God of Goldilocks

This week's Astrophysics journal has the story of a planet going around a red dwarf star, 20 light-years away from the earth.The planet has been given the name "Gliese 581g", and someone with lot of imagination, has converted the final and unimaginative "g" of the name into "Goldilocks".

It seems that Goldilocks can be a planet suitable for life similar to our earth, "the right size and location for life". May be all those scientists can take a break and need not worry about finding proofs of life on Goldilocks, I can already confirm it. There is life and there is God on Goldilocks, I know it.

Let me try to explain my view.

Scientists have already found that all matter is made of sub-atomic particles, that are in constant motion. Between our world as we see it and the sub-atomic world, there is such an immense distance that human imagination is not enough to understand it. In CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, scientists are trying to break down the sub-atomic particles to find out their compositions. I believe that sub-atmoic particles are made of ultra-sub-atomic particles, and distance of proportions between two groups of particles is as big or may be bigger than the distances between our world and that of sub-atomic particles.

In the same way, I believe that we are the sub-atomic particles of the universe, and may be our universe is sub-atomic particle for other bigger universes. For me, life is the constant motion of the sub-atomic particles, that is such that according to quantum physics it can be in more than one place at the same time. This life force joins all of us, humans, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, oceans, space, planets, galaxies into one. This super-consciousness is God.

It is for this reason that I like the ancient human's ideas of gods like mythical creatures, humans and demons and animals all combined like the mythical creatures on the Buddhist temples in Vietnam, like Ganesh in India, because these give an idea of unity of life beyond the apparent differences in our forms.

Scientists say that all our cells change, some die and others are born every minute, every day. Every time we breath, new atomic particles enter our bodies, mix with particles that make our body and some go out with our breath. We are being renewed all the time. Think of a being on Goldilocks, millions of years ago - its atomic particles mixed and travelled in space and have arrived on earth and have entered your breath. Goldilocks is here, inside you, inside us.

A case for Bharatiyata

After a long long time, I have the possibility to spend hours reading different Indian newspapers every morning and get and un update on how India is changing.

For the past twenty-five years, ever since I moved to Italy, my knowledge of happenings in India had gradually substituted by memories of past. Till about a decade ago, there was no way to receive any regular news about India, except when there were big disasters or wars or events related to Sonia Gandhi. Like the Western world, Italy also knew India thourgh the narrow lenses of yoga, spirituality, Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore, poverty, religious conflicts, etc.

Short visits for work or family holidays were cocconed in their own spheres, rarely looking out to see how the India I knew had metamorphed into new directions. My knowledge of the changes remained quite superficial, limited mostly to physical changes like the new shopping malls, metro and fly-overs.

Then about a decade ago, arrived Internet and with it the possibility of reconnecting with India. For me, the reconnection has been more related to music, culture, films, literature, friends and family. Probably I was never very keen on politics and cricket, and whatever, little interest I had, had withered away in those long years of being unconnected.

Now, for the last three weeks, I am at home alone with my mother. Apart from an occasional visit of a friend or a relative, most of my time is passed reading newspapers and magazines, and watching TV. So I have plenty of time to meet the changed India through these mediums and reflect about it.

The impact of the recent election results is one area where I have been trying to understand more about the changing India. And, I have to confess that I am a little confused.

Like, I am confused about the leftist parties. The wiping out of the smaller regional parties from the national parliament and the loss of the left parties in West Bengal, their apparent inability to reflect systematically about their defeat, etc. occupies some space in newspapers everyday. Over the past few days, the development related to Maoists in Lalgarh have been occupying front pages, increasing that confusion.

In my area of work linked with voluntary organisations, development and health, I have frequent opportunities of meeting a lot of persons who hold sympathies towards leftist or socialist philosophies. In all those discussions, I have heard regularly about the possibility of the leftist ideals of an egualitarian, sustainable world that opposes the imperialist forces of liberalization, globalisation and privatization to avoid exploitation of the poor and the marginalised. They lament that with the congess rule, without the presence of saner left forces, thse forces of liberalisation and privatization would get momentum to the detriment of the poor and the margainlised.

Yet, I have yet to read anything that properly articulates, what went wrong with West Bengal? The left-parties had the opportunity to put into practice all the wonderful egalitarian and developmental policies for the past 32 years, then how come tribals and marginalised groups of persons in places like Lalgarh continue to live lives of poverty, lack of infra-structures and lack of justice, as they do in Orissa or Chattisgarh?

