Simple world for love and peace. I Love India

Leveraging India as India Stands Up

2006-09-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

Ashok Jhunjhunwala Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, ...Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras.

ABSTRACT Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala has significant expertise in incubating technology to make a difference for the masses in India.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. This group is closely working with industry in the development of a number of Telecommunications and Computer Network Systems. TeNeT group has incubated a number of technology companies which work in partnership with TeNeT group to develop world class Telecom Access products.

The group has also incubated a company which aims to install and operate telephone and Internet in every village in India. Come here what he as to share from his vast experiences in this field.

2006-06-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

Indians everywhere should become enlightened International citizens.Wherever you are, whichever country you live, enrich that nation, not only in financial terms, but also with your sweat knowledge and dignity since that is the tradition of the country from where you came.At the same time, remember we have a common umbilical connectivity to our motherland, India.

A P J Abdul Kalam
Hon'ble President of India
at the 3^rd Pravasi Bharatiya Divas held from 7 - 9 Jan 2005 at Mumbai.

India as seen by Mark Twain

2006-04-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

"India is an epitome of the whole world and posses all the leading features of other lands - the most bewitching scenery, the most fertile soil, the most dense forests, the highest mountains, some of the biggest rivers, and intensely cold seasons may be found along with arid, treeless deserts, sandy waterless plains. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India." -Mark Twain

Some quotes about India

2006-04-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made. -Albert Einstein.

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition. - Mark Twain.

If there i one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India. -French scholar Romain Rolland.

India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border. - Hu Shih (former Chinese ambassador to USA )

Indian Snapshot

2006-03-12T17:17:00.000-08:00

This is article from HindustanTimes from Veer Sanghvi. Courtsey: Hindustan Times

For the last couple of months, I have spent very little time in Delhi or, for that matter, in Bombay. A succession of conferences, engagements and the shooting schedule for a new television programme have kept me on the road. I have visited parts of south India I had not seen for a decade; have driven through chunks of western India; spent much of the last week in north Bengal; and travelled through cities and small towns that have changed dramatically over the last ten or fifteen years.

Admittedly, my approach is that of the standard journalistic paratrooper who lands in a new place without bothering to learn the background to the situations he encounters and then moves on without fully understanding the people he has met. And yes, the vast majority of those I met were middle class or very nearly middle-class — I didn’t meet any landless labourers or poor farmers.

But, from my perspective, despite these obvious shortcomings, the experience was valuable because it got me out of Delhi and its pre-occupations. And it afforded me an opportunity to listen to people elsewhere in India.

In the ten years since I last travelled so widely, India has been transformed. Integral to this transformation has been the growth of Big Media. A decade ago, you relied on the local paper in each town (The Deccan Herald in Bangalore, The Telegraph in Calcutta, The Tribune in Chandigarh etc) to judge popular sentiment. Now, while the local papers still survive, they are being increasingly challenged by new editions of the national dailies.

Then, there are the TV channels. We live in an era when the news channels dictate the immediate responses of the middle classes (and the political elite). A case in point is the way in which educated Indians reacted to the verdict in the Jessica Lall murder case. When Manu Sharma and Vikas Yadav murdered Jessica seven years ago, it was essentially a Delhi story. But when a court let them walk a fortnight ago, all of middle class India was outraged. It was the news channels that took the case national.

But I wondered if the public mood outside of Delhi mirrored the pre-occupations of the nation’s capital. Had Big Media succeeded in forging a national consensus? Or were there trends bubbling under the surface that we had missed?

Here, for what it is worth, is a snapshot of the middle class India I encountered on my travels.

* The first and most obvious change I noticed was that politics obsesses people much less than it used to. A decade ago, when people found out I was a journalist, they wanted to know about the government. What was the Prime Minister like? How stable was his ministry? Or, they would want to discuss the latest political scandal.

The big change, this time around, was that few people wanted to talk about politics. There was widespread, if muted, approval of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi’s aura has yet to fade. But nobody seemed particularly interested in either of them. Nobody asked the great Indian political question of the last two decades: “Will the government last?”

When political issues were discussed, they tended to be local (I was in small-town Karnataka when the state government fell) and nobody cared about national political scandals. A decade ago, I was always asked about hawala, Bofors, corruption etc. Even a few years ago, Tehelka would crop up. But this time nobody asked about Quattrochhi or Natwar Singh or, even, cash-for-questions.

The only scandal that ever cropped up in the conversation concerned the Amar Singh tapes. And even then, all people wanted to know was: who were the actresses involved? And were the conversations really naughty? When I responded that I had heard the tapes and that there was nothing remotely salacious in Amar Singh’s conversations, they immediately lost interest.

* Logic suggests that if people have tired of politics, they should care about economics. But in the run-up to the Budget, not one person — not even a businessman in some aircraft cabin — asked about the Budget, before proceeding to favour me with his own thoughts. Once upon a time, this was the Big Subject. Flying back to Delhi, a day after this Budget, I began to wonder if all of us in the media had got the public mood badly wrong with our back-to-back TV coverage and excessive newspaper focus on the concessions offered to the ice-cream sector.

My guess is that Indians don’t really give a damn about the Budget any longer — unless there are huge increases in taxation. And that we in the media should rethink our outdated obsession with Budget news.

* It is a truism within Big Media to say that the people of India want peace with Pakistan. My sense, however, was that while nobody wants another war, outside of Delhi and parts of the Punjab perhaps there was no great warmth towards Pakistan. Most of India is young, does not care about Partition and sees Pakistan as just another foreign country — and a hostile one at that.

When peace with Pakistan came up, every single person I met was clear: there could only be peace on our terms. And this meant not giving up an inch of Kashmir. Nor was there any support for the idea of more autonomy for Kashmir.

So, let us treat all this liberal rhetoric about how Indians long for peace with scepticism. Our idea of peace is: Pakistan should shut up and behave itself or we will retaliate.

It is not a public mood that will lead to any lasting settlement of this long-running conflict. And I think that the challenge before politicians is to shift the consensus. Big Media has tried. And I think it has failed.

* The general view in Delhi is that the BJP is floundering, that it is a party without an issue. Judging by my travels, this view could be seriously mistaken.

There is a massive Hindu backlash building up. The public mood reminded me of the late 1980s, when such issues as Shah Bano and The Satanic Verses so upset moderate Hindus that they turned against Congress-style secularism.

The provocation, this time around, is the attitude of the Muslim political leadership to foreign Islamic issues. No Hindu I met thought it was right for a Danish paper to carry cartoons of the Prophet. But why, they all asked, did Indians Muslims have to get so agitated? What did it have to do with us? Why should a minister in the UP government announce a bounty on the head of the Danish cartoonist? Why should Indian Muslims demand the recall of the Danish ambassador?

I have written about the shameful cop-out by liberal Muslims over these issues before so I will not labour the point. But the Hindu backlash is a perfect issue waiting for a BJP initiative. This time around, the BJP need not focus on how Indian secularism makes Hindus second-class citizens in their own country. (Nobody buys that line any longer.) All it needs to do is to portray Indian Muslims as unreasonable fanatics obsessed with global Muslim issues and argue that they subscribe to some international pan-Islamic identity that could easily conflict with Indian nationalism.

My feeling is that if liberal Muslims continue to react as pathetically as they have over the last few months and if liberal Hindus do not make it clear that genuine secularism means that we fight all kinds of fanaticism — both Hindu and Muslim — a new generation of BJP leaders will ride this backlash to return to power. By ignoring the Hindu sentiment, Big Media is making a big mistake.

* So, finally, how powerful is the influence of Big Media? If you treat the national media as a force for homogenisation, then there is no doubt that they have enormous influence. I found fewer regional variations in sentiment than a decade or so ago. Even the reach of the media is astonishing: who would have heard about the Amar Singh tapes fifteen years ago?

But the old divide between the Delhi-Bombay mindset and the rest of India remains. Much of what Big Media believes (on the Budget, on relations with Pakistan, on the future of the BJP etc) seems to me to be out of step with the public mood that I encountered on my travels.

For instance, this is the age of the TV sting. But while the original Tehelka stings (on defence purchases and cricket fixing) got the country talking, the new stings are viewed as TV reality shows — as paler versions of the drama on Sa Re Ga Ma. People may watch them. But they don’t care very much. And each sting is quickly forgotten.

And as for all the little issues and scoops that we in the Delhi media care so much about (did Natwar Singh’s son go to Iraq, does Quattrochhi have access to his back accounts, do ministers listen to the PMO? etc), no matter how valid and important they are as news stories — and it is not my intention to play down their significance — the truth is that they have lost their resonance with Middle India.

Big Media has the influence. But all too often we focus on things that nobody cares about. And miss the ones that matter.

2006-02-10T13:31:00.000-08:00

To be in India is to be assaulted by sensations, smells, colors, emotions, questions; to struggle to find answers; and to face your innermost desires and fears.

Facts about India

2005-09-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Ancient thinkers of India were not only Greatest Scientists and mathematicians, but also deeply religious, esteemed saints of their times. While it may surprise some to think of religious sages as mundane scientists, the Indian view is that religion (universal) and science are but two sides of the same coin - in short…semantics. Whether one calls a natural phenomena wind or the wind god - Vayu - one is speaking of the same thing. Yet it seems that having a spiritual foundation not only brought out important discoveries still in use today, but these discoveries also were helpful without causing harm or destruction like toadys science is doing to environment,living beings & mother earth. In fact this article will cite the origins of some amazing and here-to-for mis-credited discoveries as coming from India. Some examples include so-called Arabic numerals, the concept of the zero, so-called Pythagorean theory, surgery and more. It may seem astonishing, but the ancient texts are there to show the thinking and writing of these great Indian thinkers. Why is India not credited? It seems that in the West we have a condescending, Euro- or Greco-centric view that civilizations older than Greece were uncivilized barbarians. But I digress. The point is that westerners have been brought up for decades incorrectly viewing ancient civilizations as intellectually and culturally inferior to modern man .

So it is no surprise to be surprised in learning some of the greatest discoveries not only came from India, but from ancient India. It shakes the very foundationsof prejudicial beliefs. Here are but a few examples of India's enlightened thinkers.

Cosmology & Psychology

According to India's ancient texts, around 3000 BCE sage Kapil founded both cosmology and psychology. He shed light on the Soul, the subtle elements of matter and creation. His main idea was that essential nature(prakrti) comes from the eternal (purusha) to develop all of creation. No deeper a view of the cosmos has ever been developed. Further, his philosophy of Sankhya philosophy also covered the secret levels of the psyche, including mind, intellect and ego, and how they relate to the Soul or Atma. Maharishi Patanjali again showed the great path to perfection of the human mind & codified it in his works in which he mentions the mind boggling perfections/Siddhis & knowledge man can achieve by following the laws of the universe.


Medicine (Ayurveda),  Aviation

Around 800 BCE Sage Bharadwaj, was both the father of modern medicine, teaching Ayurveda, and also the developer of aviation technology. He wrote the Yantra Sarvasva, which covers astonishing discoveries in aviation and space sciences, and flying machines - well before Leonardo DaVinchi's time. Some of his flying machines were reported to fly around the earth, from the earth to other planets, and between universes. His designs and descriptions have left a huge impression on modern-day aviation engineers. He also discussed how to make these flying machines invisible by using sun and wind force. There are much more fascinating insights discovered by sage Bharadwaj. Medicine, Surgery, paediatrics, gynecology. Anatomy, physiology, Pharmacology, Embryology, Blood circulation Around this era and through 400 BCE many great developments occurred. In the field of medicine (Ayurveda), sage Divodasa Dhanwantari developed the school of surgery; Rishi Kashyap developed the specialized fields of pediatrics and gynecology. Lord Atreya, author of the one of the main Ayurvedic texts, the Charak Samhita, classified the principles of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, embryology, blood circulation and more. He discussed how to heal thousands of diseases, many of which modern science still has no answer. Along with herbs, diet and lifestyle, Atreya showed a correlation between mind, body, spirit and ethics. He outlined a charter of ethics centuries before the Hippocratic oath. Sage Thirumular lived for hundreds of years by using the following the path of yoga & ayurveda without getting any disease & prolonging his life for hundreds of years.

Rhinoplasty, amputation, caesarean and cranial surgeries,
anesthesia,antibiotic herbs

While Lord Atreya is recognized for his contribution to medicine, sage Sushrut is known as the "Father of surgery". Even modern science recognizes India as the first country to develop and use rhinoplasty (developed by Sushrut). He also practiced amputation, caesarean and cranial surgeries, and developed 125 surgical instruments including scalpels, lancets, and needles.

Lord Atreya - author of Charak Samhita. Circa 8th - 6th century BCE. Perhaps the most referred to Rishi/physician today The Charak Samhita was the first compilation of all aspects of ayurvedic medicine including diagnoses, cures, anatomy, embryology, pharmacology, and blood circulation (excluding surgery).He wrote about causes and cures for diabetes, TB, and heart diseases. At that time, European medicine had no idea of these ideas. In fact, even today many of these disease causes and cures are still unknown to modern allopathic medicine.Other unique quality ofAyurveda is that it uncovers and cures the root cause of illness, it is safe, gentle and inexpensive, it sees 6 stages of disease development (where modern medicine only sees the last two stages), it treats people in a personalized manner according to their dosha or constitution and not in any generic manner.Further, Ayurveda being the science of 'life', Atrea was quick to emphasize, proper nutrition according to dosha, and perhaps above all else, that there was a mind/body/soul relationship and that the root cause of all diseases and the best medicine for all conditions is spiritual and ethical life.


125 Types Of Surgical Instruments

"The Hindus (Indians) were so advanced in surgery that their instruments could cut a hair longitudinally". MRS PlunketShushruta worked with 125 kinds of surgical instruments, which included scalpels, lancets, needles, catheters, rectal speculums, mostly conceived from jaws of animals and birds to obtain the necessary grips. He also defined various methods of stitching: the use of horse’s hair, fine thread, fibres of bark, goat’s guts and ant’s heads. Rishi Sushrut is known as the father of surgery & author of Sushrut Samhita. Circa 5 - 4th century BCE. He is credited with performing the world's first rhinoplasty, using anesthesia and plastic surgery. He used surgical instruments - many of them look similar to instruments used today; and discussed more than 300 types of surgical operations. One of the Ayurvedic surgical practices being used today in India involves dipping suturesinto antibiotic herbs so when sewed into the person, the scar heals quicker and prevent infection. The modern surgical world owes a great debt to this great surgical sage.


Atomic theory

Sage Kanad (circa 600 BCE) is recognized as the founder of atomic theory, and classified all the objects of creation into nine elements (earth, water, light or fire, wind, ether, time, space, mind and soul). He stated that every object in creation is made of atoms(Anu) that in turn connect with each other to form molecules nearly 2,500 years before John Dalton. Further, Kanad described the dimension and motion of atoms, and the chemical reaction with one another. The eminent historian, T.N. Colebrook said, "Compared to scientists of Europe, Kanad and other Indian scientists were the global masters in this field."

Chemistry alchemical metals

In the field of chemistry alchemical metals were developed for medicinal uses by sage Nagarjuna. He wrote many famous books including Ras Ratnakar, which is still used in India's Ayurvedic colleges today. By carefully burning metals like iron, tin, copper, etc. into ash, removing the toxic elements, these metals produce quick and profound healing in themost difficult diseases.


Nanatechnology:-

Sages of India were the real inventors, with their pure minds & higher consciousness they prepared Ayurvedic Bhasmas which are examples of Nano-technology.The team of leding Scientists in the Indian Science Congress has accepted this fact very recently. Dr. Jayesh Ballare,professor of I.I.T. Mumbai who presented the paper on Nano-bio-technology has saidthat treatment of diseases is being found out with the help of very minute particles, these can be harmful but also beneficial and a blessing when given in right minute doses.The Bhasmas prepared by Indian rishis get subdivided into Nano Particles & cure the incurable diseases.

Astronomy and Mathematics

Sage Aryabhatt (b. 476 CE) wrote texts on astronomy and mathematics. He formulated the process of calculating the motion of planets and the time of eclipses. Aryabhatt was the first to proclaim the earth was round, rotating on an axis, orbiting the sun and suspended in space. This was around 1,000 years before Copernicus. He was a geometry genius creditedwith calculating pi to four decimal places, developing the trigonomicsine table and the area of a triangle. Perhaps his most important contribution was the concept of the zero. Details are found in Shulva sutra.

Other sages of mathematics include Baudhayana, Katyayana, and Apastamba. Vedic Astrology is definately the ildst work on astronomy available in the world. Astronomy, Geography, Constellation,Science, Botany and Animal science. Varahamihr (499 - 587 CE) was another eminent astronomer. In his book, Panschsiddhant, he noted that the moon and planets shine due to the sun. Many of his other contributions captured in his books Bruhad Samhita and Bruhad Jatak, were in the fields of geography, constellationscience, botany and animal science. For example he presented cures for various diseases of plants and trees.

