Kaushal's blog

The word Sankalpa and its usage in a Hindu household

2012-02-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

The word Sankalpa and its usage in a Hindu household

The richness of a language manifests itself in many ways. One of the ways in which we say sanskrit is a rich language, is the ability of sanskrit words to express nuances of meaning. At first blush this may appear contradictory, how can a language that prides itself on precision, tolerate ambiguities in the meaning associated with one word.

But that is the nature of language. If we had a different word for every nuance in meaning, it would be very difficult to learn the language. so every language uses associativity to cut down the number of words that we may have to use. after the long preamble leading to the different meanings of Sankalpa, i offer the following;

The Nature of Sankalpa

Swami Anandakumar Saraswati

The sankalpa is a chosen resolution made during the practice of yoga nidra. It could be said that the main purpose of yoga nidra is to realize one’s sankalpa. Whether this is true or not, sankalpa has the potential to release tremendous power by clearly defining and focusing on a chosen goal. Its effect is to awaken the willpower within by uniting the conscious awareness with the unconscious forces lying dormant. It takes the form of a short phrase or sentence, clearly and concisely expressed, using the same wording each time, to bring about a positive change in one’s life. Now the important question arises: How to choose the appropriate sankalpa?

Sankalpa can be seen from different perspectives. Let us say that life is like a river that has to be crossed. We cannot step straight across from where we are standing now because the river is wide, nor can we swim against the strong current. So we search the bank for stepping stones that we can take, one by one, to cross over safely.

Crossing the river is our aim, our life’s goal. Very few people know what this is. It may take years and years to discover. Nearly everyone who has come to yoga will recognize that they are trying to achieve something, but will not be clear as to exactly what that is. So the first step is to recognize where we are now, where we stand on our bank of the river, and then to recognize what change can be attempted to begin our way over, to take the first step.

This usually means recognizing, reducing and eliminating some negative quality that we know is holding us back, where one overriding bad habit is acting like a barrier to more substantial change. This is the starting point for many people. If that negative quality can be successfully managed and dealt with, then we are in a position to recognize a positive change we can make that would improve the quality of our life. And that is the next stage of sankalpa, where we can alter the way we conduct ourselves with family, friends and society, and in our lifestyle.

Then, looking deeper and more precisely within, there may be some quality lying dormant that holds or has locked within it our hidden potential. Recognizing this is when sankalpa takes on more power because it is the nature of the inner forces, of consciousness, to be always trying to find a positive expression. But some pattern from before, some samskara or karma, has turned that force into a negative expression – or it has been suppressed and is not expressed at all. When the sankalpa is working at this level, then the attitudes we take for granted as being part of who we are will be seen not to have any real basis. Then a noticeable change in attitude takes place where everything is seen quite differently.

From here the focus of the life force becomes quite sharp, and one’s purpose in this life may be recognized, which is what we understand by sankalpa. This must come spontaneously from within as an intuitive understanding, where our nature and character, our path and dharma are in harmony. Here the spiritual dimension of sankalpa is realized.

So although four stages have been described: (i) the reforming of bad habits, (ii) improving the quality of life and living, (iii) creating a real change within our personality, and (iv) realizing what we are trying to achieve in this life – the sankalpa is really always one. But to recognize the deepest quality of sankalpa we may have to go through some of the stages along the way like stepping-stones across a river, each step within reach of the previous one.

It is said that the sankalpa should not change until it becomes realized, but many do not know what they really want and therefore in a true sense do not know their sankalpa. So, if my initial intention is to give up smoking and I succeed, then obviously the sankalpa to stop smoking will change. But really it is a transition from one stepping-stone to the next, so now a higher resolve may be made. And so on until the real nature of sankalpa is realized, as the bigger picture becomes clearer.

We may start at any point along the way, but the choice of the kind of sankalpa we make is very important and should always aim to bring out the best that is in us. Time should be taken at first to find out what level we are at and what is important to us now. Whether changing a habit or an entire personality, it must be in tune with the nature of the individual and therefore come from within, and not be a product of wishful thinking or a casual desire.

For the success of the sankalpa, certain conditions must be met. The sankalpa is like a seed that will have tremendous power, but only if it is sown in fertile ground, looked after and tended daily, with the inner certainty that the seed will produce its fruit in its own time. After the sankalpa is made, the mind nurtures it at deeper levels as the roots of the seed go further down, the emotions express it as a positive feeling that has power and strength, the body resonates with it, and the intellect does not question it – ever. Faith is where all the dimensions of the personality are in harmony, undivided and moving in the same direction together. How can it not succeed?

Lastly, the sankalpa need not be influenced by words alone. It may also be visualized symbolically as an image, felt as a sensation; it may bring up certain feelings which have a recognizable force or are just quietly known. In the end the sankalpa is not just something nice you say three times twice in yoga nidra, but it is a motivating force that you are living and moving toward all the time, every day.

Sankalpa is a personal vow or as you said, "a resolution," but it is more than that. In spiritual Yoga practices, such as Bhakti Yoga, Sankalpa is very specific, because the Yoga practitioner vows to perform a duty for an exact time, length of time, and possibly at a certain place.

The process by which we make the resolutions is also known as Sankalpa.

In the hindu tradition any major undertaking is begun with a Sankalpa.And since it involves a precise invocation it is better if the sankalpa takes place in the context of a pooja.

It is actually a declaratory formula giving not only the details of of the day according to the panchanga (ephemeris, calendar). It usually contains;

1.Names of the concerned persons, their pravara (the associated Rishis and gotra (the main rishi, who is supposed to have set the overall theme , that governs the philosophic darshana ofthe family

2. Names of the Kalpa, manvantra, yuga, (these are explained in my book ) solstice, month, fortnight, the date and day of the week

3. purpose of the sankalpa.

Some more quotes o John Kenneth Galbraith

2011-11-20T12:51:00.001-08:00

1.   We allagree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
2.   The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation isnot a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warmpersonal gesture by the individual to himself.
3.   Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment foreconomists.
4.   If all else fails, immortality can always be assured byspectacular error.
5.   It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsensethan to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
6.   Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
7.   Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
8.   Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosingbetween the disastrous and the unpalatable.
9.   Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just theopposite.
10.Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can saywhat is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
11.You will find that the State is the kind of organization which,though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
12.There is nothing that unfettered chief executives will not do tofeather their own nests.
13. "Some things werenever meant to be recycled.'" -- John Kenneth Galbraith (his bumper stickerwith a picture of George Bush. )

2011-11-20T12:29:00.001-08:00

Will Manmohan Singh be forced to quit? - MD Nalapat in epaper: Pakistan Observer

Will Manmohan Singh be forced to quit?

Geopolitical notes from India

M D Nalapat

Since the 1960s for over three decades, probably the most influential non-official individual resident in India was Ottavio Quatrocchi, an Italian who had the blunt demeanour of an Australian rather than the charm that the people of that ancient civilisation are justly known for. Nearly 70 key projects were sanctioned during this long period to companies that “Mr Q” was considered to favor, especially Snam-Progetti. Those officials who dared to sanction contracts to companies other than the few favored by Quatrocchi found their careers in India ended, including Cabinet Secretary P K Kaul, who was shunted off to Washington before completing his term in office, after a contract was won by another company instead of Snam. The then Petroleum Secretary, A S Gill, who was in line to be Cabinet Secretary found his career at an end after this decision was taken,and the minister concerned was swiftly removed from his post, as were others who dared take decisions other than those believed to have the backing of “Mr Q” What the source of the power of this Italian fixer is remains obscure.

However, none of his political allies could save his career in India once his name was outed in the scandal involving the purchase of Bofors guns in 1986. A year later, Swedish radio claimed that about $65 million had been paid as bribes to get the contract (peanuts in this day and age), and the Swiss authorities established that “Mr Q” was one of the beneficiaries. The Central Bureau of Investigation asked that his passport be impounded. Instead, on the recommendation of the minister looking after the CBI, Quatrocchi was allowed to fly out of India on 29 July 1993 to the safety of Kuala Lumpur. Since then, he has depended on his family members to ensure that contact be retained with influential individuals in India, a task that they have done so well that even today, he is among the few who can “get almost anything done” through the Government of India, including ensuring the return of the money that the investigating authorities say was a bribe paid to secure the Bofors contract. While other governments seek to confiscate the money stashed illegally away by the powerful, the Manmohan Singh government returned it to “Mr Q” a few years ago.

Ottavio Quatrocchi was never questioned - much less prosecuted – by the Indian authorities about his shenanigans. He escaped from the country in 1993 because of a morally questionable decision taken by then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, who thought he would buy peace with “Mr Q”’s friends in the Congress Party by enabling his escape. Instead, within brief months after that fateful decision, Rao began to be subjected to a barrage of attacks from Quatrocchi’s friends in the Congress Party ,acting through senior leaders in the government. Narasimha Rao never recovered from that stain, for from then onwards, despite the fact that he liberalised the economy, brought some stability to Kashmir by fending off Bill Clinton’s repeated efforts to get India to relax its hold on the state, and established an economics-centered diplomacy in place of the Nehru construct that was based on pious platitudes. By 1994,Rao was under daily fire for the perception of corruption, with all kinds of suspicious characters coming out of obscurity to make against him. After he was forced to resign as Prime Minister because of an election defeat allegations aused by a rebellion led by followers of influential politicians known to be close to “Mr Q”, Narasimha Rao was in perpetual risk of going to jail, getting freed of this Damocles Sword (in the shape of criminal cases against him) only in the final year of his life. Those who knew him well saw for themselves the fear in his eyes at the prospect of jail, a fear that paralysed him in the final decade of his life.

The Commonwealth Games scandal is Manmohan Singh’s Quatrocchi moment. Will he follow the example of his old boss Rao and allow the VVIPs responsible for a scam that has been estimated to cost the taxpayer more than $4 billion in bribes to escape? If he does so, then Manmohan Singh will be finished as a credible Prime Minister. From the time that he allows the guilty of the Commonwealth Ganes to escape – should he do so - he will become the butt of ridicule and scandal the way Narasimha Rao was. After such public bludgeoning and umiliation, it is very likely that Congress President Sonia Gandhi will request the PM to resign, and replace him with someone known to be honest, such as Defense Minister A K Antony. Although Sonia’s first choice is Home Minister P Chidambaram - because of his total loyalty to her wishes - yet in an atmosphere where the Congress Party gets pushed back to the 1987-89 period when it was clouded in corruption charges, she may have no choice but to appoint the man known as “Saint Antony” for his financial integrity. Perhaps this would be followed by appointing Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee as President of India, after the present incumbent’s term concludes in two years time.

Should the PM-directed enquiry into the scams carried out during the Commonwealth Games preparation period fail to bring those actually guilty to justice, the reputation of Manmohan Singh for integrity would be affected. After such a lapse,even should he somehow manage to hang on to the Office of the Prime Minister, each month would bring personal attacks on him. After his eventual retirement, there is no doubt that he would follow Narasimha Rao in also having multiple criminal charges filed against him, which he would have to fight all his life to stay clear of arrest and imprisonment. All this while the VVIPs actually responsible for siphoning off huge amounts of money get away. The officers close to him would also face criminal charges for being accessories or being negligent in safeguarding the public interest. It all looks like going the Narasimha Rao way of scandal and disgrace for a team that in fact is honest and sincere.

There is no doubt that the huge expenditure ( of around $ 9 billion) spent on the Games has been a platinum opportunity for many. An example is a pedestrian overbridge that was built at a cost of $2 million, which collapsed. The Indian army was asked by the PM to build a substitute, which it did at a cost of just $175,000. A list of the prices for items bought or hired by the organizers of the Games shows that in several instances, there was a 4000% markup over the prices charged to other customers by the companies involved. A week ago, a friend mentioned that to his knowledge, six container loads of currency had been smuggled across the Indian border so as to be sent onwards to Switzerland, and that this is just a “small” part of what a particular ruling party leader made from the Games.

These days, Delhi is filled with stories about how “Manmohan Singh is conducting an eyewash” in promising to investigate the scandal. Many are angry that the PM did nothing while this flood of public money was being spent, moving into action only after the media could ignore the rot no longer. Once reports began to appear in the foreign press about the many deficiencies in the organizing of the Commonwealth Games, Indian media outlets that are known to be nervous about annoying VVIPs began to focus attention on a few organizers, notably Suresh Kalmadi, the Congress Party bigwig who is the Indian Olympic Committee chief. Kalmadi is known to follow the military discipline of his youth in always checking his decisions with higher authority, but if the media are to be believed, he acted on his own in the spending of the Games cash. This is about as believable as saying that Dr A Q Khan ran his entire network without the participation of any state player, or what General Pervez Musharraf wanted the world to believe when he placed the hero of the Pakistan nuclear bomb under house arrest.

Thus far, no criminal cases have been filed against those responsible for the many tainted decisions taken during the runup to the Games. And because none of the records was taken into safekeeping for two months after the scandal first broke in the international and then national media, those in the know say that records have been erased, while others have been replaced with different versions. Computer disks have been cleaned up and the mainframes destroyed. All in all, the stately pace of Manmohan Singh’s investigation - carried out by a well-meaning but seemingly clueless Kashmiri septuagenarian - may mean that the guilty escape, which means that the full tumult of public opinion will fall on the head of the Prime Minister, who allowed the loot to go on for six years before waking up to its ramifications. Exactly as 1992-96 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao became damaged goods after allowing Ottavio Quatrocchi to escape from India on July 29,1993, so will Manmohan Singh be crippled after his enquiry turns out to be a farce. The way several VVIPs want it to be. On the other hand, if the guilty get punished, Manmohan Singh will enter the history books for fighting the corruption that has been a facet of life in India since the impecunious Robert Clive made a fortune from Bengal in two centuries and a half ago.

As things stand, the betting in Delhi is that the PM will be ineffective in conducting a probe, and will therefore be made to quit after becoming the butt of criminal charges. Should an honest man like Manmohan Singh pay such a high price - the loss of his reputation and his career - it would be a sad day for justice. Those eager for probity hope that the PM will ensure that the guilty get punished, if only just this once in a country where corruption is costing the economy more than 5% extra growth each year.

—The writer is Vice-Chair, Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair & Professor of Geopolitics, Manipal University, Haryana State, India.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=58180

A column about humorous quotes

2011-11-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

A column about humorous quotes

Some of my humorous quotes that have gotten me in trouble

Changing my mind because i was wrong

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. John Kenneth Galbraith :

Most people do not see the humor and the bathos in the above statement. But i see one of the many vanities we carry around with us is the vanity that we are never wrong . If you ask me it is totally a case of unnecessary baggage. because we are fooling nobody. nobody would believe us if we go around saying we are never wrong. i for one make no bones about it . i am hardly ever right but that is not surprising because the universe of things i know something about is far smaller than the one i dont know something about.

But people go about merrily pretending they are never wrong , and arguing about the strangest things(about which they know didly squat), not realizing what fools they are making of themselves.

While investigating non-linear systems in my thesis i wrote that dividing the world into linear and non linear systems makes as much sense as dividing the world into bananas and non -bananas , because it tells us next to nothing about the world of non bananas. but yet people make these strange classifications, assuming it gets them closer to the truth. for example, people automatically assume i am a fundamentalist because i object to a loudly broadcast wake up namaz at 5:30 am in the morning and one equally disturbing one made in the midst of the day when one cant hear the person one is talking to . First of all, i think it is rude of anybody to impose their private ruminations with their God on others. But the really sad part of these remarks, is that people are pigeonholed into bananas and non bananas, into leftwing and right wing , socialist and capitalist, Hindutva and Secular in spite of the fact that deep in our hearts we know that the human spirit is far larger in its dimensionality than these crass generalizations will admit. so let us stop making these

generalizations and stereotyping of people and if you have to make a judgement about a person , for instance a person who you wish to vote for , do so on the basis of age old verities. is he or she decent person, can he or she be trusted to keep their word even in adverse circumstances. is the person honest in his daily dealings, and more importantly is he being intellectually dishonest

Bertrand Russell’s[i] admonition; the method of simply assuming results, once one is persuaded that they are true, rather than trying to prove them,( as in the case of Greek priority over the Indics), has all the (accoutrements and )advantages of thievery over honest toil.words in parenthesis added by me

(work in progress)

[i] Russell Bertrand, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, New York and London, 1919, p.71

2011-11-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Dear All,

1456 lakh crores
1456000000000000
yes that is 1456 followed by 12 zeros or
1456 trillion INR or
pretty close to 30 trillion US$
or twice the US Annual GDP

--

Venugopal K. Menon.

2011-10-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

I do not know who the author for this piece is, but it was sent to me by Yvette Rosser, who seems to have gotten this from Vinod Saigal.

The world seems immune to such terrorism , especially when such acts are mm by committed by the authoritarian regimes, and when the regime has superpower ambitiions

SELF-IMMOLATION OF MONKS IN TIBET AND THE NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL INFIRMITY

In the unending calamities that have befallen Tibet since its military occupation by Chinese forces in 1950 the latest one to traumatise the Tibetans is the series of recent self-immolations by Tibetan monks and nuns. From time to time one hears of self-immolation by individuals in other countries as a final act of desperation. In the present case the numbers tell a tale of suppression, incarcerations, brutality and humiliation on the collectivity of Tibetan people way beyond those inflicted by totalitarian regimes in other countries. Stalin's gulags disappeared after thirty years or so once the Russian people and the world realised the extent of the horrors to which the regime's victims were being subjected. Hitler's atrocities did not last for more than seven years. In no other country in the world of the 20th or 21st centuries has extreme oppression on subjects lasted more than 20 or 30 years. In the case of China the oppression of Tibetans and Uighurs has been an unending nightmare for the suppressed minorities for three generations with no hope of relief. So horrendous has been the victimization of Tibetan people that it would be impossible to describe it in a few pages. After each protest the figures of Tibetan deaths at the hands of the Chinese occupation forces far exceed those officially conceded to by the authorities, remaining far lower than independent estimates. The actual figures after each repressive wave could be a multiple factor of three, four or five. The reason is that the Chinese forces seal off the monasteries where the unrest started for weeks and months disallowing medical aid for the wounded and other essentials of life for several weeks, some time months. These increase the fatalities several times over. No outside visitors are allowed to visit the monasteries for long periods of time. In addition to the physical decimation of the population and demographic swamping by an influx of Han Chinese, cultural genocide to eventually eradicate a millennium-and-a-half of the old culture continues apace.

