Some days back a student of Indian origin born and raised in US was surprised
to learn that India had a glorious history - he hardly believed me though.
And it did not surprise me since I have come to realize that every
civilization wants to promote itself as the best - Greek and Roman civilization
are promoted as ideals (closely followed by Egyptian one) -- Indian and Chinese
ones are lesser ones.
Greek Toga costume parties are common features of Western univs just like
Indian kurta, dhoti are picking up in Indian college fashion shows.
However, the problem is that Western historians/scholars of non Western spheres
call themselves (and each other) as the world's foremost/only reliable experts
on their chosen area of expertise - namely hows and whys of other civilization.
Most believe (I believe) that those in non-western world/developing world are
too naive/unscientific/non-modern/non-rational to understand and appreciate the
distinction between good and bad; and right and wrong.
See here http://homepage.mac.com/oafbot/myth/
(a project on Asian mythology including Vedic India and Japan etc, which
conveniently ignores Israeli myths about a son of God or people who lived for
thousand years (Abraham and his sons etc) (as per Hindi translation of Bible
which I got from Mennonite's International guest house in DC - printed by Bible
Society of India, Bangalore, India)
I believe a lay westerner is more tolerant of others' views than these experts
(whose reputation and even careers depend on promoting what they have always
held as true).
I just created a wikipedia page called Hindu Reality -speaking against this
tendency (I'm sure someone will come along and remove my arguments).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_reality - I just checked --someone has
deleted the page itself.
Wiki seems to be about might is right -
Any comments?
Umesh
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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