Crisis of Hindu Civilisation

 

 

Namaste!

 

I am indeed delighted to be here in the presence of Dr Murali Manohar Joshi ji and Prof Kapil Kapoorji and India Policy Foundation leaders who have come up with the very interesting topic. The first word, ‘crisis’, I think is very important. Usually, we celebrate how great we are,there is no problem and we are all feeling very good. The word ‘crisis’ is very important, but not often discussed. The crisis is not blaming others for past history but we have also to take stock of ourselves here and now today. And this is not being done enough.

 

I think probably the first crisis is: not enough introspection with a critical view and an objective view. It is an honour that Dr Murali Manoharji is here because I have known him for a long time, and followed his work. He is probably the most eminent and important contemporary thinker of our civilisation who is able to put it in the context of modern science, modernity in general, connect the past with the present and the future. So, in fact, I should be sitting and listening to him giving his talk. But since I have been asked to do so, I will present my thoughts.

 

The crisis that I want to talk about is the internal crisis. Are we too complacent? Are we more interested in feel-good? In fact, I find that very often when I raise challenges to the youth, they say that, “Sir, aapnehamara feel good kharabkardiya.”(Sir, you have spoiled our feel-good.) So, they want some kind of a nasha, that how great we are, how bad everybody is. But there is a ground reality that we have to take stock of. I also see that there is a tendency to do what I call micro-optimization which means me, mine, here and now. You might call it jugaad. So, when you go and raise an issue with somebody, he will say, “Sir, aapkikyatalklifhain, aapaajaiye.”(Sir, what is your problem? Please come and tell.) He will fix your problem but that doesn’t change the system. It is not an end-to-end systemic solution. There is a certain issue I will discuss as to why we often tend to drift to jugaad.

 

There are two extremes our people tend to go to. Either over-abstraction or too narrowly defining the situation and getting away with jugaad.Over-abstraction is to talk about very lofty shloka about paramarthikaand not addressing the current situation we are facing. This is a very common thing. This is a kind of common escape into other worldliness.

 

I told a relative of mine that Gurgaon is very polluted and her answer is that is what happens everywhere. So, either the problem is everywhere or it is inevitable or it is the government’s job, or there is no problem or it may be due to some difficulty you are facing. But somehow or the other the bottom line is that – I don’t need to do anything. So, this kind of an escape where a problem is so over abstracted that it is so general that you are looking at the problem from Mars or from another galaxy. You have such a broad view that you can’t do anything practical – either that extreme or the other extreme where you think it is not my problem but I can do a little bit jugaadand I can fix it. Either fixing a very narrow situation or over-abstracting, so nothing can be done. I think these two extremes are an issue.

 

Now I made a serious effort in the last five years. I have been trying to do this for a long time. But in the last five years I thought things will change and we will get the force multiplier and will get some leverage. Because we thought that the scale of Hindu civilisation will get a big jump with the change in government. But what I found is there is a deep distinction we have to make between Rashtraand Rajya.And a whole lot of activities going on in Rajya– who will form the government, what is the coalition, who is the bad fellow etc. This is all kind of a tamashaat the Rajyalevel. I know it is important and it is nice to have a good government. We have a very good government – much better than any in the past. But that is at the Rajyalevel and we can deplete our praan and feel very happy at the victories at the Rajyalevel. But what about the Rashtra? Who is looking after the Rashtra? That is my concern.

 

The Hindu civilisation or the Vedic civilisation is a Rashtraissue, not addressed by just switching from one Rajyato another. A good Rajya is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. You do need a good Rajya but just by having a good Rajya, you cannot assume that the job is done. So, the problems I am concerned about are the Rashtra problems. The Rajya has so much authority and control over the institutional machinery. They have the resources; they can decide what the educational curriculum will be. The most important organs for my work are the HRD, Ministry of Culture and ICCR which is part of the Ministry of External Affairs and I have gone around here and there for all of them. But I do not see either the vision, strategy, the commitment, the leadership, at least from my point of view, maybe there are great things happening. I will give you one or two examples. The ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) gives so many grants. Since the Leftist days, they have been giving grants to so many institutions – CSDS in Delhi for example and many others all over the country. Now I have tried to create projects where we will introduce the Vedic ideas of sociology.

