courtesy: http://economictimes.com/
Showing posts with label Vymanika Sastra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vymanika Sastra. Show all posts
15 January 2015
Note on Settings: History vs. Mythology
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/
What is
Mythology?
Mythology
is a narrative explaining how the world came to be in its present form. This is
also the frame most authors are writing from when they develop their back
story: how did the setting get the way it is?
The
difference is that the events in a myth are metaphors, whereas a back story is
supposed to be a self-consistent historical account.
MYTH AND HISTORY
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://www.britannica.com/
Myth and
history represent alternative ways of looking at the past. Defining history is
hardly easier than defining myth, but a historical approach necessarily involves
both establishing a chronological framework for events and comparing and
contrasting rival traditions in order to produce a coherent account. The latter
process, in particular, requires the presence of writing in order that
conflicting versions of the past may be recorded and evaluated. Where writing
is absent, or where literacy is restricted, traditions embedded in myths
through oral transmission may constitute the principal sources of authority for
the past.
Perils of Petty Politics in the Time of History and Science Congresses
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://www.newindianexpress.com/
Pushpesh PantThe country hasn’t lacked amusement in the past fortnight. The Indian History Congress has passed a resolution cautioning—just short of censoring— the PM to steer the ship of state clear of the minefield that is considered by its members the Exclusive Economic Zone of professional historians. The dons (pun unintended) are oblivious of the fact that those who make history have scant regard for the views of mere practitioners of the art or craft or science, call them gold diggers, grave diggers or by any other name. If historians of a certain hue were bitten by the ‘scientific’ bug, our scientists swerved dramatically towards history—to be honest, they seemed to have suddenly discovered the secrets of time travel. Many of us were surprised by the eloquence of speeches at the Indian Science Congress exhorting us to acknowledge the wisdom of our ancestors. From plastic surgery to nano technology, nuclear science to space exploration, ancient India had it all and more. Those of us who prefer our intellectual stimulation unadulterated have inevitably suffered from a severe hangover left behind by the heady cocktail of myth, history, science and science fiction.
Perhaps it is best to make it clear at the outset ‘where we stand’. We certainly don’t take all that is narrated/complied in the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the various Puranas literally. Nor can we convince ourselves that ‘none other than Indians’ are favoured by nature or Gods more than the unfortunate people born and dwelling elsewhere. While we do believe that the borders between physics and metaphysics are blurred, not all frontiers of different disciplines are fuzzy. What is important to remember is that people’s shared memories are shaped and opinions formed by lived experiences, not papers presented or resolutions passed—laudatory or condemnatory—in History Congresses, nor can scientific temper be cultivated or injected by insertion of amendments in the Constitution.
Even before the NDA II government had been installed, grave threats were expressed during the run-up to elections that how the saffron brigade was waiting in the wings to destroy our social fabric and pluralistic heritage, and alarm bells were rung to warn voting for Modi could only spell disaster. Once he came to power, we were told, the Nehruvian idea of India would be lost forever and the country pushed to the precipice of another Partition. Dark forces of fascism would destroy democracy and so on. The Congress chorus regarding the ‘nightmare’ failed to enthuse the voters and the caricature of a political party was all but wiped off in the elections.
Over six months have passed and no calamity has befallen us. True, some Central ministers have shown a penchant for faux pas and repeatedly floundered. But none has yet touched the depths that deep-diving sycophants in UPA I and II regularly reached effortlessly. But we digress.
Deliberations of the Indian History Congress and Science Congress have failed to cause the slightest ripple. Retirement drama staged by Dhoni and pillorying PK have pushed not only these but also the ‘Ghar Wapsi’ antics of the Hardcore Hindu Nukkad Natak Co. off the headlines. What is clear is that it’s not only the family proprietary concern run by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi that is in dire straits. Mulayam, Maya, Mamata too are under great pressure. Matrimonial alliances didn’t ensure the survival of monarchies in Europe or avert destructive imperial rivalries. Nor, in the changed context, they are likely to provide firm foundations for Yadav supremacy in Hindi heartland. The fellow travelling historians, it seems, are destined or determined to bear the ‘loneliness of the long distance’ runners humming Tagore’s Ekla Chalo Re.
