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Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
December 03, 2020
February 04, 2018
Act of weaving in religious discourses with science is a clever ploy to appeal to the urbane middle class | Gautam Benegal
The comments of Jaggi Vasudev warning people not to eat during lunar eclipse,
delivered a few years ago in a faint American accent (or what passes
for it), had the social media abuzz recently with a great deal of
support coming from people one would least expect. [ . . . ]
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/sadhguru-jaggi-vasudev-eating-food-lunar-eclipse-rss-hindutva-mohan-bhagwat-vhp/story/1/22172.html
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/sadhguru-jaggi-vasudev-eating-food-lunar-eclipse-rss-hindutva-mohan-bhagwat-vhp/story/1/22172.html
November 13, 2016
India: A Hundred and forty thousand (1.4 lakh) students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
Indian Express
1.4 lakh students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
The syllabus for the exam has been designed by Vijnana Bharti, which has distributed two booklets on the subject as study material to students.
Written by Ashutosh Bhardwaj | New Delhi | Updated: November 13, 2016 5:52 am
*“Astronomy and metaphysics are described in the Rig Veda”
*“The concept of the atom can be traced to Vedic times”
*“Paramanu (beyond atom) was considered to be the smallest particle, which cannot be divided further. Nuclear energy is produced by splitting the same”
*Sushruta is the “father of surgery”. He described over 300 surgical procedures… including a method of stitching intestines by using “ant-heads as stitching material”.
These are pointers from a ‘study material’ issued by Vijnana Bharti, the science and technology wing of the RSS, for an exam the outfit is conducting in over 2,000 government and private schools across the country on November 20. Around 1.4 lakh students from Classes 6 to11 will take the three-hour exam on ‘Indian contribution to science’ and the ‘Life of former President APJ Abdul Kalam’.
The syllabus for the exam has been designed by Vijnana Bharti, which has distributed two booklets on the subject as study material to students. Prominent schools such as DPS, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Amity International Schools have told their teachers to hold special classes for the students.
While schools admit that never before has any private institution been able to bring together so many top schools for an exam, they do not mind the fact that an outside authority has determined the syllabus and will also evaluate the answer-sheets. In fact, many of them said the study material was “extremely good”.
A Jayakumar, Vijnana Bharti Secretary General and a veteran pracharak, said the twin objectives of this exam were to make students aware about “India’s achievements in the world of science” and draw them “towards science”. “We have got massive attention and appreciation across the country for this exam. We are not merely a country that invented zero, but much more than that,” he said, emphasising that there was “no financial support from the government” for the exam. He said they opted for Kalam because he is an “inspirational figure”.
Vijnana Bharti, which calls itself a “science movement with Swadeshi spirit”, has some prominent names in its Governing Council, including top scientists such as Anil Kakodkar and G Madhavan Nair.
Ghaziabad’s Amity International School’s Academic coordinator Ekta Soni said they “have received the study material prepared by them (Vijnan Bharti).” “I have held a meeting with students on how to go about this exam. Science teachers are setting aside one period a week for the preparation of this exam. The study material is of very good quality,” she said. Sixty-nine students of her school are taking the exam.
Kalpna Shukla, school coordinator of Ghaziabad’s Navjeevan Model School, where 200 students are taking the exam, said, “We are taking extra classes for the morning” and believe that “this exam will help our students.”
The schools said they were in constant touch with Vijnana Bharti and have been coordinated with them for the exam. It took three months of planning, Jayakumar said, to bring everyone together.
After Vijnana Bharti evaluates the answersheets, successful candidates will appear for the state-level and then for the national-level exam. The final winners will receive awards from the President of India.
The booklets have chapters on ancient Indian scientists such as Aryabhatta, Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, Lalla and Sripati. Brahmgupta, the booklet notes, “calculated the instantaneous motion of a planet, gave correct equations for parallax and computation of eclipses”, and also “introduced the Indian concept of mathematics-based astronomy into the Arab world”.
A chapter on Ayurvedic treatment lists various kinds of oil massages, including Abhyangam, which is “very useful in treating obesity and diabetic gangrene”. While a chapter lists the achievements of the Indian Space Research Organisation, another on modern scientists has profiles of Vikram Sarabhai, Verghese Kurien, MS Swaminathan, Anil Kakodkar, Sam Pitroda and Sabeer Bhatia.
1.4 lakh students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
The syllabus for the exam has been designed by Vijnana Bharti, which has distributed two booklets on the subject as study material to students.
Written by Ashutosh Bhardwaj | New Delhi | Updated: November 13, 2016 5:52 am
*“Astronomy and metaphysics are described in the Rig Veda”
*“The concept of the atom can be traced to Vedic times”
*“Paramanu (beyond atom) was considered to be the smallest particle, which cannot be divided further. Nuclear energy is produced by splitting the same”
*Sushruta is the “father of surgery”. He described over 300 surgical procedures… including a method of stitching intestines by using “ant-heads as stitching material”.
These are pointers from a ‘study material’ issued by Vijnana Bharti, the science and technology wing of the RSS, for an exam the outfit is conducting in over 2,000 government and private schools across the country on November 20. Around 1.4 lakh students from Classes 6 to11 will take the three-hour exam on ‘Indian contribution to science’ and the ‘Life of former President APJ Abdul Kalam’.
The syllabus for the exam has been designed by Vijnana Bharti, which has distributed two booklets on the subject as study material to students. Prominent schools such as DPS, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Amity International Schools have told their teachers to hold special classes for the students.
While schools admit that never before has any private institution been able to bring together so many top schools for an exam, they do not mind the fact that an outside authority has determined the syllabus and will also evaluate the answer-sheets. In fact, many of them said the study material was “extremely good”.
A Jayakumar, Vijnana Bharti Secretary General and a veteran pracharak, said the twin objectives of this exam were to make students aware about “India’s achievements in the world of science” and draw them “towards science”. “We have got massive attention and appreciation across the country for this exam. We are not merely a country that invented zero, but much more than that,” he said, emphasising that there was “no financial support from the government” for the exam. He said they opted for Kalam because he is an “inspirational figure”.
Vijnana Bharti, which calls itself a “science movement with Swadeshi spirit”, has some prominent names in its Governing Council, including top scientists such as Anil Kakodkar and G Madhavan Nair.
Ghaziabad’s Amity International School’s Academic coordinator Ekta Soni said they “have received the study material prepared by them (Vijnan Bharti).” “I have held a meeting with students on how to go about this exam. Science teachers are setting aside one period a week for the preparation of this exam. The study material is of very good quality,” she said. Sixty-nine students of her school are taking the exam.
Kalpna Shukla, school coordinator of Ghaziabad’s Navjeevan Model School, where 200 students are taking the exam, said, “We are taking extra classes for the morning” and believe that “this exam will help our students.”
The schools said they were in constant touch with Vijnana Bharti and have been coordinated with them for the exam. It took three months of planning, Jayakumar said, to bring everyone together.
After Vijnana Bharti evaluates the answersheets, successful candidates will appear for the state-level and then for the national-level exam. The final winners will receive awards from the President of India.
The booklets have chapters on ancient Indian scientists such as Aryabhatta, Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, Lalla and Sripati. Brahmgupta, the booklet notes, “calculated the instantaneous motion of a planet, gave correct equations for parallax and computation of eclipses”, and also “introduced the Indian concept of mathematics-based astronomy into the Arab world”.
A chapter on Ayurvedic treatment lists various kinds of oil massages, including Abhyangam, which is “very useful in treating obesity and diabetic gangrene”. While a chapter lists the achievements of the Indian Space Research Organisation, another on modern scientists has profiles of Vikram Sarabhai, Verghese Kurien, MS Swaminathan, Anil Kakodkar, Sam Pitroda and Sabeer Bhatia.
February 07, 2016
India's Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience (Apoorva Mandavilli)
Scientific American
India's Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience
Scientists join writers, artists and historians in protesting the Modi government’s growing interference in academic affairs
By Apoorva Mandavilli on February 3, 2016
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Photo by Al Jazeera English under Creative Commons
Three murders, a suicide and a rash of political appointments at universities have thrown Indian academia into an uproar against the conservative (right-wing) government. Prominent artists, writers, historians and scientists are speaking out against an intensifying climate of religious intolerance and political interference in academic affairs.
“What’s going on in this country is really dangerous,” says Rajat Tandon, a number theorist at Hyderabad Central University. Tandon is one of more than 100 prominent scientists, including many heads of institutions, who signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” The statement cites the murder of three noted rationalists — men who had dedicated their lives to countering superstition and championed scientific thought — and what they see as the government’s silent complicity.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the 2014 general elections in India in a landslide victory. The BJP and Modi, in particular, are aligned with the extremist right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. (This unholy alliance is comparable to the relationship between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, but the RSS is a paramilitary group with more violent overtones than the Tea Party has shown so far.) Together, the BJP and RSS promote the agenda of Hindutva, the notion that India is the homeland of Hindus and all others — the hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others in this sprawling, secular democracy — are interlopers.
“The present government is deviating from the path of democracy, taking the country on the path to what I’d call a Hindu religious autocracy,” says Pushpa Mittra Bhargava , who founded the prestigious Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.
Despite his blatantly anti-secular stance, Modi’s stated goals for economic development are wildly popular, particularly among the country’s majority Hindus. But academics and intellectuals have been protesting the erosions on academic freedom almost from the start.
In January 2015, at the 102nd session of the Indian Science Congress, several members of the BJP government led a session on ancient Indian science and claimed that thousands of years ago, Indians had built planes that could fly not just on earth but between planets. There were other outlandish claims — that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha is proof that Indian ancients knew the secrets of cosmetic surgery, for example. Scientists were dismayed, and some did call for the session to be canceled, but their primary response then was still ridicule, rather than outrage.
In February 2015, economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen stepped down as chancellor of Nalanda University in Bihar, protesting the “considerable government intervention” in academic decisions. That same month, gunmen attacked a left-wing politician called Govind Pansare and his wife; Pansare later died of his injuries. Then, in August, gunmen killed Malleshappa Kalburgi, a leading scholar and rationalist, at his home. “They were a threat, so they were eliminated,” says Tandon.
The attacks shocked the academic community and ignited protests from writers, filmmakers and historians; many returned their national awards as a symbol of their dissent.
Scientists were late to the table, which is not surprising, given that most of Indian science relies on government funds. Still, in October, three separate groups of scientists made statements — the total signatories now number nearly one thousand — protesting the government’s inaction against the acts of violence. (Bhargava returned his Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in India, to the president.)
“Other people were protesting and we scientists were keeping quiet, and all these things were going on around us,” says Tandon. “Keeping quiet just didn’t seem right.”
The latest controversy is over the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a graduate student in life sciences at the University of Hyderabad. Vemula was a Dalit, a member of an oppressed caste in India. In July 2015, he and a group of other students had clashed with the student wing of the BJP on campus. University administrators then barred the students from public spaces on campus and withheld their fellowships, citing administrative delays as the reason.
There have many other such reported incidents of discrimination against Dalit students over the past two years. Some level of discrimination has always existed in India, says Bhargava, but “now the discrimination has increased many-fold, has come out in the open and is clearly supported by the Government, as it is an integral part of the Hindutva philosophy of RSS and BJP.”
On 17January, Vemula hung himself, saying in his suicide note, “my birth is my fatal accident.” His death has rocked academia, with unabated protests on the Hyderabad campus and elsewhere. Even before the incident, Tandon and others openly referred to Appa Rao Podile, the university’s vice chancellor, as the famed institution's first political appointee. Appa Rao has since left the university on indefinite leave.
Not everyone agrees that scientists should join in the fray.
“If you’re a social activist, if you’re a politician, if you’re a journalist with strong political view, no problem, you take part in the debate at whichever part of the spectrum you want to,” says K. VijayRaghavan, head of the Department of Biotechnology, the largest grant-making organization in the life sciences. “But I don't think it’s an issue which is a core scientific one.” He says the debate runs the risk of detracting scientists’ focus away from more pressing public health and scientific problems in the country.
The protesters disagree, saying every scientist is a citizen first.
“I signed [the petition] as a scientist but this is something I would have signed even if I was a professor of English,” says Sharath Ananthamurthy, a professor in the physics department at Bangalore University. “If we are quiet and if we let this kind of rubbish be propagated without strong dissent, a lie told a 100 times becomes a truth,” he says. “Talking about it, protesting, clarifying is the right thing.”
India's Government Is Becoming Increasingly Antiscience
Scientists join writers, artists and historians in protesting the Modi government’s growing interference in academic affairs
By Apoorva Mandavilli on February 3, 2016
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Photo by Al Jazeera English under Creative Commons
Three murders, a suicide and a rash of political appointments at universities have thrown Indian academia into an uproar against the conservative (right-wing) government. Prominent artists, writers, historians and scientists are speaking out against an intensifying climate of religious intolerance and political interference in academic affairs.
“What’s going on in this country is really dangerous,” says Rajat Tandon, a number theorist at Hyderabad Central University. Tandon is one of more than 100 prominent scientists, including many heads of institutions, who signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” The statement cites the murder of three noted rationalists — men who had dedicated their lives to countering superstition and championed scientific thought — and what they see as the government’s silent complicity.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the 2014 general elections in India in a landslide victory. The BJP and Modi, in particular, are aligned with the extremist right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. (This unholy alliance is comparable to the relationship between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, but the RSS is a paramilitary group with more violent overtones than the Tea Party has shown so far.) Together, the BJP and RSS promote the agenda of Hindutva, the notion that India is the homeland of Hindus and all others — the hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others in this sprawling, secular democracy — are interlopers.
“The present government is deviating from the path of democracy, taking the country on the path to what I’d call a Hindu religious autocracy,” says Pushpa Mittra Bhargava , who founded the prestigious Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.
Despite his blatantly anti-secular stance, Modi’s stated goals for economic development are wildly popular, particularly among the country’s majority Hindus. But academics and intellectuals have been protesting the erosions on academic freedom almost from the start.
In January 2015, at the 102nd session of the Indian Science Congress, several members of the BJP government led a session on ancient Indian science and claimed that thousands of years ago, Indians had built planes that could fly not just on earth but between planets. There were other outlandish claims — that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha is proof that Indian ancients knew the secrets of cosmetic surgery, for example. Scientists were dismayed, and some did call for the session to be canceled, but their primary response then was still ridicule, rather than outrage.
In February 2015, economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen stepped down as chancellor of Nalanda University in Bihar, protesting the “considerable government intervention” in academic decisions. That same month, gunmen attacked a left-wing politician called Govind Pansare and his wife; Pansare later died of his injuries. Then, in August, gunmen killed Malleshappa Kalburgi, a leading scholar and rationalist, at his home. “They were a threat, so they were eliminated,” says Tandon.
The attacks shocked the academic community and ignited protests from writers, filmmakers and historians; many returned their national awards as a symbol of their dissent.
Scientists were late to the table, which is not surprising, given that most of Indian science relies on government funds. Still, in October, three separate groups of scientists made statements — the total signatories now number nearly one thousand — protesting the government’s inaction against the acts of violence. (Bhargava returned his Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in India, to the president.)
