The Indic Civilization is in the process of repair after grevious damage some of it self inflicted. What has been done for 1000 years cannot be undone in 50.In the process of this decay we have forgotten elementary things like reading ,writing ,decency towards fellow human beings ,maryaada, learning to think for ourselves. We have to relearn basic skills and learn to crawl before we run again all this takes time. This is not an excuse and as i said some of it is self inflicted.Instead of focusing on what we are not focus on what we can be and what you can do to reach the goal even if it is a little. What are your goals forthe Indic civilization and what are you doing personally to achieve them .write it down and present it . You may be surprised and may inspire some of us
Very little of ancient Indian knowledge and customs have survived till date.As the present day trend goes, whatever is left of our Indian ness in behaviour may not survive another 50 years.
The downfall of intellectuals of India during the long years of Islamic rule is nothing particular of India. The same is the case of other countires of that period which came under Islamic Rule during that period.When we look around us today, we find that we are in the forefront of the fastest developing countires amongst the former colonies of the West.The entire Middle East and entire Africa were also under the colonial rule of the West. Look at the development level that majority of them achieved.We are quite ahead of almost most of them. We cannot claim that the British gave some very special treatment to us Indians.Then what is the reason for this wide desparity today.Is it that we Indians are intellectually superior humans?
Ancient India did invent/discover lot of things, from medicine, mathematics, metallurgy, architecture etc...
i think i did state already that we did invent a lot of things, that we were right up there and even ahead till about 1000 AD
The last 1000 years we slacked off and became lazy and inept. It is all our fault.
I never blamed Islam anywhere.
well you didnt ... but i blame islam for most of india's miseries, including getting colonised by the poms. even Einstein cant do much or invent, if someone went and knocked the living daylights out of him. thaats what happened to us.
Islam is merely the symptom of the problem. The root cause is decline of Hindu valor and chivalry.
how much of a reason is buddhism and the renouncement (& non-materialistic life) it propounded?? hinduism also isnt very material... on the other side, the westerners have been material and pragmatic since the days of the greeks. the romans were perhaps the most "practical" civilization in the world. the whole nordic race also has an innate propensity to shape/tame the enviornment in such a way, so as to make his own life more comfortable.
could this be the reason why they, with the exception of japan, invented all amenities??
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->on the flip side, how come the west has invented everything almost, from tangibles (cars, planes, medicine) to intangibles (democracy, courts, capitalism etc) singlehandedly??
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Beacuse of <b>paying attention to detail.</b>
This concept is repeatedly taught in the West.
because on stress on practical expetiment and observation, and not spirituality.
A man of higly developed concentration will turn out more work than a purely Intellectual man without proper concentration.
i am not talking about work output per man-hour, but on the inventive, innovative streak. we seem to lack it totally.
Indians of previous generations were lazy, inept, indisciplined and given to all kinds of irresponsible behaviour. This is the cause of our falldown.
no. thats the result .. of our fall to islam.
by the way i am sure you mean a LOT previous generation, cos when i think of previous generations first thing that comes to mind are the freedom fighters and all the leaders during the raj days...almost all of whom were brilliant, with the exception of Tintin and Snowy
Any attempt to enforce any sort of discipline is viewed as "Brahmanical imperialism" or "Ultra Orthodox Brahmanical fanatism".
what we should enforce is a culture of study-by-experiment and not by rote.
You can see the idiotic behavoiur of Indian male students in colleges.
Except for a few studious ones, the rest of them are all good for nothing loafers.
They spend their time watching movies, teasing females, flipping throught pornographic magazines etc... And a few weeks before the exam they cram in the material and pass. This is called <b>Shudra culture.</b> India is basically a Shudrasthan now.
those who dig bollywod movies, and esp those who base/model their lives on some hero of a bolly film, never ammount to much in society.
Compare them to the White students. They take their courses very seriously.
If they take up a task they do it right or they don't do it at all.
No question of half baked jobs here.
spot on about the do it right or if you cant then dont do it.
A white man knows when to work and when to play.
yes working while working, and playing while playing.
Here is Swami Sivananda on the attitude of the Indian idiots:
"Many people say that they have not got time to perform Sandhya. They have to attend several functions. This is due to their weakness and lack of good Samskaras. They do not know the glory of this divine science. <b>If they see one of their friends sitting on the banks of the river and performing Sandhya, they will begin to shout or they will play some sort of mischief."</b>
This sort of mischief mongering and taking everything as a joke is ingrained in the modern Indians.
yes due to the prevalent crappy pseudo western, cross thick bollywood cum anti values and tradition culture we have now.