 

Sociology as a discipline is a western discipline. It started in a very big way in the 1800s – somewhat before also from Europe addressing their needs. Those needs of Europe are hardly universal needs, the solutions are not universal solutions. All the great thinkers being taught in sociology and I have looked at the school curriculum, I have looked at the UPSC curriculum, I have looked at the college curriculum in sociology, anthropology, these kind of disciplines – the great thinkers that they talk about are all western names. And if you make a list of these western names, and you go to any Sanskrit scholar, any traditional person, he will not know what you are talking about. So, basically our society is being studied through alien lens and our traditional power-holders do not know what is going on. To every proposal I gave, I was told that I had to comply with the requirements of social sciences. So, now I have to fit into the opposite side’s framework – I have to first of all comply with the people whom I want to criticise, question and defeat. This means that I have to distort my own thinking and I have to fit into them, become one of them in order that my proposal be considered legitimate. They will say that you have to fit into social sciences methodology but the social sciences methodology is itself my problem and I don’t want to fit into that. And I found that the people making these decisions while they are very good Hindus and they will talk nicely and all that, they really lack the depth, the wisdom, the courage, the risk taking to say that one of the things we should do is to evaluate our own methodology. So,I said the methodologies for selecting the grants, giving to scholars, etc should be subject to review and I said, I would like to do that. This takes thinking out of the box.

 

One of the problems we have is not being risk-taking where risk is required. You cannot make a fundamental change without controversy. If you want to topple a government, that is controversial. If you want to topple Newtonian physics with relativity, that is controversial. Any technological breakthrough, any political breakthrough requires controversy because incumbents don’t like to be toppled. They are sitting in a comfort zone and they don’t like to be toppled. So, either you are a conformist or if you are a radical thinker, which we need right now, then you are controversial. So, AdiShankara was very controversial in his times, Buddha was very controversial in his times. Jesus Christ was so controversial that the rulers killed him. So, how can we become so numb and so unwilling to appreciate provocative thinking! This is a crisis. This is a crisis of our civilisationthat the civilisation built on radical thinking – if you look at the insights of the Upanishads, insights of the Mahabharat, they are so provocative – that how can people who are inheritors of such a great civilisationbe very complacent that they want things to go on as they are?

 

Let’s take a prominent thinker, DeenDayalUpadhyay. I studied his works. He gave his four famous lectures on integral humanism. And when I ask everyone what is their school of thought, they say DeenDayalUpadhyay. But that is half a century ago. DeenDayalUpadhyay in those lectures starts by criticising both the Congress party and his own party for not bringing fresh thought, for not addressing the situation in the latest context. By the same token, I have to be critical that we have not updated DeenDayalUpadhyay’s thoughts for today. We have not created a school of thought or a curriculum where that line of thought continues even today. So many things have happened in the last 50 years. For instance, he criticises Marxism and Christian evangelism which were prevalent then. But during his time there was no post-colonial studies, it came later. There was no subaltern studies, post-modernism, neo-orientalism. All these new thoughts, new feminism, new human rights,didn’t exist. The new weapons or schools of thoughts of the opposing side, we have to understand them,do purvapakshaand respond to them. We cannot say that Shankara did purvapaksha and we have memorised that and we will re-enact the old purvapaksha. That is not true to the tradition. That is like saying we don’t need batsmen who can score because Tendulkar had made enough centuries and we can talk about it. You have to do it today.

 

So, where are the Indian schools of thought, relevant for today, updated with case studies being done with today’s examples and today’s challenges. Whether it is water harvesting, global warming or terrorism or whatever it is that you take – we have to be able to apply not some social sciences theories from the past of foreign countries. We have to produce dissertations and we have to produce applications of our thought. That is what Smritiis about. You are supposed to update the Smritirather than memorizing the Smritifor each era. So, this is where I feel we have fallen short in the sense that we are not creating original thinking, out of the box provocative thinking. This is not like a religion where you memorize one book and there is blind obedience. Those kinds of religions can survive without radical thinking because that is their nature and that is how they are. But for us to survive, we need vibrant intellectuals. And this is my concern today.

