From: Xavier William <varekatx@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:23 AM
Subject: Vedas and the mosquitoes
To: india-unity@yahoogroups.com, indiathinkersnet@yahoogroups.com
I have cholesterol and the moment any one hears of it they advise me on what to do and what not to do, on what to eat and what not to eat though I am a chemical engineer and know what the chemical equations involved are to some extend. And the advice is carried on to other fields by men and women such as into religion and then there is look on their faces which is identical to the looks on the faces of my parents when they told me this is good and this is bad.
I have no problem with their face language as I have already outgrown my parents.
However I have a problem when I learn that they are younger, less educated, less read, and less experienced than me. What is more they take the Bible/Koran/veda as the ultimate source of knowledge. That is confusing to me. As far as I am concerned either there are the laws of nature or the myths of religions. I cannot accommodate both as some can and do to the detriment of religions and science and the self. Einstein said "There are only two ways of living your life. One is as if everything is a miracle (the path of religion) or as if nothing is a miracle. (The path of science)" But some adher to both as they fear the consequence of atheism such as eternal fire and/or ostracism.
Getting down to Parental advices vis-à-vis medicines, what is most common to most advices is that modern prescriptions are made of chemicals and so will harm you whereas if you use Ayurveda there will be no harm. Then they carry on with that Prental all-knowing look on their face saying that Ayurveda comes down from the Rishis who meditated in the forests and got down to the secrets of nature. Though they do not say which forests of India these rishis meditated in, it is obvious that Rishi is a north Indian term and so the forest concerned are mostly of North India. Probably no forest in south India had the kind of knowledge that the forests of north India had.
I am a chemical engineer by education and in business by profession. Chemical engineering is a discipline among thousands of disciplines that come under science. In science things can be discovered only by experimentation which in the final analysis means experiments the outcomes of which have to be measured. There is no record of any rishi doing anything let alone experimenting with anything or trying to come to conclusions after measuring the outcome. In fact science believes in measurements and so do I. But the so called rishis may have believed in intuitions, but their present-day blind-believers say that whatever the rishis - most of them Brahmins - are infallible in the same way that the Catholics say that the Pope is infallible. So the sayings of the Brahmins and Popes are far more reliable than the hours and years of work put in by scientists. Here again these people, what ever their ethnic identity be, boast that the priests of their own ethnic group have more credibility than scientists. They fail to recognize that the Popes and the Sankaracharyas and others of that ilk are mere shaman or witch-doctors in solemn attire.
Mosquitoes have tormented India for thousands or millions of years, long before vedic times and before the rishis. Obviously mosquitoes must have harassed the rishis. So when our myths say that rishis sat still for decades and discovered the secrets of Ayurveda, it is difficult for me to digest. For Valmiki to sit still until white ants covered him with their mud is difficult for me to digest. He must have been attacked by mosquitoes long before white ants and their mounts. In the meantime many Indians must have suffered from Malaria and other dreaded mosquito-borne deceases. But even after 5000 or more years of mosquitoes and Malaria the rishis of Brahmic origins had no clue to the fact we now know thanks to Western Science that they are mosquitoes that spread deceases like Malaria. Our rishis did not know of the relationship between mosquitoes and the deceases they carried because rishis had no microscospes or the means to measure and monitor the parameters concerned. Nor did the incarnations down the ages and their representatives like the rishis know of micro-organism for the simple that most knowledge comes from trial and error and experimentation and not by meditation. Meditation is glorified by our present media hype. Meditation without experimentation is as meaningless as a sea without water.
Reverting to mosquitoes, the biggest impact India and Indians have had on mosquitoes came in the form of a product named Good Knight. Did this product evolve from vedic technology? No. The technology that came in the form of Good Knight came from present-day Japanese technology, which in turn came through Japan's adaptation of Western Technology. Why did Good Knight not adopt Rishi technology for driving out the mosquitoes even as its CEO was all praises for Rishis and Indian heritage?
It is the fashion in India to bash the West and its technology and philosophy and to boast that we have a culture 5000 years old. How did we know that our culture is ancient? It took the likes of Max Muller to bring Indian history and culture to the light of the modern world and Max Muller and others like him did it by adopting Western technology. So even as we boast of our heritage we lambaste the technology that brought our culture to light.
We wake up in the morning and the first thing that we do is to pick up the brush and paste both made on the basis of Western technology and then we sit down on a Western closet and then we eat from a plate made with Western technology and then walk from our homes made of cement and steel of Western technology on an asphalt road to our car made of western technology to our work place operating along O&M principles and then we sit down to a computer made by Western technology and then access the IT and then blast it out against the West and glorify the Vedas and the Rishis. Quotations of western origins say that imitation is the biggest from of admiration. Obviously we express our admiration of the West by imitating/aping them and then in true Vedic/Brahminic fashion we lambaste the West. Is it not hypocrisy, Venkat? Cricket, football and every game
we play are borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the West. Our courts and law-making institutions operate on the guidelines introduced into India by the West. Why is it that our epics like the Geetha each shloka of which we boast have more breadth and depth than all other holy books of the world not provide for simple codes like the one Moses provided which in turn was formulated on the lines of the code formulated by Hamurabi of Babylon who was neither a Christian or a Muslim or .. It is 63 years since the British left us. However our courts still follow the CrPC introduced by the decadent West.
Not a second passes in our lives wherein we do not depend on Western technology and ideals and yet in the ultimate of hypocrisy we insult them every second of the day using the media-technology that they introduced.
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Xavier William |
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Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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