Over two-and-a-half millennia before Mahatma Gandhi it was the Buddha who first enunciated the dharma of ahimsa. contemporaneously with the Jain Digambars. China and the majority of the countries contiguous to Chinain the east and south still hold on to the Buddhist faith. How are the Chinese leadership going to explain away to their own people and the world the inhuman suffering that they continue to visit on the Tibetan people even after sixty years. The Chinese government's blanket suppression of the truth is well known. But what has happened to the rest of the world, the so-called liberal democracies. If not their leaders who seemingly worship Mammon more than God and king, what about the freedom loving people of the Western democracies who have been in the forefront of affirming their faith in human rights. What is the nature of the infirmity that has overtaken the collective conscience of several billion people that they are unable to bring their governments to hold China accountable; or does it take a few hundred billion dollars of purchase of their treasury receipts and bonds to make them close their eyes and seal their lips. Evidently that is the case.

The Tibetan sacred space is too precious an heritage of mankind to be lost to the world. Much more so for China that still has the largest population of Budhists in the world. Their leaders send erring officials on pilgrimages to ancient Buddhist temples for a parikrama several times over around the temple precincts to expiate their sins. Many leaders have also visited these sites from time to time for similar reasons. When the full realisation of the magnitude of the sins committed on the Tibetan people by those who govern China becomes known to ordinary Chinese people how many generations will have to make the parikrama of the sacred Buddhist sites to even begin to wipe out from their collective karma the sins visited on the hapless Tibetan people.

vinod saighal

Executive Director, Eco Monitors Society

New Delhi October 24, 2011.

The pieces that follow were circulated in many parts of the world after the Tibetan uprisings of 2008.

Cri de Coeur

The recent outburst of the Tibetans does not fall into the category of violence or non-violence in the accepted Gandhian sense of the word Ahimsa that the Dalai Lama and many others hold dear. The Tibetans living in Tibet have felt the crushing burden of the tyrant’s heel pressed on their hearts for many decades since the Chinese first occupied Tibet in 1950. Slowly but surely they have seen the destruction of their culture and Tibet ’s environment. As if that were not enough their religious freedom has been curbed and their most holy sites and cities occupied by the Hans - civilians as well as the military. In their daily lives they are obliged to suffer every humiliation visited upon their families. They see their land grabbed, their assets appropriated and their liberties eroded with increasing severity. Their kith and kin have been incarcerated under sub-human conditions by the tens of thousands; Killings of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen has gone hand in hand. In the face of such prolonged suffering to which they see no end in sight the rage in their hearts at their helplessness and their inability to prevent humiliation to their women and children had to find release at some point in time. Had they not done so they would have gone into collective depression and become like enslaved zombies fully reconciled to their fate generation after generation, century after century, as was the case with the backward classes in India . The collective depression, had it ensued, would have had more far-reaching effect on any hope for future revival than the systematic cultural genocide at the hands of the Chinese masters. The uprising was a cri de coeur – a veritable scream from the heart signifying that their suffering had crossed the threshold of human tolerance. In their own way they have tried to arouse the consciousness of the world that seemed to have abandoned them and was well on the way to forgetting them altogether. Should anyone categorize the March 2008 outburst of the Tibetans in Lhasa and other places as a form of violence in the Gandhian sense it would bespeak a lack of understanding of the essence of Ahimsa. Even Gandhi had something apt to say on this score.

March 22, 2008

©Vinod Saighal

Excerpt from a talk delivered on July 21, 2008 at the Annexe, IndiaInternational Centre, New Delhi to an international audience on July 21, 2008 on behalf of Eco Monitors Society

"One of the greatest manifestations of exercise of power by China relates to the hold it exercises – subliminally or sub rosa, so to say - over hundred and ninety-two countries that are part of the United Nations. China has demanded from each one of them that their leaders shall not entertain the Dalai Lama. If a referendum were to be taken across the globe the two most revered personalities today would undoubtedly be Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. In spite of that China is able to demand, across the world, that the heads of state do not interact with the Dalai Lama. What is more remarkable - and amazing – is that out of the 192 nations, full 170 or more have bent the knee to China on this score. Isn’t it strange? What is happening in the world? Great civilizations with a culture going back several millennia in South-East Asia will not give a visa to the Dalai Lama to visit their countries. China has already started exercising hegemony on a global scale that even the superpower USA is unable to match. Were it to give a fiat on the lines of the fiat given by China in the case of the Dalai Lama not more than a handful of countries in the world would obey the dictates of USA as to whom a head of state of a sovereign country should or should not meet. Yet China is able to demandcompliance from practically the whole world and, what is more, get it. A type of infringement of national sovereignties not witnessed before in the modern world on this scale.

There are a few exceptions. Surprisingly, one of the few people who had the temerity to stand up to China was the Singapore Prime Minister. On first taking over his new post he wanted to visit Taiwan . China at once demanded that the new prime minister not undertake the visit. In a remarkable reply, which should win the admiration of the world, Mr. Lee (the son of the elder statesman), the prime minister of tiny Singapore reportedly said that while he had the highest admiration and respect for the People’s Republic of China, were he to bow to its dictates, he would thereby diminish the sovereignty of all the people of Singapore. Mr. Sarkozy made a somewhat similar statement recently that no country had the right to set the agenda as to whom the president of France could or could not meet. There are other examples of proud holdouts like Germany , Canada and a few others. But well over 80 per cent of nations bow their head. This is real exercise of power. One fails to grasp the nature of infirmity that makes over 170 nations around the world succumb to Chinese blandishments. One just has to look at the President of USA, Mr. George W. Bush. Remember what he said after the March 14 uprising in Lhasa. Recall the statements made by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi and the President’s wife, Mrs. Laura Bush, as also the statement made by President George W. Bush when he gave the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. Now the same president wants to attend the Olympic Games opening ceremony inBeijing . In Tokyo he made a statement that not attending the Olympics would be an insult to the people of China . It is a reversal of what went before. Conceivably the president’s statement could be construed as an insult to a lot of other people being oppressed by China and whom the president had been supporting earlier on. The bare fact is that Beijing ultimately had its way.

But there is something else which is deeper that is taking place. I am inviting the audience to look where China is headed. In fact, practically all countries are bowing to China , including great nations like Russia , Japan and India .

--------

Yvette C. Rosser, PhD“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it 'the present'. --Eleanor Roosevelt

2011-09-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

Monograph on Sir Vepa Ramesam by his nephew the late D V Krishna Rao

Among other things this Monograph on late Sir Vepa Ramesam,retired Ag. Chief Justice of Madras High Court years ago contains an account ofhis service to the nation, mainly with reference to “Birth Control” in India(now called Family Welfare) during 1920s-30s. By all means he was a pioneer inIndia in this field and a visionary. His views and work have relevance today.His out standing service has special significance today when the whole countryis seized of the problem of ‘population explosion’.

Useful material was obtained from his sons late Vepa Gopal and SriVepa P Sarathy (now in Hyderabad) and from the journals of Madras and BirthControl Bulletins started by Sri Vepa himself as part of Neo-Malthusian Leaguewhich he established in Madras. I thank Sri Sarathy for furnishing thematerial. The booklet reveals the condition of unchecked population growth evenat that time, and its serious repercussions on the future of India, her birthrate, mortality rate etc.

It is not out of place here if I mention that Sir Vepa’s enlargedphoto is being put up in the Family Welfare Block constructed in the premisesof Durgabhai Deshmukh Hospital, Andhra Mahila Sabha (AMS) Hyderabad so that itcould be a source of inspiration to the public.

It is hoped, this monograph will be received well by literates andilliterates (indirectly) in ‘Population and Family Welfare Problem) in Indiaand the historic background of the then India. Further it may be of immenseusefulness to researchers in Family & Welfare and its development insuccessive stages.

I thank Prof. I V Chalapati Rao for editing this booklet. I shouldalso thank the Literacy House, AMS for publishing the booklet in good time.

(D.V.Krishna Rao)

Hony. Adviser, F.W.

Andhra Mahila Sabha, Hyderabad.

FOREWORD

Rarely one finds in these degenerate times a man like Sri D VKrishna Rao whose adherence to the highest values and total commitment to thecause of Family Welfare have hardly any parallel in the contemporary society.Bitten by the bug of Birth Control even as a teenager, he became a relentlesscrusader through out his life for this worthy cause. No wonder, DurgabaiDeshmukh, the founder and architect of Andhra Mahila Sabha, who had an unerringinstinct for choosing the right person for the right job, appointed him as‘Honorary Adviser, Family Welfare.

Ever since Sri Krishna Rao spent strenuous days and sleeplessnights promoting the cause of Family Welfare in a variety of ways -- deliveringlectures in Schools and Colleges and talks on Radio and TV programs, conductingquiz programs, donating prizes as incentives for propagating and practicingFamily Planning and giving liberal donations to Durgabai Deshmukh Hospital onwhose premises a Family Wel fare Block has been constructed with his money.

To commemorate the pioneering services rendered by his illustriousuncle Late Justice Vepa Ramesam, Sri Krishna Rao has prepared a highly usefulmonograph which contains educationally usable information along with a briefbio-data of his uncle who founded the Neo Malthusian League, a Madras basedorganization, per haps the first of its kind in India with the laudableobjective of propagating ‘birth-control’ long before the post-IndependenceGovernment of India took this problem seriously. Thus Vepa Ramesam, the author’suncle cut new ice and broke new ground by initiating action to

1 May 1996.

My books are available on amazon.com , Lulu.com

2011-09-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

and a number of other retail outlets

The Black money in swiss banks is mainly form India

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To get an idea of how large the sum of 198000 crore Indian Rs is (that is approximately 40,000,000,000.00 or forty billion). That would put Rajeev Gandhi in the same ball park as Bill Gates

I am a survivor

2011-07-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

Sujata garu and Rao garu,although this,is a good compilation, my concern remains the total apathy towards these issues. The average Hundu has become so debased that he would not mind being classified a thief rather than forego the money that thievery brings him. Is it wrong to call a corrupt person a thief. Au contraire ,it is in fact insufficient as a penalty regarding the magnitude oft the crime he has

committed .

Very little in this compilation is new to me and i have been asking Indians whether this is what they want. For the most part Apathy reigns supreme. But lately i have seen a glimmer of hope . There was a report of a young lady who set up a sting operation in one of the towns where i once lived (Ambarnath). She did so to capture the fact that a teacher was asking for 20,000 rs from a parent to help her gain admission for her daughter. But this woman who i think should get the Bharat Ratna award for courage , would not take this lying down .she set up a successful sting operation

It struck a familiar chord in me since my father taught me at home in Ambarnath so that i wouldnt have to go the only school in the area 5 miles from my home.

In the latest book that i have written,The Origins of Astronomy, the calendar and Time I have recounted how the Occidental has blatantly falsified our history by saying that the Greek did it all before us referring-to the computational science since antiquity. My book shows that this is almost an impassibility. But few will read it because it is a dry subject. Very few are interested when told that Trigonometry , algrebra and yes the calculus were developed in India and that the current models in astronomy were a lot closer to the work of the indians than they were to the Greeks. And we still suffer from the White Bwana syndrome and what pray is the white Bwana syndrome. It is the propensity of well educated Indians not to take notice of something unless the white man tellls him it is so. Of course there are certain things the white man will never tell you. He will never tell you that he tried to depopulate the Indian subcontinent using famines as a weapon.. He almost succeeded . In Bengal 1 out of 3 bengalis died in the famine of 1770.

What is that you say . The great Bengal famine of 1770 never heard of that, you say. Why would you , because it is rarely mentioned in Indian history books . .. My book the South asia file recounts a small percentage of the famines that were inflicted on India by the cdolonial power, and even then the rough count of the colonial holocaust came to 50 million . So if we add this to the

70 million who died in the 6 centuries prior , it is a wonder that there are any Indians left. So go get yourself a tee shirt that says on the front I am a lucky guy Or gal and in the back Because i am a survivor of the two largest holocausts in human history.

Kosla

Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Sujata Rao <sujataraobjp@yahoo.com> wrote:, it

Hi enclosed pl read an article compiled by my husband Rao.

I feel every Indian Hindu must know these facts .

S.Rao
A HISTORY OF CRIMES AGAINST INDIA

Compiled by : Dr.K.M.Rao Ph.D.,State President, Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, Tamilnadu.

Recently I have gone through an interesting book written by Stephen Knapp on crimes against India : and the need to protect its ancient vedic tradition published by I.Universe, Inc.,New York ; I would like to present here some of the salient points high lighted by him in that book . The reason why many Muslim rulers could conquer India was simply because Hindu rulers at home would not unite to fight a common enemy. Knapp puts it plain terms “there was a continuous struggle and warfare between various Rajput states. And these rivalries made itimpossible for the Rajput rulers to join hands to oust Ghazani from Punjab”.

Our History books are also, hesitant to tell the truth about the conquerors. Knapp records that the Bahamani Sulthans of central India made a rule to kill one lakh Hindus every year. In 1399, Timur killed one lakh Hindus in a single day, plus more at times. Knapp quotes K.S.Lal, the Historian as saying that between 1000 A.D. and 1525 A.D, the Hindu population decreased by as many as 80 million (8crores).

Knapp says: “this probably is the biggest holocaust in the history of the whole world, right there in India”. And he rightly asks: “yet, not many people have either forgotten this threat to the Indian Hindu population or have never heard or learned about it. This negation of Indian History is itself a crime against its population, when the people should know and learn lessons from the past.

It is not just Muslim invaders who try to destroy Hinduism in India. The Portuguese rulers in Gova are equally cruel and barbaric. The inquisition they practiced once in every two years was even worse than any Muslim imposition of Islam on Hindus by the Jesuits Catholics . One of the Jesuit priest writes: “when I have finished baptizing the people, I ordered them to destroy the huts in which they keep their idols; and I have them break their statues of their idols into tiny pieces, since they are now Christians, I could never come to an end describing to you the great consolation which fills my soul when I see idols being destroyed by the hands of those who had been idolators”.

For all that and all that, Hinduism has survived and it is even getting accepted abroad, though Hinduism does not believe in conversion. A well known U.S. media personality is quoted as saying: “now we are all Hindus”. In Russia Knapp claims one percent of the population aver that they are Hindus, but it would seem the worst enemies of Hinduism are Hindus themselves. They are giving up their own vedic heritage and culture which Knapp describes as “The last bastion of deep spiritual truth. The vedic culture and philosophy offers deep insight into spiritual knowledge that can be found nowhere else and it provides for levels of thought and knowledge of the soul and the Supreme, and the spiritual reality that are hardly matched else where”.

Knapp insists that, “ we have to remember that a true religion paves the way for every one to become spiritually aware and to establish his or her own relationship with the Supreme and the vedic system is an ideal means for supplying that”. He continues, “The spiritual principles in the vedic systems are universal, meaning they can be applied in any time or place in the universe”.

In the second part of the book, he describes the battles waged by Indians to protect their culture and what the Ghazanis , the Ghoris, Thuglak and other slave sultans, the Khilgis, the Sayyeds and the Lodis did to plunder temples and destroy places of worship and otherwise seek to eliminate the Hindu culture and civilization. Knapp describes the sacking of Chidambaram and Srirangam, the plunder of puri’s Jagannath temple, Sikandar Lodi’s desecration of Mathura, the distruction of Dwaraka, the Govindji temple in Brindavan, the Kesava temple in Mathura to name a few.

He also deals with the false image sought to be imposed on Indians by the vicious propagation of the Aryan invasion theory and the damage it has wrought. Casteism is seen as a scourge of Hinduism or a perversion of a legitimate vedic system that needs to be fought or at least seen in its proper perspective. As for the concept of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’, Knapp insists that it was used by the British to establish a lower class of Indians who were oppressed by a higher class, and to enable the British rulers to divide the Indian people into quarrelling factions. According to Knapp the idea of Aryan and Dravidian people as separate races is not only “insidious” and completely false.

An angry Knapp says: “The threat to the survival of Hindu civilization is real… Hindus should not sit quiet, but must be active. He rubbishes the elite of India who damn any Hindu who stands up for his religion as having a “Hinduthva mind- set” and one wishing to ‘saffronise the nation’.

The Generalization of the indic by Koenrad Elst as, illogical, arrogant and ignorant

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i FEEL THAT SUCH VIEWS , WHERE AN ENTIRE CLASS OF PEOPLE ARE CLASSIFIED AS UNTRUTHFUL, ARROGANT AND IGNORANT SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED IN ANY CIVILIZED SOCIETY, EVEN UNDER SUCH DUBIOUS PRETEXTS SUCH AS 'i AM SAYING THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

I concede that Rajiv has very right not to post anything he dislikes in his forum ‘Breakingindia, so i have no quarrel with him), But i am now left without a means of rebuttal and the assumption will be that i ran away from the debate . My question to the India is why do you tolerate this rubbish, let alone praise it. This is the sequence of the emails

1.Dr.Patil to Rajiv Malhotra

Dr. Patil wrote: "I did some research in 1971 at the University of Illinois. To my surprise I discovered then that SC/ST were listed meticulously by British Administrators for Vatican Church as soft targets of conversion to Christianity as a part of their long standing plan of converting whole of India into Christianity in definite stages and phases prescribed to all missionaries working at all levels in writing. These plans were not secret but were prepared,
executed and monitored meticulously by all missionaries at all levels. I had the opportunity to lay my hands on all those plans."

2. Koenrad Elst in reply to Dr Patil

’Please make these documents available to us. Without this, you enjoy little credibility, esp. after telling us that the greatest empire on earth acted as running-dog for the Vatican, with which the national Church of England was on hostile terms. Also, the census masterminds had their own post-Christian Darwinian reasons for categorizing the Indians into racial groups... I can assure you that the damage done to the Hindu cause by Hindus who think they can get away with unsubstantiated claims is enormous.