Knowledge of botany (Vrksh-Ayurveda) dates back more than 5,000 years, discussed in India's Rig Veda. Sage Parashara (100 BCE) is called the "father of botany" because he classified flowering plants into various families, nearly 2,000 years before Lannaeus (the modern father of taxonomy). Parashara described plant cells - the outer and inner walls, sap color-matter and something not visible to the eye - anvasva. Nearly 2,000 years -later Robert Hooke, using a microscope described the outer and inner wall and sap color-matter. Algebra, arithmetic and geometry, planetary positions, eclipses, cosmography, and mathematical techniques. force of gravity.In the field of mathematics, Bhaskaracharya II (1114 -1183 CE) contributed to the fields of algebra, arithmetic and geometry.Two of his most well known books are Lilavati and Bijaganita, which are translated in several languages of the world. In his book, Siddhant Shiromani, he expounds on planetary positions, eclipses, cosmography, and mathematical techniques. Another of his books, Surya Siddhant discusses the force of gravity, 500 years before Sir Isaac Newton. Sage Sridharacharya developed the quadratic equation around 991 CE. Indian astronomers have been mapping the skies for 3500 years. Copernicus published his theory of the revolution of the Earth in 1543. A thousand years before him, Aryabhatta in 5th century (400-500 CE) stated that the Earth revolves around the sun, "just as a person traveling in a boat feels that the trees on the bank are moving, people on earth feel that the sun is moving". In his treatise Aryabhatteeam, he clearly states that our earth is round, it rotates on its axis, orbits the sun and is suspended in space and explains that lunar and solar eclipses occur by the interplayof the sun, the moon and the earth. Vishnu Purana,Yoga Vashistha talks about Galaxy,Great Bears,Zodical signs,Planets,Poles,Milky Way Weekdays & Various Divisions Of Time.

The Decimal

Ancient India invented the decimal scale using base 10. They number-names to denote numbers. In the 9th century CE, an Arab mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, learned Sanskrit and wrote a book explaining the Hindu system of numeration. In the 12th century CE the book was translated into Latin. The British used this numerical system and credited the Arabs - mislabeling it 'Arabic numerals'. "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made." - Albert Einstein. The word Geometry seems to have emerged from the Indian word ‘Gyaamiti’ which means measuring the Earth. And the word Trigonometry is similar to ‘Trikonamiti’ meaning measuring triangular forms. Euclid is credited with the invention of Geometry in 300 BCE while the concept of Geometry in India emerged in 1000 BCE, from the practice of making fire altars in square and rectangular shapes. The treatise of Surya Siddhanta (4th century CE) describes amazing details of Trigonometry, which were introduced to Europe 1200 years later in the 16th century by Briggs. The ratio of the circumference and the diameter of a circle are known as Pi, which gives its value as 3,1428571. The old Sanskrit text Baudhayana Shulba Sutra of the 6th century BCE mentions this ratio as approximately equal to 3. Aryabhatta in 499, CE worked the value of Pi to the fourth decimal place as 3.1416. Centuries later, in 825 CE Arab mathematician Mohammed Ibna Musa says that "This value has been given by the Hindus (Indians)".

The Law of Gravity - 1200 Years Before NewtonThe Law of Gravity was known to the ancient Indian astronomer Bhaskaracharya. In his Surya Siddhanta, he notes:"Objects fall on earth due to a force of attraction by the earth. therefore, the earth, the planets, constellations, the moon and the sun are held in orbit due to this attraction".It was not until the late 17th century in 1687, 1200 years later, that Sir Isaac Newton rediscovered the Law of Gravity.

Metallurgy

India was the world-leader in Metallurgy for more than 5,000 years. Gold jewellery is available from 3,000 BCE. Brass and bronze pieces are dated back to 1,300 BCE. Extraction of zinc from ore by distillation was used in India as early as 400 BCE while European William Campion patented the process some 2,000 years later. Copper statues can be dated back to 500 CE. There is an iron pillar in Delhi dating back to 400 CE that shows no sign of rust or decay. There are two unique aspects to India's ancient scientists. First their discoveries are in use today as some of the most important aspects of their field; and are validated by modern technological machines. Second,their discoveries brought peace and prosperity rather than the harm and destruction of many of our modern discoveries.

Due to their intense spiritual life, they developed such power of discrimination (vivek). Spirituality gives helpful direction and science brings speed. With a core of spirituality, modern scientists' discoveries can quickly bring only helpful ideas to help humanity. While Einstein is credited with the idea that one can travel faster than the speed of light, it was written about centuries before in the ancient Vedic literature. Perhaps it was Einstein's association with the famed Indian physicist, Bose that led to his introduction to the views about the speed of light. Through deep meditation and reading the ancient Vedic texts, who knows what our modern-day scientists will discover? The major drawbacks there discoveries have is that there minds are not perfect & imperfect mind cannot give perfect & complete knowledge about truth, its only when the India will rise again in the 21 century & shine the world will see its greatness again.There are two points here, the first is that India & Indians should be proud of its amazing achievements and be properly credited, and second is that India leaves a blueprint, compass and map for how to develop safe and helpful discoveries for the future betterment of mankind.


University (The world’s first university)Takshashila  (Taxila)

Around 2700 years ago, as early as 700 BCE there existed a giant University at Takshashila, located in the northwest region of India.Not only Indians but also students from as far as Babylonia, Greece, Syria, Arabia and China came to study.68 different streams of knowledge were on the syllabus.Experienced masters taught a wide range of subjects.Vedas, Language, Grammar, Philosophy, Medicine, Surgery, Archery, Politics, Warfare, Astronomy, Accounts, commerce, Futurology, Documentation, Occult, Music, Dance, The art of discovering hidden treasures, etc.The minimum entrance age was 16 and there were 10,500 students.The panel of Masters included renowned names like Kautilya, Panini, Jivak and Vishnu Sharma.At a time when the Dark Ages were looming large, the existence of a university of Taxila’s grandeur really makes India stand apart way ahead of the European countries who struggled with ignorance and total information blackout. For the Indian subcontinent Taxila stood as a light house of higher knowledge and pride of India. In the present day world, Taxila is situated in Pakistan at a place called Rawalpindi. The university accommodated more than 10,000 students at a time. The university offered courses spanning a period of more than eight years. The students were admitted after graduating from their own countries. Aspiring students opted for elective subjects going for in depth studies in specialized branches of learning. After graduating from the university, the students are recognized as the best scholars in the subcontinent. It became a cultural heritage as time passed. Taxila was the junction where people of different origins mingled with each other and exchanged knowledge of their countries.The university was famous as "Taxila" university, named after the city where it was situated. The king and rich people of the region used to donate lavishly for the development of the university. In the religious scriptures also, Taxila is mentioned as the place where the king of snakes, Vasuki selected Taxila for the dissemination of knowledge on earth.Here it would be essential to mention briefly the range of subjects taught in the university of Taxila. (1) Science, (2)Philosophy, (3) Ayurveda, (4) Grammar of various languages, (5)Mathematics, (6) Economics, (7) Astrology, (8) Geography, (9) Astronomy, (10)Surgical science, (11) Agricultural sciences, (12) Archery and Ancient and Modern Sciences.

Measurement of Time

In Surya Siddhanta, Bhaskaracharya calculates the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun to 9 decimal places.Bhaskaracharya = 365.258756484 days.Modern accepted measurement = 365.2596 days.Between Bhaskaracharya’s ancient measurement 1500 years ago and the modern measurement the difference is only 0.00085 days, only 0.0002%.34000TH of a Second to 4.32 Billion Years. India has given the idea of the smallest and the largest measure of time. Krati Krati = 34,000th of a second 1 Truti = 300th of a second 2 Truti = 1 Luv 2 Luv = 1 Kshana 30 Kshana = 1 Vipal 60 Vipal = 1 Pal 60 Pal = 1 Ghadi (24 minutes) 2.5 Gadhi = 1 Hora (1 hour) 24 Hora = 1 Divas (1 day) 7 Divas = 1 saptaah (1 week) 4 Saptaah = 1 Maas (1 month) 2 Maas = 1 Rutu (1 season) 6 Rutu = 1 Varsh (1 year) 100 Varsh = 1 Shataabda (1 century)10 Shataabda = 1 sahasraabda 432 Sahasraabda = 1 Yug (Kaliyug) 2 Yug = 1 Dwaaparyug 3 Yug = 1 Tretaayug 4 Yug = 1 Krutayug 10 Yug = 1 Mahaayug (4,320,000years) 1000 Mahaayug = 1 Kalpa 1 Kalpa = 4.32 billion years

Architecture & Vaastu Shastra or Art of Building & Designing

It was the important ancient science given by our Maharishis & Saints whose relevance is felt by Architects & Engineers of modern times too. This science was take to china & Chinese modified it to gave their own name Of Feng Shui. Sages or Ancient scientists like Bhrigu, Atri, Vasistha,Maya did marvelous works on Vastu thousands of years ago. It is interesting to note that Dr.Robert Pinotti II , an Italian scientist observed at the world space conference that in the text of the great classical work on vastu, "samarangana-sutradhara".. He said it would be better to examine the Hindu text instead of dismissing the traditions of myths.

Psychic & Occult Sciences

Almost al the Occult & Psychic sciences known to man today have their origins to India, whether it is Science of sounds(Mantra), Tantra, Yantra , Meditation, Yoga, Palmistry, Numerology, Tarot Card Readings ,Pranic Healing, Vastu shastra, Vedic Astrology, Magic & Illusion, Astral Traveling, Metaphysics, Graphology, Study of Dreams, Science of Levitation, Magnetic Therapy, Acupressure, Hypnotism, Telepathy, Aura Readings, Past Life Regression, OBE, Distant Healing, Powers Of Mind & other Holistic Sciences etc.

Religion & Spirituality :-

Almost All the Religions Of The World have their Origins & Roots In the Great "Sanatana Dharma"(Eternal Religion) of India & Revived by Avtaars & Prophets or Messangers Of God from time to time & was given the New Name after them when they left their Earthly Existence. It was the Same Advanced Scientific Religion Practiced In India, Egypt, Mayan civilizations in the past.

Panini's grammar has been evaluated from various points of view. After all these different evaluations, I think that the grammar merits asserting ... that it is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence.- An evaluation of Panini's contribution by Cardona

The Kautiliya Arthasastra (Politics,Military,Agriculture,Minerals,Metals)

The Kautiliya Arthasastra, a Sanskrit work of the c. 4th century B.C., is more known for its contents on politics and statecraft. But the book contains information and instructions about various other aspects of social life, including man's relationship with animals and plants.

The present monograph of Prof. P. Sensarma is an excellent treatise in lucid English on the Ethnobiological Information contained in the Arthasastra. It deals with forests, plants, animals, animal husbandry including veterinary suggestions, agriculture medicinal-industrial commercial importance and application of flora and fauna, and the uses of plants and animals in biological and chemical warfare, besides weapon making and other military uses. Microbioligsts Research Today have found out that Bacteria formation in water falls in a copper vessel thus purifying it & fit for drinking but Indian Rishis & Seers have been practicing this truth thousandds of years before.

The Corrosion Resistant Iron Pillar of Delhi The pillar—over seven meters high and weighing more than six tones—was erected by Kumara Gupta of Gupta dynasty that ruled northern India in AD 320-540. Experts at the Indian Institute of Technology have resolved the mystery behind the 1,600-year-old iron pillar in Delhi, which has never corroded despite the capital's harsh weather. Press Trust of India The Indian Express 26 January 2004

Why, one might ask, did Europe take over thousand years to attain the level of abstract mathematics achieved by Indians such as Aaryabhatta? The answer appears to be that Europeans were trapped in the relatively simplistic and concrete geometrical mathematics developed by the Greeks. It was not until they had, via the Arabs, received, assimilated and accepted the place-value system of enumeration developed in India that they were able to free their minds from the concrete and develop more abstract systems of thought. This development thus triggered the scientific and information technology revolutions which swept Europe and, later, the world. The role played by India in the development is no mere footnote, easily and inconsequentially swept under the rug of Eurocentric bias. To do so is to distort history, and to deny India one of it's greatest contributions to world civilization.

By David Gray, PhD

Atomic Physics

"After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense". W. Heisenberg (German Physicist, 1901-1976)

Nathuram Godse's defense speech in court

2005-06-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

This is the speech given by Nathuram Godse in the court when he was tried for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi

Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus were of equal status as to rights, social and religious and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession. I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners in which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Chamars and Bhangis participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other.

I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Nairoji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like England, France, America and' Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of Socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely whatever Veer Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other single factor has done.

All this reading and thinking led me to believe it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (300 million) of Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and the well being of all India, one fifth of human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself to the Hindu Sanghtanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe, could win and preserve the national independence of Hindustan, my Motherland, and enable her to render true service to humanity as well.

Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokamanya Tilak, Gandhiji's influence in the Congress first increased and then became supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to those slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a mere dream if you imagine that the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and, if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force. [In the Ramayana] Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. [In the Mahabharata], Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.

In more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim tyranny in India. It was absolutely essentially for Shivaji to overpower and kill an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In condemning history's towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Gobind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhiji has merely exposed his self-conceit. He was, paradoxical, as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom they brought to them.

The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very well in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of the Indian community there. But when he finally returned to India he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the Judge of everyone and everything; he was the master brain guiding the civil disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, it might bring untold disaster and political reverses but that could make no difference to the Mahatma's infallibility. 'A Satyagrahi can never fail' was his formula for declaring his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is.

Thus, the Mahatma became the judge and jury in his own cause. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought that his politics were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with, as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, disaster after disaster.

Gandhi's pro-Muslim policy is blatantly in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma's sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and purity of the Hindi language was to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus.

From August 1946 onwards the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of the Hindus. The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi with some retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception, but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which they were a part, the greater was Gandhi's infatuation for them. Lord Wavell had to resign as he could not bring about a settlement and he was succeeded by Lord Mountbatten. King Log was followed by King Stork.

The Congress, which had boasted of its nationalism and socialism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian territory became foreign land to us from August 15, 1947. Lord Mountbatten came to be described in Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had. The official date for handing over power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbatten with his ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what Congress party calls 'freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called 'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice? When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country - which we consider a deity of worship - my mind was filled with direful anger.

One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast unto death related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed for its break some condition on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any condition on the Muslims. He was fully aware of from the experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi.

Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he had failed his paternal duty inasmuch as he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His inner-voice, his spiritual power and his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of, all crumbled before Jinnah's iron will and proved to be powerless.

Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may even call me and dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building. After having fully considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage in both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds of Birla House.

I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots.

I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi. I have to say with great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preachings and deeds are at times at variances with each other when he talks about India as a secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note that Nehru has played a leading role in the establishment of the theocratic state of Pakistan, and his job was made easier by Gandhi's persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims.

I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone else should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism levelled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in future.

-NATHURAM GODSE

Kya lagaya hai, yeh secular, secular?

2005-03-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

From Column of Arvind Lavakare from rediff.com

The truth is finally out: Ram Vilas Paswan rooting for a Muslim chief minister in Bihar is 'secular,' but L K Advani rooting for a Ram temple at Ayodhya is 'communal' if not a 'fascist' as well.

If the country's entire media and its 'intellectuals' chose to be absolutely mum on Paswan's demand based on alluring the large base of Muslim voters, it was because our media is oh, so 'secular.'

And when Advani's demand is based on the historical, revenue and archaeological records of Ayodhya, he is still 'communal' because our media is oh, so 'secular.' That is the truth and the tragedy of Hindustan's intellectuals, the Election Commission included.

Yes, the cat is out of the bag: 'When it comes to the nitty-gritty what determines whether or not a person is secular is his attitude towards the minority communities, mostly towards Muslims who matter much more than Christians or Sikhs.' That is from the pen of the high priest of liberalism, modernism and smut aka Khushwant Singh, in a recent column.

Judged by that criterion of his, Dr Rafiq Zakaria, the renowned Islamic scholar, must be pronounced as a rabid communalist for the criticism he let loose on Indian Muslims in his book Communal Rage in Secular India, where he lambasts them for their hostility towards Vande Mataram and Hindus, derides them for their ghettoist mindset and mocks them for going to the mullah seeking a fatwa on the length of the beard to be kept, the level to which the kurta must fall over the knees and on whether male urination must be done standing or sitting.

Note, incidentally, Khushwant Singh's observation that Muslims 'matter much more than Christians or Sikhs.' Why? Singh doesn't say. What is conspicuous is that this differentiation in the status of three communities is created by a sardar of 'secularism.' Truly can iconic status be given to such people only in the clueless, spineless and thoughtless pseudo-secular world created by India's English language media and their vernacular cousins and partners.

The Indian Union Muslim League party is a classic case of the 'secular' notions generated by the English media. The IUML was formed on March 10, 1948 with its roots in Jinnah's Muslim League. The IUML is touted as a political party meant for protecting the interests of India Muslims. Yet, despite its name, it is recognised as 'secular' party eligible to contest Indian elections. The Leftists of all hues, the Congress of all hues, the Yadavs and the Paswans, the Mulayams and the Mayawatis, the John Dayal Christians -- all of them don't doubt that the IUML is anything but 'secular' but how many of them all can name a single non-Muslim member of the IUML?

When viewing the BJP, however, all of the above plus the DMK, PMK et al put on their dark glasses. For all its opponents in the political and media world, the BJP is 'communal' because it projects Hindu culture and Hindu aspirations while being the only one to simultaneously promise 'Justice to all with appeasement of none.'

All these adversaries have forgotten -- like all the media -- that, as a mechanism to resolve the Ayodhya dispute, the BJP had even volunteered to shift, with modern technology, brick by brick of the Babri Masjid to a nearby site even though the Babri structure had long ceased to be a site for offering namaaz. Hence, for all these adversaries afflicted with political glaucoma, the BJP is 'communal,' period, and full stop.

