Hymn to India

What is the most beautiful note of music ? Nothing, the beauty of music lies only in the co-existence of notes. A thousand instruments need to sound together to produce the marvel of a symphony. That, my friend, is the secret of India.

What is the most beautiful color ? It is not blue – of a clear sky, not green – of a mango grove, not red – of a hibiscus. It is the absolute colorlessness of a ray of sunshine. Let it pass through a prism, and then you can marvel at the complete rainbow of colors. That, my friend, is the secret of India.

India is not a country. It is a dream. It is an idea – that the true liberty of man lies only in true equality, an idea to think beyond the hardened walls of custom and rigid practice, and an idea to dissolve the narrow boundaries of tribes and nations. India is an idea for mankind.

In 1947, a battered and destitute people, with only squalor and disease to claim as their properties, achieved their first victory of freedom. They did not speak a single language. They did not belong to a single race, they did not possess a single religion. But they had the audacious dream of living together as a single country. Even worse, they wanted to be a democracy – a complete democracy with universal franchise, every man and every woman sharing the dignity of equality. What has followed is now the greatest miracle in the modern history of mankind. Sixty years have passed, and the dream lives on, growing only stronger and stronger. What these people have discovered, my friend, is the ancient secret of India.

300 years earlier to this, around 1650 AD, a young prince in Delhi was compiling the first translation of the Upanishads into the Persian language. The crown prince for the richest empire in the world, a devout Muslim, and the apple of his father’s eye – Dara Shikoh observed, the only hope for the progress of the human spirit lies in the equality of religions, the equality of ideas. Thus, my friend, has he discovered the secret of India.

1800 years earlier to this, around 220 BC, a council of learned men was meeting at the behest of the emperor Ashoka – he did not call himself the greatest of the kings or as the mighty emperor, but as Devanampiya (the one loved by the gods) Piyadassi (the one who pleases every human being). Having built the Magadha empire – the mightiest in the world, Ashoka was still not satisifed. He knew he has yet to conquer a greater empire – that of his own inner self. He seeked to discover the one true religion and the council was conceived for this purpose. The council debated for a long time and finally discovered the one truth – the dignity of equality for all ideas. Thus, my friend, has the council of Ashoka discovered the secret of India.

300 years earlier to this, around 550 BC, an Acharya was holding the council for the republic of Taxila. The council was to decide if they have to provide more power to the representative, the raja, and maybe even turn into a kingdom. The Acharya decides in favour of the parishad – the council of the people. The ganarajya (republic) will have to continue, no person stands superior to the process of debate and consensus. Thus, my friend, has Taxila discovered the secret of India.

2000 years earlier to this, around 2500 BC, the council of the city of Meluha was meeting. The discussion was about the construction of a special palace for the commander of the army. No, the decision has been reached – it cannot be constructed at the expense of the common good of the society. And no, no slave labour can be employed in the city of Meluha. Thus, my friend, has the ancient Sindhu civilization discovered the secret of India. Leaving no trace of monuments marking  superiority, the Sindhu civilization shall be the first egalitarian governing system that the world has seen.

Meluha was the sister to Sumeria. Taxila was the sister to Greece. Magadha was the sister to China. Delhi was the sister to Arabia. Cities rise and cities fall. But, the spirit of India lives on. Equality of mankind lies in equality of ideas. Betrayals to this cause have only brought peril and destruction to the country – temporary eclipses in the perennial civilization. But just as the Himalayas keep enriching the waters of the river Sindhu, the people of India keep discovering their much cherished secret.

The secret of India is the secret to any civilization. Civilization flourishes only in the interchange of ideas – only in the interchange of people. People who have betrayed this principle for the devil of racism and fundamentalism have only brought sorrow and shame to their cultures.

Having said everything I wanted to say, I now conclude this blog. I hope my posts will prove informative for anyone who is interested in self discovery. Good luck and good bye.

Claimants to the Western Civilization

Fundamental Question :

If the Nordic people are the superior master race, what exactly were the purest of them (Scandinavians, Germans) doing until 1500 AD (from 3000 BC) ?

In this post, I will examine the notion of the western civilization and who deserve to claim from it.

Clash of Civlizations :

We are suffering from increasing noise by the so called defenders of western civilization. It has become fashionable to talk about the clash of civilizations – between the Western Civilization of freedom, democracy and everything that is good (read fair, goodlooking people) and the so called Islamic/Chinese Civilization of autocracy, degradation and everything that is bad (read dark, disfigured, freakish looking people). Especially after the end of the cold war, there has been an urgent need of creating a new enemy. Several people are working overtime to create the necessary image of the evil in the minds of the western population.

This is exemplified by popular media which produces movies such as the “300″. The story of the 300 spartans against the Persian army of Xerxes has become a metaphor of the clash between civilizations. In reality, Greeks and Persians were more alike than anybody else. They even looked similar, spoke similar languages, and had similar customs. The movie portrays the battle of Thermopylae as the struggle to preserve the western values of democracy and freedom against the evil eastern autocracy. Nobody seems to care that these values were not the sole propriety of the Greeks. Tribes throughout the world have established republics. The most ancient republic in the world (which has a written record) was Vaishali in the Gangetic basin. People of all these republics fought fiercely against the conquering kingdoms. Stories of these wars are indeed a huge part of Indian mythology. When Alexander the Great was conquering Bactria, he had to fight several Aryan tribes which refused to surrender. Every single member of these tribes had been murdered in the battlefield, and written records exist proving this. However, we don’t see Hollywood making heroic movies on the plight of Assakenois.

