Wednesday, June 19, 2013

It is better to live in present

"Better to live in present than glorify past which is never going to repeat itself." I read these lines in one of the comments to the article where the author wrote a post glorifying the Indian past thousands of years ago where women had equal status to men and contributed to all aspects of society's development. I always come across many posts that talk about our glorious culture, especially, a time in history when India was considered the wealthiest nation of that time (financially and intellectually). There are many things from our past that we all should be proud of but at the same time, there are many things that need introspection and honest analysis. Many people try to defend age old caste system and try to show how it was designed with good intentions but it's the people who messed it up. They are not ready to accept that the system itself had some flaws that allowed this type of exploitation. Some even regret that the era where women had very specific roles such as looking after the home, serving the men, and producing kids, is being threatened by feminist movements. I think readers must have understood what I am talking about here.

One more thing that is very common among some Indians is, that whenever they see some novel invention (let it be anything, starting from the discovery of gravity, the earth's shape, or the discovery of Higgs Boson) they always like to go back, find some related reference mostly from some ancient Vedic text or quote by some ancient personality or mythological story and claim that Indians were the first to think or know about that invention. These people fail to appreciate or give full credit to people who discovered these things on their own and introduced those concepts to the modern world. Many scientists work very hard to develop these ideas into something very relevant and applicable concepts in the modern world. It's not wrong to feel proud about the glorious past or study scriptures to get some clue but using these things to dilute the impact of others' hard work and independent discoveries is very wrong. Somehow all these things make me feel like we Indians are too much in love with our so-called glorious past and want to ignore the present situation of our country (which is not so glorious). One simple question we need to ask ourselves is, if we were first to discover all these things then why did we fail to develop them? Who stopped us from sharing it with the rest of the world?

We still mention proudly about Universities at Nalanda, Takshila, and Nagarjunkonda and how people from all over the world used to come to study in them, but we fail to acknowledge that we are responsible for their destruction and failed to rebuild them and reestablish their original glory. We Indians talk all the time about how these things got destroyed but don't want to talk about why we failed to rebuild these things. We proudly mention Ayurveda but at the same time don't want to accept that we failed to capitalize on the early head start given to us by our ancestors in many fields (like maths, medicine, astrology, etc.). For example, in Ayurveda, a vast knowledge about various diseases and herbal medicines was accumulated but nothing was standardized or developed in a reliable medical knowledge. Even though astronomy was well developed, and we knew about many stars and their properties, developed various mathematical theorems and equations but nothing beyond that, this was not translated into any radical discoveries like airplanes or trains. We didn't bother to continue the process of knowledge generation and propagation and lost the advantage. The truth today is that till now we haven't contributed any new medicine in modern-day drug therapy that can be accepted all over the world, we even failed to standardize our traditional medicine system so that it can produce medicines with reliable quality and reproducible results. Research and development is not our priority even today. We need to buy many sophisticated instruments and technologies from other countries, most of these countries are way ahead of us in many ways and we are not even trying to catch up with them. We even are not in a race, not because we can't run but because we don't want to run.

Somehow we proudly want to take credit for all the good things that our ancestors did in the past but completely reject or blame foreign invaders for the bad things (including casteism, religious riots, superstitions, etc.). These bad things happened in the same society and our ancestors were very much part of it. It is a very common habit to blame everything on foreign invaders. They all came from outside and messed up our wonderful system and culture. We were so good, so intelligent, so brave and so honest but we still got duped by some foreigners who came in small groups and destroyed our whole system. If we were so superior and intelligent then how did invaders manage to fool us? Why did we lose battles with them even though they were smaller in numbers? We take the easier path to blame them for everything but don't accept that we also were equally responsible for this downfall which pushed our society into the current mess.

A glorious past is always a nice thing to have and it can teach us a lot but only if we want to learn from it. We should be definitely proud of it but mentioning it again and again just to show off and take away (or dilute) others' achievements may make us happy temporarily but it's a useless exercise. If we are not willing to make any serious efforts to reach that level again then it doesn't matter how glorious was that past. If we develop a habit of living in the past then we may not be able to fully understand and recognize the challenges of the present and won't be ready to face the problems of the future. Presently our society in India is in a total mess, our political system sucks, the bureaucracy is heavily corrupted, and we have a pathetic medical infrastructure. We are going to face a lot of social, environmental, and economic challenges if we continue like this. Living in a glorious past is not going to help us in any way. We need to look at the present situation and tackle all these problems right now before they go out of our reach and become the reason for our dark future.

It always pays off to live in the present by getting all possible clues and lessons from the past. But if we refuse to accept the present situation and just keep on singing songs about past glories then we all know what will be our future. So, let's accept that currently there are many problems that we need to solve and also accept that these problems are mostly created by us, so it's our responsibility to find answers. I believe if we change our attitude then it won't be difficult to fight with these issues and work towards finding possible solutions, but the big question is are we willing to change our attitude? This is the question I want every Indian should ask today.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)

Links:
1. Were Our Ancient Ancestors Scientifically Advanced?

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