Take a look at Indian movies. Any man representing some high ideals like an Orthodox Brahmana or a Keshadhari Sikh is shown as a sort of Buffon.
It is clearly the height of idiocy to show a honorable warrior like a Sikh as a sort of buffon.
Whereas a Gay looking loafer (Usually a muslim actor) is shown as the hero.
Despite his eve teasing behaviour.
aisde of providing employment to lots of not-too-smart types, i dont see very many positeves comming out of PRESENT day bollywood (was good back in the day).
How many white men do you see engaging in eve teasing?
totally different question.... they dont have to do it... cos they get more for less.
The Indic Civilization is in the process of repair after grevious damage some of it self inflicted.
if you meant buddhism and a very strict discriminatory version of caste system, then i agree.
What has been done for 1000 years cannot be undone in 50.
yes. but why did we just rot for 1000 years??? thts a long time to allow things to slide.
In the process of this decay we have forgotten elementary things like reading ,writing ,decency towards fellow human beings ,maryaada, learning to think for ourselves.
we should have had a bloody freedom, not a "bhiksha" freedom. half the problems you and mitradena mentioned would have been adressed by now. india is the only country where "pride" is a 4 letter word.
We have to relearn basic skills and learn to crawl before we run again all this takes time.
50 years is a long time in the scientific world.
trust me, i know what i am talking. and but for nehru's blind aping of soviet tactics we would have lots of inventions in the past 50 years too. indira gandhi actually tried to correct the istakes, but rajiv gandhi spoilt it all.
What are your goals forthe Indic civilization and what are you doing personally to achieve them .write it down and present it . You may be surprised and may inspire some of us
do you want a detailed answer to this???
lets just say, i started this thread for i am well aware of this problem - cause, effect and possible solutions. i was fortunate enough to learn about the main complaint of indian scientists, (from the horse's mouth, many horses), lets also say that i am very young yet, and again am fortunate enough to have met at least one guy, who has a patented product and is comming back to india soon to launch his product. i cant change things alone, but what we'd try to do, sooner or later, is to set a trend - to become an example that others will take to... so that we change the way of thinking of the entire gamut of indian techies. to have western (or japanese) kinds of outputs, we must first learn to put in their kinds fo inputs.
Very little of ancient Indian knowledge and customs have survived till date.As the present day trend goes, whatever is left of our Indian ness in behaviour may not survive another 50 years.
i am quite sure it will survive. core hindu values are making a comeback. most importantly hindu pride is making a comeback.
The downfall of intellectuals of India during the long years of Islamic rule is nothing particular of India. The same is the case of other countires of that period which came under Islamic Rule during that period.
or even other progressive civilizations that fell to non-islamic barbarians. the mayans for example, who to invented the concept of zero on their own, and who had some of the most accurate astronomy and calender..... have produced nothing ever since they got a succor punch from the spaniards. looking at metzitos today, no one will be able to surmise that they once produced the maya and aztec civilizations.
When we look around us today, we find that we are in the forefront of the fastest developing countires amongst the former colonies of the West.
economically developping yes....but innovative???
how many patents has india taken??
texas instruments in bangalore, using the same indians, have taken more patents last year than all of india. they have the right method, which we totally lack.
The entire Middle East and entire Africa were also under the colonial rule of the West.
lets not flatter ourselves just cos we are better than africans and arabs.
Look at the development level that majority of them achieved.We are quite ahead of almost most of them. We cannot claim that the British gave some very special treatment to us Indians.Then what is the reason for this wide desparity today.Is it that we Indians are intellectually superior humans?
than arabs and afriacans?? yes.
as innovative and ingenious as japanese and nordics??
afraid not.
sarabhai's and j.c. bose are few and far between. but stiil thats not the real problem, the quality of indians. the real problem is the quality (the lack of it) of the indian system and the "rift' between the research and corporate entities.
but let me get this thread back on track..... WHAT DOES INDIA OWE TO THE WEST
??
WE CANT USE WESTERN INVENTED TRAINS, PLANES, COMPUTERS AND LEGAL SYSTEM AND CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM and keep maintaining that all they did to us is damage and loot and that we owe them nothing.
03-07-2006, 07:09 PM (This post was last modified: 03-07-2006, 07:17 PM by agnivayu.)
No one is going to dispute the fact that the White man has come up with most inventions in the last 200 years.
On trains, let's not forget that for the $1 Trillion or so the British looted from India, Japanese or German Engineers could have been paid to build a far wider and more sophisticated train system.
I think all this talk about Indians not being inventive or Chinese as uncreative is all nonsense. For India's level of economic development, what comes out of there is expected.
