The book is called “Indian Food A Historical Companion” by K.T.Achaya. I first wrote about this book here. Recently, i wrote about this in telugu here which goes to show that i fell in love with this book. It was infact my birthday gift to myself :P .. Boy oh boy what a gift! :P

“The Hindu” had  two articles on this book long back .. links to that here and here.

I will keep this short partly because i have already written about it once so the initial enthusiasm would have died down obviously ;) . Anyway, the book is about the history of our food as the title says. The book talks about our eating traditions and the paraphernalia around our cooking styles etc from pre-vedic to vedic to modern days. This has got mentions about where all the food we eat today has come from and where all our food customs have come from so on. The book will also change your own idea of globalisation .. once you finish the book you would realise that the kitchen is the best example for globalisation. And if your kitchen itself is so globalised then what is the point harping about protectionism elsewhere ;) ?

Anyway, some of the interesting snippets from the book are as follows:

Mention of Meat eating and meat cooking expertise in vedic scriptures amazed me. Particularly so because i had absolutely no idea about the food of the gods ;) . So as per the book Brahmins of those days had their share of horse meat after the sacrifice during the yagna ;) . Similarly, there is talk about meat of  Deer, Peacock, Porcupine, Rabbit, Rhinoceros, Lizard, Monitor Lizard, Donkey, Camel, Monkey etc :P . So next time you say anything overtly racist about the eating habits of our eastern neighbours then please look back at your own history :D

Then  the book also talks about alcohol consumption across various eras etc. It has some mentions of wine consumption by Lord Rama-Sita as well. A very nice collection of stories these.

Achaya then slowly traces the evolution of vegetarianism in India, the social pressures created by the rise of Buddhist and Jain religions which neccesitated these changes so on.

The best part of the book starts after this. There are so many stories about the export-import of our kitchen items that after sometime your whole idea about swadeshi will be shattered.. if at all there was one in the first place i.e., ;) . I will try and jot down some of those stories.

• Pineapple came to India from SouthAmerica
• Jalebi has Persian and Arab origins
• Cocunut has travelled along the ocean waters from Papua New Guinea and reached india through the waters of Indian Ocean
• Sweet Potato has its origins in Peru
• Rajma and Ragi are again from South America. Infact, the ancient South America-India civilisational links make a fascinating read
• Rice has a east indian-chinese-vietnamese origin
• Sesame Seeds, Mustard Seeds, Brinjal, Cucumber are Indian (Yay!!! :P)
• Ladyfinger or Okhra has come from Africa
• The andhra special “Gongura” is infact from Angola or Sudan it seems :P
• Some citrus fruits like Lemon, Mosambi, Orange and others like Mango also seem to have an Indian origin (Yay!! :P)
• Most of the spices ofcourse seem to belong either to India or Malacca Strait
• Pumpkin came from Mexico and Pomegranate came from Iran/Iraq :P
• Sunflower wasn’t there in Indian till the 1940-70 period until the russians brought it ;)
• Groundnut came from Europe while Soya came from China
• Tomato came to Europe from Mexico in 1550 and reached India in 18th Century
• Potato came from Bolivia to Europe in 1570 and reached India in 1830

Thus, Ladies and Gentleman .. from times immemorial we have been a globalised civilisation :P .. Like they say we were a melting pot of various cultures and traditions and foods thereof. This book has many more such stories.. it is a must read for anyone who loves eating :D .. I think we welcomed all foods and thoroughly Indianised them in the due course .. guess that is how it works for everything else as well.

Indiaaaa .. Incredible Indiaaaa ;)

This book is very well edited i should say. The editors interview can be found here. What i loved the most about the book is the political nature of most of the speeches. Some of them will give you goosebumps :)

• The first speech that took me by surprise totally was Syed Ahmed Khan’s 1888 speech titled “One country, two nations” .. It makes such a thrilling read! .. In parts of this speech he makes radical statements like “….. we do not want to become subjects of the Hindus instead of the subjects of the ‘People of the book’ .As far as we can we should remain faithful to the English Government” .It makes you sit back and wonder about how (politically speaking) the situation has remained the same even after over 124 years of the speech! In today’s India Hindu-Muslim question is as delicate as ever. Reference: The recent ruckus over religion based reservations
• The next speech is Mushtaq Hussain’s 1906 speech about the Muslim League. Here again are some startling lines. Some of which go like .. “… our own prosperity is bound up with, and depends upon our loyalty to British rule in India” . I’ve never read muslim league stuff before.. guess its time now ;)
• Speeches by Gandhi .. Tilak .. Vivekananda .. Lord Curzon .. Nehru etc follow
• Veer Savarkar’s “Dangerous cult of absolute non-violence” again is a riveting speech. I have started reading another book by savarkar recently and i am not surprised with his anti-gandhi tones in this speech now ;)
• Mohammad Iqbal’s 1930 speech proposing an Independent Muslim India also makes for a very interesting read.
• This is followed by M.Singaravelu’s speech called “The death of God” which has strong atheist overtones
• Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s speech on Calcutta killings makes you clench your fist .. whichever side of the argument you are on. There is something about the right wing speeches in this book.. both Hindu and Muslim right.. they are all very powerful. Wonder how it was to the actual listeners back then! His other speech on the special status given to Kashmir also is equally captivating
• Then comes Jinnah’s speech which Advani quoted when he went to Pakistan only to meet with a lot of brickbats from the Sangh Parivar.
• Godse’s speech about killing Gandhi is famous by now. Kripalani’s speech against the Hindu code bill also exposes the hypocricy of the congress back then which some call pseudo secularism today. Even today we do not have a uniform civil code!
• Jayaprakash Narayan’s “Importance of NGOs” speech was very new to me and i enjoyed it thoroughly. He speaks of “snatching the initiative from the hands of politicians, from the Parliament and the Legislatures and giving it back to the people” .. Interesting!
• Indira Gandhi’s emergency speech in 1975 has the best one liner i have heard in a long time. “The president has proclaimed the emergency. This is nothing to panic about” !!!
• Speeches by J R D Tata, Satyajit Ray, Rajiv Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, P V N Rao etc follow
• Another BJP-Right wing speech which will catch you attention is L K Advani’s “Why Ayodhya is a setback”. I remember reading about this in his autobiography.
• The book ends with some more recent speeches by Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee,Advani, Amartya Sen . The last speech is on Buddha by Gopal Krishna Gandhi

I read a library copy of this book. I dont mind buying it again once i make enough money :P .. But i somehow feel the book has mainly political speeches with strong religious overtones :P .. atleast those are the ones that strike you hard after your finish reading the book and look back at it :)

This post is about my reading of E.F.Schumacher’s “A Guide for the perplexed”. I first spoke about this book in this post here. Back then i thought it was a difficult read… But i have taken this one course this term and my reading speed has improved exponentially .. so much so that i am able to finish difficult books with ease when the lecture is going on :P . Anyway .. over to the book.