It means no whit to BJP's adversaries that its NDA government in New Delhi had two Muslims in its council of ministers who even today, when out of power, the BJP has given positions of high respect and authority. It means no whit to these adversaries that the BJP-led NDA government's defence minister was a Christian, George Fernandes, an important spokesman was a Sikh, S S Ahluwalia, and its attorney general was born a Parsi, Soli Sorabjee.

It means no whit to these adversaries that the BJP has Christians as its members from Goa to far away Mizoram and Nagaland and that one of the most prolific writers in Urdu, Muzaffar Hussein, has long been in the BJP fold. And, finally, it means no whit to this witless lot of adversaries that the RSS, the mother of the BJP, has always welcomed one and all to its arms, without ever asking for their caste or creed or community.

Under the circumstances, all that matters to those arraigned against the BJP is that the BJP must be kept away from power everywhere, and that any 'secular' government can only be without the BJP though it is all right to have in it that caricature called Lalu Yadav. The ad nauseam way these Commies and Congressmen, the Yadavs and the Paswans, the Mulayams and the Mayawatis have been talking of 'secular alliance,' 'secular coalition,' 'secular forces' and 'secular government' in recent months, makes one puke.

Hence, S Gurumurthy is dead right when he writes, 'For 'secular' India, secularism is not divorced between the State and the religion. For them secularism is exclusively for the benefit of the minorities. Extend it, secularism means pampering the minorities. Go further, it includes being allergic to the majority. That, unless one explicitly appeases the minorities and is overtly allergic to Hindus, one is not 'secular' enough. In Indian politics, uniting a minority for votes is 'secular.' Consequently, uniting the majority is anti-'secular.' And organising the majority is fundamentalist. In contrast, protecting organised minority is a 'secular' duty. This is the high point of 'secular' India.' (The New Indian Express, February 12, 2005)

The time has therefore come for the BJP to straighten its spine, hold the microphone and roar, 'Yeh kya lagaya hai, secular, secular?' It must ask that question, loud and clear, to all across the length and breadth of Hindustan. More specifically, it must direct that question to --

The Congress which, in the Rajya Sabha, voted out that clause in the 45th Constitution Amendment Bill, 1978, which defined 'secular' as 'equal respect for all religions.'

A M Ahmadi, a former chief justice of India who recorded that 'the term Secular has advisedly not been defined presumably because it is a very elastic term not capable of a precise definition and perhaps best left undefined.' (S R Bommai v Union of India, AIR SCW 2946 page 2992).

Lalu Yadav who thinks it is 'secular' to protect Bihar's Muslims from communal riots but to let a Hindu magistrate be transferred because he objected to a nearby azaan blaring during working hours despite a court order to the contrary, and to let Hindus be kidnapped a dime a dozen.

The Leftists of all hues who want us to believe it is secularism that 'in the 28th year of the egalitarian Marxist rule in West Bengal, dowry, lynching women as witches, marrying daughters to dogs and hiring sorcerers' service to tackle malaria, and refusal to eat food cooked by Muslims and lower caste Hindus are rampant and thriving in the state.' (Editorial in The Statesman,Calcutta, January 21, 2005).

Achyut Patwardhan and his ilk of pseudo-secularists who are apparently ignorant that, in his Constitution Law of India, 1998, page 4, footnote, the eminent authority, Basu, described the expression 'secular' as vague, and stated that it would be a correct summary of the provisions of Articles 25 to 30 of the Indian Constitution to say that the expression 'Republic' qualified by the expression 'secular' means a republic in which there is equal respect for all religions.

All 'secularists' of the above kind must be told that by far one of the most clear-cut concepts of pure secularism was propounded on August 11, 1947. It was not propounded by Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of today's pseudo-secularism, or by Mahatma Gandhi, who, with his Khilafat Movement was the first to officially bring religion into our politics. Rather, and most ironically, the perspective was propounded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who fought for and got Pakistan for Muslims. At the first meeting of Pakistan's Constituent Assembly that day in August 1947, following were some of the words he spoke:

'You may belong to any religious caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the State. We are starting the State with no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, between caste and creed… We should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense -- as citizens of the nation…My guiding principle will be justice and impartiality.'(Jinnah, Speeches as Governor General cited on page 491 of The Proudest Day Pimlico 1998, by Anthony Read and David Fisher).

It's another supreme irony that Jinnah's vision of a perfectly secular Pakistan has turned into a fundamentalist jihadistan on the ground while the ancient, most tolerant of all nations, Hindustan, has today turned anti-Hindu under fundamentalists of a different kind. Patriotic Indians must brook no further delay in roaring, 'Kya lagaya hai, yeh secular, secular?'

[Sandeep Arya]- So this is time to think deeply and positively by all knowledgeable Indians to understand the situation and take corrective step instead of remaining dumb fellow just pointing out that things are not going good. [/Sandeep Arya]

Why Jesus Belongs to the East

2005-03-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

Why Jesus Belongs to the East
SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI

There’s news that Jesus Christ lived in India. According to a new book by the late Paramahansa Yogananda, the three wise men who went to Bethlehem to see Christ when he was born, came from India.

According to a Los Angeles Times report, the book titled The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You claims that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. The book also tells us Jesus practiced yoga and meditation with the great sages in India during from age 13 to 30.

In Chapter 27 of the book Beyond Psychology , Osho says: “Jesus himself had travelled to India while he was young. The Bible has no account of him between the age of thirteen to thirty; The Bible has no account of where Jesus had been. This looks strange - a small life - he lived only thirty-three years - and in those thirty-three years The Bible has accounts of only three years, the last three years.

Early life incidents

"About his earlier life are only two incidents - minor, meaningless. One was of his birth and the coming of the three wise men from the East to pay tribute; and second, his getting lost in the temple of Jerusalem, arguing with rabbis. These are the only two incidents. And then from the ages of 13 to 30, seventeen years, nothing is mentioned - what happened to this man, where he was.

“These seventeen years he travelled to Egypt, to India, to Ladakh, to Tibet, and all these places were Buddhist at that time. Buddha had died only five centuries before, and his impact was still very alive. Jesus visited Buddhist monasteries. I have been to a Ladakh monastery which Jesus had visited, and I looked in their records of visitors, which they have kept for two thousand years.

Jesus was here

And I asked them if they had a record of all the visitors and their impressions about the monastery. It is one of the most beautiful monasteries, and Jesus stayed there for almost six months, studying Buddhism from the monks.

There are, in their official record, the impressions of Jesus, his signature, the date. He became immensely influenced by Buddhism, so his celibacy, his ascetic attitude, his praise for poverty, his condemnation for riches, were all borrowed ideas from Gautam Buddha."

He did come to India

A German theologian Holger Kersten also wrote a book called Jesus Lived in India . It's about Jesus's travels to India, where he first lived from the age of 14 (two years after the last mention of Jesus as a child in the Bible) to the age of 29, just before he returned to Palestine to begin his ministry (where the story in the Bible resumes again). After the crucifixion (he only apparently died) he returned to India, eventually dying in Kashmir and being buried near Srinagar. In the final pages of the book Kersten points out that Christianity as it has come down to us is nothing like what Jesus himself taught.

Christ's Eastern philosophy

I feel this is the reason Jesus is widely respected in India, because there’s something of eastern mysticism in his teaching. The West is very aggressive, continues to dominate the rest of the world. This is totally against the spirit of Jesus who teaches compassion, forgiveness and love.

And it is ironical that he was crucified because he taught this way which was very alien to the Western milieu. The West worships Jesus out of repentance and the East worships Jesus out of understanding - the same way Buddha, Mahavira, Guru Nanak and other eastern mystics are understood.

(* This article is taken from following url: http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/966651.cms and is the sole proporty of Time of India group.)

The intellectual scene in Post-independence India

2004-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

A speech of S. Gurumurthy given to IIT Chennai

One must spare some time to read this beautiful article. A must read for present educated and non-intellectual generation with biased and reserved mindset

Defeat and anger go together. Abuse and defeat go together. So, it is in this norm and with this understanding of what an intellectual debate means, I would like to place before you some of my thoughts today. Some of may find it provocative. I am confident that the audience is competent enough to absorb this and think rather than get into the mood which all of us have got used to in the last 30-40 years abuse.

Background: India before Independence
Let us see the pre-independence background, the intellectual content of India. See the kind of personalities who led the Indian mind Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, Tilak- giants in their own way. Most of them were involved in politics, active politics, day-to-day politics, handling men, walking on the road, addressing meetings, solving problems between their followers. And, meeting the challenges posed by the enemy, the conspiracies hatched against them. They were handling everything, yet, they were maintaining an intellectual supremacy, and an originality which history has recorded.

Let us look at the academic side. Whether it is a P.C. Ray who wrote on Indian Chemistry in 1905 or Sir C.V. Raman who wrote about mridangam, tabala, and violin, and saw the physics in it (this was in 1913); whether it was R.C. Majumdar or Radhakumud Mukherjee who saw greatness in the Indian civilization; trying to bring up points, instances, historical evidence to mirror the greatness of India to the defeated Indian race, they were all building the Indian mind brick by brick.

Sri Aurobindo spoke of Sanatana Dharma as the nationalism of India. He didn't rank it as a philosophy. He brought it down to the level of emotional consciousness. Swami Vivekananda spoke of spiritual nationalism; it was the same Swami who spoke of Universal brotherhood. For them philosophy was not removed from the ground reality. The nation was at the core of their philosophy. Swami Vivekananda was called the "patriot monk".

Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Rama Rajya. Bankim Chandra wrote Bande Maataram. The song, the slogans in it, the mantra in it made hundreds of people kiss the gallows smilingly and many others went to jail. It transformed the life of the people. This was the intellectual scene, this was the content. This is what powered the intellectual as well as the mass movement in India. This was the core of India, the soul of the Indian freedom movement.

The symptoms: India immediately after Independence

Imagine what happened in 1947 and after, India was able to intellectually lead not only Indians but also the whole world because of the intellectual assertion that the freedom movement brought about. Let us look at post Independence India. The persons who led post-Independence India were also trained in the same freedom movement. They went to jail, but they were not rooted in the intellectual content of the Freedom movement!

The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was in jail for 7 years. He was a great intellectual, purely in the sense of his capacity to reason, understand, read, and expound a thought. He told Galbrieth once, "I would be regarded as the last English Prime Minister of India." See the intellectual capability of the man, the enormously competent mind.

But intellectualism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has to be rooted in something concrete. Swami Vivekananda's universal brotherhood was rooted in India's greatness as a civilization. The concept of "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" cannot exist without a living form, a population which believes in it and believes in itself. You need to have a society which believes in it.

That is why India could invite the Jews who were butchered, raped, all over the world. In 107 out of 108 countries, this race was butchered. At least they had the courtesy and the gratitude to publish a book. The Israeli government published a book that out of 108 countries that we sought refuge, the only civilization, the only country, the only people, the only ideology that gave us refuge was the Indian civilization. They published a book, which most Indians are unaware of. And we invited the Muslims. The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch. And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who bomb Mumbai. But the Memons who lived with us.

In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the Prey Council, equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons went and told the Prey Council that we are Muslims for namesake, but we follow only the Hindu law. Please don't impose the Shariat on us. The Prey Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew no language other than the Kutchy language.
And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine avatharas were common between Hindus and Kutchy Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali". The Prey Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested them to pass a law which will overrule this judgment. The British government passed a law in 1923 which was called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" declaring, "If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariat, allow him to do so".

It doesn't mean a Muslim must follow the Shariat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariat Act was passed not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that he wants to follow the Shariaat. That was the integration prevalent in India.

In 1937, when the All India Shariat Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariat has become a part of Muslim consciousness.

The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the facts. Till the year 1980, in Cooch Behar district, the Shariat law was not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation, the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent of the intellectual gap in India.

Secularism: A Reversal and perversion of the Indian mind
And now, coming to what is the position today. Everything that drove the freedom movement - everything that constituted the soul of the freedom movement, whether it is the Ram rajya of Gandhiji or Sanaatana Dharma of Sri Aurobindo or the spiritual patriotism of Vivekananda or the soul stirring Vande Maataram song, came to be regarded not only as unsecular but as sectarian, communal and even as something harmful to the country.

Thus, there was a reversal, a perversion of the Indian mind. How did it occur? Today, the intellectualism of India means to denigrate India. There are mobile citizens and there are non- citizens deriding India. Go to the Indian Airlines counter you will find people deriding India. Go to a post office they will deride India. Go to a railway station, they will deride India. It is the English educated Indian's privilege to deride India.

When I was talking to postal employees in the GPO, Chennai (a majority of them were women). I told them the basic facts about the post office. I said it is one of the most efficient postal systems in the world, one of the cheapest in the world, one of the most delivery perfect postal systems in the world. For one rupee, you are able to transport information from one end of the country to the other.

And you have a postman, no where in the world this happens the postman goes to the illiterate mother and reads out the letter, he is asked to sit there and shares a cup of coffee and comes away. Money orders are delivered to the last rupee. It is an amazing system, one of the largest postal systems linking one of the most populous nations, one of the most complicated nations with so many languages.

Somebody writes the address in Tamil and it gets delivered in Patna! It gets delivered to Jawaan at warfront! When I completed my speech many of the women were wiping their tears. I asked why are you crying I have only praised you. They said, "Sir, this is the first time we've been praised, otherwise we've only been abused!"

You know how many people use the railways in India? A million people and that is equivalent to the population of Australia! And we have only abuses for them!

Have we any idea of what this country is? India has been compared with Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. You can walk across many of these countries in one night (laughs)! The best politicians, intellectuals, sociologists in India have compared us with them because, we have never understood what we are and unless you do that, you can never relate us with others.

Demonising India: Projecting a negative image.

This enormous intellectual failure, to the extent of being intellectually bankrupt, did not occur overnight, it was no accident. There is a history behind this enormous erosion. And I told you about these mobile citizens, what they have done to us. Every country has problems. There is no country without any problem. Are you aware of what is one of the most pressing problems in America today? It is incurable according to the American sociologists; even American economists have begun to agree with them. American politicians are shaken, one third of the pregnant women are school going children. And mothers mix the anti-pregnancy pill in the food without daughter's knowledge everyday.

But this is not the image of America. The image of America is a technologically advanced country etc. etc. Ours is the only country where the mobile citizens of India have transformed the problems of India into the image of India -its identity is inherently related with its problems.
Go to any country and the same negative stereotype is echoed that India is suffering from poverty and malnutrition. India has no drinking water. Indian women are burnt. If they are married, they are burnt, if they are widows, they are burnt. See the image that has been built about this country. Who did this? The English educated Indian.

And one Kaluraam Meena (have you ever heard of him? Asks the audience to raise their hands if they have), only a small fraction of this large audience has heard of him. When Clinton came to India, he went to a village called Nayla where the villagers interacted with him. And one of the panchayat board members asked him, "Sir, I am told that in the West, all of you believe that this country is a rotten country, a backward country, a poor, hungry country. Do you also think like that?"

Clinton was shaken, because he might have thought that this person might be approaching him for some favour. I will relate my experience when I went to the Carter Centre in 1993. They were talking about dispute resolution and all that. I went there to meet somebody, if not Carter, somebody else at least. His Deputy, a lady, was very hesitant to receive me. "Mr. Gurumurthy", she said, "Mr. Carter is not around, anyway, I can spare seven-eight minutes for you." I said three or four minutes of your time would do. Even before I could start, she said, "Mr.Gurumurthy, we don't have funds, we will not be able to help" (laughter from the audience). I replied, "Let us assume you have a hundred billion dollars, how much will you give me? One billion? One million?" She kept quiet, I said: "I don't need your money. I came here to discuss whether community living is an answer to disputes. I have come to discuss this because you have suggested electoral means to resolve problems in communities which have no damn idea of what an election is; whether community living is an answer because you don't what that means. She sat and discussed this with me for two hours. This is the image we have projected that anybody, who comes from India, comes to beg. Ordinary Indians did not create this impression; educated Indians created it. This is the work of civil servants, NGOs. Christian missionaries during the freedom movement created this. Indians are filthy, rotten, dirty and unhealthy, advertising abroad these are the people who need to be saved. We have to Christianise them, enlighten them, and give us money. I can understand that because it is their business. But what did we do after 1947?

We repeated the same mistakes. We projected India as a country of unending problems. As I said, every country has problems. Only in India, problems become identities. How many dowry deaths take place in India in a year? Yet, India is projected as a country burning its own daughter-in-laws. And we also talk about it. Every damn newspaper will be writing about it. We believe in self-deprecation. And this goes on in the guise of intellectualism in India. And one woman, she attempted to take a film of the widows. I wrote an article, asking her to go to Lijjat Paapad. A widow brought me up. Millions of widows have worked to bring up their children. It is a nation, which believes in Tapasya. You may not believe in it but you are an exception. Compare Deepa Mehta"s attitude with Sarada Maa's who was the wife, who became a widow after Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's passing away. She went to the very same place where Deepa Mehta went and saw the widows. Sarada Maa said, "These widows are so pure, they are an illustration and an example to me." Deepa Mehta saw them as prostitutes. The widows have already been hurt once. Why are you sprinkling salt on their wounds?

