1)

From: Santokh Singh
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 9:47 PM
Subject: [sikhyouth] Blessings in Sanskrit and lead alloy stealth technology

This editorial reaction to "Hindu religion regeneration activities" is worth reading for a chortle.

Referring to the Sanskrit campaign, if "we are apparently to believe that the Gods do not listen to us unless beseeched in Sanskrit", and also if Sanskrit does date back to 1200 BC as claimed, then how did our ancestors who lived before 1200 BC ever get their Gods' blessings?
Did you know, (according to C S R Prabhu, Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Center, Hyderabad) that “India had a treasure trove of hi-tech warfare technology that even the mighty west does not possess?" Or that "lead alloy (thamogarbha loha) used in making the body (of a war machine) would absorb light around it in a photo chemical reaction that would make it disappear?”
http://www.deccan.com/edit.htm 22/12/00
Language of Gods is dead By Mohan Guruswamy
Have you come across any good nonsense recently?
See how this stacks up with what you may have?
The December 16 issue of that venerable newspaper The Hindu, has a real gem.
Only The Hindu has this, for even that other “national” daily The Times of India with its new-found emphasis on spiritual matters seems to have missed it. But The Hindu has a long and well-established tradition of devoting space for the nourishment of the soul and it does not surprise me very much that only this newspaper has deemed it fit to treat a lecture on “High Technology in Ancient Sanskrit Literature” with the respect and deference a four column headline spread out on a prominent page indicates. The lecture was by a C S R Prabhu, Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Center, Hyderabad and was part of the three-day Indo-Nepal Sanskrit Conference at the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth. Incidentally, the NIC is a part of the Government of India’s Planning Commission and is tasked with the responsibility of collating and analysing the huge volumes of data the Planning Commission presumably requires go about its work.

The Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, I was helpfully informed by the Sanskrit Bhasha Prachara Samithi, is unlike them a quasi-governmental institution being part of the Hindu religion regeneration activities of the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam. The TTD is a supposedly autonomous body, but for all practical purposes, an instrument of the Andhra Pradesh government to manage the affairs and use the large and constantly replenishing coffers of the Venkateshwara temple to mainly foster the Hindu faith, propagate the magical powers of Lord V and persuade people to rely on him for deliverance and more usually for more sundry needs.

Many of you might recall that at one time we used to have the late N T Rama Rao as its vice-chairman. Any guesses for who the chairman was? Yes, it was the short-tempered God of the hills himself! The TTD has had a long and distinguished line of civil servants managing it on a day-to-day basis as Executive Officers. Such is the State’s grip on the TTD that even the dimensions, weight and content of the laddu prasadam are matters of State policy. Yet we call ours a secular State? A goodly part of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo marketed by the TTD has to be around the preservation of Sanskrit, which we have now for long internalised to be the language of the Hindu Gods.

Logic favours this, for the Gods could not be speaking in Hindi, which we know for that is less than a couple of centuries old. They could not be speaking in Tamil for that is a Dravidian language and our Gods are mostly, if not all, Aryan. It must be Sanskrit for it is the oldest Indic language and was in use as long back as 1200 BC. Since the Gods must have existed from the times the universe began, transiting from nothingness to initiating atoms, must we presume Sanskrit to be older than 1200 BC? Whatever be the reasons, we are apparently to believe that the Gods do not listen to us unless beseeched in Sanskrit. Which is presumably why the TTD propagates Sanskrit by organising conferences such as the one our Prabhu of the NIC addressed.

Whatever be its age, today Sanskrit is dead as a language if the essential meaning of language is that it is a means of communicating, for hardly anybody communicates in Sanskrit. In fact, it ceased to be in common usage even during the Mauryan age, when the dominant language was Pali. Today, it seems prevalent only in two places. One is in our Hindu temples where the priests use it to propitiate the Gods on our behalf. The other is in All India Radio, which has regular news bulletins in Sanskrit even though there may be no listeners, presumably to remind our non-temple going majority that there are Sanskrit readers certainly if not speakers still in India.

If there is a third place it is used, it must be the Murli Manohar Joshi household. Why? Because there is much in common between what this one time Physics professor who is the current Human Resource Development Minister believes and what our Prabhu, a senior technical director with the NIC, recently presented in what was presumably a conference of Sanskrit scholars. Prabhu’s thesis is that “the pre-Mahabharata period was an age of high technology which was ignored in the medieval period due to reasons not known.” We know the medieval period to be the period from about 1000 AD to 1500 AD. Mohammed bin Kasim came to Sind in 998 AD and so we have a pretty good corollary to deduce that our past prowess began to be ignored in this country with the onset of the Muslim domination of India.

But that is another discussion for another time. The thrust of Prabhu’s lecture apparently was that “India had a treasure trove of hi-tech warfare technology that even the mighty west does not possess. The Brahmastra and Vimana used in the pre-Mahabharata period were nothing but the earlier versions of today’s nuclear weapons and spacecraft.” We should wonder why our Light Combat Aircraft still refuses to take-off even after a decade and a half and several thousand crores of rupees later! Prabhu then is reported to have quoted from the texts “of a great scholar Subbaraya Sastry, who, in a state of yogic trance, is said to have orally dictated the spacecraft technology in a period somewhere between 1875 and 1919, which was recorded by his disciples.”