ED. Note by Kosla Vepa : This is a disingenuous argument by Koenrad Elst, and merely shows the Eurocentric cocoon he has voluntarily placed himself in , a cocoon that does not allow for the slightest possibility of any Occidental west of the Bosphorus being wrong . In reality even the worst enemies of Europe got together to cooperate when they faced an adversary outside of the European land mass, just as all of the Occident comes together today to face a common adversary that challenges the self serving theory that is the AIT. The AIT is undoubtedly a racist construct in its origins , a product of the Hegelian hypothesis trying to impress upon a gullible world that everything good and noble and worth preserving in India come from anywhere but from India. So pathetic were the arguments that, finally they came down to Afghanistan as the source of the Aryans, forgetting that Afghanistan was very much a part of India during the ancient era . I use the acronym ABT (Anywhere But from India) to express my frustration with the utter lack of scholarship, the total absence of any logic, the total ignorance of and contempt for the Bhāratīya Aitihāsik Sāmpradaya भारतीय ऐतिहासिक साम्प्रदाय..A couple of years ago, Koenrad Elst expressed himself very volubly on the subject of Indian history in a yahoo group called Abhinava Gupta.

3. My comment on KE

I could not agree more than to say that of course Dr. Patil should produce the documents. That hardly needs to be mentioned. But it is

His statement that without this you enjoy little credibility that is very puzzling to me. I fail to understand why the credibility of a person would be so affected by one event. All classes of Professionals make numerous mistakes in their life but by and large their credibility is judged by how they conduct themselves throughout their life and not by one incident. If we applied this criterion to every event in everybody's life almost nobody would pass an exam or get a job and everything would come to a grinding halt, because the entire earth will be filled with incompetent people without any credibility.

His comment that “the damage to the entire Hindu cause is enormous” is even more egregious. Because, he is threatening to tar the entire Hindu community for the acts of a few. Regardless of the merits of what he Dr. Patil says or does, the very notion that my reputation and that of the billion Hindu is dependent on the actions of one man or even 100 men simply does not stand up to scrutiny. If anything it strikes at the credibility of the person making the clam. It is he who should take lessons in logic. It is not irrelevant to note that it tends to silence people who have something worthwhile to contribute, and one should be forgiven if, perish the thought, that this the real reason why such statements (guilty by association) are mad,

My book titled, the Origins of Astronomy, cites numerous examples of undocumented claims and damaging statements by Occidentals from various countries in Europe and America, none of whom have been taken to task and if anything their credibility goes up after making these false statements and they are treated as experts for making their dubious statements with a great deal of authority. In fact the classic example of such a howler, which caused immense damage to the cause of a true history of India, is by max Mueller when he pronounced with very little or no documentation to support his claim that the Vedas were composed around 1200 BCE. Today the address of IIC in Delhi has Max Mueller Marg on it, in honor of the man who made this claim without doing the due diligence expected of a scholar.

I have one more point to make. It would make some sense for Koenrad Elst to issue such dire warnings re. credibility, if Indians commanded a position of substance, at least on matters relating to India. But that is hardly the case. There is no Sanskritist in the West who can approach the mastery over Sanskrit that sanskrit pundit in India has acquired over a minimum of 18 years of study. Yet it is rare to see a pundit being asked to comment on the contents of the Veda. Sheldon Pollock’s book on Sanskrit, the language of the Gods in the world of men makes many sweeping statements and generalizations. But i don’t think he will lose any credibility because of such howlers.

I commend Dr. Elst for all the good work he has done in the past but it is time to remind him that that the attendant implied generalizations that he has been making are offensive and will affect his credibility as a dispassionate researcher of matters pertaining to the Indic past.

4. KE in reply to me

Hindus and Indian nationalists are already at a great disadvantage when it comes to credibility because of the sorry record of other Hindus and Indian nationalists before them. Along with anyone who associates with them. Even in circles where sympathy could be expected, my raising the issue of the Ayodhya evidence is often greeted with: "Ah, the PN Oak school?" Or my case against the AIT: "Ah, another Dr. Kalyanaraman?"
My ED. Comment-Not only does he generalize this to all Hindu activists, by saying they are arrogant and ignorant, bad listeners, flout the rules of logic, indeed with little grasp of logic, but he flaunts it

Because you only talk to captive and little-informed audiences, you simply have no idea how the outside world looks at the argumentation style of Hindu activists. Because I frequent the forums of both the opposing camps, I know that Hindu activists are seen as arrogant and ignorant, as bad listeners, as thinking themselves permitted to flout the rules of logic, indeed with little grasp of logic. This not as a matter of prejudice but as a generalization from repeated past experience. Not that there are no bright and debate-smart Hindus, but they are either in the enemy camp or have a cozy position in a university that they don't want to endanger by coming out in public.

Add to this that [some] Hindu activists on their closed forums even plead for the right to tell lies. When I protest, they argue that truth is something for ivory-tower intellectuals like me. Such Hindus aren't fooling anyone except their own rank and file. Agreed that in war, misleading the enemy may be justified; but here the enemy is not fooled, only your own people are.

In this mindset of low respect for truth, it is not always clear whether untruths are deliberate or a matter of self-deception, though the harm done is clear enough. Thus, the CA textbook disaster started with the lie that the AIT has been abandoned as a racist construct etc. When I saw this included in the proposed edits, I immediately predicted that HAF wouldn't have the ghost of a chance that this would pass, and that it would only mobilize opposition against any Hindu-motivated textbook edits, even perfectly reasonable ones. And that is what happened. I knew because I know the opinion landscape and its power equations; but then the HAF people have been living in the US for decades; surely they knew all this as well? What did they think that Michael Witzel c.s. was going to let them get away with this?

Witzel can get away with arrogance, the Communists can get away with lies, and as you yourself write, Sheldon Pollock can get away with howlers on Sanskrit without losing credibility. But the power equation is such that you cannot get away with any of that. Even your best work has to fight an uphill battle to even get a fair hearing. You only have a chance if you play by the rules. So, if you make a claim about the British empire administrators working for the Vatican, you cannot dispense with the formality of putting the evidence on the table

The great thing about Malhotra & Neelakandan's book is that it is unassailable on facts. Let's not drown it into yet another round of Hindutva wailing and rumor-mongering.

Witzel can get away with arrogance, the Communists can get away with lies, and
as you yourself write, Sheldon Pollock can get away with howlers on Sanskrit
without losing credibility. But the power equation is such that you cannot get
away with any of that. Even your best work has to fight an uphill battle to even
get a fair hearing. You only have a chance if you play by the rules. So, if you
make a claim about the British empire administrators working for the Vatican,
you cannot dispense with the formality of putting the evidence on the table.

5. My reply to Koenrad

I concede that Rajiv has very right not tod. post anyThing he dislikes, so i have no quarrel with him), But i am now left without a means of rebuttal and the assumption will be that i ran away from the debate

You (KE) said

Witzel can get away with arrogance, the Communists can get away with lies, and
as you yourself write, Sheldon Pollock can get away with howlers on Sanskrit
without losing credibility. But the power equation is such that you cannot get
away with any of that. Even your best work has to fight an uphill battle to even
get a fair hearing. You only have a chance if you play by the rules. So, if you
make a claim about the British empire administrators working for the Vatican,
you cannot dispense with the formality of putting the evidence on the table.

Since KE addresses me in the second person singular, as if I made the claim, I had to respond to him likewise in the second person singular 9 I subsequently changed this passage to the third person) ,the only difference being I do not attribute sentences to him that he has not used as he has done.

Since he is addressing me personally in the second person singular, I have to make a few remarks to make to clarify what I said and why I continue to have a weltanschauung (world view, viraat darshana) that is completely at odds with hisview of matters pertaining to India.

First of all let me clarify I was agreeing with Koenrad when I said

I could not agree more than to say that of course Dr. Patil should produce the documents. That hardly needs to be mentioned.

Despite my categorical agreement with KE, he keeps insisting on chanting the same mantra when he read me a homily on the necessity of providing evidence. He did this , after I had just done telling you that ‘ of course Dr. Patil should produce the documents’ . Further, he says categorically that I made the claim re. the collusion between India Ofice in London and the Vatican which is clearly not the case. Clearly a case of a blatant lie which he got away with him I do not know what to make of it, so I assume either that his command of English is deficient or that he is deliberately repeating what he said earlier, in order to give the impression that I was disagreeing with him. Since I did not consider him a malicious person I will assume my version of Napoleon’s dictum is operative –Attribute not to malice that which can be more appropriately caused by incompetence (avidya, ignorance) .

ED note subsequently added I am now beginning to doubt whether that assumption is valid. But I was shaken even more by the fact that none of the courageous gentleman who populate the forum had the courage to point this out to him. This is even more pertinent here because Koenrad is a very prerceptive individual who has made it his life mission to study the weaknesses of the hindu. It must have given him great satisfaction that he could get stalwarts like Vishal, Kalavai not only to overlook his lies, but were actually applauding him. Altogether a very good day for him. As for me I am thankful he turned his big guns on me. It meant I was doing something right. The day when he starts praising me would cause alarm bells to ring.

But le tm e be quite e clear that it is his propensity to generalize that is very offensive. In the process he is advertising his statistical illiteracy, by converting anecdotal evidence to a universal characteristic.

Quote taken from KEs reply to me Let's not drown it into yet another round of Hindutva wailing and rumor-mongering.

My reply to KE -This is an old tactic perfected by every half baked wannabe imperialist, to say that Hinduism is OK but what we are really opposed to is Hindutva. First let us define what Hindutva is

“In a judgment the Supreme Court of India ruled that "no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms 'Hindu', 'Hindutva' and 'Hinduism'; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage." The Court also ruled that "Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism. A Hindu may embrace a non-Hindu religion without ceasing to be a Hindu and since the Hindu is disposed to think synthetically and to regard other forms of worship, strange gods and divergent doctrines as inadequate rather than wrong or objectionable, he tends to believe that the highest divine powers complement each other for the well-being of the world and mankind.”

So, even the Supreme court of India which is no ally of the Hindus felt compelled to state that Hindutva cannot be equated with religious Hindu fundamentalism.

The general approach of creating a Bogeyman is a time tested way of getting rid of your opposition. First he creates a straw man called Hindutva and demonize this category to death and then threaten to classify a person as a Hindutva unless he ceases to do anything that he objects to. Let’s just say, that just because Witzel uses the threat at the drop of a hat that there is no need for Koenrad to impress us with the threat that he can use it too. Clearly KE knows very little about me (or about Indians in general) to make such an accusation. But the tactic itself has been used ad nauseum by the British. One of the most famous cases being that of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was exiled for a number of years to Rangoon for sedition. This was his second incarceration, in the first one he was incarcerated for 18 months for murder. The most offensive weapon in the armory of Tilak was a quill pen, the one you dip in ink. That is not surprising, since their avowed intention was to topple the Brahmana, whom they regarded as their main adversary. Ironically it was Max Mueller who prevailed on the authorities to release Tilak. I do not know what he said to the authorities, but they did eventually release Tilak after keeping him incarcerated for more than six years. The point being, this is all déjà vu for most of us, been there done that.

KE has a habit of shooting the messenger, instead of debating the subject. It is so much easier to say the messenger is at fault than to discuss the subject of the debate. He refuses to discuss the issue. On the subject of the cooperation between the British Government and the Vatican I am surprised that this subject is being debated. Surely St. Xaviers College in Mumbai (and other Jesuit institutions scattered throughout in the metros of India )would not be able to set up a college in such a prime location, without the approval of British colonial administration . The evidence of such cooperation is there in stone but Indians are so enamored of the notion of an Occidental participating in our midst that we put aside our critical faculties. Suffice it to say that I can say a lot more on this subject , including the reasons why they preferred the institution be run by the Vatican, but that will deflect me from my main topic.

As for me, I was educated in a Jesuit school, and in a highly anglicized atmosphere. I was not even taught the Gayatri mantra and all the books I read were (and I read a lot) of European authors (Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, Moliere, Dumas, Edward Gibbon) If that sounds like Hindutva to KE, then his fulminations against Hindutva appear incongruous

I am also amused by the selectivity with which he uses the word wailing and whining. The dictionary renders whining as “To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint.”

When he accuses me of lying and begs us not to be arrogant that it does not constitute whining but when we say something, we are both whiny and arrogant. I am still trying to picture a whiny and arrogant individual since it is difficult to be both whiny and arrogant. He appears to be so contemptuous of the Indian that he can afford to exhibit cognitive dissonance and be sloppy in his characterizations

“I know that Hindu activists are seen as arrogant and ignorant, as bad listeners, as thinking themselves permitted to flout the rules of logic, indeed with little grasp of logic. This is not a matter of prejudice but as a generalization from repeated past experience.

Kosla Vepa Ed. Note – I beg to differ from KE on his allegation that Indians have little grasp of logic. In fact Indians were the first to employ logic in their epistemology. That does not mean that ever Indian is logical. Neither is every European. In fact Indians saw only the illogical side of the European, starting with the use of Reductio ad absurdum as a methodology for proof He rarely if ever mentions the fact that we maybe reaching different conclusions because our presuppositions ( the fundamental postulates that we hypothesize) are different

I would have to disagree with his broad characterization quite categorically on this. In fact I am shocked that he would say such a thing publicly. To respect the uniqueness and individuality of every individual is a core belief and I expect those who interact with me to respect my individuality as a fundamental requirement to be regarded as a civilized person, because once you start down the slippery slope of categorization into a lesser species, the rationalization of putting them in gas chambers or bayoneting every man woman , and child which the British did in 1857 in every village that was in the path of the Indian supply lines, becomes easy.

In the many years that I have published during my professional career and presented at conferences nobody has accused me of shoddy scholarship or remotely implied that I have told a lie. In fact I was complemented by my examiners for one of the better written thesis that they have seen, and in fact one of them was not even in my department, but came from the Math Department, and if you don’t already know, Mathematicians are extremely loathe to vouchsafe an interloper, especially if he happens to be an Engineer. My external examiner who was from MIT was similarly effusive in his praise for my research work. In case you are wondering where I obtained my PhD, I did my graduate work at the University of Waterloo, Canada. It appears likely that the town was named after the famous town in Belgium where Wellington and Blucher outfoxed the man who I regard to be one of the most visionary rulers in the history of Europe. None of the examining committee was an Indian although one was a brilliant Sri Lankan Christian who did his PhD at Cambridge. He told me he could not stop reading my thesis until 4 in the morning. Let me assure you reading a highly Mathematical sutra like thesis of 300 pages is not everybody’s cup of tea, so I took that as a compliment. It was at this time that i developed an i nterest in the history o f the sciences especially in mathematics and Rational Mechanics. I read extensively on the subject with the objective of returning to it after fulfilling my duties as a householder

So if you have any examples of my shoddy scholarship, pl. do share them with me. It will get my attention.

I presented a paper last year at the Canadian society of Philosophy and History of Mathematics. The US has no such society, but the American Mathematical Society has a history group. The title of my paper was Acceptance of ancient and medieval Indic epistemes in the Sciences of antiquity by the Occident or for those who think I am pulling a fast one, the alternate title was Why does the Occidental have such a great difficulty in recognizing the work of other civilizations. The book I have just completed offers a complete account, so it is best if you read it in total to get the complete story, with 300 endnotes, 100 tables, 150 figures, 12 chapters, 19 appendices, 630 pages. There has been a massive amount of research by me (and others)that has been underway since the days when I was at Grad school. The title of the book is The Origins of Astronomy, the calendar and Time a critique of the Western narrative in A stronomy. I must warn you that the book expects a modicum of mathematical literacy, but this should not be a problem for the learned folk here, especially those who pride themselves on their logic , for said the wise man ‘all mathematics is but a tautology’ (WE know already that Mathematics is a subset of Logic)

I expected to see a lively debate, but there was not one question and the chairperson closed the session pleading lack of time. There were 2 people who came and congratulated me on my paper. One of them was writing a book on the Roman calendar. There were a fair amount of women in the audience and I got more than the average applause, presumably because I mentioned Hypatea, Queen Dido of Carthage, Emmeline Plunkett, and Sophie Germaine as my favorites among the top mathematicians of the world. So I am puzzled why you say I avoid forums with a majority of Gaijin/Fremdevolk. In fact it is they who are avoiding me. I sent a reply to Witzel on the Eurasian thingy, but they were not even courteous enough to tell me why they refused me membership and would not post my response.

He has to be more precise than just saying I am arrogant and give me instances. He should not be surprised that there is reciprocity and that we consider his arrogance as insufferable as he consider ours especially when he is talking about Indian history

I will end this column with a quote from Mohammad Iqbal (the founding intellectual of Pakistan, since it expresses my vision of India accurately

Yunan-o-Misr-o-Roma Sab Mit Gaye Jahan Se, Ab Tak Magar Hai Baki Naam-o-Nishan Hamara, Kuchh Baat Hai Ke Hasti Mit’ti Nahin Hamari, Sadiyon Raha Hai Dushman Daur-e-Zaman Hamara.

Yunan (Ionia, Greece), Egypt, Rome have bitten the dust, but India is very much alive both in name and as a cultural icon. There is something in this soil that helped us (the Indic civilization, in the true sense) survive innumerable enemies. I post this to show that even the most diehard Pakistani nationalist in 1947 had a strong attachment to the notion of the Indic civilization and you don’t have to be a Hindu nationalist to have similar sentiments

6.MY view of KE

I am convinced that Koenrad Elst does not have the credentials to be regarded as a Historian of India . T he Indic civilization is of vast antiquity and it is impossible for one Individual to grasp the interconnectedness of the Indian subcontinent in space and time, even if he spent a lifetime and all his work appears to be restricted to the 2 centuries of British rule if that. His knowledge of sanskrit appears to be sophomoric and since his native tongue is not one of the Indian languages he has only a limited vocabulary and would not have a chance against an experienced Pundit.

Let us Look at what he is saying “ Even your best work has to fight an uphill battle to get a fair hearing. You only have a chance if you play by the rules. So, if you make a claim about the British empire administrators working for the Vatican, you cannot dispense with the formality of putting the evidence on the table.

so even our best work does not have a chance. And observe how he sprung into action when the Vatican is mentioned BUT if i play by the rules, he may throw us a bone. Sorry old chum, I but I no longer live on the plantation and it will be a cold day in MIAMI before i play by his rules.