The book talks about many things like the importance of religion, the limitations of conventional science, the folly of faith vs reason debates so on so forth. I will try and jot down some lines that appealed to me the most.

He starts the book by talking about different levels of being.. what is it that differentiates Man, Animal, Plant and Mineral. He says physics and chemistry more often than not deal with the lowest level of being i.e, tat of matter. And he brings about the limitations of such an approach by saying:

“To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combination of atoms is like saying that Shakeshpeare’s Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters“

He then goes on to talk about Science being used for Manipulation first of nature then of people. He traces this from the thoughts of Descartes and Francies Bacon. He says this concentration of scientific interest on manipulation alone has three dangers.

In the absence of sustained study of such “unscientific” questions as “What is the meaning and purpose of man’s existence?” “What is good and what is evil?” and “what are man’s absolute rights and duties” , a civilisation will necessarily and inescapably sink ever more deeper into anguish, despair and lack of freedom.

Faith, instead of being taken as a guide leading the intellect to an understanding of the higher levels, is seen as opposing adn rejecting the intellect and therefore is itself rejected. Thus all roads to recovery are barred.

The higher powers of man, no longer being brought into play to produce the knowledge of wisdom, atrophy and even disappear altogether

Agree on all three dangers! Especially the second one. I myself am a victim to that. I have always failed to understand the place of “faith” in modern day life. It is only my post-mba confusions and questions about life and the readings thereof that made me read a lot and understand the issue better.

The book then talks about four fields of knowledge. It is a wonderful philosophical journey as it makes you think a lot. The four fields of knowledge put simply are about :

(1) What is going on inside me? (2) What is going on inside others? (3) What do i look like in the eyes of others (4) What do i observe in the world around me?

Very very interesting chapters these. Though initially i felt that they are difficult to comprehend. Upon re-reading i feel that they cant be put in any simpler terms than this.He talks about how all the four fields of knowledge are important and how each one of them adds to the completeness of knowledge.In the later parts of the discussion on these fields of knowledge he also brings in the contrast of a conventional proof based scientific approach by talking about the difference between “What we can know” and “What actually exists”.

The best part of the book for me personally starts from page 124-150. It starts with a very critical analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution. On this he says,

“It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge- and that they get away with it”

I had read some criticisms of Darwin’s approach before, but this one in this book is very convincing. I remember i first read about Darwin in school in a hindi textbook and from then on my world view did change ;) . My world view both inner and outer did seem to have changed in the past one year and this book definitely has played its role in that process. So Darwin-Schumacher 1-1 ! :)

He makes some pretty strong statements here in these pages. I can only form an opinion after reading some of the books that schumacher suggested in these chapters.

Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction, even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded all too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconciliable conflict between “science” and “religion”. It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substited a faith that pulls mankind down

Umm.. it is easy to dismiss such statements as extreme theological discourse.. but schumacher’s arguments are not just blind criticisms. Like i said i am convinced that what he says is not mere namesake criticisms. I will need to read more to understand it better. So a small study on evolutionism is next in queue then perhaps :) Infact schumacher goes to the extent of saying that this alone can cause the collapse of the modern western civilisation which today is the modern world civilisation. Like we all know all civilisations to date have died unlike a few which learnt to adapt, so this may very well be the cause for the future downfall of the modern world.

“It is impossible for any civilisation to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival- in other words, without a religious faith”

In the concluding parts of the books he says something which is fast becoming my line of thought as well on the various eco-friendly things we do in the world today. I think it is time we realised that all this is a part of undoing the damage and not really contributing to the solution.

“Everywhere in the modern world there are now experiments New life styles and voluntary simplicity; the arrogance of material scientism is in the decline, and it is sometimes tolerated even in polite society to mention God. Admittedly, some of this change of mind stems not initially from spiritual insight, but from materialistic fear aroused by the environmental crisis, the fuel crisis, the threat of a food crisis and the indications of a coming health crisis. In the face of these -and many other- threats, most people still  try to believe in the “technological fix”. If we could develop fusion energy, they say, our fuel problems would be solved; if we would perfect the processes of turning oil into edible proteins, the world’s food problem would be solved; and the development of new drugs will surely avert any threat of a health crisis.. and so on.

All the same, the faith in modern man’s omnipotence is wearing thin. Even if all the “new” problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder and corruption would remain. It existed before the present crises became acute, and it will not go away by itself”

This is again brilliant! I think energy consumption and resource evaporation is just a part of the problem with our modern day world and by just shifting to renewable means etc we will not really wipe out the problem. We may only wipe out only a part of the problem that too with a lot of ifs and buts. The bigger problem is something else. Like he says elsewhere again,

“The modern experiment to live without religion has failed”

I think i will agree with this line. I myself am a victim to this in more than one ways ..so i can very much understand where the author is coming from. The best lines ofcourse are reserved to the last paragraph of the book.

“Can we rely on it that a “turning around” will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer “Yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “No” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work”

A guide to the perplexed indeed! I would treasure this book in my collection forever and i don’t say that about every book i read! :)

So this is the story of Rajasthan’s Ranji Trophy 2010-11 win. What made the win special was that they had never won it before.. they were piled up last in the plate league (ranji trophy has plate division and elite division) .. which means i think they were rank 27 of 27 teams :P .. they had never come close to winning after a runner-up finish 36 yrs ago in 1974 season.. it is the classic underdog story narrated wonderfully well by akash chopra. This year’s ranji trophy also seems to have another underdog story in the making ;) ..

