Atheism in Hinduism

MAHESH DAGA





The core of Hindu scriptural tradition, it is commonly thought, is all about theism, or belief in God. But that is a huge misconception. Even disregarding the `heterodox' streams like the charvaks, with their underlying message of materialist hedonism, or Buddhism, the philosophical canon -call it higher Hinduism -leaves room for dissent on the question of the existence of God.Indeed, the reason why some schools of darshana -Purva and Uttar Mimansa, Sankhya and Yoga, Nyaya and Vaisheshika -are regarded as `orthodox' and others such as Jainism, Buddhism and Charvaks are not, has little or nothing to do with a belief in God. The real point of departure is whether a system of thought accepts the Vedas as the ultimate source of philosophical authority .
The so-called orthodox schools do -even though it has been argued that this acceptance is more notional than real -while the other three don't. The original meanings of the terms astika and nastika, too, hinge on this vital difference. While the astikas believe in the veracity and infallibility of the Vedas, the nastikas clearly don't.
Interestingly , atheism in the Indian tradition is not necessarily premised on a prior acceptance of materialism, either in the philosophical or everyday sense. All the atheistic schools mentioned above, even when they reject God, accept the existence of a permanent soul (atman), which is distinct from corporeal or physical reality .So, Indian atheism -except in the case of the charvaks -is strongly anti-materialistic.

Off-Farm Measures to Ease Rural Distress





It is welcome that the government has increased the number of days for which work under the employment guarantee programme, NREGA, is available this year, as part of its measures to provide relief in this year of acute rural distress, thanks to a second consecutive year of deficient rains. There are a few other things the government can do away from the farm that will offer relief to farmers.Accelerate the farm-to-fork retail supply chains that many organised retailers dream of building but give up on, in the face of legal obstacle to buying directly from the farmer under the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act, absence of power to run cold storages and transport networks. Offer subsidy for diesel-generated power this will disappear as grid power becomes available -for cold storages, incentivise states to exempt perishables from the APMC Act and let mail and express trains attach special coaches that carry refrig erated farm produce to cities. Remove the hank yarn obligation on cotton yarn producers. This would allow mills to offer farmersginners a better price for their cotton. Institute a factoring service for sugarcane growers: their dues from mills can be encashed, saving them from a dreaded descent into debt. Clamp down on illegal cigarettes smuggled into the country or produced locally by duty-evading fly-by-night operators from inferior tobacco, so that tobacco farmers are spared declining demand. Step up R&D to find uses for tobacco other than poisoning the human body , such as in pesticides and weedicides.
Just raising import duties on farm produce, as the government has been, is lazy policy . Set up a group in the Niti Aayog drawing people from different sectors, not just agriculture, to think about alleviating farm distress.
Source: Economic Times, 8-10-2015

Be Good, Be Free

A SRINIVAS





Who is a good human being?
A good human being is honest to himself and sensitive to the needs of others. An emotionally honest person is a product of an upbringing that infuses a sense of self-worth. People can lack self-worth because of a Freudian rejection in their infancy . To overcome their feeling of smallness or insecurity , they control, even with good intentions, those emotionally or socially weaker than them.The good individual stands liberated from the control chain, from thought systems that divide people. He tends to be free of malice, fear, and inner turmoil -all of which arise from carrying the burden of the past. The past can be overcome only by coming to terms with it. Here, Freud's contribution to the betterment of the human condition is invaluable.
The good individual is an ardhanarishwar, possessing the traditional masculine attributes of fearlessness and direction and the feminine traits of compassion and accommodation. But to have the right instincts all through life and avoid attrition of inner strength, he needs a supportive social order. When Rabindranath Tagore said ekla chalo re, he wanted individuals to be free when they negotiated with society .
The free individual needs to engage with society to maintain his freedom. The flux in this negotiation -`neither this nor that' -in Upanishadic terms embodies the richness of existence. No wonder Kabir fused individual goodness with social emancipation. Renunciation should not be confused with running away .

Stepping stone to a successful career

Internships can help you find out whether you are really cut out for the job you are seeking.

At a time when coaching classes are mushrooming to help students crack entrance tests and job interviews, there is hardly any guidance to make job-seekers aware of the actual demands of a job and prepare them accordingly. It is very common to find confused or dissatisfied young working professionals who take up a job not knowing its demands, say career counsellors.

