An analyst on hymn street

Some cultured vultures , some new generation Indian and of course Chutney Spears have got so hassled with my earlier post 'Marutis who sold their monks' that I sometimes feel like Uma Bharti. In writing, usage of extreme poles always attracts attention and thats normal. But some further 'mediocre' thoughts from my side.

Should we junk sanskrit just because it cant give jobs? The script of both Chinese language ( Mandarin and Cantonese) is very tough to learn and is very old . Nobody in China should learn or write it. If they learn it also , they wont get the BPO and IT jobs which India has. So lets not learn even Hindi or mother tongue, Sanskrit to door ki baat hai.

In sheer capitalist terms, why cant things several hundred years old be a big opportunity for India. One-third of Americans consume alternative medicine and its a $ 10 bn industry there. Why does Ayurveda provide a much holistic cure for some illnesses than allopathy. Yoga with different versions of it ( Bikram, Iyengar et al) are slowly taking over fitness machines in the US. Give me the chicks at the gym anyday boss, who will eat all these bitter Pith nashak kadhas and perform the akhandbhujasana.

Should the spirit of human inquiry be crushed just because the process means digging into something old. Well paleontologists dug our evolutionary past to discover dinosaurs which was interesting to know but practically useless( of course smart people like Spielberg made millions from it).

Why do self help books sell more than management books. Why are so many people in the world in search of a greater meaning to life inspite of achieving all material wealth. Most self-help books prescribe nothing but a ritual . The previous best-seller Stephen Covey had a rational core whereas the latest Robin Sharma has a spiritual core that gleans a lot from some old Hindu ways of life and religion.

But some dudes feel religion is irrational . So are a lot of things we humans do . Even the most rational breed of analyzers better known as economists are junking their rational choice hypotheses. We all love to think we are rational but while standing at the shopping mall with twenty five shirts to choose from, we might be making irrational choices and still not be sure if we made the right choice.

Everyone loves the seduction of logic and order. Unfortunately gaining insights by reading and synthesising multi-threaded information pathways is difficult. Ask anyone trying to research or do a Phd . Most scientific papers are writings where the simplicity of thought is lost in the complexity of equations and other scientific terms. The Vedas or other religious texts are no different in terms of degree of difficulty. But if one believes there is no benefit like enjoyment and practicality(essentially lower order needs which every man achieves with temporal imbalances) in reading or delving deeper, dont even try. You would be worse off than Schrodingers cat.

The other big crib is "hey dont blame us , nobody taught us , didnt give us a for dummies type textbook blah blah". Well dudes no one taught us sex education we all learnt it in our own unique ways.

At the end of the day, everything is a personal choice. Collectivism even in India is finally a summation of millions of different views, and I am just on a quest to form a view. But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that a community of 15000 bloggers represents a fair sample of the vast population of resident and non-resident Indians. Issues still affect real India but may be not virtual India.

In a lighter vein , what is a Sanskrit name like pundit doing on the gateway of Indian blogosphere?

Amen to that.