Though this post starts about NS Rajarant (and hence is related to some earlier posts here) it then ends up being about the totally unrelated topic of the Ganga river. Don't know where it belongs.
vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=2970
via psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/toilets-temples-modi-development/
NSRajarant tries to pretend he's the only one who knows anything about cleaning up the environment and has to negatively insert the Vedas into his holier-than-thou statements:
Rajarant got a free pass on trying to drag in the Vedas into a topic where it wasn't even mentioned*, even though some people knew to express unease about Modi bringing in temples.
Well, I should have said the senile Rajarant got a free pass until Senthil stated:
The full text of these and other comments and the article which led to the dialogue are at the above links. Note that the psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/toilets-temples-modi-development/also hosts a powerpoint that comments appreciated.
Some things that came to mind:
* IIRC there was the DYI humanure system that some western person came up with in the late 90s/early 2000s which composts with human-waste (hence "humanure").
Don't know how eager Indians would be implementing it, but perhaps worth mentioning.
* As for Rajarant declaring "they can't be cleaned up by chanting the Vedas": don't know about the kind of wastes today, but IIRC there are indeed water purification mantras that Hindus used to chant at our Hindu Rivers, particularly the Ganga. From my limited understanding Hindus chant mantras during snaana for self-purification as well as for purification of the water they're using itself.
Of course Rajarant will declare there is nothing scientific about the Vedas/mantras, and I'm willing to agree: I'm not the one who wants to make the Vedas (or Daoist and Shinto rites that work) into science.
But fact remains - though Rajarant will never know: that mantras work (for ethnic Hindoooos).
* Another thing sort of relevant to the topic is an article that the nationalist gadget blog highlighted. The article (theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/sep/19/holy-water-faecal-matter) was by some western writer and concerned faecal matter being discovered in the "holy" springs of catholics. The western writer ludicrously compared christianised heathen springs of Europe with Ganga by declaring that Hindus merely "believed" that the Ganga was pure and so the west should accept catholics who believed European springs were "holy" water. I.e. he declared that purity and sanctity of water was a matter of "belief". Inane.
[Ganga will remain sacred no matter what. And all springs in European space of course have native Gods associated with them. E.g. we know that all the Rivers of the Greeks and Romans were manifestations of the GrecoRoman Gods, and the ancient Hellenes further recognised that all waters - even those past the Hellenistic space in unknown territory - had Gods presiding over them or were manifestations of Gods. But it's another matter to pretend that European springs are holy in any christian sense. There is nothing christian about European or any waters.
BTW, it is well known that all waters in Japanese space are manifestations of Shinto Gods. And Rivers in Daoist space are Daoist Gods. This is famous in their sacred narratives. Sometimes they're longs/dragons in both cases. Daoists and Shintos - thank the Daoist Shen and Shinto Kami for them - understand that when Hindus say that Ganga is a Goddess that Hindus really mean she is a *Goddess* and not some notion.
Oh and forgot to add that a doco or was it late night BBC news confirmed what everyone already knew: African Rivers are manifestations of certain African Gods. In the particular programme I'm referring to, an African man made the direct reference to a River in his country being a locally famous God. The context was that someone had drowned in the river and he remarked that this happened now and then, which was when he made the reference.]
Anyway, despite the western writer pleading for an equal-equal of catholic "holy water" with Ganga, Ganga water is not like springs baptised by christianism (and even today no one pretends that it is). It has a rather unique purifying property (don't know if the following contains repeats of anything else that was ever posted at IF, but not to my recollection):
1. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17134270
(npr = US national public radio?)
I think they've dubbed at least one part of this magical X-factor a microbial phage of some sort. Some organic(?) matter in the Ganga which kills the germs.
Don't know how far the west's progressed in analysing the Hindu river's properties. IIRC they were trying to reproduce the same situation with western rivers in recent years. Don't know how well they're succeeding in that either.
2. Anyway, more related stuff, the following is from 1994:
science-frontiers.com/sf094/sf094g11.htm
3. Looking up the phage stuff, found this next page which starts by repeating a lot of the above (where's the refs/credits?) - though with the added "novelty" of exclamation marks everywhere - and then mentions the 'bacterio phage':
hitxp.com/articles/science-technology/sacred-mystery-secrets-ganga-ganges/
Edited to add an example for Africans having River Gods (though this is well-known), also added in links to the rajeev2004 blog and the guardian-uk paper (and corrected a typo).
vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=2970
via psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/toilets-temples-modi-development/
NSRajarant tries to pretend he's the only one who knows anything about cleaning up the environment and has to negatively insert the Vedas into his holier-than-thou statements:
Quote:...