But, let’s try to understand what “western civilization” is and who possesses the right to claim from it. What is western civilization all about ? It begins with the Greeks – their ancient philosophers and scientists. It then includes the marvels of Rome. Finally, it merges with the industrial revolution and the renaissance. Some people go to the extent of including the religion of Christianity (in some extreme cases, even Judaism) into this encompassing definition. So, who are the purported claimants of the western civilization and its values ? United States, Europe, Canada and Australia (read – those of pure European racial stock) Supposedly, these values of western civilization are currently under attack by a multitude of freaks.

Any serious student of history would laugh at such a simplistic and stupid worldview. But, let me dissect each of these aspects in detail.

Appropriation of Greece :

First, we have to talk about the Greeks and their marvellous achievements in the sciences and in the arts. Current day textbooks trace the beginings of all sciences to ancient Greece, hardly mentioning about the parallel (and sometimes more profound) developments that took place in other parts of the world. For example, the father of Medicine is considered to be Hippocrates. The father of history is Herodotus. The father of geometry is Euclid. And so on. Nobody mentions Sushrutha, Chanakya, Brahmagupta or to what they have achieved.

In any case, let’s consider that Greeks have somehow uniquely discovered science and technology. But who were the Greeks and where did they live ? They were a mediterranean people who lived on the eastern most boundary of Europe. They occupied hardly any territory in Europe – they didn’t look beyond the Balkan mountains, beyond which they considered lived barbarian tribes. But surprise, the ancient Greeks lived in most of the modern day Turkey. They had an elaborate shared history and trade with the Persian empire. When Alexander the Great unified the tribes of Greece, he set about conquering Persia and Egypt. The north of Europe presented nothing of interest to him !

There had been several Alexandrias (cities of the conqueror) in Persia, Parthia, Bactria, Egypt and even in the western flanks of India. Each of these civilizations flourished with the influx of Greek knowledge. I will examine how much India stands to claim from the Greek civilization. The art of sculpture was highly influenced by the Greeks, and so was the science of astronomy in the later epochs. Greek genetic ancestry is present throughout the western flanks of India. Several Indian princes had Greek wives. The first major religion of India – Buddhism owes a lot to Greek patronage. Greek kings who settled in India became Buddhists and Vaishnavites, studying Indian scriptures with utmost reverence. The impact of Greece on India was so great that the popular Indian dress for women – the saree, was itself a Greek invention. Even to this day, India and Greece share a similar culture which is reflected in music and art. Ancient India and Greece were ofcourse, much more alike – due to the common Aryan civilization. The vedic pantheon of gods is essentially identical to the gods of the Illiad.

In contrast, how much does the rest of Europe stand to claim from the Greek civilization ? Close to nil.

The Europeans hardly knew about the existence of Aristotle until they read the translations from the Arabic scholars. India and Persia have more in common with ancient Greece than any of the European nations.

Appropriation of Rome :

The second important factor of the so called “western civilization” was the Roman empire. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans have made its presence felt in every corner of Europe except for the extreme north which continued to be savage. The Roman empire has also occupied significant portions of north Africa, where magnificent ruins can be observed to this day. It is sensible to call the Roman civilization as a Mediterranean civilization and not as a European civilization. Unlike the Greeks who stand to claim significant discoveries in the sciences, the Romans have discovered very little for their age. One principal reason is the lack of a continuous thread from the Greek civilization, except in some fields such as art and religion. In contrast, the fruits of Greek civilization continued to thrive in Bactria and Parthia, later picked upon by the Arabs.

Finally, the Roman empire was vandalized by invading hordes of Germanic tribes. The very word “vandalized” comes from the Germanic tribe of “vandals”. These barbarian tribes have literally destroyed the civilization in the 500 AD. Ancient Romans probably hated these tribes more than anything else in the world. Now the very descendants of these tribes – Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths, Vandals, Vrangians (in modern parlance – British, Germans, Scandinavians, parts of French, parts of Italians – the richest countries in the current world) ironically claim to be the heirs of the Roman civilization.

Renaissance or just Naissance :
Then comes the industrial revolution and the renaissance. Both of these owe heavily to the centres of learning set up by the Moorish Arabs in Spain (Andalusia). The Arabs compiled the entire knowledge of the world, taking from Greek, Indian and Chinese souces and improved upon it. They gifted the entire knowledge to the European people through their universities before they got kicked out of the European continent. This ushered in the very first golden age of Europe, the countries began to have their own share in the history of mankind by advancing this knowledge. This began to happen from 1400 AD. The consequent glory of Europe (along with its twin evils of colonialism, slavery and brutal warfare) is less than 600 years old. The term renaissance is misleading because it assumes that the people of the northern Europe had any cultural marvels any time earlier. This not being so, the term renaissance (rebirth) should be replaced by the term naissance (birth). The proud parents of the European civilization should be the Arabs.