Like the better known on-off relationship between BJP and RSS, is there also a gap between all these people who know all about sustainable development and justice, and their leftist parties?

The squabbles in the BJP about power and control positions are also baffling, but are perhaps more predictable. Like all those wars fought by Bush in the names of justice and liberation, even the “party with a difference” is actually made of fallible human beings that are just looking for another clever slogan for their public image. Their insistence on continuing with hindutva, seems more like hiding behind the already-known because of an inability to come up with a vision for the future.

In fact looking at the visions, ideas and strategies of the different political parties, I see a similar lack of ability to look at the wider reality and a continuing narrow focus of debate on liberalisation, privatization issues, either for them or against them. Yet issues and areas that require a new vision are so many!

Isn’t it necessary to see why did the leftist vision of anti-liberalisation, anti-privatization lead to poor and marginalised being still poor and marginalised? If the rabid stupidness of hindutva, that sounds very much like the reborn evangelists or talibans, does not work, what else can be there that does not close itself in women in jeans-pubs kinds of medieval debates? If reservations have had such a limited impact on the lives of millions of dalits, can we look for newer ways of decreasing those disparities? Our environment, our rivers, our forests, our biodiversity, how can we safeguard them and yet without renouncing to our share of material and economic progress?

I have never been impressed by these “our gods and our culture are in danger and we need to protect them” kind of ideas that are behind concepts of hindutva or muslim or christian revivals. On the other hand, I feel that Bharat has long and glorious religious traditions of acceptance, sharing and tolerance that the world does not have, also because probably no oner country in the world has such a long tradition of living with multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual societies.

The kind of fearless debates that Hinduism could have about its gods, about its philosophies and about its spirituality, the way Islam could develop in directions of sufism and ganga-jamuni culture, the kind of different strains of religious doctrines of equality, peace and harmany such as philosophies of Mahavir, Buddha and Nanak, that could develop in India, how can we safeguard all those?

Can’t we think of Bhartiyata, the Indian way of looking at issues that does keep in mind our culture and our traditions, but looks fearlessly at the new and the future, including the ideas of progress that come from the more “developed” world, looking at them critically?

Where are such persons, such parties, such political manifestoes?

Tavleen Singh in her coloumn in Indian Express of 20 June, “Lessons from the Ayatollah”, had written, something similar:

“It (Iran) might wake them (BJP leaders) upto the reality that the party of Hindutva is dead, dead, dead until it severs its links with the RSS. It is this “cultrual” organisation that brought into politics all those sadhus and sadhvis whose only contribution to Indian politics was venom and bigotry. Whenever religious people enter the political arena, they have to find an enemy and, in my humble opinion, it was this very bad habbit that became the primary reason for the BJP’s defeat.

The more the BJP’s leaders vented their venom against Muslims, the better they made the “pseudo-secular” Congress look….

There is great deal about ancient, Hindu India that we should try and understand and preserve. It saddens me everytime I go to a Southeast Asian country and see the immense influence of Indian civilization that continues to exist there and that is almost totally lost here. We need to understand why it has been lost here if we are not to end up as a country whose only culture comes from Bollywood.”

Perhaps a new party or a new leader would look at the concept of Bhartiyata and articulate it in a way that makes all forward looking Indians, of different classes, castes and religions to feel that they have a stake in India’s future! I hope.

The Indian Way

The lady smiled at me. She was one of those culturally aware kinds who want to be sensitive to persons of other cultures. "I know you are not a Christian, but at least I can wish you for a happy new year." Meaning, she will not offend me by wishing me merry christmas!

I guess that it is the western way of thinking that likes things to be neatly divided and separated and put into neat labelled boxes. Thus people with different religions and expected behaviours, the politically correct things to say about them, all are stored in those boxes. There is no place for ambiguity or confusion there.

Europe needs to respond and adapt to the multi-cultural societies, legacies of the colonial pasts and accelerated by growing globalisation and hordes of desperates who flee from underdeveloped world in makeshift boats to land on Spanish or Italian coasts, or crossing in from Eastern Europe. The European society, even with some differences between Roman Catholics and different protestant chruches, had long been uniform culturally, leaving aside some minorities. It is still groping for answers about how to deal with multiculturism.

And so, for not offending the non Christians, some say, no more public lighting and displays for christmas. Others like the lady above, feel that respecting other religions means not mentioning anything about your own religion to others.