What makes the book special is the stories.. classic underdog triumphs.. each one of them! :) .. I will try and write down some stories.. just like in the cricinfo review :P .. May be this one needs a spoiler alert? :P

• Akash Chopra’s own story of how he was unceremoniously kicked out of Delhi Ranji team because he had hit a bad patch despite being one of the highest run getters in season before that has all ingredients of a suspense thriller .. you never know whether he is in or out of the team and the reasons thereof :P  He gets a call “Out of the Blue” to be a part of the Rajasthan ranji team 2010-11.. and that is how the book starts :) . His autobiographical take on what a player undergoes when he faces the axe makes you wonder about how ruthless we all are as “fans” :P
• The story of Hrishikesh Kanitkar also is quite similar to the one above. Kanitkar is axed from the Maharashtra side after he hits 4 back2back half centuries in five matches .. citing “perceived lack of fitness” as the reason without conducting any tests whatsoever. He then moves on to Madhyapradesh team and finally to Rajashtan team in 2010-11.
• The story of the paceman Pankaj Singh is no less inspiring. He moves from a village near Lucknow to lucknow to allahabad to kolkata to chennai and finally to jaipur .. all in pursuit of a stable cricket career. In the midst of this pursuit there are innumerable rejections from various cricket teams and cricket associations across states. He joins in a college in hope of finding a job in army as he decides to forget the idea of playing cricket forever .. so on so forth. Very inspiring. He later turns out to be one of the biggest success stories in Rajashtan’s rise in Ranji.
• It also has the story of another paceman who was called a “Good for nothing” by Greg Chappel :P He goes on to have a god level 7.3-2-10-8 stat in his debut match against Hyderabad in the by now famous 21 all-out match
• The story of another bowler in the team who used to practice bowling action on the railway platform much to the ridicule of people  around him is hilarious and touchy at the same time. And why did he have to do all this?? .. because of financial compulsions at home which meant that he can’t quit his job in railways!
• There is this other story about a player who had to play cricket because it was the only way for him to feed his family. This story particularly will make you shed a tear or two as the player in question goes through instances of multiple deaths in family in a span of months.. including the death of a two month old baby girl. It made me sit back and wonder about how many times.. i carelessly pass a comment or two on many cricketers little wondering the circumstances behind the failure. Like this player.. who had to pack bags to play a first class match within hours after his daughter’s burial ! .. I think sometimes we just view at cricketers as if they are devices of entertainment little wondering about their human side! :( .. Infact this story also talks about a planB of this player which was to enroll in correspondence course to clear CFA! .. Cricket – Plan A.. CFA- Plan B! .. He also takes up a job in Indian Postal Department somewhere in the story! .. Reality can’t get any bitter than it is in this story .. Hatsoff to him for having survived through all this. Every problem in your own life would seem inconsequential and insignificant when you get to know of such stories
• The book then moves on to another interesting story .. that of someone who had to write CAT in pursuit of an alternate career as he had to face too many rejections from cricket associations! .. He scores a decent 84% which could have definitely got him a decent MBA degree :P
• The story of another cricketer who lost both his parents before his teens is no less inspiring. So much is his love for his mother that he inscribes his mother’s name on every single piece of apparel and gear he uses while playing representative cricket! ..
• Akash chopra then converts the book into a player’s diary by giving a commentary of all that happened on-pitch and off-pitch in the path to the Ranji trophy win .. includes the scorecards and detailed descriptions about matches with Maharashtra, Goa, Tamilnadu, Tripura, Jharkhand etc etc

All in all a super awesome book! Must read for all cricket fans.. Go buy the book :P .. If you stay in and around my place of residence .. then borrow :P .

UNDERDOG ZINDABAD!!!!

So a prof here had asked us to read Amartya Sen’s “Development as freedom” as a part of some course. I read through the book the other day .. conveniently skipping those parts of the books which seemed too scholarly or economistly to me…  thus defeating the purpose of the professor :P

I found this part of the book i.e., chapter10 on “culture and human rights” interesting. I think a lot of this is also seen in Sen’s “Our culture their culture” speech in 1995-96. This is about tolerance – interaction of cultures – globalisation etc. As always i quote paragraphs from the chapter it is up to reader to imagine the context :P

The Book

He says..

“The threat to native cultures in the globalizing world of today is to a considerable extent, inescapable. The one solution that is not available is that of stopping globalisation of trade and economies, since the forces of economic exchange and division of labor are hard to resist in a competitive world fueled by massive technological evolution that gives modern technology an economically competitive edge“

Totally agree! The more i read about the history of industrial revolution and technology in general .. the more i am convinced about how monstrous it is and how powerful it is. O technology! I bow down before thee! :P

“When an economic adjustment takes place, few tears are shed for the superseded methods of production and for the overtaken technology. There many be some nostalgia for specialised and elegant objects (such as an ancient steam engine or an old-fashioned clock), but in general old and discarded machinery is not particularly wanted. In the case of culture, however, lost traditions may be greatly missed. The demise of old ways of living can cause anguish, and a deep sense of loss“

I like this distinction between losing old machines and losing old traditions and customs. I think lost culture-traditions are far more closer to the heart than a lost typewriter. There was this fb pic that was floating around saying that “if you are born in the 80s then you are the last casette generation”. True.. but does that really make you feel sentimental? I don’t think so. But does the mention of lost knowledge systems of India make you feel sicker .. I think yes. When a very learned prof says .. “Europe had great philosophers in that age like aristotle, plato , socrates. India also had some during those times .. like.. aryabhatta.. no not him.. umm.. errr” .. You know something is wrong with your country :P. So i think lost culture is a bigger problem.

Sen says “…cultural nationalism or chauvinism can be seriously debilitating as an approach  to living”

Agree. But i think it is also important for people to be assertive about their roots/origins.

On that he says..

“Ways of life can be preserved if the society decides to do just that, and it is a question of balancing the costs of such preservation with the value that the society attaches to the objects and the lifestyles preserved” …

“What is crucial for a rational asessment of such choice is the ability of the people to participate in  public discussions on the subject”

Will the power wielding elite give so much freedom for the populace? Did anyone ever give so much freedom to the public? More importantly is it possible to have time bound resolutions on such things?