Appropriation of Abraham into Europe :

Before I proceed onto anything else, let me inspect the ridiculous entry of Christianity/Judaism in the spectra of western civilization. These great religions were the product of Semitic people who had a different language and a different history (nothing to borrow from the Greeks). These people had indeed suffered attrocities under the Roman empire. The story of Jesus Christ itself is an example of the divergence between the “western civilization” and these religions. The European countries have been meekly conquered by these Semitic religions. In contrast, the ancient Aryan religion continues to flourish and grow in India. Important strands of philosophy such as monotheism, monism, rationalism etc. have been incorporated within the ancient Aryan religion without an explicit overhaul, like how it happened in Persia or in Europe. India continues to be a thriving place of philosophical discovery.

Now, who stand to be the biggest claimants of the so called “western civlization” ? Not the USA. Not the north European states. Before the racist fanboys of these regions ponder about the “problems affecting the western civilization“, they should observe whether their own claim to western civilization holds any meaning at all !

Appropriation of Aryan Culture :

Not satisfied with the theft of all this heritage, the northern European people started to appropriate the ancient culture of India. The discovery of the fact that ancient India was home to some fair skinned people made all its achievements somehow European. Hitler did the maximum of this theft by appropriating the name Aryan and the ancient holy symbol of Swastika. Nowhere in the ancient Indian texts was the word Aryan used to mean a fair skinned person, but instead a cultured person. Apparently, there are Aryan people and there are Barb-Aryan people, as people who continue to abuse this word suggest.

Plain Conclusion :
No civilization on this planet has been bred in isolation. The great thinkers of the past have respected the marvels from every other civilization. Science shows respect only to science, and not to the tribe that one comes from. Humility is the key to any great thinker. The legend goes that Einstein had this written down on the walls of his study “I am thankful to the millions of people who go to work every day and whose fruits of labour I am relishing”. The same should be remembered by every single person and every single civilization.

Immortality Vs Eugenics

We are living at the cusp of an exponential technological revolution. The world is changing so rapidly that we fail utterly in updating our notions of morality, ethics and culture along with it. One fine example is the battle of intellectual property rights against the zero cost of replication over the internet. People (and the recording industry) are still at loggerheads on how to come to terms with such a monstrous revolution.

This is just the begining. We are soon to witness another fantastic dilemma – about the very meaning of a physical relationship in a world shaped by virtual reality. The notions of family, friends and marriage need to take new meanings in the coming ages.

But no change would be more disrupting than the upcoming revolution in genetic engineering and biotechnology. This will be posing dilemmas on the most sacred relationship ever – that between a parent and a child. We are soon to enter into an age of designer babies – children whose genetic material would be carefully engineered to ward off potential diseases and pitfalls.

The Human Genome Project is carefully mapping the DNA of the entire human population, and studying the effects of several genes. As the information keeps on exploding, we will soon be discovering which gene/set of genes are responsible for immunity against cholera or for baldness or for obesity or for myopia and so on. Parents of the future will soon be at a position to choose which set of genes their baby should possess.

The baby would receive genetic material not only from its mother and father, but from an infinite number of sources. In this scenario, the very meaning of parent-offspring would change. Throughout history, parents have looked upon children as the means to carry forward their genetic material. Most of the behavior of plants or animals (or indeed humans) is to be explaind by this primitive urge to propagate their DNA. The bodies of animals or human beings are merely bags to carry genetic material. Their primary loyalties rest with the genetic programs written in the marvellous code of DNA. With advances in science, however, DNA has no more use for these perishable bags of transmission. Thus liberated, the bags/bodies become truly independent. The primary purpose of existence would be for the sake of existence itself.

Let us observe how this miracle would be achieved. The genetic code of DNA, been secret for eons of time, is now being transcripted into other languages. Every cell of a living organism contains a copy of the genetic code, and now methods exist to preserve these cells in isolation. The stem-cell culture can grow complete bodies true to the genetic program inside the cell. At present, this remains an understudied and costly affair. But soon in the future, this becomes the most common means of reproduction for all living species.

The repurcussions of this technology are extremely profound. Evolution gets bypassed and every gene becomes immortal. Though this sounds far-fetched, this is not so. Humans, for example, have indeed stopped evolving for a couple of hundred years now. This ihas happened due to the advances of medicine. This is the reason why black-skinned people do not die in huge numbers when they settle in polar climates, or why white-skinned people do not die in huge numbers when they settle in tropical climates.

Thus, the notion of evolution has stopped having any meaning for the human species. Soon, this will be true for a multitude of other species. Unless there comes about a mass extinction like a meteorite which we are not able to avoid, the diversity of the entire genetic material of nature will forever be preserved by the advances of science.

What is evolution ? It is the logical outcome of multiplication of a gene which produces a phenotype better at survival. Due to the enormously long life-times of most living beings, this process needs to have millions or billions of years to produce any meaningful results.

But, human culture and science progress at an enormously rapid pace as compared to the slowness of biological evolution – by millions of orders of magnitude. Human beings are currently so spoilt by science that they demand results within their own life time (or within the span of one generation). They do not want to wait for the millions of years that are required.

