On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Sudev Barar <[email protected]> wrote: > On 24 August 2010 12:35, sajan venniyoor <[email protected]> wrote: >> The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? >> By Frank Thadeusz, Der Spiegel, 18 Aug 2010 >> http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html > [SNIP] > > Very interesting line of thought. > Is there any study / paper that compares the Indian habit of reading > and sharing newspapers with any other country? Or compare daily > publications stats vis other countries?
thanks for the link. in all my visits to germany have always been struck by how much people just love to read in that country, whether in cities or in small villages. during my college days, had also read that france too was a thriving hub of intellectual explosion through books, journals, and famous discussions held over coffee at parisian cafes. much later, discovered the same was true for vienna. it's too simplistic to apply the same yardsticks for india, our focus in our intellectual movements have tended to strongly veer towards arts and culture rather than science and technology. hence you see so many cultural movements in music, dance, poetry (urdu, hindi, bengali...), literature, arts and especially philosophy and mysticism happening concurrently throughout our multi-cultural country. anyways, no one paused to think about copyrights here, but control over knowledge has always been exerted, not through the law, but something far more sinister and adamantine: a strong caste system, where knowledge became the privilege and prerogative of the brahmin-class and an entire class was banned to even have access to knowledge. plus, through self-selection communities. knowledge would only be shared with you, if you belonged to a particular 'gharana' or a lineage of 'pundits' or artists. a counter-culture throughout indian history of freedom in knowledge also pervaded and still pervades. this is the grand oral tradition of knowledge, where entire tomes of literature and knowledge can be handed down generation-to-generation verbally and through memory, without using any written systems. anyways. a third line of thought, incongruent with western-thought, states that knowledge has intangible origins and is 'channelled' to humans. nearly 100 years after his death, Ramanujan's brilliant mathematics is still being analyzed and adopted by leading researchers across the world, and some of his theorams and equations are yet to be solved or deciphered. however, he never officially claimed anything as his own. read the book on his life "the man who knew infiinity". eventually, the tough legal-system and draconian laws like DRM and DMCA are going to break down when confronted by another ramanujan who belongs to the IT industry. some day. we just need to shift the focus from 'owner' of knowledge, to the 'origins' of knowledge. incidentally, how many are aware that newton's so-called ground-breaking work actually has a precedent of 700 years by an arab-persian scholar, Alhazen, who correctly explained the nature of light, rays, optics, and apart form all this even pioneered the modern scientific method? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham regards niyam > > -- > Regards, > Sudev Barar > Read http://blog.sudev.in for topics ranging from here to there. > > PS: Replying using bottom post/in-line post makes email conversations > whole lot easier for meaningful dialogue. Snip out what is not > relevant. Adopt this and spread the message. > _______________________________________________ > network mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in > -- niyam bhushan _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
