Religious conversions and India

India is probably only country of its scale which has resisted the forces of religious conversions and still maintained the multi faith Sanatana Dharma still intact.

The motivation for this blog came from 3 completely different places

One, when I was listening to a podcast on North East India and the insurgency and so on, I heard from Col Honi Bakshi who was all praise for Church for in someway taming the tribals and sort of making them "civilized". On the other hand was Rami Niranjan Desai who saw the flaws in Nehruvian method of allowing missionaries and church to enter the remote areas.

Second was the chat with Google Gemini about Russia and how it remained such a vast country and it turned out one of the reason was conversion of people to Orthodox Christianity and imposing Russian language by one of the Czars.

Lastly while discussing the same with my now Sophomore (High School) daughter she said, religious conversions are a part of state building. Essentially boils down to, if I can control what you do in your private life with such thing as god and religion then I have better ability to keep the population under control and more conformed to speak.

All these turned some of the belief's that were installed in us on its head, example Aurangzeb was just not a pious muslim who wanted everyone to see path of Allah but also a clever state builder who saw that leaving factions of Hindu alone will eventually ruin his vast empire or the same with Shivaji who believed if he cowed down to Aurangazeb then Hindu as a culture and its values will be destroyed. Same is true for Christianity and power of church and to large extent Europe and America.

I am not denying the fact that some people are motivated enough and see themselves as apostles and want people to convert to their sect but same time when it becomes a well funded and strategic process it is more than just pure religious zeal.

I started the blog quoting how India has time and again honored diversity, a very beautiful example of it comes to mind. I have always wondered how come Buddhism which originated in India and powerful backing from kings like Ashoka the great didn't survive in India as much as it did in neighboring countries and the answer probably lies in the land itself which thrives on diversity and multi culturalism. 

First language Kannada

I guess this is a problem of people of my generation and present day may not even relate to it. Or maybe I have written about this in my previous posts (I will check).

Back in the day when we transitioned from grade 7 to 8, we had to identify one language as primary (first) and secondary invariably was English (unless English was primary, those schools were far and few) and one tertiary language. Mind you till grade 7 we were doing the same and in most schools Kannada was the primary language.

Anyways, come to grade 8, a new choice popped up called Sanskrit. Considering students were starting from scratch they would start with alphabets and grammar and by end of grade 10 they would have graduated to reading some amount of Sanskrit let alone converse. So, in terms of GPA or what we used to call easy scoring subject, Sanskrit was top choice.

Yours truly was also the same mentality and by divine grace I met with a Kannada teacher MS. Gowramma who suggested me to take Kannada as primary language and my dad also suggested the same. There was initial resistance in me but I did take it up. Along with meeting such wonderful friends in that group, one thing it developed in me was the love for language, years later reflecting back on what I studied back in grade 8, 9 and 10 specially in what was called non detail were some intense texts.

Years later that spark has kept up and I don’t say I am an avid Kannada reader, same time the history buff in me would pick up a Kannada book about Karnataka Ithihasa than an English commentary.

Analyzing past events through present day lens

Remember Ramayana, the death of Ravana and return of Rama to Ayodhya and within in no time Rama decides to send his beloved wife Sita back to the forest. Of all things that happened in Ramayana, this is the one aspect I couldn't come to terms with and hence I asked our beloved late Rajima and her asnwer was as always cut throat and to the point "You guys with all your live-in relationships and all will never understand why, and will keep blaming Rama for doing the wrong thing"

A decade or so ago, I was talking to a senior colleague of mine about 401K and causally and off handedly mentioned to him how people in my parents generation often took out loans on their Provident Fund (Indian equivalent of 401k), first he looked straight in my eyes and said "they did it to take care of you and your education" and he went on to say his own stint of withdrawing from 401K funds in his younger days.

Let’s try another simple one, back in the days before age of cell phones or even phones and tracking and all such, even if the arrival of my dad from work got delayed by few hours (2-3) we had to wait calmly and patiently. Can I imagine such a thing in present day? It was normal for those days.

