FOCUS-FEBRUARY 2022

INDIAN HISTORY: SHOULD WE REWRITE IT! Sanjaan was a well known port in the Valsad district in the coastal Gujarat state. According to sources among Parsis, they migrated to India between the year 785 AD and 936 AD at the height of their persecution in their land of birth in the distant Persia, which is the later day Iran. They were a very prosperous, civilized and cultured community. They came in search of security of their persona and security for their faith. Having trusted their land of migration, they remained unconditionally faithful to the soil of their adoption and in return they remained completely protected in an atmosphere of peace and stability. Parsis prospered and flourished. Rest as the cliché goes, is a resplendent history and a glorious public knowledge. But sadly, did not find itself written into the pages of India’s evolving history. Why and how of it could be some interesting reading of some calculated disinformation/misinformation effort of some vested interest groups. First of all, why would this persecuted community opt to travel to India confident of being secure and protected?! And come to think of it, their hopes and trust were never betrayed. (SEE BOX) History of Jews in India dates back to antiquity, informs Wikipedia. Judaism is one of the first religions to arrive in India in recorded history. But sadly it remained there only. There appears to be some 2200 years of history of Indian Jews, but not much is available to corroborate this development. Jews are also a persecuted community in different parts of the world. But their history of being in India is one of peace, stability and prosperity. They are most happy being in India. Like Parsis they too are hardworking, intelligent and peace loving community. They too lived and prospered but steadily left India to their new country Israel, carved out of Palestine. Yet there is a significant number of ‘Jews’ present across India. However, Indian writers somehow glossed over the presence and contribution of Jews in India and Indian school students remained ignorant of these historical details and contribution of Jews for the development of India. Khurshed Batliwala, is a Parsee gentleman. He is an M.sc in Mathematics from IIT Bombay. Most Parsees in India are called ‘Bawa’, so is Khurshed. Over two decades ago, apparently he decided to teach people how to meditate and become happy than teach them mathematics and make them miserable. So he joins Art of Living centre of Sri Sri Ravishankar. From a volunteer he became Director managing huge events. He has even grown as an eminently readable writer. His books are published by publishing great like Harper Collins India. He is an extremely innovative teacher in making any student a better learner. He is a highly acclaimed and prolific speaker with numerous TEDx talks to his credit. “He brings to the table smooth blend of cutting edge technology and science coupled with the ancient wisdom of India which he contemporises and makes relevant for the ground situations and emerging challenges” inform Amazon in their website. Recently there was this video making its round in the social circuit. In one of his talks to IIT students, he digresses into the classical India. He starts, “All of you have heard of Varaha avatara or the incarnation of a boar. (This is one of the incarnations of Lord Vishnu, supposedly to save the drowning earth). The boar, according to mythology appears to save the earth and the picture of the earth being lifted by boar clearly shows the earth being round. This is a picture of some thousands of years ago. Even then our ancient knowledge masters knew the earth is round, which westerners learnt only less than a century or so ago. In fact, he says our languages in India calls Geography as Bhoogol, meaning circular earth. Then we call the earth as Jagath, ‘Jiski gathi hai’, the one that moves. In other words Jagath means moving earth. We knew the earth is round and is moving. This was thousands of years ago. He takes students into space and tells “there is this star called ANTARES. ARES means MARS, which is a red star, ANTARES means like MARS. It is 15th or the 16th brightest object in the sky. Our ancient elders called it Jeshta. Jeshta means the eldest or the biggest. It is indeed the biggest since it is 40,000 times bigger than Sun. This was known to our forefathers some 5000 to 7000 years ago, as the biggest, which to our naked eye is just a point in the sky. How did they know it! Then in this BIG BEAR CONSTELLATION, there are two stars, not one star, as it was believed earlier, is called Arundhati Vasishta, where one star rotates circling the other star. How was it possible to know that it was indeed rotating, to the bare eyes without telescope! Then come to Metallurgy. There are these pillars which are rust proof. Most famous are the one in front of Qutub Minar in Delhi and the other in Kollur, near the Western Ghats in the coastal district of Karnataka, some 100kms from Mangalooru. The pillar outside Qutub Minar dates back to 402 and the one in Kollur dates back beyond AD into BC. Both these pillars have remained rust proof for all these thousands of years. What is the technology behind such creations! So Indians of the yore had brains beyond logical comprehension. And come to think of it, the pillar in Kollur was learnt to have been constructed by the tribals of the area in honour of Adi Shankaracharya when he was passing through Kollur while on his journey of spiritual quest. So the knowledge of such kind was available even with those socially behind in the hierarchy prevalent in Indian society of those days. Then for 4000 years, Indians had with them the technology of making zinc and none else in the entire biosphere. One day a Chinese stole the technique and a Britisher followed him to steal it