Congressmen appear totally lost. They can’t make up their mind whether the ‘aggressively secular’ stance will go down well with the people—including themselves—whose DNA has undeniable traces of ‘soft’ Hindutva. The hardliners in Sangh Parivar may not be members of a happy joint family, but the ‘secular fanatics’ are people who present a sadder picture of defeated soldiers in disarray. People like Azam Khan don’t make their task easy with inane but dangerously provocative ‘jocular’ statements.
We began by stating that recent events haven’t lacked amusement. Much to our regret, we must conclude with great anguish that the New Year has begun with some extremely disturbing trends. The interception of an intruding suspicious boat in Indian waters by the Coast Guard and its sinking after an explosion is being treated in a most irresponsible manner by the critics of the present government. Matters concerning national security and intelligence pertaining to threats to it can’t be trivialised. Nor can all military and intelligence operations—overt or covert—discussed threadbare in public. We must learn to rise above party politics—from History and Science Congresses—to combat poverty and pollution.
Pushpesh Pant is a former professor of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Is jingoistic science discrediting the astounding achievements of ancient Indian knowledge?
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://economictimes.com/
Jacob KoshyWhen concluding a public lecture on Einstein at the Indian Science Congress in the first week of 2015, Abhay Ashtekar, an Indian-born theoretical physicist at Pennsylvania State University and among the founders of loop quantum gravity — an esoteric mathematical approach to better understand gravity's role in the universe — remarked, rather bleakly, that it was no longer possible for human beings to entirely grasp the complexity of the universe by thought alone. "Today, without sophisticated instruments, expensive space probes and gargantuan detectors, knowledge of the beginnings and evolution of the universe would have been impossible," he summarised to a resounding ovation.
However, the applause Ashtekar drew, after his hour-long recce of 100 years of cosmology, was several decibels lower than the plaudits from a 500-strong audience for Captain Anand Jayaram Bodas, who 24 hours earlier, on the same podium, expounded on a 200-foot plane that was powered by 40 engines with "flexible exhaust pipes made of fabric and animal skin". The aeroplane, the ex-pilot noted "was just one of many common in the Vedic Age". He sourced his information to texts and scriptures originally authored by Maharshi Bhardwaj, who "lived between 6,000 and 7,000 BC".
Bodas, who with his remarks made it to the front pages of most newspapers, didn't take questions such as how these planes were fuelled, what were the aerodynamic principles involved and refused an interview with this reporter saying "journalists had misrepresented his words by referring to his assertions as 'mythical'". In his presentation, he added that several techniques of making aircraft bodies with alloys were mentioned and of the 500 verses that made up the body of Bhardwaj's work, only 100 had survived. He nevertheless exhorted students to make aircraft bodies using techniques mentioned in the texts.
Had Bodas used a 15-year-old, easily available technology called Google, he would've come across a 1974 paper in the journal Scientific Opinion titled 'A Critical Study of the Work Vymanika Shastra', by HS Mukunda, SM Deshpande, HR Nagendra, A Prabhu and SP Govindaraju. The authors who are aerospace and mechanical engineers, and then at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, argued that Vymanika Shastra, one of the antiquarian books cited by Bodas that mentioned the various kinds of planes Bodas explicated, didn't seem older than 1922. Their research paper, analysing each of the various planes mentioned in the book, concludes that "...the descriptions of their making in the text do not seem to make much sense from the point of view of making them in actual practice..." and there is "no mention at all of the weights of different components. This is serious, as that is fundamental to the flying of heavier-than-air machines".
Calling Attention
While Bodas may have garnered the maximum attention at the fest — perhaps more than the several Nobel laureates, biologists, particle physicists and rivalled prime minister Modi's de rigueur extempore perorations — he is at the apex of a revisionist clamour that over the last few months has seen several ministers attribute plastic surgery, stem cells, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, algebra and Pythagoras theorem as having been developed by India and "given away" to the rest of the world. However, Science Congress' organisers say that it was unfortunate that one "publicity monger" had managed to hijack all the attention and eclipsed many more thought-provoking sessions on 'Make in India', 'Swachh Bharat Mission' and medical breakthroughs.
