Disconnected thoughts...

I ran out of new things to think about and it was mostly the same concepts with no additional inputs to it. Partly because I was lethargic and partly because I couldn't fix my mind on some topic consistently. Too many thoughts but disconnected and without a strong base for continuance. Mostly anger, bewilderment, frustration about the things that are happening daily in the world. I read the BBC news site almost on a daily basis and catch up on the main headlines especially those that involves struggle / war with the religion playing an underlying role as the reason for the struggle. We seem to be never short of such subjects - Palestine-Israel, India-Pakistan, Taliban-USA, Chechnya-Russia, Indonesia-East Timor, Syria, Iran, Iraq, all fighting in the name of religion. Jews, Christians and Muslims all share a common Prophet, many beliefs are similar, names are similar and underlying philosophy is similar, yet they don't see see each other in the eye and each one does not hesitate killing the orther in the name of proctecting their religion.

I am unable to come to terms with this. I have a religion myself and I have been brought up to believe in God and mythology and I do believe mostly because I have grown up that way and partly because I have grown to like believing it even though my rationality urges me to question every belief. But will I kill to protect it, I do not think so. If I were to truly believe in my religion then I should also have the confidence that my religion will survive with true believers like me and there is no threat of it becoming extinct.

So what if it becomes extinct. There have been so many religions in the history of mankind and not all of them are practiced today. No one prays to Hercules and Zeus today but it had its share of staunch believers and believers who were willing to kill in the name of religion. Were they successful in defending their religion? I am not so sure. Was the religion strong enough to keep itself alive? I am not so sure again. So why then the larger mass does not come to the understanding that killing others in the name of religion only spreads hate and distress. What makes someone so wild and passionate that he / she is prepared to take another life in cold blood. It is disgusting.

Pope Benedict XVI made some provocative statements and the muslims reacted strongly demanding an apology. The Pope's office made a press release that the statements made by the Pope are in fact statement made by an Emperor Manual II Paleologos of the Byzantine Empire and that the intention was not to insult Islam. Why would a Pope want to make such a statement however naive he might be and however good his intentions are. People sitting in positions where they have the power to influence the lives of many thousands of people should understand the consequence of every word they utter. Loose talks can result in loose bombs elsewhere. The planet is in the most vulnerable position now than it has ever been in the entire history. One wrong move, one wrong statement, one wrong gesture, one wrong look, one wrong thought can trigger of a series of events and it can catch like wild fire resulting in death and destruction. Will the Pope or anyone else in such positions will be willing to accept resposibilities? Even if they come out and prove that their statements have been taken out of context or wrongly interpreted, it might be too late. Someone might have been the victim of one persons urge to make statements just because they feel it is necessary.

Amazing the kind of planet we live in...

Is "reason" the God? Part 1

I plan to write few blogs under this topic since the topic as such encompasses a vast area of thought process that it would be injustice to it if I use it just for one single flash of my thought.

My mind has been deprived of sufficient 'meat' to foster thinking, either I was lazy or was reluctant. The book by Jared Diamond is getting boring my the chapter. There is too much of micro research which I don't care about and I am forcing myself to read further hoping that I would soon encounter the chapter where he offers a summary of his research.

I spend quite a lot of time on Wikipedia and I should say that it is one of the most brilliant inventions of the Internet. I have always wondered if I would ever own the complete Encyclopedia books given the fact it is nearly unaffordable and also the fact that it can become outdated in few years when new information is discovered or new topics are added. Wikipedia solves that problem for me. It is online, reviewed by all concerned and nearly accurate and up to date. Another branch of Wikipedia is Wikiversity which is sort of free online university for people to learn in a structured manner. I am currently reading a bit in Philosophy and hoping that a more structured approach would give me some structure to my thoughts as well.

So, in the process of randomly clicking on different links starting from the main topic of Philosophy, I landed on the page about Chanakya or Kautilya as he is otherwise called. A lot of people in the India sub-continent have heard about him and know him as the angry academician who fostered Chandragupta Maurya to conquer the Nandas and eventually helped him establish the Mauryan dynasty. He is also known to many as the author of one of the earliest book on Economics and Politics - Arthasashtra. I have heard stories about him from my parents and grandparents who describe him as a very learned and short-tempered Brahmin who after being insulted by the Nanda Emperor, vowed to destroy him and never to tie his long hair until his objective was met. He did in fact achieve his objective and on a lighter note, I do not know if he tied his locks.