I am very sorry to speak about this, but I have to, this audience is enlightened enough to understand me. Indian women are sexually unsatisfied and so they are becoming lesbians? This is one bloody story against us, about us. This is the image of Indian men and women, and this film is in English. Catherine Mayo wrote a book and Mahatma Gandhi said about it, "I have no time to read this filth. But I am under a compulsion, under pressure because this has been published abroad. The image of India has been rubbished and I have to counter it." With this introduction, he wrote about the book and said that this woman is a gutter inspector (laughs).

The intellectualism in India is gutter inspection- people are of this kind etc. Understand the level of erosion.

Indian Politics: Weaknesses and Pitfalls
Let us look at the post independence scenario from the macro level. We installed a system of governance and it postulated all the important goals for the Indian society and polity, which was gulped by the Indian academia, by the Indian intellectuals. We will have a classless society through socialism. We will have a casteless society through equality. We will have a faithless society through secularism. We will have a modern society devoid of tradition.

Instead of politics restructuring caste, caste has restructured politics today. Political parties are talking only in terms of castes. Has any Indian intellectual come to terms with caste? You must understand caste if you want to handle the Indian society. You cannot say that I want to have a very different kind of society. You have to handle the Indian sentiment, the Indian tradition and Indian beliefs. You can't clone a society of your choice in India. Social engineering has failed everywhere; the masters of social engineering have given up the Communists - whether it is sociologists or economists you have to accept a society as it is. You can only increase the momentum of evolution in the society; you can't forcibly bring about a revolution today. But, Indian leaders and intellectuals, till today, keep abusing caste. They don't know how to handle the caste.

Let me narrate to you how a community in Karaikudi handled this issue. The Chettiyar community assembled top businessmen, professionals from all over the world for 3 days to discuss their culinary act, how to construct houses, what languages they use, what old adages and stories their grand parents used to tell, what clothes they used to wear; not one word of politics, mind you. This was not even published in the newspapers. Intellectuals were not even aware of it. So, caste is a very important instrument in India, you may not like it. Unfortunately, every intellectual leads a caste life inside, but outside he is casteless! He is cloning an approach outside. There is no intellectual honesty at all.

And what happened in the case of secularism? In India, any one who is not a Hindu is per se secular. In the year 1947, just 10 years had passed after the Muslim League demanded and got the country partitioned, the leader who voted for the resolution for the partition of India was Quazi Millath Ismail, (who was leading the same Muslim League on the Indian side), the Congress certified that the Muslim League in Kerala is secular and hence it can associate with them. The Muslim League outside Kerala is communal with the same president! Three hundred and fifty crores are spent today for the Haj pilgrims out of the funds of secular India every year. No one can raise an objection. At least I can understand why politicians don't want to do that because they want the Muslim votes. But what about the intelligentsia. What about newspaper editors and journalists? And academicians? None of them speak out. The reason is that we have produced a state dependent intellectualism in India. We don't produce Nakkeerans anymore, our intellectualism is a derivative of the State and the State is a derivative of the polity. And in turn the polity is a derivative of the mind of Macaulay and Marx.

The Indian education system: A Legacy of Macaulay.

This Macaulayian system of education is a poison injected into our system. At least I had the opportunity of schooling in Tamil and hence could withstand the corruption that this English education brings with it. This corruption begins the moment the child steps out of the house. He is told to converse in English at home. This did not happen even in pre-Independence India, even when Macaulay wrote that notorious note sitting in Ooty. How many of you know Macaulay's formulation? Just those two or three sentences at least which form the crux - "We require an education system in India which will produce a class of interpreters, who will be Indian in colour and Englishmen in taste, opinions and morals."

This is the education system, which we have been continuing with, which was earlier conceived to produce clerks for the British Empire. If you have to differ from an English educated person you have to differ only through the English language. If you have to abuse somebody, even that has to be done in English! If you abuse the Anglicised Indian, he will not find fault with the blame but with the grammar in your language! This is the extent to which a foreign language has possessed us. But, we must master English, that is needed, but why do we have to become slaves of the English language? We must use that language as a tool, but why do we consider it as a status symbol? This is the influence of Macaulay.

If you want to understand the Macaulay/Marxist mix in India, you have to go a little back to see how Marxism grew out of the Christian civilisation. I recommend that you read the Nov 27, 1999 edition of the Newsweek, which describes how the Christian idea of the end of time called the "apocalypse", influenced the entire history, art, music, prognosis, sociology, economics, and the entire attitude of the Christian civilisation towards the non-Christian civilisations.

A Christian scholar who describes how Communism grew out of Christianity has written it. In 1624, Anna Baptists, a group of Christians who believed in the basic tenets of Christianity seized power in a particular place, banned private property and use of any book other than the Bible. When Marxism came up later through the exposition of Das Capital, the Marxists began expounding their doctrine as an extension of Christianity.

The thesis, antithesis and synthesis of making Christianity acceptable to the age of enlightenment was the Hegelian way demanded rationalisation of Christianity in the days of the Protestant movement. Hegel began with a disagreement, then started interacting with Christianity and ultimately ended up accepting Christianity.

You can see the same phenomenon with Marxist postulates- "Capitalism is my enemy, we have to deal with capitalism" and finally "we have to find a synthesis with capitalism".

Marx on India
In fact in the year 1857, Marx wrote about India, " India was a prosperous civilisation. It had a very high standard of living. Their productivity was higher. India was an economic giant." It was so. If you look at the statistics in 1820, India's share of world production was 19%, and England's share was 9%, please note that Britain was deep into the industrial revolution at that time. 18% of the world trade was in Indian hands at that time whereas 8% was the figure for Britain and 1% for US. When 80% of the American population was engaged in agriculture, India had 60% of the population engaged in non-agricultural occupations. This is supposed to be an index of development. All these statistics can be found in Paul S. Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of Great Powers".

So, Marx says, "This was a great civilisation which had produced prosperous communities." A prosperity which went deep into the villages. In the early stages, when the East India Company came to Murshidabad, an unknown name in Bengal today the Britishers were awe struck with its prosperity and wrote that it was more prosperous than London. This is no more disputed anyway, even by Indian intellectuals. Marx acknowledges the fact that this was a prosperous country and also had equality but unfortunately, he says for 2000 years the society did not change nor did it allow any revolutionary forces to enter! In his worldview human beings cannot progress without a revolution!

In the two articles on British rule in India and the East India Company- history and results written by Marx, quoted in the New York daily "Karl Marx does grant though somewhat in a grudging manner that "materially, India was fairly industrious and prosperous even before the onset of the British rule. He said that India was an exporting country till 1830 and started importing because it had opened its trade to the British." Many of you may not be aware that the kings in India had no right to over the lands, which came under the jurisdiction of panchayats. Whether it was Emperor Ashoka or Bhagavan Sri Ramachandra, the rule was the same. It was changed only during the British rule under the Ryotwari system. Even the Mughals could not change it. It was also found that family communities were based on domestic industry, with the peculiar combination of hand-spinning, hand- weaving, agriculture etc. which gave them a supporting power.

The misery inflicted by the British on Hindusthan is of an entirely different kind and infinitely more intense than what it had to suffer before civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines all these did not go deeper than the surface. But, England broke the entire framework of Hindusthan, the symptoms of reconstitution are yet to emerge clearly. This loss of the Old World without the emergence of a new order imparts a particular melancholy to the present misery of Hindus and Hindusthan. Marx goes on to say that the British interference destroyed the union between agriculture and the manufacturing industry. Suddenly he remarks that the English interference dissolved this semi barbarian, semi-civilised community.

He concedes that they were prosperous, that they organised their affairs well, they have a measure of independence, they have a democracy at the lowest level, all this has been conceded. Then, how does he classify us as "semi-barbarian and semi-civilised communities"? He notes that India's social condition remained unaltered since remote antiquity. This is important, for him revolution is the core, the soul and centre of the society. This society never had a revolution; hence it cannot be modern! There is an underlying assumption, which considers revolution as a pre- requisite for being modern.

Hence, he feels that the destruction wrought by the British is the inevitable revolution needed for the development of the Indian society. England had vested interests, violent interests in bringing about this "revolution". But, the question in focus is whether mankind can fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state? Whatever might have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about a revolution, whatever bitterness the spectacle of crumbling of an ancient world may evoke, from the point of history, we have to exclaim - should this torture torment us?

Since it brings us great pleasure, were not the rule of Taimur, souls delivered without measure? It is a creative destruction in the cause of revolution according to him. If you see Indian Communism which was expounded by a man called Rajane Palme Dutt. Has anyone heard of his name? (Two persons from the audience raised their hands). Two. He was born of a white woman and an Indian father in England. He was in charge of Indian Communism for 25 years. He never came to India though. In his book, "India Today", he laid down the framework, the policy for Indian Communists, what must be done, what is the kind of revolution needed in India, the development model etc.

In those days, even good photographs of India were not available, yet this man spoke about India sitting in London. He came to India for the first time in 1946, ten years after he wrote this book and realised that he had to revise it. He stayed for 30 days! A visitor to India was the father of Indian Communism! And from that day till date, the Indian Communist has never been with India. Not only that, they took over the Indian mind in the post- independence period. It is these Marxist/Macaulayist intellectuals who will certify whether somebody is modern or traditional, backward or secular or communal, progressive or regressive. They were running an Open Air University issuing certificates every day through the press. They have branded me as a communal man.

Labels: Tools for stultifying important debates

Labels substituted debate in India. Simply a label - communal, that is enough. Four or five editorials will appear preaching that Gurumurthy is communal and the matter must end there. No one would even discuss what communalism is! Religious fundamentalism, RSS/Bajrang Dal fundamentalism! Anyone, who exposes the Hindu cause in India is a fundamentalist! We have seen this term being used so casually and superfluously and incessantly by politicians and newspapers. Has anyone bothered to understand the meaning of religious fundamentalism going beyond these slogans?

Secularism is an intra-Christian phenomenon. It has no application outside Christianity at all. Secularism resolved the fight between two powerful persons, the King and the Archbishop who were loyal to the same faith, to the same prophet, to the same book and to the same Church. It is not a multi-religious virtue.

A multi-religious idea, a multi-religious living, a multi-religious culture, a multi-religious fabric or a multi-religious structure was unknown outside India. There was usually only one faith and no place for any other, not even for a variation of the same faith.

Fifty six thousand Bahais were butchered in one hour in Tehran! They believed in the same Koran, in the same Muhammad, the only difference was that they said that Muhammad might come in another form again. That was their only fault and they were all butchered.

But we have no such problem. We can play with God, we can abuse God, and we can beat God!
If I say that monotheistic religions have had a violent history, and the reply will be "you are communal." But this is exactly the same conclusion that a study in Chicago revealed, probably, the only study on fundamentalism conducted by anybody so far. This fundamentalism project brought out five volumes each volume about eight hundred to nine hundred pages. The conclusion they have reached is that, "Fundamentalism is a virtue of Abrahamic religions. It is not applicable to eastern faiths at all.

What about the Indian intellectuals? Day in and day out, they keep abusing us as fundamentalists, communalists, that we are anti-secular and it is being gulped down by everyone including those from the IITs and IIMs, lawyers and police officials, journalists and politicians. Look at this intellectual bankruptcy.

An inner revolution: The much needed change
We need a mental revolution, an inner revolution; we need to get rooted in our own soul. There is a missing element in India today and it is this. That element has to be restored otherwise Indian intellectualism will only be a carbon copy of Western intellectualism. We are borrowing not only their language and idiom but also we trying to copy the very soul of the West.

So, all that we need to do is (it is impossible to share the entire depth of the subject in one evening's lecture programme. I have only tried out point out in an incoherent way, how a completely fresh mindset has to be evolved. And unless it evolves, the Indian mind, which leads India, will be in a perpetual state of confusion ordinary people are perfectly all right.

Consider for example how thirty years before there was a question whether Tamil Nadu will be a part of India or not. The Dravidian parties have taken over the mind of Tamil Nadu. It had virtually ceased to be a part of India. And their attack was aimed at Hinduism. The moment you attack Hinduism you attack India. This is a fact. Neither politicians nor intellectuals nor academicians realised this. But, the ordinary people did. Just three religious movements- the Ayyappa movement, the Kavadi movement and the Melmaruvatthur Adi Para Sakti movement- have finished the Dravidian ideology to a very great extent. It is only the outer shell of Dravidianism that remains today. Tamil Nadu has been brought back successfully by Ayyappa, Muruga and Para Sakti, not by the Congress or the BJP or any other political party.

How many people have intellectually assessed the depth and the reach, the deep influence of religion over the people? A paradigm shift in a study of India would be an intellectual approach to this subject. Or consider for example its influence on economics. Many of you by now would have studied economics in some detail. Take a look at the society in India and compare the figures for public expenditure for private purposes, which is called the social security system in the West. 30% of the GDP in America is spent for social security, 48% in England, 49% in France, 56% in Germany and 67% in Sweden. This private expenditure is nothing but what you and I do by taking care of parents, our wives and children, brothers and sisters and grandparents, widowed sisters and distant relatives. This expenditure is met by the society in India.

And there is no law in India that people should do this. We consider it as our dharma. A person went to a court and demanded a divorce from his father and mother. The American court granted it saying that the only relationship that exists between two persons of America is their citizenship. The law in America recognises no other relationship ... In the year 1978, an interesting incident occurred in Manhattan. There was a power failure for six hours. Manhattan is in the heart of New York where you find the UN building, the World Trade Centre and the head quarters of many multi-national companies. One third of the world's health is concentrated in Manhattan. Within six hours, hundreds of people were killed, robbed and assaulted. We don't need electricity to behave in a civilised manner. How many intellectuals in India have ever articulated from such a sympathetic approach? We have only tarnished the image of this country. We must be ashamed of this.

Conclusion
I shall conclude my speech with this example. When Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in search of a new light. He used to get five rupees from a friend and four persons used to live on this. A cup of tea was one of the luxuries they used to have everyday in the morning, on the Pondicherry beach.

Sri Aurobindo used to always look at a mystic called Kullachamy (Subramanya Bharati has written a poem about him). He used to behave like a madman, wandering here and there, throwing stones ... One, day he came near Sri Aurobindo, lifted his cup of tea and emptied it in front of him. Then he showed the empty cup to him, placed it on the table and went away. Sri Aurobindo's friends were angry and wanted to chase him. Sri Aurobindo stopped them and said, "This is the kind of instruction I had been expecting from him. He wants me to empty my mind and start thinking afresh."

That is my appeal to you.

Questions and answer session after Sri Gurumurthy's talk

..The King cannot take over any land in the conquered territory. He has to appoint another person from that land who will maintain the Desachaara or the Dharma of that region. If a Sanaatani King invades a kingdom with a Bauddha Vihaara, our Dharma Shaastras say that the king should go and worship in that Vihaara even though he may not be a follower of the Buddha. That is why on 17 occasions Mohammed Ghauri was treated like this by Prithvi Raj Chauhan, 17 times he was captured but pardoned and let off. The next time he invaded, Chauhan was killed by deceit.

We tend to compare a non-aggressive Dharma with an aggressive one. We are a non-aggressive civilisation. We were and still are facing a problem with Islam but are we fully aware of it? Today, do you have any idea what Islamic fundamentalism is? I am willing to have a debate. The problem is in Islam not with the Muslims. A true Muslim has to kill me, this is the problem with Islam, have we ever studied Islam in depth?

Hindus are unable to understand the firepower that issues out of religion. This consciousness has been lacking. That consciousness that somebody can be fanatic enough to break temples is absent. The only time the Hindus did what the Muslims normally do is when they broke the Babri Masjid. That was the only Islamic committed by Hindus (loud applause).

Q: What about the laws of the Manu Dharma Shaastra.
There is no theology in Hinduism. Shrutis and Smritis are different. Smritis are valid for a certain time, but they can be overruled. Anybody who is familiar with the law must be aware of a principle called the Blue Pencil Theorem.that time invalidates the law.

Do Hindus insist on living as per the laws of Manu Dharma Shaastra? If it is not valid or suited to the times, our dharma gives the freedom to throw it into the Ganges.

Hindus are not going to commit sati along with the Manu Dharma Shaastra. We can have a debate on whether the Manu Dharma Shaastra was correct or not, that is a different issue.

But what about the Shariyat? Why doesn't anybody talk about it, leave alone crtitcising it? It mentions clearly all the guidelines for jehad. When a particular place is captured, all the people except young women and the aged are to be killed. The rules for sharing the booty are there. We should not be cowards in dealing with such matters. After all it is a war of words and not of swords.

Q: You have not mentioned the contribution of people like Moulana Abul Kalaam Azad and other Muslim leaders to the freedom movement?
Have you ever heard of Tabliqi Islam". No? It was a fundamentalist sect, which insisted on a rigid adherence to the Shariyat and the Umma. Moulana and some other Muslim leaders were part of this sect. That is why I have not mentioned their names.

Q: A question about the Mandal Commission and reservations.
Say, we introduce reservations for 300 years. What after that? The Brahmin will become the Harijan, then we will find this has to be changed. We must sort out a proper method to deal with it. When I was having a discussion with a bishop in America, I told him that Hindus were not used to manslaughter. If Hindus had committed such massacres probably you wouldn't be raising this issue against us. The Mayans and the Red Indians who were massacred were a hundred and ten million in number. There were many other societies exterminated, how many have studied the impact of colonialism in South America?