SB Nimse, president, Indian Science Congress Association, said that he had made a conscious effort to invigorate the century-old Science Congress by ensuring that leading, active researchers from all over the world congregate, exchange ideas and inspire young students to the possibilities of science. The proposal to include a session on scientific ideas in ancient Indian literature — the first such in the organisation's history — came from the Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University, Nagpur and, while Nimse emphasised that he had no role in conceiving such a session, it appeared a good idea. "While they initially requested a day-long session, I insisted it be only a few hours and moreover it seemed worthwhile to have a discussion on scientific thought in our ancient texts," said Nimse. "There is considerable scholarship, for instance, on the conception of multiple infinities in old Jain literature and how even Fields medallist Manjul Bhargava's [one of the speakers at the Science Congress] prize-winning work was party influenced by his reading of [19th century] German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the original." Nimse emphasised that there was no request or pressure from the government to include such a session and that whether such as session would be included in future was "up to the future president".
Sage Talk
Neither Nimse nor environment minister Prakash Javadekar, who was one of the speakers at the science and Sanskrit session, was present for the research papers that were presented and discussed. These included, apart from Bodas' presentation, talks on ancient Indian surgery, architecture and the neuroscience of yoga. Many of these works relied on a firmer historical base than Bodas' bibliography. For instance, Ashwin Sawant's work on the surgical tools and techniques in ancient India relied on the Sushruta Samhita, an important work of the Ayurveda canon, and yet the dominant argument that permeated most of the findings was that all valuable science was discovered in India and refined to immaculate perfection between roughly 2,000 BC and 500 AD. All such knowledge was known to 'sages' and over time this knowledge was "lost" or made "impure" as they began to be practised unscientifically by a larger pool of semi-trained practitioners and worse, impeded by the dominance of Buddhism, Jainism and later Islam.
Sawant, an Ayurveda physician and a PhD student, dressed in an immaculate grey suit, concluded with an exhortation that "...Sushruta is asking for credit to be known worldwide as the father of surgery". He argued that sophisticated techniques, such as corrective nose surgery, and the use of scalpels so sharp that they could "split hair", were lost because of the subsequent dominance of "certain religions". Also, he argued, "Buddhism's advocacy of non-violence gained such precedence that even the use of scalpels were considered to be violent and over time, surgery started to be practiced by 'lower classes' and they lost their refinement."
Rahul Altekar, another speaker on the same forum, claimed that principles of architecture in the Vastu Shastra were so refined that "houses were prescribed to last for an average of 500 years". Only one of the papers, by Veena Londhe and Leena Phadke, presented experimental work that purported to show the superiority of yoga asanas when compared to popular aerobic exercises of the present day such as jogging. When Phadke stated that measurements by her associates, which included researchers from the University of Munich, of electrical activity in the brain in people performing the 'sirsasana,' or a headstand, was similar to that when we are supine or extremely calm, the audience again broke into raptures. She however didn't explain why such a headstand, then, was preferable to lying down if the resultant "brain activity" was the same and why this was healthier than deep breathing.
Future of the Past
"I am a Hindu, proud of it and yet there is an inviolable line between science and belief," said KS Saraswat, a professor at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow. He was part of a separate panel at the Science Congress, which presented work at a session called the 'Future of the Past', or on what were the latest archaeological techniques and discoveries being employed to understand India's early history.
In his presentation, he showed photos of lithographs and temple iconography from several Indian, Thai and Chinese temples to argue that fruits such as maize, cashew and the Brazilian pineapple — canonically believed to have been introduced to India and the East only after the European discovery of the Americas in the 16th century — were actually known to India and the East in the first millennium itself. Though this is a matter of academic dispute, Saraswat is disinterested in its implications. "This is not even my work and am relying on previous research in the US, but I'm not going to make the argument that maize was discovered in India or that Indians knew the Americas long ago," said Saraswat, "and that's because I don't have the evidence. It doesn't matter what I actually believe."
Researchers, who are exploring provocative ideas and challenging conventional West-backed histories, said that sessions such as the science and Sanskrit impede their work.