Chilly – Sine and others

He then goes on to say that .. “there are more interrelations and more cross-cultural influences in the world than is typically acknowledged by those alarmed by the prospect of cultural subversion”

“Chili may be a central part of Indian cooking as we understand it, but it is also a fact that chili was unknown to India until the portugese brought it there only a few centuries ago”

On a similar note .. I remember reading on IE long back about Idli’s Indonesian links. I was able to dig out that article from my 2007 gmail chat logs :P .. quoting from that article:

“Hindu kings from Indonesia, a country where fermenting is quite common, often came to India between the 8th and the 12th centuries, looking for brides. The cooks with them, suggested Achaya, brought the technique that changed the character of this breakfast delight”

“Among many foreign ingredients that are now indistinguishably Indian include the tomato, the potato, the chilli and the cabbage”

I remember in 2007 i wanted to buy Achaya’s book and didn’t buy .. I think now i should! (As i was typing i realised 5yrs is way too long a wait for any book on the to-read list..so i bought one of his books on flipkart ;) ).That apart.. i also find this other book interesting “Curry: A Tale Of Cooks And Conquerors” .. Added to the to-read list.

So i also did some more research on vegetables inspired by the article and i found this table. Very funny it is. I cross-checked some of the vegetables..and it is really inspiring to know how much we have globalised :P .. So protectionism doesn’t really make sense.. Ofcourse like Gandhi said (refer below) we shouldn’t be blown off our feet ;).

And Sen doesn’t stop there.. (Yes.. i am still on track.. this post was about Sen’s book ;) ) . He says..

“The image of regional self-sufficiency in cultural matters is deeply misleading, and the value of keeping traditions pure and upolluted is hard to sustain”

“..some chauvinists in India have complained about the use of “Western” terminology in school curriculum, for example in modern mathematics. But the interrelations in the world of mathematics make it hard to know what is “Western” and what is not. To illustrate consider the term “sine” used in trigonometry, which came to India straight through the British, and yet in its genesis there is a remarkable Indian component”

“Aryabhata, an Indian mathematician and astronomer who lived in the fifth and early sixth centuries, discussed the concept of “sine,” and called it Jyanardha, or “half-chord,” in Sanskrit. From there the term migrated in an interesting way, as Howard Eves describes in An Introduction to the History of Mathematics: Aryabhata called it ardha-jya (“half-chord”) and jya-ardha (“chord-half”), and then abbreviated the term by simply using jya (“chord”). From jya the Arabs phonetically derived jiba, which, following Arabic practice of omitting vowels, was written as jb. Now jiba, aside from its technical significance, is a meaningless word in Arabic. Later writers who came across jb as an abbreviation for the meaningless word Jiba substituted Jaib instead, which contains the same letters, and is a good Arabic word meaning “cove” or “bay.” Still later, Gherardo of Cremona (ca. 1150), when he made his translations from the Arabic, replaced the Arabian jaib by its Latin equivalent, sinus [meaning a cove or a bay], from whence came our present word sine

“We must not lose our ability to understand one another and to enjoy the cultural products of different countries in the passionate advocacy of conservation and purity”

No words :P .. But i think he chose a convenient example ;) .. nevertheless this is a fun fact :D

He then also talks about traditions of skepticism and tolerance in the east. He talks about how the only firmly agnostic religion in the world i.e., Budhism is of Asian origin and about how strong athiestic arguments were there in the Indian Carvaka/Lokayata school of thought and how even Ramayana had some arguments on the folly of religious beliefs.

All in all a very entertaining 22 pages these! :)

Gandhi’s words on this actually are amazing i think and hits the target bang on..

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.“

Like i had vented out my frustration on this topic sometime back :P .. i think a lot of us in Modern day India are now okie with being blown off feet by the culture of other lands.. infact i know some who have a contempt for the culture of this land .. that is what irritates me :P.. Else i am in total agreement with all that Sen says ;)

Rwanda and white paradise

Nsekuye bizimana’s book is set in the 1970s-80s. It is about his experiences in europe. He starts the book by giving a context of his upbringing in Rwanda, the culture of rwanda and africa at large and how his world changed once he moved to Europe for studies. He talks at length about how rwandans of his times were under the assumption that everything the “white”man does is inherently superior to their own ways. He goes to europe under the assumption that he would see a paradise up there and slowly realises that the industrial nations also have problems of their own and it is not like they are intellectually superior to the so called primitives in africa. He then makes a thorough critique about the one-size-fits-all approach followed by the power elite across africa in terms of imposing its ways much against the wishes of the indigenous populace.

A lot of the observations he makes are very relevant to our times. Especially Urban India vs Rural India perhaps. Some of his views are very naive and some include sweeping statements.. but that apart i thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. I will try and jot down some points that impressed me the most in the book. Btw this not to say that i am free of biases or prejudices .. it is just about my reflections on the author’s reflections :P

Modern Medicine: He talks about how the traditional african medicine was a preventive technique while the modern medicine he encountered first in Europe was a curative technique. The emphasis on making money by curing instead of teaching people how to prevent disease is a charectaristic of today’s medicine as we know it. I think this remains the central conflict in India as well.

Suicide: He also talks about how he seldom heard about suicide in Rwanda while it was very frequent in Germany. He finds it strange that the poor don’t commit suicide while the rich do. Well, i couldn’t find too many correlations on the wiki suicide statstics page.

But from my own experience i can say that in my world i hear of suicides only when someone fails to clear a competitive exam or when someone fails to survive in a competitive institute or when someone feels cheated in a relationship or finds the work too stressful. All these are mainly modern in nature.. this is not to say that traditional societies didnt see suicides. But i think the more individualist you become the less social support you get and hence when you feel lonely there is little respite.

Stress:He then goes on to talk about the higher levels of stress in modern day industrial life. I found a very very interesting article on the internet on this topic.. Stress, the bane of modern life… it is written in the french context but has got some very interesting observations for the rest of modern industrial world as well.

African Wildlife:

“For many Germans, Africa is simply a park with lots of forests and animals” .

“My fellow countrymen and I really did see these large African animals for the first time in the Frankfurt zoo”.

“It is also no exaggeration to say that 90% of the people of Rwanda, and of other African countries, have never seen a lion, leopard, tiger, elephant etc at all”.

“It is actually paradoxical that almost every European has seen African wild animals, whereas hardly any African has”.

Interesting stuff really, we always have our own prejudices about other cultures and societies and barely spare a thought about the realities. This instance is a telling reminder of that. Africa is not a zoo! :D

On Dogs:

“Our friend also could not explain the fact that German women discriminated against him just because he was black, but that the same women did not mind taking their dogs onto their laps and stroking them everywhere the whole time. He also found it very illogical and paradoxical that German dogs not only ate better than African children, but than the whole of African population“

Racism was widely prevalent in Europe, America and Southafrica uptil the 90s i think. Not to say that it is totally eliminated now. That said, even India had and continues to have its own flaours of untouchability. So may be every culture has its achilles heel.

