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Image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay
It was twelve years
back when I was in school I watched a patriotic Hindi movie that was based on
the life of Bhagat Singh. There was a dialogue where Bhagat Singh was standing
in the court and challenged the Btitish judge by saying “ jab tumhare purvaj
jungle the rab hamare desh me baccha baccha ramayan Mahabharat bakta tha” (when
your forefathers were barbarians at that every child in India uttered the
Ramayana and Mahabharata”)
Like all emotional Indians I too got filled
with vapors of pride and there were tears in eyes. Even today this dialogue
would pump fake nationalism in the countrymen. But with passage of time when I
got myself exposed to the higher education I realized how funny and ridiculous
and foolish the dialogue was. This write up is an invitation to destruction of
mine as in the concurrent times the wave of fake nationalism and fascism in the
name of a foolish concept called “desh bhakti” is sweeping out
all logic and reasoning from the minds of Indians. Volleys of hymns and huge
vedic references will be showered on this article to prove the fake greatness
of this country. Outburst of emotions and feelings of pride of fake nationalism
will declare this article as antinational. Well these bluffs should be ignored as if they
are barking dogs.
What is
knowledge and learning?
Let us think a little
what we learn from the epics that were being chanted by even children when the
west was in the darkness of ignorance. The impact of these epics was to impose
a mental slavery on the minds of Indians. These epics created “gods” who had to
be praised day and night. In course of time the Indian minds became obsessed
with a god or god like creature who was considered to be the creator of
everything and of destroyer of everything including the human mind. Knowledge
is something what we gain from our own experiences and thoughts. We learn from
our own perceptions. What is wrong and what is right has to be decided by human
actions and thoughts. But when we had epics and chants that intoxicated our
minds we had to accept the right and wrong that were defined by some so called
“gods”. We worship a character called
Ram and Krishna only because they killed some creatures whom we were forced
to dislike we don’t know even don’t want to know what was wrong and why it was
wrong. We are forced to believe that people who put wife as stake on gambling
are righteous people. Well it’s wastage of time to repeat these stories. In a
nut shell when a civilization is kept in trance of epics dignifying some man
made creatures the rationale and the thought process comes to an end. This is
what happened when our baccha bccha used to chant mythical stories. They never
uttered the words “why, how , when”?
The topic
of Education in ancient India
If I ask some blank
head nationalist to elaborate this topic it will start with fiery slogans like
that I mentioned from the movie. “When the entire world was plunged in the
darkness of ignorance Indians reached the epitome of success in every field,
you antinational will never understand” well I don’t want to understand these
fuzzy reasoning. A more well-read nationalist will start uttering some hymns
and lessons from ancient Indian texts like Vedas and puranas but I will
consider all this in vain. The texts that fill us with gas of pride and nationalism
have a strange concept. The Indian method of education which consists of these
texts were based on the memorizing by rote method. In this method the
texts were memorized (perhaps not written) . These rotten texts were
transferred orally from one generation to other. The most heinous aspect of
Indian education is that this practice of memorizing and transferring data from
one generation to other was franchised only by one community. The people who
memorized the texts from one generation to the other have questionable memory
and authenticity, sometimes or perhaps every time they used to inject their own
thoughts in the material which later took the form of a inevitable command to the
entire society. Indian divine system of education was simple a process of
replication that made religious clerks. Now you cannot blame British or Mughals
for introducing the clerk system , this virus is within us . On the other hand
our barbarian counterparts in the west emphasized on “Don’t ask, discover” and “do
yourself methodology. Every text and every form of information was first veiled
with a dark cover of divinity and godliness and label was pasted “Divine
material Not for Everyone, Only Brahmins can manipulate”. From the very beginning Indians specially the
Brahmin community made the best efforts to vanquish human ability of thinking, discovering,
understanding and elevate the concept of
divine and God that could be assessed only by the Brahmin agents. This
is how India became the breeding house of Gods and supernatural concepts that
gave a death blow to the natural ability of man to think and discover.
The concept of writing
One very crucial question before anyone who is interested in
educational concept is the art of writing. Why and what we write. Writing as I
understand is giving a shape to one’s thoughts. I am writing this thing means I
am giving a form to my thoughts and sharing my ideas with the reader. Now if I
take a book and start copying the material from the book on a piece of paper
then it is nothing but the wasted of time, paper and pen. The very astounding
aspect of the Indian education system that will make us feel more proud is that
there was no concept of writing in ancient India. Even the great myth Mahabharata
says that if someone writes the Vedas that person will go to hell.
In addition some sage whom we consider as the best agents to god and divinity
insisted that the Vedas had to be necessarily learnt from the lips of a teacher
and in no case should be read from a manuscript. This is how the ancient sages
whom we consider as godly entities curbed the art of writing. Regarding the
origin of these texts there is no evidence who wrote the Vedas. There are plethoras
of a literature available that will invite controversies but the conclusion is
that the ancient Indian system of education insisted on forceful acceptance of
some myths rather than a discussion and writing based approach. If we analyze
this fact then one most probable conclusion is that the owners of the
Vedas and such texts did not want that the texts should be interpreted by
everyone of the society because it would be a threat to the Brahmin dominance
on the texts. Additionally the owners of these texts made things so complicated
that it is still not clear about the structure and information that is
contained in the vedas or such texts
What the
sages of ancient India taught?
The ancient sages or the founder of our rich heritage that we
feel proud of taught the concept of moksha the freedom from the cycle of
life and death. They preached the impractical concepts of getting rid of
everything. From the beginning they tied human thought and action by the chains
of religion and divinity. According to those sages or Brahmins the only goal of
life should be getting freed from the worldly matters and to search whose
existence is doubtful. Thus human potential to exploit nature and work hard to
move towards development stopped forever.
The death blow to action and discovery was again given with the use of
Vedas where it was emphasized that Vedas are the ultimate source of knowledge
and cannot be challenged in any way. Thus masses had to accept that Vedas are
the last limits to knowledge and control everything. Indian masses had to be
convinced that human endeavor to discover, to explore are meaningless and what
a barbarian sage is the ultimate truth. The
lessons of moksha and other divine narcotics produced a pronounced effect.
Mighty kings turned into sages and went for moksha leaving this vast country
open to invaders. The education system developed by these sages blocked all the
ways to discover and observe which dug the grave of scientific temper .
The caste system: earliest form of terrorism
The birthplace of terrorism is perhaps the sanatan land
of India. The cruelest form of terrorism is dividing people in the name of some
baseless laws. The Brahmins created barriers among human beings and imposed
restrictions in the name of vedas. The net result was that knowledge in every
form was imprisoned in some texts which became the property of a particular
community. Knowledge or expertise is something that needs to be spread.
Refinement and up gradation of knowledge and development of skill requires
involvement of human thoughts. But thanks to the Brahmin community who blocked
all the ways to involve more people to share the knowledge of different
subjects. The development of medicine which truly means tribal medicine that
was developed by the common people who lived in the jungles was captured by the
Brahmins and imprisoned in the name of Ayurveda. Similar to other Vedas
the approach to Ayurveda was also restricted to a particular class of people.
Conclusion
It is not easy to culminate all the issues in a single
article however in a nutshell it can be concluded that the veil of religion and
the dominance of a single community on education is responsible for the
destruction of scientific temper
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