"The vimanwallahs do more harm than good because they assume any science done in the West is conspiratorial and biased toward India. Sure, there are sometimes problems with American and European interpretations, but they must be refuted in the language of science," said Mayank Vahia, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. With interests ranging from cosmic rays and ancient astronomy, Vahia was part of a group of Indian scientists that refuted a 2004 thesis from US scientists, that the Indus script — the language of the Harappan civilisation — may not be a language at all but a mere collection of symbols, a body blow to what is understood about that civilisation. The defence of Vahia and his colleagues published in 2009 in Science — a top academic journal — used evidence from computational linguistics, statistical principles used in the auto-complete feature of texting and thermodynamics.
Other scientists argue that jingoistic science discredits the genuinely astounding achievements of ancient Indian knowledge. "I've some, but not an exhaustive, background in the history of algebra and astronomy and there is no doubt that Aryabhata predated Europe in several aspects of trigonometry," said Ashtekar, "but planes and missiles are ludicrous. How is it then that half of India doesn't have electricity? Let's us not insult the great minds of our antiquity with stuff like this." Saraswat is however resigned to the idea that this clash between cultures and the use of science to establish utopian golden ages will never go away and is embedded deep into the human DNA. "As long as people are divided by countries and their own regional histories, these conflicts will continue. Only if humanity comes together to unearth our past can we really hope to understand the course of civilisations. That, I'm sure, is impossible."
The author is a science writer
Science friction
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://timesofindia.com/
Samit BasuMillennia ago, a Vedic spaceship took off from India and colonized another planet. The Indians in it were perfectly happy: in order to minimize internal differences and language superiority squabbles and avoid the End of Days (the invention of Facebook), they'd abandoned language altogether, and used their highly advanced plastic surgery skills to give themselves perfectly sculpted bodies, which it made no sense to cover with clothes. Like all NRIs, they liked to come back to the homeland occasionally to see how poor conditions were and feel smug about their choices. The result of all this? PK is totally true, people.
Bad science? Yes. Bad science fiction? Definitely. I'm hoping to deliver the keynote address at the Indian Science Congress next year. We live in an era where even presumably well-educated adults have problems telling fact and fiction apart. That certainly explains the events at the recently concluded Indian Science Congress, which demonstrated that apart from inventing everything in the world thousands of years ago and then presumably losing these marvels while planet-hopping, undergoing elephant-head plastic surgery or tweeting in Sanskrit, Indians also lead the world in the production of bad science fiction authors.
Having been a bad science fiction author writing about vamans, rakshasas, vanars, vimanas and nuclear-powered bows for over a decade now, I have just realized my big mistake. I never thought the events in the books I wrote were true, which would have been the key to untold wealth, a ministerial berth, probably, and a permanent seat on the speaking roster of the Indian Science Congress — even in times when India's actually doing well in non-mythic science, with Mangalyaan and recent Nobel Prizes and whatever else. Science fiction, like most of literature, mythology, science, history and selfies, is essentially an attempt to use specific tools to find answers about big questions about the human condition: Who are we? Why are here? How do things work? But the goals of all of these fields are different, as are the tools they use. Sci-fi/fantasy, like mythology, folklore and fable, uses fantastic, larger-than-life devices, characters and objects, imaginary-scientific or magical, to inspire, understand and investigate humanity. Good science fiction and fantasy create alternate, whatif universes, create contexts and explanations for ways the worlds in them differ from ours, and use the resultant mixture to tell stories that, like all good stories, help readers understand who they are. But they're clear about one thing — the worlds they create are mirror universes, not this one.
When imagination took wing….
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://freepressjournal.in/
V GangadharAirports, explained fiction writers like Arthur Hailey, were noisy places, whose high decibel levels disturbed residents of sylvan suburbs and stirred environmentalists to protest. The recently concluded 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai had a different story to tell us, however. Papers read out by Indian ‘aviation experts’ at the Congress mentioned how aeroplanes flying 7,000 years ago travelled from continent to continent and planet to planet noiselessly.
We learnt hitherto unknown facts from the aviation technology expert, Captain Anand Bodas. Sanjaya in the Mahabharat gave a running commentary on the 18-day war to the blind Kaurava king Dhritarashtra.
