Hinduttva (b)

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The fourth article in this series will focus on why so many in global academia, global establishment, global media, global entertainment, global culture and the global public are so scared of and opposed to eastern philosophy, Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna while simultaneously appropriating much of eastern philosophy encoded in new language without attribution.

Part of the attack against eastern philosphy and Hinduttva derives from a hatred of the West and the fact that Western philosophy draws heavily from the east in four periods. Ancient Arya history or more than 3,000 years ago. During exchange from Alexander the Great through the Roman period. During European Enlightenment Classical liberalism [in many ways a derivative of Arya Hindu Chaarvaaka Darshana], and what is now called Post Modernism [which derives from Karl Marx’s study of India]. Much of it derives from many other causes which I am trying to understand.

Note that a stand alone post is planned to discuss the above presentations by Professor Jeffery D. Long, Professor Makarand Paranjape, Professor Anantanand Rambachan, andPprofessor Sharada Sugirtharaja. Brown Cast plans to interview Professor Jeffrey D Long with respect to Sanathana Dharma and Indology. If you have any questions for him, please leave it in the comments.

The below discussion between the San Francisco academic Vamsee Juluri and Hinduism’s great atheist Kushal Mehra discusses the Hinduphobia in global academia:

[Add summary of above video]

In the above video discussion Anjali George discusses why the Indian supreme court has forced the shut down of the ancient Sabarimala temple. Sabaramila is a brain therapy facility where woman and girls send their dysfunctional boys and men to–in order to fix them. To join the program and visit Sabaramila temple boys and men had to practice a very rigorous difficult 40 day regiment. Because most males are stupid fools, their woman and girls would:

  • gently persuade them to join [who are we kidding, in some cases girls aren’t that gentle and intimidate their men and boys into joining]
  • help them complete the regiment [in eastern philosophy and Toaism intelligence (medha) is female and males aren’t that bright, which is why they needed the help of their girls and woman]
  • keep a much more luxurious temple for themselves, a woman’s Sabrimala if you will.

Eastern philosophy is a matriarchal system of the divine feminine. Woman and girls run things. Woman and girls set up a brahmacharya Ayyapa tantra (technology) facility to help improve males. Pre pubescent girls and post menopause females can conduct the 40 day regiment and visit the brain therapy facility too.

However the supreme court of India appears to have mandated that females of child bearing age, pre-pubescent girls and post menopause woman and males need to be able to visit any part of the temple they wish at will, without completing a difficult 40 day sadhana. Naturally India’s females are furious at the Indian supreme court. Many of India’s woman see this as a me too attempt to harass Ayyapa, a celibate young male. Many of India’s females also see this as an attempt to let males be lazy and not complete their 40 day Sadhana. India’s woman are also furious that the global press, global entertainment and global academia are using this incident to demonize eastern philosophy. Which is rich, considering that the east has been feminist for thousands of years before Christ. Indian females who oppose the global “woke” narrative are being demonized as proto Nazis or proto fascists or proto male misogynist supporters of the patriarchy. One eastern female being so demonized is Anjali George. Anjali George defends eastern woman from the post modernist and caucasian intelligentsia (baizuo) critique.

 

Here is another perspective on Hindutva:

This appears to attribute Hindutva to a backlash against “secularism” where secularism appears to be defined as cultural marxist post modernist woke SJW.

 

Continue reading Hinduttva (b)

India’s sugar was bitter, until her first female scientist made it sweet

Posted on Categories India, Indian Subcontinent, Nature, Romanticism, Science, X.T.MTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 21 Comments on India’s sugar was bitter, until her first female scientist made it sweet

The Untold Story of E.K. Janaki Ammal

via X

She was born in 1897 in Tellicherry, Kerala, the daughter of a high court sub-judge and one of nineteen children in a large, liberal household called Edam. Her family belonged to the Thiyya community, considered “socially backward” under the Hindu caste system. But within Edam, caste meant little. There was music, a sprawling library, a cultivated garden, and a quiet expectation of excellence.

Her sisters married. She did not. Instead, Janaki Ammal chose plants.