“Other people were protesting and we scientists were keeping quiet, and all these things were going on around us,” says Tandon. “Keeping quiet just didn’t seem right.”
The latest controversy is over the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a graduate student in life sciences at the University of Hyderabad. Vemula was a Dalit, a member of an oppressed caste in India. In July 2015, he and a group of other students had clashed with the student wing of the BJP on campus. University administrators then barred the students from public spaces on campus and withheld their fellowships, citing administrative delays as the reason.
There have many other such reported incidents of discrimination against Dalit students over the past two years. Some level of discrimination has always existed in India, says Bhargava, but “now the discrimination has increased many-fold, has come out in the open and is clearly supported by the Government, as it is an integral part of the Hindutva philosophy of RSS and BJP.”
On 17January, Vemula hung himself, saying in his suicide note, “my birth is my fatal accident.” His death has rocked academia, with unabated protests on the Hyderabad campus and elsewhere. Even before the incident, Tandon and others openly referred to Appa Rao Podile, the university’s vice chancellor, as the famed institution's first political appointee. Appa Rao has since left the university on indefinite leave.
Not everyone agrees that scientists should join in the fray.
“If you’re a social activist, if you’re a politician, if you’re a journalist with strong political view, no problem, you take part in the debate at whichever part of the spectrum you want to,” says K. VijayRaghavan, head of the Department of Biotechnology, the largest grant-making organization in the life sciences. “But I don't think it’s an issue which is a core scientific one.” He says the debate runs the risk of detracting scientists’ focus away from more pressing public health and scientific problems in the country.
The protesters disagree, saying every scientist is a citizen first.
“I signed [the petition] as a scientist but this is something I would have signed even if I was a professor of English,” says Sharath Ananthamurthy, a professor in the physics department at Bangalore University. “If we are quiet and if we let this kind of rubbish be propagated without strong dissent, a lie told a 100 times becomes a truth,” he says. “Talking about it, protesting, clarifying is the right thing.”
December 29, 2015
Book Announcement: Science in Saffron - Skeptical Essays on History of Science (Meera Nanda)
SCIENCE IN SAFFRON
Skeptical Essays on History of Science
by Meera Nanda
First Edition
2016
––
There is much talk of the glories of ancient Hindu sciences in India today. Landmark discoveries in every field of science, from mathematics to medicine, are being credited to ancient scientists-sages of India. This book places such priority claims in a comparative global history of science. While fully acknowledging the substantial contributions of Indian geometers, mathematicians, physicians, artisans and craftsmen, it challenges their glorification for nationalistic purposes. It also questions the neo-Hindu scientization of yoga and Vedanta pioneered by Swami Vivekananda. Backed by the best available scholarship on history of science, this book offers a reading of history of Indian science without the hype that has come to surround it.
——
Meera Nanda is a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, where she teaches history of science. Trained in science as well as the humanities, she is author of several books including 'Breaking the Spell of Dharma'; 'The Wrongs of the Religious Right'; 'Prophets Facing Backward' and 'The God Market'.
––
Contents:
Introduction
1. Who Discovered the Pythagorean Theorem?
2. Nothing That Is: Zero’s Fleeting Footsteps
3. Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine
4. Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda rewrote Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtra
References and Index
––
pp viii+196, 8 pages of color plates; demy octavo 8.5 x 5.5 in.,
includes bibliography and index
ISBN 978-93-83968-08-4 Paperback Rs475
Available at major bookstores and with IPD Alternatives 35A/1 Shahpur Jatt, New Delhi 110049 Tel. 011-26491448/26492040 e-mail ipd.alternatives@gmail.com
You could also buy online from here http://www.threeessays.com/books/science-in-saffron/
or straightaway from Scholars without Borders.
Skeptical Essays on History of Science
by Meera Nanda
First Edition
2016
––
There is much talk of the glories of ancient Hindu sciences in India today. Landmark discoveries in every field of science, from mathematics to medicine, are being credited to ancient scientists-sages of India. This book places such priority claims in a comparative global history of science. While fully acknowledging the substantial contributions of Indian geometers, mathematicians, physicians, artisans and craftsmen, it challenges their glorification for nationalistic purposes. It also questions the neo-Hindu scientization of yoga and Vedanta pioneered by Swami Vivekananda. Backed by the best available scholarship on history of science, this book offers a reading of history of Indian science without the hype that has come to surround it.
——
Meera Nanda is a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, where she teaches history of science. Trained in science as well as the humanities, she is author of several books including 'Breaking the Spell of Dharma'; 'The Wrongs of the Religious Right'; 'Prophets Facing Backward' and 'The God Market'.
––
Contents:
Introduction
1. Who Discovered the Pythagorean Theorem?
2. Nothing That Is: Zero’s Fleeting Footsteps
3. Genetics, Plastic Surgery and Other Wonders of Ancient Indian Medicine
4. Yoga Scientized: How Swami Vivekananda rewrote Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtra
References and Index
––
pp viii+196, 8 pages of color plates; demy octavo 8.5 x 5.5 in.,
includes bibliography and index
ISBN 978-93-83968-08-4 Paperback Rs475
Available at major bookstores and with IPD Alternatives 35A/1 Shahpur Jatt, New Delhi 110049 Tel. 011-26491448/26492040 e-mail ipd.alternatives@gmail.com
You could also buy online from here http://www.threeessays.com/books/science-in-saffron/
or straightaway from Scholars without Borders.
October 31, 2015
India: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-linked body Vijnana Bharati organising science festival at IIT Delhi
The Telegraph, 31 October 2015
Sangh science festival at IIT
Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, Oct. 30: The Centre has directed IIT Delhi to host a five-day science festival that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-linked body Vijnana Bharati will organise from December 4.
The science and technology department has asked the IIT to provide the venue and other help for the India International Science Festival, likely to be attended by over 4,000 scientists and students and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kshitij Gupta, officiating director of the IIT, said the government had picked Vijnana Bharati as the main organiser. Institute chairperson Vijay Bhatkar, who also chairs Vijnana Bharati, said Sangh-minded scientists had founded the organisation in 1991.
"Vijnana Bharati promotes science by holding conferences and debates. It also tries to identify indigenous knowledge and works for its validation and propagation," Bhatkar said.
IIT Delhi has in recent months been collaborating with several Sangh-linked or spiritual bodies.
Under the Modi government's Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, it is partnering Sangh affiliate Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and spiritual organisation Gayatri Pariwar to provide technological solutions to villagers' problems in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Agra.
It has also involved the Patanjali Trust of Baba Ramdev for similar projects in Tehri Garwal, Uttarakhand.
The science festival will provide a platform to young scientists from India and neighbouring countries to exchange ideas. It will also showcase India's contributions to science and technology.
Government research institutions like the Defence Research and Development Organisation and the Atomic Energy Commission will organise exhibitions at the festival highlighting "the scientific temper in Indian art, culture and society".
Young scientists will display their research on subjects such as indigenous science and technology, and innovative agricultural practices and livestock management.
Bhatkar said Vijnana Bharati had conducted conferences on subjects such as Vedic science and Ayurveda over the past several years. He said eminent scientists such as Anil Kakodkar and R.A. Mashelkar were involved with the organisation.
Gupta defended the IIT's association with Sangh affiliates: "We're involving these bodies to reach out to people -what's wrong with that?"
He criticised the recent IIT Council move to increase tuition fees, saying bright students from poor families who clear the entrance test should be taught at a nominal cost.
The IIT will hold its convocation tomorrow, awarding 1,880 students with degrees, including 221 PhDs.
Sangh science festival at IIT
Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, Oct. 30: The Centre has directed IIT Delhi to host a five-day science festival that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-linked body Vijnana Bharati will organise from December 4.
The science and technology department has asked the IIT to provide the venue and other help for the India International Science Festival, likely to be attended by over 4,000 scientists and students and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kshitij Gupta, officiating director of the IIT, said the government had picked Vijnana Bharati as the main organiser. Institute chairperson Vijay Bhatkar, who also chairs Vijnana Bharati, said Sangh-minded scientists had founded the organisation in 1991.
"Vijnana Bharati promotes science by holding conferences and debates. It also tries to identify indigenous knowledge and works for its validation and propagation," Bhatkar said.
IIT Delhi has in recent months been collaborating with several Sangh-linked or spiritual bodies.
Under the Modi government's Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, it is partnering Sangh affiliate Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and spiritual organisation Gayatri Pariwar to provide technological solutions to villagers' problems in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Agra.
It has also involved the Patanjali Trust of Baba Ramdev for similar projects in Tehri Garwal, Uttarakhand.
The science festival will provide a platform to young scientists from India and neighbouring countries to exchange ideas. It will also showcase India's contributions to science and technology.
Government research institutions like the Defence Research and Development Organisation and the Atomic Energy Commission will organise exhibitions at the festival highlighting "the scientific temper in Indian art, culture and society".
Young scientists will display their research on subjects such as indigenous science and technology, and innovative agricultural practices and livestock management.
Bhatkar said Vijnana Bharati had conducted conferences on subjects such as Vedic science and Ayurveda over the past several years. He said eminent scientists such as Anil Kakodkar and R.A. Mashelkar were involved with the organisation.
Gupta defended the IIT's association with Sangh affiliates: "We're involving these bodies to reach out to people -what's wrong with that?"
He criticised the recent IIT Council move to increase tuition fees, saying bright students from poor families who clear the entrance test should be taught at a nominal cost.
The IIT will hold its convocation tomorrow, awarding 1,880 students with degrees, including 221 PhDs.
Mitali Saran: Uma Bharti and the divine water isotopes
Business Standard - October 31, 2015
Confluence of colours
Mitali Saran: Uma Bharti and the divine water isotopes
Scientists are going to use water isotopes tracer technology to see if the Ganga can in any way be connected to Mansarovar
Mitali Saran October 31, 2015 Last Updated at 00:09 IST
If you're upset, Mr Prime Minister, don't bottle it up Bringing India to book I'll have the holy cow, medium-rare If you want to be in a relationship, do it before you turn 40 Shooting for the moon
Did you imagine, o people of India, that the key to creating jobs, improving infrastructure, and lifting people out of poverty, would be to discuss cows until they come home? Now half the country is traumatised by the thought of cow-murder, and the other half is posting ‘Selfie With Beef’ to their Facebook profiles. Did you imagine, fellow citizens, that you would suddenly know this many authors, artists, academics and artistes, even though they aren’t helping to fix banking or sort out labour laws?
But that’s just the media, slavishly anti-Modi (#Presstitutes) even though it was quite recently slavishly pro-Modi (#FreedomOfExpression). Luckily, the country and its institutions carry on. Among other things, we retain the rigorous scientific temper to which we constitutionally aspire, according to our anti-Hindu Nehruvian western import of a constitution (#WakeUpHindus).
ADVERTISING
The minister for water resources, river development & Ganga rejuvenation, Uma Bharti, has put scientists at the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) in Roorkee on the job of figuring out where the river Ganga originates. We almost certainly know that the Ganga originates at Gaumukh, near Gangotri, if only because the NIH has an observatory nearby studying the river. There’s a ‘cow’ in ‘Gaumukh’. It all seems like a win. However, the minister thirsts to know if the river can be connected to the sacred lake Mansarovar in Tibet.
Mythology says that the great ascetic, Shiva, who lives there, broke Ganga’s furious descent to earth by catching her in his hair, and thus saved the earth from her raging floods. He held her in his matted locks, tamed her, and made her release her waters into seven streams, and if that’s not an ancient, proud Indian sex scene, I don’t know what is. In fact, I think there’s an exciting publishing opportunity in collating all the ancient proud Indian sex scenes from the scriptures and epics into a nicely designed little paperback series titled Spills & Boons, or Fills & Spoons or something.
At any rate, the minister isn’t going to take mythology’s word for it like some unscientific yob. Like all Taureans, she’s very determined. So the scientists are going to use water isotopes tracer technology to see if the Ganga can in any way be connected, via drifting molecules or whatever, to Mansarovar. Would proving this connection not give mythology the fillip it needs to create jobs, improve infrastructure, and lift people out of poverty? One of NIH’s experts acknowledged, with magnificent restraint, that: “The new task is a challenging one as we are heading into a completely different direction.”
I have no idea what water isotopes tracer technology is. I think maybe it’s when scientists assemble in a lab equipped with cutting-edge dart boards and beer, and sit around playing cards and telling sociologist jokes for the duration of a reasonable science experiment, before releasing a statement saying, “Our results show that this has been a total hoot, and we would now like to apply for government funding to investigate the turning radius of Kartikeya’s peacock if it had to get away from Brahma’s pillar of fire at speed. Your turn to deal.”
I will say, though, that Uma Bharti’s is not the stupidest scientific experiment I’ve heard of. That would have to be the experiment that showed that rats cannot differentiate between Dutch and Japanese sentences when a video is played backwards to them.
But I’m nitpicking. The truth is that I’ve always had a big thing for Shiva. He’s romantic perfection — passionate, powerful, unavailable, good dancer. It’s straight out of Thrills & Moon. I’m actually okay with the government throwing money at him; I’ll just pretend that I’m tucking it into his loincloth.
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com
Confluence of colours
Mitali Saran: Uma Bharti and the divine water isotopes
Scientists are going to use water isotopes tracer technology to see if the Ganga can in any way be connected to Mansarovar
Mitali Saran October 31, 2015 Last Updated at 00:09 IST
If you're upset, Mr Prime Minister, don't bottle it up Bringing India to book I'll have the holy cow, medium-rare If you want to be in a relationship, do it before you turn 40 Shooting for the moon
Did you imagine, o people of India, that the key to creating jobs, improving infrastructure, and lifting people out of poverty, would be to discuss cows until they come home? Now half the country is traumatised by the thought of cow-murder, and the other half is posting ‘Selfie With Beef’ to their Facebook profiles. Did you imagine, fellow citizens, that you would suddenly know this many authors, artists, academics and artistes, even though they aren’t helping to fix banking or sort out labour laws?
But that’s just the media, slavishly anti-Modi (#Presstitutes) even though it was quite recently slavishly pro-Modi (#FreedomOfExpression). Luckily, the country and its institutions carry on. Among other things, we retain the rigorous scientific temper to which we constitutionally aspire, according to our anti-Hindu Nehruvian western import of a constitution (#WakeUpHindus).
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The minister for water resources, river development & Ganga rejuvenation, Uma Bharti, has put scientists at the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) in Roorkee on the job of figuring out where the river Ganga originates. We almost certainly know that the Ganga originates at Gaumukh, near Gangotri, if only because the NIH has an observatory nearby studying the river. There’s a ‘cow’ in ‘Gaumukh’. It all seems like a win. However, the minister thirsts to know if the river can be connected to the sacred lake Mansarovar in Tibet.
Mythology says that the great ascetic, Shiva, who lives there, broke Ganga’s furious descent to earth by catching her in his hair, and thus saved the earth from her raging floods. He held her in his matted locks, tamed her, and made her release her waters into seven streams, and if that’s not an ancient, proud Indian sex scene, I don’t know what is. In fact, I think there’s an exciting publishing opportunity in collating all the ancient proud Indian sex scenes from the scriptures and epics into a nicely designed little paperback series titled Spills & Boons, or Fills & Spoons or something.