Elsewhere, in the book he says that industrial societies have led to more and more lonely people who in turn look for solace in their pets i.e., dogs mainly. I found this article on a psychology website on this topic.. looking at that i can only say that things haven’t gotten any better now ;).

Alcohol, a national epidemic: He says the “problem” of alcohol is widespread across all industrial countries.He also says that initially a lot of his friends thought people drank because they had a lot of money and then later realised a lot of people drink alcohol on credit. He gives some stats about how alcohol consumption per person has increased four-fold in europe from 1950-82. To quote him verbatim here.. he says..

“Technical progress has made life easier for the whites in some respects, but it’s also created some problems. Many people cannot cope with these problems, and the reaction is to reach for the bottle“

Well, possible!. But i think some more research needs to be done on these patterns ;). I found this article on the net interesting about the history of alcohol consumption. I think again drawing from my own experience i can say that alcohol consumption among urban indian youth today is a lot more fashionable and commonplace than it was a decade ago perhaps. If you are in a B-school perhaps you can relate to this more ;). The percapita alcohol consumption map on wiki also may reveal some patterns. Historically speaking drinking alcohol is as old as the sun and moon perhaps .. but its excesses are much more evident today than before perhaps.So that is that :)

Loneliness: There is this one line by a character called Ursula which the author quotes multiple times in the book. That actually captures the realities of modern life..

“You see those crowds of people-Berlin has two million inhabitants-can you imagine how painful it is to feel alone in such a crowd? One feels like one to two million, in other words like nothing”

He says that many people in the modern world are “dead inside” from a long time and that “they are only moving body masses” .

He also says that

“One feels lonely when everybody is aware that you are sad, but still nobody approaches you to ask what the matter is. One feels lonely when one realises that one has to cope with these problems alone anyway“.

Depressing lines! .. But very true. I have been on both sides of this many times in my life already!

He also talks about how “lonely hearts” ads were unheard of in traditional africa while the newspapers in europe were full of them.His friends then put up some ads and get many serious replies. In some of these conversations they had, the people in tear and desperation tell them about how they had everything but “love” and “security”

Crisis in family: He talks about how in modern industrial societies.. the concept of extended families is slowly vanishing and everyone is living in smaller and smaller sets. He also talks about elder generation germans who question “Why bother having children? We look after them with heart and soul when they’re young and when they grow up they leave us“. I know many such families in “my India” today! :(

Work and loneliness: “A man who can think only of his career loves his work more than his wife or children.When he comes home, he is often so tired that he does not feel like talking to his wife, and instead, switches on the television and drinks his daily ration of alcohol. They live together and, at the same time, seperately. One hears of “loneliness together”“

Big Cities and Brutality: In this section he speaks of the “missing feeling of togetherness” in big cities. I am sure a lot of us who have been in big cities can relate to this.

Other themes explored include “Consumptions vs Happiness” “Sexual frustration” “Damage to environment” “Consumption of drugs” etc.A bit of history about Rwanda is also thrown in. He also talks at length about the right way to develop africa according to him. He talks about two african leaders and Mahatma gandhi for inspiration on this note. I particularly liked the stuff about Mwalimu Nyerere – Tanzania’s “Father of the nation”. Despite his failed economic policies i think Nyerere’s speeches are definitely very enlightening. The book also discusses at length about various issues like Urban-rural migration, Tension between the haves and have-nots etc.

All in all it is a  must-read for anyone interested in knowing more about the effects of colonisation on cultures. I also have added a couple of books my Frantz Fanon to the “Africa” folder in my to-read directory based on multiple references to his works in this book ;). Wiki says that he is “leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century” .. Umm.. not bad ;)

#CustomaryRecruiterAlert: Okie by now you should be knowing what to do with such posts

Anna-RSS-Nanaji Deshmukh

2011 A.D was the year of Anna for Indian media (A.D for rest of the world translates to “Anno Domini” .. for India it is “Anna Domini” .. an year dominated by Anna :P).This post is about the most recent “Anna-is-a-RSS-man” controversy… obvly there have been many in the recent past orchestrated by you-know-who.

Given that i do have some spare time these days.. i am reading quite a bit online and offline. One of these days i read about Nanaji Deshmukh and his experiment in Chitrakoot M.P. I was thoroughly impressed with his work there… i.e., creating a huge network of  tens of hundreds of self-reliant villages in line with the ideas of Gandhi and Pt.Deendayal. I bookmarked their website that day. Later when i read about him on his wiki page i realised that he was awarded “Padma Vibhushan” , the second highest civilian award in India and that he was a Rajya Sabha Member.

A cursory reading of the wiki page is enough to understand that he was a great political and social worker. Agreed..all i am doing here is arm chair analysis .. he may or may not been as good as he is portrayed .. but then my point is .. government doesn’t distribute padma vibhushans jus like  that.Just because someone had RSS links is no reason to discount all the good work they have done. There is more on his work in this page (obvly it is a sangh parivar page so focus only on this text. rest of the text should be taken with two three pinches of salt :P) .

As per this TOI article that i flipped from the wiki page.. “praising nanaji deshmukh for his single-minded devotion to the uplift of the people, kalam said what the octogenarian leader was doing at chitrakoot should be an eye-opener for others”. Again.. Abdul Kalam doesnt go around praising just about anyone. .. so Nanaji shud’ve been a great man ;)

Now the media was full of Anna-RSS accusations some days ago. It was just a couple of days before this controversy that i read about Nanaji Deshmukh.. so i was obvly surprised at the coincidence. (More like i-know-this-man types).

But the reactions from all the parties totally baffled me .. first was that of Digvijay singh .. then that of BJP … that of RSS .. and that of Hazare himself.  I hope someday people learn to rise about petty party politics.. like Anna said… people like Nanaji deserve to be seen in a different plane altogether. I didn’t see a full fledged article on the work of Nanaji deshmukh in any of the papers in the last few days .. in the wake of the recent controversy i thought the nation deserved to know atleast something about the man who is at the center of this controversy.

