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Let me start by wishing all readers a really comfortable Diwali. Could the approaching yr convey to all of you well being, happiness and fulfilment. In my earlier two columns, I mentioned entrepreneurial vitality, strengthened by the legitimacy given to materials well-being within the Hindu worldview, and our exceptional legacy in arithmetic as two causes for the prominence of so many Indians within the management of company international enterprise. Right now, I wish to analyse a 3rd issue to try to perceive this phenomenon.
This will not strike many Indians themselves, however our heritage gives proof that from historical occasions, and thru the centuries, Indians have had a proclivity—even mania—for classifying information, with a view to deduce a coherent construction to the seemingly disparate parts of life. Might this potential, which isn’t all the time infallible since it will probably result in oversimplification or unwarranted generalisations, have any connection to their success in coping with the avalanche of knowledge of contemporary occasions and, as a substitute of being overwhelmed by it, permit them to discover a sample in it?
A receptivity to the interconnectedness of issues comes naturally to Indians. Their philosophy tells them that even on the stage of the smallest atom, matter is a part of an indivisible complete; their society informs them, that a person is a part of a community of kith, kin and caste; their faith proclaims that nothing is random, and delivery and dying and the whole lot in between, is a part of a causal hyperlink.
Given this, Indians appear to have an intuition to interrupt down all empirical information into finite classes in a fashion that has few parallels wherever. The whole lot is meticulously labeled. Matter is segregated into 5 gross parts: Earth, fireplace, water, air and ether (akash).
An individual’s nature is damaged down into three constituent parts (gunas): sattva, rajas and tamas. Flavours are subdivided into six varieties: salty, candy, bitter, sweet-sour, bitter and spicy. There are 9 sorts of feelings: surprise, terror, disgust, humour, pathos, anger, love, heroism and peace. Human well being is determined by three sorts of humours: phlegm (kaff) gall (pitta), and wind (vayu). Girls are of 4 primary varieties: padmini (lotus-like), sankhini (conch-like), hastini (elephant-like) and chitrini (variegated). Males too are of 4 important classes: anukula (honest and devoted), dakshina (one who distributes his feelings equally), satha (merciless) and dhrishta (shameless). There are 64 methods to make love; life has 4 principal objectives: dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Folks belong to 4 principal castes: brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras. The human journey goes by means of 4 phases: brahmacharya (the age of studying), grihast (the lifetime of a house-holder), vanaprastha (gradual withdrawal from the world) and sanyasa (renunciation).
The important level is that Indians appear to have a congenital inclination to distinguish the database round them. Due to this fact, typically they seem like unfazed by the sheer accretion of knowledge or the elusiveness of a paradigm. Like beavers accumulating items of wooden, they proceed to deconstruct each, inspecting the attainable elements, decreasing them to understandable smaller models, linking these to one another, and enjoying round with the elements, whereas conscious of the necessity for a unifying precept.
This, maybe, explains why India had constructed one of many world’s most intensive databases—and a superbly workable system to entry it for mass purposes—greater than 3,000 years in the past. The Bhrigu Samhita, a treatise on astrology first written in Vedic occasions, compiles a minimum of 500,000 horoscopes, and claims to have an infinite variety of information of individuals, on the idea of which 4.5 million horoscopes could be permuted.
Fin Wandahl, a Danish traveller, has written about his go to in 1997 to a Bhrigu practitioner within the small north Indian city of Hoshiarpur. Wandahl gave him his date, time and place of origin on the idea of which he drew up an astrological chart. The astrologer then rummaged for about fifteen minutes amongst bundles of horoscopes earlier than rising with one, written on a yellowing sheet of paper, that had an equivalent delivery chart as Wandahl’s. The astrologer didn’t have a pc. However he might pull out an identical horoscope of a person born midway throughout the globe 35 years in the past! Wandahl writes that what the astrologer advised him about his previous was uncannily appropriate. He was prepared to advise him on the longer term too, however solely on the fee of a hefty charge, which the parsimonious Dane was unwilling to pay.
There are different examples of such databases. The pandas of Rishikesh and Haridwar preserve what might arguably be essentially the most intensive corpus of genealogies wherever on this planet. A pilgrim has solely to present her household title, and the hometown of her ancestors, for these conventional archivists to tug out information tracing the household’s lineage for a number of generations. Clearly, the file just isn’t full or correct in each occasion. The inhabitants has grown so exponentially, that it might maybe be partially outdated. Nonetheless, the database remains to be terribly intensive and systematically catalogued.
This column is intentionally provocative. It’s offered as a risk, a tentative inference, not a scientific thesis backed by dependable empirical information. However the psyches of individuals, and the origins of their abilities, are all the time a matter of debate and thriller. That’s the reason I’d particularly welcome the response of readers.
Pavan Okay Varma is an writer, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). Simply Like That may be a weekly column the place Varma shares nuggets from the world of historical past, tradition, literature, and private reminiscences with HT Premium readers. The views expressed are private
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