 

Now, there is a yogi civilisation and there is a gladiator civilisation. The gladiator is a term from the Romans which stands for military, authority, top down rule, police power. Western civilisation is actually Roman. The Romans conquered Greece in the 140-145 BC and brought the whole Greek civilisationunder their control. And then, Christianity, which was originated south of the Mediterranean, was also taken over by the Romans who were in the north of the Mediterranean. So, if you look at the map, Christianity is actually in Asia and it is not European in origin. The Romans took that over and the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century creates what is called the New Testament, in a town called Nicea. I went there, it is now in Turkey, and saw where they actually did all this. So, the Romans conquered and assimilated the Greek civilisation and the Christian thought and created what became known as the West. This Roman ethos of the gladiator is very deeply enshrined in the Western thought. That is why the West is so good at institutions, multinationals.

 

The Romans and the Vatican, which basically became the first major multinational of the world.How you have governing bodies, how will have rules, how you remote manage the things, how you appoint the Governors. The whole approach of the modern corporates and modern governance is based on the Roman style. This is what I call the gladiator civilisation, they have done a lot of amazing things and the ethos is top down.

 

Contrast this with the yogi civilisation. The yogi civilisation is where you do not need that much policing because each citizen is a yogi, he has dharma, he is satvik and he is concerned about other people. He is voluntarily doing things because you don’t have to push him into it, you don’t have to make him do things by the use of sticks because that is his tapasya. It is his dharma. So, if you have a community of yogis, you do not need much policing. This is very interesting. You have a different way of organizing the group, getting group dynamics, group performance without top-down heavy-handed stuff. We are that kind of a civilisation and the West is a different kind of civilisation.

 

I would submit to you that the crisis that we have is that today we are neither. We are neither good yogis nor have we achieved institutional power. We do not have people complying to a real true swadharmafrom within, living that life because people are corrupt, people are opportunist, people are looking for selfish goals, people are materialistic.

So, the yogi fabric of the civilisation has fallen apart and there is the history of it for thousand years – how it has fallen apart, how it has broken, how it was destroyed, the paramparas destroyed. So, there is a history for it. It is not the fault of anyone today. But we have to take stock of this fact that our historical strength as a yogi civilisation where the fabric of society was such that individuals self-empowered, self-actualized could do great things collectively without a central authority forcing them. In fact, this goes back to the Harrapan-Saraswati-Indus Valley civilisationwhere there is no major capital. So, if you look at the history of those small towns, there is no very big palace or fortress that would be the centre of power. Nothing looks like a headquarter. So, it means that as far back as we can remember we have been a very decentralized civilisation.

 

Decentralized means that everyone at every level has a lot of autonomy. But that means you must be responsible person. If you give lot of freedom and lot of autonomy to people who are irresponsible, corrupt or selfish, then you have a complete lawlessness and then you will have chaos and problems. And we are having that. Because our traditional customs have been broken and we are neither westernized, nor are we Vedic. We are neither here nor there.

 

So many attempts have been made to Westernize us and to destroy our civilisation. For example, it has been described rather foolishly that education means writing rather than the oral tradition. It is considered foolishly that the measure of education is how much English we know. The benchmarks and the criteria of what makes a nation have become very westernized. Either we become fully westernized and we have the power of western institutional authority. The United States have institutions that will keep it running and these institutions are very robust. For us to do that will take a very long time. But then we will not be a Vediccivilisation. You have to decide whether you want to be true to who we are and then we become modern, based on our own foundation. Or do you want to abandon that because you think that it is no good and try to become Westernized and Americanized and so on. So many youth today judge their success based on the criteria of how Americanized they are. There is very little confidence and interest in the traditional ways.