The narration and its subsequent interpretation found its way to modern Vedic times as per the ‘Vaimanik Shastra.’ Such ancient aviation theories were documented nearly 7,000 years ago, by sages like Bharadwaj.
As the Science Congress progressed, many such theories were debunked by modern scientists and students of science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and the IITs. They saw these claims as grotesque attempts to glorify the past, encourage superstition and showing no understanding of aerodynamics. Should we posit fantastic theories on battlefields of the past or should we use those battlefields as springboards for further research? Captain Bodas and others did not hesitate to link aviation to Rigveda.
The links between ancient surgery in India and those mentioned in ancient Greece made no sense. The minority Indian groups also drew attention to our sophisticated ancient Indian surgery techniques, unlike some present day instances, where limbs are sometimes wrongly amputated.
Medicine experts at the Science Congress asserted that ancient Greek surgeons used excellent tools and passed them on to ancient Indians. Surgery came to them naturally. Sailors on British and European vessels, from the 17th century onwards, who needed dental treatment, were plied with liquor to numb them to the pain of the surgery. The ancient Greeks were more sophisticated and used chloroform, which made the process easier.
The Science Congress did not refer to the more recent quirks in the US and Europe, like Russian scientists munching on peanuts on the eve of a rocket launch. When Indian scientists and astronomers gathered to witness and study a total solar eclipse some years ago in Hyderabad, foreign scientists present wondered why their Indian colleagues disappeared on and off, coming back looking much fresher. Obviously they had disappeared for a quick ‘holy’ bath, followed by a mini-puja, with ‘prasad’ and whatnot. A happy mix of ancient ritual and modern science.
Inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Science Congress diehard Conservatives put out dozens of ‘Old is gold’ nuggets of information, met with much applause by the PM and his group. How many of us knew that Mathematics, Algebra, Zero, Infinity and the decimal system were known to our ancients and that we gave these ideas to the West? Modi himself applauded cosmetic surgery that took place aeons ago. It was made clear at the science meet that much of the teaching and learning was done in Sanskrit.
Ancient India was generous enough to share her scientific knowledge with other nations and civilisations. Dr Harsh Vardhan, the BJP minister from Delhi, explained that sharing knowledge came naturally to our ancient scientific Indians. We gave the Pythagoras Theorem to ancient Greece (we don’t know what for). Visiting potentates liked zebra meat and ancient Indian kings obliged them with herds of zebras, explaining that ‘all zebras’ had been donated and thus this branch of mathematics came to be known as Algebra.
With the NDA Government determined to popularise ancient science and Sanskrit, several more innovations are likely to follow. The next topic of research could be transmigration of souls (souls of living birds and animals entering human bodies or human souls entering other human bodies, as in the case of King Vikramaditya). We could understand bird language thus and tweet better, perhaps.
These are included in the science syllabus for the 2016 Science Conference in Vikramaditya Nagar. With India opting to follow the World Trade Order and Intellectual Copyright Act, there is an ambitious plan to ‘pinch’ some copyright material from foreign sources. Just to make up for the Algebra from Arabia and Geometry from Greece.
The aviation front opens up newer skies. Our flying ‘aakash sundaris’ could take crash courses in make-up from female members of ancient cabin crew, who relied on naturally available beauty aids. We should give back generously for all that we have got.
In honour of Pythagoras, we should name a few of our major roads (and parks) after him, but must make sure these roads are pothole-free because his theorem did not account for these modern day pitfalls. Of course, one gets the hiccups thinking of the scientist who jumped out of the bath, shouting out the Sanskrit equivalent of Eureka and one must pray that he was halfway decently clad, in the finest short-stapled cotton we were producing at that time.
Alternate history: Passing off fiction as fact
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://www.hindustantimes.com/
Sitharam Yechury
It is not often that two distinctive developments, separated by distance across the globe, should have a bearing on contemporary India. One is the terrorist attack on the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo which killed 12 people in Paris on January 7.
The other is the stunning defeat of sitting Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the elections held on January 8. Brimming with over-confidence that he would be re-elected for another six years, for having ended a 30-year-long civil war in the country, Rajapaksa, called these elections two years ahead of schedule. His defeat shows, once again in history, the frailty and futility of arrogance that accompanies authoritarian rule in a democracy.