There are many such incidents like these that I keep encountering these days leading me to think, if I can’t even fathom what it was like 3 or 4 decades ago, what gives me the ability to understand, comprehend to what happened or even written a few thousand years ago.

Yes, Rajima had that talent, delivering great lessons in a sentence or two.

Ps: this is another take on my previous post of “Rama and Sita”

Was Rama right

 The other eternal question stems from the Indian epic Ramayana, after all things endured by Sita, why did Rama decide to send her off to forest.

About a decade and half ago, I was doing this course on Krishna avatara with Late Rajima and I can’t think of a better scholar than her in Indian epics. I took the courage to ask her but didn’t know where to start. I was beating around the bush to ask her and she said “ask whatever it is directly”.

Me: was Rama not at fault for exiling Sita

Rajima: your generation of live in relationships and multiple partners and so on will never understand Rama and will keep blaming him

At that moment, I was confused and didn’t understand what she was saying.

Fast forward to today, a memory flashed across to me, I was in grade 6 or so and me and my friend were arguing that the embracing scenes between hero and heroine in a movie are shot without them embracing in front of the camera.

Meaning, one can argue that our back ground was conservative enough that we couldn’t comprehend a unknown male and female embrace even for acting.

Now, if I were to extrapolate to few thousand years backwards, I think I get my answer.

That said, I still don’t know if Rama was right.

An eternal question answered

 

Back in India when I was a child, that was the middle of milk revolution and India was importing high yielding milk cattle from Europe and others. Either keeping the breeds pure or mixing them with local cattle for the pure breeds didn’t sustain the extreme temperatures or the tropic weather.

That said, females were milk cows and the question about males were a disaster for the eternal belief that those cows/ox couldn’t be used for tilling land. When probed deeper, answer always was that the foreign cows lacked the hump needed to stop the yoke and beam from sliding down.

I believed the answer till I left the country and realized people in Europe were ploughing even with horses and donkeys, there is no breed of horse that has a hump.

The answer finally came to me when visiting the Billings dairy farm in Vermont. The cattle can’t take the heat and love the nippy cold and will slide on snow and hence the farm had big industrial fans to keep them cooler.

So, the answer was three fold, one is the fact that these cows/ox were not trained for tilling and for generations were bred for milking and training these is a hard task and might take a few generations to get them ready. Second, we needed to change the yoke and beam design for these ox and lastly and most importantly, these cattle were bred for the cold weather for generations and had trouble adjusting to the hotter/tropical weather.

Now, the question can rest in peace.

When popular movies get things wrong

From the other side of the Ocean (I mean India), America is a fascination and been there for ever I would say and to a large extent mis understood. It becomes even worse when mainstream movie makers like Suresh Heblikar, Nagatihalli Chandrashekar or Sethuram get's it completely and illogically wrong.

Lets start with Heblikar, the man is amazing focusing his movies on mental health issues with movies like Kaadina Benki, Prathama Ushakirana and so on. I have great respect for him. But the case I am arguing here is, with the Ushakirana movie, it is illogical because a simple engineer along with his wife who is a complete simpleton and guessing by their kids age must be in early 30s come to America in a simple shirt and pant and her in Saree and return just after 3 years as though they won few million dollars in lottery and like in Avatar, just got transformed to a version only made sense to him in a jiffy. I have spent more than a quarter of a decade here and have friends in all spectrum and in general those who come for such short durations that too such orthodox folks can't even get used to the food let alone culture. Their primary aim is to save up and send home and return rich. Also, for the whole period of 3 years there were no vacations, the couple never went back to see their kids? Of course these are logical questions and that's not for everyone.