In the end it's all about motivation and enthusiasm, which is what is lacking among Indians primary because of the secular socialists who took away all incentive to do anything. If someone could make money by being innovative, then they have a good reason to come up with something new. This technique is what enabled America to stay ahead of everybody else.
I think spirtuality is also very important, a lack of it leads to society becoming unfocused and demoralized (ie. Europe today).
Eastern religions are not equal to the Abrahamic religions. Abhrahamic religions are anti science, and their prophets of doom usually would threaten people with hell. In the west then, as people moved away from the Christian doctrine they actually made great progress in science.
Comparing the role of religion in the west/middle east with India or East Asia is not valid.
Separation of church and state for example does not apply to Eastern religions, where there is a natural separation and tolerance.
So called Hindu Nationalism is not religious at all, but is in fact just plain Indian Cultural Nationalism .
Also let's not get carried away glorifying a race or culture as superior just because they are ahead now. Every dog has it's day. Every Civilization has it's peaks and valleys. Last 200 years have been the height of western civilization. A lot of change is coming on the horizon, such as the large number of Scientists and Engineers in India and China. This is going to transform where most of the future technology is going to come from.
There is no way to prove or disprove if Indians could have invented trains. I think Indians do have the capability to invent trains or the warp drive in the future. If the zero wasn't discovered, how far would math and science have progressed?, there is no way to predict that.
BTW: I think Tintin was the most important contribution by Belgians.
<!--QuoteBegin-ben_ami+Mar 7 2006, 02:21 PM-->QUOTE(ben_ami @ Mar 7 2006, 02:21 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->point if to determine just how much india owes to the west.
if you say we dont owe trains to the west, then prove that we could easily have come up with trains on our own... and so on.
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a pretty good relpy, though "besides" the topic and not ON the topic.
just a few points.
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india will invent NOTHING as long as we have a culture "business by association" instead of "business by innovation".
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we cant deny that we did benifit from western medicine, science, law, technology. whether we could have come up with it had be not been kept on the mat by islam for 1000 years in secondary. i say there is just one single benifit of the colonial rule in india - it pulled us out of the grip of islam - socially, techologically, educationally, in matters of governance, law etc.
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though abrahamic religions are anti science, the people at the cuting edge of most scientific discoveries through out history have been the children of abraham.
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the tittin i refered to was not the reporter that Herge (George Remi) created, but a lawyer politician that indian masses created. I'll leave it to you to work out how many legs, the Snowy i was talking about, had.
How do you think the industrial revolution in Europe was funded for? <b>A good start to this discussion might be listing the GDPs or nations wealth of the all nations around that time.</b>
Have you read some of the writings in Dharmapal's thread and also some letters of Gandhi pertaining to education system in pre-colonial India (I know Gandhi's favorite whipping boy for all, but let's give credit where it's due). They had clearly documented with facts and figures the kind of educational system we had in India which could have been a model for rest of the world. This was before British took over and ruined it (by design).
oh i know precisely well how their many industrial revolutions was funded by the massives loots of raw materials thay made from various countries.
i also know that that didnt introduce trains to india to help us in any way, but to help themselves loot us better (ie. to get the darjeeling tea to england u need to build a railway like from darjeeling to the port of calcutta etc).
and the same applies to the education system they introduced - done to create brown sahibs.
to the IAS brigade they used - done to rule india better using indians (a technique the poms learnt well from the romans).
if we have benifitted from anything the poms brought to india, its purely by way of consequence, not because they intended it, and its becuase we turned things around (take education for example) and used it in such a way that would help us.
having said that, even though accidental and unintended, there's no denying that a dose of "western civilization" did help to pull us out of islamic dark age.
i also know and have stated here itself how india was doing well on all spheres before muslims arrived. if india never had a muslim rule then you could say that the pom rule was un-necessary from all respects. but facts are facts and we were indeed plunged into a retarded mediaval culture by muslims. someone (now in my iggy bin) once commented on this forum how Ram Mohan Roy, of all people, was an "anglicised idiot" (the poms sent a missionary to convert him. result?? 1 month later the missionary tok to hinduism. thats how anglicised ram mohan roy was) and how his contributions were totally superfluous. but thats a valid point, only if we could undo the muslims rule by some time machine. saying that india had no dowry and had lots of female education etc back in vedic days dont help... cos in year 1800 those vedic days were buried deep by 800 years of islam.
i'll maintain - the west never tried to help us knowingly in any way.
but inadvertantly, india DID benifit from "western civilization" in many ways, most of all, it pulled us out of islamc culture, islamic backwardness of society and most importantly islamic rule - ie. we were under politically elected hindus post 47, and not some nabab or badshah.. (the indian govt or the pom govt will never say those exact words - it isnt politically correct for either party.)
of course all that came for the terrible price of being reduced from the richest to the poorest country in the world, but thats a different thread.
