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On the Indian Knowledge Systems Calendar from IIT Kharagpur
(This article also appeared in Raiot.)
My alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, has created a condensed history of Indian knowledge systems in calendar form. Lavishly produced, it is being widely shared and praised on social media. Sadly, it brims with lies, misleading ideas, and fanciful fictions. Rather than educating to inform and delight, it seeks to inflate cultural pride by taking liberties with the truth. Let me explain.Early India had many solid achievements in advancing knowledge but this calendar’s authors miss loads of them while twisting the rest into convoluted descriptions laced with Sanskrit jargon. For instance, they ignore the Harappans entirely—their fine urban planning, precision weights, hydraulic engineering, the first indoor toilets, and a relatively egalitarian society with no standing armies or temples. Instead, they begin with legendary Vedic sages. It’s as though they can’t acknowledge that the roots of any knowledge system could possibly lie earlier and outside of the holy Vedas. They also repeat the absurd claim that Sanskrit is ‘the root of the entire Indo-Aryan branch in Asia and systems of European languages.’ No, it’s not. Sanskrit is just another branch of the family, like Persian and Greek.
5 comments on On the Indian Knowledge Systems Calendar from IIT Kharagpur
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Cargo
(A short story, first published in Write & Beyond)
“I re-read your letter concerning your great-great-grandmother, ” Sam said. He was standing, tall and slender and aged, his balding pate gleaming white under the museum-style track-lighting that hung above him. But he moved with a gentle grace as he bent over and placed a yellowed logbook upon his rosewood desk. It was a cargo manifest from a ship called the Good Grace , which had been owned and captained by his great-grandfather, Samuel Collins. Each page of the slim ledger was encased in a plastic sleeve, which he turned delicately. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find what you’re looking for in here. But let me just see if I can locate the right volume, and then you’re welcome to take a look.”“My old grandma remembered her, the stories she told.” Keisha said. Her face was serious but not sad as she spoke, peering sideways at the high, teak bookshelves surrounding her. “But it took a lot of digging to learn the name of the ship. ”
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Our Moment on Earth
[The seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobile, to shareholders in 2015
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For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness. -
Modern Myths of Human Power
[The sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
“The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW Bush to international diplomats at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992
“Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to the house of Hades.” —Thanatos to Apollo in a scene from Alcestis by Euripides, 5th Century BCE
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Talk Less, Work More
On India’s troubled relationship with democratic values. (First published in The Baffler.)
Sometime after midnight on June 25, 1975, over six hundred political leaders, social activists, and trade unionists in India were rudely awakened by knocks on their doors. By dawn, they had been placed behind bars for inciting “internal disturbance.” In parallel, the government shut off electricity to newspaper offices, blocking their next day’s editions.“The President has proclaimed the Emergency,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in a surprise broadcast the next morning on All India Radio. “This is nothing to panic about.” The previous night, she had made a bleary-eyed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed trigger the Emergency provision in Article 352 of India’s constitution, which allowed her to postpone elections and suspend most fundamental rights, including those to speech, assembly, association, and movement. With the stroke of a pen, Gandhi had effectively dismantled India’s democratic infrastructure, concentrating dictatorial power in herself. Total press censorship was imposed, and foreign journalists who did not toe the line were summarily expelled, including stringers with the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. On June 28, someone snuck a clever obituary into the Bombay edition of The Times of India: “D’Ocracy—D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26th June.”
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Lost and Found in Eden
[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.
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Tales From a Changing World
[The fourth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Tabea Bakeua lives in Kiribati, a North Pacific atoll nation. Her country is likely to be the first to disappear completely under the rising seas within a few decades. Asked by foreign documentary filmmakers if she “believes” in climate change, Bakeua considers and tells them, “I have seen climate change, the consequences of climate change. But I don’t believe it as a religious person. There’s a thing in the Bible, where they say that god sends this person to tell all the people that there will be no more floods. So I am still believing in that.” She smiles, self-consciously, as she continues. “And the reason why I am still believing in that is because I’m afraid. And I don’t know how to get all my fifty or sixty family members away from here.” She’s still smiling as tears fill her eyes. “That’s why I’m afraid. But I’m putting it behind me because I just don’t know what to do.” She turns, apologetically, to wipe away her tears. [from “The Tropical Paradise Being Swallowed By The Pacific” by Journeyman Pictures]***
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Notes from the SV Underground
During my 20+ years in Silicon Valley and since, I’ve often pondered the impact of the Internet on social life. As an exploration of this for a broad audience, I think The Social Dilemma is excellent. It captures, if a bit luridly, the largely amoral nature of the hyper-capitalist creativity of Silicon Valley—and its bad consequences. Watch it!Technology, says the film, ought to be a tool that serves us. But interactive social media works differently from its earlier “broadcast” counterparts. It streams 24×7 personalized news, opinion, gossip, ads, propaganda, pop culture—all competing for our attention. The film shows how we pay for it, how it spies and uses algorithmic wizardry to mine our tastes and behaviors without our consent, how it hacks our attention span and exploits our psychology to benefit private and state interests, how it further polarizes and divides us. It artfully manipulates us with dopamine hits and facilitates the spread of fake news like never before. All this, argues the film, harms mental health and raises social strife. We’ve ceded too much privacy and power to a few tech corporations that are de facto monopolies, whose understanding of us is “the product” that’s monetized—as part of “surveillance capitalism”. It’s a Faustian bargain, the film suggests, and calls for sensible regulation before things get much worse. You may not agree with all of the opinions in the film but it’ll make you think.