 

A good example of balance is China. China has decided that their traditional civilisation is Confucian. Confucius was a great thinker. So, Confucian thought is like saying Vediccivilisation. And they are very clear that Confucian thought is not anti-modernity, it is not anti-post modernity. They believe that Confucian thought gives them a foundation on which they have modernity, post modernity. They are going to be the most modern country, the most scientific country, most industrialized country. In material terms, they will be the most powerful country and yet they will not lose character as a Confucian country.

 

And something similar, the Japanese achieved on a smaller scale than China where they did not lose their tradition but they became an economic power in terms of technology, science and all that stuff. They did not think that you have to make a choice between tradition and modernity. They said we have modernity according to our own way of achieving modernity. So, just like there is a Western universalism which means the West says we are universal people and our views and our theories are universal and our ideas are from the time of Roman civilisation etc. The West has built so many strata or so many levels on top of their own civilisation. And China is doing it. Japan has done it. The real Vedic civilisation has to be modern, post-modern, materialist, economic – all of that we have to do on top of Vedic platform. This is Vedic universalism. We have to create Vedic exceptionalism. Like in America they say that their grand narrative is called American exceptionalism. Every school child knows what is meant by American exceptionalism. You could be Democrat or Republican – but you stand for American exceptionalism – that is non-negotiable.

 

So, we don’t have consensus for a grand narrative of Vedic exceptionalism which is required. Now the people who are promoting Vedas often go into such orthodoxy and dislike for the modernity and not really engaging in modern issues they need to. By doing that they are not making the Vedic civilisation relevant. They are making it irrelevant. But you will follow them because of nostalgia because your parents said so. But the youth are not convinced that there is any use for it. On the other hand, there are people who will abandon it and they will become weak shots in the modern sense and not have anything to do with our tradition. So, the integration of these two is the challenge that we face.

 

Only recently that I got to meet the senior RSS leadership and I am very impressed with them, I wish I had got to know them earlier. Because I only knew about them through the papers and what the media said about them isn’t true. Their name begins with Rashtra, so obviously they should be the caretakers of that and that is their ambition and that is what they are allabout. However, I feel that their methods, their criteria of defining their goals are not based on the practical needs of the world today necessarily. They are doing great job in developing villages, bringing them basic needs, nation development etc. All that is fantastic and is required. But when we evaluate your performance in cricket, you don’t say that this is the way we have always played whether you feel that way or not. The point is there is an objective measurement. There is a certain standard of expectation and you are judged according to that. If you are investment manager, managing people’s money, you can’t lose all investments and say that we have been doing like this for 100 odd years now and this is the way we do it. Our way doesn’t matter and the objective criterion needs to be evaluated.

 

Politics is an objective evaluated because it depends on whether you win or lose elections. Now I will give you an example. Cricket has objective criteria. One team or player doesn’t get to choose for himselfwhat he considered to be good batting. The sport has decided what constitutes good score, bad score. Investment managements are based on such criteria. Politics is based on such criteria. So, RSS should decide the criteriaon which it wants to evaluate itself. And this cannot be inbred. And this has to be a public discussion. If it is for nation building, the nation has to participate in it and decide what is our need. What does nation building consist of? What do we want from nation builders?

 

If there is a distinction between Rashtra and Rajya - for Rashtra there is RSS and for Rajya there is BJP. BJP gets evaluated through elections. They are playing this game of electoral politics and that is how they are decided. And RSS has to open itself to criticism and open itself to who are they accountable for and how do we decide what is the criteria for success? How can we say that we are successful unless we establish the meaning of success? What is the meaning or definition for success in nation building has to be discussed.Once you discuss that, then you can decide whether you have good manager or not? Do we need to bring people from outside?

 

A long time ago, I used to be a top executive consultant to some of the big American companies that required turnaround. Turnaround means an industry has changed so radically that your old methods don’t work and you have to reinvent yourself. And in every method, I found that the ones with very old internal management, that is all the people grown from within were in trouble once the industry changes. They have to bring in 25-30 per cent new management at the top. They need a combination of old management to bring in continuity and new blood that can think differently. Unless a company is willing to do that, they will die. This is what my experience was in many industries. And this is what the old Indian institutions need to do. Gurus need to do that.