She trained first at Queen Mary’s and Presidency Colleges in Madras, then left colonial India in 1924 on a Barbour Scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she would become the first Indian woman to earn a doctorate in botanical science. She lived in an all-women’s dorm, smuggled a squirrel in her sari for company, and worked under renowned botanist Harley Harris Bartlett.

She returned to India and joined the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore, where she changed the course of Indian agriculture. The country’s native sugarcane was hardy but lacked sweetness; imported varieties were sweeter but weak. Janaki crossbred both into something stronger, higher-yielding, and perfectly suited for Indian soil.

The sugar in Indian chai owes its taste to her. Continue reading India’s sugar was bitter, until her first female scientist made it sweet

Israel, India, and the Rise of Defensive Asymmetry

Posted on Categories Geopolitics, India, Palestine, Gaza & Israel, Politics, Science, War & Military History, X.T.MTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 80 Comments on Israel, India, and the Rise of Defensive Asymmetry

A Pause in the Offensive:

Without getting into the ideological or emotional dimensions of current conflicts, one point stands out: both Israel and India seem quietly surprised by the defensive resilience of their adversaries.

Whether it’s Iran-Israel, India-Pakistan, or even Russia-Ukraine, a pattern is emerging: offensive campaigns that assumed rapid success are stalling against increasingly capable—and surprisingly tenacious—defensive postures.

In classic military doctrine, a successful offense requires a 3:1 superiority. That logic appears to be inverting. What we may be witnessing is a shift in the scientific and technological balance—not just in weaponry, but in surveillance, cyber, and even psychological endurance as evidenced by the Iranians on national television in this clip, IMG_0631.

Continue reading Israel, India, and the Rise of Defensive Asymmetry

“A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia

Posted on Categories Culture, Geopolitics, Politics, Race, Science, United States, X.T.MTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments on “A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia

Vice President JD Vance recently declared that America doesn’t need to “import a foreign class of servants” to remain competitive. “We did it in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “We put a man on the moon with American talent. Some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War two, but mostly by American citizens.”

The line is memorable—not for its nationalism, but for its breathtaking amnesia.

The moon landing was not the product of some closed, white-bread meritocracy. It was powered by German engineers, Jewish refugees, and immigrant scientists—many quite literally “imported.” Wernher von Braun, the face of NASA’s rocket program, was a former Nazi, repurposed by America for its Cold War dreams.

Today, the immigrant pipeline Vance sneers at includes his own in-laws—his wife’s parents, Indian-born academics. I’ve highlighted this problematic tendency before. They weren’t servants. They were scholars. Like hundreds of thousands who have powered this country’s universities, tech firms, hospitals, and labs. America doesn’t run on pedigree. It runs on brains. And yes, those brains often have accents.

America First doesn’t mean America stays first Continue reading “A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia

How precision farming in Rajasthan’s desert is turning farmers into millionaires

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In the vast aridity of Rajasthan, winter brings relief from the scorching heat, but also an eerie stillness. Life here moves to the rhythm of sand and shrub.

On early mornings of late December, Jaipur, like any large city in north India, quivers in a silvery film of pollution. As you drive past the city’s last high-rises and elevated roads, the atmosphere is an emulsion of dust and smoke. Every movement lifts the earth into the air.

Dawn comes, but not day. The dim, silver sun in an aluminum sky offers little heat or light. The fields are a naked beige after the monsoon groundnut crop has been dug up. The first green shoots of winter wheat and bajra have barely broken through the soil.

In a census of lifeforms here, trees would be an inconsequential minority. Among the trees, neem and khejri (also known as shami in most of north India and vanni, banni and jammi in the south) dominate. When I say dominate, they average two-or-three an acre.

The shami is considered a symbol of kshatriya valour. Legend says the Pandavas hid their weapons in a shami tree. Now, these trees, pruned and sheared for the season, resemble charred limbs raised in silent prayer. By summer, the khejri would yield nutritious pods called sangri used in the Rajasthani dish ker-sangri.