Cleaning up the environment beginning with better sanitation should be high on the nation's priority. Just look at the Yamuna river, or any other. We humans created the filth, not the gods. It is our job to clean it. If we have to use Western ideas clean them, so be it. They cannot be cleaned up by chanting the Vedas.
Rajarant got a free pass on trying to drag in the Vedas into a topic where it wasn't even mentioned*, even though some people knew to express unease about Modi bringing in temples.
Well, I should have said the senile Rajarant got a free pass until Senthil stated:
Quote:And this only shows the mindset of the Hindutvavadis, particularly the NRIs.. can any one have such callouse and contemptuous attitude towards vedas? and it is these people who lecture about dharma..
The full text of these and other comments and the article which led to the dialogue are at the above links. Note that the psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/toilets-temples-modi-development/also hosts a powerpoint that comments appreciated.
Some things that came to mind:
* IIRC there was the DYI humanure system that some western person came up with in the late 90s/early 2000s which composts with human-waste (hence "humanure").
Don't know how eager Indians would be implementing it, but perhaps worth mentioning.
* As for Rajarant declaring "they can't be cleaned up by chanting the Vedas": don't know about the kind of wastes today, but IIRC there are indeed water purification mantras that Hindus used to chant at our Hindu Rivers, particularly the Ganga. From my limited understanding Hindus chant mantras during snaana for self-purification as well as for purification of the water they're using itself.
Of course Rajarant will declare there is nothing scientific about the Vedas/mantras, and I'm willing to agree: I'm not the one who wants to make the Vedas (or Daoist and Shinto rites that work) into science.
But fact remains - though Rajarant will never know: that mantras work (for ethnic Hindoooos).
* Another thing sort of relevant to the topic is an article that the nationalist gadget blog highlighted. The article (theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/sep/19/holy-water-faecal-matter) was by some western writer and concerned faecal matter being discovered in the "holy" springs of catholics. The western writer ludicrously compared christianised heathen springs of Europe with Ganga by declaring that Hindus merely "believed" that the Ganga was pure and so the west should accept catholics who believed European springs were "holy" water. I.e. he declared that purity and sanctity of water was a matter of "belief". Inane.
[Ganga will remain sacred no matter what. And all springs in European space of course have native Gods associated with them. E.g. we know that all the Rivers of the Greeks and Romans were manifestations of the GrecoRoman Gods, and the ancient Hellenes further recognised that all waters - even those past the Hellenistic space in unknown territory - had Gods presiding over them or were manifestations of Gods. But it's another matter to pretend that European springs are holy in any christian sense. There is nothing christian about European or any waters.
BTW, it is well known that all waters in Japanese space are manifestations of Shinto Gods. And Rivers in Daoist space are Daoist Gods. This is famous in their sacred narratives. Sometimes they're longs/dragons in both cases. Daoists and Shintos - thank the Daoist Shen and Shinto Kami for them - understand that when Hindus say that Ganga is a Goddess that Hindus really mean she is a *Goddess* and not some notion.
Oh and forgot to add that a doco or was it late night BBC news confirmed what everyone already knew: African Rivers are manifestations of certain African Gods. In the particular programme I'm referring to, an African man made the direct reference to a River in his country being a locally famous God. The context was that someone had drowned in the river and he remarked that this happened now and then, which was when he made the reference.]
Anyway, despite the western writer pleading for an equal-equal of catholic "holy water" with Ganga, Ganga water is not like springs baptised by christianism (and even today no one pretends that it is). It has a rather unique purifying property (don't know if the following contains repeats of anything else that was ever posted at IF, but not to my recollection):
1. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17134270
(npr = US national public radio?)
Quote:Mystery Factor Gives Ganges a Clean Reputation
by Julian Crandall Hollick
December 16, 2007 1:30 PM
The fourth report in a six-part series
Hindus have always believed that water from India's Ganges River has extraordinary powers. The Indian emperor Akbar called it the "water of immortality" and always traveled with a supply. The British East India Co. used only Ganges water on its ships during the three-month journey back to England, because it stayed "sweet and fresh."
Indians have always claimed it prevents diseases, but are the claims wives' tales or do they have scientific substance?