If you study the accounts recorded by the colonial authorities, whites themselves, you will notice that disease was unknown in those societies, plague was unknown, malaria was unknown. They led a peaceful life. How many of us are aware that Columbus set out to sail to discover. India, the motive, which inspired them, was the belief that Satan was settled in India! And that this is delaying the return of Christ! Look up the Encyclopaedia Britainicca, which mentions that Columbus believed in eschatology. There is one thing that these whitemen do which is commendable i.e., honest writing. Anyway, coming back to the thread, how many of you have studied Christianity to understand this concept? Have you heard of eschatology? Only two persons. Christ is supposed to return and when he does, for a thousand years there will be a rule of justice and peace on earth.

But, if he has to return, there should be no other religion, that is a pre-requisite. It is not non-Christian religions will disappear of their own. All non-Christians have to be converted to Christianity. Then Christ will come. This is eschatology. Traders were merely the tools; it is religion, which was the prime imperialistic force behind. Columbus instead discovered America, but could not succeed in converting them, so they were killed. How many of these Indian intellectuals have the guts to say this?

Q: What do you have to say about some instances of upper caste Hindus and Muslims joining hands to kill lower caste Hindus?
The subject in focus is the Indian intellectual scenario and Indian intellectuals, don't jump to issues related to the masses. What have the intellectuals done to lead the masses in a proper direction? So, it is natural that the masses behave in their own way. In India, the masses are leading the intellectuals! When that happens you cannot avoid such distortions, there must at least be an intellectual appraisal of what the masses do.

Why do ten million people gather at the Kumbh Mela? Nobody sends an invitation to them! And they have been doing this year after year for centuries together. Have you ever heard of the Kavari procession in the North? People carrying Ganges water, they walk right up to Rishikesh and hundreds of people on the way will be distributing food for them. These intellectuals are not even aware of the various activities, which go on in the country. arrogance has its roots in ignorance.

How many of you have ever been to a slum? In 1987, I was asked by the RSS to go to a slum, to have food and sleep there. A slum girl prepared tea by squeezing the tealeaf in hot water using her cloth that was the tea I took. I was about to vomit! It is easy to blame India. But are we willing to own India?

I was persuaded to do this by the RSS, in order to understand India from different angles. I didn.t learn economics simply through textbooks and colleges. I have been to Ludhiana, Jamanagar, Tirupur, Sivakasi, Rajkot- these are the places where you will find boards like, "we want people for work". It is not in Bombay, Madras or Calcutta. In these villages, it is the traditional communities, which have built up the industries.

The entire Ludhiana was built by the Ramgadia community, not by engineers. A diesel engine in Rajkot is being built completely by a Patel community. None of them is an engineer. 75% of fans produced in India are from Kasi, produced by traditional communities. In Punjab, the entire Australian cricket control order amounting to 3 crores has been given to one carpenter. He makes cricket bats for the Australian cricket control board. Carpenters can make ten willows a day; this man makes fifty per day and earns Rs.200/- per willow.

He drives car but doesn't know English. Our HRD index is 135. But, have we ever certified the roadside mechanic as an automobile engineer? Who repairs your Mercedes car? The IIT graduate or the roadside mechanic? Automobile Engineering is one of the most intricate subjects, this can mechanic can handle it, but do we recognise him as an educated man? Certify this unrecognised talent in India and see where India stands in terms of HRD index.

We don't know India. There is a gigantic intellectual vacuum; I am willing to have a daylong debate on it.

Programming Arena - VB 6.0 and VB.NEt issue

2004-10-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

"When They Rip It from My Cold, Dead Fingers"
Bradley Jones (view profile) October 18, 2004

Disclaimer: (Article From CodeGuru). I like this article is too informative and ased on my flavor that i planned to provide it in my space

Visual Basic 6 is now two versions old with yet newer versions in beta. VB 6.0 was followed by Visual Basic .NET (2002) and then Visual Basic .NET 2003. Visual Basic 2005 is now in beta and due out next year. Just as Visual Basic 3.0 and other popular past versions have faded out of mainstream existence, so is the predicted future for VB 6.0.(continued)

With VB 6.0, however, there are some arguments being made as to why it should not pass into the graveyard as quickly as some of the even older versions. But, are these valid arguments or are those comfortable with the product simply grasping at excuses to prolong the standard evolution that follows all software products and languages?
Are people really sticking with Visual Basic 6? If so, what are the reasons for sticking with an old version? Will the .NET version of Visual Basic be forced upon those who would otherwise continue forward with the old version? Is this situation any different from virtually every other product that has established itself in the market? Are gains being lost by not going to the newer .NET versions, or are gains lost by going to a new version?
Is this really an issue?
Why isn't Visual Basic 3 still around?
Are People Sticking with Visual Basic 6.0?

A large percentage of people are still using Visual Basic 6.0. There are enough people still using VB 6 that Microsoft is still looking for ways to make the transition to .NET even easier for these programmers and their applications. Many Visual Basic discussion forums, including Jupitermedia's own VBForums, continue to have high traffic in the "classic" (version 6) VB sections, and numerous articles continue to be published. While the world is being inundated with .NET articles, VB 6 is not being completely forgotten.

Within the forums, you'll find that many developers have stated that they see no reason to upgrade. In fact, many give reasons on why they don't plan to upgrade and why they believe most shouldn't upgrade. It is worth looking at a number of these reasons for sticking with VB 6. It is also worth noting how accurate the reasons are.

VB .NET Is a Different Language
One of the most common complaints is that Visual Basic .NET is not an upgrade from VB 6, but rather it is an entirely new language. This is one of the most popular issues raised when VB 6 developers were asked why they were not upgrading to .NET.

Within the forums, Ice_531 stated "Different syntax means more time to learn it. Sure, some things are still the same or similar but really .NET is a completely different language."
Merri had similar comments when he stated, "In my opinion, VB.NET isn't a sequel to the Visual Basic series: The syntax is different; it isn't of the same version line. It isn't an improved version of VB; it is a completely new language. Microsoft probably just wants to make more people use their C#."

Yet another person, BruceG, stated it succinctly, ".NET does not build on the previous versions of VB." BruceG expanded this, however, to state, "Up until .NET, VB has to some degree retained the flavor of its great-grandfather, BASIC. I would say the 'flavor' of BASIC is that it is a very high-level language with simplified syntax—you could concentrate on the problem at hand and let the computer do the work." He continued with "Saw demo, it was not easy. Have to know this-dot-that-dot-the other thing, blah, blah, blah."

Is Visual Basic .NET a new language?
This is a rough question to answer clearly. The syntax is very similar in that an if statement is still an if and a foreach statement is still a foreach. Capitalization is not required and semicolons are not needed to end commands.

Overall, the basic syntax is similar; however, most people mix language and libraries into the same bucket. This is where .NET pulls away from the Visual Basic of the past. Additionally, some basic commands and features that have been grandfathered in Visual Basic editions did go missing in .NET. This includes very common commands such as OPEN for opening basic files. Others commands were included, such as CType.

The commands that may have been lost in VB 6 are replaced in VB .NET with a robust library of routines. These routines are the .NET Framework classes that go beyond what VB 6 included. Within the .NET Framework is a number of routines within the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace that are specifically focused at the original VB commands. With this library as a part of a project, you have access to many of the original commands. For those commands that were lost, the .NET Framework provided other more robust solutions.

The .NET Framework is full of new classes and, thus, people are correct in that they have to be learned. The benefit of learning these classes, however, is that they are the exact same classes being used by other .NET languages, including C# and managed C++. Once you learn these classes, you will find that you can work with other .NET languages much easier.

Adding commands and classes is great, but losing them doesn't generally create goodwill. In VB .NET 2003, a lot of the functionality of VB was maintained. There were editor features that were critical to the language that were lost in the first .NET versions, including 2003. In VB 2005, the biggest return will be "edit & continue," which was a critical feature for the average VB developer. The loss of "edit & continue" alone caused a number of developers to go running from VB .NET. Microsoft, however, is listening to the developer community and is working to resolve many of these issues. This can be seen in some of the other features being added to the IDE that will help to make it the easiest development tool to use.

VB .NET Is Not Good for the Hobbyist!
".NET just isn't good for a hobbyist programmer."
This comment was made by Merri as a matter of fact. Others using Visual Basic 6 have made the same comment regarding VB .NET.

One of the values of Visual Basic is that it was quick and easy to create simple applications. You could drag and drop controls in a simple IDE and quickly create applications. Additionally, it was relatively easy to get entry-level versions at a low cost. This all added up to a product that hobbyists picked up and used.

There is the perception that VB .NET isn't for the hobbyists. There is a perception that it can no longer be easy. There are a number of reasons for these perceptions.

One reason for VB .NET appearing harder to use is that the IDE seems to be more complex. This is a result of having more features. It is possible, however, to customize the IDE back to something simpler. Additionally, Microsoft is releasing an Express version of Visual Basic 2005 that cuts out a lot of the items not needed by a hobbyist developer. This will greatly simplify working with VB.

In addition to releasing the Express editions, Microsoft has also increased the number of starter kits that are available. A starter kit is a full-fledged sample application that includes all of the source code. These applications can be cusomtomized and re-used. Existing starter kits do things ranging from a complete Web site to tracking a person's time. The starter kits provide a perfect starting point for a hobbyist who is primarily interested in simply building a solution and not as worried about writing every single line of code.

Another factor that complicates VB .NET has already been mentioned. The use of "edit & continue" is a huge factor in the perception of an easy-to-use product. This single item seems to be able to make the IDE friendly and responsive. According to those working with Microsoft, this is continually one of the biggest issues raised regarding VB .NET, and it is an issue that is finally being resolved in the 2005 version. In the current version, this feature was lost.

The need to compile and use a runtime also comes up in conversations as to why VB .NET is more complicated and less of a hobbyist tool. While the older VB also required a runtime, many people neglect to mention that. The facts are that the .NET Framework is needed for a VB .NET application to run. This is a much more substantial requirement than the runtime file needed in the past. In the short term, this is an issue; however, .NET is becoming a part of the operating system. Additionally, by Microsoft's count, there are over 100 million desktops with the .NET Framework on them already.

As machines upgrade to newer versions of Windows, it will be more likely that the .NET Framework will already be on the machine. The next version of Windows (Longhorn) has the .NET Framework built in. Additionally, many of the service pack disks that have been distributed also include the .NET Framework on them. The runtime will have to be installed before your .NET application will run. Granted, you can build an installation that pulls the runtime down from the Web or include it with your application when you distribute it. This is the same situation that was faced by earlier VB developers with its runtime. Granted, the required runtime files are substantially larger; however, Microsoft has included a "bootstrapper" that makes including the runtime install with your application easy.

Visual Basic .NET Programs Are Huge!
One of the other perceptions with VB .NET is that the resulting programs (EXEs) are huge. Steven made the comment, "there seems to be a lot more overhead when I toyed around with it on a friend's computer and just created a simple hello world app; the dern thing was like 300 Kbs!!!"(continued)

I have found that this is simply not the case. With VB .NET, much of the functionality is within the .NET Framework. All of the Framework functionality is provided in the runtime. As such, this functionality is not needed in the VB .NET file you create. As a quick example, and to test out Steven's comment, I wrote my version of a "hello world" test. It is a small program that copies text from a textbox into a label. The text is simply appended onto the existing in text in the label. The application has three buttons: one to clear the controls, one to do the append, and one to exit the program. Figure 1 shows the form for this application, which took less than five minutes to create, counting the time for the IDE to launch.

This application—or one similar to it—is what I generally create the first time I open up a new tool or work with a new programming language. It is a little more than simply typing out "Hello World" on a form, but it provides the ability to see how easy it is to create a form, add controls and customization, and work with basic text.

I'd speculate that this small application is much more robust than the Hello World application mentioned by Steven. The resulting executable program that was created was 15 Kb. This was the version created with debug information. A release version should be even smaller. This is a far cry smaller than 300 Kb! In general, you will find that if your application relies upon Framework classes, its size will not be outrageous.

Visual Basic .NET Costs Too Much!
Another reason people believe that VB .NET is not for them is the cost. This issue also stands on its own.
"Strictly because of the cost." Was the reason dglienna gave when asked why he hadn't upgraded.

Szlamany echoed cost as well; however, not regarding the product itself; "Lots of dollars to develop—lots of time—switching to something new costs R&D dollars that no one wants to give us..." He goes on to say, "Cost of MS product has nothing to do with it—we have MSDN license to just about everything—bought action-pack two years ago. MS sends me CDs every month—we don't even have time to catalog them... It's all about internal cost to make the transition. And getting customers to want to do it as well."

mudfish also noted the secondary cost, "I do not think the people I work for want the expense of the training to shift us to .NET now! The longer they wait, the more it will cost in man-hours!"
The cost of going to .NET can be summed up into two areas. The first is the cost of the product and the second is the cost to train in order to understand and use the product.
Visual Basic .NET is free. More specifically, the compiler for VB .NET is a part of the .NET Framework, which is freely available. The development environment and all the tools that make VB visual are what cost. Whereas there are third-party tools that can be used to create VB applications, the Microsoft product is the primary one that people want. There are trial versions that last from 60 to 120 days; they can be obtained in books and other places. Additionally, there is a standard version that can be obtained for under $100. There are a variety of other versions as well. Most cost about the same as the original prices of their VB 6 counterparts.

With Visual Studio 2005, you can expect the inclusion of Visual Basic in as a part of the Standard Edition. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Microsoft has announced—and has in beta—a Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition; it has a simplified interface. While Microsoft hasn't committed to pricing on the Express versions, it have said that it will be competitive. Because this is a SKU below the Standard edition, it could be assumed that it will be substantially lower in price than that version. Right now, you can get the beta of Visual Basic 2005 Express freely at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/.

While options for getting VB .NET cheaper are being announced, the other issue of cost centers on training. Learning takes time, and time is often considered a cost.

There are no great answers for getting around the cost of training; however, there are some good ones. The number of Webcasts and chats being done by Microsoft and other companies has increased dramatically in the past year. At the time this article is being written, Microsoft was even advertising on Developer.com that if you attended three free Webcasts, they would give you a copy of the standard edition of VB .NET! Microsoft is also distributing a resource kit and has provided numerous documents on upgrading. The Express Edition includes starter kits and "Getting Started" content. Add to this the targetted help functions, the smart tags, and the other features and the result should be that less training is needed to get up and coding with VB .NET.

Numerous sites have popped up with articles and other information to help you get started as well. Sites such as CodeGuru and Developer.com include sections for VB .NET. You can also find numerous discussion forums where questions can be asked.

Although articles, Webcasts, and discussions are not classroom training, they do provide free information to help you learn to use VB .NET. The cost of time is still there; however, it can already be seen that people with .NET experience are becoming more valuable than those without.

Visual Basic 6 Works and Can Do It All!
One of the most interesting and simple comments made when asking people why they are sticking with VB 6 came from Bruce Fox. Bruce simply stated, "Why? VB6 does everything I need."

Another comment was made by Pasvorto, "I don't see where I could provide any more functionality to my company. So, if there is no return, why pay the price to change?"

I've seen this argument made numerous times. The language or tool I am using works and I can do anything needed, so why change? I watched a manager make this argument for keeping a team of C programmers on a distributed program. C worked, the libraries had been created, and things were getting done. There was no need to switch to a GUI RAD tool. Fortunately, the switch was eventually made and a team of twenty developers was reduced to around a half dozen developers who produced more than the original team that was three times their size!

Initially, you will be less productive in a new environment; however, once you become familiar with the environment (such as the .NET Framework) and with the tools (such as the Visual Basic .NET IDE), you will quickly realize that there are a lot of features that will make you even more productive than you were before. The short time loss of productivity should be more than made up for in the long run. This becomes even truer within VB .NET 2005, where things such as Intellisense get supplemented with Intellitask and where features such as auto-correction are made available. For Web development, the addition of features such as Master pages help to focus your coding into the areas that are most important. Wizards and options help to eliminate many of the redundant tasks that you do.

A Digression...
It is worth mentioning one big difference between VB .NET and VB 6. VB .NET is an OOP tool. It was created to do Object-Oriented Programming. VB 6 and earlier were more focused on being RAD tools. The focus was on rapid development. This focus on the RAD came at the cost of some of the features that more advanced languages have. With VB .NET, the doors are open to tap into the same feature set that the advance-level languages have. This doesn't mean that the RAD has to be gone. In fact, Microsoft is focused on making VB .NET even more appropriate for rapid application development while maintaining its ability to tap into all the features of advanced languages and OOP.

Real Reasons to Go Visual Basic .NET
I often get calls from recruiters and companies looking for developers. I am asked for more recommendations for VB .NET developers than for VB developers. In fact, when asked for people using Microsoft developer technologies, it has become very rare to be asked for a person having no .NET development experience.(continued)

What is the point of stating this? Simply, if you are going to be looking for a new VB job in the future, chances are that your VB 6 credentials are not going to be enough to get you the job. Chances are, you are going to have to have .NET experience as well.

Where is DBase today? How many Paradox applications are being built? Where are all the requests for PowerBuilder developers? Have you met many Clipper developers lately? If you look really hard, you will find that there are still some systems out there using these languages and tools, but for the most part, they are yesterday's technologies. They were all great products. They were all the best in their class at one point. Those who knew the tools would tell you that they did everything that was needed at the time. Those who knew the tool are most likely programming in a different language or tool today.