What many people do not know including myself is that Arthasashtra was one of the first comprehensive book written on Economics and Politics addressing topics such as fiscal and monitory policy, public welfare, international relations, effects of immigration and emigration, military tactics and politics. He is also credited for couple of other books namely Nitisashtra and Chanakya Niti. Nitisashtra is a treatise on the ideal way of life and it addresses various topics such as marriage, familial responsibilities, and duty to society among others. It draws upon all the knowledge he had about Vedas and Upanishads that he mastered in the course of his life.

I came to know all about this from Wikipedia while I was browsing and more can be found if anyone is interested. My objective of giving this background was that in one of the reference site I came upon an article written by Surin Usgaonkar who has written about Supreme Court of India uphelding Kautilya's jurisprudence on Hindu wedding. This was a case about a couple who applied for divource and the court granted it and the statement made by the judge was thus, "Where the parties are young and the mental disorder is of such a type that the sexual act and procreation of children is not possible, it may furnish a good enough ground for nullifying the marriage.". Apparently, this statement seems to have been drawn from one of the niti's of Chanakya which states, "If a husband is either of a bad character, or long gone abroad, or has become a traitor to the crown, or is likely to endanger life of his wife, or has fallen in the esteem of his community, or has lost virility, he may be abandoned by his wife." - Translation by Dr R. Shamasastry © 1923.

Remember Arthasashtra was written 2300 years ago. What makes me wonder is not that Chanakya was a man of such fore-thought or the fact that he wrote it 2300 years ago when many parts of the world was filled with hunter-gathering nomadic groups or the fact that the social setup was pretty much similar to our current advancement in social understanding. What amazes me is that where are we after 2300 years later? If divource is an acceptable norm under certain cases and if we follow the normal curve of evolution both biologically and intellectually then today the concept of marriage for instance should be redundant. Or at the very very least, divource should be accepted factually as a way of life. But is divource really accepted in all walks of life in India? That is a question for each of us to think about.

This again relates to my earlier question as why the people in the Indian peninsula when so educated at one point in time lost all the knowledge and wisdom and are starting afresh as urban hunter-gatherers? I am not a nationalist, in fact I am an idealist who thinks that the national boundries should not exist and that we are people of this planet and not people of a particular country or a particular sect or a particular religion. The fact that I bring up India in most of my blogs is because that is the environment in which I grew up. I understand the past about India better than the past about China or Egypt. If I had enough information about those civilizations, then my argument would encompass them as well. The underlying agenda is to understand a certain skewness that I believe I see in human intellectual evolution. It is as if someone took the time machine and re-directed the course of human development to point zero and all the so called advanced civilization had to start all over again. I am not convinced that it is due to war or disease that certain group of people evaporated into thin air. Intelligent people have better chance of surviving adversity than the not so intelligent group. If this is un true then we can safely assume that this planet will be defeated or diminished in stature by less primitive group.

So, why the title "Is "reason" the God? Well the previous paragraph was of course not my original intention to put it here but had to continue my flow of thoughts. One of the things that I constantly observe when I read the Indian scriptures is that most, in fact almost all of them are based on sound reason than speculation. Consider another quote from Vashishta Dharmasashtra which I pick up from Surin's article:

svayaMipratipannaa vaa yadi vaa vipravaasitaa|
balaatkaaraa upbhuktaa vaa chora hasta gataa api vaa || 28-2||
na tyaajyaaduSitaa naarI naasyaas tyaagasvidhIyate |
puSpa kaalam upaasIta R^itu kaalena shudhyati || 28-3||

I do not have the complete translation for the above verse and I know it is a "sin" to quote something which I do not understand but effectively the above passage says that the society should not abandon a woman who has been 'raped' and should support in restoring her life back to normal and those who oppose such support for the women should be considered as much a criminal as the 'rapist' himself.

