Bolivian President reverts to Andean religion, shuns church ceremony

Bolivian President reverts to Andean religion, shuns church ceremony

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-01-21T191011Z_01_N21262912_RTRUKOC_0_UK-BOLIVIA.xml&archived=False

By Helen Popper
TIWANAKU, Bolivia
Sat Jan 21, 2006

At the sacred ruins of a powerful pre-Inca civilisation, a colourfully clad Evo Morales sought the spiritual energy and blessings of his Andean ancestors on Saturday, the eve of his inauguration as Bolivia's first indigenous president.

The 46-year-old Aymara Indian walked a path, which had been swept with coca leaves, that travelled among Tiwanaku's pyramids and temples, dating from 700 AD, in the company of spiritual leaders.

They dressed him in a red tunic like the ones used by the priests of Tiwanaku 1,000 years ago and a four-cornered cap and bestowed on him a staff of command representing the 36 nationalities of Bolivia's indigenous majority.

Amid shouts of "Jallalla Evo" (Long live Evo), the leaders performed rituals to energise the president-elect and together they made offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth, to thank her for the victory.

Morales had gone to Tiwanaku to pray to Pachamama before the December 18 elections, in which the leftist won a surprisingly high 54 percent of the vote in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America.

Some 10,000 Bolivians from all over the country descended on the revered ruins, the cradle of the Aymara people located 40 miles (70 km) from the capital, La Paz, and 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) above sea level.

"Today begins a new era for the native peoples of the world," Morales told the crowd in Spanish, urging his followers to help "end the colonial state and the neo-liberal model."

The ritual was a mixture of Andean tradition and modern improvisation since the white elite has ruled Bolivia, a country of 9.4 million today, since the Spanish arrived 500 years ago.

Morales, a llama herder in boyhood who rose to prominence as leader of the coca farmers, will be sworn in on Sunday in Congress with an unprecedented 12 heads of state in attendance.

'I WILL BE MILLIONS'

Tiwanaku is considered to be the greatest megalithic architectural achievement of pre-Inca South America, home to 20,000 inhabitants at its height. It melted into obscurity around 1200 AD.

At dawn, under the heavy grey skies of the Andean highlands, Morales's followers protected themselves in the multicoloured indigenous flag, the ubiquitous Wiphala, and blue scarves of his Socialist party. Community leaders identifiable by their red ponchos provided the first ring of security.

After years of turmoil and protests that toppled two presidents, hope for change fuelled the festive atmosphere.

"There is so much poverty in Bolivia and before there was not much chance of change," said La Paz engineering student Juan Jimachi. "Even the rich people support Evo. He cannot betray us because he is one of us."

Despite centuries of oppression, only in recent years has, Bolivia's indigenous majority, made up mainly of Aymara, Quechua and Guarani nations, organised itself politically.

Morales rose to prominence among the indigenous with his coca growers' protests against a U.S-funded war on drugs and eradication of the coca crop, the raw material used to make cocaine.

In the 18th century during Spain's colonial rule of mineral-rich Bolivia, a defeated Aymara leader, Tupac Katari, predicted: "You only kill me, but I will return and I will be millions."

But the "original" citizens, and even Morales himself, are amazed that Tupac Katari's prophecy has come true.

"What we are seeing now is something that we never could have imagined," said Waldo Wilcarani, director of the brass band for the city of Oruro in which Morales used to play the trumpet.

Who remembers ancient India's scientific wealth?

Who remembers ancient India's scientific wealth?
By Md. Vazeeruddin - Syndicate Features

