It was the philosopher Santayana who said, “Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it". What about those who never bothered about their own history? They will do much worse than repeating or reliving it; they will tread the paths tried out and abandoned by their predecessors. India and Indians are condemned to this fate because we are an ahistorical society. India’s history was not properly recorded here; and for any worthwhile facts on our own past we depended chiefly on the writings of Arab travelers, Greek diplomats and Chinese scholars. Later of course, the Westerners hijacked Indian History and retold it the way they wanted to.
India’s past beyond the sixth century B.C. has virtually no chronology. Inextricably intertwined with popular fiction, our past is hidden in stories and folklore. Even great scholars who made remarkable contribution to human knowledge and literature are projected as jokers and imbeciles who got a sudden bolt from the blue and turned overnight to statesmen and poets. Two such cases are Chanakya and Kalidasa. Their less worthy Western counterparts are better known and celebrated all over the world not only because of the meticulous care with which the West preserves its history, but due to our own shabby ways of remembering the past. The house where Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon is preserved as a national monument in UK. On the contrary, in Ujjain where Kalidasa lived and wrote his epic poetry there is hardly any historical relic other than rivers and temples dating back to his times.
Ujjain was the city of Vikramaditya, the wise and brave emperor whose court was full of legendary luminaries including mathematicians, astronomers, men of medicine, architects, grammarians and scholars whose intellects hovered in the rarified atmosphere at the limits of human understanding. Those days the reference line of “zero longitude” (the equivalent of Greenwich line of modern times) was set through the centre of sanctum sanctorum of Maha-Kaleshwar temple under Vikramaditya’s patronage. All the wisdom and valour of the king is lost in tales of his adventures with a vampire called “Vethalam”. A matter of great surprise is that Vikramaditya (Chandragupta II of Gupta dynasty) lived in the First century AD, more than 300 years after Alexander’s campaign, and yet he is more a folklore’s mystery than a hero of history.
Alexander’s progress through the Indian subcontinent was effectively arrested by Chanakya’s defence planning . He, the mentor of Chandragupta Maurya and the virtual founder of Maurya Dynasty was a statesman par excellence whose knowledge of defence, and original contributions in Law and Economics make him the first ever political economist in the world. Instead of learning Arthasastra as part of the curriculum we try to do a character assassination of the great scholar by focusing on some of his orchestrated idiosyncrasies and stubborn personal style. Is it not a shame that every teacher of economics pays homage to Adam Smith as the first economist in the world, blissfully ignorant about Athasastra, a timeless piece of scholarship produced many centuries ago?
Treasure of Techniques washed away from this country by the currents of “Western education” includes our ability for mental arithmetic. While fairly advanced countries in the West were struggling with Roman numbers(not good for any useful purpose other than counting) during the middle Ages India had always had the decimal system from ancient times. Vedic Mathematics (now popular everywhere) tells us that Pythagoras Theorem was well known in India and had five different proofs centuries before it was known after Pythagoras (6th century B.C- Contemporary of Buddha).
Most of us do not know that one of the most popular results in Trigonometry 〖Sin〗^2 θ+〖Cos〗^2 θ=1 was enunciated by Varahamihira in 5th Century AD. He was the one who tabulated the coefficient triangle of binomial expansions (a+b)^n for positive integer values of n, known today as Pascal’s Triangle.
In fact many of us blame the British for leaving behind a bad education system in India. We do not realize their real success lied in making us believe that we had no past worth remembering and that the West was the fountainhead of all human knowledge.
Today if our students and young people in Western Universities excel in comparison with others one reason is that they have an edge over others in Mathematics. If you wish to taste the excellence of our ancestors in mental arithmetic pull out your calculator and check the values of the “Vulgar Fractions” as your friend who knows the “Sutra” writes it effortlessly on a piece of paper. You will find your calculator is dumb beyond the 8th digit while your mind can go on and on until you recognize a pattern.
1/19=0.052631578947368421 052631..
1/59=0.01694915254237288135593220338 98305084745762711864406779661 016949…
1/79=0.0126582278481 0126582…
Those who can write computer programs may try the conventional method and Vedic Method to evaluate such fractions and look at the merits of mental arithmetic.
Our schools have discarded mental arithmetic in the name of “modernization”. They teach commutativity and associativity before the child gets any clue, presumably because that is how it is done in the West. If the present is the legacy of the past the future would hold for us, what we sow today.
Post Script:
Once I bought in a US Department Store 53 dollars worth sundry things. Reluctant to carry loose change I gave a hundred dollar bill and 3 dollars asking her to return a fifty dollar bill. The teller girl didn’t understand the process and kept insisting that I had given her more than the necessary cash. Hundred dollar bill was enough. On further talking her Supervisor entered the scene, understood my demand, took all the money and entered $103 instead of 100. Balance now gets printed out as $50. There you are!!! She pulls out a 50 dollar bill and gives me, full of smile and surprise, exclaiming, “Oh, these Indians!!! Brainy, Real brainy!!!”