Career guidance is essential for job-seekers. While internship is the best way to test a candidate’s comfort and skills for any job, students often don’t realise its importance.

“Many a time, students lack information about a specific job profile and are unaware of its parameters. The recruitment cells in colleges should also provide assistance in securing internships. Most colleges offering postgraduate courses have recruitment cells, but there is lack of a proper internship programme policy in colleges offering only undergraduate courses,” says Abhishek Anand, director of test-prep company Eptitude.

Internships are not only required for grooming students so that they meet the demands of the corporate world, they also add value to the resume.

“What is expected of students is evolving. Nowadays, many MBA colleges prefer students with at least two years of job experience. Besides, internships help test a candidate’s employability. An employer can check out if the intern can become a prospective employee,” says Anand Venkatesan, mentor and COO of Eptitude.

Initiative

Admitting that companies are also on the lookout for trained professionals, Sonal Mehra, an HR professional from a telecom industry said that companies usually push HR personnel to hire trained professionals.

“Internship programmes are the best way to test the grey matter of a prospective employee. Freshers who join a company come with a lot of expectations and require a lot of hand holding. Companies want professionals who can start contributing to the work space immediately. They don’t want to invest too much time in training new recruits. Although training programmes are conducted for new recruits, these programmes are held only for freshers who are recruited through college placement cells. Companies should also conduct workshops in colleges which help job-seekers acquaint themselves with the various types of work profiles,” said Mehra.

While internships help in getting a hands-on experience, it is also important to reach out to working professionals and ask for information.

“It is important to network. If you want to pursue a career in investment banking, talk to an actual investment banker and see if his/her job appeals to you. Social media sites like LinkedIn are helpful for asking around for such help. When a company posts an advertisement for a vacancy, go through the demands of the job in detail and see if you’re really cut out for the job,” said Jatin Bhandari, founder and CEO of education consulting firm PythaGurus.

Keywords: Internships, job placement, searching for a job, higher education, Career guidance

The Hindu, 7-10-2015

Violence as the new normal

In directing States to show “zero tolerance” to attempts to “weaken the secular fabric” of the country, the Union Home Ministry was voicing its concern at the widening social acceptance of communal violence as a normal part of everyday life. The lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq for “eating beef” was an extreme case, but the circumstances that led to the murder were not dissimilar to those in many other parts of the country following the political mobilisation along communal lines against cattle slaughter. That the Ministry thought it fit to issue the directive despite law and order being a State subject indicates the seriousness of the situation in several States. Many Hindutva activists have projected cow slaughter as a deliberate assault on the religious sensitivities of Hindus by butchers and traders and exporters belonging to other religions. In such a situation, it would not take much effort on the part of extremist elements to portray any meal in a non-Hindu family as a grave provocation. Thus, the advisory issued by the Ministry — warning against the exploitation of religious emotions or sentiments and calling for the “strictest action as per law” against the culprits — demands the urgent attention of State governments. Law enforcers need to act at the very first sign of trouble.

However, the BJP-led government at the Centre should guard against letting this issue descend into a political slugfest with State governments run by other parties. In Uttar Pradesh, especially, the stage seems set for a blame game between the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. In its report to the Centre, the SP government avoided listing any motive for the Dadri attack. To readily grant that the violence was the result of sudden outrage over beef consumption would have been to ignore the systematic, communally charged campaign against cattle slaughter by Hindutva activists. While noting that there were allegations that Akhlaq was killed for consuming the “meat of an animal whose slaughter is banned”, the report said no conclusion had been reached as yet. Evidently, the report stuck to the bare, verifiable facts, in order to prevent Hindutva elements from making political capital out of religious sentiments around the cow. Also, this has left the window open to charge the accused with attempting to instigate large-scale communal violence. The Home Ministry, in issuing the directive, might have wanted to shift the onus to the States to prevent such incidents. But, beyond apportioning blame and shifting responsibility, the Central and State governments ought to realise the potential for trouble from this campaign against beef by communally motivated elements.