He makes all these unctuous statements about the scholarship in India. We are talking apples and oranges here. He is forgetting that many engineering schools in the US would be adversely affected if it weren't for the Indian faculty and the cheap labor provided by Indian graduate students. Now if you took Astro physicist Chandrasekhar and placed him next to Joe six pack we know who will be considered the better scholar, but that is exactly what he does in reverse when he compares the scholarship of those who frequent the internet forums with the elite of the western world who have a PhD and are at the end of their career .

This is not to say that all is peachy keen in Education in India and i am the first to say that the education system in India is out of balance and needs a good infusion of innovation to teach people to think for themselves and teach them how to create new knowledge. I touch upon this briefly in the book, but all of this is of little concern to Elst. His sole aim seems to be to say that we don’t have a chance against the Occidental unless we are submissive to his rules of engagement. At HEC 2006 in LA he went into a diatribe about how we misquoted Macaulay never mind that Macaulay single handedly decapitated India’s educational system. The fact that th policy instituted by Macaulay resulted in the plummeting of the literacy rate to 6% is of no importance. In HEC 2008 in Chicago he gave me a not so subtle hint that i should refrain from writing about Eurocentrism for very obvious reasons, because the Vatican was the prime mover in creating such a psychosis

He gets perturbed when people say derogatory things about Sonia and he himself rarely says anything bad about anything Christian. He titled his book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind. as if to say he personally takes the credit decolonize us.

During the ICIH2009 (to which he practically invited himself) . He was constantly mocking us saying he would take us seriously only if we could change the text books. There was clearly mockery in his tone, and it was also clear that he was alluding to our effort at changing the text books in CA., which he regards as an abject failure

And then he complained there were too many RSS types there (at ICIH 2009). I asked him what is it to you ? Why should it bother you. In reality the RSS were a no show.

Appendix A Reply to Witzel

I am posting this response in my blog, since the moderators of the Indo Eurasian yahoo group will not afford me the right of rebuttal at their site. What are they afraid of ? It is interesting that the notion that 6 people with a science background turn their attention to history in a land of 1 billion , should be a cause for such derisiveness and scorn on the part of the Professor of Sanskrit from Harvard

Apparently it is not permitted for even 6 people out of a billion , over a sixty year period to claim some degree of scholarship in the field after spending their lifetime studying it. So much so that, even when such a low number as 6*10**-9 is involved, ( a number that will not register as a statistically significant quantity and is below the 6 Sigma number used by engineers to define a process with an incidence of errors that is for all practical purposes, is equal to 0), Prof Witzel feels compelled to remark that it is just a hop step and a jump away from saying anybody can become a historian. He also ignores the fact that each of the six brings impressive credentials to the task, and that if anything such a small number in fact indicates how hard it is to be taken seriously as a Historian of India, especially if one is not an Occidental

The more important point to make is that if we use Prof Witzel’s criterion almost every occidental historian (and philologist of India in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century) should have disqualified himself, from writing or commenting on India. Almost all the original sanskritists were self taught, with very little independent verification of their credentials. That includes Franz Bopp and Bernouff. Max Mueller never got his PhD degree( it is in fact doubtful whether he completed the course requirements for a Masters) and his ability to converse or understand a single sentence of spoken Sanskrit was abysmal. One suspects he never went to India, and subject himself to a debate with a Sanskrit pundit because he knew that the resulting ignominy would expose him for what he truly was , a charlatan claiming expertise in a language, in which his mastery was sophomoric at best. In fact it was Schopenhauer who had the perspicacity and the integrity to say that the much vaunted Sanskrit knowledge of these so called Sanskritists was worse than the knowledge of a high school graduate in Latin. Note that current day Indologists never quote Schopenhauer.

It is the civilizational historians like Arnold Toynbee and Will Durant that have taken the contrarian viewpoint. The rest have been content to make the assumption that The European is naturally superior and therefore everything he says should be accepted without questioning. The entire dialog between India and the occident has been one long circular argument, where Michael Witzel of Harvard maintains that i do not have the right to be taken seriously because I am a Hindutva. There are several assumptions that are implicit in such a stereotyping of the Indian , simply because

1. He is a proponent of Hindutva – in many cases he makes this assumption simply because we disagree with him, it stands to reason that he is a hindutva proponent

2. That therefore. I forfeit the right to have an informed opinion.

3. That no Indian has the right to become a historian unless he is anointed as such by an occidental and that conversely every Occidental has the right to call himself a historian of India , simply because he spends a couple of years in the subcontinent. Most British Historians of India have had no formal training in History much less Indian History. No occidental has challenged the credentials of the host of British and occidental writers from Sir James Mills to Sir William Jones ,Vincent Smith, Sir Penderel Moon or Frank Pargiter, none of whom were Professional historians but the very same Occidental has the absolute hubris to judge whether I possess the credential to write about my own civilization. I maintain that none of these self anointed experts has a clue about ancient Indian History. They view Indology in the same light as Entomology, the study of insects, where the subject of the study has very little to say about the objectives and methodology of the study. This is similar to the study of Egyptology, where the original civilization has long since disappeared thanks to a succession of dynasties that had no interest in antiquity, with the result that Egyptologists could say anything and get away with it. But when it came to India they faced a major problem, because despite ravages of constant wars over a period of 600 years, and herculean efforts to alter the mindset of the Indian, there were sufficient numbers of Indian pundits who were well versed in Itihāsa to challenge the English and their cohorts in the European mainland
Alas, I am challenged more frequently by Indians than I am by Occidentals , who (the Indics) are horrifed that i dare to question the conventional wisdom as propounded by a member of the conquering race. In the Indo-Eurasian_research@yahoogroups.com, Michael Witzel wrote:
For your weekend amusement, though the repeated insistence on "rewriting" of Indian history is really boring.

See:
"US-based engineer turned historian, Dr Vepa" says it all Like our long time friends mathematician Rajaram, bank employees Dr. K. and Talageri, electric engineering Prof. S. Kak, medical technician V. Agarwal (M.Sc.), astrologers like David Fawley ("Vamedeva") etc. etc. Likewise, K. Vepa: he has a PhD of the University of Waterloo in Engineering Sciences & applied mechanics, studied there 1968 - 1972. *Anybody* in the Indian orbit can turn historian overnight, at the drop of a hat. Preferably, after retirement. Yesterday a conference on this topic has begun in Delhi: Interestingly, even IER/Westerner-baiter Sandhya Jain (rabid columnist in the chauvinistic paper, the Organizer), had to comment:"NONE of the persons mentioned is a historian!" Sure, it is a political* event that she should actually welcome. Quote: International meet on Indian history
Statesman News Service

NEW DELHI, Jan. 7: A three-day international conference on Indian history, civilization and geopolitics is set to begin here on Friday. The executive director of the Indic Studies Foundation, Dr Kosla Vepa, said the aim of the conference was "to decolonise various aspects of ancient Indian history and its chronology which were deliberately distorted and mis-dated during the British Raj with a view to causing confusion and a sense of inferiority among Indians". He said the conference is expected to be a landmark event in the interpretation of ancient Indian history since the "current version of history is not accurate and distorted. There is a need to rewrite the history of India. History as we see it". The US-based engineer turned historian, Dr Vepa said the conference "aims at increasing awareness of strategic thinking in India and to show that a strategic approach based on long-term objectives is essential to ensure a safe and secure future for the ancient Indian civilization and lead it to still greater heights".

Dr Vepa who has been studying history for over a decade now said it was a forensic science and depends on numerous other subjects and was not just the study of dates or mere guess work (as it has often been when rendered by the European) Asked whether institutions like Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and NCERT have been invited for the conference, he said: "They have not given their consent to attending it." However, historians and scholars who are expected to attend the conference include Mr Bharat Karnad, Mr Kanwal Sibal, Mr Uday Bhaskar, Mr JS Rajput and Mr Vikram Sood (these are all person s who have spent a lifetime studying the strategic issues facing India and while they may not have a degree in History have spent a lifetime studying the consequences of Indian history on the strategic environment facing India today

Quote from Vepa's web site vepa>: "The Indic Studies Foundation, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, seeks to propagate a more accurate and rational approach to the study and dissemination of the Indian Civilizational ethos in the world" and: "I have prepared educational materials and calendars for dissemination to schools in India and the US." Remember the CA schoolbook case? After failed attempts to rewrite history there,
this has been their new front Onward, Hindutva soldiers!

Cheers,
Michael

Appendix B MY reply t o KE in the aftermath of ICIH 2009

· Since the ICIH 2009 conference has been mentioned rather derisively BY
Koenraad Elst in this post,and i quote

At the Hindu history-rewriting conference in Delhi IIC last January, the usual wailing could be heard about the anti-Hindu bias in the textbooks. No mention was made of the fact that the BJP had been in charge for six years and that the textbooks had been changed already, only so miserably that the Congress-Communist combine had no problem at all justifying a return to the anti-Hindu textbooks. The conference had no session on: "What did we do wrong?" This time around, I suggest that all those involved in or cheering for the CA textbook edit proposals face their own failure and do some honest soul-searching.

·

I should clarify, as the convenor of the conference what our goals were in this
conference. incidentally Koenraad was a guest at this conference,and he had made
a specific request to be given a slot to speak. I would have hoped he would have
the courtesy as a guest to refer to the conference by its proper name . The
question of rewriting Indian History is surely an expression of the contempt he
has for our attempts. He specifically alluded to our rewriting of history, and
he keeps repeating this even though i patiently explained to him that the
question of rewriting only occurs, if we accept the colonial paradigm which
was written by British ICS officers and in some cases like James Mills and
Karl Marx by people who had never set foot in india. For most of us who grew
up in independent india and have never known the proper history of India, this
remains a process of discovery and deciphering of our past. That it is an
uphill task is certainly no secret.

If Koenraad had expected that as a result of the conference we would change the
text books, he is clearly exhibiting a degree of naivete not commensurate with
his knowledge of this problem. I do not know what he is talkng about when he
refers to the usual wailing about the anti-Hindu bias in the textbooks..
Obviously this is a history conference and mention was made about the bias in
text books world wide . We could hardly avoid mentioning that central fact. It is also clear in retrospect that the only reason he wanted to come to the conference was that he could write about it derisively afterwards

I am reproducing below the goals and lessons learnt.

The ICIH 2009 was planned with rather ambitious Goals in mind. These goals and
objectives were set forth in a Philosophy and Motivations document. We came into
this conference with certain premises..
That the Indic civilization is a unique civilization that has withstood great
odds and maintained a continuity over several millennia.
That there are several developments that are taking place which place this
civilization under jeopardy, one of these being the apathy towards historical
topics in general and the massive distortions that have entered our history
books, a legacy of our colonial past. It is the goal of the Indic Studies
Foundation to catalyze the Indic peoples worldwide to make people aware of such
distortions and to correct them.

APPENDIX C THE ROLE OF THE INDIC STUDIES FOUNDATION

The Foundation will undertake a series of seminars annually with an exclusive
focus on Indic history to specifically research the distorted history,
investigate its consequences, assess its consequences, and remedy the situation
by facilitating impartial/professional research into Indic history, and in
addition will conduct programs to correct the history in the academia, media and
in public perception. In past seminars, we have succeeded in raising h4e
awareness s of the Indic peoples to the magnitude of the problem. For example we
have
1. Identified key distinguishing characteristics and dates of the Indic
civilization.
The following key distinguishing characteristics were highlighted
The staggering amount of literature ever since the time of ancients

The eclectic nature of the knowledge built up since antiquity
The essential continuity of the Indic civilization
The unique nature of the contributions in various fields such as
Mathematics and Astronomy
The following key events were identified
The dating of the Veda
The dating of the Mahabharata war to serve as a sheet anchor for the History
of India
The dating of the Birth of the Buddha

The dating of the coronation of Chandragupta Maurya
The dating of Adi Sankara
The dating of the Sulva Sutras
The dating of the Shatapatha Brahmana and Yajnavalkya

2. Indicated those areas of Indian history which are egregiously in error.

There are resulting inconsistencies in the chronology of the Indic historical narrative, which is now horribly mangled to fit the straightjacket of the Colonial imperatives, which we have termed the Colonial Paradigm of Indian history. The Foundation will make available presentations of the conference so that scholars and researchers can eventually reconstruct a true Chronology keeping the aforementioned aims in mind. The Foundation also calls upon the civil society -- parents, teachers, journalists and other stakeholders to attend the follow-up workshop to develop a strategic plan of corrections in History and remediation of the negative impact of contrived history on the youth. The Foundation is committed to devising and executing plans ï‚§ that will focus awareness on the antiquity, diversity, intellectual vibrancy, the logical rigor and ontological scope of Indic civilization, the profound contributions it has made to many spheres of activity of humanity. ï‚§ comprehend the nature and breadth of adversarial theologies which seek to malign the Indic ethos, dispel lacunae and misconceptions in the understanding of Indic traditions in India and the Western hemisphere, as exemplified by the case of the California Text Book Misrepresentation of Ancient India in 2005/2006 OBJECTIVES OF ICIH 2009 We hoped to spark the initiative of investigators, researchers, historians, think tank consultants, and yes even Autodidacts into setting the stage for a process whereby the framework for the Indian chronology is more in synchronization with the latest discoveries as well as to encourage the use of new technologies in deciphering the Indic past while at the same time establishing a Forensic science that is devoted to such efforts. We can also educate the parents as consumers to demand a more authentic treatment of History in school text books. Hence, the conception.
The conference has basically two objectives. One is to increase awareness of strategic thinking and to show that a strategic approach based on long term objectives is key to creating an environment for a civilization in which the future is less threatening and offers greater and better choices. The second objective is to increase awareness of the importance of learning the accurate history of India and its impact on the future choices that a country can and should make in its vital interest.

We will follow up with seminars and workshops on producing text books and other
materials for dissemination to educational institutions. I continue to labor under the hope that the effort of correcting the history will energize and attract youngsters, especially when it is packaged as a forensic multidisciplinary science and as an adventurous life involving travel (all over the globe) and that recounting the correct history is one way to coalesce
around a shared heritage. We feel the conception of the conference was unique in at least 2 significant aspects. We devoted a good portion of the sessions to civilizational aspects,
in particular the unique Indic contributions to the intellectual wealth of the planet. It was particularly important to do so, since these contributions have been severely downgraded, so much so that even key contributions such as the decimal place value system is erroneously attributed to other civilizations. We also felt that there Is not sufficient appreciation of strategic issues facing the Indic civilization and the key role that our historical consciousness plays. in the manner that we approach the geopolitics of the subcontinent. Many wondered both prior to the conference and during the conference , as to the necessity and the relevance of clubbing such disparate subjects under the same umbrella. The lively discussion that took place in these sessions, is in itself the answer to such questions.

LESSONS LEARNT

We feel that the innovations that the conference has introduced into the study of History, will take root and help us in removing the distortions, and that in itself is no small measure of success. We have energized a whole host of new members from the coming generations and have made them enthusiastic in the quest for an authentic history of India and the Indic peoples. It is now important to build upon these successes and create a nucleus of activists who will prove to be the leaders of tomorrow. Much remains to be done and the battle for regaining control of our own history has just begun.

As an example of the widespread distortion in our chronology we have attached our proposed skeleton of the chronology of Indic History. We do not claim that every event is correctly depicted in this table but there are far fewer inconsistencies in this proposed chronology than in the current version of History that is taught in history books today.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12762350/Proposed-skeleton-of-Chronology-of-the-Indic-\
Civilization
Dhanyavad

Dr. Kosla Vepa, Director Indic Studies Foundation

[Response to Koenraad's post (03 March 2009) at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Abhinavagupta/message/4885

http://tinyurl.com/deney8

KE RePLY

KV Since the ICIH 2009 conference has been mentioned rather derisively BY Koenraad Elst (...) I should clarify, as the convener of the conference, what our goals were in this conference. incidentally Koenraad was a guest at this conference, and he had made a specific request to be given a slot to speak. I would have hoped he would have the courtesy as a guest to refer to the conference by its proper name.

KE The circumlocution was because I couldn't remember the exact title, nothing else. But of course the conference was devoted to rewriting history, viz. history as currently taught.

- there is not the slightest hint on apology

KV The question of rewriting Indian History is surely an expression of the contempt he has for our attempts. He specifically alluded to our rewriting of history, and he keeps repeating this even though i patiently explained to him that the question of rewriting only occurs, if we accept the colonial paradigm which was written by British ICS officers and in some cases like James Mills and Karl Marx by people who had never set foot in India. For most of us who grew up in independent India and have never known the proper history of India, this remains a process of discovery and deciphering of our past. That it is an uphill task is certainly no secret.”

KE It seems that you mean that the question of rewriting history does not arise because what Mill, Marx etc. wrote is no history at all, and the chronology of India as presented at the conference is merely a restoration of an existing history of India that the colonialists and Marxists have wiped under the carpet. I'm afraid that, on the contrary, no precolonial native chronology of India existed, only bits and pieces from which we now, taught by the colonials in historical methods, may hope to compose a consistent chronology.

ED note by KV – The colossal ignorance that this man consistently exhibits is only exceeded by his arrogance. There is an Ancient Persian Proverb, that reads as follows

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is a pupil. Teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep. Wake him.

He who knows, and knows that he knows is a teacher. Follow him."

Moreover, if you want to prove the "colonial" historians wrong, a comprehensive rebuttal would ideally contain an explanation of how they were misled into drawing the wrong conclusions. They usually did give specific reasons for e.g. the sheet-anchor Sandrokottos/ Chandragupta. So far, I've only seen those arguments being ignored or being waived in a very loose manner. Thus, when an Ashokan pillar lists five non-Sanskrit king names, each of them resembling Greek names of known Hellenistic kings, what are the chances that all five merely happen to resemble Greek (Aliksundara/ Alexander, Amtiiyaka/Antiochos ) but actually belong to unknown kings of unknown language, as claimed by Sethna?

MY response to that is, if the colonial version is a piece of crap based on guesswork (like max Mueller’ dating of the Veda, Aranyaka, Brahmana, Upanishad, what engineers refer to as a WAG (wild ass guess), then one should not waste time by refuting something that max Mueller has repudiated

The attitude of far too many Hindu history-rewriters is one of: "Leave me alone with your troublesome questions of method! I don't need method, I have scripture that tells me all I need to know!" If the outside world refuses to follow you, it may be less a matter of colonial bias than of a normal revulsion at the arrogance of such history-rewriters. I say this even when supporting some of the positions of the history-rewriters, esp. on Aryan origins. That position, viz. against the AIT, has likewise been compromised no end by the ridiculous reasoning (apart from foul language) adopted by a number of very vocal Hindu history-rewriters.