How is that for philosophy based on reason. In my opinion the point in time when these philosophies where being written and collected together, the society had a vary rational outlook at least the people who were in the governing position and leading the development of the society if not every member in those time. An outlook of this kind perculated to the members of the society who do not have the time or inclination to ponder about profound things it probably is the first step towards an ideal society. Society free of prejudice, war, moral and material crime, jealousy, blind beliefs and superstition, craving for wealth and power and a material accumulation of any kind.

Given that we claim we inherit a lot of our thinking process from our ancestors who in-turn wrote the vedas and upanishads, we should be praying "reason" as God.

Can we lead a minimalistic lifestyle?

I am currently in the 5th chapter of the Guns, Germs and Steel book by Jared Diamond and it is getting a bit boring with information overload. There is too much of fine details which are not my area of interest, it probably is for someone else.

I have not been doing enough reading over the weekend or been thinking about the questions that prop up in my mind and don't have much to express in this post. If you are reading ahead you might feel bored! I am going to think and write simultaneously now as I don't have any processed info to type.

My focus today will be on world affairs. There seems to be temporary peace in Lebanon atleast according to the BBC. I got to bring in the BBC here since I am afraid that most news agencies today do not do justice to the concept of reporting. Most reports are biased and they are partial in reporting some and ignoring others. So ultimately a news gets reported or left out based on the editor of the news media and not based on what the population needs. The editor weilds great power here since the public's opinion is driven based on what every individual reads (most of the time at least) and what can be read is detemined by the editor. Sometimes it looks scary that the mass opinion could be so easily manipulated.

If every reader was a thinker then what they read is carefully taken in, assimilated, thought through and ingested or discarded based on the credibility of the information. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most people who read the papers or watch television are people who are susceptible to emotional reactions and they can be easily influenced to form an opinion that is carefully engineered by media personnel for their own vested interests.

My work involves launching an e-newsletter on a monthly basis and my client takes a lot of effort to understand what is important or attractive for their redears and constantly improve on the content to increase readership, clicks etc. One of the things recently being discussed is something called Head Map. I did not know what it meant initially and later found out that this is a controlled experiment that is conducted to understand the user's reading behaviour. What happens from a layman's perspective is that the subject of the experiment wears an equipment that monitors where the user looks and traces his / her eyeball movement and the researcher tries to understand the normal beaviour of the user by observing the patterns in multiple subjects.

I am fairly certain major news agencies would be employing this technology to determine which part of the newpaper or the website the reader is most interested in and highlight the latest news in those locations so they generate maximum output with minimum inputs. I am also certain that this technology does not come cheap, which means that companies that spend on such researches needs to take their investment out as soon as possible. This brings in the bias that I talk about earlier. So the editor is forced to highlight news that is more attractive to read for a casual reader rather than the pertinent one which might be boring and do not generate enough interest for the reader to spend sustained amount of time with the newspaper or the website.

Then the question is can an entity survive being an idealistic media source which is unbiased, reports every news as it happened without a twist or an element of personal gain. My answer would be that it is next to impossible. Then the next question is how far can a news agent go so that the entity can sustain its existence and yet do as little damage as possible to the actual news.

Fortunately or unfortunately we are living in a world that is on a path to total consumerism at a steady and consistent pace. Whether consumerism is good or bad is a debate that will rage on for a long time but what is sure for now is that the world is firmly set on the path of attaining total consumerism. We can't blame a single or group of countries here but everyone is responsible for this outcome. All developing countries are aspiring to be developed countries and all under-developed countries want to become developing countries and all developed countries want to stay developed. The end outcome is a phenomenol rate of consumption of resources of this planet. The rate of consumption is so high that many fear that a lot of natural resources would disappear even before an alternate source can be found.

Forget the world and its complexity, I personally find it hard to lead a minimalistic lifestyle. I am so ingrained in todays comforts that it is extremely hard to give up on something that you are used to.

I am going to pick this topic up sometime in future again with more detailed thinking since today the idea was to continue the habit of entering a blog on a daily basis to keep the thinking stimulated and busy!

Do we do things as much as we talk about things?

I almost don't. But I would like to.

So how do we go about doing things that we so conveniently talk about. Talking about things seem so easy and sounds so possible. But when I start to think about how I act, the task seems insurmountable. Why is it so? Is it because that talking is easy and throwing opinions does not require effort. The very process of writing down what I talk about seems like a difficult task.