This latter development has a bearing on us, with the current ruling dispensation increasingly showing tendencies of all power flowing from the Prime Minister’s Office.
The authoritarian trends are increasingly seen with the strengthening of the current ‘Ordinance Raj’. The Union finance minister has reportedly said that while the Rajya Sabha can have “its say”, the government will have “its way”. President Pranab Mukherjee’s reported unprecedented cautioning of this government on frequent recourse to take the ordinance route seems to be falling on deaf ears.
The former development, once again, shows that rousing religious passions spreading intolerance lead to unpardonable crimes against humanity through terrorist attacks. Aggressive pursuit of the Hindutva agenda and sharpening communal polarisation through campaigns of ‘love jihad’ or ‘ghar wapsi’ engender such tendencies in our country.
Communalism and fundamentalism in our country grow by feeding on each other. In order to strengthen themselves, they seek to glorify the past, to conquer the present and capture the future. To glorify the past, mythology replaces history and masquerades as the repository of scientific advance. Thus, there is a tendency to continue to refuse to learn the correct lessons from these developments.
A case in point is the recent 102nd annual Indian Science Congress. Instead of discussing India’s current scientific achievements and defining its future direction, it became the platform to propagate ‘unscientific temper’. Section V, Article 51A (h) of our Constitution on Fundamental Duties of every citizen enjoins upon us, among other things, “To develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”.
The science congress should have impressed upon the prime minister, who customarily inaugurates this meet, irrespective of the government in power, to spend more than the current measly 0.88% of our GDP on research and development for India’s emergence as a global power. The United States spends 2.74% and China around 2%. The GDP of both these countries is much larger than India’s, meaning that they spend multiple amounts more in absolute terms.
Instead, this science congress made various claims, glorifying Indian science in the ancient past (read: glory of ‘Hindu civilisation’) like aircraft technology existed in India 7,000 years ago, etc. Such fabrication of our ancient history has been emboldened, also, by the prime minister’s earlier claims that plastic surgery in ancient India could implant an elephant’s head on a human body to create Lord Ganesha and that ancient India was well-versed with ‘stem cells research’ and in ‘in-vitro fertilisation’ like procedures that permitted the immaculate conception and birth of Karna.
Of course, there were many landmark scientific achievements in ancient India. The advances in astronomy and mathematics were path-breaking. But they came more than four millennia later than claimed! However, modern science would have been impossible without the invention of the zero, not merely as a tool for accounting (in which many other ancient civilisations preceded us) but as a philosophical and mathematical concept whose opposite is the infinite.
This gave birth to negative numbers, irrational numbers, quadratic equations, mathematical constants, etc, and the philosophical ‘battle of ideas’. Though Arab traders carried these scientific achievements to the western world, to be fair, they credited “the lands beyond the Indus river”, Hindustan, for these advances.
However, 7,000 years ago, what was the state of human civilisation in these lands? Archaeologists have painstakingly documented this evolution through scientific methods like ‘carbon dating’. Between 5,000 and 4,000 BCE, the stage is described as having reached “handmade ceramic; cotton cultivated”. This is based on the findings at Mehrgarh-II, an early site of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Further, assuming such were ancient India’s achievements as claimed, why could various kingdoms in these lands not resist, indeed stop, periodic invasions, the establishment of Empires leading to the colonisation of India? Did not our scientific growth stagnate after the Brahmanical caste hierarchical order re-triumphed over Buddhism, denying access of learning and knowledge to the vast majority of our people? Buddhism had encouraged such a milieu, permitting scientific advance to thrive.
Often the Hindutva brigade accuses Marxist historians of debunking the ‘glory of the ancient Hindu civilisation’. However, the most elaborate expositions of advances made in ancient India have come from the writings of Marxists like Irfan Habib (born a Muslim), Rahul Sankirtyayan, DD Kosambi, Devi Prasad Chattopadhyaya and many others.
Historians of the Hindutva variety, on the other hand, did not make any significant study of our ancient past that would stand up to serious intellectual scrutiny.
