Gancy's World

I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have certain beliefs and dogmas and I don’t want those patterns of existence be disturbed because I have my roots in them.  I don’t want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state of unknowing and I dislike that.  If I am torn away from everything I now and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of things to which I am going.  So the brain cells have created a pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which may be uncertain.  The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call FEAR

[ Started writing an article on India’s 61^st Independence.  Lost interest half way.   Below is half complete article.  Interested can read at leisure ]

Proceedings of recent time have left me disillusioned.  Uncurbed inflation, cowardice acts of terrorism, violence in J & K, shameful political drama are just one too many more than I can recount have left me perplexed trying to find ‘how long India can exist in politically unity?’  I thought to have become amalgamated into the Indian thinking fabric of defeatism, pessimism and false ego.

At this time of the hour Ambedkar’s word 60 years ago is more true than it was then.

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment.  It has to be cultivated.  We must realize that our people have yet to learn it.  Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

-          B. R. Ambedkar

All my doubts are not without valid reasons.  Are we nation of skeptics?  Until freedom left liberalist wished for British imperialism to continue; since Independence, for 40 years, we hoped in vain for USSR to build India; last 20 years, are we hoping on United States to develop India?

For it to be appropriate, who could write such an article as ‘India @ 61’?  Politician? Journalist? Scholar? Westerner? If alive, Gandhi? Nehru? Is when I realized if such was to be written it must more appropriate by common folk of the nation.  Whence started writing ‘India @ 61’.  What was I to write? Should it be an account of progress and fallback, about strength and weakness, about valor and defeat, about greatness and embarrassment, about culture and religion, about secularism and communalism, about diversity and unity? This would merely reduce it to a historian’s account of India as journalist.  So I deliberated to write from ideological perspective through my mind’s eye.

I was to understand what is India? – ‘India is just a geographical expression .  it is only the British who united it.  We aren’t even one nation – for a nation must have one language, one religion, one race’ – how often have we heard this? So what is real India? - And I found it from Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’.  It is a five thousand years long continuity of cultural expression that is India.  It is a thousands of years of history of invasion and upheaval, a tradition which was widespread among the masses and powerfully influenced them.  Starting with ‘The Indus civilization’ – which represents a very perfect adjustment of human life to a specific environment that can only have resulted from years of patient effort.  And it has endured; it  is already specifically Indian and forms the basis of modern Indian culture.

Astonishing as it was that any culture or civilization should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more; and not in a static, unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time.  These were the men who seemed to know life and understand it, and out of their wisdom they had built a structure which gave India a cultural stability which lasted for thousands of years.  It is the people of this nation are India – no cast, no creed and no religion 

India’s Strength and Weakness – 19^th through mid 20^th century while western world was advancing India fell behind in the matters of technique, and Europe, which had long been backward in many matters, took the lead in technical progress.  Behind this technical progress was the spirit of science and a bubbling life and spirit which displayed itself in many activities and adventures voyages of discovery.  New techniques gave military strength to the countries of western Europe, and it was easy for them to spread out and dominate the East.  That is the story not only of India, but of the whole of Asia.

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:  JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation;”

Today, does this great nation stand up to the preamble of the constitution devised 59 years ago? Where is the security when terrorists are walking free after crime? Where is the equality when there is still no common civil code?  As a common man of this nation what are we to do to uphold the preamble of our constitution and leave up to it?

“Even if you must go all the way to China,” said the Prophet, “seek knowledge”.  This was the theme of Muslim (Submission) during the golden age lasted for 500 years.  There was split in Muslim, those who believed and followed ‘only way to God is by Revelation’ and those who believed and followed ‘only way to God is by Reason’. 