What is eugenics ? It is the extremely stupid process of trusting biological evolution to take its course, and wantonly killing unwanted genes/attributes with the hope of making it faster. This sounded like a good idea for the Spartan Greeks who killed all their deformed/handicapped children. Anybody who thinks of similar terms in the current age needs to have their heads examined by a psychiatrist. Firstly, we don’t need to kill any individuals in the rabid hope of speedening up biological evolution. Secondly, the process of judging the genotype based on the phenotype is stupid to begin with.

In today’s age, we can pick and choose on the genetic material themselves. In the future, the parents will be able to choose whether their baby would have blond hair / black hair. They would be able to decide whether their baby needs to look like Marlon Brando or like Mussolini. They might indeed be X-men with superior mental/physical capabilities hard to imagine in our own generation.

Now, in this scenario, it is extremely annoying to hear the talk of racist propaganda. When immortality (for our genes) is just around the corner, who can even bear to listen to the melancholy of racism ? – only the most melancholic nuts that are the marvels of human evolution !!! Not to mention that the argument is extremely stupid by itself considering the digital format of genetic information.

Until our sensibilities of love and family keep to have their meaning, let’s enjoy our life for what it has to offer. Let’s make love. We hardly have enough time. We are soon going to turn immortal.

How to solve casteism

Caste is possibly India’s biggest embarrassment on the world stage. A majority of the population of India do not even acknowledge this to be a problem. What’s wrong with caste, they would ask.

People try to justify casteism with all kinds of theories. The much-popularized notion (in the western countries) is that the karma-philosophy has been used to justify caste (one is born into a low caste based on one’s deeds in the past life). But in the current age, this is no longer true. The crimes of casteism do not stem from a philosophical debate, but from more basal instincts of man. A more popular theory (in India) is that lower castes tend to be unclean, and thus deserve to be seggregated. This is a dangerously misleading argument which stinks of racism.

Cleanliness had been used as an argument from the very ancient days to justify racial domination. The Romans applied it against their slaves, the French aristocracy applied it against the bourgeoisie, and the Nazis applied it againts the Jews. The Britishers applied it against all the Indians when they were colonizing them. Remnants of these feelings can be observed even now in fiction and in films. So, it now feels absolutely sick when one Indian applies this argument on another.

Caste is now understood to be a social problem, and not as an economic problem which could be expressible by the terms of class. Going by this understanding, the constitution of India provides special privileges to the disadvantaged castes in the name of affirmative action. People from the so-called lower-castes find it easier to secure admissions to universities for pursuing professional education. They also have protected quotas of employment in the public sector. India does not have a functioning welfare state which caters to the economically disadvantaged strata of the society. It is in this scenario that the principles of affirmative action are applied in the name of social justice. Curiously though, the criteria for availing these opportunities depends on the nature of one’s birth, i.e, which caste one has been born into.

However, as it can be seen clearly, 60 years of these policies have done nothing to improve the plight of the lower-castes in India. Routinely, the newspapers report about caste-related murders and public humiliations. The attitude of caste-superiority is firmly entrentched in the minds of even the educated middle class of India. Why is this so ?

I would like to argue that the problem of the caste stems primarily from racism. As long as the root of the problem is not attacked, one would never reach a solution. The social and economic aspects of caste are just symptoms of a deeper disease which is racism. In crude terms, racism can be defined as the stereotyping a person based only on the information related to one’s birth. Caste fits exactly into this particular definition.

When we acknowledge that the problem lies with racism, we have to accept that the only true solution that can be offered is that of deleting the very notion of race. This is probably hard to implement in the global circumstances, but can very well be achieved in India.

Whether they like it or not, Indians are a completely mixed race. So, it is ridiculous for them to continue with the ancient customs of racial seggregation. The only solution to racism (caste) lies in discouraging within-caste marriages.

Please notice that I am not just saying inter-caste marriages should be encouraged. This is true. But apart from this, a viable solution needs to have a definite element of discouraging within-caste marriages. This type of discouragement can be manifest in the form of higher taxes. Couples belonging to the same caste and begetting more than one offspring would need to pay a higher tax. Since India is facing an acute problem of population explosion, one could achieve a dual solution thus.

There are people who argue that the caste system had its own virtues. Brahmins, the educated class, were the most respected. The warrior-class who protected the sovereignity of the country were also very respected. The merchant-class who were the backbone of the economic system were also given due respect. These values can indeed be considered as part of the cultural values of India. However, they immediately get corrupted when coupled with racism. The entire problem of caste in India was with the determination of one’s identity by one’s birth. Detached from this stigma, the cultural values of India could indeed be upheld. People who obtain PhDs would be the new Brahmins. People who serve in the army would be the new Kshatriyas. People who make business executives would become the new Vaishyas. The government can indeed provide tax benifits to these people as a way of encouragement.

If these policies are implemented, one can say confidently that the problem of casteism would disappear from India within 25 years. Otherwise, it would continue to persist. The caste-based identity would continue to damage any notions of nationalist or linguistic identity of the person, thereby causing great harm to the cultural rejuvenation of India.