again. William Champion is the first one to start a Zinc Distillery in Great Britain in the year 1543, claims Khurshed Batliwala. Then there is this Shloka (a hymn or verse in Sanskrit) in praise of Lord Krishna, he points out. There is nothing truly special at its normal appearance. But when you apply the theory of KATAPAYADI SANKHYA, it reveals a whole lot of significance. It is a theory where words can be represented by substituting it to numbers. When you substitute these words in the Shloka, you get a value of Pi(π), corrected to 30 decimal places, which clearly means, our rishis knew encryption also, thousands of years ago. Khurshed then takes the audience to Vasco Da Gama, the Portuguese who landed in the court of Zamorin in Kerala. He had left Lisbon in search of India, with the biggest ship then available in whole of Europe. Being afraid of travelling in high sea, he stays put in Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of African continent. There meets an Indian trader Kanhabhai, from Gujarat, who had ships 10/12 times the size of ship, that Vasco Da Gama had, to help him travel to India. Here the point he was making was, even Indian ship building was far bigger and advanced than Europeans of those days. These details that he was sharing with his students clearly indicated the very high level of intellectual and material attainments. But our history writers, committed to some weird ideology, blacked out these inspiring details and our young evolving minds remained ignorant of India’s superlative greatness in the days of yore, some thousands of years ago. How these faculties were so greatly developed! Khurshed tells that ‘there is only one reason, all our saints were scientists. All of them did Pranayam, all of them did yoga and all of them meditated. And when these yogic lessons are practiced over long years, you no longer remain limited by physical instruments. Thus, if you want to travel to space or the depth of an atom, you just close your eyes and get there to see it in person to know it accurately! That’s how; they could study the CONSTELLATION in the distant sky and accurately talk about stars and galaxies. Or learn the technology of making rust proof iron, or make commercial zinc, or build huge sea going ships and many other attainments. So, the basis of our intellectual and scientific prowess is the spirituality, which has been systematically destroyed by Britishers and other invaders. British replaced Yoga by P.T and sadly even after 70+ years of being a free country, our governments have not gone back to Yoga to remove P.T from school curriculum. Another place and another time, spiritual master, Jaggi Vasudeva, also known as Sadguru chatting with an ideologically marooned visitor, and how systematically clips the visitor’s arguments to tell him emphatically that YOGA is the solution for many of country’s problems. The visitor asks, why Lakshya Foundation is trying to forcefully include yoga in school curriculum? Which is only an exercise? And this forceful inclusion is in conflict between liberty and faith! Sadguru, refutes all allegations forcefully. According to Sadguru, Yoga and chemistry or physics are not the same thing. In school, you were forced to learn physics and chemistry, and none complained. Besides Yoga is never a mere exercise. When you are made to learn the chemistry of the plant you were told its biology. When you were forced to commit unspeakable cruelty on frogs to learn its chemistry you call it zoology, but when asked to learn about your own body and its inner mechanism, it become forceful and you call it a mere exercise, why? Brain of Indians is still in Greenwich Mean Time. British left Indian shore in 1947, but are stuck in our head. That’s the problem. Yoga is the science with which India grew. This is the science with which Indians achieved heights of success. At one time we were the greatest economy and largest exporter on the planet earth. We were the most scientifically advanced nation thousands of years ago, simply because people understood the human mechanism well and how to take it to the highest level. Today we are down below. We need to rise. It is time to rise. If the nation has to rise, we individuals have to rise. If individual human beings do not achieve a certain level of balance and excellence within themselves, how do you expect to take a nation ahead! That is why every child, should learn Yoga irrespective of community. We want every child anywhere in the world to benefit from the practice of Yoga, because this is a profound science of inner well being. And this talk of faith in conflict with yoga is all politics. Tell me if you bend your body will your faith go away? What kind of a faith is that? Yoga is not asking you to worship any God. If you breathe the way it’s done in yoga, how your faith will go away? If you don’t breathe your life will go away. You must know that. It’s all politics. If yoga was introduced by any other party none would have protested. It’s because it’s being brought by a party, allegedly of Hindus, you are protesting. That is the problem! Here we have discussed issues relating to our national and social past of India from the perception of two intellectuals. They have told and conveyed enough and more within the limited space. There may be intellectuals who differ in perception of what these two gentlemen have conveyed. Readers are free to agree or disagree and respond appropriately. We are a democratic nation; all have their right to opine. And this is the first attempt at writing on issues relating to India’s history. There will be series of such writings at different intervals and carry the debate towards a state of conclusion, so that an attempt to rewrite the Indian history is purposeful and objectively carried forward which will tell the truth as truth is.