Sessions of Indian Science Congress are held with monotonous regularity at fixed periodicity. Eminent persons use them to think aloud on what breakthroughs India needs to achieve. For instance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just told such a session that India should aim at a second Green Revolution. That was a laudable sentiment. But is it not the duty of the notables to use such sessions to tell the masses what ancient India had achieved in the field of science? Is Indian heritage only spiritual and cultural, and not scientific? On the contrary, it is at least as scientific as it is spiritual or cultural. It is, however, true that any claim that India's scientific heritage is as great as its spiritual and cultural heritage may baffle many Indians because we have for decades, if not centuries, believed that science is the West's contribution to humanity while India made the world aware of, and prize, cultural and moral values. That is the reason why we talk day in and day out of our spiritual and cultural heritage but seldom, if ever, of our scientific heritage. Do we have any? Not many know the true answer. In the book "Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham", edited by Mikulas Teich and Robert Young, Dr Rahman, "speaking for India", convincingly exploded the myth that science and technology were essentially European. The Director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies called for co-ordination among various agencies for the allocation of funds for the promotion of research into the history and philosophy of science in India. Inaugurating in Delhi a meeting of experts on "approach and logistics of supporting research into history and philosophy in India", Dr Ashok Jain said that critical studies in the historical and philosophical contexts of science and technology were vital for the sustenance of an innovative tradition. Research in this area is not only of cultural and academic significance but is responsible also for bringing to life the "foundational aspect of science" which is vital for the development of theoretical science. Unfortunately, a meeting, jointly organized by the Institute and the National Commission on History and Philosophy of Science, went more or less unnoticed by the public; understandably because the view is gaining ever-increasing acceptance that interest in the history of science is a sign of failing powers. Mercifully, however, medical practitioners who are usually enthralled by the history of medicine do not hold this low opinion. The possible reason is that physicians and surgeons, like all who are executants rather than theorists, are great hero-worshippers, and hero-worship is a great incentive to the study of historical records. What, anyway, is the Indian science whose history needs to be known? Take, for instance, zinc. Europe learnt to produce it in 1746, but it was distilled in India more than 2,000 years ago through the use of a highly sophisticated pyro-technology. Distillation of this metal in India was brought to light through a series of nearly intact structural remains of ancient Indian zinc distillation furnaces at Zawar near Udaipur in Rajasthan. In late 17th century zinc was imported in small quantities from the East and used in the production of brass. After all, before the advent of present-day high-pressure technology, zinc had inevitably to be produced as a vapour because of the vast difficulties in its distillation process at Bristol in Britain in 1747. The discoveries at Zawar nevertheless prove that Indians knew the process some 2,000 years ago. Or consider astronomy. According to Dr B.G.Sidhartha, Director of the B.M. Birla Planetarium at Hyderabad, Rig Vedic authors had already discovered the spherecity of the Earth and established the heliocentric (Sun-cantered) theory much before Copernicus. The Rig Veda, according to him, is the oldest textbook on modern astronomy. As such, its seers were scientists in the modern sense. Yet they deliberately concealed this knowledge in hymns, probably because the subject was the preserve of priests. In the hymns themselves, however, can be found through new interpretations the information that light is composed of seven colours, a discovery attributed by modern science to Newton. Thus, when Indra lets loose his seven rivers, it means the splitting of sunlight. Therefore, the rainbow is called "Indradhanush" in the Atharveda. Three ancient astronomers, the "Ribhus", were the first to establish that the Earth was round and that Mercury and Venus revolved round the Sun. But these sacred texts came down from father to son and thus lost their form and structure till they were lost by about 1400 B.C. The computer is the reigning fad today and, therefore, India's scientific achievements of the past, some argue, pale into insignificance. But were our ancient scientists totally ignorant of what has developed into the computer? Aryabhata, the ancient Indian mathematician, it is true, had no computer, but some of the techniques that he developed were precisely the ones used in solving problems with today's computer. What is more, computer designers in the West are now studying the works of ancient Indian mathematicians to learn a thing or two about writing software. Aryabhata's algorithm, called "kuttaka" and meant to solve linear intermediate equations, has been found by the West to be extremely efficient computationally. Similarly, the method of Brahmagouta, Jayadeva and Bhaskara-II (rediscovered in Europe 1000 years later) was "optimum in minimizing the number of steps for solving a problem". Dr Rick Briggs, an American computer engineer, in a paper published in the 1985 issue of "Artificial Intelligence", said that ancient Indians had developed a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit "in a manner that is identical not only in essence but also in form with the current work of artificial intelligence". According to him, "Sanskrit grammarians had already found a way of solving what is perhaps the most important problem in computer science—natural language understanding and machine translation". Now take physics. Dr Erwin Schrodinger, in an essay, "Seek For The Road", written in 1925, said that science, like Vedantic philosophy, used analogy to comprehend phenomena, as logic had its own limitations and left the scientist in the lurch after taking him up to a certain point. Dr Schrodinger, who won the Nobel Prize for his wave equation that placed the revolutionary quantum concept (as opposed to the Newtonian mechanistic interpretation) on a firm scientific basis, found support for Vedanta in the new physics with its element of indeterminism and idea of "collapse of the wave function", mathematical entity to describe nature for no discernible physical reason. The most important link between science and the Sastras is an uncompromising logical attitude to everything. According to Prof. T.S.Shankara, who took up "sanyas" and became Swami Parmananda Bharati after teaching physics for 15 years in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai, some basic concepts of modern-day physics are found in the Sastras. For example, the concept of relativity is to be found in them. Basic ideas of relative velocity (velocity not being absolute but only relative) are extensively referred to by Shankaracharya, quoting the Vedas. The Brahmashastras contain a profound discussion on the same subject. According to Swamiji, "if only some of our students had known this, one of them could have developed Einstein's theory of relativity much before it was done. Pithy statements in the Sastras can help our scientists make significant contributions". Or consider what the eminent nuclear physicist D.S.Kothari has to say. In a prestigious lecture on "Science and Values" delivered at the Indian National Science Academy on the concluding day of its golden jubilee celebrations, he claimed that the view of the universe provided by physics proclaimed the moral insight of philosophy. "Plank's constant, which explains movement of electrons at various levels of energy, does lead to the moral conclusion that in practicing truth lies immortality as stated in the Rig Veda," he explained. "Plank's constant has a message that either we hang together or will be destroyed together," he said, and referred to the Rig Vedic invocation to the Sun that stressed the wisdom of practicing truth. How can we lament lack of national pride in Indians without first acquainting them with the country's phenomenal scientific achievements in the dim distant past?