The solutions of affirmative action (social) and welfare state (economic) can augment the above strategy for a reasonable and fixed amount of time, such as 25 years. The problem of racial divide in India demands urgent attention from the policy-makers to provide a fixed timeframe solution. I would like to make an appeal to all the people from disadvantaged castes in India. “Please get conscious and fight for a real strategy – a strategy that will redeem the situation from the abject racism that sorrounds you now. Don’t be lulled into a complacency just by a package of reservations. They would solve none of your problems.”

Where’s my hidden racist ?

It is quickly becoming a pop culture phenomenon to dig into the hidden racist. The recent Borat movie and the ruckus about the Big Brother TV episode come to mind immediately. I find this phenomenon extremely irritating.

Ofcourse, what else would you expect from people ? Give them a break.

What’s more concerning to me is how these kind of cultural analyses always miss the bigger picture. In the long run, it doesn’t hurt the society if a fat redneck thinks that black people are ugly, or if he thinks Chinese people are evil.

What really hurt the society are economic policies. The current world order is so skewed in favor of the western countries that this should sound immediate bells of alarm.

In today’s world, massive trade barriers impede producers of the third world countries from selling their products in the rich western markets. Not only are western consumers sacrificing a huge diversity in their markets (and simultaneously paying much higher prices), but they are also breaking the back of all efforts towards industrializing the third world.

In today’s world, capital can move freely across borders but labour cannot. Even if one is desperate to work and earn some food to save oneself from starvation, one cannot do so.

In today’s world, millions of children go uneducated, thereby condemned to lives of perennial poverty. Millions of people die of preventable diseases because they cannot afford the prices dictated to them by the health-care corporations. In today’s world, millions of people consider exploring their creativity as a luxury, as they are forced to fight the immediate battles of survival.

None of this makes any kind of sense. The only reason why this situation persists is because of intense and pathetic racism. It is the feeling which perverts a person and prevents him from acknowledging the simple fact – that all human beings on this world are equally capable of doing miraculous things, and thus deserve equal opportunities.

What is racism ? It is judging a person of what one is capable of based on the details of one’s birth.

This feeling is a viral disease which can infect any ideology, however great it may be, and corrupt it to the core. Every person who wants to be strongly vocal about any ideology that he possesses needs to take this litmus test.That ideology can be religion or politics or whatever. This is an important preprocessing step before any ideology can be applied, whether related to immigration laws, affirmative action or trade barriers. It can be left-wing politics or right-wing politics. It can be Mel Gibson’s Christianity or Bal Thakeray’s Hinduism. If it doesn’t pass the preprocessing step, it will never lead to the intended results.

It doesn’t matter if Jade Goody calls Shilpa Shetty a loser and asks her to go back to the slums.

What does matter is intelligent people not thinking twice before they subscribe to ideologies which deny the equality of opportunity for fellow human beings. There in lies the hidden racist.

India’s population : World’s problem

Indians like me living overseas confront a peculiarly weird problem. We get looked upon as the spillings of an exploding population that can no longer be contained within its country. In these eyes, all Indians belong to a single substandard species – a species which is good at nothing except at raising its population.

You can imagine how infuriating it is for us to be at the brunt of this prejudice. To begin with, it is extremely difficult for an Indian to make it big in India – amongst the enormous competition for scarce resources. The people who make it abroad in search of better opportunities are usually the cream of the cream. It is no wonder that the Indian diaspora does exceedingly well in all the western countries, especially in USA where it contributes to a huge packet of state revenue in the form of taxes.

But, there is a reason behind this prejudice. India’s population is indeed sky-rocketing, with no end in sight immediately. Biologically speaking, I should be happy about this phenomenon. Since the sole biological motivation of a living organism appears to be replicating its genes, it should gladden my heart to be sorrounded by an identical gene pool. This primitive feeling is racism, and it is at the bottom of most of the tragedies that happened in human history.

But, this feeling is also utterly, totally false. It is not good for the health of an organism to be sorrounded by an identical gene pool. A species with limited genetic diversity will be wiped out in the midst of parasites and viruses. A classic and sad story is that of the American Indians who died of the old-world/european diseases. One of the reasons why they had such limited immunity is because of their migration pattern out of Africa. This community was genetically isolated for thousands of years, where as the other communities thrived by inter-breeding.

Possibly nowhere is the genetic diversity as high as it is in India, but this doesn’t mean Indians are the best equipped in fighting diseases. As long as the doors of India are open to foreigners, the community of Indians continue to get enriched by genetic diversity. This is no longer happening because India is being so densely crowded, there is hardly any space for new people. Never has it been the case in history, except now.

Scientists talk about the advantages of biodiversity in an environment. Similarly, we should pay great attention to the diversity of our own human gene pool. Burgeoning populations in South Asia are a great threat to this.

But, why is this population increase happening in the first place ?

It is not happening because of the primitive biological instinct of replicating the genes. It is happening because of an utter lack of education and opportunities. This is the simple answer.

In ancient times, every couple used to give birth to ten chidren. With luck, a couple of these children survived in the midst of disease. But with advances in medicine, the child death rate has fallen to an astonishing low. This has not completely sinked in the cultural mindset of the developing countries. As a rule, high birth rates happen only in rural undereducated communities.