 

I did a series of talks on ‘Where are the Pandavas?’ Is Guru the Pandava? Is the BJP the Pandavas? Is Sangh the Pandavas? Are academic people the Pandavas? Are the billionaires the Pandavas? I don’t see any of the categories that I gave really considering that this is their job as the Pandavas, they will make the sacrifice, they are not aiming for a short term goal, they want to do the tapasya, they are willing to take risks, make waves and are really attuned to the latest requirements of the Kurukshetra.

 

The Kurukshetra has to be studied and the Kurukshetra includes so many challenges going on today which are not just internal at the village level or inside India, there are challenges at the global level. To build India as a nation, you have to understand the entire global system today.

 

This was not the case in earlier Vedic Times. In earlier Vedic times, there was no clash of civilisations because other civilisations were thousands of miles away, there was an ocean. Maybe a few people would come in a boat or a few men come through the Khyber Pass. But not like today. Today, no civilisation is isolated. No civilisation can say that we are insulated from the rest of humans. So, in this age of clash of civilisations, whether we like it not, we must understand these civilisations that we are encountering, we have to study them in great detail. That is our purvapaksh system. And we have to understand our Kurukshetra and define our objectives and our criteria accordingly. And then get the leaders who can do all these things.

 

So, I am hopeful as individuals at the top are exceedingly bright both in the Sangh as well as in the BJP. I am hopeful that at some point in time they will have done all the short term fighting and after winning all the short-term battles and feeling that they are secure, I hope they will move on to the next level of encountance and that is when the true crisis management can begin.

 

Thank you very much for listening. I wanted to leave you with some provocations because I think in the spirit of our civilisation, we need to provoke our bright young minds. And then you have to think and debate and argue and that is how we come up with solutions together.

 

Namaste!

 

 

 

So, if you want to evaluate your cricket team, it is not good enough that they are winning some IPL matches, you have to win international matches. So, we have to come up with Pandavas who on a global scale are really the best of the best. Now for that, you also need training academies. You need Gurus for mentoring these people. It is notone person who comes from nowhere. You need a pipeline to develop these kinds of people. And this is where the education system, the HRD system needs to be completely revamped. The youth I feel are not performing to the optimum due to no fault of theirs. I think they are not getting the education required to generate leaders.

 

So, Pandavas to me means leaders of society. The kind of leaders we once had. We have had enormous leaders in the past and we can all go through the list of such leaders. We need people of that stature who can shake things up, create a new revolution, renaissance and move us into the future. For that, we need Pandavas.

 

I am not limiting myself to the literal interpretation of the five characteristics of the Pandavas. Today there may be more than five characteristics that we need. Today, they are a small group of thought leaders or action-oriented leaders who can revolutionize society. India is blessed with good DNA. Wherever I go around the world, Indians are doing very well in all sorts of fields. But somehow in India, we do not have the ecosystem. It is an ecosystem issue. The same individual when he goes somewhere else, within two years he will be doing very well.

 

 

Our foundation gave many grants to all these big universities in West and we say why don’t you teach people our great thinkers? And they wanted academic materials and they would go online and see that even our own universities are not teaching these kinds of things. I gave them a list of who are the great thinkers. We have been teaching like it is some kind of side thing. We have not been looking at our thought as it is applied to manufacturing industries, science. Science should be built on our thought. Social structures, political thought, human relations…we are not applying that in our own educational system and we are saying why don’t the West respect it? We have to first respect ourselves. This is an important thing.

 

A credit to the West, I will give. They are very self-critical. We are doing it in politics. We are self-critical with one party against another. But we have to be self-critical about civilisations also. We should be able to critique Gurus. Gurus are human beings and they are not beyond fault or are perfect. They know more about their fields than the rest of us. But they are also limited beyond their areas or discipline. And there is nothing wrong in going and engaging them in a respectful way. So, we also need to study our great thinkers, create the paramaparas. Where is theDeenDayalUpadhyayschool of thought? It should be there.