Such rewriting of history is now being done, through the spread of ‘unscientific temper’, to glorify and establish as MS Golwalkar propagated the uninterrupted glory of the “Hindu civilisation” in these lands since ancient times.
The RSS/BJP are vigorously working to transform, by sharpening communal polarisation, the modern secular democratic Indian Republic into the RSS project of a rabidly intolerant fascistic ‘Hindu Rashtra’, where religious minorities and atheists will not be treated as equal citizens. The realisation of this project, unless resisted and defeated, will permit such a transformation of India, as we know of it today.
Sitaram Yechury is CPI(M) Politburo member and Rajya Sabha MP
An 'ancient' treatise no older than 1904
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, January 15, 2015
courtesy: http://www.thehindu.com/
DIVYA GANDHI
Aircraft based on drawings and text of Vyamanika Shastra cannot fly...
Vymanika Sastra, the “Vedic” aeronautical treatise by an ancient Rishi describing giant indigenous airplanes that travelled between cities and continents 7,000 years ago, it turns out, is no older than 1904, the year of the Wright brothers’ first successful flight.
Aeronautical engineers of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), who, in a 1974 paper, scrutinised the Sanskrit text and its Hindi and English translations, concluded that the work had neither Vedic origins nor scientific credence. The Vymanika Sastra, however, does betray “knowledge of modern machinery,” they say in the paper published in Scientific Opinion decades ago.
At the 102nd Indian Science Congress held earlier this month in Mumbai, retired pilot Captain Anand J. Bodas presented a paper on “Ancient Indian aviation technology” and spoke of India’s ancient aircraft described in the Sanskrit text by “Maharshi Bharadwaja.” The giant 60X60-ft airplanes with 40 engines and a radar system, “rooparkanrahasya”, could travel between cities, countries and planets, he said raising considerable controversy at the conference.
“In a 1974 paper, IISc scientists found Vymanika Sastra has neither Vedic origins nor scientific credence.”
The group of five IISc scientists, however, says in their paper that the aircraft described in Vymanika Sastra is a “gross violation of Newton’s laws.” The paper adds that “none of the planes has properties or capabilities of being flown; the geometries are unimaginably horrendous from the point of view of flying; and the principles of propulsion make them resist rather than assist flying.” In short, “If the craft is taken to mean what the drawings and the text say, it can be stated that the craft is a decided impossibility.”
The scientists looked at four airplanes described in the Vymanika Shastra and studied them for their aeronautical principles, geometry, materials, chemistry and operational data: Shakuna Vimana made from “prana kshara” (ammonium chloride), Bengal gram, mercury, borax, mica, silver and ‘panchamrita’; Sundara Vimana comprising five tiers and capable of flying at 12,800 mph on electricity produced in vessels containing, among other concoctions, cow and elephant urine; Tripura Vimana that could fly in air and also move in water and on land; and Rukma Vimana.
They concluded that “It appears that his work cannot be dated earlier than 1904 and contains details which, on the basis of our present knowledge, force us to conclude the non-feasibility of heavier-than[-air] craft of earlier times.”
Co-author of the scientific paper, S.M. Deshpande, a former Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the IISc told The Hindu: “In the course of our research, we found quite conclusively that the text was written by Subbaraya Shastry from Anekal — not by a Rishi Bharadwaja — and no earlier than 1904.” Shastry dictated the text during “trance-like spells” in the form of shlokas to a scribe and commissioned drawings from a draughtsman from an engineering college, Professor Deshpande said.
The illustrations “definitely point to a knowledge of modern machinery,” says their paper. “This can be explained on the basis of the fact that Shri Ellappa who made the drawings was in a local engineering college and was thus familiar with names and details of some machinery.” The scientists add: “What we feel [is] unfortunate… is that some people tend to eulogise and glorify whatever they can find about our past, even without valid evidence. In the absence of any evidence, efforts will be made to produce part of the evidence in favour of antiquity.”
Professor Deshpande said he and his colleagues were, 40 years ago, “driven by scientific curiosity” to study this work to see if it was possible to create an aircraft based on the text from an aeronautical point of view. “But we were disappointed.”
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Fact vs myth: Mixing up mythology and history will ensure that fun of reading texts is lost