Umesh:
What you are saying is right.
The West has a Eurocentric view of the world. They claim that the basic
foundation of the Western Civilization, especially on science, is mainly based
on Greek civilization. They even donot like to give proper credit to the Indian
and Chinese contribution in mathetics and other science. I would say, the West
is still in the Dark Age. However, they have a point. Indians basically donot
have any record of what they did. If you want to counter the present
Eurocentric view, the best (and only way) is to debate will SOLID facts and
figures and not with rhetoric.
If you have any specific issue, I would be glad to discus.
Rajenda
----- Original Message -----
From: umesh sharma
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2007 7:04 PM
Subject: [Assam] Indian reality versus Western mythology
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.
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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