My India

Desktops, Laptops, Palmtops, Rolltops… technology is advancing or evolving in a cracking pace. All innovations added together have made both the nation and the individual smart. But, this is not the India of my dreams. The more we embrace shortcuts and change our life styles to become smarter and smarter the more we become prone to disappointments of all sorts. India of my dreams is not a crowd luxury mongers but a family of self-confident people who live in a state of peaceful happiness and celestial awareness. 

 

India had a bright past. All that the present world cries to have newly invented were not unknown to India. What is special with India was that we knew how to use knowledge in all its appropriateness. The theory of gravitation, which we attribute to Newton, was originally invented by Bhaskaracharya. (Read it in 'Siddhantha Sirmani’ > part ‘Bhuvanakosam’> Chapter 6. It was Aryabhatta who first said that the earth is round and it is rotating around the sun (read ‘Arybhatiyam’ which Aryabhata 1st wrote in his 23 year in AD 449). It was not Isaac Newton who first said that light is travelling. Instead, it was the great Vijayanagar Empire Guru, Sayanacharya, who prayed, ‘I bow to Thee Sun God who sends light at a speed of 2022 ‘yojana' in half of a ‘nimisha'. Remember that Varahamihira had calculated the longitude and latitude of the city of Alexandria to be 23.7 degrees in the year AD 553, while with Greenwich meantime also, the figure is almost the same - 23.3 degrees. In front of St. George Sanskrit University in Germany, we see a sculpture of our Indian Seer Panini. Know that German grammar is based on the book 'Ashtadhyaayi', which he wrote. 

Our Atharva Veda with all its 51 branches is a complete medical book. The father of Medical Sciences Hippocratus says in his book 117 times that he has heavily drawn from the Indian Mystics, Charaka and Susrutha. Surveys of Washington Post and New York Times say that 65% of the 40 plus people there do Suryanamaskar - the Indian Yoga. Patanjali talks about evolution well in his Natyasasthra. It is Chanakya in ‘Arthasasthra who talked about a one day break in seven days. In the Bodleian library of Oxford University, there are around 2000 numbers of palm leaf records kept at high security. Those 442 Rigveda books in Harvard University belong to India. Maxmuller who learned Sanskrit, translated very many Sanskrit books and finally wrote the Book of Oriental for himself agrees that the whole world will once stretch both its hands before India, just to know what they missed.

 

The Persians, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, the English …., all invaded into our country – some with Semitic philosophies and some with Arabian disciplines, but most prepared to loot our open treasuries. Still, India is intact and stands against all recessions and famines. India was always a hard nut to crack, even for the gunmen of the West. How many of us know that India is the only continuing ancient culture of that kind? All other ancient civilizations are under mud, but India is not. Don’t you Indians feel proud of our rich heritage? 

But now, it is very sad to say that the purpose of all social workers, religious or politicians, seems to be looting each other. It pains me heavily. I envision an India in which God Consciousness is a common gift and where parents are honoured, teachers are respected, leaders are followed, siblings are served and the entire humanity is loved unconditionally. Just one determined human being is enough to transform this great nation back to its original ambience – its’ You!

Joseph Mattappally