IDC Spring 2019 Seminars

Our goal in India Discovery Center has been to understand the distinction or difference a person of Indian origin might bring to a table of nations.  All human beings have general needs of food, housing and survival.  What does India offer if any to the world civilization?  I want to summarize
our findings so far.

Through our studies and observations, we have come to believe that besides survival, the human
being is also creative.  Creativity lives in the brain and operates through imagination and intelligence.  It is a process through which we adapt to the environment in stead of breaking it down.  We understand that the natural resources are helpful to us and we learn to economize.  We appreciate the role of sun and water.  We appreciate co-existence and harmony.  We understand the power of the society and its constraints.  We understand that we don't live by ourselves but we live with the help of nature and the grace of the universe.

The above is not a profound revelation but is not realized unless one reflects on life for a long time. Any reflection needs security of food.  This is where India as a land has been blessed by nature.  Whenever the first man arrived in India, he discovered that he does not have to explore any further.  Food, water and good climate were all there.  India became a base for all people who arrived.  They all adopted the empirical principle of respecting the nature since they appreciated the landscape and realized that the nature was providing the nourishment.  Later they discovered that nature also healed. Food hygiene was declared claiming that longevity was a human right!

Security of food and good health propelled people to devote time into music, dance and art.  People had time to create elaborate social festivals and spend long hours in preparing for artistic productions. A grass-root culture developed based on artistic expressions, fashion and design.  It went to the extent that the performing arts were coded and put together for people to learn and be trained. The code became the only resource of its kind in the world.  People discovered the play of the mind and the role of speech.  The study of speech and articulation became an obsession among the Indian people.  Analysis of speech led to better communication and precision in messaging.  The latter helped in creating better quality of life. All productions took a stamp of finer aspects of expression.

India produced the first and the only grammar book in the world and empowered people to express freely.  Freedom of expression led to massive literature in all subjects.  They become the glory of India two thousand years ago.  Gradually literature became more focused, lyrical and musical.  Technology developed to depict the finer aspects visually through paintings or carvings.  The regimentation of religion was removed to allow individual freedom which engineered further creativity in food, textiles, individual makeup, living style and faith.  India became a dynamic country throbbing with creativity building massive temples, elaborate frescoes, intricate designs which
made the country the most opulent nation in the world.

We have come so far in our studies.  We will offer our observations in a survey seminar on March 31,
Sunday, afternoon 2 PM at Lexington Public Library. We will cover the five periods: Indus, Vedic, Classical, Golden and Hindu in twenty-minute segments.  We will have a Q&A session.  We will make this free survey seminar educational for all. The siting in the Library large meeting room is restricted to eighty people.  Please register by sending mail to indidiscoverycenterusa@gmail.com to reserve your seat.  Please visit http://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org to learn more.

Then we will continue on our exploration to go further.  India would be occupied and would be ruled by various foreign elements.  We will explore the splendor of the Mughals and the resistance of the Marathas in our series seminar VI at Bemis Hall in Lincoln on May 4.  We will announce further next month.

Where are we in the journey?

I had started this blog to write end of 2016 about my wanderings, but got occupied in taking the journey.  Most material on India has been written by individuals who never belonged to the land.  Most dates are conjectures and most materials are simple extrapolations.  The lack of analytical material was itself a revelation and it was difficult to handle the sloppy work.  We took upon ourselves to go through the original texts as much as possible to help recreate the texture of life.  

We developed our own thinking as we progressed.  Much new material evolved through group discussion and self-reflection that we reported in our seminars.  I would not go into all details, but express my delight on the period that we just completed.

We labeled the period as Hindu Period spanning from 500AD to 1500AD.  This was the fifth period in our seminar roster, earlier ones being the Indus Period, the Vedic Period, the Classical Period

(700BC-200BC) and the Golden Period (200BC-500AD).  These adjectives were adopted from the

earlier classification, giving the impression that India was at its peak in wealth and well-being around 400AD.  What we discovered was that the period did extend much longer and India was a land of style, fashion and creativity till people lost their homes and their lands to arbitrary taxation. 

While the process of terror and insecurity would be the topic in our next seminar, I wish to express my delight to invite you to walk on the streets of Ujjain, or Kashi or Puri or Madurai in 1100AD.

You would see well-dressed people walking, ladies with style and sophistication going their way, the stores selling design textiles and art objects, and artists singing or dancing in various city theaters.  There is no competition, each person feels secure and free.  In the corner, poets have assembled and they are reciting their compositions.  The language of conversation is rich, the contents of the conversation is technical.  Then there are number wizards who are setting up their instruments to measure the shadow to measure time and are predicting the future events in the sky.  So is the observation by AlBiruni, the Arab historian who happened to accompany Mohammed Ghori and stayed back to study India.