I was planning this “akhil bharatiya pad+rath yatra” type thing once my course ends :P .. okie that was a flashy name.. but jus wanted to visit a few places.. Chitrakoot has been added to that list now.

[Edit: S.Gurumurthy's article in IE dated Mar 2010 "Nanaji, as I knew him"]

Deendayal Upadhyaya

After seeing his name again and again on the chitrakoot page.. i decided to do a bit of reading about “Integral Humanism” the core philosophy propounded by Deendayal Upadhyaya which is the founding philosophy of today’s BJP.

I remember .. long back when i read L.K.Advani’s autobiography “My Country My Life” he spoke at length about Deendayal Upadhyaya and i was wondering .. who the hell is this guy! :) . So finally i managed to finish reading it.. a short 50+ page pdf it is.

I was surprised to see some striking similarities with Mahatma Gandhi’s “Hind Swaraj”. It is a wonderful vision for a national party to have. Though, i see that they have done very little in that direction when they were/are in power in state and center :P (discounting the stuff done by people like Nanaji ofcourse)

There are some vehement criticisms to the document which i found here. I found them to be very very shallow. Obvly the person who wrote the website already decided his stance before hand and was very biased when he started off.. like we all know.. biased people make some really absurd analysis.. and this one is no exception. What amused me most was some lines from the ending text:

“Capitalism and socialism centralize, so we shall decentralize. Had capitalism and socialism decentralized, we shall centralize. Capitalism and socialism are both western concepts, so we shall build something on our own. The scientific knowledge of the West belongs to the whole world, but not their economic policies. The US is in the West and therefore I shall be in the east. Socialism is a reaction to capitalism. Ours will be a reaction to socialism and capitalism”

The author obvly was trying to be very sarcastic.. and show that he is a smart chap. But like telugu film directors in the runup for flashy oneliners .. he forgot the strength of a good storyline i.e., content. Deendayal obvly was not the first to talk about decentralisation. Like i myself have documented in my blog in recent past all the below men at various points of time in their career spoke about this model.

• M.N.Roy talked about co-operative economy after he got disillusioned with Communism
• Gandhi talked about that in his “Hind Swaraj”
• “Loknayak” Jayprakash Narayan said the same  too about the self-reliant village model
• Tagore said the same in his “Samavaya Niti”
• Louis Kelso talked about a similar model in which every man is a capitalist
• G.K.Chesterton and Hellaire Belloc proposed the same by drawing inspirations from Christian traditions
• There are legions of economists on the New Economics foundation page who have said the same about “the third way”
• Am damn sure there will be many many others .. :)

So  as per the author of the “antibjp” site i think all these people are crackpots? :P .. The list has got devout christians.. ex-communists .. congressmen.. socialists and intellectuals .. so all those random arguments of the website guy pale.Case closed :P.

PS: Like i said in the first line..i neither belong to RSS nor BJP. I think just like Congress betrayed Gandhi.. BJP of today also has betrayed Deendayal’s “Integral Humanism” . So no point being enamoured by party websites and mission-vision documents. I do not hold any political affiliations as of now. Heck! i couldnt even vote till now as my name went missing from electoral rolls :( .. So please don’t get judgemental about me :P .. i am just your quintessential middle class indian armchair analyst :P ..

#ReaderAlert .. lot of text

The last time i spoke of the atomic physicist turned environmentalist ‘Winin Pereira’ was here. Recently, i happened to read one more of his books “Inhuman Rights – The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse”. This post is about that reading.Such books make us think about a lot of things in our everyday life we take for granted today. This is a 1997 book.

This one again was from arvind gupta’s book gallery but i believe the hardcopy also can be procured from here.( I haven’t tried this channel yet.. but i plan to buy sometime soon :) )

Anyway, the book talks about many things.. westernisation, colonisation, businesss unsustainability, exploitation, rights abuse, exterminating indigenous peoples etc. I will only refer to some parts of the book which made me sit back, think and reflect.

On Individualism

The book talks about a lot of things.. but somewhere in the last 20% of the book there is this chapter on individual rights.. and that is the one which made me think the most esp considering the fact that i myself am troubled with extreme individualism these days.

“Individualism is based on the belief that personal pleasure is the only good and personal pain is the only evil. The unlimited pursuit of pleasure, usually confused with happiness, is considered the ultimate right of every person, thus transmuting selfishness into a universal virtue“

In recent past, discussions in class and off-class are leading to this fundamental.. individualism vs collectivism thing. I think this interaction will continue to shape our lives in the next few decades :)

“The sombre side of the doctrine of individualism is that those disadvantaged by the same system must also take personal responsibility for their own misfortune, poverty or suffering. The west has accumulated such unparalleled wealth that the affluent can claim that only individuals who are flawed in some way could possibly failed to do the same. The system promotes itself as the most perfect form of human society achievable, given the fallen state of humanity. It is only one step from this to assert that all the problems of so prodigious a system must stem from the failings of human beings. Individuals can then be made to bear the burden of pain inflicted by social and economic wrongs as though these were their own self-inflicted tragedies”.

The system is “ruthless”. I myself have experienced this feeling many times .. from the time i started by higher education in 2001. The whole things runs on a up or out funda sadly :( .. Again like i said prevly.. i don’t agree that India is a collectivist society in its entiriety anymore. A lot of “the India that i am in” is very very individualistic.

On Consumption

“Western economics claims that “consumer sovereignty” as a fundamental ethical right: “What i want, I have a right to get”. The criteria people normally use when attempting to satisfy their wants are: “Do i like it?” “Can i afford it?” . This implies that the money at the disposal of the individual has been justly earned and that no one has been impoverished or hurt by its acquisition. It further conveys that the purchase contemplated has in no way harmed or exploited those who produce it or the environment. In other words, money cannot be tainted and money itself overrides all other ethical considerations.”

This aspect of our consumption today is interesting. Urban Indian consumer of today is very much like that in the west.. so am sure the attitude has percolated down to us today :).