Source: The Hindu, 7-10-2015

Ramanujam biopic: A man who was more than the sum of his parts

On a winter morning nearly 100 years ago, GH Hardy, 35, Cambridge’s rising star in mathematics, received a 10-page ‘Dear Sir’ letter from an Indian clerk, filled with theorems. Some of them suggested that what Hardy had asserted about the orders of infinity, and what the German mathematician Johann Gauss had asserted about prime numbers, was inadequate.

The letter-writer, S Ramanujan, said he could do better.

Dismissing it as a practical joke, Hardy picked up the London Times to follow England’s moves in the world. Politically, England was in a time of turmoil. Mathematically, it was in deep sulk. Isaac Newton’s Principia was still its Bible; it had no time for the Continent’s mathematical breakthroughs. The university system that had produced Newton produced GS Hardy — his mathematics insisted on proof.

Ramanujan, a self-taught 23-year-old whose education and culture was routed through his Tamil-Brahmin way of life, worked by intuition; his theorems, which mathematicians still call ‘good guesses’, bypassed proof. He often credited his results to the family deity, Namagiri.

Nonetheless, Hardy and Ramanujan began to collaborate, with the former facilitating Ramanujan’s tenure in Cambridge. Their collaboration is now the subject of a film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Bafta awardee Dev Patel and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons. The film is based on the 1991 Robert Kanigel book of the same name.

Ramanujan, unsurprisingly, is the reference point among Indian mathematicians for talking up India’s mathematical tradition and why, like him, their personal lives feed off mathematics and vice-versa.

The Indian math tradition seems to be more about pure mathematics than applied. It’s a forced hierarchy, but mathematicians preserve their idealism about the former, says physicist Ranjit Nair.

Ramanujan, physicists almost seem to suggest, could have been one of them. ‘Guessing’, it turns out is important to both disciplines.

“First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step,” said physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, best known for his work in quantum mechanics.

“Even if you don’t solve a math problem, it can give you new ideas, allow you to see new connections,” says Shanta Laishram a mathematician with the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Delhi. “So when other people rediscovered the proof of Ramanujan’s formulas and identities, it became breakthroughs. Robert Langlands, a famous mathematician at IAS, Princeton, made a number of interesting conjectures; his ideas gThis is perhaps why, when Ramanujan called out Hardy’s ‘mistakes’ in his letter, instead of suppressing it, the latter made it the subject of academic enquiry. He showed it to his colleagues, threw Ramanujan’s questions open in a seminar.

“Mathematics is a democratic space,” says Laishram. “Our job is to ask questions and seek out truth.” Asking questions and having an argument is not the same thing and mathematicians understand that, he adds. “I can tell my guide directly ‘You are wrong for X or Y reason’.”

He doesn’t risk applying the same approach in his private life. “Before I got married, I have had girls cool off me… ‘You ask too many questions!’ my other friends cautioned,” he recalls with a laugh.

If mathematics is the language scientists use to talk to each other, how do they talk to other people? Self-absorption is a common crime, says Antar Bandopadhyay, another ISI mathematician, with a poker face.

Outside of the world of mathematics, mathematicians, says professor A Raghuram of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, are no different from other people. He, too, put on his trousers one leg at a time. Friends, however, titter, when he passes a comment peppered with the linguistic idiosyncrasies common to mathematicians, such as ‘That movie was totally trivial’ or ‘That whiskey has a highly nontrivial taste’, he adds.

(Note: An elementary math equation such as 2 + 2 = 4 can be dismissed as ‘trivial’; new results, whose proof is not immediately evident, are ‘non-trivial’.)

Ramanujan clearly did not make proof the basis of all aspects of his life. Social theorist Ashis Nandy, who in his book, Alternative Sciences (1980), discussed the ‘method’ of two pre-colonial figures of science — Jagadish Chandra Bose and Ramanujan — says Bose tried to join the Vedantic point of view with research findings, to validate his culture through his science. But Ramanujan “did not try to convince himself or others of this connection, even though he was ‘possessed’ by mathematics”.ave new insights for other mathematicians.”

The highest form of truth and beauty is to be found in great theorems, and you may call this God, says professor Raghuram. “My guess is that is what Ramanujan meant by his references to Namagiri. There was no question of her handing out things to him,” agrees professor Ram Murty of Queen’s University, Ontario.