Would you rather, your children advance like the Americans?
India’s past beyond the sixth century B.C. has virtually no chronology. Inextricably intertwined with popular fiction, our past is hidden in stories and folklore. Even great scholars who made remarkable contribution to human knowledge and literature are projected as jokers and imbeciles who got a sudden bolt from the blue and turned overnight to statesmen and poets. Two such cases are Chanakya and Kalidasa. Their less worthy Western counterparts are better known and celebrated all over the world not only because of the meticulous care with which the West preserves its history, but due to our own shabby ways of remembering the past. The house where Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon is preserved as a national monument in UK. On the contrary, in Ujjain where Kalidasa lived and wrote his epic poetry there is hardly any historical relic other than rivers and temples dating back to his times.
Ujjain was the city of Vikramaditya, the wise and brave emperor whose court was full of legendary luminaries including mathematicians, astronomers, men of medicine, architects, grammarians and scholars whose intellects hovered in the rarified atmosphere at the limits of human understanding. Those days the reference line of “zero longitude” (the equivalent of Greenwich line of modern times) was set through the centre of sanctum sanctorum of Maha-Kaleshwar temple under Vikramaditya’s patronage. All the wisdom and valour of the king is lost in tales of his adventures with a vampire called “Vethalam”. A matter of great surprise is that Vikramaditya (Chandragupta II of Gupta dynasty) lived in the First century AD, more than 300 years after Alexander’s campaign, and yet he is more a folklore’s mystery than a hero of history.
Alexander’s progress through the Indian subcontinent was effectively arrested by Chanakya’s defence planning . He, the mentor of Chandragupta Maurya and the virtual founder of Maurya Dynasty was a statesman par excellence whose knowledge of defence, and original contributions in Law and Economics make him the first ever political economist in the world. Instead of learning Arthasastra as part of the curriculum we try to do a character assassination of the great scholar by focusing on some of his orchestrated idiosyncrasies and stubborn personal style. Is it not a shame that every teacher of economics pays homage to Adam Smith as the first economist in the world, blissfully ignorant about Athasastra, a timeless piece of scholarship produced many centuries ago?
Treasure of Techniques washed away from this country by the currents of “Western education” includes our ability for mental arithmetic. While fairly advanced countries in the West were struggling with Roman numbers(not good for any useful purpose other than counting) during the middle Ages India had always had the decimal system from ancient times. Vedic Mathematics (now popular everywhere) tells us that Pythagoras Theorem was well known in India and had five different proofs centuries before it was known after Pythagoras (6th century B.C- Contemporary of Buddha).
Most of us do not know that one of the most popular results in Trigonometry 〖Sin〗^2 θ+〖Cos〗^2 θ=1 was enunciated by Varahamihira in 5th Century AD. He was the one who tabulated the coefficient triangle of binomial expansions (a+b)^n for positive integer values of n, known today as Pascal’s Triangle.
In fact many of us blame the British for leaving behind a bad education system in India. We do not realize their real success lied in making us believe that we had no past worth remembering and that the West was the fountainhead of all human knowledge.
Today if our students and young people in Western Universities excel in comparison with others one reason is that they have an edge over others in Mathematics. If you wish to taste the excellence of our ancestors in mental arithmetic pull out your calculator and check the values of the “Vulgar Fractions” as your friend who knows the “Sutra” writes it effortlessly on a piece of paper. You will find your calculator is dumb beyond the 8th digit while your mind can go on and on until you recognize a pattern.
1/19=0.052631578947368421 052631..
1/59=0.01694915254237288135593220338 98305084745762711864406779661 016949…
1/79=0.0126582278481 0126582…
Those who can write computer programs may try the conventional method and Vedic Method to evaluate such fractions and look at the merits of mental arithmetic.
Our schools have discarded mental arithmetic in the name of “modernization”. They teach commutativity and associativity before the child gets any clue, presumably because that is how it is done in the West. If the present is the legacy of the past the future would hold for us, what we sow today.
Post Script:
Once I bought in a US Department Store 53 dollars worth sundry things. Reluctant to carry loose change I gave a hundred dollar bill and 3 dollars asking her to return a fifty dollar bill. The teller girl didn’t understand the process and kept insisting that I had given her more than the necessary cash. Hundred dollar bill was enough. On further talking her Supervisor entered the scene, understood my demand, took all the money and entered $103 instead of 100. Balance now gets printed out as $50. There you are!!! She pulls out a 50 dollar bill and gives me, full of smile and surprise, exclaiming, “Oh, these Indians!!! Brainy, Real brainy!!!”
Would you rather, your children advance like the Americans?