At any rate, the minister isn’t going to take mythology’s word for it like some unscientific yob. Like all Taureans, she’s very determined. So the scientists are going to use water isotopes tracer technology to see if the Ganga can in any way be connected, via drifting molecules or whatever, to Mansarovar. Would proving this connection not give mythology the fillip it needs to create jobs, improve infrastructure, and lift people out of poverty? One of NIH’s experts acknowledged, with magnificent restraint, that: “The new task is a challenging one as we are heading into a completely different direction.”
I have no idea what water isotopes tracer technology is. I think maybe it’s when scientists assemble in a lab equipped with cutting-edge dart boards and beer, and sit around playing cards and telling sociologist jokes for the duration of a reasonable science experiment, before releasing a statement saying, “Our results show that this has been a total hoot, and we would now like to apply for government funding to investigate the turning radius of Kartikeya’s peacock if it had to get away from Brahma’s pillar of fire at speed. Your turn to deal.”
I will say, though, that Uma Bharti’s is not the stupidest scientific experiment I’ve heard of. That would have to be the experiment that showed that rats cannot differentiate between Dutch and Japanese sentences when a video is played backwards to them.
But I’m nitpicking. The truth is that I’ve always had a big thing for Shiva. He’s romantic perfection — passionate, powerful, unavailable, good dancer. It’s straight out of Thrills & Moon. I’m actually okay with the government throwing money at him; I’ll just pretend that I’m tucking it into his loincloth.
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com
October 28, 2015
Press statement by Distinguished Scientists on climate of intolerance & ways in which science and reason are being eroded in India
Press Statement by Distinguished Scientists
October 18, 2015
The scientific community is deeply concerned with the climate of intolerance, and the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.
It is the same climate of intolerance, and rejection of reason that has led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi and the assassinations of Prof. Kalburgi, Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Shri Govind Pansare. All three fought against superstition and obscurantism to build a scientific temper in our society. Prof. Kalburgi was a renowned scholar and an authority on the Vachana literature associated with the 12th-century reformer Basava, who opposed institutionalised religion, caste and gender discrimination. Similarly, Dr Dabholkar and Shri Pansare promoted scientific temper through their fight against superstition and blind faith.
The Indian Constitution in Article 51 A (h) demands, as a part of the fundamental duties of the citizens, that we ‘…develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing instead is the active promotion of irrational and sectarian thought by important functionaries of the government.
The Indian civilization is a truly plural one. We have always had many practices and communities that have allowed space for each other; we celebrate the festivals and anniversaries of all faiths. This unity and peace has now been disturbed by a rash of bigoted acts, attacks on minorities and Dalits, which show no signs of abating.
The writers have shown the way with their protests. We scientists now join our voices to theirs, to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science and our plural culture. We reject the destructive narrow view of India that seeks to dictate what people will wear, think, eat and who they will love.
We appeal to all other sections of society to raise their voice against the assault on reason and scientific temper we are witnessing in India today.
(The views expressed in the statement are individual and do not reflect views of the institution a signatory is affiliated to.)
Dr Alladi Sitaram Visiting Professor, Chennai Mathematical Institute; Professor Emeritus, Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Ashoke Sen, Padma Bhushan, Fellow of Royal Society (FRS), Distinguished Professor, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad
Dr Ashok Jain, Former Director, National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS), New Delhi
Dr A Gopalakrishnan, Former Chairman, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Government of India
Dr D Balasubramanian, Padma Shri Research Director, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, & former Director Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad
Dr Madabusi Raghunathan, Padma Bhushan, Fellow of Royal Society (FRS), Professor, National Centre for Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Dr PM Bhargava, Padma Bhushan, Former Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad (one of the original signatories to the 1981 Scientific Temper Statement)
Dr P Balaram, Padma Bhushan, Former Director, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Satyajit Mayor, Foreign Associate, US National Science Academy, Director, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Spenta Wadia, Emeritus Professor and Founding Director, International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr AP Balachandran, Joel Dorman Steele Professor of Physics (Emeritus), Physics Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA.
Dr Abhishek Dhar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Alak K Ray, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Alok Laddha, Chennai Mathematics Institute, Bangalore
Dr Amit Sengupta, National Convenor, Peoples Health Movement
Dr Anna George, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi
Dr Arnab Bhattacharya, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Arvind, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali
Dr Ashvin Vishvanath, University of California-Berkeley, USA
Dr Avinash Dhar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr B Ravindran, Institute for Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar
Dr BLS Prakasa Rao, CR Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, Hyderabad
Dr B Ananthanarayan, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr B Rajeev, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore
Dr B Ekbal, Former Vice Chancellor, Kerala University
Dr B Sury, Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Chandrasekhar Khare, Fellow of Royal Society, Professor of Mathematics, University of California-Los Angeles, USA, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Mr D Raghunandan, Director, Centre of Technology and Development, New Delhi
Dr DP Sen Gupta, Visiting Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
Dr Debashis Ghoshal, School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Dr Dhruv Raina, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Dr Dilip Ahuja, Profesor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
Dr Dinesh Abrol, Institute of Studies in Industrial. Development, New Delhi
Dr Dipendra Prasad, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Firoza Sutaria, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru
Dr Gadadhar Misra, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Gautam Mandal, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Hema Murthy, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai
Dr Joseph Samuel, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Justin David, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Kapil Paranjape, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali
Dr LS Shashidhara, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune
Dr Leena ChandranWadia, Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai
Dr MG Narasimhan, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
Dr MRN Murthy, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr MVN Murthy, Professor Emeritus, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai
Dr Madan Rao, Raman Research Institute and NCBS-TIFR, Bengaluru
Dr Mangal C Mahato, Department of Physics, North East Hill University, Shillong
Dr Nilmani Mathur, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr P Ajith, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Pallab Basu, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Partha P Majumder, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani
Dr Parthib Basu, Department of Zoology, Calcutta University, Kolkata
Mr Prabir Purkayastha, Chairperson, Knowledge Commons, New Delhi
Dr Prajit K Basu, Centre for Neural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hyderabad
Dr Prajval Shastri, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru
Dr Pramathanath Sastry, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai
Dr Pravabati Chinganbam, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru
Dr Probal Choudhuri, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
Dr Purushottam Kulkarni, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Dr R Ramanujam, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai
Dr R Shankar, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai
Dr Rahul Roy, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi
Dr Rajat Tandon, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Hyderabad
Dr Rajesh Gopakumar, Director, International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Rama Govindarajan, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad
Dr Ranjini Bandyopadhyay, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Ravinder Banyal, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru
Dr Riddhi Shah, School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Dr Ronnie Sebastian, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune
Dr Rukmini Dey, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr S Chakrabarti, Department of Chemistry, Calcutta University, Kolkata
Dr S Ranganathan, National Institute of Advanced Studies Bengaluru
Dr Sabyasachi Chatterjee, Formerly Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru; and President All India Peoples Science Network
Dr Sachindeo Vaidya, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Samriddhi Sankar Ray, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Sandeep Krishna, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Sanjib Sabhapandit, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Santanu Datta, Chief Scientific Officer, BUGWORKS Inc., Bengaluru
Dr Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi
Dr Saumen Datta, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Shamsher Singh, Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Sharada Srinivasan, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
Dr Shiraz Naval Minwalla, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Shrikrishna, G Dani Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Dr Shyamala Mani, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Siva Athreya, Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Sorab N Dalal, Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and
Education in Cancer, Navi Mumbai
Dr Sriram Ramaswamy, Director, TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad
Dr Subhro Bhattacharjee, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Begaluru
Dr Sumati Surya, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru
Dr Sumathi Rao, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad.
Dr Sunil Mukhi, Indian Institute of Science Education and
Research, Pune
Dr Suresh Govindarajan, Dept of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology,
Chennai.
Dr Suvrat Raju, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Bengaluru
Dr T Jayaraman, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai
Dr TR Govindarajan, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai
Ms Tejal Kanitkar, Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Dr Tiju Thomas, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai
Dr Todadri Senthil, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
Dr Vani VC, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Dr Venkatesh Athreya, Adjunct Professor, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai; formerly President All India Peoples
Science Network
Dr Vidita Vaidya, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Dr Vijay Kumar, Krisnamurthy, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru
Dr Vineeta Bal, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi
Dr Vishal Vasan, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Dr Vivek Borkar, Institute Chair Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
India's three scientific academies have for the first time spoken out about growing irrationality and intolerance
The Telegraph - 28 October 2015
'Sad', science stands up to be counted
G.S. Mudur
New Delhi, Oct. 27: India's three scientific academies have for the first time spoken out about growing irrationality and intolerance in the country, contributing to a crescendo of concerns that have until now emerged largely from the community of humanities.
An inter-academy panel on ethics in science has said the Constitution demands allegiance to scientific temper that, the council said, encompasses rationality, rights and responsibility in equal measure.
"We note with sadness and growing anxiety several statements and actions that run counter to this constitutional requirement of every citizen," the five-member panel said in a statement.
Also called the "Committee of Elders", the panel represents three bodies: the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, and the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad. The country's most accomplished, influential and respected scientists are fellows of the three academies.
The panel, quoting Rabindranath Tagore's poem, Where the mind is without fear, has issued an appeal to "all sections of Indian society" to raise their voice against acts of irrationality and intolerance.
Many scientists view the panel's move, coming amid a chorus of similar concerns expressed by sections of writers and members of the Sahitya Akademi, as significant because the scientific academies have rarely articulated positions over social issues.
"What has been happening is extremely disturbing - the killings of rationalists, the spread of unfounded rumours," said Indira Nath, a panel member and a senior immunologist, formerly with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.
"Our statement is not intended to be against any political party or against any government, it is intended to remind everyone that it is important to adopt a scientific temper and engage in rational thinking," Nath told The Telegraph.
In another initiative, several senior scientists, some of whom are fellows of the academies, have circulated among themselves a draft statement to protest against the "climate of intolerance" and the erosion of science and reason in the country.
The draft, shared with this newspaper, condemns the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaque in Dadri and the murders of rationalists M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. It describes the incidents as signals of "rejection of reason".
The draft, prepared by the scientists but not released yet, says: "We scientists now join our voices (with those of writers and others) to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science, and our plural culture. We reject the destructive narrow view of India that seeks to dictate what people will wear, think, eat, and who they will love."
The draft has described Indian civilisation as truly plural. "We have always had many practices and communities that have allowed space for each other, we celebrate the festivals and anniversaries of all faiths. This unity and peace has now been disturbed by a rash of bigoted acts that show no signs of abating," it said.
A member of the three-academy panel said the decision to issue a statement stemmed from discussions among the members. "We're all very concerned about what is going on," Mamannamana Vijayan, a molecular biophysicist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, said. "We felt this has to be done, we have to say what we feel."
The three scientific academies have over the past decade collaborated on issues primarily related to science and education. Six years ago, an inter-academy panel had proposed the introduction of flexible, four-year college undergraduate courses to allow students to choose from a bouquet of subjects. But senior scientists do not recall the three academies - even through an inter-academy panel - uniting to articulate an issue connected to societal thinking.
The academies had remained silent in 2001 when the University Grants Commission - the National Democratic Alliance was in power at the Centre then - proposed the introduction of astrology as an undergraduate course in Indian universities.
Pushpa Bhargava, a senior biologist and former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the UGC's proposal on astrology. "But I did it alone, although some scientists had similar concerns, the academies did not speak out," Bhargava said today.
Dorairajan Balasubramanian, the chair of the inter-academy panel on ethics and a biologist, said: "We've selected Tagore's poem because it beautifully captures the essence of scientific temper."
Members of the scientific community have also launched an online petition articulating similar concerns. "A highly polarised community is like a nuclear bomb close to criticality. It can explode any time and drive the nation to utter chaos," the petition already signed by over 130 scientists has said.
'Sad', science stands up to be counted
G.S. Mudur
New Delhi, Oct. 27: India's three scientific academies have for the first time spoken out about growing irrationality and intolerance in the country, contributing to a crescendo of concerns that have until now emerged largely from the community of humanities.
An inter-academy panel on ethics in science has said the Constitution demands allegiance to scientific temper that, the council said, encompasses rationality, rights and responsibility in equal measure.
"We note with sadness and growing anxiety several statements and actions that run counter to this constitutional requirement of every citizen," the five-member panel said in a statement.
Also called the "Committee of Elders", the panel represents three bodies: the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, and the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad. The country's most accomplished, influential and respected scientists are fellows of the three academies.
The panel, quoting Rabindranath Tagore's poem, Where the mind is without fear, has issued an appeal to "all sections of Indian society" to raise their voice against acts of irrationality and intolerance.
Many scientists view the panel's move, coming amid a chorus of similar concerns expressed by sections of writers and members of the Sahitya Akademi, as significant because the scientific academies have rarely articulated positions over social issues.
"What has been happening is extremely disturbing - the killings of rationalists, the spread of unfounded rumours," said Indira Nath, a panel member and a senior immunologist, formerly with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.
"Our statement is not intended to be against any political party or against any government, it is intended to remind everyone that it is important to adopt a scientific temper and engage in rational thinking," Nath told The Telegraph.
In another initiative, several senior scientists, some of whom are fellows of the academies, have circulated among themselves a draft statement to protest against the "climate of intolerance" and the erosion of science and reason in the country.
The draft, shared with this newspaper, condemns the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaque in Dadri and the murders of rationalists M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. It describes the incidents as signals of "rejection of reason".
The draft, prepared by the scientists but not released yet, says: "We scientists now join our voices (with those of writers and others) to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science, and our plural culture. We reject the destructive narrow view of India that seeks to dictate what people will wear, think, eat, and who they will love."
The draft has described Indian civilisation as truly plural. "We have always had many practices and communities that have allowed space for each other, we celebrate the festivals and anniversaries of all faiths. This unity and peace has now been disturbed by a rash of bigoted acts that show no signs of abating," it said.
A member of the three-academy panel said the decision to issue a statement stemmed from discussions among the members. "We're all very concerned about what is going on," Mamannamana Vijayan, a molecular biophysicist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, said. "We felt this has to be done, we have to say what we feel."
The three scientific academies have over the past decade collaborated on issues primarily related to science and education. Six years ago, an inter-academy panel had proposed the introduction of flexible, four-year college undergraduate courses to allow students to choose from a bouquet of subjects. But senior scientists do not recall the three academies - even through an inter-academy panel - uniting to articulate an issue connected to societal thinking.
The academies had remained silent in 2001 when the University Grants Commission - the National Democratic Alliance was in power at the Centre then - proposed the introduction of astrology as an undergraduate course in Indian universities.
Pushpa Bhargava, a senior biologist and former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the UGC's proposal on astrology. "But I did it alone, although some scientists had similar concerns, the academies did not speak out," Bhargava said today.
Dorairajan Balasubramanian, the chair of the inter-academy panel on ethics and a biologist, said: "We've selected Tagore's poem because it beautifully captures the essence of scientific temper."