A second reason is a complete lack of retirement benifits. The institution of family is very strong in the developing world, especially in south Asia. People would rather want to have more children to take care of them in the old age, when they cannot rely on the government pension (if at all anything is provided). This is again the reason why many people rather want to have boys instead of girls (highly distorting the gender ratio).

To rein in the population explosion, a civilized country like India cannot impose forceful birth control. It can only strive to increase the levels of education and improve the safety net of retirement benifits. With its limited resources, it is obvious that it cannot do a sufficiently good job of it.

People in the west fail to see this urgent problem. A tiny fraction of the money that goes into the defence budget of the western countries can solve this. If this issue is not addressed, the western countries stand to lose the battle of the human gene pool (especially with their dwindling birth rates).

The disease-ravaged countries of Africa also have a similar problem at the door step. With advances in the reach of modern medicine, population explosion is bound to happen in Africa. It is better to prevent the problem before it engulfs all of us.

In the current era of globalization, nobody in the world is safe from the problems with massive population. Human beings are the most precious resource for economic development. Overpopulated countries automatically provide cheaper roads to production.

To maintain and sustain the economic health of the developed countries, controlling the population increases in other countries is an extremely high-priority issue.

Sexual selection as a genetic disease

In this post, I want to discuss about the prejudice of people against black skin. A person need not be a racist to consider fair skin as beautiful and black skin as ugly. Part of this prejudice is cultural. Most of us are raised in cultures which glorify the fairness of skin as a vital element in the beauty of a person. But, can this prejudice be explained entirely in terms of faulty upbringing ? We cannot tell for sure. I would like to consider the argument that part of this prejudice is rooted in our genes.

When Homo Sapiens evolved out of apes, they lost their fur. This happened in Africa 60,000 years ago. With naked skin, humans were exposed to the harshness of the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Natural selection forced them to evolve a pigment, called melanin, as a means of protection against this. This turned the skin of humans to black. When they started migrating out of Africa, all humans were black. So, how did fair skin arise in the first place ?

When humans migrated to colder climates, they lost their need for melanin. However, the rule of nature is that attributes which have no evolutionary disadvantage just keep staying. No force of natural selection explains why black skin could be a disadvantage. So why did fair skin arise in the first place ?

Some people think fair skin arose as a need for camouflage within sheets of ice – this theory is quite humorous, but nothing more. A more plausible answer lies in the force of sexual selection.

When Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, he stressed on natural selection as the most important force determining the metabolism of animals and plants. However, there are several things that cannot be explained by natural selection alone – the colorful tail of a peacock, for example. As Darwin put it, “the sight of a peacock’s tail just makes me sick”. This bright tail gives no advantage for the peacock in terms of gathering food or fighting rivals. Instead, it is just a blaring invitation for predators to attack the bird. The reason why this tail arose is a big dilemma – even to this day.

To explain this, Darwin proposed a different force of evolution, termed as sexual selection – female peahens prefer peacocks with bright tails. So a peacock with a bright tail gets higher reproductive success even though it puts it at a higher risk from predators. But this still doesn’t answer the question – why should females prefer such a stupid attribute ? Biologists still keep debating about this.

One of the most promising theories we have now is called the “handicap theory“. The bright tail of the peacock is essentially a handicap. When a female eyes at such a tail, it thinks “this male has to be extremely strong and powerful in its other attributes to keep surviving with such a handicap”. Thus the tail becomes a reproductive plus point for the male.

Sometimes, even if there is no logic for selecting a mate, this gets hard-coded into the genes of the female under a theory known as the “sexy son hypothesis“. When a female looks at a crowd of females using a logic to select mates, it selects its potential mate using the same logic. That is, it selects a peacock with a bright tail because it knows that its offspring will have a bright tail too, and thus, have higher reproductive success.

Darwin reverted to the force of sexual selection to explain the several useless attributes that arose in animals and plants. He also opined that the differences of features between several human races could also have been due to sexual selection, because, they obviously provide just no evolutionary advantage under nature. This could be the same reason for the rise of fair skin. In humans, due to monogamous relationships, the pressures of sexual selection are applicable both on males and females.

Sometimes, sexual selection is in logical agreement towards natural selection. That is, females prefer attributes which are essentially tell tale signs of higher survival skills – such as the long antlers of a deer or the deep roar of a lion. Males prefer attributes which are signs of higher virility in females – such as youth and a healthy body. In humans, these preferences can be observed in females getting rated according to the size of their breasts and their bottoms – essentially signs of good health and virility.

At other times, sexual selection gets extremely illogical, such as the preference for a fair skin. This can be explained only through theories such as “handicap theory“and “sexy son hypothesis“.

Fair skin is essentially a handicap in tropical climates, and if a person survives with this handicap, that is only because of greater immunity and strength otherwise. In the tropics, this pattern could not be sustained for long because the trade off between survival and reproductive success is tilted towards darker skin. However, as humans migrated to colder climates, this handicap ceased to be as severe as it used to be. This provided a trigger for the onset of sexual selection, with people preferring fair skin as a mating-choice and the fair skinned people not dying as badly as they used to die in the tropics. The pattern of fair skin got repeated in the population through the “sexy son hypothesis“.