When I want to put my thoughts into words, there comes the element of corroborating what I say. When we speak to people, there is hardly a need to prove with supporting theories or facts, every statement you make. Many variables eliminate this requirement - body language, tonality of the voice, the influence over the listeners, background of the speaker etc. But when we write and when it is read by someone, we are not present in that place to substantiate what we have written. The person reading frames his/her opinion on what is written and the imagination of the reader cannot be controlled unless what you state is irrefutable and comes with facts that the reader does not have a choice but read and imagine in the same way that it was written. The old adage "It is easier said than done" says it all.

The reason for this post is based on some of the events this week that caught my attention and affected me in some sense - the Israel-Lebanon / Hezbollah (or should I say Islam) war, the death of the current Maori Queen, the indigenous people of Taiwan, who are supposedly part of the Polynesian 'race' and whose language have strong links with the Austronesian language family, trying hard to find an identity for themselves among the majority of Chinese population, the mud spills in Java that is threatening the villages nearby the oil and gas company which had in some sense caused the spills and Naom Chomsky's interview with Merav Yudilovitch voicing the hyprocrisy of the current Middle East war which according to Chomsky is clouding the events that is taking place in Gaza, Palestine.

Everytime I read these news over the Internet, there was a emotional upsurge of feelings in me about many things that is going on in this world and the state of my inability to influence these events for the betterment of the state of the world. And then, I stopped for a moment and thought about it - why am I affected by these unconnected events? In the first place, why am I even thinking about it when I don't have the intention to get off my chair and do something about it? Then I started to realize that this planet has a lot more of such people who feel strongly about many things around them but don't raise a finger to do something about it. I am not representing this behavior here in a negative sense since it is not in my obligation to do something when I haven't caused it. But... and this is a big BUT, I have a choice to do something about it. It is in my hands to exercise that choice and I of course am not going to be condemned to hell if I don't take the choice of doing something about the feelings that I have about events that I consider are detrimental to the human progress.

These series of thoughts in me are in some sense aligned to my previous posts as well. When I ponder over the question of why 'West' is better than the 'East', I am kind of forced to think that the East did not do as much as they talk or think they would like to do. Of course I do not claim here that this the reason and I have solved the centuries old puzzle of why the West colonized the East and not the other way around. There are other factors as well and those factors are all the work done by anthropologists, historians, scientists and archaeologists. But every time I come across their reasons, I am not convinced deep down inside me that those reasons have solved the puzzle. Mostly because the reasons they state are in today's context not relevant anymore but still 'East' is lagging behind the 'West'.

If one under developed country were to come out clean and decide to take the step towards progress, I don't think it can take more than couple of decades or slightly more to become as developed as any other developed country. But no one comes out clean. Then the question is why? And there are many reasons for the 'why' - civil war, religious differences, economic support, literacy, natural resources etc., But above all there is also the variable called 'intention' to take that step. This is definitely lacking. Why? I can't seem to answer that now.

Referring back to my earlier posts of the significance of the Vedas, I find more research done by non-Hindus than by the people who claim that it is holy. If I want to use the Sanskrit slokas on my computer or for publication, I have rely on typography developed by the Germans. I get more English and German researches interpretation of the Vedas that I get from the priests in India. Ok, I do not wish to start a debate here that the people of India are doing less - may be I did not search well, may be the 'priests' are not technology savvy and I don't find their work on the Internet etc. But what I am trying to highlight here is that if the Indian's claim that their culture and heritage are that significant then I should find their works everywhere I look. I do not find an Indian expert in Mayan or Greek or Roman civilization but I do know BBC has a wonderful site for children to learn about Indus Valley civilization. This is something the people who claim it holy can do - it is not hard for a news agency like Doordarshan or The Hindu to come up with a concept whereby the next generation of children learn about their heritage. I don't see an inclination there for sure - or should I say, there is an inclination but no action!

I come back to my same suspicion of whether we are doing justice to the words that we let out of our mouth. It is rather better to stay quite and not do anything rather than raise a tantrum and not do anything.

Take your pick...

Is culture the culprit?