 

Look at the West. They have created a Marxist school of thought which has been going on for decades. There is a Feminist school of thought, they have parampara, they have great respect for people who originated these ideas and how it is gone further. So, they study the paramparas, they study the previous thinkers in the school of thought and continue it on their own. They have created these schools of thoughts in the last 100 years. What school of thought have we created? Take Vivekananda. We read Vivekanandabut who is taking it forward in today’s terms? It is not just a matter of teaching what he wrote, but taking those matters and applying it in today’s times. I don’t see Gandhians doing that either. Whether you are for or against Gandhi is irrelevant to my point. I am saying that Gandhians believe that you praise Gandhi, make a deity out of him, but they are not Gandhians in their own lives.

 

 A: Again, I will give you the example of China. In China, their computing is done in Mandarin which is their language. Now in India, you will say that Microsoft also gives you Office in Hindi. But there is a difference, when you do Hindi Microsoft, the text can be Devanagari but the commands are in English – Save, File, Copy. If you ask someone who is a very traditional person who is not Anglicized, not Westernized – what does Save mean – would it mean that I save money? It is not our term. It is not an idea we have. In Mandarin when Microsoft sells Office computing, the Chinese required that not only the text has to be in Mandarin but even the commands have to be in Mandarin. Even the way you are thinking has to be Mandarin.

 

The court systems are in English. In some courts, you can’t enter without knowing English. Even if you can practice in Hindi or some other language, the case law is published in English. To be a good lawyer, you have to study the case laws. Even if the Constitution is available in various languages, the case law is published in English. So, if I am a competitive lawyer and I want to win a case, I have to read the English case laws. This is where we have not bridged the gap 72 years after independence. You can say that China did not have thousand years of colonisation. Japan did not. So, the examples I am giving you are of people who did not lose their civilisational powers and their fabric of culture. We did. Our job is not easy. But what I am worried about is that we have not even started this in a serious way. We started little bit here and there and then it starts and it stops. We have not invested in long term projects to reclaim our civilisation in ways that are also modern. So, I would say that the revival has to be in a way that the youth will get jobs. You have to create employment so that a person who is very solidly entrenched in our civilisation is also a good IT engineer, he is a good doctor. It is not like if you are studying tradition, then you are unemployable. That should not be the case.

 

 A: Not only has the university curriculum not changed but the UPSC exam is also still the same. Some of the thinkers you have to master are exactly those I have spent 25 years fighting against. This is for me very sad.

 

 A:There are many battles to fight but I am going to choose my battles. I want to choose my battles to be the most important ones and with a big consequence and big impact. And the idea of choosing the battle on vocabulary, the cost and the internal confusion created will be lots and will take us away from more important issues. So, whatever I feel personally about this issue, I don’t want to make it into one of my hundred battles. If I want to make a list of the hundred battles I want to win, this will not figure. It is an important one but not top priority. It will just create diversion from more serious issues. Whether you say Vedic or Hindu, what is important is we agree on the entity that we are talking about. It is a civilisation from our shruthi, smriti and ithihas, dharmashastras, shivsutras, natyashastras, and all the performing arts. You can call the civilisation whatever you want, but I am more interested in the substance of the civilisation rather than how we name it.

 

What happened later is that when others came, they came as armies. They were sent by some headquarter somewhere. They were reporting to that authority. So, they came to conquer, plunder, rape, take slaves and therefore it was not their faith as an individual that was the issue. It is their militaristic and imperialistic mindsetas an organization. It is an organisation headquartered somewhere. So, we have to understand this.

 

If we can convince a community that you should not come under the control of foreign nexus. You should be swadeshi, you should be Bharatiyaand you can practice a faith how you want. China is doing that. China is saying that the Church or the Vatican cannot appoint Bishops in China and the Chinese will decide who is going to be the next Bishop. But in India, the Vatican appoints the local Bishops. So, if the headquarter is appointing the next Bishop, giving him ideology, sending him overseas for training, it is like a branch office of a multinational.