If you are doing professional-level development with VB, chances are that within a few more years, there will be little new development for you to do if you don't move to .NET or something else. Visual Basic 6 is an older version. Microsoft has a support plan in place, but with time that support will cost and with even more time it will go away.

Although VB 6 does do a lot, VB .NET is being positioned to be able to do more. VB .NET includes access to the complete .NET Framework. This is thousands of classes and methods for getting things done. Additionally, VB .NET can tap into and use any libraries or classes created with any other .NET language. This means that VB .NET programmers have access to all the routines created by C# and managed C++ developers. While access to these was available before, it was not as easy.

What Does Microsoft Say?
Microsoft obviously wants everyone to upgrade for a variety of reasons. I feel comfortable in saying that they also understand that you are not going to upgrade simply because they would like you to.

.NET offers a lot of promise and VB .NET does as well. As I mentioned previously, the Visual Basic team at Microsoft is working to make sure VB 2005 has many of the features that VB 6 developers wanted. In many ways, those promises are starting to materialize.

Microsoft is not simply abandoning VB for C#; however, it did make the hard decision in regard to backward compatibility. S. Somaseger, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation, states it clearly in his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/08/01/204540.aspx (referring to the Visual Basic language):

"We're 120% committed to the language and the product not just today but for a long, long, long time to come, as we have been in the last decade now. I know that when we moved from VB6 to VB.NET, we broke compatibility and that is a sore point with some of our developer customers. It was a huge decision that we did not take lightly at that time. The trade-off clearly was making a leapfrog jump in innovation as we moved to the .NET platform versus ensuring full compatibility."

In a conversation with Craig Symonds, General Manager of the Visual Studio Tools, he stated, "Forrester Research recently reported that 56% of enterprises are using the .NET Framework for their development (see http://www.microsoft.com/forrester). Clearly, we've seen a significant amount of momentum since we launched three years ago." Craig went on to say," A key goal for 2005 is to add or fix key adoption blockers for those folks that haven't made the move to .NET as of yet."

Knowing that Microsoft is interested in addressing the blocking factors for migrating to VB .NET, it is worth looking to see what is coming next. Visual Basic 2005 .NET is in beta. Robert Green, Program Manager for Visual Basic at Microsoft, stated the following when asked what the best features of VB 2005 would be:

"Drag and drop data binding to local data, server-based data, Web services, and business objects. Code snippets. My, which is a speed dial into the Framework, (for example, My.Computer.Network.IsAvailable). Language features such as generics and operator overloading. Strongly typed resources and settings, (as in Form1.BackgroundImage = My.Resources.CoolBackground, where CoolBackground is actually coolbackground.jpg). Edit and continue. Auto-correction, where the background compiler detects errors in your code and suggests ways to fix the error, and then automatically makes the correction. Those are some of my favorites."

Robert points out a number of features that will make VB .NET go beyond the RAD tool it was in version 6.

In the most recent conversation I had with Craig Symonds, he echoed many of the features that Robert mentioned. Additionally, Craig stated that Microsoft is definitely focused on taking steps to making it easier for the VB 6 developer to learn VB 2005 .NET quicker. He stated that a ton of time is being spent on VB 2005 with the focus on making things simpler. This simplification should help to make VB the RAD tool it has been in the past. Craig stated that this focus for simplifying things would continue into the future for VB.

Craig also mentioned that there is a perception that VB .NET requires the "ripping and replacing" of VB 6 applications. He stated that this was one of the perceptions along with many of the items mentioned earlier in this article that are causing people to avoid .NET. There is also the perception that C# has taken over VB. Although C# is gaining a ton of momentum, VB is still very high in usage. Additionally, VB .NET does not require the re-writing of older VB applications. The old and the new can work together.

Support for Craig's comments about C# versus VB can be found in the TIOBE numbers published on Developer.com. The numbers for Visual Basic are 500% greater than for C#. Even taking into account the additional items tracked in the Visual Basic category, it should still land substantially higher on the chart. The TIOBE rankings show current interest in a topic. (See http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3417831.)

When Should Visual Basic 6.0 Be Killed?
Visual Basic 6 is going to be around for quite a while. VB .NET is, however, taking over and the reasons for upgrading are becoming more compelling with each new version. With the release of 2005, many of the remaining issues about upgrading are going to be addressed—including edit & continue.

While VB 6 may be around for a long time, it can already be seen that employers looking for VB experience are looking for .NET people more so than those without. For those doing professional development, the need for VB 6 in new development should be going away sooner rather than later. As .NET becomes a standard within Windows systems, so will development using .NET.
Although VB .NET is only three years old, it is entering its third version. The magic at Microsoft seems to peak in the third version of a product. Just think about VB 3 and Windows 3.0! The third version of VB .NET will be VB 2005. It is in beta now and will be released next year.

Conclusions
Although there are a number of reasons to stick with VB 6, Microsoft is working to tilt the scale to VB .NET. Microsoft made a tough decision to avoid hurting VB .NET with backward compatibility. Statistics are already starting to show that .NET development is becoming more predominant.

The promise of using VB .NET is the ability to tap into the full .NET Framework and to make Visual Basic a first class programming language. As Craig Symonds stated, "[VB .NET] removes the glass ceiling in 6.0."

If you are a professional developer doing VB 6.0 development, the days of developing new systems with your tool of choice are numbered. It may be time to start looking at VB .NET even if you have to do it on your own. Otherwise, you may be working with the guys who didn't want to upgrade from VB 3.

After all, Visual Basic 3 could do almost everything in its day, too! Sidebar

Bradley Jones, is a Microsoft MVP that works for Jupitermedia as an Executive Editor over many of the software development sites and channels. His experience includes development in C, C++, VB, some Java, C#, ASP, COBOL, and more as well as having been a developer, consultant, analyst, lead, and much more. His recent books include Teach Yourself the C# Language in 21 Days.

The Olympic Spirit in my life

2004-10-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

The Olympic Games are the world's largest pageant of athletic skill and competitive spirit. The spirit of the Olympic Games is about more than just medals. It's about ordinary people displaying extraordinary determination, skill, character and cooperation. The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

I am indeed fortunate to be part of such events when a group of students displayed extraordinary determination and skills to organise event to its success. First among these memorable events was organisation of seminar on Information Technology. The thought of organizing such event rose during discussion among friends. This idea was discussed with professors and other students all of them found this as innovative and interesting and they shown there inclination for active participation. College administration provided just infrastructure help required for organizing seminar but avoided any financial support.

For financial support we had contacted to several computer coaching institutes and even The Institution of Engineers local chapter authorities. Fortunately the authorities have shown their kind interest in sponsoring the event by providing prizes for best papers in each session. This was a major boost up for our team as Institution of Engineers was backing up our event. The seminar was scheduled after a week because of forthcoming examination. This was indeed a short time period, but news of this event spread waves through the college and students from various fields formed groups and came forward to participate actively. To our astonishment we received 52 good papers from about 80 participants. This was indeed more important in such a college where just a few students know about technical papers and their presentation in seminars. This was collective effort and co-operation of all the participants and members of orgainising committee who displayed extraordinary determination, teamwork and practiced hard to make the seminar as memorable event.

This memorable event formed a solid benchmark and was followed by organisation of National Student Seminar supported by State regulatory authority. This time the team of experienced organizers was ready to take care of several aspects related to the organisation of seminar. This was indeed a good platform where students from various states participated to share their knowledge and expertise not only educational but also their cultural.

International education is also one such similar platform where students from different countries with different language, race, culture, religion and knowledge background come close to each other and share their knowledge. This leads in better understanding of other fellow as a human being without any consideration to its religion, races and origin and develops respect and healthy relationship among them. This in long term helps in bridging the gap in between the different nations and hence spreads spirit of friendship.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - Joel on Software

2004-10-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This article belongs to Joel on Software and written by By Joel Spolsky onThursday, March 23, 2000. I hope thsi article will be helpful for everybody on the other end of screen, so i am sharing this.

Hiring the right people is extremely crucial to Fog Creek Software. In our field, there are three types of people. At one end of the scale, there are the unwashed masses, lacking even the most basic skills for this job. They are easy to ferret out and eliminate, often just by reviewing a resume and asking two or three quick questions. At the other extreme, are the brilliant superstars who write lisp compilers for fun, in a weekend, in Assembler for the Palm Pilot. And in the middle, you have a large number of "maybes" who seem like they might just be able to contribute something. The trick is telling the difference between the superstars and the maybes, because at Fog Creek Software we only hire the superstars. Here are some techniques for doing that.

First of all, the #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:
Smart, andGets Things Done.

That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night. Our goal is to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set. Any skill set that people can bring to the job will be technologically obsolete in a couple of years, anyway, so it's better to hire people that are going to be able to learn any new technology rather than people who happen to know SQL programming right this minute.

Smart is hard to define, but as we look at some possible interview questions we'll see how you can ferret it out. Gets Things Done is crucial. People who are Smart but don't Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say "Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language" and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant white paper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful.

Now, people who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. This makes them liabilities to the company because not only don't they contribute, but they soak up good people's time. They are the kind of people who copy big chunks of code around rather than writing a subroutine, because it gets the job done, just not in the smartest way.
The most important rule about interviewing:
Make A Decision

At the conclusion of the interview, you have to be ready to make a sharp decision about the candidate. There are only two possible outcomes to this decision: Hire or No Hire. Turn to your computer and send immediate feedback to the recruiter. The subject line should be the name of the candidate. The first line of the email should be Hire or No Hire. Then you should spend about 2 paragraphs backing up your decision.

There is no other possible answer. Never say, "Hire, but not in my group." This is rude and implies that the candidate is not smart enough to work with you, but maybe he's smart enough for those losers over in that other group. If you find yourself tempted to say "Hire, but not in my group," simply translate that mechanically to "No Hire" and you'll be OK. Even if you have a candidate that would be brilliant at doing 1 particular thing, but wouldn't be very good in another group, that's a No Hire. Things change so often and so rapidly that we need people that can succeed anywhere. If for some reason you find an idiot savant that is really, really, really good at SQL but completely incapable of ever learning any other topic, No Hire. They don't have a future at Fog Creek.

Never say "Maybe, I can't tell." If you can't tell, that means No Hire. It's really easier than you'd think. Can't tell? Just say no! Similarly, if you are on the fence, that means No Hire. Never say,

"Well, Hire, I guess, but I'm a little bit concerned about..." That's a No Hire as well.
An important thing to remember about interviewing is this: it is much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people's time fixing all their bugs. If you have any doubts whatsoever, No Hire.

While you are conducting the interview, don't worry that if you reject a lot of people, Fog Creek won't be able to find anyone to hire. That's not your problem. It's the recruiter's problem, it's H.R.'s problem, it's Joel's problem, but it's not your problem. Keep asking yourself which is worse - that we grow into a big, lousy software company with lots of coconuts, or that we stay small but high quality? Of course, it's important to seek out good candidates and everybody should see it as a part of their mission to find and recruit smart people who get things done. But once you're actually interviewing someone, pretend that Fog Creek has plenty of great candidates. Never lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find great candidates.
But how do you make this difficult decision? You just have to keep asking yourself during the interview: is this person smart? Does this person get things done? In order to be able to tell, you're going to have to ask the right questions.

Just for fun, here is the worst interview question on Earth: "What's the difference between varchar and varchar2 in Oracle 8i?" This is a terrible question. There is no possible, imaginable correlation between people that know that particular piece of useless trivia and people that Fog Creek wants to hire. Who cares what the difference is? You can find out online in about 15 seconds!

Actually, there are some even worse questions. I'll get to that later.

So now we get to the fun part: interview questions. My list of interview questions comes from my first job at Microsoft. There are actually hundreds of famous Microsoft interview questions. Everybody has a set of questions that they really like. You, too, will develop a particular set of questions and a personal interviewing style which helps you make the Hire/No Hire decision. Here are some techniques that I have used that have been successful.

Before the interview, I read over the candidates resume and jot down an interview plan on a scrap of paper. That's just a list of questions that I want to ask. Here's a typical plan for interviewing a programmer:
A) Introduction
B) Question about recent project candidate worked on
C) Impossible Question
D) C Function
E) Are you satisfied?
F) Design Question
G) The Challenge
H) Do you have any questions?

Before the interview, I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in 1 hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression. An interview is like a very, very delicate scale -- it's very hard to judge someone based on a 1 hour interview and it may seem like a very close call. But if you know a little bit about the candidate beforehand, it's like a big weight on one side of the scale, and the interview is useless. Once, right before an interview, a recruiter came into my office. "You're going to love this guy," she said. BOY did this make me mad. What I should have said was, "well, if you're so sure I'm going to love him, why don't you just hire him instead of wasting my time going through this interview." But I was young and naïve, so I interviewed him. When he said not-so-smart things, I thought to myself, "gee, must be the exception that proves the rule." I looked at everything he said through rose-colored glasses. I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So: don't listen to recruiters; don't ask around about the person before you interview them; and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you've both made your decisions independently. It's the scientific method!

The Introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidate at ease. I spend about 30 seconds telling the person who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure the candidate that we are interested in how he goes about solving problems, not the actual answer. By the way, in doing the interview, you should make sure that you are not sitting across a desk from the candidate. This creates a formal barrier which will not place the candidate at ease. It is better to move the desk against a wall, or to go around and sit on the other side of the desk with the candidate; this does help put the candidate at ease. This results in a better interview because it is less distorted by nervousness.

Part 2 is a question about some recent project that the candidate worked on. For interviewing college kids, ask them about their senior thesis, if they had one, or about a course they took that involved a long project that they really enjoyed. For example, sometimes I will ask, "what class did you take last semester that you liked the most? It doesn't have to be computer-related." Actually I am usually pretty happy if they choose a non-computer related course. Sometimes you look at their schedule, and it looks like they are taking the bare minimum number of Comp Sci courses, but every elective is something related to Music. Then they will tell you that their favorite course was Object Oriented Databases. Yeah, right. I'd be happier if they admitted that they just liked music more than computers, instead of sucking up.

When interviewing experienced candidates, you can talk about their previous job.

In this question, I'm looking for one thing: passion. When you find a project that the person worked on recently, these are all good signs:

They get very excited talking about it; they tend to talk more quickly and get animated. This shows that when they are interesting in something, they will be passionate about it. There are far too many people around that can work on something and not really care one way or the other. Even if they are passionately negative, this can be just as good a sign. "I was working on installing Foo Bar Mark II for my previous employer, but he was such a dope!" These are good candidates that we want to hire. Bad candidates just don't care and will not get enthusiastic at all during the interview. A really good sign that a candidate is passionate about something is that when they are talking about it, they will forget for a moment that they are in an interview. Sometimes a candidate comes in who is very nervous about being in an interview situation -- this is normal so I always overlook that. But then when you get them talking about Computational Monochromatic Art they will get extremely excited and lose all signs of nervousness. Good. I like passionate people who really care. (To see an example of Computational Monochromatic Art try unplugging your monitor.)

They are careful to explain things. I have rejected candidates because when they talked about their previous project, they couldn't explain it in terms that a normal person could understand. Often engineering majors will just assume that everyone knows what Bates Theorem is or what Peano's Axioms are. If they start doing this, stop them for a minute and say, "could you do me a favor, just for the sake of the exercise, could you please explain this in terms my grandmother could understand." At this point many people will still continue to use jargon and will completely fail to make themselves understood. GONG!

If the project was a team project, look for signs that they took a leadership role. A candidate might say: "we were working on X, but the boss said Y and the client said Z." I'll ask, "so what did you do?" A good answer to this might be "I got together with the other members of the team and wrote a proposal..." A bad answer might be, "Well, there was nothing I could do. It was an impossible situation." Remember, Smart and Gets Things Done. A good way to tell if somebody Gets Things Done is to see if historically they have tended to get things done in the past. In fact, you can even ask them directly to give you an example from their recent past when they took a leadership role and got something done -- overcame some institutional inertia, for example.

OK, the third thing on that list is the impossible question. This is fun. The idea is to ask a question that they have no possible way of answering, just to see how they handle it. "How many optometrists are there in Seattle?" "How many tons does the Washington Monument weigh?" "How many gas stations are in Los Angeles?" "How many piano tuners are there in New York?"

Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap into trying to figure out some back-of-the-envelope answer. "Well, lets see, the population of LA is about 7 million; each person in LA has about 2.5 cars..." Of course it's OK if they are radically wrong. The important thing is that they leapt into the question enthusiastically. They may try to figure out the capacity of a gas station. "Gee, it takes 4 minutes to tank up, gas stations have about 10 pumps and are open about 18 hours a day..." They may try to figure it out by area. Sometimes they will surprise you with their creativity or ask for a Los Angeles yellow pages. All good signs.

Not-so-smart candidates will get flustered and upset. They will just stare at you like you landed from Mars. You have to coach them. "Well, if you were building a new city the size of Los Angeles, how many gas stations would you put in it?" You can give them little hints. "How long does it take to fill up a tank of gas?" Still, with not-smart candidates, you will have to drag them along while they sit there stupidly and wait for you to rescue them. These people are not problem solvers and we don't want them working for us.

For programming questions, I ask candidates to write a small function in C. Here are some typical problems I would ask:
1.0 Reverse a string in place
2.0 Reverse a linked list
3.0 Count all the bits that are on in a byte
4.0 Binary search
5.0 Find the longest run in a string
6.0 atoi
7.0 itoa (great, because they have to use a stack or strrev)

You don't want to give them any problems that take more than about 5 lines of code; you won't have time for that.