http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=2978

Hindu Civilization is 7000 year old

http://www.tinyurl.com/8wx5e

Older civilisation than Indus found

Vadodara, Jan 21: Recent excavations in parts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Pakistan have made the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) believe that a developed civilization possibly existed in the region in the 6th millennium BC, assumed to be older than the Indus valley civilisation. According to ASI Director Dr B R Mani, the civilisation, believed to be much older than the Indus civilisation of the second and third millennium BC, stretched from Iran in the west to North Bengal in the east. Dr Mani, who is here to attend a two-day international seminar on 'Magan (the present Oman) and Indus civilisation,' said till now the Indus and Harappan were considered to be amongst the world's earliest civilizations, but the relicts found during the recent excavations provided some evidence regarding existance of about 7,000-year-old civilization. ''Excavations at Lahuradeva site in Uttar Pradesh, Mehergadh in Pakistan and Haryana have led to recovery of pottery, cultivated rice and other artefacts dating back to that period,'' the ASI director said, adding that further research and excavations were on not only by the ASI but also by concerned state agencies and different universities. Bureau Report

Happy new year! (and my usual rumblings)

What would it take a Hindu New year be celebrated like this?

• When the power of the nation (China) is behind it, Google (or USA or anyone for that matter) would obviously be conscious of its culture (in this case Chinese New year)
• If I remember right, last year, President Bush avoided attending Diwali get-together, but on the same day evening, he attended a Islamic holiday party. I read somewhere the comment was - Hindus do not constitute a state (governing country). We, as Hindus typically, would attribute to his (Bush's) ignorance and move on. So be it. But, we have something to note though - Strength matters (including numbers)
• May this year of Dog teach us something!
• Now, please check out Google's greetings!

PS: Please do not forget to check out the appeal on http://www.hinduyuva.org

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Who are opposing the Hindu initiative to end discrimination in California textbooks?

http://www.indiapost.com/members/story.php?story_id=5264

 

Many Hindu American parents have been dismayed by the negative and caricaturist description of our heritage that our school children in the United States are subjected to. A few Hindu organizations such as the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) and the Vedic Foundation (VF), as well as many individual Hindus, have been working with the California Department of Education (CDE) to end the derogatory and discriminatory portrayal of Hinduism in textbooks.