Members of the scientific community have also launched an online petition articulating similar concerns. "A highly polarised community is like a nuclear bomb close to criticality. It can explode any time and drive the nation to utter chaos," the petition already signed by over 130 scientists has said.
September 29, 2015
India: Where is all this Vedic science and Hindutva history leading us? (Kai Friese)
scroll.in - 29 September 2015
As Prime
Minister Narendra Modi departed on his latest foreign mission to spread
the word about Digital India in Silicon Valley, I embarked on a more
nostalgic excursion to visit Rabindra Bhavan, one of the landmarks of
Nehruvian modernism in New Delhi. My intended mission was one of
architectural curiosity but I stumbled instead into the wormhole of an
exhibit recently inaugurated by the Minister of Culture, Mahesh Sharma
in Rabindra Bhavan’s art galleries. It was entitled Cultural Continuity from Rig Veda to Robotics.
Inside the gallery was a display of plastic placards decorated with calendar art and tele-serial imaginings of the Mahabharata, coupled with crude info graphics informing us that by correlating references to the planets and stars in the Sanskrit epics with astronomy software, the historicity of Lord Ram, and the narratives of the Ramayana and Mahabharata had now been firmly established. To wit: the “fall of Duryodhan in mace bettle” occurred at 06:50 on November 14, 3139 BC. Ram himself was born on January 10, 5014 BC. “Around 12 to 1 noontime.” And so on…
For such a low tech installation (the “robotics”, I was informed, was a “figurative term”) the exhibition had startling ambitions. An accompanying publication from the organisers, I-SERVE or Institute of Scientific Research on Vedas, claimed to “provide a solid foundation to the new idea of rewriting the history of the world on purely scientific basis”.
Sadly, such risible displays of kitsch pseudoscience are hardly remarkable anymore. From the exhibition’s endorsement by the Ministry of Culture to the appointment of a dull obscurantist as the head of the Indian Council for Historical Research, to the prime minister’s famous pronouncements on Ganesha and Karna as evidence of ancient Indian plastic surgery and genetic science, to the defence minister’s recent remarks encouraging the Defence Research and Development Organisation to “take lessons from the sages”, it seems that when it comes to the history of India, Amar Chitra Katha is the new normal. Not a day goes by now without further reports of the march of Vedic science.
Marching into the past
Yesterday it was a Delhi University seminar determined to establish the 7,000-year old vintage of the Vedas (i.e. some 2,500 years older than the epic of Gilgamesh), today the news that the ravings of Dina Nath Batra, who peddles tales of Vedic motorcars and other ancient Indian inventions such as the television, will be required reading for schoolchildren in Haryana.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Prime Minister Modi is flying through the air with the greatest of ease in that pushpak vimana, otherwise known as Air India One – a 19-year-old Boeing 747-437 – to talk about India’s digital future with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other rishis of our age.
It would be reassuring to see these opposing trajectories as a sign of balance, between modernity and tradition, the past and future, or cultural fantasy and technological ambition. Or, more plausibly, between rhetoric and action. In other words, that Modi is all about the economy, infrastructure and governance and that the other stuff is just diversionary political window dressing. That perhaps it doesn’t really matter if cultural institutions like the Lalit Kala and the ICHR descend into mythomania. After all, they were probably broken anyway.
Does it really matter?
So what if a few moribund cul-de-sacs of Bharat sarkar are handed over to inconsequential and superannuated Hindutva loyalists? Hasn’t every administration rewarded sycophants with sinecures? You might even see some redistributive justice in the government’s determination to épater the haut-bourgeois academic establishment of Lutyens' Delhi by sharing the spoils of its election victory with its own obscure intellectuals. Reading an interview with the new ICHR chief, Y Sudershan Rao, in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser, it’s hard not to be struck by the pathos of his self-deprecation:
But Professor Rao, to his credit, does seem to be a committed digital Indian. He maintains an active blog on which he shares such interviews, his CV (former professor in the department of History and Tourism Management, Kakatiya University), and several papers replete with references to the ancients and seers.
“Bharat Varsha is endowed with voluminous record of history…not only of its people and their culture but the history of entire creation and its secrets,” he tells us in one such, dealing with “Problems of Chronology – Date of Mahabharata War”. Since becoming ICHR chairman, he has also helpfully maintained an online diary littered with fulsome thanks and praises to Narendra Bhai Modi ji, glimpses of his busy schedule attending seminars (such as a “national workshop of the Mythic Society in connection with their project on ‘Re-Writing History of our Nation’”), occasional gestures of handwringing at the “onerous” responsibilities facing him, and earnest exhortations to do our duty to “the great lovers of our nation” (sadly, not Vatsyayana but Deen Dayal Upadhayay).
From its passing references to our certain knowledge of extra-terrestrial life (because “our ancient Indian historical tradition says”) to the Pavlovian grovelling of a well-trained bureaucrat (“the Chairperson thanked the government for taking up such a pious project”), Rao’s diary recalls the weirdness and banality of an apparatchik’s Newspeak in Stalinist Russia. Or Emergency-era India. To paraphrase a famous seer, tragic history is being rewritten as farce.
Some caution
But just how funny is that? Watching a televised interview with three of Prime Minister Modi’s more polished advisors heralding his journey to California, I was intrigued to see the plummy Jagdish Bhagwati strike a note of caution. “On social issues, people associated with the BJP like [Mohan] Bhagwat are going back to a version of Hindutva which is really a virulent disease,” he said. “That needs to be stopped.” But having just spent an hour with the prime minister, the Columbia professor was confident that Modi would not be hampered by “this strain from which he actually came – and we did discuss his origins – he told me this is where he grew up. The RSS.”
By the end of that interview Bhagwati was all giggling reassurance – certain that the prime minister was, above all, committed to a transformative vision of economic reform. It’s not hard to understand that eminent economists feel less threatened by the “cultural” penumbra of Hindutva than their colleagues in history departments.
Personally, I think it’s unlikely that the nation’s economic institutions, from the Reserve Bank of India to the Institute of Economic Growth will suffer the indignities of the ICHR. It’s also hard to imagine that science and medicine will face a Vedic Lysenko – despite the new Aayush ministry and a few laboratories torturing dogs with cow urine, there are just too many politicians in dire need of bariatric surgery. Even the eminent historians will probably endure; they will just come from private schools and foreign universities – as they always have.
The upshot
So is the BJP’s assault on culture a victimless crime – or a trivial one – after all?
Back at the Rig Veda to Robotics exhibition as I watched busloads of fresh-faced school children from the Saraswati Shishu Mandir being squired around the shoddy placards I had my doubts. Not that I imagine many of them would be persuaded to pursue actual careers in history or archaeology. The exhibition itself had been conceived by a moonlighting enthusiast from the Revenue Service. And yet, watching a new generation subjected to this relentless discourse of “pride” and “glory” rooted in imagined shame I could only feel despair. Perhaps those kids would go home and visit the I-SERVE website as all little digital Indians should. They’ll see genuine pictures of the children’s president, the late APJ Abdul Kalam, inaugurating a seminar of the Institute for Scientific Research on Vedas. And also a prominent link to Stephen Hawking’s endorsement of “books authored by Dr Sivaramababu (organising secretary I-SERVE)” acknowledging that “Vedas might have theory superior to Einstein’s law E=MC2.” It’s a hoax of course, sourced from a pranked Facebook page.
But who cares? They’re only children. It’s only about history. And Hinduism. The sad thing is that it’s really not a joke. On all the available evidence, from the mouths of our ministers to the proliferating swarm of “Internet Hindu” trolls the fantastical charlatanry of Hindutva “history” is central to the new National Project. Rather than a contradiction or a balance, Digital India and the new Vedic Science is to take their authors at their word, a “cultural continuum”. It’s frightening.
Because I’m as frightened as the next guy, allow me an exculpatory aside: Believe it or not, I think the Vedas are a wonder. I’ve loved the Ramayana and the Mahabharata since I was a child having my first experience of theatre, of notions of love and war and passion, of good and evil, of life and death, in the Ramlilas and Krishnalilas of Delhi. And I’m happy to acknowledge I am of "Hindu ancestry", (about 30%, I had a DNA test). So why am I frightened?
Maybe it’s because I spend too much time in digital India. Of course I know there’s really nothing Vedic about the Internet. Except for the strain that Jagdish Bhagwati called a “virulent disease”. In other words, a virus. It’s something the sages of Silicon Valley might want to think twice about uploading.
Silicon Valley and the Temple of Doom: Visiting the 'Rig Veda to Robotics' exhibition
Where is all this Vedic science and Hindutva history leading us?
Inside the gallery was a display of plastic placards decorated with calendar art and tele-serial imaginings of the Mahabharata, coupled with crude info graphics informing us that by correlating references to the planets and stars in the Sanskrit epics with astronomy software, the historicity of Lord Ram, and the narratives of the Ramayana and Mahabharata had now been firmly established. To wit: the “fall of Duryodhan in mace bettle” occurred at 06:50 on November 14, 3139 BC. Ram himself was born on January 10, 5014 BC. “Around 12 to 1 noontime.” And so on…
For such a low tech installation (the “robotics”, I was informed, was a “figurative term”) the exhibition had startling ambitions. An accompanying publication from the organisers, I-SERVE or Institute of Scientific Research on Vedas, claimed to “provide a solid foundation to the new idea of rewriting the history of the world on purely scientific basis”.
Sadly, such risible displays of kitsch pseudoscience are hardly remarkable anymore. From the exhibition’s endorsement by the Ministry of Culture to the appointment of a dull obscurantist as the head of the Indian Council for Historical Research, to the prime minister’s famous pronouncements on Ganesha and Karna as evidence of ancient Indian plastic surgery and genetic science, to the defence minister’s recent remarks encouraging the Defence Research and Development Organisation to “take lessons from the sages”, it seems that when it comes to the history of India, Amar Chitra Katha is the new normal. Not a day goes by now without further reports of the march of Vedic science.
Marching into the past
Yesterday it was a Delhi University seminar determined to establish the 7,000-year old vintage of the Vedas (i.e. some 2,500 years older than the epic of Gilgamesh), today the news that the ravings of Dina Nath Batra, who peddles tales of Vedic motorcars and other ancient Indian inventions such as the television, will be required reading for schoolchildren in Haryana.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Prime Minister Modi is flying through the air with the greatest of ease in that pushpak vimana, otherwise known as Air India One – a 19-year-old Boeing 747-437 – to talk about India’s digital future with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other rishis of our age.
It would be reassuring to see these opposing trajectories as a sign of balance, between modernity and tradition, the past and future, or cultural fantasy and technological ambition. Or, more plausibly, between rhetoric and action. In other words, that Modi is all about the economy, infrastructure and governance and that the other stuff is just diversionary political window dressing. That perhaps it doesn’t really matter if cultural institutions like the Lalit Kala and the ICHR descend into mythomania. After all, they were probably broken anyway.
Does it really matter?
So what if a few moribund cul-de-sacs of Bharat sarkar are handed over to inconsequential and superannuated Hindutva loyalists? Hasn’t every administration rewarded sycophants with sinecures? You might even see some redistributive justice in the government’s determination to épater the haut-bourgeois academic establishment of Lutyens' Delhi by sharing the spoils of its election victory with its own obscure intellectuals. Reading an interview with the new ICHR chief, Y Sudershan Rao, in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser, it’s hard not to be struck by the pathos of his self-deprecation:
“I may not be an ‘Eminent Historian’ like the people you are referring to…being from a state university, maybe I cannot be called a specialist historian…So I don’t fit into the category of elite historians who can afford to specialise at micro level.”
But Professor Rao, to his credit, does seem to be a committed digital Indian. He maintains an active blog on which he shares such interviews, his CV (former professor in the department of History and Tourism Management, Kakatiya University), and several papers replete with references to the ancients and seers.
“Bharat Varsha is endowed with voluminous record of history…not only of its people and their culture but the history of entire creation and its secrets,” he tells us in one such, dealing with “Problems of Chronology – Date of Mahabharata War”. Since becoming ICHR chairman, he has also helpfully maintained an online diary littered with fulsome thanks and praises to Narendra Bhai Modi ji, glimpses of his busy schedule attending seminars (such as a “national workshop of the Mythic Society in connection with their project on ‘Re-Writing History of our Nation’”), occasional gestures of handwringing at the “onerous” responsibilities facing him, and earnest exhortations to do our duty to “the great lovers of our nation” (sadly, not Vatsyayana but Deen Dayal Upadhayay).
From its passing references to our certain knowledge of extra-terrestrial life (because “our ancient Indian historical tradition says”) to the Pavlovian grovelling of a well-trained bureaucrat (“the Chairperson thanked the government for taking up such a pious project”), Rao’s diary recalls the weirdness and banality of an apparatchik’s Newspeak in Stalinist Russia. Or Emergency-era India. To paraphrase a famous seer, tragic history is being rewritten as farce.
Some caution
But just how funny is that? Watching a televised interview with three of Prime Minister Modi’s more polished advisors heralding his journey to California, I was intrigued to see the plummy Jagdish Bhagwati strike a note of caution. “On social issues, people associated with the BJP like [Mohan] Bhagwat are going back to a version of Hindutva which is really a virulent disease,” he said. “That needs to be stopped.” But having just spent an hour with the prime minister, the Columbia professor was confident that Modi would not be hampered by “this strain from which he actually came – and we did discuss his origins – he told me this is where he grew up. The RSS.”
By the end of that interview Bhagwati was all giggling reassurance – certain that the prime minister was, above all, committed to a transformative vision of economic reform. It’s not hard to understand that eminent economists feel less threatened by the “cultural” penumbra of Hindutva than their colleagues in history departments.
Personally, I think it’s unlikely that the nation’s economic institutions, from the Reserve Bank of India to the Institute of Economic Growth will suffer the indignities of the ICHR. It’s also hard to imagine that science and medicine will face a Vedic Lysenko – despite the new Aayush ministry and a few laboratories torturing dogs with cow urine, there are just too many politicians in dire need of bariatric surgery. Even the eminent historians will probably endure; they will just come from private schools and foreign universities – as they always have.
The upshot
So is the BJP’s assault on culture a victimless crime – or a trivial one – after all?
Back at the Rig Veda to Robotics exhibition as I watched busloads of fresh-faced school children from the Saraswati Shishu Mandir being squired around the shoddy placards I had my doubts. Not that I imagine many of them would be persuaded to pursue actual careers in history or archaeology. The exhibition itself had been conceived by a moonlighting enthusiast from the Revenue Service. And yet, watching a new generation subjected to this relentless discourse of “pride” and “glory” rooted in imagined shame I could only feel despair. Perhaps those kids would go home and visit the I-SERVE website as all little digital Indians should. They’ll see genuine pictures of the children’s president, the late APJ Abdul Kalam, inaugurating a seminar of the Institute for Scientific Research on Vedas. And also a prominent link to Stephen Hawking’s endorsement of “books authored by Dr Sivaramababu (organising secretary I-SERVE)” acknowledging that “Vedas might have theory superior to Einstein’s law E=MC2.” It’s a hoax of course, sourced from a pranked Facebook page.