A wonder in the desert

Once we reach Gurha Kumawatan, a village 40km to the west of Jaipur, the transformation is startling. The fields are suddenly green and scurry with life. The raw sting of the air carries the red-wattled lapwings’ shrill and quirky ‘did-he-do-it’ call.  Towering above the farmland, giant semi-circular enclosures—like Amazon warehouses—dot the landscape.

These are polyhouses, industrial-scale farms that allow farmers to produce up to ten times more food than in open fields. Using a technique called protected farming, they require only a fraction of the water, fertilizers, and chemicals needed in traditional agriculture even on poor soil and climate that’s oppressively extreme.

Read the full story https://theplate.in/how-polyhouse-farming-in-rajasthans-desert-is-turning-farmers-into-millionaires/

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/0ClJa5ICJpY?si=ouZZtPtl-bU9thQL

From Udaipur to Okinawa riding on orange peel

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The story of twenty-five -year-old Narayan Lal Gurjar might not be out of place in Bollywood.

The playful experiments he conducted in his father’s small farm as a teenager in Kerdi, a village of 300 with 40 homes in Rajsamand district in southern Rajasthan, is the foundation for his patents and the agriscience startup incubated by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology that has attracted investments from well-known Japanese venture capital firms such as Beyond Next Ventures and MTG.

And all this before he turned 23.

Gurjar’s firm EF Polymer (EF stands for eco-friendly) headquartered in Okinawa with manufacturing plants in Udaipur makes super absorbent polymers (SAP) from orange and banana peel that has the potential to help millions of small farmers in arid and water scarce regions across the world harvest better yields.

Read the full story here 

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How a small, sleepy town in Karnataka turned into the vegetable nursery of India

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The right socio-economic conditions, availability of trainable talent, clement weather all year-round and a pioneering entrepreneur’s vision to harness it all setting up a sunrise-sector business turns a dozy place into a prosperous hub of startups. This isn’t yet another paean to Bengaluru’s status as the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India. It is the story of a place smack in the geographical centre of Karnataka, 300km to the northwest of Bengaluru called Ranebennur that’s the epicentre of India’s hybrid vegetable seed production.

Since seeds are the most critical and fundamental unit of input in agriculture, it would not be an exaggeration to call such a place ‘startup town’.

Seeds of success

Ranebennur is where India’s largescale, commercial production of hybrid vegetable seeds began in the late 1970s. Today, most major national and multinational agriculture companies from Syngenta to Pioneer to Namdhari have operations in the region. The farmers in this small region produce roughly Rs 500-crore worth of hybrid seeds of vegetables such as tomatoes, chillies, brinjal, okra and assorted gourds.

Such is the economic impact of hybrid seed companies on the local economy that it is common to find homes bearing homage to them. A seed company’s name inscribed in concrete suffixed with the word ‘krupe’ (benevolence) on the forehead of concrete homes painted in bright Vaastu-compliant colours ranging from parrot green to lemon yellow and Barbie pink isn’t a rare sight.

All of it is thanks to Manmohan Attavar a pioneering horticulture scientist and entrepreneur who must rank alongside MS Swaminathan and Verghese Kurien in the pantheon of modern India’s agriculture renaissance figures.

Manmohan Attavar, a pioneering scientist who created India’s first commercial tomato and capsicum hybrids

Read the full story here about how a pioneering Indian scientist-entrepreneur turned a non-descript town in Karnataka into India’s vegetable garden.

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MS Swaminathan: architect of Green Revolution; the greatest Indian since Gandhi

Posted on Categories Economics, History, India, ScienceTags , , , , ,

On the occasion of India’s 65th anniversary of Independence, television channels CNN-IBN (now CNN News18), History Channel, and Outlook magazine jointly ran an audience poll, steered by a panel of “experts”, to ascertain the ‘Greatest Indian after Gandhi’.

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, who passed on at the age of 98 on September 28, 2023, barely made it to a shortlist of 50, let alone the Top 10 that contained Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar in a club overwhelmingly comprising politicians.

Such lists are gimmicks anyway and a result of political partisanship, recency bias and media narratives.