I just finished the first chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel book by Jared Diamond. He talks about a theory of how humans evolved from apes and how they migrated from their place of origin in Africa to the rest of the world. It is a synopsis of years of research and hypothesis done by various scientists, archeologists, historians and anthropologists. Basically the chapter says that the species called the Humans or Homo Sapiens evolved from other earlier species such as apses, homo erectus etc. and they started to migrate from Africa to the rest of the habitable parts of the planet at various points in time in the last few million years.

I am not sure if there is a convincing explanation as to why humans evolved only in Africa and not in other continents. I am yet to do that research but not keen as my thoughts lie elsewhere.

The basic argument in his book is that the humans are as they are because of the environment around them. This might look like a simple and obvious statement but proving them convincingly and with facts and researches takes hell of an effort. He spent the last 30 years trying to answer this convincingly. So, lets not take the statement lightly. He tells a story that prompted me to write this blog today.

Sometime in the 18th century, the native settlers in New Zealand called Maori took a boat and about 400 of them landed on a nearby island which was inhabited by another native tribe called the Moriori. Note that the Maori and Moriori are decendents from the same earlier settlers of Australia and New Zealand. When the Maori settled in New Zealand and later started to grow in numbers some of them started moving out of the island and landed in another very small island and they later became the Moriori tribe.

Back to the story, the Maori who landed on the island in the 18th century were armed with guns, clubs and other weapons and walked around the island telling the Moriori that the island now belongs to them and they are in-turn slaves of the Maori tribe. One has to note that the number of Maori who landed were out numbered by Moriori by atleast 3 to 1. If a fighting had ensued in that place, the Maori would have been slaughtered and the course of Moriori history would be quite different today. But the Moriori did not fight back. For one they did not have a fighting army of people, they were not as organized as Maori nor did they posess any of the sophisticated weapons that the Maori brought with them. As the Moriori's did not have any the skills required to fight, they quitely accepted their fate and decided to share their resoources and accept the Maori as their masters and avoid bloodshed. To make the long story of occupation short, the Maori's in-turn killed the defenceless Moriori as if they were cattle and cooked and ate the people. The Moriori's in turn ran for their lives and hid in caves, pits and bushes to escape the blood thirsty Maori. Finally the occupation was successful and Maori started ruling the left over Moriori.

Jared Diamond makes a hypothesis here as to why the Moriori were under equipped to fight the Maori when both the tribes were from the same decendents and Moriori were in fact people of the earlier generation of Maori who migrated to the tiny island off the coast of New Zealand. His hypothesis is thus: New Zealand was a large island and it had a varied climatic conditions suitable for different types of food production. When the early Maori stepped into New Zealand they had suitable conditions for farming, cattle raising etc and thus had surplus food. When a society has surplus food then a portion of population of the society have the opportunity to focus on things other than food production. Like for example they can develop art and crafts and tools while another part of the society was busy working to feed them. This also gives opportunity to have another group to train as fighters to attack nearby settlements and takeover their resources thereby becoming more stronger. All this then requires leadership and bureaucrats to organize the food production, tools production, maintaining the fighters etc. Thus over centuries the Maori became more stronger and organized.

The small group of people who left the earliest Maori settlement and reached the tiny island off the coast of New Zealand found the place to be too cold for any agriculture. Being a small island there was not much variation in the entire island area. Hence they started hunting for food source. If you are a small group in a cold island with only souce of food being the native animals then there are a few things you want to do. To start with you do not want to fight each other and try to stay united, secondly, you do not want the population to grow so much that you start to exhaust the natural food source. And that's exactly what the Moriori did. They reached a concences that they will stay united. They castrated some of their male children to keep the population in control. Since the kind of animals they were killing where passive in nature such as seals and fish they did not need sophisticated weapons. And since they did not fight each other they were passive in their natural qualities and slowly forgot the concept of fighting and war. And also since hunting was the only source of food everyone had to be engaged in the good gathering process and obviously no one had the time to focus on other developmental activities.

Now wouldn't you call this the ideal candidate for a takeover. If you said 'yes' then you thought just like the Maori and that is exactly what they did.