But who cares? They’re only children. It’s only about history. And Hinduism. The sad thing is that it’s really not a joke. On all the available evidence, from the mouths of our ministers to the proliferating swarm of “Internet Hindu” trolls the fantastical charlatanry of Hindutva “history” is central to the new National Project. Rather than a contradiction or a balance, Digital India and the new Vedic Science is to take their authors at their word, a “cultural continuum”. It’s frightening.
Because I’m as frightened as the next guy, allow me an exculpatory aside: Believe it or not, I think the Vedas are a wonder. I’ve loved the Ramayana and the Mahabharata since I was a child having my first experience of theatre, of notions of love and war and passion, of good and evil, of life and death, in the Ramlilas and Krishnalilas of Delhi. And I’m happy to acknowledge I am of "Hindu ancestry", (about 30%, I had a DNA test). So why am I frightened?
Maybe it’s because I spend too much time in digital India. Of course I know there’s really nothing Vedic about the Internet. Except for the strain that Jagdish Bhagwati called a “virulent disease”. In other words, a virus. It’s something the sages of Silicon Valley might want to think twice about uploading.
March 20, 2015
'Politics and religious ideology should not intrude into science'
'Politics and religious ideology should not intrude into science'
http://www.thehindu.com/news/specially-touched-says-venki/article7012241.ece?homepage=true
"Science is about investigation based on facts and experiments", says Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, President Elect of the Royal Society
“There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science,” Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, President Elect of the Royal Society, told The Hindu.“Science is about investigation based on facts and experiments. Above all, it should be a meritocracy, and that is very important to foster good science in India."
Articulating some of his concerns about the future of science in India, the Nobel Laureate said that that above all science needs stable funding and scientists need to be properly remunerated. “They are choosing a life of scholarship which involves a lot of hard work, and it is only right that you reward these very bright people with at least a decent and stable life,” he said.
“I heard that some nonsense was spouted at the Indian Science Congress by people who are ideologically driven,” he said. “What was astonishing to me is that the Indian science establishment did not speak out instantly and strongly about it. That needs to happen. I don’t have a problem with any government, including the current one. However, governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.”
Dr. Ramakrishnan identified the National Centre of Biological Science in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and IISER, Pune, as “positive examples” of how science is being done in India today. He had special words of praise for the NCBS for its high standards of science and encouragement of young scientists, attributing these features to the leadership traditions set by its visionary Founder Director and eminent scientist, Obaid Siddiqui. This continued under K. VijayRaghavan (who subsequently left to become Director of Department of Bio-technology), and by the present Director, Satyajit Mayor. The IISc, he added, “also has a long democratic tradition of doing science.”
Dr. Ramakrishnan called upon scientists and governments to consult with each other over how best to establish priority areas in science and spending levels, but then leave it to scientific experts on how to implement these decisions without further interference.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/specially-touched-says-venki/article7012241.ece?homepage=true
"Science is about investigation based on facts and experiments", says Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, President Elect of the Royal Society
“There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science,” Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, President Elect of the Royal Society, told The Hindu.“Science is about investigation based on facts and experiments. Above all, it should be a meritocracy, and that is very important to foster good science in India."
Articulating some of his concerns about the future of science in India, the Nobel Laureate said that that above all science needs stable funding and scientists need to be properly remunerated. “They are choosing a life of scholarship which involves a lot of hard work, and it is only right that you reward these very bright people with at least a decent and stable life,” he said.
“I heard that some nonsense was spouted at the Indian Science Congress by people who are ideologically driven,” he said. “What was astonishing to me is that the Indian science establishment did not speak out instantly and strongly about it. That needs to happen. I don’t have a problem with any government, including the current one. However, governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.”
Dr. Ramakrishnan identified the National Centre of Biological Science in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and IISER, Pune, as “positive examples” of how science is being done in India today. He had special words of praise for the NCBS for its high standards of science and encouragement of young scientists, attributing these features to the leadership traditions set by its visionary Founder Director and eminent scientist, Obaid Siddiqui. This continued under K. VijayRaghavan (who subsequently left to become Director of Department of Bio-technology), and by the present Director, Satyajit Mayor. The IISc, he added, “also has a long democratic tradition of doing science.”
Dr. Ramakrishnan called upon scientists and governments to consult with each other over how best to establish priority areas in science and spending levels, but then leave it to scientific experts on how to implement these decisions without further interference.
February 09, 2015
Space for pseudoscience of the Hindutva variety at the Indian Science Congress reflects all-round saffronisation
EPW, Vol - L No. 6, February 07, 2015
Saffron Science
by Anand Teltumbde
Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.
– Albert Einstein
The culture vultures belonging to the Sangh Parivar have long been preying on every kind of lie and falsehood about the history of the subcontinent to establish their supremacist claim. The roots of the current Hindutva project may be traced to the intellectually rich incipient initiatives of the early stalwarts of the so-called Hindu Renaissance in Bengal – from Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – towards Hindu revivalism. But the palpable beginning of this supremacist project can only be traced to the intellectual juvenility of the Chitpawan reconstruction in Maharashtra, provoked mainly by the fall of Peshwai. It was articulated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (The Arctic Home in the Vedas), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History), the progenitor of Hindutva, and the likes of Purushottam Nagesh Oak (claiming Taj Mahal as a Shiva temple and a Rajput palace named Tejo Mahalaya, this in his book, Taj Mahal: The True Story). Bordering on lunacy (or idiocy), Oak claimed that not only every medieval structure but also the Kaaba in Mecca as an ancient Hindu monument.
These claims implicitly included Hindu supremacy in the sphere of science and technology, but they were never voiced aloud in specific terms, and in such an august forum as the 102nd Indian Science Congress (ISC), held recently in Mumbai under the aegis of the University of Mumbai. The shrillness of these claims was particularly discomfiting in the wake of a series of Hindutva overtures such as “love jihad”, “ramzade – haramzade”, “Bhagavad Gita as national scripture”, “Madarsas as dens of terror training”, “Godse as a patriot”, etc, that have been played out by the saffron brigade accompanied by the deafening silence of the state.
Comic Claims
The ISC was formed on the lines of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the initiative of two British chemists, J L Simonsen and P S MacMahon, to stimulate scientific research in India through an annual meeting of research workers. Right from its first meeting that took place from 15 to 17 January 1914 at the premises of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, with Asutosh Mukherjee, the then Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, as president, it has been conducted rationally, discussing actual research in the sciences supported by empirical evidence. The ISC has never provided a platform to anyone unrelated to science. Given this convention, it is symptomatic that the ISC in Mumbai, the homeland of Hindutva, has given a platform to Hindutva ideologues to present their bizarre wares before the scientific community. On the second day of the Congress, a symposium on the “Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit” had been scheduled, inviting eight speakers to speak on ancient Indian botany and topics like the “Neuroscience of Yoga”, “Scientific Principles of Ancient Indian Architecture and Civil Engineering”, ancient Indian aviation technology, and ancient Indian surgery.
On ancient Indian aviation technology, one captain Anand Bodas, a retired principal of a pilot training facility, delivered a 30-minute speech based on a paper he co-authored with a lecturer at Mumbai’s Swami Vivekanand International School and Junior College. He claimed that the sages Agastya and Bharadwaja had invented jumbo aeroplanes in the Vedic age, 7,000 years ago. These planes flew not only from country to country but also to other planets; not just forward, but backwards and even sideways. They used various types of metal alloys in their construction and were piloted by men wearing “virus-proof, water-proof, and shock-proof” jackets made of fabric from underwater vegetation.
Bodas exhorted the younger generation to study Bharadwaja’s book Vimana Samhita, make the alloys in India and save foreign exchange. The radar system, called rooparkanrahasya, presented the actual shape of the aeroplane to the observer, instead of the mere blip. He claimed something which nobody on this earth seemed to know, that in 1895, a “full eight years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA”, a Marathi couple, “Shivkar Bapuji Talpade and his wife gave a thrilling demonstration flight on the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai”. It is a different matter that the technical basis of the “Vedic Ion Engine” supposedly used by Talpade was trashed by researches that examined the technological feasibility of such flights (H S Mukunda et al, “A Critical Study of the Work ‘Vymanika Shastra’”, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) way back in 1974.
Similar fantastic claims were made by other speakers. One ayurvedic physician, a general practitioner in Mumbai, described the advances made by Indian surgeons “thousands of years before the rise of the modern surgery”. Indians had developed 20 types of sharp instruments and 101 blunt ones for surgeries. The former “were so sharp that they could split a human hair”. Another presenter spoke of how “ancient Indian engineers had adequate knowledge of Indian botany and they effectively used it in their construction.”
The “forte” of this symposium was such that most ministers of the Modi government at the conference heightened its significance. For instance, Harsh Vardhan, the Union Minister for Science and Technology, said,
Our scientists discovered the Pythagoras theorem, but we ... gave credit to the Greeks. We all know that we knew ‘beejganit’ much before the Arabs, but selflessly allowed it to be called Algebra.
Such irrational claims by intellectuals of the Sangh Parivar were not unusual but they were now being made in a science forum before the scientific community. The claimants were surely emboldened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said at the dedication of a hospital of the Ambani Group in Mumbai on 25 October last year that the existence of Ganesha and Karna proved that plastic surgery and genetic science had existed in ancient India.
National Phantasm
Some scientists did publicly protest against the inclusion of such a pseudo-science in the ISC programme. The online petition initiated by an Indian scientist working for the US government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was signed by about 1,500 scientists. But there were obviously many in the ISC and outside who condescended.
None asked such simple questions to those comedians as to how and when this ancient treasure trove of knowledge had vanished to leave historical India pitiable on every conceivable count. All people are endowed with the capacity of generating and possessing knowledge which comes about in face of challenges. Indians, because of the rich natural endowment of the country, perhaps did not face as big challenges as others did and hence they did not have to use their capacity to invent/discover things. Moreover, this complacent state was fossilised by the contrivance of the caste system which permanently blocked the majority of people from access to knowledge.
India did contribute to the pool of scientific knowledge in certain branches that were monopolised by the parasitic class of Brahmins who maintained an exclusive dominance over knowledge. For instance, they wove intricate philosophies and developed cognitive constructs and systems which covered astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and alchemy. The zero – largely acknowledged as India’s contribution – necessarily falls in this class. It is in the abstract sphere that India seems to have made a significant contribution but in spheres that interface with labour, she had little contribution to make.
India lagged in science and technology for production as it was cut off from the sphere of formal knowledge. For example, it did not know the arch, the most efficient curve in engineering, which made the superstructure with heavy cross-beaming too heavy for the foundation, eventually to collapse and vanish. It is therefore that India does not have any architectural evidence of her “greatness”, including, of course, the interplanetary aeroplanes and surgical instruments. It perhaps did not know about the stitching of clothes until medieval times.
Fascist Stratagem
All these things, including External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s shocking proposition for making Bhagavad Gita the “national scripture” or Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani’s outrageous move to impose Sanskrit on the school curriculum are actually part of a well thought-out strategy of the Sangh Parivar. This is to transform India into a fascist state as fast as possible. Jingoistic cultural nationalism is a proven vehicle to create a national community required to realise the fascist motto of “one people, one culture, one leader”. Projecting a development focus, promoting super power discourse, posturing with rhetorical bravado, picturing a glorious past, shadow-boxing an enemy, all this with massive inputs of lies and falsehoods, and with a deliberate anti-intellectual stance, are also established characteristics of the fascist modus operandi.
If this is understood, there may not be any more surprises about the raw antics of certain constituents of the Sangh Parivar and silence of the so-called saner people within it. The process necessarily involves “othering”, which is served well by these antics. They are meant to communally polarise people so as to consolidate and expand the Parivar’s Hindu constituency. Adivasis and Dalits, a potential threat to the Hindutva project, having been Hinduised and Brahminised, respectively, the other minorities would be terrorised into submission.
The project of speedy saffronisation of all institutions is in full swing. Space to pseudoscience presentation in the ISC is just a gauge to assess it. A minor protest of a thousand odd scientists in an online petition in a country that boasts of the second largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world reveals that the danger of fascism is close upon us.
The space given to pseudoscience of the Hindutva variety at the Indian Science Congress must be viewed as part of the ominous process of all-round saffronisation that is presently underway.
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Maharashtra.
Saffron Science
by Anand Teltumbde
Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.
– Albert Einstein
The culture vultures belonging to the Sangh Parivar have long been preying on every kind of lie and falsehood about the history of the subcontinent to establish their supremacist claim. The roots of the current Hindutva project may be traced to the intellectually rich incipient initiatives of the early stalwarts of the so-called Hindu Renaissance in Bengal – from Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – towards Hindu revivalism. But the palpable beginning of this supremacist project can only be traced to the intellectual juvenility of the Chitpawan reconstruction in Maharashtra, provoked mainly by the fall of Peshwai. It was articulated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (The Arctic Home in the Vedas), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History), the progenitor of Hindutva, and the likes of Purushottam Nagesh Oak (claiming Taj Mahal as a Shiva temple and a Rajput palace named Tejo Mahalaya, this in his book, Taj Mahal: The True Story). Bordering on lunacy (or idiocy), Oak claimed that not only every medieval structure but also the Kaaba in Mecca as an ancient Hindu monument.
These claims implicitly included Hindu supremacy in the sphere of science and technology, but they were never voiced aloud in specific terms, and in such an august forum as the 102nd Indian Science Congress (ISC), held recently in Mumbai under the aegis of the University of Mumbai. The shrillness of these claims was particularly discomfiting in the wake of a series of Hindutva overtures such as “love jihad”, “ramzade – haramzade”, “Bhagavad Gita as national scripture”, “Madarsas as dens of terror training”, “Godse as a patriot”, etc, that have been played out by the saffron brigade accompanied by the deafening silence of the state.
Comic Claims
The ISC was formed on the lines of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the initiative of two British chemists, J L Simonsen and P S MacMahon, to stimulate scientific research in India through an annual meeting of research workers. Right from its first meeting that took place from 15 to 17 January 1914 at the premises of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, with Asutosh Mukherjee, the then Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, as president, it has been conducted rationally, discussing actual research in the sciences supported by empirical evidence. The ISC has never provided a platform to anyone unrelated to science. Given this convention, it is symptomatic that the ISC in Mumbai, the homeland of Hindutva, has given a platform to Hindutva ideologues to present their bizarre wares before the scientific community. On the second day of the Congress, a symposium on the “Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit” had been scheduled, inviting eight speakers to speak on ancient Indian botany and topics like the “Neuroscience of Yoga”, “Scientific Principles of Ancient Indian Architecture and Civil Engineering”, ancient Indian aviation technology, and ancient Indian surgery.
On ancient Indian aviation technology, one captain Anand Bodas, a retired principal of a pilot training facility, delivered a 30-minute speech based on a paper he co-authored with a lecturer at Mumbai’s Swami Vivekanand International School and Junior College. He claimed that the sages Agastya and Bharadwaja had invented jumbo aeroplanes in the Vedic age, 7,000 years ago. These planes flew not only from country to country but also to other planets; not just forward, but backwards and even sideways. They used various types of metal alloys in their construction and were piloted by men wearing “virus-proof, water-proof, and shock-proof” jackets made of fabric from underwater vegetation.
