The world's second largest standing army that can be called to crush insurgencies also helps.
2,170 karma · joined June 12, 2009
Traitors don't necessarily have to set out to commit treason against their country - they can be just unsophisticated simpletons greedy for power. And they can commit treason and sabotage the nation in the name of patriotism.
I only recently completed an undergraduate sequence in quantum mechanics. I still have general relativity and quantum field theory left, which will take some more time to do properly. I also don't know how moral it'd be to wade into those waters without being on a first name basis with Jackson and Goldstein.
Suffice it to say that there's a lot of work to do. But time is something that I have!
As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validated scientifically. For e.g., how might a Nagarjuna or Shankara have argued for their claims if they were born in the 21st century?
I suppose I don't have any deeper reasons other than sheer inquisitiveness or jijnAsA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa) :-)
I don't understand why more Indians and particularly Hindus are not doing this. This looks to me like a thrilling intellectual and even spiritual adventure, and one of the few things that are truly worth doing in life.
An example that readily comes to mind are the courses on manufacturing processes offered by both MITx and NPTEL. The MITx course was clearly a class apart - you actually got to see the processes in question and how they were applied in the real world factories. When speaking about how a product was made, the lecturer actually bothered to bring samples of those products, sometimes dismantled them, and showed us how they could have been put together. I only audited this a few months ago, and to this day I remember the concepts vividly.
On the other hand, in the videos I watched, the NPTEL course lecturer simply read out from powerpoint slides, which he prepared from a standard textbook. You were better off reading the textbook directly than watching the video alternating between the slides and the lecturer's face. It was a very uninspiring, depressing experience.
Maybe I am missing something, but Zikr sounds suspiciously like japa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japa), which is a well accepted form of concentration meditation in all Dharmic traditions. Many teachers will ask neophytes to have a regular japa practice, where you recite a mantra a certain number of times often with the help of a mAlA, first audibly, and gradually, mentally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japa#Degrees_of_loudness). The idea being that it's easier to focus on a gross object at first to keep your mind steady, and later proceed to more subtle forms. Patanjali himself recommends that Om be chanted and its meaning reflected upon (https://www.himalayanacademy.com/saivite-scriptures/patanjal...).
The forms of meditations in dharmic traditions is quite bewildering. Patanjali himself recommends to concentrate on anything that you are comfortable with (https://www.himalayanacademy.com/saivite-scriptures/patanjal...).
This has occurred to me as well. But then, this is good news! It means that at least theoretically it might be possible to understand these important historical figures by inducing these hallucinations and psychotic experiences in ourselves in a deliberate and controlled way. This might be the key to understanding religions thoroughly.
I'd even say that a great deal of human progress depends on carrying out this project.
This to me sounds like the equivalent of trying to squat with a 200 kg weight on your back on day one when you have never trained with weights before.
In the context of Dharmic spiritual traditions, meditation (of various types) is intentionally aimed at facilitating a deconstruction of your normal sense of self and also induce altered states of consciousness. These should not be taken lightly.
If you are going to pursue it seriously, it's best to gradually ease into the tradition and respect the spiritual context in which these techniques are supposed to work. It's possible that the recommendations that Dharmic spiritual traditions have for ethics and devotional practices allow us to be more prepared for our experiences during mediation sittings and receive them in a more wholesome way.
Prima facie, it'd seem that the common factor enabling their persecution is Islam.
Unfortunately, they found that it was the non-depressed individuals who had an inaccurate view of their abilities and station in life! The depressed individuals seemed to view themselves quite accurately. So apparently, a bias towards evaluating yourself more positively seemed to play a role in inculcating positive mental states.
He said that instead of the much touted self-esteem, he now thought that perhaps we should focus on control and self-discipline. Overall an interesting idea, I thought.
Now my aim is to study these topics in Sanskrit with a traditional scholar. Currently trying to see how to make this work.
I picked up the rudiments of Sanskrit enough to be able to understand lectures in the language and read straightforward prose. I also gained a basic understanding of Indic philosophy, but I suppose that is not a skill. Now my aim is to deepen these skills to more advanced levels.
Currently I am also trying to learn Physics and Mathematics at the undergraduate and post-graduate level. It's taking forever because I keep getting distracted with life generally. But my aim is nothing less than gaining a solid grasp of our current modern understanding of how the universe works. I hope to get somewhere respectable by the time I am 45.
Either Hindus must rewrite the theology of Hinduism to accept an interpretation of the concept of varNa in a way that is concordant with humanistic and egalitarian ideals, or Hindus must accept that Hinduism will be reduced to a minority religion in India. I can't imagine why anyone would agree to be part of a religion that formally considers him or her as a lower class human by birth than certain other humans in the same religion.
This is not really true. If I recall correctly, Jesus was born in the Davidic line as per the bible, which was important for his claim as the messiah. His high "caste" did matter to his followers. Caste is determined by your pedigree, and not by how rich you are.
It's true that caste-based discrimination is a curse that India must do away with. Perhaps it'd be more helpful to let different communities adhere to whatever traditions are important to them without attaching the concept of highness or lowness associated with it.
Sometimes there is a tendency to forget that there is more to the USA than Trump and co. I think most Europeans are well aware of the "battle for the soul of America" within USA. The retreats from partnerships are most likely only a temporary glitch.
There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news.