 

So, the problem is the foreign origin civilisations are being remote controlled from a foreign location like a multinational operating here and that is a problem. Not their idea of God or who they want to worship which would not be a problem. I believe that we have to win over these people and basically cut off the foreign control over these people. That is my thought but it is a very complicated problem and controversial problem. I congratulate you for your courage.

 

I wrote so much when the Chinese decided that rather than allowing Google, they will develop their own search engine. I said that these platforms will control the brains of the people in the future. And don’t let the American platforms take over, we should create Indian platforms. I wrote to the IT billionaires that you are selling labour to the Americans and making tons of money, you should take some of that money and reinvest in creating in these products. So, we will have our own swadeshi equivalent of these social media. They didn’t want to because it is not easy money or quick money, they have to do it for 5-10 years. But now the Chinese are controlling their own platforms and those platforms are going to start marketing globally. Like Alibaba has gone public and doing very well even in the US markets.

 

We have not been thinking big term or long term. It is more like – I am a billionaire, I can sell one lakh programs, put in America and make USD10,000 per year profit for each of them – why should I bother with all this? So, this is the problem. We have invested mainly in selling labour to people at hired cost. We have not built the products with our own people and the government has not encouraged. In China, the government has encouraged. Even today, the control of Indian data that Facebook has and Google has is so huge. Data is the future oil. So, the people who control data, control your influence. They know how to advertise to you, how to market to you, how to embarrass you, how to create a scandal about you, because they know what you are writing. And I have been saying we need equivalents. But you will be surprised, even government officials who have sensitive things to say are using Gmail, as if it is secure. I keep talking about it all the time that India should create its own platforms as far as technology is concerned and India should encourage Make in India platforms. You don’t find any Indian app in the top 10 apps of the world. But Indian programmers have written those apps. We have supplied the labourto do the work. It is like poor labourers come from Bihar and they build some big building. After the building is done, they don’t even own one brick, they don’t own any equity, it belongs to the person who employed them. We are brick layers. We are very proud of the USD125 bn tech industry, but we are exporting brick layers. This is our bad policy; it is a short-sighted policy by the government and also by the industrialists.

 

The first question, how to build a bridge between traditional experts and international western experts. One of the things our foundation is doing is to organise a group of events called – Sadas which is a traditional debate in Sanskrit. So, what we did is, we would bring the thoughts of some very important Western thinker and we would translate it into Sanskrit and present it to our Sanskrit team and our Sanskrit team would give an answer. And we have recorded. It is our way of educating our Sanskrit people about Western thought.

 

We find that the young pandits trained in the tradition can give very strong answers – if they are told in a language that they can understand. That translation and bridging we are doing. I will tell you what the Chinese did for thousand years. The Chinese emperors always translated the latest western thought into Mandarin and made it a part of curriculum. They said you must study the thought and give an answer to it. We did not do that. We either taught Western thought and asked students to memorize it as such. They said this is what the opponent is saying, what is your answer. The correct way to teach here would be to teach them the theories but from Mahabharata, give an answer. The paper should be you must know what the other guy is saying but the emphasis should be on how to answer it.

A:I will give you a good example. I went to Baba Ramdev’s school. They run a school where in the morning, it is all taught in Sanskrit, after the lunchbreak, they are taught in English to help them get jobs. The idea is to make dual culture, dual language citizens who are very comfortable in their own idea of who they are and also very competitive in the world. Chinese do this a lot. Chinese teach in Mandarin a lot and after a certain age, they start introducing English so that the person also knows how to read and understand what the rest of the world is saying. But the foundation is in Chinese. So, what we need to have done by now is experiment many things. We should have opened 50 schools of this kind, 50 of some other kind. But we are not doing it. That needs imagination. People have to talk, you need to have the vision, but I don’t see any learning going on here. I will tell you Indian traditional system of learning have been adopted in Western countries without acknowledging that they are Indian and are getting all the benefits from it.