ED. Note by KV –Here he goes generalizing again creating a strawman and implying that every body who disagrees with him is just as bad. He has to clearly say who he is talking about, and if he is accusing me then he has to give examples. I suspect that he is trying to distance himself from his earlier identification opposing the AIT.

> If Koenraad had expected that as a result of the conference we would change the text books, he is clearly exhibiting a degree of naivete not commensurate with his knowledge of this problem. I do not know what he is talking about when he refers to the usual wailing about the anti-Hindu bias in the textbooks.. Obviously this is a history conference and mention was made about the bias in text books world wide . We could hardly avoid mentioning that central fact
>

As if I had ever disputed that the Indian history textbooks are biased. The point is that even any ideal unbiased version of history has no chance of making it into the textbooks if you mess things up as thoroughly as the BJP government has done. Among the invited speakers were prominent participants in the BJP efforts. It simply won't do to let them get away with criticizing the usual Thapars and Habibs without having their own record put to scrutiny.

And was it a history conference? Some contributions, yes. But others, oh well. Like that physicist or so who came to project his power-point essentially just juxtaposing Sanskrit words with quantum-physics terms, as in a parody on the "Tao of Physics" genre. I've seen the type too often at similar conferences, WAVES etc.: businessmen who like to see their name on a book cover, contribute a fat wad of dollars to the organization, and in return are allowed to fill a slot with a totally garbled juxtaposition of half-understood terminology from various unconnected fields.

In this instance, a lady Sanskrit professor from Orissa faulted him not for his utter lack of method but for mispronouncing "Patanjali" (with long first a). She agreed with him that it was ridiculous to say Hindus had no sense of history, giving as her reason that "we Hindus have invented history: the word Itihasa means 'history'!" So how is that for a method of proof: a mere word as proof for the existence of the thing designated? The word "centaur" exists, so centaurs exist? Of course the Itihasa writers meant to conserve a memory of the past, but by now "history" means more than that, viz. a critical investigation of testimonies of the past so as to reconstruct it as faithfully as possible. In discussions on yahoo lists like BEF, IndiaArchaeology, AncientIndia etc., I still see time and again how Hindus just don't get the merest basics of historical method, with a childlike reliance on scripture, and then rarely scripture as it really is but scripture as summarized in popular retelling.

Most of all, I recall the Lankan professor Gunatilake, who gave one of the best papers, being insulted and interrupted by the chairman who faulted him for bringing in politics (viz. the Christian role in Tamil Eelam separatism), when "Geopolitics" was actually one of the themes mentioned in the conference title. He wondered aloud if he hadn't come to the wrong conference, and in passing lambasted the proposed Purana-based chronology as being totally unscientific. Maybe he was prejudiced about that, but at any rate he hadn't heard any convincing arguments in its favor.

This is a misleading description of what happened

But yes, Kosla-ji, I am grateful for the invitation and I had a good time at the conference.

Kind regards,

Appendix D anybody who can spell india thinks he is an expert in Indian history and if he is an occidental, he thinks that is license enough to lecture indians on their own history

My response to Francesco Breghenti on March 20, 2009 in the Abhinavagupta
Quote "This so-called debate on the need of rewriting Indian History is really driving me nuts... Every new proponent who claims to be challenging the "distorted colonial views on Indic chronology" is, if possible, even
worse than the one who has preceded him/her!"

My reply to Signore Breghenti, It is not an objective criterion to say that everything a historian writes in India has to pass your approval. There is the question of what credentials you bring to the table to be competent to pass judgement on others. This is a sincere question to see if you have any locus standi in Indian History or is it simply a rhetorical question which of course does not necessitate an answer.

If in fact you reassure me (with a list of your publications etc you have the requisite qualifications to conduct a eaningful dialog on Indian History, I would ask you to take some of the dates and prove to me that i am wrong. Merely quoting second hand sources will not pass muster. You must state your assumptions clearly and make valid and logical inferences. Simply passing the buck to Sir William Jones and quoting him is not enough . You must establish with reasonable certainty that your inferences follow from your premises.

But then I read further in your diatribe, when you say

"It is beyond my comprehension to understand how the new chronology your Foundation proposes, and which looks even more "extreme" than the ones variously proposed in times past by your associates David Frawley, N.S.Rajaram, Stephen Knapp, Michel Danino etc., can be even remotely claimed to be more "consistent" than the chronology taught in history books today."

So it appears you are not even asking me for a clarification. You are merely stating your opinion . Since you don’t seem to have the slightest desire to hear my side of the story, I will not burden you with any explanations, since you appear to be quite contented that you know everything that is to be known in Indian history and do not appear to have the slightest curiosity as the reasons why i make the claim.

Everyone has an opinion , especially on India, Opinions that are more numerous than the stars in the milky way galaxy and i truly envy those who appear content with the certainty of their view that they know everything that is needed to be known about Indian history and view with suspicion any attempt to correct major howlers like the Aryan Invasion theory.

Kosla
thinking."John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-)
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no
need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."John Kenneth
Galbraith

[Response to Francesco's post (21 March 2009) at

Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee

2010-12-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee

By Scott Horton

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007797

Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, has published a bombshell book about Churchill’s attitudes toward India and the steps that he took during World War II that contributed to a horrific famine in Bengal in 1943. I put six questions to her about her book and some of the pushback it has drawn from Churchill’s defenders:

1. You write that Hitler never fully embraced the Indian nationalist cause because he expected Britain to reach some accommodation with Germany that allowed it to retain most of its empire, and specifically India. What is it about Churchill and Britain that Hitler misunderstood in this regard?

Madhusree Mukerjee (photo by Dave Freda)

Hitler believed that the so-called Nordic race, which in his view included Germans and Britons, was destined to rule the world. He sought to emulate, not supplant, the British Empire: the German empire would comprise the Slavic countries to the east. As he saw it, the United Kingdom would retain its colonies but assume the role of Germany’s junior partner in world domination.

Hitler underestimated the depth of Churchill’s reverence for England’s imperial traditions. To Churchill, the British would be second to none. Moreover, Churchill’s reading of history told him that Britain had always maintained the balance of power in Europe: whenever France or Germany had marched, England had marched—against. This time would be no different. Churchill also believed that it was his destiny to lead his country in war against a vile enemy.

Hitler may have evoked particular repugnance because, in addition to persecuting Jews, he was seeking to enslave Europeans. Churchill had condoned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, explaining that the aggressor was “an ancient State, with the highest sense of national honour and patriotism and with a teeming population and a remarkable energy.” And he had advised against intervention when Italy attacked Abyssinia, on the grounds that the victim was not “a fit, worthy, and equal member” of the League of Nations. Hitler trusted that British leaders would likewise comprehend his desire to induct Slavs, whom he saw simply as slaves, into the Third Reich.

2. Yet you do write that Churchill harbored a deep racism or at least ethnocentrism when it came to the Indians and that he toyed with the idea of building a British alliance with Untouchables, Sikhs, and Muslims to hold India and keep Hindu nationalists at bay. Did this reflect a reasonable appreciation of the forces then at work in India?

Perhaps at no other period during the war than in the summer and fall of 1943 did the number of ships at hand so greatly exceed those already committed to Allied operations… [in May] alone the president had transferred to British control fifteen to twenty cargo vessels for the duration of the war. By the summer of 1943, the British shipping crisis had given way to what historian Kevin Smith calls a “shipping glut” and the S branch would refer to as “[w]indfall shipping.”… So many vessels would present at North American ports that autumn to be loaded with supplies to add to the United Kingdom’s stockpile that not enough cargo could be found to fill them. If ever during the war a window had opened for saving lives in Bengal—at no discernible cost to the war effort—this was it.

—From Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Basic Books—Copyright © 2010 Madhusree Mukerjee

Churchill’s divide-and-rule policies found fertile ground among India’s Muslims. For decades, British conservatives had sought to deepen India’s inherent fissures in order to weaken the nascent independence movement. For instance, in 1905 Viceroy Curzon planned to partition Bengal province along religious lines, so as to enhance rivalries between Muslim landowners in its east and Hindu nationalists in its west. He also encouraged the formation of the Muslim League as a counterweight to the dominant nationalist party, the Indian National Congress.

A prolonged agitation led to Bengal being partitioned instead along linguistic lines. But then the colonial government introduced separate electorates for Muslims—that is, every Muslim in British India was required to vote for a Muslim. The measure favored separatists, who could get elected by appealing to narrow sectarian sentiments. The British subsequently introduced separate electorates for other groups as well, but the effort was partially repulsed.

So although Churchill was interested in exploiting diverse social fault lines, he concentrated on widening the Hindu-Muslim rift—which he regarded as “the bulwark of British rule in India.” When Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, called for a separate nation of Pakistan, Churchill hailed “the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness” among India’s minorities. During the war, the British government encouraged the demand for Pakistan and propagandized along Islamist lines against Hindus.

3. At several points you suggest that Churchill was inspired by the remembrance of the 1857 uprising to take steps that disregarded the value of civilian lives in India. But, as you note, in 1920, following the Amritsar massacre, Churchill denounced precisely that logic when it was used by Brigadier Reginald Dyer and his supporters to justify the tragedy that had occurred. Churchill decried what happened as “frightfulness” and called for accountability for Dyer. Doesn’t this suggest a different attitude towards the Indians?

In 1920 Churchill was not hostile to Indians. The independence movement had yet to develop to its full strength; and the Indian Army, which was largely loyal to the British, had just sacrificed 60,000 lives in World War I. The British Empire was threatened mainly by actions such as Dyer’s. By killing more than a thousand Sikh civilians—at least by the Indian account—Dyer had undermined the loyalty of Sikh soldiers in the Indian Army. The army had accordingly dismissed Dyer; and, as secretary of state for war, Churchill was called upon to defend the army’s action. Hence his speech denouncing “frightfulness,” or terror tactics.

Incidentally, in these years Churchill was calling for gas attacks on rebellious Iraqis, in order to “spread a lively terror.”

By the 1940s, the Indian situation had changed dramatically. The freedom movement, led by Gandhi, posed a potent challenge to the Empire and caused Churchill’s animosity toward Indians to escalate. And the Indian Army had acquired many native officers, whose loyalty could not be taken for granted. So Churchill ensured that if rebellion broke out in India, the colony’s best-equipped and -trained battalions would be fighting the Axis—on another continent.

India was bereft of defenses, so that when Japanese forces reached the colony’s borders, the War Cabinet ordered scorched-earth measures to deter their advance. The resulting destruction of rice and boats contributed to famine.

4. The central thesis in your book is that Churchill and the War Cabinet took a series of decisions which led inexorably to the starvation of between 1.5 and 3 million persons in 1943. You do not, however, charge that it was their conscious intention to starve these people to death—unlike what the Nazis did in east central Europe about this same time, when starvation was a conscious policy objective. But do you believe that they knew or should have known that this catastrophe would follow from their decisions?

The War Cabinet received repeated warnings that famine could result from its exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort—and ignored them.

The Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942 cut off rice imports, of between one and two million tons per year, to India. Instead of protecting the Indian public from the resultant food shortage, the War Cabinet insisted that India absorb this loss and, further, export rice to countries that could no longer get it from South East Asia. As a result, after war arrived at India’s borders, the colony exported 260,000 tons of rice in the fiscal year 1942-43.

Meanwhile India’s war expenditures increased ten fold, and the government printed paper money to pay for them. In August 1942 a representative of India’s viceroy told the War Cabinet that runaway inflation could lead to “famines and riots.”

In December 1942, Viceroy Linlithgow warned that India’s grain supply was seriously short and he urgently needed 600,000 tons of wheat to feed soldiers and the most essential industrial workers. The War Cabinet stated that ships were not available. In January 1943, Churchill moved most of the merchant ships operating in the Indian Ocean over to the Atlantic, in order to build up the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials. The Ministry of War Transport cautioned him that the shift would result in “violent changes and perhaps cataclysms” in trade around the Indian Ocean. (In addition to India, the colonies of Kenya, Tanganyika, and British Somaliland all suffered famine in 1943.) Although refusing to meet India’s need for wheat, Churchill insisted that India continue to export rice.

With famine raging, in July 1943 Viceroy Linlithgow halted rice exports and again asked the War Cabinet for wheat imports, this time of 500,000 tons. That was the minimum required to feed the army and otherwise maintain the war effort. The news of impending shipments would indirectly ease the famine, he noted: any hoarders would anticipate a fall in prices and release grain, causing prices to fall in reality. But at a meeting on August 4, the War Cabinet failed to schedule even a single shipment of wheat for India. Instead, it ordered the buildup of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. So 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India—destined not for consumption but for storage.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials, intended for shoring up the postwar British economy, reached 18.5 million tons, the highest ever. Sugar and oilseeds overflowed warehouses and had to be stored outdoors, under tarpaulins.

Of course Churchill knew that his priorities would result in mass death. In one of his tirades against Indians, he said they were “breeding like rabbits” anyway. On behalf of Indians, the War Cabinet ignored an offer of 100,000 tons of Burmese rice from freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose (who was allied with the Japanese), discouraged a gift of wheat from Canada, and turned down rice and wheat volunteered by the United States.

The War Cabinet eventually ordered for India 80,000 tons of wheat and 130,000 tons of barley. (Barley was useless for famine relief because it had no impact on prices.) The first of these meager shipments reached India in November. All the while, the Indian Army consumed local rice and wheat that might otherwise have fed the starving. The famine came to an end in December 1943, when Bengal harvested its own rice crop—at which point Churchill and his friend Cherwell renewed their demand for rice exports.

5. Another figure who comes in for a shellacking in your book is Frederick Alexander Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, an Anglo-German known as “the Prof,” who exercised a powerful influence over Churchill. You describe Cherwell as an impressive scientist but also someone who harbored some rather sinister Malthusian ideas with a latent racist component. What were these ideas and how did they contribute to the famine?

All the evidence points to the prime minister and his closest adviser having believed that Indians were ordained to reside at the bottom of the social pyramid, such that their financial ascendancy as creditors during the war became a source of frustration and fury. Long after India had obtained independence, the Prof would describe the “abdication of the white man” as the worst calamity of the twentieth century—more deplorable than two world wars and the Holocaust.

—From Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Basic Books—Copyright © 2010 Madhusree Mukerjee

Judging by a lecture that Cherwell gave in the 1930s, he regarded colonial subjects as “helots,” or slaves, whose only reason for existence was the service of racial superiors. In drafts of this talk, he outlined how science could help entrench the hegemony of the higher races. By means of hormones, drugs, mind control, and surgery, one could remove from slaves the ability to suffer or to feel ambition—yielding humans with “the mental make-up of the worker bee.” Such a lobotomized race would have no thought of rebellion or votes, so that one would end up with a perfectly peaceable and permanent society, “led by supermen and served by helots.”

In November 1943, Cherwell urged Churchill to hold firm against demands for famine relief. Else, he warned, “so long as the war lasts [India’s] high birthrate may impose a heavy strain on this country which does not view with Asiatic detachment the pressure of a growing population on limited supplies of food.” That is, he blamed the famine on the irresponsible fecundity of natives—and ignored the devastation of the Indian economy by the war effort. He also elided the fact that the War Cabinet was preventing India from using its ample sterling balance or even its own ships to import sufficient wheat.

By Cherwell’s Malthusian argument, England should have been the first to starve. It was being kept alive by massive imports. In 1943 the United Kingdom imported 4 million tons of wheat, 1.6 million tons of meat, 1.4 million tons of sugar, 409,000 heads of live cattle, 325,000 tons of fish, 131,000 tons of rice, 206,000 tons of tea, 172,000 tons of cocoa, and 1.1 million gallons of wine for its 47.7 million people—a population an eighth that of India.

To Cherwell and also to Churchill, colonial subjects were worth saving only if they made a direct contribution to the war effort. According to Field Marshal Wavell, Churchill wanted to feed only those Indians who were “actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways.” The rest were dispensable.

6. Arthur Herman argues that you rely too heavily on Leo Amery’s diaries, recording Churchill’s intemperate outbursts, and pass by the fact that Churchill took decisive steps to ameliorate the famine. “Without Churchill,” he says, “the famine would have been worse.” How do you respond to this?

My indictment is based on what Churchill did, not on what he said. The Ministry of War Transport papers, the Cherwell Papers, and the official histories of British wartime food supply, shipping, and economy are my key sources. They show, for instance, that the War Cabinet scheduled eighteen ships to load with Australian wheat in September and October, 1943. Not one of these ships was destined for famine-stricken India.

Had anyone else been prime minister, he would have striven to relieve India’s plight instead of consigning wheat to stockpiles.

Churchill’s diatribes, as recorded in Amery’s and others’ diaries, are, however, useful in understanding why he acted as he did. Famine had failed to temper his hostility toward Indians. Churchill would tell his secretary that Hindus were a foul race protected by their rapid breeding from “the doom that is their due.” He wished Arthur Harris, the head of British bomber command, could “send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.”

'Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India' indicates the level of his drepravity

2010-12-08T10:41:00.001-08:00

This clearly shows the extent of the depravity of Winston Churchill His disregard for the value of human life especially if it was not British),his extreme hatred for the Babus ( a euphemism for the Brahmana), his intention to keep India as a vast Gulag., where no one could enter or leave, all indicate a Psychopathic mind of a Megalomaniac

Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India

By: Madhusree Mukerjee

Vol XLV No.32 August 07, 2010

Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945, has compared the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill with Adolf Hitler in his manuscript The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister. This article dwells on the circumstances of this remark by Amery. It finds that Churchill’s idea of redesigning Indian society by terminating the babu class and moneylenders and his policy towards Bengal famine and the War Cabinet meetings provoked Amery to make such an explosive comment.

As the victorious end of this glorious struggle for human freedom draws near, the time is coming for a policy in relation to India more worthy of our true selves. We have had enough… of shameful pledges about Indian self- government, and of sickening surrenders to babu agitation. If we went even further two years ago in an open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India that was only because we were in a hole. That peril is over and obviously a new situation has arisen of which we are fully entitled to take advantage.