This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
This is a serious impediment to developing any useful expertise in any area, but I have sort of made peace with this tendency. But not all is lost. It has been my experience that the next time I visit a previously learned topic, it's significantly easy for me to load everything to my "active" memory, and build-up from there. Apparently, you never truly forget the things that have once learned well. See here, for e.g.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117110834.h...
> Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten.
I am no expert on memory, but from what I have read on the topic, our long-term memory is virtually unlimited, the main constraint being inability to recall rather than the memory content being erased. If you have once learned a topic well but haven't visited in a long time, you may not be able to recall it very easily, but you will be able to recognize or relearn it better than someone who doesn't have any exposure to the topic.
> In a press release issued Sunday, Delhi police said they had arrested 32 “white-collar criminals” and seized 55 computers along with dozens of cellphones, internet routers and “illegal software” being used in what they described as a “swanky international cheating scam call centre targeting Canada citizens.”
> All of those arrested are residents of India and between the ages of 18 and 38, according to the statement.
> The Delhi police alleged the scheme has been targeting Canadian citizens by claiming their social insurance numbers had been compromised.
Here's another: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
> LONDON: British Police service on Monday said it had shut down two sophisticated criminal call centres in Kolkata, instrumental in defrauding thousands of victims in the UK alone, with the cooperation of Indian police.
> The call centres were raided by 50 officers from the Cyber Division of Kolkata Police last week as part of a worldwide four-year operation conducted by the UK police and Microsoft.
Mutual distrust and animosity was always there underneath the surface. The internet is just making it a lot more visible to outsiders.
Don't forget that India itself was born during violent and widespread Hindu-Muslim clashes that displaced some 10+ million people from their homelands and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others. The past history of India has been quite violent if you think about it. We have had several insurgencies fueled by ethnic hatred and real or imagined grievances. The 80s and the 90s were very violent years. We had the Gujarat riots (or pogrom, depending on whom you ask) as late as 2002.
The freewheeling, anonymous nature of the internet just makes ideas fueling hatred to spread fast. Now it is easier for skilled rhetoricians to infect others. Everyone is getting radicalized - Hindus, Muslims, various caste and ethnic groups, you name it.
All this is not even counting any bots and propaganda armies on the internet working overtime to project a certain narrative. I fear that things might get worse, much worse, before they get better.
Abrogation of Kashmir's special status has been a top agenda of the BJP for the past few decades. They are pretty big on "national unity", and they see the special status for Kashmir as going against this principle. They want Kashmir fully integrated into India once and for all. They also consider the indecision about Kashmir's status in India as being a prime cause for terrorism in that region. Kicking the muslims has very little to do with it.
Whether this step will backfire remains to be seen. Indians will have to ask some very tough questions about what kind of nation they want India to be, and whether the vision they come up with will be viable at all given the nature of the Indian society.
The saving grace (in my opinion) is that India is vastly more susceptible to pressure from outside than China. Indian government can't simply impose a policy and expect the population to fall in line. If western sanctions make lives difficult for India's industry or the common citizens, the government will have to backtrack pretty much immediately.
The trouble is that India has a social bootstrapping problem. India's governance depends on the leaders Indians elect, which means that the electorate sets the policy followed by the leaders. And this electorate is largely poor and illiterate. This means that vastly sub-optimal policies get followed than what would be ideal. Often religious, casteist and nationalistic tropes are an easier sell than those based on science, commonsense and reason. But it also has the advantage that draconian policies that oppress the citizens don't get implemented.
I have audited a few introductory courses from vyoma samskrita pathashala (https://sanskritfromhome.in).
There's also the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan in India (http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/) who have a two year introductory correspondence course. I believe they deliver overseas as well. I did the first year of their course with the help of a tutor I hired from urbanpro.com, but (as with all things GoI) I found the experience to be far less satisfactory than Samskritabharati's.
If you can read Hindi, you can also look at the school textbooks by NCERT as well, which are available for free (http://ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm)
Two "Western"-style books that I would recommend are:
* Devavanipravesika (An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language) by Robert Goldman
* Samskrita-SubodhinI (A Sanskrit Primer) by Madhav Deshpande.
One thing I want to do is to work through these books once I am done with Samskritabharati just to cement the things I have learnt.
The nice thing about Samskritabharati's course is that it doesn't just teach the language, but it also introduces you in a gentle (but unapologetic!) way to the whole tradition that flourished through it's medium. They also publish books in Sanskrit, which may also help you in your education.
Good luck!
- I will complete the final level of a beginner's Sanskrit course this August. This has been an intermittently executed project for me. I can follow uncomplicated spoken and written Sanskrit now, and can mostly understand Sanskrit at the level of Gita or the Indian epics. My long term aim is to be able to read Indian philosophical works in their original.
- I am teaching a few neighborhood kids Mathematics, Physics, and occasionally, Computer Science. This is immense fun!
- I am trying to learn at a deeper level some of the topics that I learned during my undergraduate studies. On this front, right now I am working on understanding operating systems and compilers a bit better.
There are other "luxuries" that middle-class Indians can afford if they're earning at least the lower-end of American-level salaries. Early retirement, reasonably affordable healthcare and education, properties far away from cities and affordable labor to work them, more affordable house-help (cooks, house-maids, nannies).
Speaking personally as someone who has lived in a first-world country and who's now living in India, I find that free time is more valuable to me than drones or Lamborghinis or iphones. Not saying that things are ideal in India - far from it, in fact. But living in India does have its positive side as well.