 

There is something in America called accelerated learning. Lot of parents send their kids to accelerated learning because they tell you that they can teach faster. I found that the kind of methods they were using were very similar to our methods. So, I started researching and they told me the history of this. They said that the man who found this technique is LorsaKnopf. I started looking for Lorsa Knopf and sure enoughLorsa Knopf during the Cold War was sent by the Soviets to find how yogis get special powers. He was sent to India. CIA was doing research on whether yogis have special powers. And the Soviets were also doing it. This person was a neuroscientist and he was sent to India to find out how to make use of the power of yogis of our purpose. He came back and said that one very extraordinary power I found was that these people have huge memory. They can memorize hundred thousand verses. He said according to our neuroscience, this is not possible. How can a person memorize so much, so quickly and so flawlessly? So, he was sent to do this research on extraordinary memory. And he developed ideas. One of the things he said is when they teach maths, they sing the tables. The singing is recorded in one part of the brain which records arts, aesthetics and the logic of the numbers is recorded in the other side of the brain. And since you are recording them simultaneously, they are correlated. They are dual recorded and the two kinds of recordings are linked with each other. And when you teach a child with that, he is going to be much smarter and he is going to learn more. Then he says that these people also enact, they use drama, theatre, so they are getting both the points. So, he says that this is the path to accelerated learning. This accelerated learning becomes big deal all over.

 

So, one Indian, in Trinidad got hold of this. I was running this Centre for Indic Studies in University of Massachusetts. Some anonymous donor gave million dollars and said that I want to start this accelerated learning in US. So, this panditji form Trinidad came and he started teaching accelerated learning. He got these school drop outs and in seven years, he got them through their 12th grade exams. So, these people could study in seven years what normal people would take 12 years to do. This became a very important thing. Now why are we not able to take up techniques like this from our own culture? We are alienated from our own learning methods. If our people were extraordinary geniuses, there were certain methods of learning. We are becoming more Americanized, short attention span, you are trying to do something on the phone. We are going away from the use of memory, more mechanisation dependence like that. I think these are some very serious issues.

 

We are probably becoming second class Americans, not first class either. Maybe the one per cent SundarPichai type will become billionaires, very small number. But the 99 per cent population are chasing a dream to become westernised which is not going to be viable on a big scale for so many people. And in the process of chasing somebody else’s civilisation we are giving up our own. That is the defect – we are neither here nor there – not the yogi not the gladiator. Not properly in Sanskrit, not properly in the West.

 

 

My question was why can’t Indian universities be invited to map the KumbhMela? This had the element of Artificial Intelligence. Having data about India is a huge goldmine for the companies and western people. So, I don’t know why they are ignoring this. But it is not just in the south, it is rightly in the north too.

 

 A: You are not disagreeing with me but you are agreeing with me. I am also saying the same thing.

 

A: I have so many PowerPoint presentations. In fact, I gave one to Modijicouple of years ago. And Modiji was very impressed. He called somebody from the PMO’s office and said I should be allowed to give a lecture for a minimum of two and a half hours, and there will be culture minister present and HRD minister will be present and so on. I was very happy thinking I finally have a strong backing. But those people didn’t do anything. I am sorry but the culture minister after three hours said that our culture is going very well. Someone fed me jalebis in Manchester. I said our culture has reached everywhere. He didn’t get what I was trying to say.

 

I have done my best but I don’t know what to do about all this. Because I have given a proposal to the ICCR that we should create one day seminars in Washington, in New York, in London where we will bring a panel of experts to talk about our views in this global dialogue of civilisation. We will answer back and talk back. We will take all the hot topics; we will have experts and we will invite them to come and debate. I said we will even pay for it; we just want your blessings so that they feel that the Indian nation is involved in all this. Chinese are doing this all the time. But the ICCR decided not to do this. We will organize a talk on Yoga because it is non-controversial. We will do a Bharatanatyam concert. That is the idea of culture. But what you are talking about is controversial and we don’t want to do it. So, this is the situation I am in.

 

Thank you very much all of you!