I was thinking about the contrast of such thinking from my own growing up experience in India. For Gurupurab, I knew that the prabhat-feri passed very early in the morning, so I would wake up early to get my dose of kacchi lassi from the truck that came down from the Gurudwara. Coming out from a temple, we did not ask people if they were hindu, muslim or sikh before offering them a bit of prasad. When Irene, our neighbour came with the plate of sweet seewiyan for Idd, we were taught to say, "Idd mubarak". In the morning, when I saw Sajid bhai I would say Salaam Valekum and he would answer with a namastey. For the midnight mass of Christmas, more than once I went to the Cathedral near Gol Dakhana and when everyone else around made the sign of cross, I also did. It was just another way of ringing the temple bell.

Religious ambiguity, the soft confines between religions, is part of Indian identity. By venturing in the other religions, by embracing them, by celebrating them you didn't loose your own identity.

Perhaps that is part of Indian system of logic, I am asking myself. We have a particular way of thinking that does not seek the clean separate boxes with neat labels, so dear to the western thinking?

Sometime ago, I was reading a book that talked about a census carried out under British in early 1900s. During the census, a huge number of persons in Punjab had declared themselves to be hindu-sikhs. No, you can't be hindu-sikh, you have to be either hindu or sikh, choose one, they were told. It laid the grounds for creating divisions among hindus and sikhs in Punjab, the book claimed.

Perhaps, the British did have a clear strategy for dividing and ruling India or perhaps this was just a by-product of western way of thinking that does not accept ambiguity that we seem to embrace?

In a world that is dominated by great conflicts between the three monotheistic religions Christians, Jews and Muslims, I sense that we are moving towards polarisations. Everyone closed in their own boundaries with common spaces bounded by rules they call "tollerance and respect for all religions". To me, it seems a way of saying, I believe that I am superior, my religion is better, but I will not waste my time in telling you about it, so just lets not talk about it.

This polarised way of thinking is seeping in India as well, by well meaning persons. But I think that there are lot of merits in our Indian way of reasoning, that does not call for tollerance and respect, it calls for embracing and acceptance of the other. We don't need to stop public displays of joy at Christmas, we need to extend it to other religions, so that we can celebrate festivals of others, like we celebrate our own.

May be western way of logical, rational thought, that prefers clean unambiguous answers is good for somethings like IT and our own confused, inclusive, ambiguous way is better for other things, especially about religions and about living together!

Against nature?

There was yet another debate on the TV about nature versus nurture, this time provoked by the news that the museum of natural history in Oslo is organising an exhibition on homosexuality in animals.

It is never easy to say what do we inherit from our parents through the genes and what is more learned behaviour depending upon where we grow up. Somethings that may seem clearly hereditary are not always so.

Like people often said that my voice sounded exactly like my father's. And now on telephone, my son's friends mistake me for him and my friends and colleagues mistake him for me. Is that because of genes or is it because growing up together, I subconsciously internalised my father's voice and my son did that with my voice?

Illnesses like high blood pressure running in families, have similar confusions. Do you get high blood pressure because your ma or grandma had it or because living in the same house, you share all your habbits of eating, exercising, reacting to stress?

It is much easier to deal with physical characteristics like the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your ears. That you did get through the genes.

There are many practical implications of the final conclusions of such debates, and that is why any conclusion is hotly debated. For example, if we accept that mental illnesses like neurosis are the result of genes, then perhaps all theories of Freud and therapies like psychotherapy trying to find the cause of your illness in the way your mom wrapped your nappies when you were three months old, can be considered as useless!

Another practical example is about criminal behaviour. If we accept that criminal behaviour is because of genes, then what use is putting the fellow in the jail or worse, hanging him? What could he do, he had no choice but to follow his genes?

So to go back to the debate on the TV on homosexuality in animals, the stakes are much higher. Different religions consider homosexuality to be against nature. Here, vatican officially assumes a similar position. If we accept that animals can also be homosexual, such arguments will be difficult to sustain.

Actually such debate is not new. Some years ago there was lot of discussion about some male Humbolt penguins in a German zoo who preferred to stick with their own company while the females were left in peace.

In the debate on the TV, we had similar arguments. It is the stress of living in the zoo, it is the stress of increasing urbanisation, these are not real serious relationships but only playful behaviour in animals, and so on. So it will always go on, each side refusing to be convinced by the other.

In the picture, the famous humbolt penguins from the German zoo.