Bodas exhorted the younger generation to study Bharadwaja’s book Vimana Samhita, make the alloys in India and save foreign exchange. The radar system, called rooparkanrahasya, presented the actual shape of the aeroplane to the observer, instead of the mere blip. He claimed something which nobody on this earth seemed to know, that in 1895, a “full eight years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA”, a Marathi couple, “Shivkar Bapuji Talpade and his wife gave a thrilling demonstration flight on the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai”. It is a different matter that the technical basis of the “Vedic Ion Engine” supposedly used by Talpade was trashed by researches that examined the technological feasibility of such flights (H S Mukunda et al, “A Critical Study of the Work ‘Vymanika Shastra’”, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) way back in 1974.
Similar fantastic claims were made by other speakers. One ayurvedic physician, a general practitioner in Mumbai, described the advances made by Indian surgeons “thousands of years before the rise of the modern surgery”. Indians had developed 20 types of sharp instruments and 101 blunt ones for surgeries. The former “were so sharp that they could split a human hair”. Another presenter spoke of how “ancient Indian engineers had adequate knowledge of Indian botany and they effectively used it in their construction.”
The “forte” of this symposium was such that most ministers of the Modi government at the conference heightened its significance. For instance, Harsh Vardhan, the Union Minister for Science and Technology, said,
Our scientists discovered the Pythagoras theorem, but we ... gave credit to the Greeks. We all know that we knew ‘beejganit’ much before the Arabs, but selflessly allowed it to be called Algebra.
Such irrational claims by intellectuals of the Sangh Parivar were not unusual but they were now being made in a science forum before the scientific community. The claimants were surely emboldened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said at the dedication of a hospital of the Ambani Group in Mumbai on 25 October last year that the existence of Ganesha and Karna proved that plastic surgery and genetic science had existed in ancient India.
National Phantasm
Some scientists did publicly protest against the inclusion of such a pseudo-science in the ISC programme. The online petition initiated by an Indian scientist working for the US government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was signed by about 1,500 scientists. But there were obviously many in the ISC and outside who condescended.
None asked such simple questions to those comedians as to how and when this ancient treasure trove of knowledge had vanished to leave historical India pitiable on every conceivable count. All people are endowed with the capacity of generating and possessing knowledge which comes about in face of challenges. Indians, because of the rich natural endowment of the country, perhaps did not face as big challenges as others did and hence they did not have to use their capacity to invent/discover things. Moreover, this complacent state was fossilised by the contrivance of the caste system which permanently blocked the majority of people from access to knowledge.
India did contribute to the pool of scientific knowledge in certain branches that were monopolised by the parasitic class of Brahmins who maintained an exclusive dominance over knowledge. For instance, they wove intricate philosophies and developed cognitive constructs and systems which covered astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and alchemy. The zero – largely acknowledged as India’s contribution – necessarily falls in this class. It is in the abstract sphere that India seems to have made a significant contribution but in spheres that interface with labour, she had little contribution to make.
India lagged in science and technology for production as it was cut off from the sphere of formal knowledge. For example, it did not know the arch, the most efficient curve in engineering, which made the superstructure with heavy cross-beaming too heavy for the foundation, eventually to collapse and vanish. It is therefore that India does not have any architectural evidence of her “greatness”, including, of course, the interplanetary aeroplanes and surgical instruments. It perhaps did not know about the stitching of clothes until medieval times.
Fascist Stratagem
All these things, including External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s shocking proposition for making Bhagavad Gita the “national scripture” or Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani’s outrageous move to impose Sanskrit on the school curriculum are actually part of a well thought-out strategy of the Sangh Parivar. This is to transform India into a fascist state as fast as possible. Jingoistic cultural nationalism is a proven vehicle to create a national community required to realise the fascist motto of “one people, one culture, one leader”. Projecting a development focus, promoting super power discourse, posturing with rhetorical bravado, picturing a glorious past, shadow-boxing an enemy, all this with massive inputs of lies and falsehoods, and with a deliberate anti-intellectual stance, are also established characteristics of the fascist modus operandi.
If this is understood, there may not be any more surprises about the raw antics of certain constituents of the Sangh Parivar and silence of the so-called saner people within it. The process necessarily involves “othering”, which is served well by these antics. They are meant to communally polarise people so as to consolidate and expand the Parivar’s Hindu constituency. Adivasis and Dalits, a potential threat to the Hindutva project, having been Hinduised and Brahminised, respectively, the other minorities would be terrorised into submission.
The project of speedy saffronisation of all institutions is in full swing. Space to pseudoscience presentation in the ISC is just a gauge to assess it. A minor protest of a thousand odd scientists in an online petition in a country that boasts of the second largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world reveals that the danger of fascism is close upon us.
The space given to pseudoscience of the Hindutva variety at the Indian Science Congress must be viewed as part of the ominous process of all-round saffronisation that is presently underway.
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Maharashtra.
January 16, 2015
India: Scientists without a scientific temper (Pushpa M. Bhargava)
The Hindu, January 17, 2015
Scientists without a scientific temper
by Pushpa M. Bhargava
India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85 years — largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country
Jawaharlal Nehru coined the term ‘scientific temper’ in his book The Discovery of India, which was published in 1946. He was also the President of the Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI), which was registered as a Trade Union, and with which I was closely associated with in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (This may be the only example of a Prime Minister of a democracy being the President of a Trade Union.) One of the objectives of ASWI was to propagate scientific temper. It was very active in the beginning, but fizzled out by the 1960s as the bulk of scientists in the country, including many who were occupying high positions, were themselves not committed to scientific temper which calls for rationality, reason and lack of belief in any dogma, superstition or manifest falsehood.
The conclusion that our very own scientists — who would be expected to be leaders in the development of scientific temper — did not possess scientific temper themselves and were just as superstitious as any other group was supported by another incident in 1964. Following a statement by Satish Dhawan (who later became Secretary, Department of Space), Abdur Rahman (a distinguished historian of science) and I, set up an organisation called The Society for Scientific Temper, in January 1964, the founding members of which included distinguished scientists like Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner. For membership to the society, the following statement had to be signed: “I believe that knowledge can be acquired only through human endeavour and not through revelation, and that all problems can and must be faced in terms of man’s moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural powers.”
We were disillusioned when we approached scientist after scientist and all of them refused to sign the statement. Clearly they were devoid of scientific temper. Following this disillusionment, I persuaded Professor Nurul Hasan, then Education Minister, to have the following clause included in Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of Indian “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.”
This should have woken up our scientists and reminded them of their duty vis-à-vis scientific temper, but I do not believe that the situation in this respect is any better, even today, than what it was 50-60 years ago. Let me cite three examples.
Little improvement
During the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, then Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi asked the University Grants Commission to issue a circular to all universities stating that they should start a degree course in astrology. For this, he said, a special grant would be given. My colleague Chandana Chakrabarti and I filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging this dispensation. Our lawyer was Prashant Bhushan. The petition was admitted but was eventually dismissed (as could be expected), for belief in astrology — which is totally unscientific and irrational and has been repeatedly shown to be a myth — is widespread, with those who dispense justice also not being immune to it. Not one scientist came forward in support of us; nor did any of the six national science academies we have, on which a substantial amount of public funds are spent every year. Our supporters, who even sent us unsolicited funds to fight the case, were all non-scientists. In fact, recognising the above inadequacies of our science academies and their insensitivity to science-related social problems in general, I resigned from the fellowship of three of our science academies in 1993.
The second example would be the silence of our scientists and the six science academies when, last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a group of scientists in Mumbai, claimed that organ transplantation was known in ancient India — he gave Ganesha with his elephant head and human torso as an example.
The third example would be the much publicised symposium on “Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit” at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai, which was held earlier this month. At this meeting, it was said that India had jumbo aircraft (60 x 60 feet; in some cases 200 feet long) that flew between continents and planets 9,000 years ago (some 4,500 years before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro). Not only that, it was also claimed that we had a radar system better than the present one, based on the principle that every animate or inanimate object emits energy all the time. And in the 21st century, “fusion of science and spirituality will happen because of the law of inter-penetration,” it was said. I doubt if any serious academic would have heard of this law which would not make any sense. These and many other absurd claims made at the symposium were an insult to the several real scientific accomplishments of ancient and medieval India.
Winding up academies
None of our so-called scientists of note and scientific academies has raised a voice against these claims. Surely, the distinguished scientists who organised the Science Congress knew what was likely to be said at the symposium, but, perhaps, they believed in it all or were pressurised politically. Therefore, there is a strong case for the annual Indian Science Congress to be banned (as I also argued in my article in The Hindu, “Why the Indian Science Congress meets should be stopped” (Open Page, September 30, 1997), or its name to be changed to Indian Anti-science Congress.
As regards the science academies, they can easily be wound up without any damage being caused to Indian science. India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85 years – largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country, of which scientific temper would be an important component.
(Pushpa M. Bhargava is the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, and chairman of the Southern Regional Centre of Council for Social Development.)
Scientists without a scientific temper
by Pushpa M. Bhargava
India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85 years — largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country
Jawaharlal Nehru coined the term ‘scientific temper’ in his book The Discovery of India, which was published in 1946. He was also the President of the Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI), which was registered as a Trade Union, and with which I was closely associated with in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (This may be the only example of a Prime Minister of a democracy being the President of a Trade Union.) One of the objectives of ASWI was to propagate scientific temper. It was very active in the beginning, but fizzled out by the 1960s as the bulk of scientists in the country, including many who were occupying high positions, were themselves not committed to scientific temper which calls for rationality, reason and lack of belief in any dogma, superstition or manifest falsehood.
The conclusion that our very own scientists — who would be expected to be leaders in the development of scientific temper — did not possess scientific temper themselves and were just as superstitious as any other group was supported by another incident in 1964. Following a statement by Satish Dhawan (who later became Secretary, Department of Space), Abdur Rahman (a distinguished historian of science) and I, set up an organisation called The Society for Scientific Temper, in January 1964, the founding members of which included distinguished scientists like Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner. For membership to the society, the following statement had to be signed: “I believe that knowledge can be acquired only through human endeavour and not through revelation, and that all problems can and must be faced in terms of man’s moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural powers.”
We were disillusioned when we approached scientist after scientist and all of them refused to sign the statement. Clearly they were devoid of scientific temper. Following this disillusionment, I persuaded Professor Nurul Hasan, then Education Minister, to have the following clause included in Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of Indian “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.”
This should have woken up our scientists and reminded them of their duty vis-à-vis scientific temper, but I do not believe that the situation in this respect is any better, even today, than what it was 50-60 years ago. Let me cite three examples.
Little improvement
During the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, then Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi asked the University Grants Commission to issue a circular to all universities stating that they should start a degree course in astrology. For this, he said, a special grant would be given. My colleague Chandana Chakrabarti and I filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging this dispensation. Our lawyer was Prashant Bhushan. The petition was admitted but was eventually dismissed (as could be expected), for belief in astrology — which is totally unscientific and irrational and has been repeatedly shown to be a myth — is widespread, with those who dispense justice also not being immune to it. Not one scientist came forward in support of us; nor did any of the six national science academies we have, on which a substantial amount of public funds are spent every year. Our supporters, who even sent us unsolicited funds to fight the case, were all non-scientists. In fact, recognising the above inadequacies of our science academies and their insensitivity to science-related social problems in general, I resigned from the fellowship of three of our science academies in 1993.
The second example would be the silence of our scientists and the six science academies when, last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a group of scientists in Mumbai, claimed that organ transplantation was known in ancient India — he gave Ganesha with his elephant head and human torso as an example.
The third example would be the much publicised symposium on “Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit” at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai, which was held earlier this month. At this meeting, it was said that India had jumbo aircraft (60 x 60 feet; in some cases 200 feet long) that flew between continents and planets 9,000 years ago (some 4,500 years before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro). Not only that, it was also claimed that we had a radar system better than the present one, based on the principle that every animate or inanimate object emits energy all the time. And in the 21st century, “fusion of science and spirituality will happen because of the law of inter-penetration,” it was said. I doubt if any serious academic would have heard of this law which would not make any sense. These and many other absurd claims made at the symposium were an insult to the several real scientific accomplishments of ancient and medieval India.
Winding up academies
None of our so-called scientists of note and scientific academies has raised a voice against these claims. Surely, the distinguished scientists who organised the Science Congress knew what was likely to be said at the symposium, but, perhaps, they believed in it all or were pressurised politically. Therefore, there is a strong case for the annual Indian Science Congress to be banned (as I also argued in my article in The Hindu, “Why the Indian Science Congress meets should be stopped” (Open Page, September 30, 1997), or its name to be changed to Indian Anti-science Congress.
As regards the science academies, they can easily be wound up without any damage being caused to Indian science. India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85 years – largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country, of which scientific temper would be an important component.
(Pushpa M. Bhargava is the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, and chairman of the Southern Regional Centre of Council for Social Development.)
January 14, 2015
Promoting Prejudice, Poisoning Minds - Parivar’s intrusions into education
by Praful Bidwai
If there’s one thing that the 102nd Indian Science Congress, held in Mumbai, will be remembered for, it’s the outrageous claims made at it about the achievements of science in ancient India, including the assertion that Indians between 7000 and 6000 BC knew how to make airplanes that could undertake “interplanetary travel”, and fly backwards and sideways, as well as forwards!
[. . .]
http://www.sacw.net/article10388.html
If there’s one thing that the 102nd Indian Science Congress, held in Mumbai, will be remembered for, it’s the outrageous claims made at it about the achievements of science in ancient India, including the assertion that Indians between 7000 and 6000 BC knew how to make airplanes that could undertake “interplanetary travel”, and fly backwards and sideways, as well as forwards!
[. . .]
http://www.sacw.net/article10388.html
November 17, 2014
The magic of Mythological Fiction (Ram Puniyani)
http://www.sacw.net/article10002.html
One of the best parts of childhood for me was to enjoy the mythological tales and become aware of the world where Lord Hanuman could fly, as the emergency herbal treatment is to be delivered to his master’s brother; Laxman. Lord Ram travelling by Pushpak Viman (aero plane), Lord Ganesha being planted with the head of elephant as his human head was chopped off by his father, all this was uncritically digested. Karna is born from the ear of his mother; Kauravas are born from the mass delivered by Gandhari, the mass being divided into 100 pieces and being preserved. Such fanciful imaginations were so engrossing that questioning them never came to my mind. With growing up years, some exposure to science and then rigorous training for close to decade in a medical school forced one to revisit the childhood fantasies built around mythological fictions. Realization gradually dawned as to how to distinguish between fact and fiction, history and mythology. The beauty of imagination; fiction of the pre-Historic times, does still remain etched somewhere but is not a guiding principle for understanding of social phenomenon and processes.