Anyhow, today is one year since my first novel appeared in the world. Among its themes is the culture and inner life of Silicon Valley, revealed via office events and interactions between the protagonist, Ved, and his coworkers. The Social Dilemma reminded me of those parts, so to mark its first anniversary, I’ve published below one such excerpt from my novel. Go buy it for juicier bits about a 36-year-old who, in an era after the dot-com crash and 9/11, stumbles and ripens through messy experiences in sex, love, work, family, friendship, and cultural belonging. I should add that the novel is a story drawn from life, not a story of my life. Full disclosure: it has dopamine hits galore!
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Of Wanderers and Nomads
(The third in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.)
At the beginning of our story—paraphrased from an origin story remembered by a Cree elder—two figures are walking along the clouds. They’ve been walking long and far. Looking down through the spaces between the clouds, they spy a beautiful, green landscape, rich and inviting. They long to go down to this land, but they don’t know how to get down from the clouds. So the two keep walking. When at last they see a speck on the horizon, in the far distance, they walk toward it. The speck grows, looming larger than they are as they get nearer. When the two look up at it, it looks back down at them—it’s Great Spider.The people tell Great Spider how much they wish to climb down from the clouds and inhabit the land below, and they ask him for his help. So Great Spider begins to weave a web. He weaves and weaves and weaves, until he’s woven a boat. The two climb into the boat with Great Spider’s web still attached, and Great Spider lowers it down from the clouds. Despite his care, the boat rocks and sways precariously. After a long and harrowing downward journey, the boat ends up stuck in the top of a huge tree.
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A Story of Fire and Ice
(The second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The first part is here.)
When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town.So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares.
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A Day of Shame
A double whammy day: a year of Kashmir in chains and a vulgar display of majoritarian pride in Ayodhya. Today, it’s worth listening to Baba Laldas, the former priest at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, on the motivations behind the Ram temple movement and its leaders. This is an excerpt from the documentary, Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992) by Anand Patwardhan, now on YouTube. Laldas spoke openly against Advani’s rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri masjid. He was shot dead within a year and the case remains unsolved.
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Caste and the Delusion of “Merit” in Indian Higher Education
(This essay first appeared in The Caravan, Aug 2020, where it has received many comments. Its full text is also available on Magster.)
The great engineers of medieval India were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces.
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Happy Childfree Day!
Today, August 1, is International Childfree Day, one of my favorite marked days of the year. Today I celebrate my early decision to never have children—one of the greatest decisions of my life—among my surest, bestest, zero-regret life choices. I feel like I dodged a bullet!I like kids as people, but on the rare occasion I’ve tried to imagine life with my own kids, it has felt like a horror movie that might leave me screaming and panting. Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. 😊 Perhaps I simply had a weak instinct for fatherhood. I can’t remember ever wanting it; it seemed like a bad deal. Were I religious, I’d thank god every day for saving me from a life of far more angst, suffering, and prayers—and, I reckon, not enough compensatory joy. I’m thankful for life’s countless miracles of non-birth and its precious unbundled love. 😀 And I’m lucky to have an amazing life partner whose beliefs and values align with mine—a rare gift, without which the trials of parenthood, too, are far worse.
To younger folk in two minds about having children, especially in the nauseatingly baby-obsessed culture of India, I assure you that going childfree can be a perfectly wonderful, fulfilling and wholesome way of life. Don’t let social pressure—led by unimaginative family and friends lost in the quicksand of conformity—risk ruining your life. Don’t make babies because you’re expected to, or out of boredom, or to mask marital problems. Don’t live someone else’s dream for you. Unlike many other decisions, entering parenthood is non-reversible and could well be your one-way ticket to far more misery than joy—witness the legions of parents mired in toxic spousal relationships, shrunken horizons and mindless drudgery. But if it’s then fair to say that parenthood is not right for everyone, the flip side holds too: being childfree is not for everyone either. So think hard, very hard!
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What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather
(The first in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily.)
In 1997, I was living on Ambae, a tiny, tropical island in the western South Pacific. Rugged, jungle-draped, steamy, volcanic Ambae belongs to Vanuatu, an archipelago nation stretching some 540 miles roughly between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There, under corrugated tin roofs, in the cinderblock classrooms of a small, residential school, I taught science to middle- and high-schoolers as a Peace Corps volunteer.