The above is the opening paragraph of a three-page typewritten manuscript, dated August 1944 and entitled The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister. It is to be found among the papers of Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945. The manuscript is appended by the initials WSC, and appears at first glance to have been written by Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill at a time when the second world war was coming to a bloody but triumphant end.

Two years earlier, in the spring of 1942, the shockingly rapid advance of Japanese forces onto the Indian border had created political pressures that had induced Churchill and Amery into a desperate measure: they had sent socialist politician Sir Stafford Cripps to India with an offer of dominion status after the war, in return for the cooperation of the Indian National Congress with the war effort. According to the 1944 document, however, Churchill hoped to rescind the Cripps offer – the “open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India” – and instead to announce a new policy on the colony:

Quote:

No more nonsense about self-government; down with all (brown) landlords and profit-making industrialists, collectivize agriculture on Russian lines and touch up the untouchables.

Churchill’s New Dawn Vision

The scheme would commence with removing those Englishmen – including the then viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell – who, according to this paper,

Quote:

would not only appear to have taken our pledges seriously, but to be imbued with a miserable sneaking sympathy for what are called Indian aspirations, not to speak of an inveterate and scandalous propensity to defend Indian interests as against those of their own country, and a readiness to see British workers sweat and toil for generations in order to swell even further the distended paunches of Hindu moneylenders.

The pledges would include the repeated promises of self-government for India made by the British government. The numerous babus “who infest the government offices” would also have to be disposed of, the paper continued, and replaced by a new force of English re-educators who would uphold “our historic right to govern India in accordance with our own ideas and interests”.

The regeneration of India would involve uplifting the untouchable, suppressing child marriage, limiting population, and getting rid of cows. Most importantly, it would require the imposition of a radically new administrative structure. Every five villages would require “one English instructor in the new way of life”, as well as “one English head policeman with five Indian subordinates drawn from the loyal martial races”. In total, the colony would require 1,60,000 instructors, 1,60,000 English police officers and 8,00,000 Indian policemen. Holding this system in place would also require the army and air force to be expanded, “at any rate until India has become accustomed to the new regime”. Any criticism in the British parliament of the “new dawn over India” would be banned. “It will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian precedent, to forbid any but trusted officials to leave India or to allow any visitors from outside except under the closest supervision by an official Intourist Agency.”¹

Did Winston Churchill really envision this extraordinary reconfiguration of I ndian society? The short answer is “no” and the long answer is “yes”. A finely pencilled notation reveals the paper’s immediate author: “A skit by LSA after a harangue by WSC in Cabinet – only slightly exaggerated”. The last two words are underlined. Amery had penned the paper, but he did not invent the ideas it contained. He merely caricatured the prime minister’s ramblings in the War Cabinet – no doubt to vent his anger at Churchill’s devastating colonial policies, for which the British and Indian public and press were blaming the secretary of state for India; and perhaps also to explain to shocked colleagues, why during the War Cabinet meeting of

4 August 1944, Amery had compared Winston Churchill, the beloved war leader, to Adolf Hitler.2

War Cabinet Meetings

On that summer day, the War Cabinet had been discussing a response that Wavell had drafted to a missive from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In an overture to the viceroy, Gandhi had offered to suspend the Quit India movement (which had commenced in August 1942, following the Congress rejection of the Cripps offer) and to cooperate with the war effort in exchange for an immediate declaration of independence. The viceroy had drafted a polite reply turning Gandhi down, but o ffering an olive branch: if Hindus, Muslims, and the main Indian minorities agreed on a constitution, they could form a transitional government, under the tutelage of the existing one, until the war was over.³

The prime minister was vehemently opposed to Indian emancipation, however, and moreover, bore immense personal animosity towards Gandhi. When the old man had been released from British custody three months earlier, in May 1944 – because he appeared to be at risk of death from a coronary or cerebral thrombosis – Churchill had instructed Wavell that u nder no circumstances should he negotiate with Gandhi, “a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fibre, largely in the hands of native vested interests”.4Accordingly, when Wavell’s draft response to Gandhi had come up before the War Cabinet for the first time, “the real storm broke”, Amery wrote in his diary. The viceroy should not be interacting with“ a traitor who ought to be put back in prison”, raged the prime minister. “As for Wavell he ought never to have been appointed”. The tirade had lasted for a full hour. A committee had rewritten Wavell’s response so that it bristled with hostile legalese, but the War Cabinet had sent it back for further revision.

At the next War Cabinet meeting on India, on 4 August 1944, Churchill inserted into the new draft response to Gandhi a statement of British responsibilities t owards untouchables in a land ruled by caste Hindus. Amery pointed out that this was irrelevant to the issues that Gandhi had raised – and provoked a furious res ponse from Churchill, “describing how a fter the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender”. Instead of honouring repeated promises of emancipation for India, Churchill continued, he would strengthen British rule and simultaneously

Quote:

carry out a great regeneration of India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivisation on Russian lines. It might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell and most of the present English officials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men.

Amery’s Hitler Remark

According to Amery’s diary, Churchill even attacked the patriotism of the Secretary of State for India on the grounds that he supported the interests of “Indian moneylenders” over those of Englishmen. “Naturally I lost patience”, continued A mery in his diary, “and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s which annoyed him no little. I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane.”5

Amery made the Hitler remark in the heat of argument, but clearly he stood by it. For he left much out of his diaries – notably, any hint of his Jewish heritage, a secret uncovered in 2000 by historian William D Rubinstein. So the retention of this explosive comment can be no accident. Given that Chaim Weizmann, the future premier of Israel, had recently told Amery about a “monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them”, he understood as well as anyone could in those times the implications of his comparison.⁶ Amery may have been provoked by the reference to moneylenders – a hint that Churchill saw upper class Indians through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews. “All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more f amiliar to this subtle race than to… the Jew of the dark ages”, Thomas Babington Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who, in the view of this 19th century historian, compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome characteristic that he perceived in the Hindu: “as usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them”. The Bengali babu, another writer had joked in 1911, was “something of an Irishman, something of an Italian, something of a Jew: if one can conceive of an Irishman who would run away from a fight instead of into it, an Italian without a sense of beauty and a Jew who would not risk five pounds on the chance of making five hundred.”7

Amery may have had a further cause for his Hitler comment: exactly a year earlier, on 4 August 1943, the War Cabinet had made its first, and most crucial, decision to deny famine relief to Bengalis. Amery was undoubtedly aware of this anniversary, and the memory of what had transpired at that fateful War Cabinet meeting may have fuelled a simmering anger that burst forth upon Churchill’s tirade. In July 1943, the Government of India had informed the War Cabinet of outbreak of famine in Bengal, and requested emergency shipments of 5,00,000 tons of wheat by year-end. Half of that quantity would supply the army, while the other half would support the war effort by feeding urban and industrial populations; if any of the imported grain happened to be left over, it would be used for famine relief.

Outbreak of Famine

At the War Cabinet meeting of 4 August 1943, Amery had propounded the urgent Indian need for food “in as strong terms as I could”, according to his diary – but had failed to get the War Cabinet to schedule even a single shipment of wheat for India. The Secretary of State for War, Sir Percy James Grigg, who believed that the famine had been created by Bengali babus in order to make profits from speculation, had baselessly contradicted the Government of India and the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Grigg asserted that wheat would not relieve the Bengal famine – apparently in the mistaken belief, expressed in descriptions of the Bengal famine by more than one British historian, that Bengalis would not or could not eat wheat. (In truth, the War Cabinet wanted to conserve wheat, which was available in Australia, for the feeding of Europeans, if and when they were liberated.) Instead of scheduling relief for Bengal, the War Cabinet had dispatched 50,000 tons of wheat to Ceylon to await instructions as to the final destination, while around 1,00,000 tons of barley – which consignments were close to useless because they would have negligible effect on food prices – were to be ordered for India from Iraq.⁸

Churchill did say that if the situation in India got worse, Amery could bring it up again; but the next day, 5 August 1943, he left for a conference in Quebec. The following week a committee disbursed the shipping in the Indian Ocean for the next month. In September, 10 vessels would be required to load in Australia with wheat flour, and two with other foodstuffs, but none of these consignments would be g oing to India. In October, nine or 10 vessels would be needed to load in Australia with wheat and other food, but again none would be destined for India. Around 75,000 tons of Australian wheat would be transported to Ceylon and west Asia each month, to supply the war effort, and a further 1,70,000 tons would go to a supply centre in the Mediterranean region – to be stockpiled for future consumption by the civilians of southern Europe, whom Churchill hoped to liberate. The few ships travelling to India would be filled with war-related cargo. As for the Iraqi barley promised for India, negotiations on price, being the province of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Food, were incomplete when the War Cabinet again discussed the famine on 24 September 1943.

Later that year, Amery was able to ensure that the 50,000 tons of wheat intended for Ceylon eventually went on to India, and that a further 30,000 tons were ordered for the colony. The first of these consignments probably arrived in November. The timing is significant, because the greater the delay, the more the number of lives lost. The quantities matter too: as a result of the War Cabinet’s priorities, the Government of India received a mere 16% of the wheat that it had requested – far from enough to meet the requirements of the Indian army, let alone that of a famine-stricken populace. As a result, the army continued to use domestic supplies that could otherwise have been used to relieve famine: it consumed 1,15,000 tons of rice in 1943, twice the quantity it had used the previous year, because of a concurrent shortage in the supply of wheat.9

From the beginning of the war, India had exported grain for the war effort; the net quantity of wheat and rice exported in the fiscal year 1942-43 was 3,60,000 tons. Rice exports from India had come to a halt only in July 1943. But when the colony s uffered from famine – in no small part because of the scarcity and inflation resulting from such extractions of supplies – shiploads of Australian wheat would pass it by, to be stored for future consumption in Europe. The starvation of Bengalis was of little consequence, Amery quoted Churchill as saying, because the people were of negligible value to the war effort and in any case they were “breeding like rabbits”.¹⁰

Around July or August 1943, the non-availability of grain had forced government-run relief centres in Bengal to r educe the rations provided to famine victims to about four ounces per person per day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale at which, at much the same time, inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald were being fed. The Bengal famine had drawn to an end in December 1943, when the province h arvested its own winter rice crop. It killed 1.5 million people by the official e stimate alone, and possibly twice as much by other accounts.11

It is in this context that Amery’s comparison of Churchill’s attitudes with those of Hitler must be viewed. “In the occupied territories on principle only those people are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food who work for us”, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, had stated of the Slav countries that Germany had conquered (Poland, Czechoslovakia and tracts of the Soviet Union). Further,

Quote:

Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly-occupied eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to funnel off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the army and necessitates increased s upplies from home.

As the Third Reich tightened its grip, the withdrawal of its colonies’ products and resources would result in the deaths, from starvation and disease, of tens of millions of ordinary Slavs, noted a Nazi policy paper formulated in 1941.12 Notably, after attending one of the War Cabinet debates on sending famine relief to India, Wavell noted in his diary that Churchill wanted to “feed only those [ Indians] actually fighting or making m unitions or working some particular railways”.13 According to Amery, the prime minister felt that feeding Bengalis, who were not making much of a contribution to the war effort, was less important than feeding Greeks, who were. Such views towards Indian non-combatants are difficult to distinguish from the Nazi attitude towards ordinary Slavs, who were d escribed as “superfluous eaters”. Amery could not have known the specifics of the Nazi scheme for exploiting the colonies, called the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East). But he had read Mein Kampf in the original German and had studied Hitler’s speeches, which made no secret of the Führer’s dreams of restoring prosperity to Germany by extending its hegemony towards the east. Amery had even had a long conversation with Hitler in 1935, and noted in his autobiography that the German leader had a good grasp of economics. Amery was in any case aware that the Nazis were withdrawing resources from occupied territories (such as Greece), and leaving the natives to starve – just as Churchill had done in India.

Redesigning Indian Society

Nevertheless, the immediate provocation for Amery’s Hitler remark was not famine relief but Churchill’s scheme for the re designing Indian society. Whereas the prime minister held ordinary Indians to be expendable (and no worse) his attitude towards the Indian upper class was one of active hostility. In particular, he was convinced that native merchants and moneylenders had caused the famine (Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945) by stockpiling grain, which belief had exacerbated his enmity. Although much about his plan for India remains vague, Churchill clearly believed that a major makeover of native society, involving the termination of the babu class and its replacement by a British ruling elite, was necessary in order to extend British rule over India for “a few more generations” (as he had written to Viceroy Linlithgow in 1937). Churchill’s ideas for India’s future bear a passing resemblance to what is now known of Nazi plans for rendering the Slav regions into permanent slave territories by means of intellectual decapitation. In the Nazi plan, every Jew, as well as every member of the Slav intellectual and upper classes – people who, in Hitler’s view, were likely to f oment rebellions – were to be exterminated and replaced by a German ruling class. What makes Hitler’s legacy particularly horrific is that this plan was not merely theoretical: he did, in fact, largely implement the first part.14

Churchill’s ideas, as recorded by Amery, suggest also the influence of Stalin. Churchill met the dictator several times during the course of the war. He came

to admire Stalin’s decisiveness and ruthlessness – as evinced by the implementation of a scorched earth order against those Soviet citizens whose homes and fields lay in the path of the Nazis, which action had helped turn the tide against the invaders. In the early 1930s, Stalin had created in Soviet Union a collectivized society ruled by a class of party elites – in part by eliminating the kulaks, or rural moneylenders (although in practice all better-off peasants were targeted). At a meeting in 1942, Churchill had questioned Stalin about this collectivization scheme, which, along with appropriations of grain by the state, had led to the Ukrainian famine in which about 10 million people died.15

In subsequent conversations, Churchill would return to the prospect of collectivizing Indian society as well, at the expense of usurers and others – broadly, the babus, or educated Hindu males, who comprised almost the entire leadership of the Congress Party. According to Amery, in April 1945, Churchill spoke of “abolishing Indian landlords and moneylenders, instituting a Soviet system, etc”. Since Churchill detested communism, his fixation with this project speaks to his hatred of upper class Indians. The British imperial imagination cast the babus of India in a role similar to that in which the Nazis cast the Jews and the Slavic upper class, and the Soviets cast the kulaks and Ukrainian u pper class – as enemies of the state.16The British people, who by and large were weary of imperialism, would no doubt have viewed with disfavour such measures as collectivisation and large-scale imprisonment (or even extermination, judging by the language in which Amery recorded Churchill’s diatribe of 4 August 1944) undertaken in their name – especially after having fought a war to defend freedom. According to the Amery paper, ordinary Britons would not be permitted to know. Wartime restrictions were keeping from them many details of Churchill’s India policy, including his refusal to relieve the Bengal famine, and the prime minister evidently hoped to extend such protections to the post-war period by introducing Soviet-style controls: hence the “Intourist” bureau.

As it happens, Churchill and the conservatives decisively lost the British elections of 1945, so that he could not even begin to put into practice his ideas for the post-war regeneration of India.

Notes

1 Amery Papers, AMEL 1/6/34.

2 Barnes and Nicholson, 995.

3 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1100, 1136-8.

4 CHAR 20/165/43, 27 May 1944.

5 Barnes and Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, 992-993; Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1152-4.

6 Barnes and Nicholson, 986.

7 Joseph V Denney, Macaulay’s Essay on Warren Hastings (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1907), 36; Quoted in Chakravarty, The Raj Syndrome, 127.

8 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 157, 163; Barnes and N icholson, 933-934.

9 MT 59/631, “Note of a Meeting Held to Discuss Cross Trade Programme Requirements”, 11 August 1943.

10 Barnes and Nicholson, 950.

11 Woodhead, Famine Inquiry Commission, 109-110; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, 102; Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, 271.

12 Steven R Welch, “Our India”.

13 Moon, ed., Wavell, 19.

14 Welch, Nazi Plans for the East, in Adler, et al, G enocide: History and Fictions, 35-37.

15 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 23, 301.

16 Barnes and Nicholson, 1039.

COMMUNICATION FROM RAJIV MALHOTRA

2010-12-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

Until a few years ago, the Hindus in UK were protesting that the colonial loot is being mis-classified as "museum collection," when in fact it ought to be returned to the places from where it was looted. Then the clever Brits started hiring Indians to curate this loot, anddisplay it with respect in order to win them over, and thereby keep the loot. Over time, history gets forgotten and people get swayed by the aesthetics - upmarket wine and cheese parties at the house of lords and other prestigious places with our own desi bhais as the newly appointed "lords" and so forth. These new kinds of bhadralok ("white Indians") then do the dirty work, which includes getting the heat off the back of the Brit authorities who have no intention to return this loot. As this article below shows, this strategy has worked. Now Hindus "laud" that the Brit museums are holding precious artifacts of India without being bothered that these were were looted in colonial times.

In the 1990s, at a Sotheby's auction in New York, I saw a 10th century Vishnu status about 4 feet tall in impeccable condition, made of black marble. The description in their catalog was that it came from Orissa in a temple. It was being sold by a Brit family whose grandfather had brought it from India after his "service" in India. I was so moved and
bothered by this "sale" of India, that I decided to buy it so it returns to Indian hands, which I managed to do. Till this day I have tears when I see the beauty of this murti - it even has signs that people worshipped it at one time. I also bought a 2nd century Gandhar Buddha (now the place is called Afghanistan), and both these serve to remind me of the immense mental colonization that has taken place as things get reclassified over time.

Starting out as plunder, the object goes thru multiple intermediaries, until it reaches some rick person in England, and becomes part of the elite "private collections". Generations later, at some point his family cashes out by selling it via Christies/Sotheby's (both of whichN Started as middlemen in colonial times selling off Indian loot to rich Europeans). Some of the best pieces end up in western museums, where today's generation of ignorant Indians feel "honored" that the west has put it on display. I guess the old generation of UK Indians who were fighting to get back the kohinoor and other artifacts must have vanished.

Welcome to India's globalization! We have arrived!

Why Study History? By Peter N. Stearns

2010-11-02T20:14:00.000-07:00

Why Study History?

By Peter N. Stearns

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?

Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.

Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline.

History should

be studied
because it
is essential to
individuals and
to society, and
because it
harbors beauty.