For Chandrashekar, in his movie America America the couple in USA manage to buy not a starter home but a huge house within a few years of marriage and that too in posh LA for what would be present day ~$700K. I would like to know from the director if he can find me such a house in middle of LA. or SFO, can't remember. The cassette part is another big miss, all the years it was lying around in USA and never was played. The party scene of Ramesh is laughable for 1995 India had just opened up and America was struggling with effects of Iraq war and conflicts in Africa. The dude loses job and how the hell did he manage to stay in the country, maybe because Trump was not the president then :). There are lot more loop holes but again logic, something to left outside movie halls.

Lastly my favorite (for real) Sethuram. in one of the serials he did his daughter-in-law gets a chance to go to "America" and not his son and she goes with her boss. The boss is also owner of the company and he promises all good behavior but apparently breaks them when he lands here. In short, he starts exploiting her and she returns back to India dejected. The lady was ready to seperate from husband while in India but couldn't muster courage to file a complaint against her boss while in USA?

I am all for entertainment and all for baseless and no logic movies like James Bond or Bourne or our own home brew from YRF but please don't make these stupid and logical mistakes and call it a movie based on real life situations. For the truth is miles away from your fiction.

The saddest reality is movies like these truly formed the public perception back in the day with some conservative families not even wanting to send their children either to study or work abroad or America means instant wealth and not highlighting other struggles like life style adjustment, loneliness and for present day visa issues.

Teaching history in a complex country like India

 I have written quite a few blog posts on India and its history, whether it is rich or poor depends on one's perspective.

One cannot deny it’s a civilizational state with a constant occupation and change and being a country linked by land to both Middle East and Europe has a long history. In fact each and every region of the country has history going back by a thousand years if not more. To top that curriculum designers must account for nation building and highlight the history from Delhi centric perspective too. Last but not the least is the freedom struggle itself which technically started with first war of independence in 1857 and ended with 1947.

Keep in mind, we cannot ignore the world history which is shaping our contemporary world affairs also, at the least world wars 1 and 2 followed by Cold War to fall of Soviet Union to the present day conflicts and the dictatorships and so on.

I am only talking history and haven’t even touched the geography or the constitution/law or what we used to call Civics.

I truly pity the NCERT people for their job is not easy.

While I stated the problem statement here are some suggestions to make it slightly better.

1. Add history and others as a compulsory subjects for grade 11 and 12, adding 2 more years to the system of education helps a lot
2. Like they do in this country, dedicate a year worth in high school to learn about local history meaning in my case history of Karnataka. Dedicate another year on the world history and so on
3. Eliminate switching to Sanskrit or even English as first language in grade 8 and stick to local language or Hindi as first language from beginning to end, advantage is that students would have had great mastery over language and can digest complex literature and I myself learnt a lot with studying Kannada literature which otherwise I would not have learnt. Example : Jhansi rani Laxmi Bai is mentioned in history books but Kitturu Chennamma or Keladi Chennamma were learnt through kannada literature which were part of the curriculum.
4. Stop teaching history as dates and events but focus on drawing parallels and finding what Google likes to call “system analysis” for example how being religious zealots destroyed empires time and again across the globe with no exception. Or my favorite, any kingdom especially the big ones get destroyed by inner rot and court room politics than an external invasion
5. Its been 80 years since independence, at the rate of 12 years of education umpteen batches have passed through, time to teach real history be it about Jihad of Aurangazeb or Inquisitions by Spain in Goa or the Naval revolt of 1947 or how bankrupt England was at end of WW-II that it couldn't really control its "colonies"
6. Constantly I heard that "History is dead subject", this has led to people thinking it is set in stone and cannot be changed and more I have learnt over time, if anything its the opposite. It is as alive as Science and probably as fascinating

Of course all these require systemic changes in thinking and might need new ways of drafting curriculum and training teachers and probably a generation or two to go through.

My fundamental problem with the way I learnt history was, it was sorry to say completely Delhi Centric and sadly when I read Nehru Discovery of India, he was so freaking light on south of the Vindhya’s I was flabbergasted.

As one famous person once said, "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it"