In the fourth installment of a six-part series, independent producer Julian Crandall Hollick searched for the "mysterious X factor" that gives Ganges water its mythical reputation.
He starts his investigation looking for the water's special properties at the river's source in the Himalayas. There, wild plants, radioactive rocks, and unusually cold, fast-running water combine to form the river. But since 1854, almost all of the Ganges' water has been siphoned off for irrigation as it leaves the Himalayas.
Hollick speaks with DS Bhargava, a retired professor of hydrology, who has spent a lifetime performing experiments up and down Ganges in the plains of India. In most rivers, Bhargava says, organic material usually exhausts a river's available oxygen and starts putrefying. But in the Ganges, an unknown substance, or "X factor" that Indians refer to as a "disinfectant," acts on organic materials and bacteria and kills them. Bhargava says that the Ganges' self-purifying quality leads to oxygen levels 25 times higher than any other river in the world.
Hollick's search for a scientific explanation for the X factor leads him to a spiritual leader at an ashram and a biologist in Kanpur. But his best answer for the Ganges' mysterious substance comes from Jay Ramachandran, a molecular biologist and entrepreneur in Bangalore.
In a short science lesson, Ramachandran explains why the Ganges doesn't spread disease among the millions of Indians who bathe in it. But he can't explain why the river alone has this extraordinary ability to retain oxygen.
I think they've dubbed at least one part of this magical X-factor a microbial phage of some sort. Some organic(?) matter in the Ganga which kills the germs.
Don't know how far the west's progressed in analysing the Hindu river's properties. IIRC they were trying to reproduce the same situation with western rivers in recent years. Don't know how well they're succeeding in that either.
2. Anyway, more related stuff, the following is from 1994:
science-frontiers.com/sf094/sf094g11.htm
Quote:The Incorruptibility Of The Ganges
The Ganges is 2525 kilometers long. Along its course, 27 major towns dump 902 million liters of sewage into it each day. Added to this are all those human bodies consigned to this holy river, called the Ganga by the Indians. Despite this heavy burden of pollutants, the Ganges has for millennia been regarded as incorruptible. How can this be?
Several foreigners have recorded the effects of this river's "magical" cleansing properties:
1. Ganges water does not putrefy, even after long periods of storage. River water begins to putrefy when lack of oxygen promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria, which produce the tell-tale smell of stale water.
2. British physician, C.E. Nelson, observed that Ganga water taken from the Hooghly -- one of its dirtiest mouths -- by ships returning to England remained fresh throughout the voyage.
3. In 1896, the British physician E. Hanbury Hankin reported in the French journal Annales de l'Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes died within three hours in Ganga water, but continued to thrive in distilled water even after 48 hours.
4. A French scientist, Monsieur Herelle, was amazed to find "that only a few feet below the bodies of persons floating in the Ganga who had died of dysentery and cholera, where one would expect millions of germs, there were no germs at all.
More recently, D.S. Bhargava, an Indian environmental engineer measured the Ganges' remarkable self-cleansing properties:
"Bhargava's calculations, taken from an exhaustive three-year study of the Ganga, show that it is able to reduce BOD [biochemical oxygen demand] levels much faster than in other rivers."
Quantitatively, the Ganges seems to clean up suspended wastes 15 to 20 times faster than other rivers.
(Kalshian, Rakesh; "Ganges Has Magical Cleaning Properties," Geographic, 66:5, April 1994.)
From Science Frontiers #94, JUL-AUG 1994. 1994-2000 William R. Corliss
3. Looking up the phage stuff, found this next page which starts by repeating a lot of the above (where's the refs/credits?) - though with the added "novelty" of exclamation marks everywhere - and then mentions the 'bacterio phage':
hitxp.com/articles/science-technology/sacred-mystery-secrets-ganga-ganges/
Quote:Ganga Jal ââ¬â The Holy water of Ganga
Antibacterial Nature of Ganges Water
In 1896, E. Hanbury Hankin (a British physician) after testing the water of Ganga wrote in a paper published in the French journal Annales de IInstitut Pasteur ,
The bacterium Vibrio Cholerae which causes the deadly Cholera disease, when put into the waters of Ganga died within three hours! The same bacteria continued to thrive in distilled water even after 48 hours!
He also suggested that the water of this river and its tributary Yamuna were responsible for containing the spread of this deadly disease cholera in the region in those days!!