While going through the tough medical discipline, one came to see the complexity of human body, histopathology, immune systems, blood groups, bio-compatibility and what have you. A mere thought that Lord Ganesha could carry an elephant head if taken logically will lead you to so many questions. If the head is severed from the body; for how many minutes one can survive? The head houses the brain with higher centers for control of breathing and heart pumping amongst others, so how long can one remain alive to be a recipient for other’s organs, and that too the head of an elephant? What is the difference in the immune system of human body and elephant? Even while transplanting kidney to one human being to another there are battery of tests carried on meticulously to assess the compatibility between recipient and the donor. So there was all this paraphernalia, if Mr. Modi is to be believed?
A mass delivered from uterus; can it be divided into 100 pieces? What type of micro surgery is required for splitting the fertilized ovum? Can uterus be located near ear? I am sure all these questions must have cropped up in the minds of the doctors, who had the privilege of listening to their Prime Minister in person when he was inaugurating their hospital. They heard, “We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time. We all read about Karna in Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb… We worship Lord Ganesh. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time, which got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery”.
Hope the hospital he inaugurated is not planning to undertake such miraculous surgeries and splitting of the ovum in to hundred pieces! Many in the country surely must be feeling happy that their PM has given glory to ‘our’ past achievements! By all accounts it was a pastoral society or might have been the beginning of agricultural times, with hunting stage still lurking somewhere. The facts are very different from the utterances of the PM.
The practical impossibility of these fictional tales being true cannot be overemphasized. As understood with great pain and scientific enterprise the fictions of mythology of Mahabharata or Ramayana do not stand even a chance of being actualized. All this requires a huge infrastructure, body of scientific knowledge of human body, physics, astronomy, and myriad other components of knowledge which have been growing from the past but have taken definitive contours in last few centuries only. With all this progress in scientific enterprise today none of these ‘glorious achievements’ can even be dreamt of even today. The World of science has taken giant strides and built up on the cumulative knowledge of human society as a whole. Surely there are many contributions which came up in ancient India, and they need to be underlined, and their wisdom and logical method highlighted. Some of these are the ones related to Charak Samhita (Medical science), Sushrut (Surgical techniques); contributions of Aryabhatt in astronomy and discovery of zero. What is important is to build a method of thinking and logic which can take us to the next step of the knowledge, ultimately leading to techniques and applications, which in turn can be used to enhance and enrich existing scientific knowledge.
It’s not that it’s only in our country that such mythological fantasies developed. All old civilizations have such interesting myths. In Egypt, in prehistoric times the tales of Cleopatra tell us that she had belief, like probably many other Egyptians, in the supreme power of many gods who had animal’s heads, like Baboon God head Hedj-Wer and Annubis the jackal headed God. Had the likes of Modi known about this Egyptian belief, the claim of ‘export of our knowledge’ claim would have been registered by now. What a coincidence with our own Lord Ganesh? Is it again a case of plastic surgery or flight of imagination? In Greek mythology, Chinese mythology and many other traditions such fictional characters do merrily abound.
The hope and prayer is that in order to prove the point, those in seats of power do not divert and waste social funds for investigations of these fantasies. While an average person can believe in Lord Ram’s travel in Pushpak Viman or someone else travelling on a flying mat, if those in power believe in these things; the danger of public money and state funds being diverted for ‘research’ in these fantasies is very frightening. One recalls that during Zia Ul Haq’s regime in one of the conferences was on ‘how to solve the power shortage’. Encouraged by the atmosphere where it is supposed that all knowledge is already there in our holy books, one ‘scientist’ presented a ‘research paper’ which argued that jinns are an infinite source of energy and that should be harnessed to solve the power crisis in Pakistan! Mercifully, one hopes that state did not allocate funds for such a research! Any way science is a universal knowledge not owing allegiance to any country or religion. There cannot be anything like a Hindu science or a Muslim science!
While individuals can harbor the reality of mythology, the matters will be difficult if the chief of state has belief in these fictions being part of History. That will be a big set back to the progress of scientific, rational thinking and enterprise. This combination of mythology, religion and politics will make the matters worse. Many competing mythologies will be struggling with each other for their acceptance and being encouraged by such utterances. And the fantasies of power of jinn’s and plastic surgery for Lord Ganesha will a have field day.
One of the best parts of childhood for me was to enjoy the mythological tales and become aware of the world where Lord Hanuman could fly, as the emergency herbal treatment is to be delivered to his master’s brother; Laxman. Lord Ram travelling by Pushpak Viman (aero plane), Lord Ganesha being planted with the head of elephant as his human head was chopped off by his father, all this was uncritically digested. Karna is born from the ear of his mother; Kauravas are born from the mass delivered by Gandhari, the mass being divided into 100 pieces and being preserved. Such fanciful imaginations were so engrossing that questioning them never came to my mind. With growing up years, some exposure to science and then rigorous training for close to decade in a medical school forced one to revisit the childhood fantasies built around mythological fictions. Realization gradually dawned as to how to distinguish between fact and fiction, history and mythology. The beauty of imagination; fiction of the pre-Historic times, does still remain etched somewhere but is not a guiding principle for understanding of social phenomenon and processes.
While going through the tough medical discipline, one came to see the complexity of human body, histopathology, immune systems, blood groups, bio-compatibility and what have you. A mere thought that Lord Ganesha could carry an elephant head if taken logically will lead you to so many questions. If the head is severed from the body; for how many minutes one can survive? The head houses the brain with higher centers for control of breathing and heart pumping amongst others, so how long can one remain alive to be a recipient for other’s organs, and that too the head of an elephant? What is the difference in the immune system of human body and elephant? Even while transplanting kidney to one human being to another there are battery of tests carried on meticulously to assess the compatibility between recipient and the donor. So there was all this paraphernalia, if Mr. Modi is to be believed?
A mass delivered from uterus; can it be divided into 100 pieces? What type of micro surgery is required for splitting the fertilized ovum? Can uterus be located near ear? I am sure all these questions must have cropped up in the minds of the doctors, who had the privilege of listening to their Prime Minister in person when he was inaugurating their hospital. They heard, “We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time. We all read about Karna in Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb… We worship Lord Ganesh. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time, which got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery”.
Hope the hospital he inaugurated is not planning to undertake such miraculous surgeries and splitting of the ovum in to hundred pieces! Many in the country surely must be feeling happy that their PM has given glory to ‘our’ past achievements! By all accounts it was a pastoral society or might have been the beginning of agricultural times, with hunting stage still lurking somewhere. The facts are very different from the utterances of the PM.
The practical impossibility of these fictional tales being true cannot be overemphasized. As understood with great pain and scientific enterprise the fictions of mythology of Mahabharata or Ramayana do not stand even a chance of being actualized. All this requires a huge infrastructure, body of scientific knowledge of human body, physics, astronomy, and myriad other components of knowledge which have been growing from the past but have taken definitive contours in last few centuries only. With all this progress in scientific enterprise today none of these ‘glorious achievements’ can even be dreamt of even today. The World of science has taken giant strides and built up on the cumulative knowledge of human society as a whole. Surely there are many contributions which came up in ancient India, and they need to be underlined, and their wisdom and logical method highlighted. Some of these are the ones related to Charak Samhita (Medical science), Sushrut (Surgical techniques); contributions of Aryabhatt in astronomy and discovery of zero. What is important is to build a method of thinking and logic which can take us to the next step of the knowledge, ultimately leading to techniques and applications, which in turn can be used to enhance and enrich existing scientific knowledge.
It’s not that it’s only in our country that such mythological fantasies developed. All old civilizations have such interesting myths. In Egypt, in prehistoric times the tales of Cleopatra tell us that she had belief, like probably many other Egyptians, in the supreme power of many gods who had animal’s heads, like Baboon God head Hedj-Wer and Annubis the jackal headed God. Had the likes of Modi known about this Egyptian belief, the claim of ‘export of our knowledge’ claim would have been registered by now. What a coincidence with our own Lord Ganesh? Is it again a case of plastic surgery or flight of imagination? In Greek mythology, Chinese mythology and many other traditions such fictional characters do merrily abound.
The hope and prayer is that in order to prove the point, those in seats of power do not divert and waste social funds for investigations of these fantasies. While an average person can believe in Lord Ram’s travel in Pushpak Viman or someone else travelling on a flying mat, if those in power believe in these things; the danger of public money and state funds being diverted for ‘research’ in these fantasies is very frightening. One recalls that during Zia Ul Haq’s regime in one of the conferences was on ‘how to solve the power shortage’. Encouraged by the atmosphere where it is supposed that all knowledge is already there in our holy books, one ‘scientist’ presented a ‘research paper’ which argued that jinns are an infinite source of energy and that should be harnessed to solve the power crisis in Pakistan! Mercifully, one hopes that state did not allocate funds for such a research! Any way science is a universal knowledge not owing allegiance to any country or religion. There cannot be anything like a Hindu science or a Muslim science!
While individuals can harbor the reality of mythology, the matters will be difficult if the chief of state has belief in these fictions being part of History. That will be a big set back to the progress of scientific, rational thinking and enterprise. This combination of mythology, religion and politics will make the matters worse. Many competing mythologies will be struggling with each other for their acceptance and being encouraged by such utterances. And the fantasies of power of jinn’s and plastic surgery for Lord Ganesha will a have field day.
November 01, 2014
India: The two faces of Mr. Modi (Karan Thapar)
The Hindu, Nov 1, 2014
The two faces of Mr. Modi
By Karan Thapar
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assumption that in prehistoric mythological times India had mastered genetic science and plastic surgery is irrational
What do we expect of our prime ministers? This is not a rhetorical question and you’ll soon see why. We expect integrity, commitment, dedication, administrative expertise and, hopefully, a fair modicum of intelligence. But is that all?
As important as all the other qualities, we also expect rationality. We may not always agree with what our prime ministers say or are committed to do but we assume that their thoughts and actions are rational, well-considered and credible. In other words, even if their decisions turn out to be wrong — and that often happens — they won’t offend against common sense.
It is here that I have a bone to pick with Narendra Modi. Speaking at the inauguration of the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre last Saturday, he said: “Mahabharat ka kehna hai ki Karn maa ki godh se paida nahi hua tha. Iska matlab yeh hai ki us samaye genetic science mojud tha … Hum Ganeshji ki puja kiya karte hain, koi to plastic surgeon hoga us zamane main, jisne manushye ke sharir par haathi ka sar rakh kar ke plastic surgery ka prarambh kiya hoga.” [It is said in the Mahabharata that Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means in the times in which the epic was written genetic science was very much present. We all worship Lord Ganesha; for sure there must have been some plastic surgeon at that time, to fit an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.]
No doubt many Hindus share Mr. Modi’s assumption that in prehistoric mythological times India had mastered genetic science and plastic surgery. As individuals they are free to believe what they want. But for the Prime Minister of India to proclaim this belief as fact — and that too at the inauguration of a hospital — is something else.
Why? This is because it’s not rational to use mythology as the basis for claiming scientific achievements. First, there’s no proof other than the assumption the myth is true and that’s an unwarranted assumption. Second, how do you account for the fact the scientific knowledge and achievements you are boasting of have been lost, if not also long forgotten, and there is no trace of any records to substantiate they ever occurred?
Even worse, Mr. Modi’s views echo those of Dinanath Batra. His books are now part of the curriculum in 42,000 schools across Gujarat and carry messages from Mr. Modi when he was Chief Minister. They claim stem cell research was known in the days of Kunti and the Kauravas, television was invented at the time of the Mahabharata and the motor car existed in the Vedic period. Few would deny this is nonsense. Why wouldn’t you say the same for the claim India mastered genetic science and plastic surgery in prehistoric times?
I have two further points. First, Mr. Modi wants to build smart cities, stresses the need for education and is proud of the successful mission to Mars. He believes in digital India, wants to import bullet trains and ‘Make in India’ state-of-the-art defence weaponry. These are 21st century ambitions. How does all of that sit alongside this belief in unverified mythology? Are they not contradictory?
Second, Greek mythology has centaurs and minotaurs; the Persians have the griffin; the British the unicorn; and fairy tales have mermaids and werewolves. Mr. Modi’s position would also lead us to believe these creatures actually existed. But does anyone believe they did? Surely only in our dreams? Or only whilst we were children?
Ultimately, my problem with the Prime Minister’s comment goes a step further, but it could be the most critical of all. Under Article 51 A (h) of the Constitution it’s the fundamental duty of every citizen to develop a scientific temper. I can’t see how the Prime Minister is doing that by blatantly claiming medical advances on the basis of unverified myths. His views clearly and undeniably contradict this constitutional requirement. In fact, if he thinks about it I feel confident Mr. Modi would not disagree!
These are troubling doubts and for the Prime Minister to be the cause of them is even more worrying. Finally, I’m dismayed this issue has not got greater attention in the media. Nor, to my astonishment, has any Indian scientist refuted the Prime Minister’s claims. Their silence is perplexing. The silence of the media is deeply disturbing. It feels as though it’s been deliberately blanked out by everyone.
(Karan Thapar is a television commentator and anchor of the Headlines Today programme, To The Point)
The two faces of Mr. Modi
By Karan Thapar
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assumption that in prehistoric mythological times India had mastered genetic science and plastic surgery is irrational
What do we expect of our prime ministers? This is not a rhetorical question and you’ll soon see why. We expect integrity, commitment, dedication, administrative expertise and, hopefully, a fair modicum of intelligence. But is that all?
As important as all the other qualities, we also expect rationality. We may not always agree with what our prime ministers say or are committed to do but we assume that their thoughts and actions are rational, well-considered and credible. In other words, even if their decisions turn out to be wrong — and that often happens — they won’t offend against common sense.
It is here that I have a bone to pick with Narendra Modi. Speaking at the inauguration of the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre last Saturday, he said: “Mahabharat ka kehna hai ki Karn maa ki godh se paida nahi hua tha. Iska matlab yeh hai ki us samaye genetic science mojud tha … Hum Ganeshji ki puja kiya karte hain, koi to plastic surgeon hoga us zamane main, jisne manushye ke sharir par haathi ka sar rakh kar ke plastic surgery ka prarambh kiya hoga.” [It is said in the Mahabharata that Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means in the times in which the epic was written genetic science was very much present. We all worship Lord Ganesha; for sure there must have been some plastic surgeon at that time, to fit an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.]
No doubt many Hindus share Mr. Modi’s assumption that in prehistoric mythological times India had mastered genetic science and plastic surgery. As individuals they are free to believe what they want. But for the Prime Minister of India to proclaim this belief as fact — and that too at the inauguration of a hospital — is something else.
Why? This is because it’s not rational to use mythology as the basis for claiming scientific achievements. First, there’s no proof other than the assumption the myth is true and that’s an unwarranted assumption. Second, how do you account for the fact the scientific knowledge and achievements you are boasting of have been lost, if not also long forgotten, and there is no trace of any records to substantiate they ever occurred?
Even worse, Mr. Modi’s views echo those of Dinanath Batra. His books are now part of the curriculum in 42,000 schools across Gujarat and carry messages from Mr. Modi when he was Chief Minister. They claim stem cell research was known in the days of Kunti and the Kauravas, television was invented at the time of the Mahabharata and the motor car existed in the Vedic period. Few would deny this is nonsense. Why wouldn’t you say the same for the claim India mastered genetic science and plastic surgery in prehistoric times?
