aspect of a much wider possibility. Ignoring the education of the body, for instance, by which death could be conquered. The education of the vital, through which we can understand that perhaps fear and courage are two halves of one whole. The education of the psychic, by which we touch the That lying within us. All of which have their own logics, that don’t necessarily conform to scientific definition. Silence as a stairway to reach these depths, for instance.

Not for a moment am I questioning scientific logic, just wondering whether those conforming to it have their minds open enough to accept the possibility of other paradigms, other logics. The existence of, say, a spiritual logic. Could it be that the scientific temper has seen merely religious seeking through irrational beliefs, and hence is discounting it—and along with it, its deeper, spiritual aspects? Could it also be that it concerns itself only with change and not the Source, the stuff from where it all began? The Indian Express Monday, November 14, 2005 Read comment[s]

Garibaldi and Nehru

Exactly a century ago, Pandit Nehru first walked into this elite public school that takes its name from its location, leaving two years later for Cambridge with the rudiments of an English gentleman's education and a head full of radical ideas that would bring the British Raj to its knees. For, in an accident of history, Harrow unwittingly presented tomorrow's freedom fighter with the ultimate reading list.

As a prize for excellence, the school fatefully selected for the 18-year-old Nehru the first volume of G M Trevelyan's historical trilogy on Giuseppe Garibaldi. It was to be a turning point in Nehru's life. The soldier played a central role in the 19th-century unification of Italy and the rise of Italian nationalism. Garibaldi's example prepared Nehru for the struggle he would have to wage with powerful words and persuasive ideas before the Empire would crumble. Later, Nehru was to record the impact that long-ago school prize had on him. Transfixed by Garibaldi's struggle, Nehru bought two further volumes on the gallant soldier and admitted it inspired in his young breast "visions of similar deeds in India...of a gallant fight for freedom, and in my mind, India and Italy got strangely mixed together."

On Monday, Harrow celebrated its ham-handedness in making that historically fateful gift to one of its greatest sons. Marking the centenary of Nehru's entry into the school with a respectful ceremony redolent of history, Harrow's headmaster Barnaby Lenon declared "Nehru was a role model for Harrovians." Indian High Commissioner Kamalesh Sharma added: "In some way, by presenting the book on Garibaldi, Harrow contributed to the strengthening of the desire for freedom for India that Nehru would later win." RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL [Wednesday, November 16, 2005, THE TIMES OF INDIA]

On Considering the Source

Sources are precious. Original ideas, even more so. The nature of design practice means that we will always, by necessity, need to reference existing information, but in our race to the finish, let's not forget that in the very process of translation — from idea to form, from one thing to many things — we are not obligated to imitate, replicate, and indeed — mediate. Posted by Jessica Helfand

A friend of mine, a painter, recently saw a group exhibition at PS1 in New York in which he was struck by the absence of primary source material. Although intentionally abstract works, these paintings all referenced extremely specific aspects of contemporary culture, most of them heavily filtered through the media. Put another way, these artists weren't abstracting simple forms — natural forms, geometric forms, simple and universally comprehensible forms — but were instead referencing ideas that had already been parsed by various media sources. While on one hand, this work could be said to be mirroring a particular generation of artists who have come of age in a heavily mediated world, my friend was conflicted: does our willlingness to accept the cultural and biographical bias of the maker mean we are also meant to forgive the absence of original ideas?

In the wake of last week's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the question of where sources come from is on everyone's mind. And while it might be said that questions of national security are not likely to be compromised by a group of abstract painters, the question of source material is, I think, one that deserves a second look. Because it is by its nature tied to the exigencies of public communication, graphic design is perhaps less overtly prone to this type of critique: after all, in traditional practice, there are a series of external transactions — involving clients, budgets and a host of personal and public agendas — that frame the process, if not the actual product of the design itself. Art, on the other hand, does not invoke the same kinds of interpersonal complexities, although there is a long tradition of patronage, going back to the Medicis, that shows the artist does not create work in a vacuum. Yet beyond the obvious — the clients, the curators, the governing factors of economics and what the market will bear — the central question remains: when is an idea original, unmediated — and pure?