Our scientist from the NIC then helpfully adds that the “text contains technical details on assembling, fabricating and erecting a spacecraft, the metals, semi-conductors, advanced alloys used and other minute aeronautical information.” What these details are is even more interesting. For instance one of the alloys is said to be made by using a cactus called “vajrathundam”. And why not? After all did not that other great homegrown scientist Ramar Pillai from near Coimbatore, extract petrol from herbs and which feat several of our great leaders like the self-styled rationalist Karunanidhi, and the former physics professor from Allahabad hailed as a great triumph of indigenous science and native scientific achievement?

Apparently in Sanskritic science, like in swadesi economics, all sorts of convenient miracles are possible! The newspapers recently carried an item that the Mazagaon Docks is incorporating stealth technology for the next generation of warships for the Indian Navy. Instead of wasting huge amounts of public money on development costs, the Navy would probably be better off if it consulted our Prabhu of the NIC who says “the spacecraft could become invisible on its own. The lead alloy (thamogarbha loha) used in making the body would absorb light around it in a photo chemical reaction that would make it disappear.”

I think that a warship made of lead alloy would become invisible to the naked eye and to surface radar because its leaden weight would pull it down into the bottom of the ocean. But then I am not a scientist. There is much more of this stuff from where it comes. I have heard some of it before. Our former physics professor from Allahabad is full of these instances of our former greatness. For instance, it was a nuclear holocaust reduced us to our current state, an impoverished, backward and suffering country that was occupied by foreigners for most of the past two millennia. Uranium and plutonium isotopes have half-lives of more than 40,000 years and surely some of it should be sending Geiger counters into a ticking frenzy. But logic is of no use to the believer.

If modern man evolved after triumphing over the Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago, our destructive impulses did not take very long to blossom into mushroom shaped clouds, did it? (Did we actually triumph over the Neanderthals for it often seems that they still are around?) Many of us would have heard sometime or the other that Hanuman, the android God, could go to the Himalayas to fetch sanjeevani to revive the stricken Lakshmana and return in a flash because he had a hypersonic plane. And Rama’s Vimana was nothing but a helicopter! The clincher usually is that we had to be great for did we not give the world the zero! Does that account for our predilection for that numeral which seems the usual sum product of our national endeavours? My problem is not that such nonsense is believed and parroted around.

We will always have people who will interpret the past differently and try to live out their fantasies. The problem is when such people begin to surface on State-provided pulpits. Then the nonsense gets official sanction and consequently some currency. As a nation, we seem to have a problem separating mythology from history. As a society with a long tradition of oral history, facts get embellished, enlarged and exaggerated with each telling. When truth gets laden with layers of poetic license, history tends to become mythology.

Mythology makes good reading and often is the most effective means of highlighting moral dilemmas and providing moral benchmarks to guide us through life, as is the Mahabharata. But to take the Mahabharata or the Ramayana and all that grew in between to be our history would be straining credulity to the utmost. Or in other words, it is just plain foolishness. But with the recent history we are bequeathed with, with most of the just passed Millennium more notable for our fall from grace, and notable mostly for our defeats and the self-centred treachery of the ruling classes, is it any wonder that we tend to elevate mythology to history?

At 12/21/2000 11:35 PM-0800, you wrote: Tribune News http://www.tribuneindia.com Sanskrit to be made compulsory eGroups Sponsor

2)

From: Santokh Singh
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 1:08 PM
Subject: [sikhyouth] Re: Names used

Waheguruji ka Khalsa Waheguruji ki Fateh

We could forward data for those Sikhs who do not have access to PCs.
I asked 3 others and have also included their inputs.

The reason for this survey will be given at an appropriate time later as we do not want the results to be influenced. Please consider this to be very important for the welfare of everyone carrying a Sikh name, whatever gurdwara, dera or sect one is comfortable with.

Purpose ...............................Choice#..........................Reason(if any)
guarantee card..........................9.................................short
ticket........................................4.................................short
membership card......................4..................................short

guarantee card .........................4.................................short
ticket........................................2..................................passport name
membership card..................... 7...............................short and wants to be called by first name

guarantee card........................ 8................................----------
ticket...................................... 1.............................. with addition of s/o B Singh
membership card.................... 3...............................-----------

guarantee card....................... 9...............................short
ticket..................................... 3.............................. short
membership card................... 2............................... establishes his identity best

santokh

Could you please spare us a minute and answer this question?
Send replies to sysurveys@yahoo.com.
If you can, fwd this to Sikh forums and friends and ask for their help.
The more the number of replies, the greater the accuracy and the results can be very helpful to us all.
Substituting Manjit Singh Gill for your complete name, (young ladies pls substitute Kaur/K for Singh/S), then:

What have you used when asked to supply your name for a routine purpose like filling in a guarantee card for an electrical appliance, a train/plane ticket, or a membership of a club?

#1 Manjit Singh
#2 Manjit Singh Gill
#3 Manjit S Gill
#4 MS Gill
#5 Manjit Gill
#6 M Singh
#7 M Gill
#8 Singh
#9 Gill
#10 AN Other

Purpose..................... Choice #.................................... Reason(if any)
guarantee card
ticket
membership card

There is no need to think long and deeply, just the truth as you recall it - as it does not necessarily mean that you are using the same combination of names at present. The answers are completely confidential. The final result will be made public in about 2 weeks.
Thank you
sysurveys@yahoo.com

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