The thing that I noted was the effect the environment was having on the behaviour of the people of Moriori. Maori + few centuries of cold weather conditions + No farming opportunities + Simple animal source for food = passive people who do not want war and willing to accept the fate thrust upon them. But also note that they were smart enough to recognise that they have to castrate some portion of the male off-springs in order to maintain a balance in their society which I am certain that the Maori never thought of.

The behaviour of people over centuries becomes their culture. What we fail to recognize is the fact that the culture had a reason when the practice began and over time the reason could no longer be valid for the culture to continue. The culture could be a boon and a bane - for Moriori tribe it turned out to be a bane.

Do we consider culture as a culprit for the people of the east for not showing progress from what their ancestors developed?

Why is the world dominated by the West

Or I should rename the title as - Why is the larger part of the population of the world and the real estate of the world dominated by a much smaller population in comparison

This has been a question in my mind for a long time as well. And this is very much linked to my previous post about the significance of Vedic scriptures. When you are born as a Hindu in India and brought up in a resonably conservative environment, one of the things you constantly hear is that the Gods of the Hindu mythology are very much present somewhere in the Universe and they are governing the well being of the planet. The stories about the Gods and their victories over the demons is something you hear on a daily basis as childhood stories, as practical examples in day-to-day issues and problems, as moral lessons, as a foundation for ethical values in ones life as one starts to form ones own set of standards for life as they grow older, as a means for salvation, as a dimension through which we can understand the complexities of life and source of problems etc. I can go on with the list but, I guess you get the idea. You cannot escape the reference of the mythology in your daily life if you grow up there. Even non-Hindus would have a significant knowledge about the Hindu mythology even though they have embraced a completely different faith and practice.

Growing up in such an environment one would completely accept the mythology to be real even though for most the rational portion of their mind would tell them that the stories are highly improbable and there may be a deeper hidden meaning to the stories. This state of complete acceptance even suppressing their rational thought is defined by some as Bhakti or Devotion. I can try to define Bhakti in another post as this requires significant text as well. If you are very keen to know what the word means then you can read at Wikipedia - Bhakti. However, my description would be more to the spirit of the word than the literal meaning.

Having accepted that they are true (my mind tosses between my belief and my rationality) you then tend to naturally glorify the antient texts and give them a holy status in your life. This of course happens in most religions of the world as well - Bible for the Christians, Quran for the Muslims, Guru Grant Sahib for the Sikh etc. If we view them objectively, they are just texts written by thinkers and intellectuals of the past conveying significant moral and ethical values for the future generations and in some sense a spiritual path leading to solutions of the problems in our world. Similar texts can be writtin by current day thinkers and intellectuals as well. But we do not want them and we would like something from the past to signify that we have been intellectuals and thinkers for a very long period of time thereby demonstrating superiority over another group with another text. The other group might have a text written much later in the historical time period but they would claim that their books consists of texts which impart more profound value system and advancement in thinking. The age of the texts alone of course is not the only point of contention between groups of people. So the argument goes on...


Hindus have such texts too. The Bhagawat Gita, the four Vedas, the Upanishads etc. In fact the Hindus have too many to keep count for an average man of the crowd. These text are old, very old by scholarly standards, written between 2000 to 500 BC and very very old according to the believers in the text, supposedly by more than 5000 years. I do not wish to debate as to how old the texts are and I would leave it to the respective experts in the field to determine them. What I intend to probe here is the value that these texts purportedly carries according to the believers and followers of the texts. Most consider them as significantly advanced in its content in diverse fields such as Philosophy, Medicine, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry etc even in today's context. Some say that the interpretations of these texts are woefully inadequate gravely limited by our current day understanding of things. How advanced these texts are is something to debate as well since the catch here is that many claim we are limited by our current day understanding of things. So it is something like defining the idea of fourth dimension or quantum mechanics to a lay man who has no clue about what Physics is.

Again I leave it to the experts to decide how advanced they are and whether we lack knowledge even in the current day to fully understand the scriptures. But I do want to take a stand here and state that these texts were advanced at least at the point in time when it was written. I think this is a fair assumption. For example we have the gravitational theory by Newton in the 17th century which can be considered quite advanced during his period of time. Similarly the Vedas were advanced studies at that point in time in which it was written. Many of the things stated in Vedas have been discovered / invented / realised at different parts of the world much later to the period in which it was written. Having said that we can now assume that the society existing in let's say 1000 BC was quite an advanced society which had the significant knowledge in different fields of science and theology.