Clearly, there is nothing that suggests the notion of pure has any relationship to the world we live in. But at the same time, the idea of targeting original sources — and by conjecture, of seeking original ideas — seems like a goal we should, in all fairness, support. (There's a certain amount of semantic confusion here that easily leads to a kind of involuntary hypocrisy: we want to breathe clean air and drink pure water, but we don't want our art to reference "purity" because that wouldn't be a reflection of the world in which we live.) This is not to suggest that purer is better — but that the notion of a primary source, meaning unmediated and unmoored from a host of other complexities — has become something of an endangered species in our time. Designers, who might be said to embrace a slightly more pragmatic vision of making work and disseminating messages, feel the burden of communicating the complexities of an age in which "pure" resonates as utopian, sugar-coated, and false. (There is also the very real fact that "pure" in graphic design recalls the neutral, overly homogenized, and borderline fascist tone of the International style.) And it's tricky: it's all been done. How can anyone ever use Futura Bold Italic again and not evoke the purview of Barbara Kruger?

These sorts of assessments — of which visual metaphors, messages and meanings drive and are driven by people participating, as makers, in an ongoing repository of visual culture — lie at the cornerstone of a kind of ideological polemic about design versus art. Isn't it all subjective? Who is to say what is original? And how do we know if it is? And why, frankly, should we care?Let's return to the idea of sources. To the designer, "referencing" an earlier style or maker can be seen as a kind of post-modern pastiche. When done with irony, it can be deliriously enchanting — Paula Scher's open gesture to Herbert Matter in a series of posters for Swatch, in the early 1980s, come to mind. Sans irony, we're left with blatant plagiarism, and at the risk of really painting myself into a corner, I will refrain from giving examples. At the same time, we yearn for new visual languages to emerge: so scratchy handwriting replaces the clean alignments of mechanically-rendered type and we applaud ourselves for letting go. We photograph signage on our cell phones and upload images to share online: here, through digital concensus, we sanction our societal acceptance of this itinerant, manmade vernacular form, whereupon it becomes streamlined and secondary, no longer the stuff of impulse, the magic of outsider art.

There is one more piece to take into consideration — and that's the piece that involves reality. One has only to consider the popularity of Reality TV to understand why any of us with a healthy imagination would see the blurring of fact and fiction as material worthy of compelling inquiry. But beyond the seduction of the blur lies the deeper, more pressing question: what does the truth look like? Lately it is easy, too easy, to see reality as something distanced from the truth. Writing of the greater concerns over social displacement and substance abuse in yesterday's New York Times,, a psychiatrist warns that the growth of technology has cleaved us from a greater reality of self. "We say that we are "going" places on the Internet without ever leaving the room. Posted by Jessica Helfand on November 3, 2005 07:09 AM Jump to Most Recent Comment

Yehi Hai Right Size, Baby

Jayant V Narlikar

The Times of India , October 15, 2005

In the 1930s, biologist and geneticist J B S Haldane wrote an article 'On Being the Right Size', in which he discussed several living systems in the context of why they come in the particular sizes we find them in. For example, why can't we scale a rabbit to the size of an elephant? Haldane reminds us that the giants in the ancient mythologies, described as enormously larger than humans, would have perished under this mathematical law. Given the composition of a system, there is a natural size for it. Its overall balances are well maintained at that particular size. If you increase the size of the system, the controlling forces scale differently and lose their equilibrium. As sizes increase the volume-based forces grow faster than the surface-based ones, and vice versa. Which is why babies are in greater danger of exposure to cold than adults.

Even man-made systems are subject to influences that are size-dependent and there is a right size for each system. A famous magazine in the United States went out of circulation because its circulation increased. The decline of the Roman Empire began when it became too big. It became increasingly difficult for a central administration in Rome to control far-flung regions. Likewise, political parties in India find it increasingly difficult to have a national cohesive character. As they seek to expand their influence, they have to contend with local aspirations of regions removed from their central think tank. The result is the politics of coalition. The uncontrolled growth of metropolitan cities is another example. The larger the population the greater the infrastructural problems, which rise in greater proportion than the monetary contribution the larger population would bring.

The atomic nucleus contains neutrons and protons, bound by an attractive nuclear force. This force is basically stronger than the force of electrical repulsion between any two protons, but the force is effective only over a short range. We can build stable, bound nuclei by adding more and more particles, but only up to a limit. When we reach the nucleus of iron, we find that this is the limit. This nucleus has 56 particles. If we add more we start descending the stability ladder. The binding provided by the nuclear force loosens because of the large size — the same problem that brought down the Roman Empire. It is time we learnt from nature that 'right size is beautiful' is a good motto to adopt, especially when we are tempted to grow too big for comfort. The writer is an astrophysicist.