Let's look at a couple of these in detail. #1: reverse a string in place. Every candidate I've ever interviewed in my life has done this wrong the first time. Without exception, they try to allocate another buffer and reverse the string into that buffer. The trouble is, who allocates the buffer? Who frees the buffer? In giving this question to dozens of candidates I found out an interesting fact. Most people who think that they know C really do not understand memory or pointers. They just don't get it. It's amazing that these people are working as programmers, but they are. With this question, here are some ways to judge the candidate:

Is their function fast? Look at how many times they call strlen. I've seen O(n^2) algorithms for strrev when it should be O(n), because they are calling strlen again and again in a loop.

Do they use pointer arithmetic? This is a good sign. Many "C programmers" just don't know how to make pointer arithmetic work. Now, ordinarily, I wouldn't reject a candidate just because he lacked a particular skill. However, I've discovered that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it's an aptitude. In Freshman year CompSci, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their Atari 800s when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol'; time learning Pascal in college, until one day their professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes PoliSci majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. This is an aptitude thing, not a skill thing – it requires a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can't do.

For #3, you can see how well they learned the bitwise operators in C.... but this is a skill, not an aptitude, so you can help them with these. The interesting thing is to watch them write a subroutine that counts all the bits in a byte, then ask them to make it much, much faster. Really smart candidates will create a lookup table (after all, it's only got 256 entries) that they only have to create once. With good candidates, you can have a really interesting conversation about the different space/speed tradeoffs. Press them further: tell them you don't want to spend any time building the lookup table during initialization. Brilliant candidates might even suggest a caching scheme where bits are counted the first time they are used, and then stored in a lookup table so they don't have to be counted if they are used again. Really, really brilliant candidates will try to devise a way to compute the table using some kind of a shortcut taking advantage of the patterns that occur.

When you watch somebody write code, here are some techniques that may be helpful:
Always reassure them that you understand that it's hard to write code without an editor, and you will forgive them if their paper gets really messy. Also you understand that it's hard to write bug-free code without a compiler, and you will take that into account.

Some signs of a good programmer: good programmers have a habit of writing their { and then skipping down to the bottom of the page and writing their }s right away, then filling in the blank later. They also tend to have some kind of a variable naming convention, primitive though it may be... Good programmers tend to use really short variable names for loop indices. If they name their loop index CurrentPagePositionLoopCounter it is sure sign that they have not written a lot of code in their life. Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap.

Good programmers plan before they write code, especially when there are pointers involved. For example, if you ask them to reverse a linked list, good candidates will always make a little drawing on the side and draw all the pointers and where they go. They have to. It is humanly impossible to write code to reverse a linked list without drawing little boxes with arrows between them. Bad programmers will start writing code right away.

Inevitably, you will see a bug in their function. So we come to question 5: Are you satisfied with that code? You may want to ask, "OK, so where's the bug?" The quintessential Open Ended Question From Hell. All programmers make mistakes, there's nothing wrong with that, they just have to be able to find them. With the string functions, they'll almost always forget to null-terminate the new string. With almost any function, they are likely to have off-by-one errors. They will forget semicolons sometimes. Their function won't work correctly on 0 length strings, or it will GPF if malloc fails... Very, very rarely, you will find a candidate that doesn't have any bugs the first time. In this case, this question is even more fun. When you say, "There's a bug in that code," they will review their code carefully, and then you get to see if they can be diplomatic yet firm in asserting that the code is perfect... In general, it's always a good idea to ask the candidate if they are satisfied with their answer before moving on. Be Regis.

Part 6: the design question. Ask the candidate to design something. Jabe Blumenthal, the original designer of Excel, liked to ask candidates to design a house. According to Jabe, he's had candidates who would go up to the whiteboard and immediately draw a square. A square! These were immediate No Hires. In design questions, what are you looking for?

Good candidates will try to get more information out of you about the problem. Who is the house for? As a policy, I will not hire someone who leaps into the design without asking more about who it's for. Often I am so annoyed that I will give them a hard time by interrupting them in the middle and saying, "actually, you forgot to ask this, but this is a house for a family of 48-foot tall blind giraffes."

Not-so-smart candidates think that design is like painting: you get a blank slate, and you can do whatever you want. Smart candidates understand that design is a difficult series of trade-offs. A great design question: design a trash can for a city street corner. Think of all the trade offs! It has to be easy to empty, but impossible to steal; it has to be easy to put things into, but hard for things to fly out of on a windy day; it has to be solid, yet inexpensive; in some cities, it has to be specially designed so that terrorists can't hide a bomb in it.

Creative candidates will often surprise you with an interesting, non-obvious answer. One of my favorite questions is Design a Spice Rack for Blind People. Inevitably, candidates will put Braille somewhere on the spice bottles, and it usually winds up being on top of the lid for various reasons which you'll discover after you've asked this question 100 times. I had one candidate who decided that it would be better to put the spices in a drawer, because it is more comfortable to scan Braille with your fingertips horizontal than vertical. (Try it!) This was so creative it surprised me -- in dozens of interviews, I had never heard that answer. And it really took a major creative "leap" outside of the bounds of the problem. On the strength of that answer alone, and no negatives, I hired the candidate, who went on to be one of the best program managers on the Excel team.

Look for closure. This is part of Get Things Done. Sometimes candidates will drift back and forth, unable to make a decision, or they will try to avoid hard questions. Sometimes they will leave difficult decisions unanswered and try to move on. Not good. Good candidates have a tendency to try to naturally keep things moving forward, even when you try to hold them back. If the conversation ever starts going around in circles, and the candidate says something like "well, we can talk about this all day, but we've got to do something, so let's go with decision X" that's a really good sign.

Which brings us to #7, The Challenge. This is fun. Throughout the interview, you look for the candidate to say something that is absolutely, positively, unarguably correct. Then you say, "wait a minute, wait a minute," and spend about 2 minutes playing devil's advocate. Argue with them when you are sure they are right.

Weak candidates will give in. No Hire.

Strong candidates will find a way to persuade you. They will have a whole laundry list of Dale Carnegie techniques to win you over. "Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you," they will say. But they will stand their ground. Hire.

Admittedly, in an interview situation, you are not equal parties. Thus there is a risk that the candidate will be afraid to argue with you because you are in a position of power over him. BUT, good candidates will tend to get fairly passionate about the argument, and they may momentarily forget that they are in an interview, and they will get very involved in trying to convince you. These are the people we want to hire.

Finally, you should ask the candidate if they have any questions. Some people like to look to see if the candidate will ask intelligent questions, which is a standard technique in the interviewing books. Personally, I don't care what questions they ask; by this point I've already made my decision. The trouble is, candidates have to see about 5-6 people in one day, and it's hard for them to ask 5-6 people different, brilliant questions, so if they don't have any questions, fine.

I always, always leave about 5 minutes a the end of the interview to sell Fog Creek. This is very important even if you are not going to hire them. If you've been lucky enough to find a really good candidate, you want to do everything you can at this point to make sure that they want to come to Fog Creek. Even if they are a bad candidate, you want to get them excited about Fog Creek Software so that they go away with a positive impression of the company. Think of it this way: these people are not just potential hires; they are also customers. They are also salesmen for our recruiting effort: if they think that Fog Creek is a great place to work, they will encourage their friends to apply.

Ah, I just remembered that I promised to give you some more examples of really bad questions to avoid.

First of all, avoid the illegal questions. Anything related to race, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, or physical handicap is just illegal. If their resume says they were in the Army in 1990, don't ask them, even to make pleasant conversation, if they were in the Gulf war. It's against the law. If their resume says that they attended the Technion in Haifa, don't ask them, even conversationally, if they are Israeli. It's against the law. There's a pretty good discussion of what's illegal here. (But the rest of the interview questions at that site are pretty stupid).

Next, avoid any questions which might make it seem like we care about, or are discriminating based on, things which we don't actually care about or discriminate based on. The best example of this I can think of is asking someone if they have kids or if they are married. This might give the false impression that we think that people with kids aren't going to devote enough time to their work or that they are going to run off and take maternity leave.

Finally, avoid brain teaser questions like the one where you have to arrange 6 equal length matches to make exactly 4 identical perfect triangles. If it's an "aha!" question, you don't get any information about "smart/get things done" by figuring out if they happen to make the mental leap or not.

Interviewing is more of an art than a science, but if you remember the Smart/Gets Thing Done principle you will be in good shape. When you get a chance, ask some of your co-workers what their favorite questions are and what kinds of answers they look for. In the Building 16 cafeteria in Redmond this is a perennial favorite topic of lunchtime conversation.The company I started, Fog Creek Software, makes a terrific product called FogBUGZ for software project management and bug tracking. It's web based, affordable, and runs on your own server, and it's now available for Windows, Unix, or Mac OS X servers. Check it out now — there's a free online trial! Enter your email address to receive a (very occasional) email whenever I write a major new article. You can unsubscribe at any time, of course.

Are Indians really dumb? -- G V Dasarathi

2004-10-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This wonderful article belongs to columnist Mr. G.V. Dasarathi. I liked this too much that i had put in my small place. This article was published in rediff.com on August 1,2004

'The whole process where people get an idea and put together a team, raise the capital, create a product and mainstream it -- that can only be done in the US. It can't be done sitting in India. The Indian part of the equation is to help these innovative US companies bring their products to the market quicker, cheaper and better, which increases the innovative cycle there. It is a complementarity we need to enhance.'
-- Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys, quoted in The New York Times, March 7, 2004.

Translated into plain English, this means 'Indians lack creativity and cannot come up with the ideas to create and sell a product. Indians can only do the backend slog work that helps US companies create and sell their products.'

How about this?
ISRO -- the Indian Space Research Organisation -- is the result of Dr Vikram Sarabhai's vision. Its first rocket, like the one in the picture, was launched 40 years ago. Over the past 40 years, a multi-disciplinary group of electronics, mechanical, electrical, civil and chemical engineers has designed and built 32 satellites and three generations of launch vehicles culminating in the GSLV.

This was done with almost totally indigenous R&D, battling US sanctions. Each time that a technology or component was unavailable, ISRO went ahead and developed it on its own. ISRO's satellites help India in telecom, television broadcasting, weather forecasting, disaster warning, telemedicine, education and fishery. Technologies in areas as diverse as optics and artificial limb manufacture have been developed and transferred to Indian industry.

Jamsetji Tata wanted to make textiles in Nagpur in the 1800s with the cotton grown there. Nagpur had no textile industry then, and in Manchester Jamsetji was told that Nagpur's weather was not suitable as it was too dry. He said, 'Alright, I will bring the Manchester weather to Nagpur.' He imported humidifiers and started India's first textile mill in 1874.

When Jamshetji started the Tata Iron and Steel Company and wanted to export steel rails to Britain, a Britisher called Sir Frederick Upcourt said, 'Do you mean to say that Tatas propose to make steel rails to British specifications? I will undertake to eat every pound of rail that they make, if they do that.' The Tatas did manage to make steel rails and export them to Britain. Upcourt must have developed a massive case of indigestion). In World War II British tanks were called Tatanagars because the steel was made in Tatanagar.

To paraphrase Nilekani, Vikram Sarabhai and Jamsetji Tata got an idea, put together a team, raised the capital, created a product, and mainstreamed it. They did it sitting in India, 40 years and 125 years ago respectively, when India's technical capabilities were far less than they are now.

So we now have two Indias.

One has a severe inferiority complex and is unwilling to do anything creative because it thinks it is incapable of it. It thinks being called the back office of the world is the ultimate compliment, missing the implied insult in the word back. It thinks its ultimate destiny is to do all the slog work of the world.

The other is confident about its capability, dreams big dreams, then goes ahead and translates the dreams into reality. There are innumerable success stories like ISRO and Tata Steel in India today, in manufacturing, electronic hardware, pharmaceuticals, software, fashion design, or any area that you can think of. The problem is that these are not highlighted. Creative individuals and organisations who are developing products or technologies with a lasting impact are unsung heroes.

To be a hero in India today you just have to make a lot of immediate money. Creativity is irrelevant, and maybe dreamers like Vikram Sarabhai and Jamsetji Tata would be considered fools.

When you dream a big dream, maybe a small part of it gets translated into reality. If you do not dream at all, what do you finally get in reality?An entrepreneur must have self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Why is it that this confidence is missing in the heads of India's biggest software companies?

Back to the Raj?

Every Indian child's history textbook says something to this effect: 'During the British Raj we exported cheap raw material to Britain, then imported the finished products at a much higher price. We were paying for the value addition done in Britain, and the Raj prevented us from doing the value addition here. We were being exploited by the British.' The IT industry is considered to be India's biggest success story, but in reality 99% of it involves the export of cheap (human) raw material and the import of expensive finished products.

We are happy if Microsoft starts a development centre in India and employs a couple of thousand people. We develop the software modules that go into Microsoft Windows XP at a low price, and then pay through our noses to import the finished Windows XP.

There is no British Raj to exploit us today, so what prevents us from doing the big value addition here now instead of exporting cheap man days? Why are we exploiting ourselves? The standard argument is that the software industry is evolving, and will 'move up the value chain.' There is, however, no evidence of any motion up the value chain. Some of the biggest IT companies are on the contrary regressing into BPOs. Everyone is happy making a lot of money today, and there is no thought of tomorrow.

Another argument goes: 'Oh, but see how much foreign exchange the IT industry is earning for the country.' Agreed, we are making a lot of money selling our time, but we would be making many times this amount selling our creativity through technologies, designs or finished products.

Current government policies, value systems and the education system are creating a whole generation of people who believe they are second class professionals unfit to do anything creative. During the Raj the British convinced us we were fit to only produce raw material and not finished goods. They'd be proud of us now -- we've learnt the lesson very well and are now convincing successive generations too.

In today's India Jamsetji would probably have said to Frederick Upcourt, 'Maybe you have a point and I'm taking a big risk trying to make steel in this Third World country. I think I'll just sell you the iron ore from my Noamundi mines. Besides, I can start selling you the ore from next month itself, while it will take me 5 years to build the steel plant and start making money.'

So are we really dumb?

A century ago, Jamsetji Tata took some foreign visitors to the Majestic Hotel in Mumbai but was denied entrance because he was an Indian. Jamsetji simply resolved to build a hotel that was even finer, and which would not discriminate against people on the basis of colour or race. Today when we lose software outsourcing contracts and get thrown out of the US, we go back and beg to be allowed back in instead of fighting back by being more creative than them.

We need drastic changes in the education system and in government policies to reward creativity and value addition. Changes that produce creative people, visionaries, dreamers, people with guts, like Vikram Sarabhai and Jamsetji Tata.

We are definitely not dumb. We just have to stop thinking that we are.

The campaign against Indian civilization

2004-10-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This Article belongs to columnist Rajeev Srinivasan and posted on Rediff.com on August 17, 2004. I do like this article too much that i want to keep it in my little space and share among others. This is second part of sequel in which first part has been The Battlefield of Indian History

Another Indian tradition that has never received sufficient recognition is the fact that the civilization has been by and large respectful of others, as well as democratic:
Tolerance for heresies and for refugees

Heresies such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were accepted and not persecuted by Hindus
Refugees such as Jews fleeing Roman oppression around 72 CE, Syrian Christians fleeing persecution in Syria in the 345 CE time frame, Parsis fleeing Iran around 750 CE, Tibetans fleeing Chinese oppression since 1950 have all been welcome.

Among 148 countries Jews have lived in, India is the only one in which they were never persecuted

Indus-Sarasvati sites noted for lack of armies or sculpture or seals glorifying the arts of war
No large royal palaces or homes of noblemen

No signs of violent struggle across the vast area of the civilization, not even in the abandoned cities: this implies that they were not conquered, but ran out of water

The Indus-Sarasvati civilization seems to have existed not under the power of military might, but under genuine republican rule of the people

If so, this is unique among the history of civilizations

There is an ancient tradition of democracy going back to the Mahajanapadas of North India and to Chola times in South India, and the ancient rules for elections carved on stone edicts in places like Chingelput, Tamil Nadu, are more stringent than in modern-day democracies

Emperor Asoka the Great's rule was unmatched in the world in the peaceful management of a large empire, after the initial violence in Kalinga.

Here I have merely touched upon the vast riches of Indian history. For doing so, the usual suspects will label me a divisive communalist fascist obscurantist. Whereas the real fascists are the Marxists and Nehruvian Stalinists who are using the coercive power of the State for putsches, coups and intellectual purges. HRD minister Arjun Singh has been on a jihad lately, shouting "off with his head" at the slightest provocation. He would have been quite at home in Stalin's Soviet Union, happily deleting individuals and events from the history du jour.

Arjun Singh's biases are clear: he prefers Islamist and Marxist interpretations. Marxist versions of history are generally intended to increase China's sphere of influence. For example, they use very dubious history to claim Tibet. The only historical claim China has on Tibet is that they were both part of the Mongol empire of Chengiz and Kublai Khan (see Claude Arpi, The Fate of Tibet, Har-Anand). Tibet was, for most of its history, a fiercely independent and warlike state. Chinese claims on Tibet based on distorted history are as absurd as if India were to claim Singapore since both were part of the British empire.

Chinese irredentism doesn't stop there. It wants territory from every one of its neighbors: Xinjiang, Tibet (both annexed), Siberia (Russia), Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Ladakh (India), the Spratly Islands (Vietnam), Mischief Reef (the Philippines), the Senkaku Islands (Japan), Taiwan. And every one of these claims is based on extremely dubious, manufactured history. There must be oodles of Chinese mandarins beavering away at making up history.