Coming back to my question why is the world dominated by the West? I am using the term West and dominance quite loosely here and it is not meant to point fingers at a particular group of people in a negative sense. By West I mean the developed countries / economies and by dominance I mean technological superiority, high standards of living, low health risks, high literacy rates etc. Indian subcontinent is neither West or dominant and so is China, Egypt, Central Asian countries, Africa, South America etc. All the countries mentioned here boast civilizations as old as India itself but none of them are West or dominant. The question is why?

I recently started reading a book titled as Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond a professor at UCLA. The question that is trying to answer is similar to mine but encompasses a little more than my question. He asked the question (or rather he was asked that question according to the book) back in 1972 as to why is the world dominated by the 'West' and not the other way round? I am hoping that by reading this book, I will have some insight into the answer that I am seeking as well.

Referring quickly back to the Vedas before I close this post, why did such advanced societies suddenly (or gradually) diminish in significance and lost the knowledge that they possessed. Why did they not capitalize from the discoveries, inventions and understanding of their previous generations? Why were they passive and let themselves be colonised by Europeans and other invaders in the middle and later part of the second millenium. How could they lose knowledge when we are all told that everything can be lost (money, property, fame, power) but not the knowledge that you acquire?

I intend to keep pursuing the answers and my second pit stop in blogging ends here.

The first one...

I was blogging for a while when at school doing MBA, nothing spectacular just my thoughts on various things. But the interest waned out and I eventually stopped. I wanted to start blogging again not for someone to read what I write but for me to read what I am writing. It may sound paradoxical but the idea here is to explore if what I am thinking that I am thinking is really what I am thinking. I don't mean to be cryptic here but the statement truly reflects what I go through in my mind.

Of late, I have had this new interest in vedic scripts and have been curious to understand them from a historian's perspective. The perspective that I am trying to have here is why was it written in the first place. Is there really advanced knowledge hidden in them as believed by a billion Hindus all over the world? Were people really that advanced socially and scientifically, several millenia in the past?

If all the answers to the above questions are as they are believed by the present day Hindus then it surely contradicts with the evolutionary theories of Nature in which we believe that the as time goes by, people become more knowledgeable more wiser both by new thoughts and by learning from the past. The current conditions in India where most Hindus live does not reflect this progress. On the other hand we seem to have regressed in the last thousand years.

So the questions that I ponder about are:

1. Are the Vedas really to be considered massive source of knowledge and are there still opportunities for us to learn from it even today, i.e., Is there still knowledge in them that is yet to be recognized by all cultures in the world.
2. If not, why do people still cling on the the Vedas and fool themselves in the process. In other words, why are people being ignorant and unwilling to come out of that blind belief mode. On the contrary if they are to be recognized as massive source of knowledge then why is the world not embracing it completely and devouring it for what's hidden in them?
3. The third question is if they indeed are a treasure house of knowledge why did the Indians regress instead of progress and dominate the current world society in terms of both theoritical and practical knowledge
4. And my final questions - Am I asking the right or the wrong questions. Are my thoughts aligned here so that I have a reasonable chance of pursuing answers to these questions.
   

I have no idea if I will ever find the answers to these questions, but I enjoy pursuing the answer.

I have always been interested in history, culture, traditions, philosophy, religion, spirituality, human expressions and thoughts, behaviour, psychology, civilizations, race, ethnicity and theoritical science. And I am agnostic by nature. I would like to believe in 'God' possessing no knowledge in me to question, but unfortunately I think I have crossed the line. I don't think I have a choice but to seek 'God' by pursuing and acquiring knowledge.

The pursuit of the answer for the questions above inexorably involves cocepts like faith, God, belief in the orally transfered knowledge and a very deep involvement and understanding of the culture, traditions and finally the willingness to take leap of faith. And hence I say that I have no idea if I will ever find the answers.

What I intend attempting in the blogs is a serious introspection about myself and my thoughts and to figure out the answers to the questions that is always hovering in my mind. I shall touch upon everything that I feel strongly about and weave a common link between those disparate topics which I inexorably think that they indeed are linked.