Amongst fair skinned people of today, generations of evolutionary corroboration has etched this prejudice hardly into their genetic make up. So viola, we have a notion of beauty defined in terms of the colour of the skin. Not surprisingly, this standard of beauty is not present in the populations of Africa which have not been subjected to the same pressures of sexual selection. In India, there had been a high contamination of the gene pool with fair skinned people. It is not surprising that people in India have a highly distorted view of human beauty.

The journey of the human migrations can now be studied directly through genetics. It is the gene haplogroup M, (specifically M9) which has arrived successively in India over periodic waves of settlements. These people have spent enormous amounts of time (ranging from 30,000 to 50,000 years) in colder climates to be subject to the pressures of sexual selection. They are of the same stock as the majority of the Europeans and probably looked the same – pale and blond. When they descended into the subcontinent, a vast majority of them could have died at a very early age due to the disadvantage of fair skin. So, a second series of evolutionary pressures, this time from natural selection, turned their hair and skin darker. After a period of 10,000 years running to this date, the fairest of the Indians could not have been as pale as the Europeans, even without the interracial mating that happened in India. But the prejudice against dark skin was subject to much longer periods of evolutionary pressures (5 times longer), so it continues to this day.

Is sexual selection bad by itself ? No. How can one hate the tail of a peacock or the song of a cuckoo ? Amongst the brutal forces of natural selection, these elements add some spice and variety. But, at best, they can be described only as cute. When taken to excess, these prejudices become vitriolic. For example, when the prejudice for fair skin overrides the prejudice for large breasts, it should be termed as a genetic disease – as it results in lesser reproductive success for an individual. I think it is time that we honestly asked ourselves the question – how many of us are subject to this genetic disease.

It is even more pathetic when these prejudices enter the very fabric of culture – when they get associated with everything that they have nothing to do with. For example, it is outright stupid to associate fair skin with wisdom or creativity. This turns the whole problem into a cultural disease, which is affecting the mentalities of a huge number of people currently. Under the guise of free speech, these poisonous rantings are continuing to spread. Nobody seems to be learning any lessons from history.

As human beings, if there is something that we possess that we should be proud of – it is our capacity to think and reason. The human brain is a marvellous product of evolution and the pride in this should unite every single human being. Next to this, every other attribute that we possess is marginal and negligible. But, we still obtain no respite from racism and its associated diseases.

In order to understand the gravity of this problem, let’s observe popular culture. How many times has a savage barbarian be portrayed with blond hair ? Why don’t we see images of blond people dancing to drum beat and performing human sacrifice ? How many times has devil or a demon been portrayed with blond hair or fair skin ? As long as this notion seems unthinkable, it means that the grip of the cultural disease is quite strong on our society, just waiting to explode through physical acts of racism such as murder and genocide.

Children of Men

You are what you think. As Jude says “Love..Love.. Love… That’s all you should be thinking of”. A mind filled with happy thoughts sees greater things in life, art or science. This is why I have not written more on this blog, because even the very process of thinking about race/racism is melancholic.

The thought of race is just an outcome of a deeper insecurity in a person. This is all the more a reason why I feel sorry for India. When people in India fall prey to race (coated through terms such as caste, religion or region), they commit betrayal to the very notion of India.

As I mentioned earlier, India is the perfect antithesis of race. No person in India has a race. Not only does each person have a genetic imprint from diverse tribes of humankind, but also each person is different from everybody else in India. There is no Indian race.

I find it extremely offensive when Indians are termed as brown people.

Not only is it far from truth (there is variation of skin color ranging from very dark to fair within all regions of India), it creates a sense of alienation that Indians are different from African people. The notion of a brown identity results in racism exhibited by Indian diaspora towards natives in Africa, Carribean islands, Pacific islands etc. This is terrible.

What is Indianness ? It is the constant process of questioning and discovery about oneself, as illucidated by these lyrics of the sufi poet Bulla Shah. Throughout its history, India has offered welcome to thousands of tribes which have managed to preserve (and enrich) their own culture without the fear of persecution. None of the philosophers of India were satisfied by contemporary dogma, but created new and exciting directions of thought. When one claims to be an Indian, one should be strong enough to realize that one is alone in this world, that there is nobody else like oneself. Otherwise, one does not deserve to be labeled as an Indian. This is why I cringe at the word Desi (Indian social group). I am not a brown person. I am a person of many colours. Each human being is a person of many colours.

Indians are the citizens of the world. They are the children of Africa. They are the children of Persia, of China, of Greece, of Arabia … Any land at a cultural confluence is an India. Any person of mixed ancestry is an Indian. Any people fleeing persecution automatically become Indians. They will be welcomed by the mountains, forests and the rivers of India.

Indians are the children of men.

They have reason to treat every human being on this planet with the affection reserved to one’s parents.

Futuristic Indian Flag

With the recent advances in digital printing, we need to update our national flag.

This design shows that the entire spectrum of human thought is present inside Indian philosophy. All these diverse strands of ideas find a happy merger inside India – just as all the colors of the spectrum merge into the purest white.