In this writer’s view, with no disrespect to those of yours, there isn’t anyone more worthy of the tag ‘greatest Indian since Independence’ than Dr MS Swaminathan. He provided the bedrock of science and built institutions up from scratch with scant resources to usher in the Green Revolution. His contributions made India not just food self-sufficient, helped 800 million poor escape hunger, but also turned it into a leading producer of every major agricultural commodity.

 

Faith and food

Swaminathan can be seen as the male embodiment of Annapoorna, a form of Parvati, the Hindu deity of food and nourishment, holding in one hand a Leitz binocular research microscope and his field notes in another, instead of the pot and ladle filled with food in popular religious iconography.

That both the Goddess of nourishment and Swaminathan, the scientific guarantor of food security, are now relegated in public consciousness is a measure of India’s progress and the liberty we now have to take access to food for granted.

Read the full story here

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Book Review: The Universal History of Numbers

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A review I wrote 20 years ago.

Georges Ifrah is a Frenchman of Moroccan origin who was an ordinary schoolteacher of mathematics before his students sparked one of the great intellectual quests of our time (or, indeed, of any time). His students asked him where numbers came from? Who invented them and why? How did they take their modern form? When he tried to answer these simple questions, he found that the information found in standard textbooks was highly unsatisfactory and frequently contradictory. Not content with passing on half-truths and conjectures, Mr. Ifrah abandoned his job and embarked on a ten-year quest to uncover the history of numbers. He traveled to the four corners of the world, read thousands of books, visited hundreds of libraries and museums and asked questions of countless scholars. All this research was supported by odd jobs as delivery boy, chauffer, waiter, night watchman and so on. The result was a book called FROM ONE TO ZERO A Universal History of Numbers, (published in English translation in 1985  ). The book was a hit and brought fame and fortune and the chance to do more research. This led to a much larger book, The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, which was translated into English in 1998 (after initial publication in French in 1994) and is now available in either one or two volumes.

These books have earned Mr. Ifrah the title of “Indiana Jones of numbers” and worldwide celebrity. After reading the book, I can only add that he deserves every superlative that has been used, and more. To quote a reviewer from “The Guardian”: “Georges Ifrah is the man, and this book, quite simply, rules.” This is not just a history of numbers, it is universal history disguised as the history of numbers. Mr. Ifrah starts with the most basic questions; what kind of “counting sense” do animals possess? What do we know about the number sense of our pre-human ancestors? When we evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens, what kind of numerical ability was “hard-wired” into our brains? He presents fascinating information about the most primitive counting systems, using tally marks, fingers, body parts etc. from these simple beginnings, we move to the abstract concepts of number and its notations. The detail provided is astounding. We learn about the earliest systems of numbers used in the Middle East, India, china, and the ancient Maya etc.etc. And not only do we learn about the numbers, Mr. Ifrah slips in his humanistic, sensitive and very very detailed knowledge of history so smoothly that we hardly notice that we are learning, not just the history of numbers, but the history of mankind; told by a very fair, very balanced and deeply sympathetic observer. Continue reading Book Review: The Universal History of Numbers

The Consequences of Coronavirus

Posted on Categories Economics, Geopolitics, Politics, Science, United States23 Comments on The Consequences of Coronavirus

A couple years back, I spent my down time playing a video game called Plague Inc. The game starts off with you playing as a bacteria, parasite, fungus, or of course as a virus. Your objective is to spread yourself across the globe infecting as many humans as possible, eventually leading to the culling of all of humanity. To win, you must silently evolve and spread, careful to not alert too many humans nor remain too isolated. On the way, you cause travel bans, mass hysteria, political clashes, etc
 Sound familiar?

Screenshot of Plague Inc – A Popular Disease Simulator Game

Now, we are seeing an eerily recognizable reality to the fantasy of that game. Coronavirus-19 has become the modern plague of our times. And while it is no where near the level of Plague Inc’s apocalyptic end game, COVID-19 threatens to upend many of our society’s given structures and force the world down a new path.

Continue reading The Consequences of Coronavirus

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