Other ancient traditions such as Jainism are also ignored in textbooks. HEF has received letters of support from Jain groups, as well as Hindu American organizations representing immigrants from Nepal and the Carribbean. More than 100 world-class scholars of archaeology, history and academic study of religion have written to CDE in support of HEF/VF efforts.

A group of academics led by Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard, has been opposing these reasonable changes. Interestingly, Witzel's group admitted that they were unaware of the nature of the proposed changes when they wrote their protest letter to CDE on November 7, 2005'.

Who are they, and why did they oppose the changes? Steve Farmer, a non specialist who does not understand a single Indic language or genre of texts, initiated Witzel's petition, on which many Marxist ideologues signed. It seems that Michael Witzel, who sent the petition on behalf its signatories, has called Hindus immigrant to the USA, "lost or abandoned people." Reports also indicate that he has made fun of the most sacred Hindu chants such as "Om." Witzel indulged in clandestine activism, and urged his cosignatories to mobilize opposition to the Hindu initiative through fringe ultra-left Indian or South Asian groups in the United States.

Lars Martin Fosse, a cosignatory on Witzel's petition and writing on behalf of Witzel's petitioners, appealed to fundamentalist Christian missionaries and alleged Khalistanis to mobilize volunteers to oppose the Hindu initiative. Sikhs, who are a peace-loving, hard-working and enterprising community, have been rightly upset that textbooks that deal with medieval history ignore Sikhism.

During their subsequent intervention at the CDE, Witzel's group argued that proposed HEF/VF correction that 'Ramayana was composed before Mahabharata' (the textbook said the opposite) should be rejected because 'how does a 6th grader care which text was written first'!

When Hindu groups proposed replacing a textbook picture erroneously showing a bearded man with a skullcap with the caption 'Brahmin', Witzel's group proposed that the picture should be replaced with that of an untouchable scavenger! When HEF/VF proposed that ahistorical pictures of members of the four castes should be replaced with more accurate drawings, Witzel wrote that the existing pictures were no worse than those found in the 'Amar Chitra Katha'!

Whereas the descriptions of other religious traditions in the textbooks do not say anything about unequal treatment of slaves and women therein, Witzel wants to single out Hinduism and India for such negative treatment.

Predictably, the Witzel group has received strong support from Indian communists who have always borne an animus for Hindus. The very first articles by Nalini Taneja favoring his stance came out in the online newspaper of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Further articles by Anjana Chatterjee, an Indian leftist in United States, appeared in some Leftist online magazines, as did articles by Vijay Prasad, founder of the Forum of Inquilabi Leftists (FOIL).

The online blitz was carried out by FOSA ('Friends of South Asia'), a front of FOIL. These articles did not have much academic or substantive content, and indulged in reckless calumny by association, even insinuating that the HEF and VF were somehow linked to the murder of 1000 Muslims in Gujarat! Prasad's article even had the conspiracy theory argument that the edits proposed by Hindu groups wanted to make India look good so that the country could attract more foreign investment.

There were shrill and abrasive appeals for campaigns against HEF/VF on lists of Indian communists residing in the US, followed by letter writing to Indian American newspapers. Surprisingly, FOSA did not attack edits of the Islamic community, as if Islam is not a 'South Asian' religion practiced in South Asia. These articles alleged that HEF/VF were male chauvinist, forgetting that a good chunk of the advisors and coordinators of these organizations were women.

All kinds of abuses in their standard lexicon ('fascists', casteists, Hindu nationalists, Nazis etc.) were hurled without any attempt to understand the issues academically. Another conspiracy theory stated by Leftists was that HEF/VF wanted to exclude the Aryan Invasion

Theory from textbooks because they wanted to declare that Hinduism alone is indigenous to India and all other faiths are foreign!

These same people argue that Hinduism was constructed in 19th century by the British. How is it possible simultaneously that Aryans brought Hinduism into India in 1500 BCE, and then the British invented Hinduism out of nothing 3000 years later?