A famous Caliph of 8^th century C.E established what known as the ‘House of Wisdom’ which seeded the greatest invention, discoveries in all known fields of human knowledge – Physics, Mathematics, Astrology, Astronomy, Chemistry, Architecture, Poetry, Philosophy, Medicine and list goes on.  This golden age at 8tgh century C.E, Baghdad being the center of Islam intellect would one day lay the seeds of European renaissance and enlightenment.   Unfortunately much of the contribution from Islam is lost for every in history.  The foundation laid by Islam intellects and buildings were built by Europeans and later to become as Europe single handedly achieved the wealth of knowledge know to mankind.

Theory of relativity was known to Islam scholars a thousand years before Einstein.  Islamic scholars flew gliders eight hundred years before Wright Brothers.

I am working to compile a long list of Islamic inventions and discoveries and dates vs. the same achieved (or rather used) by European counterparts.

In an era when the relationship between Islam and the West seems fraught with misunderstanding, how many of us realize that Muslim intellectual achievement was once the envy of the world? In magnificent centers of learning, from Damascus to Baghdad and Cairo, mathematicians a thousand years ago developed algebra, algorithms, and trigonometry – the foundations upon which modern technology is built.  Inventors devised the crankshaft and early versions of the torpedo and the parachute.  Physicians’ techniques ranged from orthodontia to asthma care to tracheotomy.  And Muslim astronomers calculated our planet’s diameter and circumference to a remarkable degree of accuracy – at the time when Europeans thought the earth was flat!!!

Their contribution to modern knowledge are almost beyond counting.  How many of us know the names of ibn al-Haytham, ibn Sina, al-Tusi, al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam? These very men paved the way for Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, and many others

[MS dictionary does not know them.  Newton, Einstein are valid words in English Dictionary where as ibn al-Haytham, ibn Sina are underlined RED]

The Lost History – A book from National Geographic 

In the British-Indian battler at the fortress of Srirangapatanam in Mysore, in 1979, at this point India is succumbing to the invading British, but under Muslim ruler Tipu Sultan, India is still fighting.  One tactic, put in place by the sultan’s father Hyder Ali, is a formidable rocket force.  Each Indian battalion had 200 rocketeers in place, armed with ample supplies of rockets capable of traveling a thousand yards and tipped with lethal warheads, including gunpowder charges, pointed tips, and even a kind of whirling blade that shreds everything on point of impact like a meat grinder.  Though by then Europe had rockets, none of them had the range and lethality of these rockets.

During the battle, thousands of Indian missiles slam into the British forces, considerably slowing their advance.  Finally, when the fortress falls, the British capture several hundred loaded rockets and rocket launchers and thousands of unarmed ones.  Some of these are packed and shipped back to Britain for study.  They come to the attention of one William Congreve, an armaments expert in the service of the king.  He swiftly sets about incorporating the Indian design into the British forces.

And then, only 14 years later, when the infant United States is under attack from the same British Empire, the so-called Congreve rockets fashioned after the Indian rockets are fired at the uncooperative Americans, in particular from ships in the Chesapeake Bay against one Fort McHenry, protecting the American city of Baltimore.

An American prisoner of the British will watch throughout the night as his captors launch volley upon volley of Congreve rockets at the American fortification.  The next morning, when he sees the tattered American flag still flying above the fort, he will be inspired to write a patriotic song called the ‘Start Spangled Banner’!!!

Most Americans know about Francis Scott Key and their national anthem.  But because of lost history, they do not know that those rockets inspiring the song were born in faraway China, brought west by the Mongols for events like the attack on Baghdad, then transformed by the Muslims into more versatile weapon of war, and shot into the European mind through the Crusades, through the re-conquest of Spain, through the Turkish attack on the gates of Vienna, and through the final Muslim-Indian resistance against British.

Nor do they know that one day, distant descendants of those rockets and rocketeers will animate renewed bloodlettings in the 21^st century in the so-called clash of civilizations, tiresomely like the battles of lost history, and in many of the same places: Baghdad, Israel, Afghanistan.

It is one irony of lost history that its blade cuts both ways!!!

Courtesy: The Lost History – Michael Hamilton Morgan for National Geographic