Water of Ganges has Anti-putrefaction properties
C.E. Nelson, another British physician noticed that, the waters of Ganga when taken even from one of its dirtiest mouths at Hooghly, by the ships returning to England, remained fresh throughout the long journey!! Normally river water begins to putrefy over a period of time due to lack of oxygen which promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria, which in turn gives rise to the smell of stale water.
How River Ganga cleans the dead bodies
In 1927, Flix dHerelle , a French microbiologist, was amazed when he saw that only a few feet below the bodies of persons floating in the Ganga who had died of dysentery and cholera, where one would expect millions of germs, there were no germs at all!
In other words, Hindus had for thousands of years rightly believed that Ganga purifies the dead bodies, which is why probably the bodies of even those who died of infectious diseases were offered to this river for purification!
Recent Research on Ganges
D.S. Bhargava, an Indian environmental engineer/professor of hydrology has spent a life time studying the amazing properties of Ganges. He measured the remarkable self cleansing ability of Ganges in an exhaustive three year study which showed that Ganges is able to reduce its biochemical oxygen demand levels much faster than other rivers! Bhargava says that the self-purifying quality of this river leads to oxygen levels that are 25 times higher than any other river in the world.The Ganges cleans up suspended wastes 15 to 20 times faster when compared to other rivers!
In a study conducted by the Malaria Research Center in New Delhi it was observes that the water from the upper reaches of Ganga did not host mosquito breeding, and also prevented mosquito breeding in any water it was added to! On the other hand, water from other rivers were shown to allow mosquito breeding!
(Refs to papers for the last would have been nice.)
Mysterious Power of Ganga Water
There are two major factors which give Ganges its unique ability.
1. The presence of Bacteriophages which gives it the anti-bacterial nature.
2. An unknown factor called the Mystery Factor, which gives this river an unusual ability to retain dissolved oxygen from the atmosphere!
Bacteriophage in Ganga Water
Bacteriophage are those viruses which kill bacteria. What a cat is to a mouse, the bacteriophage is to a bacterium. In fact what Hankin reported in 1896 about the antibacterial nature of Ganges was the first modern observation/documentation of a Bacteriophage ! It was Herelle, (who again observed the anti-bacterial nature of Ganges) who coined the term Bacteriophage (meaning bacteria eater ) for these viruses.
The high levels of oxygen in the waters of Ganga gives it the unique ability to remain fresh over a prolonged period of time. The waters of Ganga when added to other water resources in adequate amount, causes the bacteriophage in it to quickly multiply cleaning the new water resource of any bacteria present in it. Which is why the ancient Indians used to take Ganga jal back home to clean their local water resources! People practice it even today, except that most of them dont know the actual reason!
In other words, the water of river Ganga can be an alternative for using antibiotics to treat bacterial diseases! Ancient Indians who used the water of rivers like Ganga never required any antibiotics, for the very water they used was anti-bacterial in nature! This type of Bacteriophage Therapy has been suggested by many researchers, but rarely tried/tested or practised in the health industry.
In fact it was in the former Soviet Union that the most active research about using bacteriophages to treat bacterial diseases was done at the George Eliava Institute ! This research institute was co-founded by George Eliava and Felix DHerelle after DHerelle introduced Eliava to the wonderful world of Bacteriophages.
Phage Therapy Research in India
GangaGen Biotechnologies , a bio-medical research company based out of Bangalore, is now leading the alternative therapy of Bacteriophage based treatment for antibiotic resistant bacteria. It is the first firm to have developed bacteriophage based commercial products. Their first bacteriophage based product was to treat the problem of E.Coli in Cattle.
Industrial Pollution in the waters of Ganga
Having said all this, all along the course of river Ganga, today 27 major towns dump over 900 million litres of sewage/industrial waste into it every day! This nonsense should be stopped at any cost. Humans have no rights to pollute the natural resources of this planet. If we cant handle our waste, we shouldnââ¬â¢t be producing it in the first place. Rather than being an individualââ¬â¢s symbolic effort to fight pollution, it should be an enlightened mass movement of entire humanity to create non-polluting technology out of the science we know.
The very fact that almost all the technology that we possess today in the name of development and modernization is polluting, proves that the technology we have created using modern science is still primitive. It has more to do with our greed, than with science.
Edited to add an example for Africans having River Gods (though this is well-known), also added in links to the rajeev2004 blog and the guardian-uk paper (and corrected a typo).