<!--QuoteBegin-Viren+Mar 7 2006, 07:57 PM-->QUOTE(Viren @ Mar 7 2006, 07:57 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Have you read some of the writings in Dharmapal's thread and also some letters of Gandhi pertaining to education system in pre-colonial India
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no but i will do that now.
when i have free time i often read thread in thsi froum from the first post upwards.
my first choice is alwasy the AIT and colonial threads. havent got around to dharampal's writtings yet.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->having said that, even though accidental and unintended, there's no denying that a dose of "western civilization" did help to pull us out of islamic dark age.
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I'm not sure of that either. Sun was indeed setting on Mughal rule. Read Aurangazeb's dying will where he rants of those evil Hindus give him a hard time in west, east and south etc... Please read some threads in other forums here, it's all there.
mughal rule would have ended - could not last forever.
but we would not gave gotten from backward islamised countries, to a country with trains, hospitals, universities all of a sudden/overnight.
most likely some other muslim dude would have usurped power (like the slave kings of delhi killed the current king to install himself) and become shah-en-shah of a major chunk of india, or there'd be civil war between hindus and muslims or in a best case senario, we could have regrouped under a sikh-rajput-maratha combine and de-islamised india somewhat.
but we could not have modernised india from mediaval arabishness overnight.
but i'll repeat, though benifit we did from "Western civilization', ALL of that was by way of consequence and came about inadvertantly.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->but i'll repeat, though benifit we did from "Western civilization', ALL of that was by way of consequence and came about inadvertantly<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Maybe, but we do know for sure that West certainly did benefit from it's 'colonies' or 'slave labor'.
We could do all this "what-if" jousting to our hearts content, it's not getting us anywhere. For this thread to survive, direction of this thread has to change.
Maybe, but we do know for sure that West certainly did benefit from it's 'colonies' or 'slave labor'.
of that there is little doubt - about how much natural resources/money the west owes india and its other colonies. but the question was the opposite one
We could do all this "what-if" jousting to our hearts content, it's not getting us anywhere. For this thread to survive, direction of this thread has to change.
yes. so let me try and do that.
can we have the answers please - what does india owe to the west - instead of answers explaining WHY we couldnt invent much, or whether they ALSO owe us a lot by way of resources, lets just state what each of us members feel, india actually owes to western civilization.
its a pity that we use the british system in toto, viv.a.vis what they gave us. we should have a more india centric set of laws, the govt and the IAS officers should belong to the people of india and not the other way round (a legacy of raj days), we should chuck outdated victorian laws that are still used in our judiciary and get a fresh set of india centric and hindu centric law, we should have a indianised education system and not one that glorifies greece and rome alone while skimming over indian achievements etc. we should also start having product companies and develop upon the technology the poms left us with (for example, we got trains from them. why couldnt we improve upon pom trains on our own?? why do we still borrow technology from germany - as we recently did - to update our trains with the latest technology)
if we manage to do all that, then we will to a great extent manage to unburden ourselves from what the west left us with and be able to claim/say 2 things.
one that we dont owe much to the west. and two we could just as well have come up with these technological and social innovations/systems ourselves.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->We could do all this "what-if" jousting to our hearts content, it's not getting us anywhere. For this thread to survive, direction of this thread has to change.
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Right.
Let us focus on the positive things on the West and how to absorb that into our own culture.
I have listed some above. Can others here think of anything else?
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What are your goals for the Indic civilization and what are you doing personally to achieve them .write it down and present it . You may be surprised and may inspire some of us
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Kaushal,
Very good question.
I will write what my plan for a future radiant Hindu rashtra is this weekend.
hello!!! I need your help.... I'm an italian student ( so, please, forgive me if I make some mistakes <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo--> ) I need to know ( for a university research) the most famous brands of household appliance in india ( local or foreign producers)... that is, what brands do you find in supermarket or in specialized store of household appliance (dishwashers, refrigerators, washers)? and how many people possess (an approximate percentage) this kind of household appliance? and what kind of feature do people pay attention to (design, innovation technology, energetic saving etc...)??
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lastel: Seems like a business/market research kind of project. Do you have anything to share on your work till date? Please post if you do, it'll improve your chances of getting response from other forum members.
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo--> ) I need to know ( for a university research) the most famous brands of household appliance in india ( local or foreign producers)... that is, what brands do you find in supermarket or in specialized store of household appliance (dishwashers, refrigerators, washers)? and how many people possess (an approximate percentage) this kind of household appliance? and what kind of feature do people pay attention to (design, innovation technology, energetic saving etc...)?? 
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