A new twist in this controversy is the recent involvement of 'Dalit' groups, who showed up in strength at the Board office in Sacramento on January 12, 2006. They protested the edit that asked for exclusion of the word 'Dalit' from one of the eight textbooks. It seems that 'Dalit' word means "broken/oppressed" which might have a demeaning impact on any student of referred castes. The word 'Dalit' is being used only after 1950s that too mainly in one section of India while word 'Harijan' was most commonly used by Mahatma Gandhi in 20th century. Even Kabir used the same word few hundred of years back.

In modern India, the Government of India uses "scheduled caste" while popular political party covering these castes uses "Bahujan Samaj". Most importantly, the textbooks dealt with Hinduism and India before 600 AD, in this ancient period, untouchability was anyway a rare phenomenon according to standard scholarly works.

Moreover, ancient Buddhist texts also seemed to include similar treatment of Chandalas in ancient India, and true egalitarianism was absent in other religions as well. Therefore it was unfair to single out Hinduism. However, Witzel group and the Indian American Leftists played the 'Dalit' card, further muddying the situation to no one's benefit. Some reports indicate that many of the participants who showed up at the Board meeting might not be Hindu Dalits.

Lastly, some members of the Indian Muslim community (such as Khalid Azam of the Indian Muslim Council) have stepped in the fray although Islam was not present in ancient India. They justify their role on the pretext that they are supporting Dalits, and because they are concerned at the 'Hindutva' nature of the edits proposed by HEF/VF. Needless to say, their participation is only vitiating the relationships between Hindus and Muslims in the United States.

The reality is that HEF/VF have only one concern, that impressionable sixth-grade school-going children of CA can use factually and historically accurate education materials that also conform to the CA State Law [Education Code 60044(a) and Subsection (b)], the "Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Content (2000 Edition):

"1. Adverse Reflection. No religious belief or practice may be held up to ridicule and no religious group may be portrayed as inferior."
2. Indoctrination. Any explanation or description of a religious belief or practice should be present in a manner that does not encourage or discourage belief or indoctrinate the student in any particular religious belief."

How will an excessively negative presentation of India and Hinduism help any student? It could only hinder the psychological development of Indian American and Hindu American children because their classmates will not help notice that only Hinduism has been depicted negatively and other faiths have been not. So Hindu parents appealed to various parties opposed to these edits to consider the welfare of little children, and not make them the battleground of their divisive politics imported from India.

In contrast to Hindu changes, the 500 changes of the Jewish community and a hundred changes proposed by the Muslims were accepted in toto by everyone without a single protest. But as many as 58 of the modest 95 odd Hindu group proposed edits were opposed by the same people. Why? Are Hindus children of a lesser 'god'? Why is that that 'scholars' who have never acted constructively in improving the coverage of India and Hinduism in textbooks are now trying to 'foil' constructive maiden attempts by HEF/VF? How come anti-Hinduism is common in all these groups?

Important Links

• HEF Press Release Dec 12

• Times Of India: Jan 17, 2006: Indian history books raise storm in California

• S. Gurumurthy(Dec 29): Yes, 'secular' US seems kinder to Hindus than 'secular' India

• Rediff.com:(Dec29) Suhag Shukla: 'I am not for rewriting Hinduism'

• Sulekha Blog: Karthik: CA Textbook Trial

• Prof. Ramesh Rao: Whose religion is it anyway?

• Indian Express: CBE to revise Hindu Texts

• Scholarship of Equine Posteriors

• Vishal Agarwal: Romila Thapar Defends the Aryan Invasion Theory!

• Dr. Kalyanraman: Harvard professor launches anti-Hindu Crusade

• Dr. Yvette Rosser to India West: Stereotypes, Errors In Calif. Textbooks

• India Herald: Hindu Activists partially succeeds

• Jewish News: Textbook rejected for anti-Jewish bias

• Jewish News: California Textbooks Remove Anti-Jewish Claims

• Dr. Alex Alexander: Indian Identity in American Schools

• Sandhya Jain(Dec25): Diaspora depressed over deception

My Take

I support efforts of Hindu Education Foundation and Vedic Foundation to correct the mistakes in CA Textbooks...

More later...