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Satire by Pushpa Jijji
I recently discovered Pushpa Jijji (Cheshta Saxena in real life), a talented satirist who performs mostly in Bundeli. I was especially charmed by her use of Bundeli language that I often heard growing up in Gwalior (Hindi speakers should get most of it). She has been putting out short videos on YouTube in which she pokes fun at Indian patriarchy, politics, and, lately, their interface with the pandemic (no subtitles). As with most good satire, the laughs lie uncomfortably close to a substrate of grim realities.
If you like the episode below, check out a few others I liked: one, two, three, four, or visit her YouTube Channel.
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The Threat of Covid-19 in India
How to assess the threat of Covid-19 in India? How much fear is justified and how much is overblown? How to think about future policies? Some thoughts below.About 27,000 people die every day in India, including all causes of death combined (0.73% of the population annually). These can be classified into three categories:
(1) About 25%, or 6,750 deaths, are from communicable (infectious) diseases like TB, HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Flu, Diarrhoeal and other respiratory or parasitic diseases.
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Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People
(First published in The Baffler)
The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.
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A California Story | Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley: A Novel by Namit Arora
I’ve done it, friends. I’ve written a novel and it’s out today! 🙂
It’s available in two editions: A California Story in the United States from Adelaide Books, and Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley in India from Speaking Tiger Books. I thank both publishers for betting on me. Extra thanks to Speaking Tiger for their professionalism and the love and care they invested in their edition.
This novel has been in the works, off and on, for over a decade, and I’m delighted to see it in print. Today I can even partly forget all the trials and tribulations en route (what follies and conceits kept me going, I wonder).
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Inside an Indian Family
This essay first appeared in White Wall Review.My grandmother was nine years old when she married my seventeen-year-old grandfather, who was just completing his university studies in South India. They were wed in an Andhran village surrounded by jungle, where tigers still roamed. The pair had never before laid eyes on each other. Nor would they meet again for several years afterwards.
My grandmother, whom I called Avva, remained at home with her own parents after her wedding rites, but she was immediately subject to the dictates of her in-laws, who plainly intended to enforce her subservience: Avva was removed from school, where she attended the third standard. She was denied her violin, which she loved learning to play. She was forbidden to wear black, her favorite color, because her husband didn’t like it. Before she even knew him, Avva’s horizons were darkened by her husband’s shadow, which would follow her for the rest of her life.
Categories: Biography -
What Is Climate Catastrophe?
The changing concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas.The looming catastrophe of climate change is not only about the increasing frequency of natural disasters that we already see causing hardship and economic stress to communities. The worst catastrophe is not even the horror that will befall more and more people over the coming decades as their food, homes, livelihoods, and security are eliminated by these disasters and the uncertainties that follow in their wake. Most of us are unaware that there are already millions of people displaced by climatic factors—droughts, storms, floods, desertification, sea-level rise, heat, and fire—across the world. Within the next decade already, the UN estimates that there will be tens of millions of climate refugees looking for food, shelter, and safety. This will affect geopolitics, as we’ve already seen. This will spawn untold scenes of humanitarian disaster as famine, disease, and violence propagate. But perhaps 20 or 30 or even 50 million refugees are something the world can deal with, a hardship from which our systems can eventually bounce back.
However, if we do not shift our present course and take RADICAL action to eliminate fossil fuels and restructure our ways of life on this planet as quickly as humanly possible, we are looking at a future where more than a billion refugees are expected to accrue over the coming decades. It’s difficult to see how such a situation would NOT spell the collapse of modern human civilization. This is the ultimate catastrophe climate scientists are urging us to act to avoid.To avoid this catastrophe, we must prepare ourselves to reimagine how we live upon this planet—our energy systems, our food systems, our urban infrastructures, our politics, and everything in between. People are understandably resistant to this idea. It requires a commitment to chart an unknown path for humanity, fraught with uncertainty, and to do it collectively with people from all walks of life, even those we may consider our enemies. But if we do NOT accept this and do not do our best to adjust ourselves and our civilizations to mitigate the worst ravages of climate change—still yet to come—we will face not only the sincerely difficult task of demanding the best of ourselves, not only the genuine risks of exploring unfamiliar ideas and directions for innovation, but also the near certainty of total collapse, much sooner than most of us are willing to imagine: we will feel the shift in our own lifetimes; our children will struggle in a rapidly devolving world as they reach middle age; our grandchildren will bear the brunt of this catastrophic failure. This is if we continue on our present course of denial and inaction.What can you do? If you live in even a moderately functioning democracy, the most important thing you can do is to put your efforts toward empowering leaders who will suitably address the emergency, enact policies that begin the needed transitions of our infrastructures and business practices, and hold the responsible bodies accountable for positive change. In other words: VOTE for climate-conscious candidates. Learn what you can. Teach what you can. Make noise.