Does that mean God cannot be part of any equation for most mathematicians? In brief: Yes. But Bandopadhyay has his own take on the matter: “Suppose I say God is Green and non-God is Red and I say I believe in Red. Where does that leave me? Neither do I believe nor do I disbelieve. I cannot count out the existence of God nor his non-existence. This is not new in mathematics. In maths, we can have a theory with a postulate and another one with the negation of the postulate.”

Bandopadhyay, however, says there is no problem in upholding religious beliefs, and they do not harm or hamper one’s mathematics. “I have a mathematician friend who is an orthodox Hindu. He performs all the rituals, but his religion makes him humble, opens his mind to other things,” he says.

In these times of religious obscurantism gaining a foothold in the sciences, can mathematics retain its purity? Raghuram, who was one of the resource persons for the documentary The Genius of Srinavasa Ramanujan, says those who talk highly of Vedic Mathematics are unable to see that it was “a bag of tricks to solve a few numerical problems. If studied as an aspect of history, sociology and the culture of a different time, it is fine, but it is no substitute for modern mathematical curricula”.

Nair suggests that when seeking an ‘Indian tradition,’ it would in fact be better to refer to the Jyotisha Vedanga rather than Vedic Maths, which is of much recent origin and does not cite any sources. “In the Vedanga, the Jyotisha meant astronomy/mathematics. In the Sulva Sutras, the Pythagoras theorem in the Indian tradition makes its appearance, at least three or four centuries prior to Pythagoras,” he says.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-10-2015

After Long Travels, Coming Home To Yourself

Marguerite Theophil





Bit by bit, year by year, almost imperceptibly , we separate ourselves from who we really are. For a lucky few, we somehow rediscover that Self. A beautiful story from the indigenous people of North America teaches this: In a remote village a child was born.As he grew, he loved to run, play and swim. But most of all he loved the stories his grandmother told. His favourite was about the Singing Stone ­ a stone of absolute beauty ­ conferring wealth, power, knowledge, wisdom of the entire world on whoever possessed it. He would ask: “But where, can I find this Singing Stone?“ She would sigh and say , “Oh child, I know not; maybe you will find it someday .“At 13, he was to be initiated into the tribe as a man. When he was asked his one wish that must be granted, he knew that it was his strong desire to discover what `singing stone' meant.
Before he set out his grandmother said, “There is a wise and learned scholar in the North, with a library which contains every book in the world.Perhaps there you will find out about the Singing Stone.“
The scholar smiled in welcome when he arrived; of course he could stay for as long as he wanted. Many years later, the young man came to the end of all the books the library contained. For of all the great knowledge in that noble library , he sadly told the scholar, not a single page of a book, had contained a single word about the Singing Stone.
“I know nothing of it,“ said the scholar, “maybe the Butterfly Queen of the South can help.“
After many adventures he reached a shining palace of crystal and glass. The Butterfly Queen made him welcome, smiling knowingly at the desire in his eyes. For many years, exotic food, rich clothes and beautiful maidens were his for the asking. He built a fine palace, living a life of great luxury and pleasure. But, after many years, somehow it all lost its appeal; and middle-aged now, he felt something calling from within.
“You have kept me a prisoner here; I lost my purpose. I had come to ask you of your knowledge of the whereabouts of the Singing Stone!“ The Butterfly Queen said gently , “The only person who has kept you prisoner here is yourself. As for the Singing Stone, I know nothing; but in the west there lives a great Wizard who may .“
He finally reached the Wizard's dwelling, staying there for many years, learning all kinds of magic and spells, even surpassing the Wizard in his skill. By now he had completely forgotten the purpose of his coming here. But he wasn't really satisfied, much to his surprise ­ and one night he dreamt of his almost forgotten quest.
So he went to the Wizard and said he was setting off on a journey; the East was calling him now. “Have you any knowledge of the Singing Stone“ he asked the Wizard. “I have not,“ he replied, “but you should follow your instincts and go East.“
After many months he came to a group of small wooden dwellings. He watched as the door of a little home opened and a very old couple came towards him. And he knew that this was his home, this was the place he had set out from nearly 61years ago, and these two people before him were his parents.And as they put their arms around him, his mother whispered softly , “Welcome Home, Singing Stone.“