I was entertained to hear about the latest Chinese claim, this one on both North and South Korea. Thanks to readers Rajan and Ravi for bringing this to my attentionhttp://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FH11Ad03.htm. The Chinese are now claiming that the Korean Koguryo kingdom was theirs, and therefore the Koreas belong to China! The Chinese are putting the economic squeeze on the Koreas to force them to accede to its self-serving view of history. Similarly, Europe may soon find itself under economic pressure to concede that the Mongol empire, which extended as far as the outskirts of Vienna, belongs to China. The fact that Mongols were from Mongolia, not China, and that they brutally enslaved the Han Chinese, is a minor detail they obfuscate.

The Marxist missionaries in India are similarly preparing the way for Chinese territorial claims on large parts of India, now that Tibet has been devoured and its Indic culture destroyed. The Chinese quest for lebensraum continues apace: they have an insatiable hunger for land. This has to be resisted fiercely by anyone who cares for India.

Furthermore, reader Malolan brought to my attention new research on Alexander the Macedonian. Here is a link to a review ("Alexander the bloody brutal" in the UK Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,1273578,00.html) of a book that debunks the mystique about Alexander, and shows that he was an appalling monster who had more luck than smarts. White historians have inflated his deeds, calling him "the Great". But of course they have never accepted "Ashoka the Great", or "Rajaraja Chola the Great" despite their singular accomplishments.

This, however, is what one expects: each nation and culture pumps up the valorous deeds of its people, as part of its propaganda efforts, and to establish its greatness. For example, the Chinese recently made much ado about the alleged achievements of some Admiral Gao or something like that, who they claim circumnavigated the world.

India, misled by sundry nattering nabobs of negativism, is the only nation that does the opposite, namely downplaying the real and brilliant achievements of its culture and civilization and its citizens. The stunning accomplishments of Indian civilization have been denigrated in a sustained campaign. With Nehruvian Stalinists and Marxists in power, this process has received fresh impetus.

The activities of the HRD ministry recently have been so offensive that a group of intellectuals led by Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, and including people like Dr Nanditha Krishna, Dr Padma Subramanyam, Dr R Nagaswamy, Smt Tavleen Singh, Prof Prema Pandurang, Prof Kapil Kapoor, Prof Makarand Paranjape, Sri P Parameswaran, Sri P R Krishnakumar, and Brahmachari Abhayamrita Chaitanya, have approached the President of India with a letter on July 12 regarding the ongoing controversies concerning textbooks and education. The letter asks the Government of India to work for a "lighter, fulfilling and stimulating education, based on innovative pedagogy and promoting the great human values and achievements of Indian culture."

The letter is also supported by the International Forum for Indian Heritage, www.ifih.org, and email: ifih@ifih.org which is active in particular in the field of education.

The letter talks about three issues:
1.0 Historical distortions. The current campaign to allegedly 'correct distortions' in the NCERT texts makes the implicit assumption that the earlier textbooks written by Marxists are error-free. They are anything but error-free, and they are highly prejudiced. Marxists are obsessed with caste and the promotion of unscientific theories such as the Aryan Invasion Mythology.

Besides, "the most sublime concepts of Hindu, Buddhist or Jain scriptures are covered, if at all, in a dry paragraph or two; Hindu society is consistently portrayed as regressive, superstitious or stagnant while Islamic and Christian inputs receive much praise; in fact, Islamic rulers are depicted as generally well-intentioned, progressive, broad-minded and tolerant, while their millions of victims are denied even the right to be remembered (contrast this with the way other nations zealously preserve the memories of such holocausts)."
"The net result of Marxist historiography is an effective denial of the spiritual foundations of Indian civilization and of its original, sustained, varied contributions to the progress of humanity... How our spiritual culture has had a great cementing and unifying impact on the Indian masses is also passed over in silence."
"Students who receive this education have no self-respect and are devoid of pride in their country. The result is that our young people are at best ignorant and at worst have contempt for their Indian self."

2. Teaching Indian culture and heritage. "The appalling ignorance of the average Indian student about India's heritage... We wish to stress that calling for an intelligent integration of Indian culture and heritage in education is not a sin; it is not 'communal' but progressive... Such cultivated ignorance, which even Macaulay would not have dreamed of, is inexcusable in independent India. Why India should be presented as a dark hole of ignorance, with all worthwhile knowledge seen to be coming from the West, is inexplicable. This only reflects on the ignorance of our educationists and textbook writers. It certainly does nothing to build the students' self-confidence as Indians, their pride in being Indian, and their respect for India."

3. The quality and modernization of Indian education. "Both teaching and learning have become caricatures of what they should be. The child's inquisitiveness and creative qualities are smothered and he or she is expected to become an unquestioning machine. Neither debate nor inquiry are encouraged. Textbooks are of generally a very poor standard, with irrelevant, undigested and seriously outdated data, shabby language, unappealing printing... In a word, we have created a cruel and hateful system."
The letter suggests that "what Indian intellectual life and education are yearning for is not ideology but freedom from ideologies; not thought police but stimulation for original, creative thinking... Let us spare our children the putrid politics of a few adults who have not been able to move away from colonial times. Let us feel proud of our Indian culture and heritage, which alone can save India from further fragmentation, and which still has much to offer to the world."

The HRD ministry's antics remind me of Pink Floyd in The Wall:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone!
Hey, Teacher, leave us kids alone!
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

The lousy education in India, in particular the teaching of history, is a crying shame. History is being used as a weapon to destroy the idea of India. By suppressing Sanskrit, irreparable damage has been done to India already. The anti-nationalists at the Center are now attempting to annihilate whatever has been salvaged.

Postscript
Raj Mohanka wrote to me about a timeline he created, and it is available at www.newdharma.org under 'Royal Chronology'. I think it's an interesting venture, although I disagree with his continued support for the Aryan Invasion Mythology.

The WAVES (World Association of Vedic Studies) conference was held recently at the University of Maryland. For more details try the website http://www.umassd.edu/indic/waves/ The next WAVES conference is to be held in Bangalore at the end of the year.

A symposium on Indian Mathematics (Recent Researches on Indian Mathematics and the Scientific Renaissance) is slated for October 2nd at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. The topic of the history of mathematics has, in recent years, received much prominence due to its importance for the understanding the ideas that made the Scientific Revolution possible. The beginnings of modern mathematics are normally traced to the work of Newton and Leibniz on calculus and infinite series. But it is now been recognized that the origin of many infinite series, notably those relating to the arctangent, sine and cosine, is to be found in Kerala, India, two hundred years prior to the time of Newton. The Kerala mathematicians and astronomers also made fundamental contributions to mathematical astronomy.The Symposium will present research on the period of the Kerala School as well as the larger subject of Indian mathematics.For information and details, please contact:Conference Chairman: T.R.N. Rao, University of Louisiana, Lafayette.URL: http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/faculty/rao.htmlEMAIL: trn@cacs.louisiana.edu PHONE #: 337 482 6877Program Committee, Chairman: Subhash Kak, LSU, Baton Rouge.URL: http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/hist.htmlEMAIL: kak@ee.lsu.edu PHONE #: 225 578 5552

The battlefield of Indian history - Rajeev Srinivasan

2004-10-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is article published in rediff.com by columnist Rajeev Srinivasan Rajeev.srinivasan@gmail.com on August 16, 2004. I did liked this article too much that I want to keep it with me forever, This is my try to put this article in this little space.

Indian history is once again centrestage. There is in some quarters a feeling that history is the most boring of subjects, consisting of long, dry lists of dynasties and the exploits of rather barbaric kings. This, unfortunately, is a result of the way history is taught in India. For it is fake history that has been manufactured by people with vested interests with the intention of keeping Indians enslaved.

History is perhaps the most important of the humanities. There is nothing quite like history that can be used in positive and negative ways to affect the affairs of men. To paraphrase George Santayana, I would say, "Those who forget their history are condemned." Condemned to forever be second-class, to forever lack self-respect, to forever suffer loss of self-image.

India's loss of knowledge of its history is a double disaster, because it turns out India's history is almost unimaginably lustrous: in fact, within the first order of approximation, one could claim that India invented almost everything worth knowing in the ancient world. India was, for millennia, the Empire of the Intellect, the civilization that with astonishing creativity generated more ideas than the rest of the world put together.

The denigration of Indian history is a project originally put into action by colonialist Britons, who identified, correctly, that by controlling the past they would be able to control the present as well. After Independence, a cabal of Marxists has dominated the official version of history in India, and they too want to control India's present and future. They have managed to brainwash entire generations of Indians into believing that everything that originated in India is worthless.
Through the miracles of "truth by repeated assertion" and the patronage extended to them by the Nehru Dynasty and its retainers, these self-proclaimed "eminent historians", many of them affiliated with the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, have manufactured a history of India that is widely at odds with the evidence on the ground. They are completely unwilling to accept new archaeological and other discoveries. They are dogmatic fundamentalists who remind me of the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant heliocentrism despite scientific evidence.

The desire to re-infect history with the Marxists' pet shibboleths is seen in the unseemly haste with which the newly-anointed mandarins of culture in the UPA government have proceeded to change text-books. This is much like the instant histories that were popular in the Soviet Union, and are popular in China these days: every now and then it is rewritten to glorify whoever is the strongman of the moment.

India's, however, is no instant history. It shows a tremendous cultural continuity of at least 5,000 years and possibly as much as 10,000 years: there are identifiable methods and modes of activity that have not changed at all from the Indus-Sarasvati civilization to today. This fits in with the written and oral records of Indic civilization, which talk about the current age, the Kali Yuga, as beginning on a specific date in 3102 BCE.

The Aryan Invasion Mythology, which Max Mueller created, was influenced by his Christian fundamentalist belief that the world was created in 4004 BCE, and therefore he arbitrarily assigned the date of 1500 BCE to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization (he allowed a millennium or two for Noah's floodwaters to recede and for Europeans to find their way to India!). This is utter idiocy. Mueller himself later disowned this date, but the "eminent historians" have yet to wake up, much like Galileo's tormenters took 400 years to accept his theory officially.

There are a number of assertions made by nationalists that the "eminent historians" will and do fight tooth and nail.

There is no such thing as an "Aryan" and a "Dravidian": the people who inhabited the Indus-Saraswati region were just Hindus; it appears increasingly likely that they in fact migrated out from India: this would explain the linguistic and other ties connecting India and points West, just as well as an invasion into India would

Ancient Hindu civilization was already mature by 3102 BCE, the beginning of the Kali Yuga. At that time, astronomers observed a peculiar celestial configuration. Only an advanced civilization would have been able to observe and record such an astronomical phenomenon

There is significant evidence of a continuous unbroken culture to the present day from the earliest known Indus-Sarasvati settlement at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, Pakistan (6500 BCE)
Indic, Sanskrit-knowledgeable Mitanni kings in Syria wrote treaties as early as 1400 BCE. One of the Mitanni kings, Tusharatha or Dasaratha, was the father of the famed Queen Nefertiti of Egypt

There are enough astronomical clues in the Vedas and other ancient Hindu texts to indicate that they could not have been written later than about 2500 BCE

Even minimal near-shore marine archeological investigations at Bet Dwaraka, Mamallapuram, Poompuhar and Kanyakumari have indicated the presence of man-made structures of great antiquity; one or two artifacts have been dated as early as 7500 BCE

The obvious influence of India on Southeast Asia shows how Indian ideas and thus 'soft power' were irresistible to many cultures; similarly, a lot of Christian myths are derived from older Hindu and Buddhist myths. There was a 'Greater India' that was the India's cultural sphere of influence.

India was also the Empire of the Intellect, although the "eminent historians" are loath to admit it. Some of the greatest achievements in the sphere of pure thought came out of India. And it is not that it was all idle speculation: for, the invention of zero and the decimal system, of algebra and calculus, as well as the creation of accurate astronomical tables, all had practical uses in calculation and in navigation. To take just a few examples:

The so-called Pythagoras Theorem is discussed in the Sulba-sutras circa 800 BCE by Baudhayana. He also showed how to square the circle

Panini's Sanskrit grammar ca. 500 BCE is arguably the greatest achievement of a single human mind in all of history, for he was able to capture the infinity of expressions in language in a finite set of 4,000 rules. See also http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_rao-t_syntax.htm

Aryabhata's astronomy ca. 499 CE is of the highest order, for he realized that the earth is a rotating sphere and quite accurately calculated the diameter; and he predicted eclipses, in addition to providing a value for pi accurate to six decimal places and producing an accurate table of sines

Algebra was known to Aryabhata; and it is discussed in detail in Bhaskara II's "Lilavati" ca. 1150 CE

Parameswara and Nilakantha of the Kerala School of mathematics and astronomy ca. 1400 CE proposed a heliocentric theory for the solar system, displacing the earth as the center of the Universe. Madhava, another member of the Kerala School, invented the theory of infinite series and the basis for calculus (it is now believed that Jesuit missionaries took this material back to Europe, and that Leibniz and Newton possibly got their ideas on the calculus therefrom). See Ian Pearce's website.

In addition, there are astonishing facts about the prosperity of the advanced civilization:
As late as 1750 CE, India accounted for 24.5 per cent of all manufactured good in the world. England accounted for 2%. (A century later, the numbers were reversed)

The Thanjavur delta in Tamil Nadu and the Brahmaputra delta in Bengal were two of the world's four greatest centers of industry till 1750 CE (why do you think the British got their paws into Bengal and Tamil Nadu first?)

India was the only source of diamonds in the world till the late 1800s, when diamond-bearing ore was discovered in South Africa and Australia

Indian metallurgy was remarkable. The famous 'damascene' steel used to make the finest swords (Muslims in the Crusades had these: Saladin is known to have had one) came not from Damascus, but from India: it was called 'wootz' here. Similarly, the rust-free Iron Pillar in Delhi was an amazing feat

India had some of the best textiles and designs in the world; a large number of terms used for textiles come from India, such as muslin, calico, seersucker, cashmere, gingham, madras, dungarees, the 'paisley' design, khaki, pyjamas,...

India was a center for specialty services, such as medicine and surgery

Sushruta practiced plastic surgery and did Caesarian sections; he invented 101 surgical instruments named after animals, some of which are still used

Charaka wrote treatises on digestion, anatomy, metabolism and immunity

Ayurveda and the related science of pressure points were taken to East Asia by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma; East Asian martial arts, as well as quite possibly acupuncture, are derived from these

According to the research done by Dharampal based on first-hand colonial reports in the British Museum (see his book The Beautiful Tree) there was a school in every village, and children of every caste were taught therein, before the British invasion of India. Illiteracy was a British gift, as in Burma (see Amitav Ghosh's Glass Palace)

As late as 1750 CE, the average Indian agricultural or industrial worker was better off than his equivalent in England

Then there is a great deal of very interesting information about the Indus-Sarasvati civilization as well (see Michel Danino, The Invasion That Never Was):
It has been shown that the Sarasvati dried up circa 1900 BCE as the result of a series of earthquakes. The entire course of the Sarasvati, a broad and mighty river, has been identified from satellite imagery, showing that it flowed from the mountains to the sea
The geographical area of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was greater the areas of the contemporary civilizations of Egypt and Mesapotamia put together!
Across this huge area, there was a startling uniformity of town planning techniques, weights and measures (in the binary system ratio 1:2:4:8:16:32:64), and in the sizes of bricks used for construction

They used a decimal system of measurement as well. At Lothal, an ivory scale was discovered that has precise markings 1.70mm apart; and the pier walls at the port of Lothal are 1.70 meters thick

An analysis of the sites in the civilization shows that there are far more of them clustered around the Sarasvati than the Indus: Kalibangan, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi, Lothal...

Jai Ganesh

2004-10-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

Om Geneshay Namah

Vakratunda MahakaayaSuryakoti Samaprabha

Nirvighnam Kuru Mey DevaSarva Kaaryeshu Sarvada

Om Gajaananam Bhoota Ganaadhi SevitamKapitta Jamboophaala Saara Bhakshitam

Umaasutam Shoka Vinaasha KaaranamNamaami Vighneswara Paada Pankajam

Tatpurushaaya Vidmahe

Vakratundaaya Dheemahe

Tanno Danthihi Prachodayaat

Ganesh Stotra

Om Pranamya Shirasa DevamGauriputram Vinaayakam

Bhakataavaasam Smare NityamAayuh Kaamartha Siddhaye

Prathamam Vakratundam ChaEkadantam Dviteeyakam

Thriteeyam Krishna PingaakshamGajavaktram Chaturthakam

Lambodaram Panchamaam ChaShashtam Vikatameva Cha

Saptamam Vighnaraajendram Dhoomravarnam Tathaashtamam

Navamam Phaalachandram ChaDasamam Tu Vinaayakam

Ekaadasam GanapatimDvaadasam Tu Gajaananam

Dvaadasaitaani NaamaaniTrisandhyam Yah Pathernnarah

Na Cha Vighna Bhayam TasyaSarva Siddhikaram Prabho

Vidhyarthi labhte vidhyam dhanarthi labhate dhanam

Putrarti labhte putram moksharthi labhate gatim

Japed Ganapati stotram shadibh marsham phalam labhet

Sanvatsaren siddhicha labhte natra sanshayam