I have two further points. First, Mr. Modi wants to build smart cities, stresses the need for education and is proud of the successful mission to Mars. He believes in digital India, wants to import bullet trains and ‘Make in India’ state-of-the-art defence weaponry. These are 21st century ambitions. How does all of that sit alongside this belief in unverified mythology? Are they not contradictory?
Second, Greek mythology has centaurs and minotaurs; the Persians have the griffin; the British the unicorn; and fairy tales have mermaids and werewolves. Mr. Modi’s position would also lead us to believe these creatures actually existed. But does anyone believe they did? Surely only in our dreams? Or only whilst we were children?
Ultimately, my problem with the Prime Minister’s comment goes a step further, but it could be the most critical of all. Under Article 51 A (h) of the Constitution it’s the fundamental duty of every citizen to develop a scientific temper. I can’t see how the Prime Minister is doing that by blatantly claiming medical advances on the basis of unverified myths. His views clearly and undeniably contradict this constitutional requirement. In fact, if he thinks about it I feel confident Mr. Modi would not disagree!
These are troubling doubts and for the Prime Minister to be the cause of them is even more worrying. Finally, I’m dismayed this issue has not got greater attention in the media. Nor, to my astonishment, has any Indian scientist refuted the Prime Minister’s claims. Their silence is perplexing. The silence of the media is deeply disturbing. It feels as though it’s been deliberately blanked out by everyone.
(Karan Thapar is a television commentator and anchor of the Headlines Today programme, To The Point)
September 14, 2014
September 03, 2014
India: Advocating ‘Vedic mathematics’ as a replacement for traditional Indian arithmetic shows ignorance
The Hindu, 3 September 2014
Nothing Vedic in ‘Vedic Maths’
C. K. RAJU
Advocating ‘Vedic mathematics’ as a replacement for traditional Indian arithmetic is hardly an act of nationalism; it only shows ignorance of the history of mathematics
Gujarat has made it compulsory for school students to read the texts of Dinanath Batra, endorsed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. According to news reports, Mr. Batra has now proposed a non-governmental education commission which will Indianise education through, for instance, Vedic mathematics. The Minister for Education has also mentioned Vedic mathematics as part of her agenda.
Ignorant of tradition
One appreciates the desire of these people to work for Indian traditions. But where in the Vedas is “Vedic mathematics” to be found? Nowhere. Vedic mathematics has no relation whatsoever to the Vedas. It actually originates from a book misleadingly titled Vedic Mathematics by Bharati Krishna Tirtha. The book admits on its first page that its title is misleading and that the (elementary arithmetic) algorithms expounded in the book have nothing to do with the Vedas. This is repeated on p. xxxv: “Obviously these formulas are not to be found in the present recensions of Atharvaveda.” I have been pointing this out since 1998. Regrettably, the advocates of “Vedic mathematics,” though they claim to champion Indian tradition, are ignorant of the actual tradition in the Vedas. Second, they do not even know what is stated in the book — the real source of “Vedic mathematics.” Third, they are unaware of scholarly writing on the subject. When education policy is decided by such ignorant people, they only end up making a laughing stock of themselves and the Vedas, and thus do a great disservice to the very tradition which they claim to champion.
Everyone learns how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in school. Why should we replace those algorithms with “Vedic mathematics”? Will that Indianise education? No. The standard arithmetic algorithms actually originated in India, where they were known by various names such as patiganita(slate arithmetic). However, the word “algorithm” comes from “algorithmus”: the Latinised name of al Khwarizmi of the 9th century House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He wrote an expository book on Indian arithmetic called Hisab al Hind. Gerbert d’Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II), the leading European mathematician of the 10th century, imported these arithmetic techniques from the Umayyad Khilafat of Córdoba. He did so because the primitive Greek and Roman system of arithmetic (tied to the abacus), then prevailing in Europe, was no match for Indian arithmetic. However, accustomed to the abacus (on which he wrote a tome), Gerbert was perplexed by algorithms based on the place-value system, and foolishly got a special abacus (apices) constructed for these “Arabic numerals” in 976 CE. Hence the name “Arabic numerals” — because a learned pope amusingly thought there was some magic in the shape of the numerals which made arithmetic efficient.
Later, Florentine merchants realised that efficient Indian arithmetic algorithms conferred a competitive advantage in commerce. Fibonacci, who traded across Islamic Africa, translated al Khwarizmi’s work, as did many others, which is why they came to be known as algorithms. Eventually, after 600 years, Indian algorithms displaced the European abacus and were introduced in the Jesuit syllabus as “practical mathematics” circa 1570 by Christoph Clavius. These algorithms are found in many early Indian texts, such as the Patiganita of Sridhar or the Ganita Sara Sangraha of Mahavira, or theLilavati of Bhaskara II. So, advocating “Vedic mathematics” as a replacement for traditional Indian arithmetic is hardly an act of nationalism. On the contrary, it only shows ignorance of the history of mathematics. Spreading this ignorance among future generations will weaken the nation, not strengthen it.
The techniques of “Vedic mathematics” are designed for mental arithmetic, traditionally used by lower caste artisans such as carpenters or by people like Shakuntala Devi. There are many other such systems of mental arithmetic today. If that is what we intend to promote, we should first do a systematic comparison. We should also be honest and refrain from using the misleading label “Vedic” which is the main selling point of Bharti Krishna Tirtha’s system, and which attracts gullible people who infer value just from the wrapper.
Suppressing real Mathematics
Promoting the wrongly labelled “Vedic mathematics” suppresses the mathematics that really does exist in the Vedas. For example, Yajurveda 17.2 elaborates on the decimal place value system (the basis of Indian algorithms) and some of those names for numbers are still in use, though terms such as arab (arbudam) have changed meaning. That passage shows that the place value system extends back to Vedic times, and it was a late acquisition only in mathematically backward Europe.
Likewise, the theory of permutations and combinations is built into the Vedic metre (and Indian music in general), as explained in various texts from Pingala’s Chandahsutra to Bhaskar’s Lilavati. The aksa sukta of the Rgveda gives a beautiful account of the game of dice, which is the foundation of the theory of probability. The romantic story of Nala and Damayanti in the Mahabharata further relates dice to sampling theory (to count the number of fruits in a tree).
More details are in my article on “Probability in Ancient India” available online and published in the Elsevier Handbook of the Philosophy of Statistics. However, all these scholarly efforts are jeopardised, for they too are viewed with suspicion.
We need to change the Western and colonial education system, especially with regard to mathematics. Traditional Indian ganita has much to offer in this process, but “Vedic mathematics” is definitely not the right way.
Wrong solutions like “Vedic mathematics” persist because an insecure political dispensation values the politically loyal over the learned who are loyal to the truth. (“Merit” apparently is important only in the context of reservations.) Such political processes are historically known to damage real traditions.
As I wrote over a decade ago in my book The Eleven Pictures of Time, those who attain or retain state power through religion are the worst enemies of that religion, whatever be the religion they claim to represent: Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism.
(C.K. Raju is author of Cultural Foundations of Mathematics. He was professor of mathematics, and Editorial Fellow of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture.)
Nothing Vedic in ‘Vedic Maths’
C. K. RAJU
Advocating ‘Vedic mathematics’ as a replacement for traditional Indian arithmetic is hardly an act of nationalism; it only shows ignorance of the history of mathematics
Gujarat has made it compulsory for school students to read the texts of Dinanath Batra, endorsed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. According to news reports, Mr. Batra has now proposed a non-governmental education commission which will Indianise education through, for instance, Vedic mathematics. The Minister for Education has also mentioned Vedic mathematics as part of her agenda.
Ignorant of tradition
One appreciates the desire of these people to work for Indian traditions. But where in the Vedas is “Vedic mathematics” to be found? Nowhere. Vedic mathematics has no relation whatsoever to the Vedas. It actually originates from a book misleadingly titled Vedic Mathematics by Bharati Krishna Tirtha. The book admits on its first page that its title is misleading and that the (elementary arithmetic) algorithms expounded in the book have nothing to do with the Vedas. This is repeated on p. xxxv: “Obviously these formulas are not to be found in the present recensions of Atharvaveda.” I have been pointing this out since 1998. Regrettably, the advocates of “Vedic mathematics,” though they claim to champion Indian tradition, are ignorant of the actual tradition in the Vedas. Second, they do not even know what is stated in the book — the real source of “Vedic mathematics.” Third, they are unaware of scholarly writing on the subject. When education policy is decided by such ignorant people, they only end up making a laughing stock of themselves and the Vedas, and thus do a great disservice to the very tradition which they claim to champion.
Everyone learns how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in school. Why should we replace those algorithms with “Vedic mathematics”? Will that Indianise education? No. The standard arithmetic algorithms actually originated in India, where they were known by various names such as patiganita(slate arithmetic). However, the word “algorithm” comes from “algorithmus”: the Latinised name of al Khwarizmi of the 9th century House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He wrote an expository book on Indian arithmetic called Hisab al Hind. Gerbert d’Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II), the leading European mathematician of the 10th century, imported these arithmetic techniques from the Umayyad Khilafat of Córdoba. He did so because the primitive Greek and Roman system of arithmetic (tied to the abacus), then prevailing in Europe, was no match for Indian arithmetic. However, accustomed to the abacus (on which he wrote a tome), Gerbert was perplexed by algorithms based on the place-value system, and foolishly got a special abacus (apices) constructed for these “Arabic numerals” in 976 CE. Hence the name “Arabic numerals” — because a learned pope amusingly thought there was some magic in the shape of the numerals which made arithmetic efficient.
Later, Florentine merchants realised that efficient Indian arithmetic algorithms conferred a competitive advantage in commerce. Fibonacci, who traded across Islamic Africa, translated al Khwarizmi’s work, as did many others, which is why they came to be known as algorithms. Eventually, after 600 years, Indian algorithms displaced the European abacus and were introduced in the Jesuit syllabus as “practical mathematics” circa 1570 by Christoph Clavius. These algorithms are found in many early Indian texts, such as the Patiganita of Sridhar or the Ganita Sara Sangraha of Mahavira, or theLilavati of Bhaskara II. So, advocating “Vedic mathematics” as a replacement for traditional Indian arithmetic is hardly an act of nationalism. On the contrary, it only shows ignorance of the history of mathematics. Spreading this ignorance among future generations will weaken the nation, not strengthen it.
The techniques of “Vedic mathematics” are designed for mental arithmetic, traditionally used by lower caste artisans such as carpenters or by people like Shakuntala Devi. There are many other such systems of mental arithmetic today. If that is what we intend to promote, we should first do a systematic comparison. We should also be honest and refrain from using the misleading label “Vedic” which is the main selling point of Bharti Krishna Tirtha’s system, and which attracts gullible people who infer value just from the wrapper.
Suppressing real Mathematics
Promoting the wrongly labelled “Vedic mathematics” suppresses the mathematics that really does exist in the Vedas. For example, Yajurveda 17.2 elaborates on the decimal place value system (the basis of Indian algorithms) and some of those names for numbers are still in use, though terms such as arab (arbudam) have changed meaning. That passage shows that the place value system extends back to Vedic times, and it was a late acquisition only in mathematically backward Europe.
Likewise, the theory of permutations and combinations is built into the Vedic metre (and Indian music in general), as explained in various texts from Pingala’s Chandahsutra to Bhaskar’s Lilavati. The aksa sukta of the Rgveda gives a beautiful account of the game of dice, which is the foundation of the theory of probability. The romantic story of Nala and Damayanti in the Mahabharata further relates dice to sampling theory (to count the number of fruits in a tree).
More details are in my article on “Probability in Ancient India” available online and published in the Elsevier Handbook of the Philosophy of Statistics. However, all these scholarly efforts are jeopardised, for they too are viewed with suspicion.
We need to change the Western and colonial education system, especially with regard to mathematics. Traditional Indian ganita has much to offer in this process, but “Vedic mathematics” is definitely not the right way.
Wrong solutions like “Vedic mathematics” persist because an insecure political dispensation values the politically loyal over the learned who are loyal to the truth. (“Merit” apparently is important only in the context of reservations.) Such political processes are historically known to damage real traditions.
As I wrote over a decade ago in my book The Eleven Pictures of Time, those who attain or retain state power through religion are the worst enemies of that religion, whatever be the religion they claim to represent: Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism.
(C.K. Raju is author of Cultural Foundations of Mathematics. He was professor of mathematics, and Editorial Fellow of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture.)
September 04, 2013
India: Reason must triumph over blind faith (Praful Bidwai)
THE assassination of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune is a black mark on Indian society. Forces of intolerance, superstition, irrationality and reaction killed him not because he threatened their faith or freedom, but because he was against exploiting people through black magic, sorcery, and sleights-of-hand while invoking supernatural powers.
http://www.sacw.net/article5457.html
http://www.sacw.net/article5457.html
August 30, 2013
India: Dabholkar’s anti-superstition war demanded a level of introspection of which we are incapable
[. . .] Dr. Dabholkar’s campaign against superstition and inhuman rituals needed a certain level of intellectual introspection. It compelled us to check our position on an abstract concept like faith as opposed to concrete issues like corruption and rape. By ourselves, we do not think there is darkness in our beliefs and thoughts that need to be eradicated. We are just not used to such intellectual abstraction and lack the discipline to challenge our own ‘faith’. Do we realise that many of those young protesters are queuing up for darshan in front of Saturn temples on Saturdays, Sidhdhivinayaks on Tuesdays and Datta temples on Thursdays? Do we get disturbed seeing more youth becoming religious? Do we even observe that most of our neighbours have some spiritual gurus/matas from whom they seek solace? Do we question in our own minds (let alone challenge it publicly) the sponsored, vulgar celebrations on the occasions of Dahi hundi, Ganeshotsav, or Navratri? Do we frown to see our friends’ fingers being adorned with astro-crystals and gemstone rings prescribed by astrologers and godmen? Are we ready to accept that religion and practicing rituals are proving to be our cumulative catharsis? Actually, Dr. Dabholkar did not ever challenge our faith and religious belief. He merely challenged the superstitious practices and unscientific claims of godmen. Yet we simplistically labelled him as anti-Hindu. We did not even attempt to understand the provisions of the Bill proposed by him. If we do not find anything objectionable in scientists like Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam or icons like Sachin Tendulkar visiting a “miracle man”, why should we expect the media to engage in an enlightened debate on the bill proposed by Dr. Dabholkar?
Sorry Dr. Dabholkar, we failed you! We are ashamed that we may fail to find your assassins! We are ashamed that we will move on expediently! We are ashamed that we are lethargic bystanders of the present! Sorry Doctor, we never deserved you!
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/sorry-doctor-we-didnt-deserve-you/article5065450.ece
Sorry Dr. Dabholkar, we failed you! We are ashamed that we may fail to find your assassins! We are ashamed that we will move on expediently! We are ashamed that we are lethargic bystanders of the present! Sorry Doctor, we never deserved you!
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/sorry-doctor-we-didnt-deserve-you/article5065450.ece
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