The Golden period did not end, it became a Platinum Period.  The prosperity reached people and everyone became creative and artistic.  We see art in clay, stone., metals, gold, gems, textiles, food, cooking and in personal habits.  The God was not out there in the heavens, but it was in one's work, in the person's tools, it expressed through the person's hands.  Literature itself became an art.  The God came in human voice and people felt the cosmos through their music.  The harmony and the aesthetics became the ruling principle.  Each one is free and independent, but each action fits to an undefined whole which gets created by the group through collaboration and constructive energy.  The power of seeing the harmony was God, who would guide if one went beyond one's self and tried to see the whole.

India exported materials, traded with various countries, settled in the Far East, propagated religious ideas in China, Tibet and Cambodia.  They built temples at home and built temples abroad.  Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam accepted Indian thoughts and adopted Indian languages.

Engineering techniques on metallurgy, stone carving and construction projects were mastered.  Artists enjoyed to produce new work, The tradition of good work ran in the families.  Nutrition and fresh food were important and people maintained excellent health.  There was food for all.  Nobody went hungry. 

I can continue for pages, but shall stop here.  I will analyze various contributions that made India

prosperous in the future blog posts.  Presently I am curious to know how we lost it all.  We have 

some understanding, but I wish to come to a firm conclusion.  I will write gradually.       

Why India Discovery Center?

As the year of 2016 comes to a close, I wish to reflect on our journey with the concept that makes India Discovery Center.  

"India" in the title is a place holder.  It is not a political unit, but a knowledge unit.  In the early days, the entire subcontinent from Iran to Thailand could have been known as a unit. While we don't think that the man originated in this span of the earth, but we have reason to believe that human beings inhabited this area very early in the history of civilization.  On the trail from Africa, human beings also settled in many other areas, but the longest continuous evolution of culture happened in this piece of land on the planet.  It is likely that the first structured literary expression blossomed in India leading to a reflective view of life of survival, fellowship and harmony.  With the river-fed fertile land and a host of vegetation and wild life, the Indian society evolved to define structures in living, invent techniques of enterprise and over all created organizational methods in order to pursue knowledge. Independent thinking and structured living of men and women in India five thousand years ago would be the envy of people in any age.

Then we come to "Discovery."  Among the most fundamental thoughts that developed in India in her early history was the assertion that the human voice was a map of the universe and could enable us to communicate with any object in the universe through proper simulation.  The analytic thinking behind such assertion leads to enunciate that the human voice is not confined to the audible speech, but goes to a deeper comprehension and understanding of an object in one's mental faculty.  That the humans are blessed with a "mind" that can imagine physical objects and create impressions in the brain is the basis of Indian cosmology.  No object or no space is too far for the mind.  While we know of these assertions and enunciation, we do not know how such a thought shaped itself.  We also do not know who the people were and how they lived their life.  Much of the old literature is still not fully studied, many are yet to be uncovered.  Sanskrit language though reviving, was put in the cold for several centuries under the colonial rule. Without proper investigation, we are led to the phrases like "revelation" which have no sustained comprehension.  

The declaration that the entire universe could be a homogeneous unit led to a greater opportunity of thinking in numbers and organizing in sets.  Organizing objects in groups led to organizing thoughts in mind, which eventually gave rise to a distinct grammar, scientific measurement of time and the tools of communication using language.  Naming of objects has been the most mysterious exercise for the human civilization. Object names have moved on to all parts of the world modified through accent and tonality.  Sanskrit language still uses the science of naming, while the world languages memorize words.  Object comprehension than object tabulation has been the most important contribution of the Indian mind.  As we said before, comprehension can lead to simulation and in a deeper sense guide to actualization. This process has been called yoga, a concept totally foreign to the rest of the world.  India taught to the world that a human has the potential to mirror the universe in himself or herself, but we do not know how such a teaching was enabled and by what schooling.  Such empowerment is lately covered in a phrase called "will-power", which is a trait and not an endowment.

We have to come to many more areas of discovery in the fields of music, sciences, technology, engineering, textiles, materials and metallurgy.  But I want to conclude this segment with the third word in the tile, which is "Center".  We envision building a Center where we can learn the evolution of civilization through exhibits and hands-on activities.  We wish to create a laboratory of human curiosity in order to understand how we think and how we organize.  We research and display historical facts to understand where human beings excelled and where they failed.  We celebrate freedom but we understand occupation. India is a living replica of human civilization.  We create a Center to understand India such that we may understand the humanity and the human civilization.  We hope the Center would come to life by 2021.

Please join us in our seminar "Study of the Vedic Period" scheduled for January 21, 2017, in Lincoln, MA.  Please visit our website at http://www.indiadiscoverycenter,org for registration and participation.