History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

The importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behavior is no mere abstraction. Take an important human phenomenon such as alcoholism. Through biological experiments scientists have identified specific genes that seem to cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in some individuals. This is a notable advance. But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a history: rates of alcoholism have risen and fallen, and they have varied from one group to the next. Attitudes and policies about alcoholism have also changed and varied. History is indispensable to understanding why such changes occur. And in many ways historical analysis is a more challenging kind of exploration than genetic experimentation. Historians have in fact greatly contributed in recent decades to our understanding of trends (or patterns of change) in alcoholism and to our grasp of the dimensions of addiction as an evolving social problem.

One of the leading concerns of contemporary American politics is low voter turnout, even for major elections. A historical analysis of changes in voter turnout can help us begin to understand the problem we face today. What were turnouts in the past? When did the decline set in? Once we determine when the trend began, we can try to identify which of the factors present at the time combined to set the trend in motion. Do the same factors sustain the trend still, or are there new ingredients that have contributed to it in more recent decades? A purely contemporary analysis may shed some light on the problem, but a historical assessment is clearly fundamental—and essential for anyone concerned about American political health today.

History, then, provides the only extensive materials available to study the human condition. It also focuses attention on the complex processes of social change, including the factors that are causing change around us today. Here, at base, are the two related reasons many people become enthralled with the examination of the past and why our society requires and encourages the study of history as a major subject in the schools.

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a slightly more complex level) a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well—and sometimes abuse it. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

A study of history is essential for good citizenship. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow goal and can even challenge it at some points.

History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. History provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values—it's the only significant storehouse of such data available. It offers evidence also about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship. Further, studying history helps us understand how recent, current, and prospective changes that affect the lives of citizens are emerging or may emerge and what causes are involved. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

What does a well-trained student of history, schooled to work on past materials and on case studies in social change, learn how to do? The list is manageable, but it contains several overlapping categories.

The Ability to Assess Evidence. The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence—helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations. Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change. Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.

Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past—we lack the perspective for this feat; but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.

History Is Useful in the World of Work

History is useful for work. Its study helps create good businesspeople, professionals, and political leaders. The number of explicit professional jobs for historians is considerable, but most people who study history do not become professional historians. Professional historians teach at various levels, work in museums and media centers, do historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important—indeed vital—to keep the basic enterprise of history going, but most people who study history use their training for broader professional purposes. Students of history find their experience directly relevant to jobs in a variety of careers as well as to further study in fields like law and public administration. Employers often deliberately seek students with the kinds of capacities historical study promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations. They develop research skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources of information, and the means to identify and evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential. Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

What Kind of History Should We Study?

The question of why we should study history entails several subsidiary issues about what kind of history should be studied. Historians and the general public alike can generate a lot of heat about what specific history courses should appear in what part of the curriculum. Many of the benefits of history derive from various kinds of history, whether local or national or focused on one culture or the world. Gripping instances of history as storytelling, as moral example, and as analysis come from all sorts of settings. The most intense debates about what history should cover occur in relation to identity history and the attempt to argue that knowledge of certain historical facts marks one as an educated person. Some people feel that in order to become good citizens students must learn to recite the preamble of the American constitution or be able to identify Thomas Edison—though many historians would dissent from an unduly long list of factual obligations. Correspondingly, some feminists, eager to use history as part of their struggle, want to make sure that students know the names of key past leaders such as Susan B. Anthony. The range of possible survey and memorization chores is considerable—one reason that history texts are often quite long.

There is a fundamental tension in teaching and learning history between covering facts and developing historical habits of mind. Because history provides an immediate background to our own life and age, it is highly desirable to learn about forces that arose in the past and continue to affect the modern world. This type of knowledge requires some attention to comprehending the development of national institutions and trends. It also demands some historical understanding of key forces in the wider world. The ongoing tension between Christianity and Islam, for instance, requires some knowledge of patterns that took shape over 12 centuries ago. Indeed, the pressing need to learn about issues of importance throughout the world is the basic reason that world history has been gaining ground in American curriculums. Historical habits of mind are enriched when we learn to compare different patterns of historical development, which means some study of other national traditions and civilizations.

The key to developing historical habits of mind, however, is having repeated experience in historical inquiry. Such experience should involve a variety of materials and a diversity of analytical problems. Facts are essential in this process, for historical analysis depends on data, but it does not matter whether these facts come from local, national, or world history—although it's most useful to study a range of settings. What matters is learning how to assess different magnitudes of historical change, different examples of conflicting interpretations, and multiple kinds of evidence. Developing the ability to repeat fundamental thinking habits through increasingly complex exercises is essential. Historical processes and institutions that are deemed especially important to specific curriculums can, of course, be used to teach historical inquiry. Appropriate balance is the obvious goal, with an insistence on factual knowledge not allowed to overshadow the need to develop historical habits of mind.

Exposure to certain essential historical episodes and experience in historical inquiry are crucial to any program of historical study, but they require supplement. No program can be fully functional if it does not allow for whimsy and individual taste. Pursuing particular stories or types of problems, simply because they tickle the fancy, contributes to a rounded intellectual life. Similarly, no program in history is complete unless it provides some understanding of the ongoing role of historical inquiry in expanding our knowledge of the past and, with it, of human and social behavior. The past two decades have seen a genuine explosion of historical information and analysis, as additional facets of human behavior have been subjected to research and interpretation. And there is every sign that historians are continuing to expand our understanding of the past. It's clear that the discipline of history is a source of innovation and not merely a framework for repeated renderings of established data and familiar stories.

Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.

Why does my child do Sanskrit? by Rutger Kortenhorst

2010-10-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

Why does my child do Sanskrit?
by Rutger Kortenhorst

http://sanskrityoga.wordpress.com/453

Rutger Kortenhorst, a Sanskrit teacher in John Scottus School in Dublin, speaks on the value of teaching Sanskrit to children, based on his own experience with the language.

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, we are going to spend an hour together looking at the topic ‘Why does my child do Sanskrit in John Scottus?’ My bet is that at the end of the hour you will all have come to the conclusion that your children are indeed fortunate that this extraordinary subject is part of their curriculum.

Firstly, let us look at Why Sanskrit for my child? We are the only school in Ireland doing this language, so this will need some explaining. There are another 8 JSS-type schools around the world that have made the same decision to include Sanskrit in their curriculum (they are all off-shoots from the School of Philosophy).

Secondly, how is Sanskrit taught? You may have noticed your son or daughter singing Sanskrit grammar songs in the back of the car just for the fun of it on the way home from school. I’ll spend some time telling you HOW we approach teaching Sanskrit now since my year in India.

Why Sanskrit?

But first of all: why Sanskrit? To answer that we need to look at the qualities of Sanskrit. Sanskrit stands out above all other languages for its beauty of sound, precision in pronunciation and reliability as well as thoroughness in every aspect of its structure. This is why it has never fundamentally changed unlike all other languages. It has had no need to change being the most perfect language of Mankind.

If we consider Shakespeare’s English, we realize how different and therefore difficult for us his English language was although it is just English from less than 500 years ago. We struggle with the meaning of Shakespeare’s English or that of the King James Bible. Go back a bit further and we don’t have a clue about the English from the time of Chaucer’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ from around 700 AD. We cannot even call this English anymore and now rightly call it Anglo-Saxon. So English hadn’t even been born! All languages keep changing beyond recognition. They change because they are defective. The changes are in fact corruptions. They are born and die after seven or eight hundred years –about the lifetime of a Giant Redwood Tree- because after so much corruption they have no life left in them. Surprisingly there is one language in the world that does not have this short lifespan. Sanskrit is the only exception. It is a never-dying constant. The reason for the constancy in Sanskrit is that it is completely structured and thought out. There is not a word that has been left out in its grammar or etymology, which means every word can be traced back to where it came from originally. This does not mean there is no room for new words either. Just as in English we use older concepts from Greek and Latin to express modern inventions like a television: ‘tele [far] – vision [seeing]’ or ‘compute –er’. Sanskrit in fact specializes in making up compound words from smaller words and parts. The word ‘Sams – krita’ itself means ‘completely – made’.

So what advantages are there to a fundamentally unchanging language? What is advantageous about an unchanging friend, say? Are they reliable? What happens if you look at a text in Sanskrit from thousands of years ago?

The exceptional features of Sanskrit have been recognised for a few centuries all over the world, so you will find universities from many countries having a Sanskrit faculty. Whether you go to Hawai, Cambridge or Harvard and even Trinity College Dublin has a seat for Sanskrit –although it is vacant at present. May be one of your children will in time fill this position again?

Although India has been its custodian, Sanskrit has had universal appeal for centuries. The wisdom carried by this language appeals to the West as we can see from Yoga and Ayurvedic Medicine as well as meditation techniques, and practical philosophies like Buddhism and most of what we use in the School of Philosophy. It supports, expands and enlightens rather than conflicts withlocal traditions and religions.

The precision of Sanskrit stems from the unparalleled detail on how the actual sounds of the alphabet are structured and defined. The sounds have a particular place in the mouth, nose and throat that can be defined and will never change. This is why in Sanskrit the letters are called the ‘Indestructibles’ [aksharáni]. Sanskrit is the only language that has consciously laid out its sounds from first principles. So the five mouth-positions for all Indestructibles [letters] are defined and with a few clearly described mental and physical efforts all are systematically planned: [point out chart]After this description, what structure can we find in a, b, c, d, e, f , g…? There isn’t any, except perhaps that it starts with ‘a’, and goes downhill from there.

Then there is the sheer beauty of the Sanskrit script as we learn it today. [Some examples on the board]

You may well say: ‘Fine, but so why should my son or daughter have yet another subject and another script to learn in their already busy school-day?’ In what way will he or she benefit from the study of Sanskrit in 2010 in the Western world?

The qualities of Sanskrit will become the qualities of your child- that is the mind and heart of your child will become beautiful, precise and reliable.

Sanskrit automatically teaches your child and anybody else studying it to pay FINE attention due to its uncanny precision. When the precision is there the experience is, that it feels uplifting. It makes you happy. It is not difficult even for a beginner to experience this. All you have to do is fine-tune your attention and like music you are drawn in and uplifted. This precision of attention serves all subjects, areas and activities of life both while in school and for the rest of life. This will give your child a competitive advantage over any other children. They will be able to attend more fully, easily and naturally. Thus in terms of relationships, work, sport– in fact all aspects of life, they will perform better and gain more satisfaction. Whatever you attend to fully, you excel in and you enjoy more.

By studying Sanskrit, other languages can be learnt more easily; this being the language all others borrow from fractionally. The Sanskrit grammar is reflected in part in Irish or Greek, Latin or English. They all have a part of the complete Sanskrit grammar. Some being more developed than others, but always only a part of the Sanskrit grammar, which is complete in itself.

What Sanskrit teaches us that there is a language that is ordered, following laws unfailingly and as they are applied your child gets uplifted, not only when they grow up, but as they are saying it! This means they get an unusual but precise, definite and clear insight into language while they are enjoying themselves.

They learn to speak well, starting from Sanskrit, the mother language of all languages. Those who speak well run the world. Barack Obama makes a difference because he can speak well. Mahatma Gandhi could move huge crowds with well-balanced words. Mother Theresa could express herself with simple words which uplift us even now. The language of the great Master Teachers of mankind from times past is all we have got after centuries and millennia, but they make all the difference. We can enter the remarkable mind of Plato through his words. If your daughter or son can express themselves well through conscious language they will be the leaders of the next generation.

Sanskrit has the most comprehensive writings in the world expressed through the Vedas and the Gítá. The Upanishads –translated by William Butler Yeats have given people from all over the world an insight into universal religious feelings for more than one century now. To know these well expressed simple words of wisdom in the original is better than dealing with copies or translations as copies are always inferior to originals. We really need clear knowledge on universal religion in an age faced with remarkable levels of religious bigotry and terrorism arising from poorly understood and half-baked religious ideas.

Culture

Vivekananda, a great spiritual leader from India revered by all in the World Religious Conference of 1880 said:

You can put a mass of knowledge into the world, but that will not do it much good. There must come some culture into the blood. We all know in modern times of nations which have masses of knowledge, but what of them? They are like tigers; they are like savages, because culture is not there. Knowledge is only skin-deep, as civilization is, and a little scratch brings out the old savage. Such things happen; this is the danger. Teach the masses in the vernaculars, give them ideas; they will get information, but something more is necessary; give them culture.
Sanskrit can help your child to express universal, harmonious and simple truths better. As a result you will really have done your duty as a parent and the world will reap the benefits in a more humane, harmonious and united society. Sanskrit can do this as it is the only language that is based in knowledge all the way. Nothing is left to chance.

Just think for the moment how confusing it is for a child to learn to say ‘rough’, but ‘dough’. And why does the ‘o’ in ‘woman’ sound like an ‘e’ in ‘women’? How come the ‘ci’ in ‘special’ is different from the ‘ci’ in ‘cinema’? Teachers may well say ‘Just learn it’ as there is no logical explanation, but it only demonstrates to a child that it is all a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. What else does this randomness in the fundamental building-blocks of language teach a child about the world? That it’s just a confusing, random chance-event? How can this give anyone any confidence?

Now go to a language where everything is following rules. Where nothing is left to chance from the humble origin of a letter to the most sophisticated philosophical idea. How will that child meet the world? Surely with confidence, clarity and the ability to express itself?

I have seen myself and others growing in such qualities, because of our contact with Sanskrit. I have just spent a year in India. Though it felt a bit like camping in a tent for a year, it was well worth it. For many years, we taught Sanskrit like zealots i.e. with high levels of enthusiasm and low levels of understanding, to both adults in the School of Philosophy and children in John Scottus School. We did not perhaps inspire a lot of our students and may have put a number of them off the study of Sanskrit. It felt to me like we needed to go to the source. Sanskrit teachers worth their salt need to live with people whose daily means of communication is in Sanskrit. I had already spent three summers near Bangalore doing just that and becoming less of an amateur, but it really needed a more thorough study. So I moved into a traditional gurukulam for the year. This meant living on campus, eating lots of rice and putting up with a few power-cuts and water shortages, but by December 2009, I made up my mind that I would step down as vice-principal of the Senior School and dedicate myself to Sanskrit for the rest of my teaching life. It felt like a promotion to me as quite a few could be vice-principal but right now which other teacher could forge ahead in Sanskrit in Ireland? [Hopefully this will change before I pop off to the next world.] With Sanskrit I’m expecting my mind to improve with age even if my body slows down a little. Sanskrit is often compared to the full-time teacher, who is there for you 24/7 whereas the other languages are more like part-timers. The effects of studying Sanskrit on me have been first and foremost a realistic confidence. Secondly, it meant I had to become more precise and speak weighing my words more carefully. It also taught me to express myself with less waffle and therefore speak more briefly. My power of attention and retention has undoubtedly increased.

Teaching method

Now, let me explain for a few minutes, HOW Sanskrit is taught. To my surprise it is not taught well in most places in India. Pupils have to learn it from when they are around age 9 to 11 and then they give it up, because it is taught so badly! Only a few die-hards stick with it, in time teaching the same old endings endlessly to the next generation. This is partly due to India having adopted a craving to copy the West and their tradition having been systematically rooted out by colonialism.

For learning grammar and the wisdom of the East, I was well-placed in a traditional gurukulam, but for spoken Sanskrit I felt a modern approach was missing.

Then I found a teacher from the International School belonging to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. His name is Narendra. He has developed a novel, inspiring and light method to teach grammar, which doesn’t feel like you do any grammar at all. At the same time it isn’t diluted for beginners so you don’t end up with partial knowledge. I also followed a few Sanskrit Conversation camps, which all brought about more familiarity.

Narendra says he owes his method to Sri Aurobindo and his companion The Mother who inspired him to come up with the course we now follow in Dublin. This is one of the many things The Mother said to inspire him:“Teach logically. Your method should be most natural, efficient and stimulating to the mind. It should carry one forward at a great pace. You need not cling there to any past or present manner of teaching.”

This is how I would summarize the principles for teaching Sanskrit as we carry it out at present:
1. Language learning is not for academics as everyone learns to speak a language from an early age before they can read and write and know what an academic is. So why insist in teaching Sanskrit academically?

2. The writing script is not the most fundamental thing to be taught. A language is firstly made of its sounds, words and spoken sentences. [The script we use -though very beautiful- is only a few hundred years old.]

3. Always go from what is known to what is new.

4. Understanding works better than memorisation in this Age. Learning by heart should only take up 10 percent of the mental work, rather than the 90 percent rote learning in Sanskrit up to the recent present.

5. Don’t teach words and endings in isolation; teach them in the context of a sentence as the sentence is the smallest meaningful unit in language.

6. Any tedious memory work which cannot be avoided should be taught in a song.

7. Do not teach grammatical terms. Just as we don’t need to know about the carburetor, when we learn to drive a car.

8. The course should be finished in two years by an average student according to Narendra. This may be a little optimistic given that we are a little out of the loop not living in India, which is still Sanskrit’s custodian. At present I would say it is going to be a three-year course.

9. Language learning must be playful. Use drama, song, computer games and other tricks to make learning enjoyable.
We have started on this course since September and it has certainly put a smile on our pupils’ faces, which makes a pleasant change. I now feel totally confident that we are providing your children with a thorough, structured and enjoyable course. Our students should be well prepared for the International Sanskrit Cambridge exam by the time they finish –age 14/15- at the end of second year. We will also teach them some of the timeless wisdom enshrined in various verses. At present we are teaching them: “All that lives is full of the Lord. Claim nothing; enjoy! Do not covet His property”- in the original of course.

The future

Let us look at the 500 – year cycle of a Renaissance. The last European Renaissance developed three subjects: Art, Music and Science to shape the world we live in today. It had its beginning in Florence. The great Humanist Marsilio Ficino made Plato available to the masses by translating it from Greek to Latin. We live in exciting times and may well be at the beginning of a new Renaissance. It also will be based on three new subjects: Some say that these will be Economics, Law and Language.

Language has to become more universal now as we can connect with each other globally within seconds. NASA America’s Space Program is actively looking at Sanskrit in relation to I.T. and artificial intelligence.

Sri Aurobindo said “…at once majestic and sweet and flexible, strong and clearly-formed and full and vibrant and subtle…”.