The wheel at the center stands for the Indian notion of nothingness, which revolutionized mathematics. This method of counting is central in Indian philosophy to understanding the nature of human progress and justice.

United Federation of Indian States

You have seen me complain about the bad effects of racism, but there are cases where it, or rather what is called nationalism, is of great use.

The nation-state is a strong form of rallying people together for a common cause of development. This feeling is essential for motivating several issues such as civic sense, importance of savings and investment in the home industry.

However this feeling of nationalism is strongly tied to the feeling of racism, and if mishandled, can spell trouble to the entire generation of people. We have seen examples of this throughout history – in Germany, Italy, Japan and currently in Israel.

As I speak today, we are moving slowly into a new age of inter-nation-states, from the old age of nation states. When I say that, I do not mean the United Nations, but the United States of America.

USA is one of the few nations which cannot claim to be a nation-state (as understood in the classical sense of the term). Its people are a mixed lot from several races, cultures and backgrounds. They have hardly anything in common, except for a zeal for development and a strong pride in being the citizens of the richest country in the world.

This phenomenon of transcending the classical borders of the nation-state is also being observed in Europe. The new Europe sans frontieres is bringing together the old nation-states of France, Germany, Italy, Spain (and Poland, Greece and soon the whole of Europe) into a common political fold. In unity, lies strength – the strength to combat the great economic powers such as the US or China.

But luckily, in India, we have been functioning as a unified-nation for a very long time. This should, indeed, be very surprising because India is very much like Europe – in both scale and variety. Two regions in India – say Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, have more differences in between them than the nations of USA and Canada. In spite of the seeming impossibility, functioning as a united nation has been good to India – atleast in the first 50 years.

But with its humongous differences, it is extremely hard to define India as a nation state. This is directly evident in the absence of national political parties.

With the momentum imparted from the freedom struggle, the Indian National Congress (INC) has managed to maintain a national existence till now. But with the current generation of Indians, fewer people associate the INC with the freedom struggle and it is consequently losing its identity.

The Left parties, however, have a philosophy which transends that of the nation-state, and thus qualify to being national parties (even though they do not have the numbers to support that claim)

The Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP) which is India’s answer to the classical right wing party, however, desperately needs the feeling of nation-state for its existence. And it has chosen to build that sentiment from the wrong sources – the pseudo religion of Hinduism.

Hinduism is a particularly bad choice – not only because this definition alienates a vast minority of people, but also because it does not exist in the first place.

The way of life of the so-called Hindus from different parts of India is so vastly different, that they hardly identify with each other. These differences are more pronounced if we look at the geographic extreme points – for example,  the Kashmiri pandits and the Nambiyar brahmins of Kerala.

However, for all its faults, this feeling of nation-state has been essential for building a strong country (economically and technologically). This is where India stands to lose out to rivals such as China (or even Indonesia or Brazil) The latter countries find it far easier to convince rich ex-patriots to invest in the fledging home industry.

There is a solution to these problems – which is not only necessary but also inevitable.

This is the right moment in history when the central government of India has to relinquish control and provide more autonomy to the states.

In principle, this means transforming the Indian government to resemble that of the United States – a highly federal structure with the centre taking care of only defence and international affairs.

I argue that we move even further.

The following decentralizations are necessary :

• Each state organizing its own centers for research and excellence.
• Each state having its own tourism department with complete autonomy.
• Each state implementing its own tax policies.
• Each state sending its own athletes for competition in the international arena.
• Each state having its own policies on entertainment and censorship.
• Each state having its own policy on social subsidy and reservation.

The above points are essential, and will liberate several progressive regions of India from the shackles of harmful policies being followed at the centre. Moreover, as independent entitities, the competition between the states will be so intense that they will be forced to implement the correct choices (even if they go against populist sentiment)

But the biggest benifit of the new United Federation of Indian States will be that strong political parties emerge on the scene – which actually reflect the operating pressure groups. Strong leaders will emerge who the people actually connect with. A strong sense of nationalism developes when the people think that their culture is at stake if they lose out on the race for development.

India is mature for this decentralization :

• Indian people already have a very strong sense of identity as Indians.
• No state would try to break away from the Indian Union, because that will be against the tremendous advantages provided by the strong defence and economy.
• A strong democracy with periodic elections is already functional in India.
• No state will run into the problem of religious fundamentalism or military dictatorship – especially when the millitary is still under the command of the Union Government.
• Indian people already have several National Institutes – such as IITs, DRDO, NIN, CCMB etc – to provide coordination between the different regional research institutes.

Observe that none of the above would be true, had we done the same thing immediately after independence. Most probably, India would have degenerated into warring faction states, which is the case with Africa.

But this time in history – it is ripe and auspicious.

This process of decentralization would also reduce the regional discontent that we are facing in the North Eastern states and in Kashmir.

With the new form of government, people elect their representatives from amongst themselves. In such a scenario, the children of the Nehru family would not be the only option that would be left to a country of 1 billion people.

This change is not only necessary but also inevitable. The series of coalition governments that we witness in the centre are just a prelude to the major decentralization in power.

I welcome the day when this new India greets the world, and provides an example for other inter-nation-states (which are desperately needed in South America, Middle-East, North Africa and in Central Africa).