“Consumption over basic needs requirements — hyper-consumption — is an abuse of other people’s right to life. The failure to observe this, is one of the major yet rarely mentioned violations of human rights today. It is an abuse that is perpetrated by nearly all citizens in the West and those in the Two Thirds World who imitate their life-styles”

Totally agree. This is also similar to what gandhiji said on this topic. But i will also say that it is incredibly difficult to stay simple in “my India”. Infact, the whole economy post liberalisation is running under the assumption that the whole of india turns on the hyper consumption mode and india shall “grow and develop!” :P

On “turning back the clock”

“Well, if the revival of modest and frugal ways of life is turning back the clock, at least it is an improvement on those, who, urging on an industrialisation without end, risk turning back the clock to the book of Genesis when chaos covered the face of the earth“

Interesting! .. I think Gandhi’s Hindswaraj also argues on similar lines. By the time i am 70 perhaps the answer to this question will be much clearer.. by then there will not be a debate on modes of development .. there will be only one answer .. which one it is .. is the question :P

On “Human Nature”

“Another attack (on critics) is that the present system reflects the reality of human nature and that this nature cannot be changed. “Human Nature”, in  this context invariably means greed, selfishness and individual self-aggrandisement

But human nature is also charectarised by self-sacrifice, concern for others, compassion and cooperation; otherwise the human race would have extinguished itself long ago“

Very true.

Doomsday predictions?

“Such statements are dismissed as the ramblings of irrational, millenium cultists; of people who have been predicting doomsday for generations. But doomsday has not yet come and will never arrive since Western science and technology are religiously believed to be capable of indefinitely substituting resources and eliminating pollution. However even though it appears to be permanently entrenched, the Western systems already showing a variety of signs of deterioration“

I think it is easy to pass judgement on people who think differently. But seldom do we actually evaluate their  merit. This crisis that our world is seeing today is i think unique and cannot be compared with others like  Ozone depletion scare or Y2K scare or End of millenium scare etc.. this is much deeper and bigger in both scope and scale. (Btw Halley’s comet arrival in 1910 also was one of the doomsday prophecies ;) )

Solution?

“The shift to simpler life-styles- reducing the purchase and use of non-necessities – will itself undermine the system, in a sense, “the magic of market place” , can be used not only by choosing what we buy, but by choosing what we don’t buy. The system, no matter how tyrannical it becomes, cannot deprive citizens of the right not to buy. And since the source of its wealth and power is the manufacture and sale of its products, not buying is a potent means of hastening its downfall“

Well. well. now this is something :) . But i like i said prevly… it is now very very difficult to stay simple :) The economist Ludwig Von Mises in his book “anti-capitalistic mentality” took the argument to the other extreme and  questions this whole funda. Well.. for now looking at the way things have gone around .. may be consumers have been brain washed i dunno.. but i think Von Mises argument won the game :)

More Solutions?

“Many ancient systems, still practised by indigenous peoples who have been living simply for thousands of years, provide viable and more just model alternatives to the Western system. They can teach the wisdom of smallness, the value of communities which include individual autonomy with communal generosity and a non-violent ecological perspective“

“Small is Beautiful” …. Indeed !

This post is about that reading .. (Wait! don’t groan :P .. there is time for that).

He has been succesfully sidelined by the mainstream economists i think.. if it was not for the reading of that television elimination book by Jerry Mander i wouldn’t have known about Kelso. Sad!

Apparently he once told a reporter that his book is about “one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind!” :D . It defintely is a important discovery.. “most” or not i don’t know.

The book discusses in detail about the problems with current day economics and makes some radical proposals.

• The fundamental argument is on these lines .. as time progressed technology has made “Capital” (Machinery and other such investment) a lot more powerful+productive than “Labour” .
• A lot of the wealth is now generated by the capital and very little by labour. Infact, as per author in the USA of the 60s ..90% of wealth was generated by capital and only 10% by labour. But the tragedy is that only 5% of the populace own this 90% capital.
• Now, what has been happening is .. the labour which is infact responsible for only 10% of the wealth keeps on demanding higher wages by attributing the increase in overall productivity to their labour while it was infact because of the capital. Not only that .. lop-sided government policies keep on pushing companies for higher labour employment whereas on the other hand technology is becoming more efficient and needs as little labour as possible.
• Infact, he criticises the taxation policies also which draw away a lot of income from the rich who got their income for their capital and distribute it to the poor who demand “just” wages for their labour. He calls this ridiculous because a man should get a wage as per his contribution to the economy.
• If you have contributed only by labour then you can’t expect to “steal” what someone else has legitimately earned by their “capital”. He says that these dynamics and more are responsible for all the inequality in the world, inflation, false promise of full employment, depression-recession cycles of economy etc.
• He says that the modern day solutions of “socialism”/”communism” or welfare-states that tax rich to pay poor etc are flawed ideas. His argument against communism is that .. it draws away the power of “capital” from everyone except the bureaucrats and government and makes everyone depend on “labour” which is infact worse than the present state. The argument against robbing the rich to pay the poor also has been mentioned already.
• He calls for a new form of capitalism called “Capitalism” (with capital C :) ) . The idea here is to move in exactly the  opposite direction from where communism has moved. To make everyone capitalists! . To distribute capital as freely as possible. Diffuse capital to all employees to make them all owners of capital etc. Thus the productive power of capital supplements the reliance of the employee on his own manual  labour.
• From here he goes on to make some more radical proposals like : (a) Zero corporate tax and tax only on personal income (b) 100% employee owned companies (c) Infact, he also talks about consumer owned companies elsewhere (not sure if it was in the book). Consumer Stock Ownership Plan also is an interesting idea.

My criticism: Obvly i am too small a fella to critique accomplished economists. But here are my thoughts from my first reading of “the Capitalist manifesto”. Afterall my blog is about  my thoughts :P . Clearly, the model of distributed ownership he proposed is in line with all those things that i have written about in the recent past .. be it Tagore’s Co-operativism via his Samavayaniti or Chesterton’s distributism and many other things. But to contrast with Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and similar such books .. Kelso assumes that the supremacy of Capital over labour is good or that the supremacy of technology over our way of production is good while Gandhi was vehemently against technology that is against the growth of the soul. Also, there is very little that kelso talks about in terms of the damage to the environment and other sustainability issues of today caused by the techno-centric production. Agreed .. in 1958 it was perhaps very difficult to visualise all this. And then there is this inherent assumption that this path of “development” is correct and only the means of ownership and ways of distribution has to be changed. I think this part of the book is debatable.

The awesomeness of Kelso’s effort regarding ESOPs

So i wanted to finish my reading on Kelso ( that is him in the pic btw) for now by reading about the reasons for his so called failure and sidelining by mainstream economists. I stumbled upon this article titled “Fifty Years of Utopia: A Half-Century after Louis Kelso’s The Capitalist Manifesto, a Look Back at the Weird History of the ESOP” .

Like mentioned in the article.. from the birth of the idea of the ESOPs .. to the legislation regarding it .. to the vigorous lobbying related to it .. it was all done by one man .. “Louis Kelso”. This story makes a very interesting read. It also emphasises the impact a committed individual can make on economic policy.

Also happened to read some more on “when democratic ESOPs fail” .. very interesting read again.

Conclusion:All in all i have added one more name to the list of people who’s works have inspired me :) What i do with those inspirations is a very different thing :P . As of now i need a job for subsistence :D

Of late, i have been listening to various arguments from multiple friends online and offline about this whole idea of “we were living dark ages .. the colonialists came and enlightened us“, “india missed out on the industrial revolution lets not miss out on the knowledge revolution” (this was by a ceo), “we are backward .. they are forward” so on so forth. Now, i get irritated when i listen to this. No, i am not saying india was a near perfect civilisation.. we had our negatives we also had our positives. That is the case with every civilisation. But i have this thing for blanket statements like that above.

I tried to understand why we are like this from a longgg time .. 2006 shud i say?

Like i have mentioned “macaulay” a couple of times before .. in my 2007 post on viswanatha’s “veyi padagalu” and more recently when i wrote about wenin pereira’s book .. I think the british deserve a pat on their back for ruining India ;) (and for creating India as well ??) .

I think the argument is very clear .. one side quotes text from macaulay’s minute on education … “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and says .. “look this is how India got ruined”. The other side says.. this is all RSS propaganda .. infact it is good that they came and enlightened us. (I am simplifying arguments here.. but i think the reader gets the idea)

I have read some criticisms about the pro-pre-colonial India school of thought and i just can’t understand how anyone in their sane mind can support ludicrous ideas like colonialism .. Manifest destiny or The White Man’s Burden.

I would put myself close to the former school of thought .. i believe every land in the world is unique and has its own local needs and history .. so there is no point propagating a mono-culture for the entire world. I also feel as people from this land.. we need to have some respect for its science, its history, its culture .. what not. Again, i am not saying we were perfect.. no one is.. from time to time there were reforms and they will continue to be so. But that is no reason to assume that we lived in dark age and india before british was charectarised by legions of ignorant masses.

It is in this context that i would want to write about this very interesting series of articles that i read a couple of days ago. These are articles from the “Economic and Political Weekly”.

So the first article is titled “A critique of eurocentric social science and the question of alternatives” by Claude Alvares .. to describe it in very simplistic  terms.. the article is about “academic slavery”… It is about how most of the social science curriculum is uncritically imported from the west. I think one of the followup articles also says clearly that this import is not limited to social science alone and the case is the same with maths or physics or biology as well.

This takes me to my recent reading of wiki page on “Indian Mathematics“

This was my complaint with my schooling for long .. I still dont know why my maths textbooks never spoke about the math in Bhaskara’s Lilavati . If ever there was one book that made learning maths fun it had to be this! .. the idea of teaching maths with puzzles embedded in poems is fantastic. I go straight to this section in wiki on Indian Mathematics .. not a single one of these was taught to me anywhere in my 12yrs of school mathematics or 2yrs of engineering mathematics! Who is to blame? ..It is easy to blame Macaulay :P .. but what about post independent India :D ?

Now, it is easy to understand the attitude of present day educated urban intelligentsia .. if from childhood you are barely taught anything about Indian Science or Indian Social science.. and every bloody axiom or theory you studied was an import.. then you are bound to think that .. “okie .. we indians were just a bunch of fools” . I am not giving a “holier than thou” discourse here .. i am as much a party to this culture as anyone of you are .. we are all just a bunch of fools :P ( *joke* )

And btw this is not so much about “Hindu” sciences .. the wonder called “Seamless celestial globe” invented in Mughal India is just as much an Indian invention as anything else. This is again a fascinating story though i don’t understand the full technicalities of it .. but it is about casting big large spheres without any seam. There are two ways in which big globes could be made .. one way is to cast two metal hemisphere and soldering these to produce a big sphere… it is the other way which surprised the west and by and large the rest of the world when it was discovered.  I have already written about India’s legendary “wootz steel” before here.

Moral of the story is we have done a great job in forgetting to teach the new generation about everything that was ours and teaching only imported stuff. This has a direct impact on the lack of cutting edge research in India today.. if every single line of what you studied was imported .. and had a built-in dependency .. then how can “original” research spring up?

And by no means am i saying that cultures shouldn’t interact.. way back in the 5th century Varahamihira was influenced by Romaka Siddhanta ( Doctrine of Romans) .. all i am saying we shouldn’t let all the original works of the land erode .. and accept whatever is taught to us as holy gospel.

So coming back to the article..

“The question few people ask is: Why do Indians or Iranians or Chinese for that matter allow themselves to continue to be fed a diet of what Europeans or Americans decide is social science? Is it possible that they could survive for thousands of years without intensive know-how about social, political, scientific or military organisation ? Why are we unable to resist the notion that European sociology or anthropology or American political science or psychology is some kind of absolute which cannot be questioned? Or as we simply too lazy to surrender this colonial inheritance and rethink anew?“

Totalllyyyyyyyy Agree :) .. I dont know if this can be applied to MBA curriculum also.. but definitely if the idea of “management” can be extended to non-industrial societies also (coz humans were humans then also :P) .. then i am sure there will be something we can learn from Indian knowledge systems as well.

The author later quotes a far more powerful passage from a african writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o :

“The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance [was] the cultural bomb.The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life”

The author goes on to say:

“It is truly amazing to discover that so many educated segments in practically every colonized society could be so convinced eventually of their own – and their civilization’s – worthlessness, that they would allow themselves to be robbed of everything that their civilizations had to offer and then meekly submit to remould themselves in the manners and thinking of those who came from far outside their borders”

It is truly amazing Sir.. It is :( And the article goes on in this tone.It is a wonderfully well written article (tats my fav phrase btw :p)

Infact there is another one titled “Steeped in eurocentricism” which is a far more scathing criticism of the whole thing.. some passages will actually hit your straight on ur face :D

Btw no offense meant to any of my friends who were party to these arguments. Afterall we are argumentative indians.. it is our birth right to argue :D