What John Scottus pupils have said:

It makes your mind bright, sharp and clear.

It makes you feel peaceful and happy.

It makes you feel BIG.

It cleans and loosens your tongue so you can pronounce any language easily.

What Sanskrit enthusiasts have said:

It gives you access to a vast and liberating literature.

It can describe all aspects of human life from the most abstract philosophical to the latest scientific discoveries, hinting at further developments.

Sanskrit and computers are a perfect fit. The precision play of Sanskrit with computer tools will awaken the capacity in human beings to utilize their innate higher mental faculty with a momentum that would inevitably transform the mind. In fact, the mere learning of Sanskrit by large numbers of people in itself represents a quantum leap in consciousness, not to mention the rich endowment it will provide in the arena of future communication.NASA, California

After many thousands of years, Sanskrit still lives with a vitality that can breathe life, restore unity and inspire peace on our tired and troubled planet. It is a sacred gift, an opportunity. The future could be very bright.

Rick Briggs [NASA]
You may well have a few questions at this stage after which I would like to introduce you to a plant in the audience. A parent turned into a blazing ball of enthusiasm over Sanskrit grammar: John Doran. I would like him to wrap up.

I’ll give NASA’s Rick Briggs the last word from me:

One thing is certain; Sanskrit will only become the planetary language when it is taught in a way which is exiting and enjoyable. Furthermore it must address individual learning inhibitions with clarity and compassion in a setting which encourages everyone to step forth, take risks, make mistakes and learn.

Rick Briggs [NASA]

Hindu sects in Trinidad and Tobago by Dr. Kumar Mahabir

2010-10-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Hindu sects in Trinidad and Tobago

by Dr. Kumar Mahabir

Hinduism is the major religion among people of Indian descent in the Caribbean who reside mainly in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago (hereinafter referred to as Trinidad).

Hinduism remains one of the oldest living religions in Trinidad and the wider world. According to the 1990 official census data, Hindus in Trinidad form the second largest religious group in the country, after Roman Catholics. Roman Catholics comprise 29% of the population, Hindus 24%, Anglicans 11%, Muslims 6% and Presbyterians 3%. In a population of over one million, approximately 238,000 persons are Hindus.

Christians are divided into sects such as Catholicism, Anglicanism, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Hindus are also separated into various sects. Traditionally, they have been branched into four main denominations: Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism and Smartism.

In Trinidad, Hindus can be further categorised conveniently into sects such as Sanatanist, Arya Samaj, Kabir Panth, Sikh, Shivnarine/Sieunarine, Lord Murugan, Mother Kali, Hare Krishna, Sai Baba, Ganapathi Sachchidananda, Radha Madav, Chinmaya Mission and the Divine Life Society. It is not a simple task to categorise Hindus since they are often open and versatile in their beliefs, practices and affiliations.

Adherents of the Sai Baba group resist the Hindu label although the overwhelming majority of its followers are Hindus who retain most of the trappings of the traditional faith. Hindus also revere Jesus Christ, whom they consider to be another incarnation of God. Hindus are also more likely to visit a church or mosque to pray than Christians or Muslims are to enter a mandir.

Some Hindus choose to follow a swami who acts as a spiritual mediator or divine guide on how and to whom to pray. Except for the Sanatanist, Lord Murugan and Mother Kali (all of whom do not have an international spiritual leader), Hindu sects in Trinidad have been formed by the influence of swamis from India who possess(ed) charismatic personalities. In the Mother Kali sect, each poojaree [priest] in the temple becomes a trance medium and divine healer for the devotee.

In person, swamis are revered as divine incarnations. When absent, their photographs and statues are placed on the altar next to deities such as Lord Rama, Krishna and Radha, and are adulated. The only local male swami in Trinidad is Swami Prakashananda who is the founder and spiritual head of the local Chinmaya Mission. He does not claim divine birth, or to be gifted with extraordinary powers, or to be an incarnation of god who has descended on earth to save mankind. He is therefore, not worshipped.

Mother Kali, Radha Madav and Arya Samaj are the only groups that allow women to become priests. Except for Sanatanist, all the other sects train and ordain non-Brahmins to become priests. Unlike other Hindu sects, Sikhs and Sai Baba devotees do not recognise priests within their fold. Members from their congregation share leadership and ceremonial roles.

Arya Samaj, Kabir Panth, Shivnarine/Sieunarine and Sikh are the only four sects which do not venerate images. Sikh performs the least number of ceremonial rituals.

Not included in this selection is the group led by Swami Brahmadeo. He has a small following in Trinidad, but does not have a temple dedicated to him. Also excluded is the group led by Swami Amananda, the only local female swami in the country. She is the founder and spiritual head of the Sidha Yoga Ashram in Trinidad, which has become dormant.

Groups like the Blue Star Organisation, led by Sri Vasudeva, and the Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga Centre headed by Hemlata, are not sects, but rather centres that teach yoga and meditation.

The largest of all these groups is the Sanatanist, the newest is Lord Murugan, the most ethnically-diverse is Hare Krishna, and the most ecstatic is Mother Kali. Most Sanatanist Hindus belong to the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha. Smaller numbers follow SWAHA which is led by pundits of the Persad family in Aranguez. The fastest growing sects are Sai Baba and Mother Kali. However, the Shivnarine/Sieunarine and Divine Life Society have been experiencing a rapid decline in membership.

The sect that has virtually disappeared is the Ramanandi as a consequence of its merger with the Sanatanist. Followers of this faith are devotees of Ramananda (1400-1470) who lived in the Indian holy city of (Benares) Varanasi.

What is remarkable about these sects is that they do not encourage intolerance among their Hindu denominations or other non-Hindu faiths. Hindus believe the dictum in the Upanishads [3000 BCE] which proclaims that all the paths lead to the same goal, just as cows of various colours yield the same white milk.

“Hindu sects in Trinidad” is the theme of this year’s edition of the magazine being produced by the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Council. Copies of the magazine can be obtained by e-mailing dmahabir@gmail.com, or by calling 674-6008, 675-7707.

Dr. Kumar Mahabir

Chairman, Indo-Caribbean Cultural Council (ICC)

Assistant Professor, University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT)

10 Swami Avenue, Don Miguel Road

San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago

West Indies

Tel: (868) 674-6008

Tel/fax: (868) 675-7707

Mobile (868) 756-4961

E-mail: dmahabir@gmail.com, mahab@tstt.net.tt

Please visit the UPDATED website for books on South Asians/(East) Indians in the Caribbean

http://chakrapub.wordpress.com/

Please visit the UPDATED website for magazines on South Asians/(East) Indians in the Caribbean http://icctrinidad.wordpress.com

Harvard and the Indian Billionaires by Rajiv Malhotra

2010-10-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

Harvard and the Indian Billionaires
By Rajiv Malhotra, Oct 15, 2010.

This morning, Times of India celebrates the headlines that, "Harvard gets biggest international donation in 102 yrs, from Tata Group."http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Harvard-gets-biggest-international-donation-in-102-yrs-from-Tata-Group/articleshow/6752185.cms The timing on the eve of Obama's India visit has strategic importance. This whopping $50 million gift is part of a massive trend that deserves some thought, so here I go...

Many years ago, when RK Mishra (Dhirubhai Ambani's right-hand man) was alive, he and his wife stayed a weekend with me specifically to get briefed on what to do about Harvard's request for funding chairs there. I brought in 6 scholars who were part of my team studying the state of South Asian Studies in the west. The data we supplied were eye-openers for Mishra, as they had never been made aware of the anti-India tilts in places like Harvard. One talk I gave compared how harvard studies China with great respect, while India is seen through the human rights lens - caste, women's "oppresion", minority "oppression", etc... Others gave specific areas of biases as well - from Aryan theory on. The result was that Mishra went back and advised the Ambanis to NOT give Harvard a dollar, until they would make changes to their stance on India. China, I was able to show, gets treated as a serious civilization. One factor was that China studies is done largely in Mandarin while India is studied in English. Also, China regulates visas for western scholars such that it blacklists those it finds troubling, whereas India is open and welcomes everyone without supervision, and fails to do any analysis after the fact as to whats being produced. In fact, Indians find it a compliment when westerners study them, as though suffering from an inferiority complex of feeling left out. Finally, a key difference is that Indian intellectuals are heavily anti-India because of pseudo-secularism and marxism deeply entrenched in Indian intellectual circles, and most important Indian scholars are western trained and/or funded and/or craving to be in their good books for fame and prestige. Chinese do not suffer such complexes, which in India are the after-effects of colonization. This is because Gandhi got superseded by Nehru in defining the elitist Indian ethos. Gandhi was emphatic about his Indianness, whereas Nehru bragged to John Kenneth Galbraith that he was the "last white man to rule India."

This intervention by me through R.K. Mishra did put a temporary dampener on their crusade to dip into the pockets of rich Indians. It also put me on the hit list of harvard. I also ended Infinity foundation's annual sponsorship of the Indology Roundtable at Harvard which was my "listenind device" of what they were up to. As a follow up to this saga, my friend, JC Kapur in Delhi, called up the head of FICCI at the time, and told him point-blank to stop supporting Harvard's PR campaign with Indian industry for such funding. This too worked, and grudgingly the FICCI head at that time stopped opening doors for harvard in India. But the lure to become famous in harvard and dine with the who's who of white american establishment is too powerful for Indians to resist. The real "success" for most is when they are recognized by the west. This is what the west knows well, having studied Indian culture for centuries, and used precisely this knowledge to manage, control and topple one raja after another in the 17th and 18th centuries. Take the kids to Cambridge, play polo with them, have western women to flirt, etc. - so they can feel like admitted to the club as honorary whites in front of other Indians. After independence, the brits got replaced by the americans, hence the strategic importance of places like harvard.

Some years later, there came a call from a prominent Indian that Anand Mahindra was being roped in by Harvard, and he had given them office space in his Mumbai HQ. So I was set up for a persional one-on-one meeting with Anand Mahindra. He is a very decent, gentle, open-minded executive for sure. He listened to my frank talk. He was unaware of these issues which clearly bothered him. But he made clear that he owed a lot to harvard, as they had given him a scholarship to study there when his father had refused to support him go there. So it was payback time for him, nothing more. Not to worry, he said, because he was giving only very small sums of money, such as $20,000 at a time, and that too for Indian students to go there as scholars. He suggested that I write to him my objections concerning harvard, so he could pass it on, and make sure they change their approach. I also suggested to him that Indians who want to fund Harvard should fund their business school, which has become pro-India, but NOT the humanities which are the nexus of this "south Asian" nonsense. A few days later, at Mr. Mahindra's suggestion I had a brief phone chat with Harvard's Sugata Bose who was visiting India as harvard brand ambassador to raise funds. I have publicly criticized Sugata Bose for his writings that depict pre-Mughal India as uncivilized, his idea of colonial problems focusses only on British but exempts the islamic colonizers, and he sees de-colonization as the return to a unified south asia under quasi-islamic civilization (positioned as "secularism"). This, of course, his girlfriend and co-author, Ayesha Jalal, has very skillfully managed to make into the core curriculum on south asia at places such as Harvard. (Jalal while not on the Harvard faculty was on the committee of their South Asia program until I pointed this strange anomaly out, and then she suddenly left that visible spot.) Prof Bose was cordial and frank, and we agreed to continue to chat later - which never materialized. Bose also lashes out against his great grand-uncle, Subhash Chandra Bose, the freedom-fighter, portraying him as a fascist. Music to the ears of the harvard establishment. These folks bring in Kashmir separatists, Maoists, "abused Hindu women", Dalit activists, etc. routinely as the "voices of the real India." Anand Mahindra announced last month that he is donating $10 million to Harvard specifically designated for the Humanities.

About 5 years ago, my colleague at Infinity Foundation, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and I went to see Rajat Gupta (McKinsey) to meet privately for several hours. I raised the topic that before Indian philanthropists give funding to US unversities, people like Rajat should do "due diligence" on what a given program has produced, how it fits into the image of India that the philanthropist has. After all, no management consultant proposes an investment by his wealthy client in any venture without due diligence. It struck a chord with him. Then I pointed out that nobody other than me had attenpted any such arms-length critical study of South Asian Studies in USA. I mentioned that Chinese government and Chinese private donors do an annual report on the state of China Studies in the west, just like any industry analyst would do for an indistry, and this guides them where and how to invest. This gives them the basis for evaluating a given program and negotiating from a position of knowledge about what is what in the discipline. He was candid in confessing that he had not studied the south asia studies discipline to be able to tell me what went on in depth. But, he remarked in typical India style, he thinks the persons involved in such studies seem like "nice guys" and decent folks. I responded that in evaluating a business investment, the due dligence would not be based on whether the management team were "nice guys" or decent folks in their personal lives, but that it would look for hard-hitting data and evidence to evaluate. Had he or anyone else studied the writings of such departments over the past 50 years, to be able to evaluate what was going from the Indian point of view? The answer then reamins the same today - no, they have not!

In one meetng after another for 15 years, I have raised such issues. One example of such an article I wrote in 2003 is on Rediff.com, titled, "Does South Asia Studies undermine India?" (See: http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/dec/08rajiv.htm ) I have also proposed that India could use its own India Studies and even South Asian Studies based in Indian universities (as a way to study neighbouring countries with an India-centric lens). I have argued that the money used to fund one Harvard chair (at least $5 million) could fund a whole department of scholarship in India. The irony is that even those who claim to be patriotic, nationalists, including those being described as "Hindu nationalists," seem confused and mixed up. The GOI has given major funding to western studies of South Asia - including both BJP and Congress led governments. Yet there is not a single government or private philanthropist report on the state of this "industry" that studies India, which consists of several thousand scholars full-time who come from various disciplines - religious studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, human rights, women's studies, etc. On the other hand, China Studies in the academy is secure in China's hands, with western scholars are "outsiders" craving to be allowed entry.

Before spending money, one must have a strategic clarity as to what ideas of India are to be promoted. Otherwise, well formulated ideas of India by various other institutions get to dominate - such as ideologies of seminaries, US government thinktanks, academic south asian marxists-islamists, etc. Indians participate but not on their own rules. Tragically, Indians do not even have clarity on this amongst themesleves much less being able to project it. At a gathering at Ram Jethmalani's house last year, I was invited as the featured speaker for the evening. I spoke on this very issue that Indians must take control of India Studies. One prominent woman activist (Madhu Kishwar) diverted the issue by asking whether the studies would be done in Hindi! The whole gathering easily got distracted by any odd and irrelevant idea, that should not have diverted them from the core proposition being discussed. Some others asked "whose idea of India" would be studied, would it be the Muslims' idea and dalit idea, or would brahmins dominate? Indians do not even have a consensus on what is India as we want to see it.

Earlier this year, there was a rumor that Infosys founder Narayan Murthy was giving $15 million to harvard to translate and publish ancient Indian texts into English, for popular reading. On the surface this seems good for us. But the details count and such details are typcially glossed over by Indians. The editor appointed for the series is none other than Prof. Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), even though he takes an explicitly Marxist view of Sanskrit - explotation by brahmins of dalits, women, muslims, etc. His famous writing, "The Death of Sanskrit" laid out his idea of its history as a source of power in the hands of a few. He has been editor of the CLAY series of Indian Classics already, and one has to see that to get an idea of his biases. (See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Sanskrit_Library ) While doing a great job bringing out the "beauty" of the indian materials, the fact remains that he simply assumes and states the Aryan invasion/migration theory as a given without even raising any issue with it. Very elegant and beautifully produced, this series already has 46 volumes in print, and its influence is considerable. My concern was that the Murthy family might not have invested time and resources to go into the details of the issues at stake in the translation of Indian classics in the west. The Murthy donation will also take this new series from harvard, and send it back into Indian education, making this "Made in USA" depiction of Indian Classics the canon for Indians to study as their definition of themesleves. This is what max Mueller's works did a century ago. It is their money and they have a right to do what they please with it. But wouldn't it have been wiser if they had funded something to do with their area of expertise and competence, so they could at least evaluate and monitor professionally, and not depend on "they are nice fellows" level of naivete. When this rumor was critiqued by me, the head of the Hindu American Foundation inquired and concluded that the runor was false based on his "inside" information from the Murthy's. A few days later the official announcement was made. Also, Prof. Pollock was awarded the Padma Shri award by GOI at a Republic Day ceremony in Rashtrapathy Bhavan, for his great contributions to the study of sanskrit.

None of the reactions from the "Hindu activists" have made any sense either, be it issuing petitions or writing angrily to the parties concerned. They have failed to understand the deeper mechanisms at work. You dont fight a patient's infection by holding playcards shouting slogans against the germs! The doctor has to understand the mechanisms of the disease and how/where to intervene. But a lazy, incompetent man (despite his good intentions) would have no time to go to med school and learn all that, and THEN be competent to defeat the disease. He is in too much of a hurry, wants to make a big splash in public to look important; and hence he stands outside the hospital shouting slogans against the germs. This sounds like a strange analogy, but if you examine closely the "activists" at work, it is a fairly accurate one.

Kaushal's blog

The word Sankalpa and its usage in a Hindu household

The Nature of Sankalpa

Swami Anandakumar Saraswati

Some more quotes o John Kenneth Galbraith

Will Manmohan Singh be forced to quit? - MD Nalapat in epaper: Pakistan Observer

A column about humorous quotes

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. John Kenneth Galbraith :

My books are available on amazon.com , Lulu.com

The Black money in swiss banks is mainly form India

I am a survivor

The Generalization of the indic by Koenrad Elst as, illogical, arrogant and ignorant

1.Dr.Patil to Rajiv Malhotra

2. Koenrad Elst in reply to Dr Patil

3. My comment on KE

4. KE in reply to me

6.MY view of KE

Appendix A Reply to Witzel

KE RePLY

Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee

Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee

'Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India' indicates the level of his drepravity

Redesigning Indian Society

COMMUNICATION FROM RAJIV MALHOTRA

Why Study History? By Peter N. Stearns

Why Study History?

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History Provides Identity

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

History Is Useful in the World of Work

What Kind of History Should We Study?

Further Reading

Why does my child do Sanskrit? by Rutger Kortenhorst

Hindu sects in Trinidad and Tobago by Dr. Kumar Mahabir

Harvard and the Indian Billionaires by Rajiv Malhotra