Notes from the heart of the universe

A screenshot from a 2024 calendar came to me last week from a fervent friend with the following message India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europersquos languages she was the mother of our philosophy mother through the Arabs of much of our mathematics mother through the Buddha of the ideals embodied in Christianity mother through the village community of selfgovernment and democracy Mother India is in many ways the mother of us allNo that wasnrsquot a member of the ruling party speaking They were written by Pulitzer Prize winners Will and Ariel Durant in their book A Case For IndiaThe rest of the attached PDF calendar filemdashapparently created by a highlevel team at IIT Kharagpurmdashbristled with polysyllabic terms like temporal cycles geomorphological patterns hierarchical foundations and panuniversal spirituality I was handed a brandnew acronym IKS standing for Indian Knowledge SystemsTheir point however was clear India is has always been and will forever be the centre of the universe Jai HindIf you received this calendar what would your reaction have been Choose one1 I knew it all along2 Wow Never knew that Never knew that we were such bosses3 You really expect me to believe that bucket of sloshThe pages of the calendar are a bewildering carnival ride of spiritual geological metaphysical cosmological philosophical and religious factoids with quotations in Sanskrit and Bengali difficult to understand and for that reason impossible to challenge The calendar liberally quotes Swami Vivekananda who systematically and with humility listed Indiarsquos contributions to human knowledge and understanding The calendarrsquos lsquoscientificrsquo assertions includemdashThe Persians learnt astronomy from IndiaThe Arabs learnt about zero and mathematics from IndiaWe also invented plastic surgery interstellar space travel and nuclear fusion as proven by the detailed descriptions of obviously nuclearpowered projectiles in Indiarsquos epics The Ramayana and The MahabharataIndians are the master race Everyone descended from Indians including Vikings Native Americans Chinese and Africans Indians migrated far north and crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas The world might call them Mayans Incas Totonacs or Hopis but they all came from IndiaSanskrit is the mother of all languages and is a watereddown version of Vedic language which has existed forever and forever If in the beginning was the Word then that word was VedicZoroastrianism and Judaism were apparently born from Indiarsquos Atharva Veda Buddhism purportedly a child of Hinduism influenced Christianity The AlShaibi Traditions in Atharva Yathrib moulded Islam In brief all religions came from HinduismFinally as we are regularly reminded India is the mother of democracy We understand freedom choice selfexpression rights and civil libertiesThe word hubris comes to mind It takes a monstrously large ego to describe your corner of the world as the divinely ordained centre of the universe whence everything came into being It allows the average Indian to strut talk louder than everyone else and feel entitled arrogant and aggressive on the world stageThere are questions waiting to be askedmdashWhen did India become recognisable as a country The Indian subcontinent has existed for millennia but the political boundaries we recognise as India were only drawn just around a century ago The brutal division of this India into its Muslims and its Hindus was a colonial legacy The Indus Valley civilisation was profoundly tolerant and secular and understood secularism and the connection between faithsWhich other countries also believe that they are the catrsquos whiskers The world is full of countries who have no doubt about their superiority Americans call their nation the ldquogreatest country in the worldrdquo Their President is the selfanointed ldquoLeader of the Free worldrdquo an obsolete Cold War term that once separated capitalists from communists China almost as old as India has its own origin story no less golden Do they want world domination Irsquoll give you one guessMother Russia has no doubt that the world is meant to be theirs and that it will one daySo what India is the worldrsquos oldest civilisation extant since 6000 BCE Sanskrit is nonpareil as a language easily a metalanguage Indiarsquos ancient scientists did invent a stunning range of technologies from plastic surgery to indoor plumbing Its savants and philosophers asked questions about the universe that Western minds had never consideredBut so what That India is long gone and we are nothing like it today India then was too wise to aspire to the mere political power of ruling everyone else or proposing Hinduism as the best religion in the universe A Vivekananda quotation in the calendar accidentally captures the one thing ancient India was and modern India is emphatically notldquoI am proudrdquo Vivekananda said ldquoto belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as truerdquoWhere is that enlightened IndiaThe day before yesterday on December 30 one day before 2023 became 2024 IIT Kharagpur quietly washed its hands of the calendar that seeks to prove that India is the birthplace of practically everything in the world and that religion science and culture are actually connectedThere goes thatYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper