Kuldip Dhiman's Philosophy & Psychology Blog

A brush with death

2011-02-24T08:22:00.000-08:00

The Tribune
Sunday, October 24, 2010
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20101024/spectrum/book5.htm

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
By Pim van Lommel, M.D.
HarperOne. Pages 442.
Price not stated.

Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience

THERE can be nothing more obvious than consciousness. After all, we seem to experience it all the time. As the philosopher Rene Descartes said, you could doubt the existence of everything, but you could not doubt your own existence, and that is because you are thinking and you are conscious. And yet, consciousness is the biggest mystery ever, and there are philosophers and scientists who say consciousness is mere fiction, or at the most it is an epiphenomenon, i.e., it is a by-product of bio-chemical activity in the brain. Of late, the materialist view is being questioned, and scientists are beginning to take consciousness seriously. Many now believe that consciousness is somehow connected with the brain, and that it ends with death. In other words, body is a necessary condition for consciousness. That is why, when someone receives a severe blow on the head, they might become unconscious.

Things are not that simple, however. Scientists and philosophers have now begun to consider seriously that, which has been claimed for centuries by people in diverse cultures. Many people all over the world have for ages said that they have experienced being out of their bodies. This is now known as a near-death experience (NDE).

In Consciousness Beyond Life, cardiologist Pim van Lommel defines an NDE as "the (reported) recollection of all the impressions gained during a special state of consciousness, which includes some specific elements such as witnessing a tunnel, a light, a panoramic life review, deceased persons, or ones own resuscitation". Most cases of NDE were experienced during a heart attack, in a state of coma after a traffic accident, asphyxia, intoxication, electrocution, depression, failed suicide, or during meditation.

During his long career as a doctor, Lommel says he was surprised by the number of his patients who claimed to have had near-death experiences after a heart attack. His training as a mainstream scientist made it difficult for him to believe these accounts, but he could not ignore the cases for too long. Recent studies in the US and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 per cent of the population has reported an NDE.

To verify the claims of his patients, he designed a research methodology, so he could investigate the phenomenon under controlled conditions. After years of hard work, he and his fellow researchers published their findings in the medical journal, The Lancet, in 2001. The present volume is based on that study.

Lommel gives us a good background to physiological and psychological theories that try to explain NDE, but finds most of them are unable to come with a satisfactory explanation. "There is no direct evidence to prove if and how neurons in the brain produce the subjective essence of our consciousness . . . materialist approach falls short in many respects and can no longer be maintained in its current form. It is now becoming increasingly clear that brain activity in itself cannot explain consciousness."

Although we do not yet have a satisfactory theory to explain consciousness, the author feels that quantum mechanics could possibly be a strong candidate. "This not-yet-commonly-accepted interpretation posits that our picture of reality is based on the information received by our consciousness. This transforms modern science into a subjective science in which consciousness plays a fundamental role." Of course, quantum theory cannot explain consciousness fully, but in conjunction with the results and conclusions from NDE research, it can contribute to a better understanding of the transition or interface between consciousness and the brain.

After studying cases of NDE, Lommel has come to a conclusion that brain is not a necessary condition for consciousness, i.e., consciousness can exist independently. He strongly believes that consciousness cannot be located in a particular space and time, this is known as nonlocality. "Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension that is not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time. This endless consciousness is always in and around us. We have no theories to prove or measure nonlocal space and nonlocal consciousness in the material world. The brain and the body merely function as an interface or relay station to receive part of our total consciousness," says the author.

A very well-written book; it should be read especially by those who still strongly cling to the materialistic paradigm of science — the problem is, they won’t.

Will science find the final answer?

2011-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

The Tribune
Sunday, February 20, 2011

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life
By Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow.
Bantam Press.
Pages 200. Rs 599.

AS you are reading this review, an exact copy of yours could be going to war in a galaxy far away, and yet another copy doing household chores in another universe, and yet another having dinner in a restaurant hundreds of light years away. This idea is not of science fiction but an inference from the equations of theoretical physics. Physics has come a long way from Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and others, so much so that if these great minds from the past were to visit us today, they would be totally confounded by the latest work that is being carried out by theorists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and others.

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, is a book that tries to explain the latest in physics to the non-specialist with the help of lively prose and excellent illustrations.

But what do theoretical physicists do? In the past, scientists conducted experiments in the lab or in nature and formulated theories to explain the laws of nature so that predictions could be made. Today, theories are so complex and elaborate that a lone scientist cannot conduct experiments to test a theory. Collaboration of several colleagues and huge financial and infrastructural resources are required. Some of the theories are so abstract that by the time experimental confirmation is made, most theoreticians will not be around. This is well reflected in a cartoon by Sydney Harris in the book. A woman is introducing a theoretical physicist to another theoretical physicist by saying: "You both have something in common. Dr. Davis has discovered a particle which nobody has seen, and Prof. Higbe has discovered a galaxy which nobody has seen."

In the past three of 400 years older theories have been constantly replaced with newer ones, and at this rate we might wonder if scientists might reach a stage when someone might formulate a theory that explains everything, in other words a theory which cannot be improved upon. The authors suggest that M-theory is the only one that a final theory ought to have. The book is about this theory. But why do we need such a theory?

About a century ago, Maxwell and Einstein united the theories of electricity, magnetism and light, and following that a standard model was created in the 1970s in the form of a single theory of the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force. In order to include gravity, string theory and M-theory were formulated. M-Theory is not yet complete, but it has passed several tests.

But why do we need theories? After Newton gave his famous laws of motion and gravity, scientists have wondered how do laws originate, are there any exceptions to the laws, and if there is only one set of laws. Hawking and Mlodinow show us that laws are formulated by observing regularities in nature, and they are mathematically described. Secondly, there can be no exception to the laws, i.e., there is no room for miracles. This is called scientific determinism.

If the world is determined by the laws of science, you might ask if we have a free will. According to the authors, we are made of so many particles and processes and there are so many variables, that to make any prediction about human behaviour is impossible. As Richard Dawkins, the famous theorist and writer of The Selfish Gene has argued that the brain process is so complicated that it is better to assume we have a free will.

Furthermore, is there only one set of possible laws? In the chapter Alternative Histories, the authors show us how particles of matter fired at a screen with two slits in it could exhibit interference patterns just as water waves do. This happens because a particle does not have a unique history. In other words, as a particle moves from point ‘A’ to ‘B’, it does not take one definite path as our everyday experience would expect, but rather simultaneously takes every possible path connecting the two points. In such a scenario a particle could travel through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself. This was first showed by Richard Feynman who suggested that to calculate the probability of any particular endpoint, we need to consider all the possible histories that the particle might follow from its starting point to that endpoint. The authors say that we could also use Feynman’s methods to calculate the quantum probabilities for observations of the universe.

"In this view, the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way. Most of these correspond to other universes. While some of these correspond to other universes. While some of those universes are similar to ours, most are very different. They aren’t just different in details, such as whether Elvis really did die young or whether turnips are desert food, but rather they differ even in their apparent laws of nature."

The usual assumption in cosmology is that the universe has a single definite history. Hawking and Mlodinow hold that we could use the laws of physics to calculate how this history develops with time. This is known as the "bottom-up" approach to cosmology. But since we must take into account the quantum nature of the universe, the probability amplitude that the universe is now in a particular state is arrived at by adding up the contributions from all the histories. Instead of the bottom-up approach, one should trace the histories from the top down, backwards from the present time.

As for the books title The Grand Design, it is argued that just as Darwin and Wallace explained how living forms could evolve through natural selection without the help of God, "the multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit".

Hawking and Mlodinow are great physicists, but they seem to have a very poor grasp of philosophy when they say that philosophy is dead as it has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. It is true that most philosophers have knowledge of physics that is over a century old, but that does not apply to all philosophers. When scientists say science ought to be done with a certain methodology, and when they talk about space, time, etc., they are giving us a framework of the scientific method, and they are formulating concepts. If this is not philosophy, then what is? It is a different matter that such a framework might be formulated by scientists themselves. But when they do so, they are doing philosophy, however, what they do with this framework and methodology is science. The antipathy towards philosophy is, perhaps, a hangover of the idea of elimination of metaphysics as suggested by some thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century. Philosophy is more than metaphysics; it includes ontology, epistemology, ethics, arts, religion, politics and logic. Without logic, science would be dead. When you say a thing "ought" to be done in a certain way, you are giving a philosophy; when you talk about space, time, matter, etc., you are formulating concepts, this is philosophy, and it is at the bottom of any discipline of knowledge.

Back to the question of free will, we might recall that when Hawking was working on his PhD thesis in the early 1960s, he was diagnosed with ALS, and he was told that he would not survive for too long. Nearly 46 years have gone by, Hawking is not only alive but is grappling with some of the most stubborn problems of theoretical physics. One wonders if this is because of his strong will, or it is the result of the position and spin of the trillions and trillions of atoms that are tossing around in his body.

Do we end with death?

2011-01-16T01:24:00.000-08:00

The Tribune, Sunday, January 16, 2011

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

Science and the Near-Death Experience
How Consciousness Survives Death
By Chris Carter
Inner Traditions
Pages 304, Price: Not stated

Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives DeathIn the present volume Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death, philosopher Chris Carter (not to be confused with the creator of The X-Files) mentions the strange case of A. S. Wiltse, a physician suffering from typhoid, who was declared ‘dead’ by his doctors. It later emerged that he had actually gone into a coma. After regaining consciousness he told the doctors that he had had the strange experience of leaving his body during the comatose state. ‘As I turned, my elbow came into contact with the arm of one of two gentlemen who were standing in the door. To my surprise his arm passed right through mine without apparent resistance . . . I directed my gaze in the direction of his and saw my own dead body.’

This is one of the several cases of the near-death-experience (NDE) reported in the book from all over the world from a wide spectrum of peoples who were declared clinically dead or very close to death. The common experience of most of the subjects who report an NDE is a feeling of detachment from the body, levitating in the air; extreme fear and supreme bliss at the same time; and a sense of absolute dissolution. Some talk of going through a tunnel and seeing bright light at the end, while others speak of meeting dead relatives or friends. Many subjects recall that they could think a lot more rationally and clearly; some claim to have had a 360-degree vision during the period and could read the thoughts of others. However, not all the NDEs are a result of life-threatening situations for one might have such an experience during meditation or even while doing mundane activities. Sceptics regard such experiences as hallucinatory, while paranormal specialists find them to be evidence of an afterlife.

After the experience most subjects find a greater urge to know their purpose in life; they also show increased compassion for others, and an increased interest in spirituality and a lack of interest in sectarian religion. Most of them fear death no longer as they begin to believe that this life is not the end. Carter cites studies which indicate that among those individuals who come close to death, about 30 per cent report an NDE.

Apart from the mysterious nature of these cases, Chris Carter has a more serious purpose in writing this book. The central question he poses is whether the mind depends upon the brain, or can it also exist independently of it. This is a perennial problem in philosophy and science, and in spite of tremendous progress made in neuroscience and other disciplines, the solution eludes us. Most philosophers and scientists would say that the mind cannot exist independently of the brain — Chris Carter boldly argues that it can.

One phenomenon that might shed new light on the mind-body problem is the near-death experience (NDE) just mentioned. Those who believe that consciousness is dependent upon the brain say that as a strong blow to the head often results in a loss of consciousness, it is proof enough that mind depends upon the brain. This inference is flawed counters Carter. For example, if the radio we are listening to is smashed, it does not follow that the music we were listening to was being produced by the radio. The implicit assumption here, Carter points out is that "the relationship between brain activity and consciousness was always one of cause to effect, and never that of effect to cause. But this assumption is not known to be true, and it is not the only conceivable one consistent with the observed facts mentioned earlier. Just as consistent with the observed facts is the idea that the brain’s function is that of an intermediary between mind and body, or in other words, that the brain’s function is that of a two-way receiver-transmitter — sometimes form body to mind, and sometimes mind to body."

The point Carter is making is that there is something like universal consciousness which the brain manifests in a limited way. So even if the brain perishes upon death of a person, the universal consciousness continues to remain independently. "The fact that up until the brain’s death the mind can be affected by the condition and limitations of the brain does not entail that the mind cannot continue to exist without the brain and carry on at least some of its processes."

This book is an open attack on established materialistic science which is based on classical physics in which all interactions between particles are local and occur independent of anyone observing them. Some theorists of this school hold that consciousness is outside their domain, while others stress that it is just an illusion. There are many theorists who have rebelled against the assumptions of classical physics, and they point out that quantum mechanics might hold the key to consciousness. Carter devotes over 50 pages in the chapter Physics and Consciousness where he gives a very clear and lucid picture of quantum mechanics, and tries to show how it could explain consciousness. Readers familiar with quantum mechanics would know that the apparent observer-induced change in an atom’s mode of existence is called the collapse of the wave function. In other words, the conclusion of the experiment depends upon the conscious observer. Hence, some theorists propose that the collapse of the wave function cannot be a physical process; instead, the intervention of something from outside of physics is required. Something that is not subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, and the only such entity is consciousness.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2011/20110116/spectrum/book4.htm

A brush with death

2010-10-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Tribune, Sunday, October 24, 2010

A brush with death
Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
By Pim van Lommel, M.D.
HarperOne. Pages 442.
Price not stated.

There can be nothing more obvious than consciousness. After all, we seem to experience it all the time. As the philosopher Rene Descartes said, you could doubt the existence of everything, but you could not doubt your own existence, and that is because you are thinking and you are conscious. And yet, consciousness is the biggest mystery ever, and there are philosophers and scientists who say consciousness is mere fiction, or at the most it is an epiphenomenon, i.e., it is a by-product of bio-chemical activity in the brain. Of late, the materialist view is being questioned, and scientists are beginning to take consciousness seriously. Many now believe that consciousness is somehow connected with the brain, and that it ends with death. In other words, body is a necessary condition for consciousness. That is why, when someone receives a severe blow on the head, they might become unconscious.

Things are not that simple, however. Scientists and philosophers have now begun to consider seriously that, which has been claimed for centuries by people in diverse cultures. Many people all over the world have for ages said that they have experienced being out of their bodies. This is now known as a near-death experience (NDE).

In Consciousness Beyond Life, cardiologist Pim van Lommel defines an NDE as "the (reported) recollection of all the impressions gained during a special state of consciousness, which includes some specific elements such as witnessing a tunnel, a light, a panoramic life review, deceased persons, or ones own resuscitation". Most cases of NDE were experienced during a heart attack, in a state of coma after a traffic accident, asphyxia, intoxication, electrocution, depression, failed suicide, or during meditation.

During his long career as a doctor, Lommel says he was surprised by the number of his patients who claimed to have had near-death experiences after a heart attack. His training as a mainstream scientist made it difficult for him to believe these accounts, but he could not ignore the cases for too long. Recent studies in the US and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 per cent of the population has reported an NDE.

To verify the claims of his patients, he designed a research methodology, so he could investigate the phenomenon under controlled conditions. After years of hard work, he and his fellow researchers published their findings in the medical journal, The Lancet, in 2001. The present volume is based on that study.

Lommel gives us a good background to physiological and psychological theories that try to explain NDE, but finds most of them are unable to come with a satisfactory explanation. "There is no direct evidence to prove if and how neurons in the brain produce the subjective essence of our consciousness . . . materialist approach falls short in many respects and can no longer be maintained in its current form. It is now becoming increasingly clear that brain activity in itself cannot explain consciousness."
mm
Although we do not yet have a satisfactory theory to explain consciousness, the author feels that quantum mechanics could possibly be a strong candidate. "This not-yet-commonly-accepted interpretation posits that our picture of reality is based on the information received by our consciousness. This transforms modern science into a subjective science in which consciousness plays a fundamental role." Of course, quantum theory cannot explain consciousness fully, but in conjunction with the results and conclusions from NDE research, it can contribute to a better understanding of the transition or interface between consciousness and the brain.

After studying cases of NDE, Lommel has come to a conclusion that brain is not a necessary condition for consciousness, i.e., consciousness can exist independently. He strongly believes that consciousness cannot be located in a particular space and time, this is known as nonlocality. "Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension that is not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time. This endless consciousness is always in and around us. We have no theories to prove or measure nonlocal space and nonlocal consciousness in the material world. The brain and the body merely function as an interface or relay station to receive part of our total consciousness," says the author.

A very well-written book; it should be read especially by those who still strongly cling to the materialistic paradigm of science — the problem is, they won’t.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20101024/spectrum/book5.htm

Brainstorming the Mind

2010-09-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

The Emerging Mind
By Vilayanur Ramchandran.
BBC-Profile Books.
Pages 208. Rs 195.

DR Vilayanur Ramachandran, the author of The Emerging Mind, mentions the case of David who had sustained head injury in a car accident, and was in a state of coma. He came out of coma and seemed quite normal, except he started having one delusion—he would look at his mother and say, "Doctor, this woman looks exactly like my mother but she isn’t, she is an impostor".

Then, there are patients whose legs have been amputated, yet they feel pain in these so-called phantom limbs, and this pain seems to be real. There are others who see only half of the scene before them. So, when they eat from a plate, they eat only one half of it, leaving the other untouched, as they can’t see it. Some have a normal vision but are blind to one particular colour. All these patients have suffered damage to their brain, and these cases are important in understanding the functioning of the brain which is the most complex and mysterious structure in the universe.

It is with the advances made in neuroscience that we have just begun to slightly appreciate the sheer complexity of the brain, which is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or neurons that form the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses. It is here that exchange of information occurs. It has been calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words, the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe!

There is a further complication. Although the brain might be the most structure, we can still hope to understand it one day as it is after all a physical structure. What is more illusive to comprehend is the mind.

Many take the brain and the mind to be one, but this view is not accepted by several thinkers and scientists. And what about consciousness? We do not see the world like a camera, we actually feel it. Although the brain might be a necessary condition for consciousness, it is difficult to explain how consciousness arises out of nerve tissues and neurons. Many scientists, who have been studying cases of near-death experiences and other paranormal activities, have begun to question the assumption that to be conscious a brain is necessary.

However, since Ramachandran is a mainstream neuroscientist, he limits his arguments to the brain being necessary for consciousness. He is humble enough to concede that in spite of all the impressive advances we have made, there is hope that we might get some understanding of the mind. Especially, after the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, we are for the first time in a position to understand directly DNA’s contribution to the mind.

Ramachandran has studied brain-damaged patients in order to solve the brain-mind mystery. In the case of David, the author explains that vision is a very complex process. When we see a thing, it is analysed by thirty different visual areas at the back of our brain. Only then can we recognise the object we are seeing, whether it is a cat, a table, or mother. This identification takes place in a small brain region called the fusiform gyrus—which is damaged in patients with face blindness. Finally, once the image is recognised, the message is relayed to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, which allows you to gauge the emotional significance of what you are looking at. "In David’s case," says Ramachandran, "perhaps the fusiform gyrus and all the visual areas are completely normal, so his brain tells him that the woman he sees looks like his mother. But to put it crudely, the ‘wire’ that goes from the visual centres to the amygdala, to the emotional centres, is cut by the accident. So, he looks at his mother and thinks, "She looks just like my mother, but if it’s my mother why don’t I feel anything towards her? No, this can’t possibly be my mother, it’s some stranger pretending to be my mother."

This book also tackles other eternal questions such as selfhood, free will, and aesthetics. Art, its creation and enjoyment, is a mysterious activity. Although art is a subjective and individualistic, Ramachandran wonders if there are any universal principals of art. Many thinkers have held that art is a social activity, inspired by the environment. While this is certainly true, many human beings have innate artistic capabilities of either creating or appreciating art. What follows is a lively discussion of the emergence of art and art styles, which is rather long to be discussed in detail here. The author does not merely speculate, he shows how his theory of art could be empirically tested by studying how the brain circuitry behaves while creating art. The same method can be applied to study romantic love.

Ramachandran gives an example of two people in love sometime in distant future. As they make love, their brains are being mapped, and the electrochemical activity that is going on becomes apparent. The man says to the girl, "You mean that’s all there is to it? Your love isn’t real? It is all just chemicals?" The girl replies, "On the contrary, all this brain activity provides hard evidence that I do love you, that I’m not just faking it."

These questions are notoriously difficult to answer, but the author says maybe there is a single answer to the problem just at DNA base-pairing was the solution to the riddle of heredity.

The question of selfhood is defined by a set of attributes such as embodiment, agency, unity, continuity. The author says maybe we will succeed in explaining each of these attributes individually in terms of what is going on in the brain.

Whether you agree with the contention or not, this is a very interesting and informative book.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100829/spectrum/book3.htm

Language shapes our world

2010-08-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100801/spectrum/book1.htm
The Tribune, Sunday, August 1, 2010

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker
Penguin. Pages 500, Price: £ 3.50

Shakespeare wrote famously in Romeo and Juliet: "What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." We might disagree with the Bard, for although it is true that if rose had some other name, it would taste as sweet, but it would depend on what that other name was. The rose would not smell as sweet if it were a homonym of ‘shit’.

Under the influence of philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, and Wittgenstein most of us strongly believe that language shapes our world. This view was taken to the extreme when Roland Barthers said, "Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual."

American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker defies these extremely influential philosophers. He upends the established view by forcefully arguing that it is our thoughts about the world around us that actually shape our language. After all if roses never existed, we would not think about their smelling sweet or otherwise.

Pinker is a versatile genius who is eminently persuasive and eloquent. Philosophy of language, Semantics, linguistics, and evolutionary psychology are his main interests. Philosophy of language concerns problems such as: How words relate to reality; What is the nature of meaning? What is truth, reference, logical necessity? Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language.

Pinker’s earlier books The Language Instinct (1995), Words and Rules (1999) explored the human capacity for language – how we manage to absorb innumerable words and the astonishingly complex rules that govern their use. In two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), he examined human nature, mind, and consciousness using an evolutionary framework.

His latest book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature shows that semantics and psychology are ultimately related. Human beings think, language is the medium with which they think, and thinking constructs our world for them. Each individual thinks differently, hence each of us lives in a different world though the objective reality is the same for all of us.

Pinker begins the book by asking us to recall what happened on September 11, 2001. He asks us how many events took place on that fateful day. Most of us would say one event took place because although the World Trade Center had two towers, they should be treated as one, and though several people were involved, the attacks were conceived in the mind of one man who had just one mission. Some might argue they were two events as there were two separate buildings standing at a reasonable distance from each other; they were struck at different times, and collapsed at different times. Many of us might be frustrated by this debate which seems frivolous, or mere philosophical hair-splitting. Whether it was a single event, two events, or three, what difference does it make?

It makes a great difference points out Pinker. If the judges determining the insurance claims saw 9/11 as one event, the leaseholders of WTC would get three and a half billion dollars, on the other hand, if the lawyers could prove it that they were two events, the leaseholders would receive seven billion dollars. A difference of a solid three and a half billion dollars!

Further, some might call it a terrorist attack on freedom; others might call it a holy war waged for freedom. The way language is used and conceived could be the difference between life and death.

Pinker writes: "The fact that rival construals of a single occurrence can trigger an extravagant court case tells us that the nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds. The language of thought allows us to frame a situation in different and incompatible ways. . . . And the ability to frame an event in alternative ways is not just a reason to go to court but also the source of richness of human intellectual life. As we shall see, it provides the materials for scientific and literary creativity, for humor and wordplay, and for the dramas of social life."

Continuing in the same vein, Pinker says that most of the conflicts among peoples and countries are nothing but a matter of how we use words and definitions. Abortion is seen by some as the free choice of a woman to be a mother or not, while anti-abortionists term it as murder in the womb.

Pinker shows how our minds deal with the objective, physical world. Consider the following sentences:

"She loaded hay into the wagon",

"She loaded the wagon with hay"

Although they might seem similar to us, the former is a content-locative construction in which the emphasis is on the thing being moved; and the latter is a container-locative construction in which the emphasis is on where the thing is being moved to. In the first case the impression is that some hay was loaded into the wagon, and in the second the suggestion is that the wagon was fully loaded with hay.

Then, there is a major controversy in psychology about what is innate, i.e., hereditary, in us and what we acquire through culture and the environment. The established view is that nothing is innate; the mind is a blank slate on which experience is written.However, this view is being seriously challenged by thinkers like Pinker who hold that although environment plays its role, heredity, too, plays a major role in language acquisition because children learn their mother tongue very easily without any professional training, and animals cannot be taught a language no matter what training is given to them. The capacity to learn a language is innate, but what language a child learns would depend upon the society into which it is born. Further, the human brain is made up several specialist domains which make us capable of rationality, emotions, abstract theorising, and linguistic skills.

There are a good number of other concepts like how we use proper names, indirection of speech, metaphors, swearwords, and jokes, which make this book extremely valuable for readers interested in language and the wonder called the human mind.

The mystery of vanishing Sarasvati

2010-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati

By Michel Danino. Penguin Books. Pages 358. Rs 399.

THE importance of Ganges as the most sacred river in Indian culture cannot be overstressed. However, there was another river which was a lot more important than the Ganges. In fact, there are not very significant references to the Ganges in the Vedas. The pride of place was given to the Sarasvati, a river that no longer exists!

The Rig Veda considered it to be the mother of seven seas. There are 45 hymns in which the Rig Veda eulogises it. In the Ramayana, it is referred to as the sacred Ikshumati—Bhrahma’s daughter. The Mahabharata too has references to the river. But the story does not end here: there is strong evidence that apart from the Indus, the Sarasvati was also the lifeline of the Indus Valley Civilisation, thus prompting some scholars to call it the Indus-Sarasvati Civilisation.

In The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati, Michel Danino, a French scholar, gives a detailed account of the renewed interest in the disappearance of the ancient river.

Archaeologists have long speculated that the humble Ghaggar, which flows out of the Shivaliks, is actually the Sarasvati of antiquity. Danino says it is truly noteworthy that when the British archaeologists mapped the Indus Valley sites about two hundred years ago, they found most were located round the dry bed of Ghaggar-Hakra.

But why zero in on the Ghaggar-Hakra as a relic of the Sarasvati? Aren’t there other contenders? The Rig Veda mentions Sarasvati as a mighty river flowing from the mountain to the sea and located between the Yamuna and the Shutudri (Sutlej). The Mahabharata, the Brahmanas, and the Puranas also make similar references to the Sarasvati. Danino says the British explorers who took up the clue found several seasonal streams emerging from the Shivalik Hills, but no major river flowing between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. They continued their search nevertheless because there was a strong tradition mentioning a mighty river flowing westward and getting lost. This tradition correlated with Sanskrit texts, and the maps plotted by the British lent strong support for the thesis that the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra was indeed a remnant of the mythical Sarasvati.

The author reviews the various projects undertaken by the British and other European adventurers since the days of the East India Company to find the Sarasvati. One of the earliest explorers was Colonel James Tod who speaks of the absorption of the Caggar (sic) river as one of the causes of the depopulation of the northern desert.

Almost 200 years ago, a French scholar named Vivien de Saint-Martin, too, argued that all the streams that flow from the west to the east, the Ghaggar, the Markanda, the Dangri, the Sarsuti and the Chautang unite in a single bed which is the Rig Veda’s Sarasvati. Marc Aurel Stein, another archaeologist who came to India in the late 1880s, postulated that the easternmost tributary of the Ghaggar was still known as the Sarsuti, a corruption of ‘Sarasvati’.

Modern scholars, too, have suggested that the Ghaggar is a strong contender for the mythical Sarasvati. Satellite imagery of the region shows that the Ghaggar, in other words the Sarasvati, was important not only in the Vedic times but also during the Harappan age. The Ghaggar was the lifeline of the Indus Valley Civilisation, because out of a sample of about 1,400 Harappan sites, more than 75 per cent are situated on the banks of the Ghaggar-Hakra channel.

If it was such an important river, what happened to it? Why did it vanish suddenly? Some researchers have suggested that it was the lack of rainfall over the years that dried up the Sarasvati. Richard Dixon Oldham, a British geologist, who joined the Geological Survey of India in 1879, rejected such theories. If that were the case, other rivers of the region would have got affected too.

He argued that part of Yamuna’s waters might have flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra bed in Vedic times: "It may have been that the Yamuna, after leaving the hills, divided its waters and that the portion which flowed to the Punjab was known as Sarasvati, while that which joined the Ganges was called the Yamuna." Geological changes were responsible for the Sarasvati changing its course and finally getting lost.

Recent studies give credence to the theory that geological and tectonic movements were responsible for some of the shifting rivers. Evidence from survey fieldwork and recent satellite imagery strongly suggests that the Ghaggar-Hakra system in the past had the Sutlej and the Yamuna as tributaries. Geological changes diverted the Sutlej towards the Indus and the Yamuna towards the Ganga, following which the river did not have enough water to reach the sea, and it dried up in the Thar Desert.

And this vanishing act happened much before the Vedic age. In fact, one of the reasons for the sudden fall of the Indus Valley Civilisation was the drying up of the Sarasvati. The Harappans were thus forced to move eastwards but they did not forget their revered river. They kept its memory alive by making it part of the Triveni Sangam, where it meets (albeit invisibly) the Ganges and the Yamuna. Danino says, "Not only was the Sarasvati thus made to connect with the Ganges, but in the course of time, Sarasvati the goddess passed on many of her attributes to Ganga. ... In many ways, Ganga is an avatar of Sarasvati, just as the Ganges civilisation is a new avatar of the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation."

Michel Danino has produced a scholarly work which will inspire future explorers and theorists to try to solve the mystery of the vanishing sacred river.

The saint of saints

2010-06-29T08:10:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The saint of saints
Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: The Sadhaka of Dakshineswar
By Amiya P. Sen.
Penguin/Viking. Pages 178. Rs 325.

THERE are many paths to God realisation, such as the path of bhakti (devotion), jnana (knowledge), karma (action), etc., and Hinduism does not favour any particular path. The idea is the seeker ought to choose the path according to his own nature and disposition. The irony is that the follower of one particular path often finds other paths worthless or even harmful, that is because he just cannot appreciate the other viewpoint. And this is the cause of all the religious strife the world over.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa tried several avenues one by one, but his path was mainly that of bhakti. "Rather than progress in a linear fashion, Ramakrishna's preferences seem to have alternated between dualism and non-dualism. Even after he ascended to the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, the highest state of mystic realisation known to an Advaitin, Ramakrishna chose to return to the state of bhakti-bhava." This quote is from Amiya P. Sen's Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: The Sadhaka of Dakshineswar, a very well researched and lucidly written book.

Sen begins with a very informative preface, which gives a background to the religious and social milieu of the 19th-century Bengal. Religious atmosphere was rich and varied, although with the coming of Western ideas through the East India Company, many young educated people began to regard Hinduism as being nothing but superstition. And from the same lot, there were others who defended Hinduism resolutely. At such a time, we see the rise of Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, better known as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who would have a tremendous impact on people of India, especially Bengal.

Sen says, "Looking back, Ramakrishna does appear to have contributed substantially to the renewed interest n Hinduism, but this itself is due to the fact that, in the1870s and 1880s, he was easily the first prototype of a modern saint and guru."

While the follower of the path of knowledge depends upon pure contemplation, and the follower of action depends upon work without attachment, the follower of bhakti marga depends upon unconditional love towards his personal deity. The devotee often gets so ecstatic that he might begin to dance wildly or might get into a trance when the emotions become too strong to control. Though all paths are beneficial, the path of devotion has a certain edge. The author says Ramakrishna believed that although the path of devotion is not superior to the path of knowledge, it is like the woman who can be freely admitted to the inner chambers whereas jnana, as the self-conscious male, has first to establish his bona fides before being allowed in.

The book vividly captures the vibrant life of one of the most influential saints of India. We get insights into his relationship with his wife, brother, well-wishers, and his disciples, the most famous of thembeing Swami Vivekananda. Sen writes with the objectivity of an academic and that is what sets this book apart from many others on the life of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100627/spectrum/book5.htm

Call it Love If You Like

2010-06-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

The Tribune, Sunday, March 25, 2001 Lead Article
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010325/spectrum/main1.htm

Call it Love If You Like

No one seems to know what love is. Some even doubt its existence. Of
late love has attracted the attention of a group of people who are
supposed to have nothing to do with gentler emotions: the scientists.
While poets, writers, and artists have only made wild conjectures
about love, scientists and evolutionary psychologists may have grasped
the meaning of romantic love, says Kuldip Dhiman

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is
love," said Sophocles 2400 years ago. You might forgive Sophocles for
saying this, but anyone who ever fell in love might vehemently
challenge these words. Far from freeing us from all the worries of
life, love quite often does the opposite, the great initial high
notwithstanding. In spite of all this, people have been falling in
love for ages, and shall continue doing so.

Why do people fall in love? Would it make any difference to the world
if no one ever fell in love? And if love is such a wonderful thing,
why does it turn sour with time? If love is good for mankind, why does
society create obstacles in the path of love?

Poets and writers have for centuries written reams and reams on love,
but have so far not given us any insight into it. If anything, they
have confused the issue, because being a highly subjective experience;
love means different things to different people. We have heard their
version for centuries, now let's hear what the scientists have to say
about it. But could love ever be understood by the cold logic of
science?

In his recent book Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, published by
Oxford, Dylan Evans, Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy
at King's College, London, presents a scientific study of emotions,
and also devotes time to an emotion peculiar, as far as we know, to
humans: romantic love.

Evans tells us that love is after all not such a metaphysical subject.
We fall in love for very practical reasons. Further, if we wish to
take romantic love to the lab, so to speak, we would first have to
follow the demands of the scientific method. And the first step is to
find a basic definition of love. After studying various cultures,
anthro-pologists have come up with this working definition of love: a
powerful feeling of sexual attraction to a single person, feelings of
anguish and longing when the loved one is absent, and intense joy when
he or she is present.

Some people may squirm at the very idea of defining love. Love knows
no definition, they might say, knows no bounds, has no reasons.
Actually love does have its reasons although most of us don't seem to
understand them.

But if love is an emotion, how is it different from other emotions
like anger, fear etc. Why do we have these emotions in the first
place? Wouldn't we be better off without emotions? Not at all. Without
emotions, living beings would not have evolved at all. If we did not
have the emotion of fear, for instance, we would walk into a fire,
walk over cliffs, not run away at the sight of predators. In other
words we would not see danger, and, as a result perish. Evolution
would never have got going. Perhaps evolution equipped us with
emotions so we could survive in the tough battle of survival on this
otherwise inhospitable planet.

Apart from the basic emotions like fear, anger, disgust etc. that are
necessary for our very survival, we also have some culturally specific
emotions that are peculiar to certain cultures. For example, in India,
some people appear to be under the spell of spirits, and as a result
they behave in a strange way. Similarly, the Gurumbha people of New
Guinea get into an emotional state of 'being a wild pig'. When they
get into this state, they behave as wild pigs. This emotion is
culturally specific, as it is not experienced by peoples of other
cultures.

Now, is love a basic emotion or is it a culturally specific emotion?
Speaking exclusively to The Tribune, Dylan Evans said: "Many people
have argued that romantic love is a culturally specific emotion like
'being a wild pig'. They say it is not seen in many cultures, and most
of us would not have fallen in love if we hadn't heard of it. But this
view has come under attack these days. After studying various
unrelated cultures all over the world, anthropologists found that it
was common for people to experience romantic love. They also listed
other elements including elaborate courtship gestures such as giving
gifts and showing one's love in song and poetry. They then examined
the anthropological literature and counted the number of cultures in
which this collection of features was described. To their surprise
they found that it was described in 90 per cent of the cultures on
record."

Dylan Evans, Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, King's
College, London spoke exclusively to The Tribune about romantic
love.Developing the point further, Evans says, "Romantic love may not
be a culturally specific emotion, but nor is it a basic emotion like
fear. The philosopher Paul Griffiths has argued that there are not two
kinds of emotion but three. In addition to basic emotions and
culturally specific emotions, he claims that there are 'higher
cognitive emotions.' This is fine so long as we realise that these
categories are not black and white.

"As well as differing from basic emotions in their degree of
innateness," believes Evans, "higher cognitive emotions also differ in
a number of other ways. They are not so automatic and fast as basic
emotions, and nor are they universally associated with a single facial
expression. Love is a case in point. Although love at first sight is
possible, it is relatively rare. It seems much more common for love to
grow gradually over the space of several days. Contrast this with the
emotion of fear, which typically overtakes a person in a matter of
milliseconds. And, while fear is easily recognisable by its typical
facial expression, there is no specific facial expression associated
with the emotion of love." This perhaps explains why some of us are
incapable or not very good at expressing our love.

The reason Paul Griffiths proposes emotions like love should be called
'higher emotions', is that they involve much more cortical processing
(Done by the cerebral cortex: the extensive outer layer of grey matter
of the cerebral hemispheres, largely responsible for higher brain
functions, including sensation, voluntary muscle movement, thought,
reasoning, and memory.) than basic emotions. While basic emotions are
largely processed in subcortical structures (the portion of the brain
immediately below the cerebral cortex) buried beneath the surface of
the brain emotions like love are more associated with areas of the
neocortex that is the part of the brain that has expanded most in the
past five million years of human evolution, and supports most of our
most complex cognitive abilities such as explicit logical analysis.
The fact that the higher cognitive emotions are more cortical than the
basic emotions means that they are more capable of being influenced by
conscious thoughts and this in turn is probably what allow higher
cognitive emotions to be more culturally variable than the basic
emotions. However, despite their greater cultural variability, the
higher cognitive emotions are still universal. Like basic emotions,
but unlike culturally specific emotions, the higher cognitive emotions
are part of human nature, shaped by our common evolutionary history.

If the main goal of life, as Darwin states, is survival and
propagation of our genes, what purpose does love serve? If fear saves
us from danger, and anger makes us ready for attack and thus helps us
in our survival, love appears to do the opposite. We waste time
thinking about our loved one, do all sorts of irrational things, ruin
careers, and even commit suicide. Often, after getting the person we
love, we realise he or she is not worth it.

"Love may seem irrational," says Evans, "but even its most bizarre
aspects may be vital if it is to fulfil its function of helping us
obtain a mate for long enough to have and rear children. Here is some
of what I say about it in the book: There are lots of other situations
in life when it is vital to be able to make credible promises. Robert
Frank refers to all these situations as 'commitment problems', and
argues that all the higher cognitive emotions solve different kinds of
commitment problem. The capacity for guilt solves those commitment
problems in which you have to make a credible promise not to cheat.

"Likewise, argues Frank, romantic love solves another kind of
commitment problem that in which you have to make a credible promise
to remain faithful to one other person. Jack and Jill may consider
each other suitable mates, but they will be reluctant to commit
themselves to each other unless each is sure that the other will not
walk out on them as soon as someone more attractive comes along. The
realisation that the other person is in love can provide this
assurance. Now, basic emotions like anger and fear are easy to feign,
but higher cognitive emotions like guilt, shame and love are extremely
hard to feign because we have no control over them. Hence, when we see
someone showing these emotions, we normally believe them to be
genuine. If Jack commits himself to Jill because of an emotion he did
not 'decide' to have (and so cannot decide not to have), an emotion
that is reliably indicated by such physiological signals as
tachycardia (a rapid heart rate, especially one above 100 beats per
minute in an adult) and insomnia, then Jill will be more likely to
believe he will stay with her than if he had chosen her after coolly
weighing up her good and bad points. 'People who are sensible about
love are incapable of it', wrote Douglas Yates."

Alas! life is not that simple. Although higher cognitive emotions are
very hard to feign, it is not impossible to feign them. Most men fake
them quite successfully to entice a woman into falling in love with
them, only to desert her later. The world if full of free riders, who
wish to have a woman without the commitment of running a household and
raising children.

The game of love gets more complicated because men and women fall in
love for different reasons, although these differences are of degree
not kind. In the tough battle for survival on this planet, our
foraging male ancestors needed to propagate their genes, and they had
a better chance if they mated with as many females as possible. In
order to do so they had to compete with the other males. Women, on the
other hand, invest a lot more than men in a relationship because it is
they who get pregnant, and have to look after the resulting offspring
for years. Although they might desire more men, but as they can have
only one or two children a year, it is pointless to have more
partners. Since they did not have safe contraception, women had to be
a lot more careful in choosing their partners than men. While men went
for quantity, women looked for quality. But generally, women preferred
to have one man who was willing to help her in bringing up her
offspring, rather than many with no one taking the responsibility of
running the household. Men may put a premium on physical
attractiveness, but women go for status, wealth intelligence, and the
willingness to provide resources. But we must not forget that although
quality may be more important to women, they are not entirely
monogamous Likewise, men might wish to have more women, but when they
think about settling down, they, too, start thinking in terms of
quality. All this is predicted by evolutionary theory, and was tested
by David Buss in a study of 33 different cultures

It is at this point that matters began to get complicated. Since men
were hunters, the better hunters among them often came back with more
food than the bad hunters. The females naturally chose them as mates
because more food meant personal survival as well as the survival of
their future offspring. But what guarantee there was that the man who
was offering food would also help in raising children. Women had to
find some way of knowing who was sincere in his intentions and who was
not. So they waited for the strongest possible man to approach them
and propose to them. The only problem was that the strong man often
tried to dominate as many women as possible, often deserting the older
ones and not caring for the offspring. As humans became more cultured,
women realised that the strongest man was not usually the one with the
best physique, as wealth and knowledge could also make a physically
weaker man very powerful in society. Quick to take a cue, intelligent
men developed better ways of demonstrating their love than defeating
an opponent in a duel. With time, lengthy courtship rituals developed
such as singing romantic songs expressing love in poetry, or
exchanging gifts. Some tried to prove their love by not taking care of
themselves, not taking care of their health or appearance, harming
themselves and even committing suicide. Women took this behaviour as a
sign of true love. Why else would someone go through the agony? As a
result, only committed men found women and dishonest men were
threatened with extinction. Since no one like to be extinct, least so
dishonest men, they began to mimic all the symptoms of true love in
order to lure women. The story got murkier and murkier and now there
is hardly any pointers left to differentiate between the honest and
the dishonest. In such a scenario, how can true love prosper, and how
could lovers live happily ever after?

In reply, Evans says, "The question whether men and women can live
happily ever after can be answered without reference to evolutionary
theory, simply by looking at the statistics for divorce. Current
divorce rates in western countries of between 33 and 50 per cent do
not suggest that lifelong marital happiness is common. On the other
hand, the fact that a few couples do manage to stay in love until they
die tells us that it is not completely impossible either."

We could produce children and care about our family without being in
love. Not many married people are really in love, or whatever love
they had is long since dead, but life goes on regardless.

"The idea that we could produce children and care about our family
without being in love," says Evans, "is precisely what evolutionary
theory calls into question. Could we really be bothered to do all that
without a powerful visceral feeling telling us that it was the most
important thing in the world? True, love may wane after a few years,
but evolutionary theory only requires that it last long enough to have
and raise a child to an age at which it can get by on its own - say,
about seven years. Could this be the biological explanation of the
famous 'seven-year itch'?"

When spurned by a lover, why do some of us (including some animals)
never marry, never go for another mate, never get on with life? Some
even commit suicide. Is it not against Darwin's laws? It is one thing
to emotionally blackmail the other to make them believe that we cannot
live without them, but why do some carry out the threat? Why don't we
lick our wounds and just find another partner?

"Depression is a mystery for evolutionists whatever its source,
whether it is caused by unrequited love or anything else. There are
some theories around, but they are still rather speculative."

There are some who talk about love without sex. What purpose does this
serve? Is it a mere escape? Married people falling in love for the
sake of love is understandable as they can have platonic love with
their extramarital partners and sex with their spouses, but what about
unmarried lovers?

"Romantic love without sex is, from an evolutionary point of view, an
aberration, just like homosexuality. That doesn't mean that there is
anything morally wrong with it, since evolutionary theory is not in
the business of value-judgements. But it does tell us that our
development is very flexible, and can send us down paths that are not
in the interests of our genes."

Is it possible to fall in love with more than one person?

"The answer is I don't know. There seems to be a large amount of
cultural variation on the issue of monogamy versus polygamy. Where
polygamy is allowed, however, it is almost always polygyny (one man
with many wives) and almost never polyandry (one woman with many
husbands)."

Love does exist, although the concepts, the reasons for falling in
love and expectations of men and women may be quite different. Thus
the eternal conflict in the battle of the sexes will go on, unless
lovers learn to make compromises and learn to respect the fact the
other is not necessarily hell.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010325/spectrum/main1.htm

Cosmological odyssey

2010-06-14T11:36:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Cosmological odyssey
Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

The Edge of Reason: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology
By Anil Ananthaswamy.
Penguin Books.
Pages 322. Rs 399.

IN the realm of physics, there are pure theorists and there are experimenters. Theoretical physicists study phenomena in nature, observe regularities, and then come up with mathematical models and theories that explain it. Their aim is to rationalise, explain and predict physical phenomena so that we could harness nature to our advantage.

No matter how accurate a scientist's abstract theorising might be, it is not accepted as theory until it is verified experimentally. There was a time, when both theory and experiment were performed usually by the same person, but now the theories are so complex and the experiments so complicated and expensive that it is impossible for the same person to come up with a hypothesis and also test it.

In The Edge of Reason: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology, Anil Ananthaswamy, consulting editor for New Scientist and contributor for journals like National Geographic, gives us an overview of how theories are developed and also how they are experimentally tested. In this engaging first-person account that reads like a travelogue, he takes us on a cosmological odyssey to the remote corners of the world, where some of the most audacious theories are being tested empirically.

Among the handful of science writers of Indian origin, Ananthaswamy writes with a rare gift of making highly theoretical and technical concepts comprehensible to the lay reader. He begins by giving a theoretical background to various theories of physics, and then takes us to the place where they are being tested. All the while he keeps musing about the mysteries of nature: How did the universe come into being? Why is the universe expanding? Is this the only universe in existence? What is dark matter? What is dark energy? What are neutrinos? What is the origin of mass? What happened to the antimatter that should have been produced along with matter after the big bang?

Our first stop is Mount Wilson, Pasadena, where there is a telescope that enabled scientists to confirm that our universe is far bigger than we had earlier imagined. We are then taken to an abandoned mine in Minnesota, called the Soudan Mine. It is where experiments are being conducted to look for dark matter that is inferred to exist from gravitational effects on visible matter and background radiation, but is undetectable. "Along with dark matter," says Ananthaswamy, "there is now another puzzle: dark energy. Together they form the bulk of the universe, about ninety per cent. In other words, have no clue about ninety per cent of the universe." Using the four massive telescopes at Paranal, Chile, scientists are working overtime to solve this mystery.

As we turn the pages, we visit Lake Baikal in Siberia, the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the deserted Karoo in South Africa, the frozen expanses of Antarctica, and the Hanle Valley in the Indian Himalayas where scientists are trying to unravel the most mysterious phenomena that that baffle us.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100613/spectrum/book2.htm

Blood against blood

2010-05-30T09:49:00.001-07:00

Sunday, May 30, 2010

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100530/spectrum/book3.htm

Blood against blood
Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

Empire of the Moghul: Brothers at War
By Alex Rutherford
Hachette India.
Pages 436. Rs 495.

LIKE the first volume of the quintet Empire of the Moghul, Alex Rutherford's Brothers at War also opens with the death of an emperor and the war of succession among the siblings. In December 1530, Babur's eldest son Humayun, the fortunate one, finds himself wearing the crown at the age of 22. The inexperienced prince not only had to deal with the rebellious Afghans, but also with his ambitious half-brothers and cousins. In the murky world of power and politics, no one could be trusted. Unable to rely on anyone, Humayun consults his trusted astrologer before deciding anything. But in spite of the favourable predictions, Humayun is defeated by the survivors of the Lodi regime. As if that were not enough, Sher Shah Suri frustrates all efforts of Humayun to consolidate an empire. Added to this is the treachery of his unscrupulous half-brother Kamran who goes to the extent of kidnapping Humayun's infant son, Akbar.

Rutherford very deftly recreates the life and times of the second Moghul Emperor who ruled present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of northern India. He was forced into a 15-year long exile as a result of continual attacks by archrival Sher Shah Suri and his half-brother Kamran. It was during this period that Humayun's Persian wife, Hamida, gave birth to Akbar, who would himself be an emperor in the future. Not the one to give up, Humayun, with the help of Persian sympathisers, recovered most of the territories 15 years later. During his exile, he had remembered his father's words: "If you cannot defeat your enemy by force of arms, do not despair. Find other ways. A sharp, well-oiled double-bladed axe is a fine weapon but so is a finely honed mind that can find a subtler path to victory`85 ."

Like the first book, this one also reflects Rutherford's amazing talent for recreating history as fiction. Going through historical records and personal accounts, he manages to create well-rounded characters, breathtaking battle scenes, and exotic background. The author makes sure that research does not overshadow the narrative. The dialogue is natural, and the plot is gripping, although a little less griping than the first book, and that is because Babur led a lot more adventurous and risky life.

Rutherford's Humayun comes across as a humane character with normal human failings. He is kind, and pardons even his treacherous brother Kamran; he is a good warrior but does make elementary mistakes. Even during a military campaign, or in times of hardship, he finds time to make passionate love to wife Hamida. He is a man who keeps his word, even if the other person has not.

The writer pays good attention to secondary characters as well, like Khanzada, Humayun's aunt whom he consults and trusts; Salima, his favourite concubine; Jauhar, his attendant; Suleiman Mirza, general of cavalry; Sher Shah Suri and Kamran.

Every attention is paid to historical detail, making the plot and characters come to life.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100530/spectrum/book3.htm

The marvels of Indus Valley

2009-12-14T07:51:00.001-08:00

Kuldip Dhiman

Harappan Technology and its Legacy
By D. P. Agrawal.
Rupa & Co. in Association with Infinity Foundation.
Pages 332. Price not mentioned.

WHAT is now known as the Indus Valley Civilisation or Harappan Civilisation was discovered accidentally when a railway line was being laid down in the 1920s. Initially, archaeological sites were found in the twin towns of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, now in Pakistan, but with the passage of time, more and more sites have been found in the north of the Indian subcontinent. It was Sir John Hubert Marshall, the then director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India who carried out initial excavations of the sites. Western historians until then had thought that India's historical past was not more than 3,000 years old, but these excavations pushed the timeline by at least 2,000 years back, if not more.

In the present volume, Harappan Technology and its Legacy, D. P. Agrawal focuses on Harappan technological achievements, although he covers other aspects also. This is quite an exhaustive book that covers ecology, technology, architecture, arts, crafts, transportation, stone cutting art, ceramics, metallurgy, pyrotechnology, animal husbandry and agriculture. The author is an expert in the subject, and has worked with the Archaeological Survey of India, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and Physical Research Laboratory. He writes in a direct matter-of-fact style, and packs his thesis with hard facts.

The first thing that strikes us is the amazing care in town planning that we see in these sites. Major towns could accommodate more than 50,000 people, and the engineers and architects had to be really competent in order do design such settlements. A standard grid was followed in the design of these towns. The engineers of the time made sure to construct reservoirs for drinking water, and also made sewage lines and storm water drains. The Harappan engineering prowess is most clearly revealed in the hydraulic structures. Then we have the Great Bath, which is an example a perfect leak-proof structure.

In the past 90 years, many other sites have been discovered, and with every find, archaeologists and historians have come across amazing all round achievements of the civilisation.

Agrawal shows that when it came to scientific instruments, the Harappans contributed the true saw, needles (with holes at the pointed end), hollow drills, and so on.

"The Harappan arts and crafts," writes Agrawal, "present a bewildering array of forms, techniques, and usage of raw materials. They had a highly developed lapidary industry that could work on hard stones like agate and chalcedony, and soft stones like steatite. They could produce intricate designs by alkali etching of carnelian beads, which were probably meant for export to Mesopotamia."

Another striking feature of the civilisation was standardisation of industrial norms. The Harappans had developed a binary metrological system for measuring weights, and used a unit of 17mm for linear measurements. The bricks used in construction of buildings were of standard size—in fact, all things were standardised.

The Harappans used locally available raw materials for manufacturing crafts such as woodworking, basket making, simple weaving, terracotta pottery, and so on, although they had to import raw materials for stone-shaping for domestic purposes, and chipped stone tool-making. There was a third category crafts using local materials, complex technologies, and intricate production processes such as in stoneware bangle manufacture, elaborately painted pottery, complex weaving and carpet making, ceramics, and metallurgy. They possessed the knowledge of smelting even sulphide ores and produced bronze in complicated shapes.

The Harappans were also good at the arts and this can be seen from the surviving sculptures such as the Red Torso, the Dancing Girl, and the famous Priest King. The sculptors not only were good at human figures, but also at sculpting animals. And then, of course, we have a large collection of ceramics, pots, bowls, pans, etc.

Obviously, a civilisation that had achieved such scientific, technological and artistic heights could not have done so without having a solid agricultural base. At Kalibangan, we can still see plough marks in a field, and a terracotta model of a plough from Banawali is very elegantly designed.

One thing that sets the Harappan civilisation apart is its concern with the ordinary masses. While all the great cities of the world built great palaces and monuments which were largely for the benefit of the rich, the Harappans built structures which were for the masses like the Great Bath and the Granary. They did not show much interest in conquering; they were more interested in creating.

The book has dozens of colour photographs, maps, diagrams and sketches that beautifully illustrate the text. There is an amazing array of new artefacts that makes this volume all the more interesting.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091213/spectrum/book2.htm

The first Moghul

2009-11-01T08:42:00.001-08:00

Kuldip Dhiman

Reviewed for The Tribune, November1, 2009
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091101/spectrum/book5.htm

Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North
By Alex Rutherford.
Headline Review.
Pages 436. Rs 495.

WHEN Babur was barely 12, his father died in a freak accident. Hardly had Babur got over the shock, he had to prepare himself to take over the reigns of Ferghana or else he would be dethroned by his uncles or cousins. Just retaining Ferghana would not be enough, though. His father had told him on several occasions: "We owe Timur a debt. He was a great man, my son. His blood is your blood. Never forget it. Be like him, if you can. Live up to your destiny and let it be greater than mine."

And Babur would never forget the words of his father. So, at an age, when you play in the fields, Babur found himself burdened with the responsibilities of a ruler as his father had not left a very secure kingdom for him. The problems were not only external, for his uncles, cousins, and other hopefuls were only too keen to topple him and seize power.

In Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North, we find Babur trying to consolidate his position and regain some of the lost lands. His first job was to attack Samarkand. It was a long campaign lasting seven months, and it proved to be expensive and he realised that while he was engaged in the seize, Fergana had been usurped by his detractors. And as he charged back to recover it, his troops deserted in Samarkand. The whole experience found Babur losing both Samarkand as well as Fergana. The young king was beginning to realise the harsh realities of life, and he would need all the talents of his great ancestors. For instance, to realise his ambition, he would have to make alliances with his cousin Mahmud, who would help him seize Samarkand in order to win a bride for himself. Their motives were different, but the ruthlessness the same.

In this action-packed historical novel, which is first of a series of five novels that he is writing on Moghul emperors, Rutherford, magnificently recreates the rise of Babur from the Mediterranean, through Afghanistan, and finally India, where he founded the Moghul dynasty. The novel is meticulously researched, and the author claims to have visited every location described in it. The result is a dramatic and picturesque presentation of history that keeps you turning page after page although you might be familiar with major historical facts. History books give facts, but it is historical fiction that puts life into the characters and events. Rutherford's lively prose and sharp psychological insights make us feel and care for the characters we meet in the book. Apart from the major players, Rutherford very passionately creates the others like Wazir Khan, Babur's mentor and protector; Kutlugh Nigar, his mother; Khanzada, his sister, and Roxanna, his father's concubine.

In the deft hands of Rutherford, Babur emerges as a strong and ambitious man who he is ruthless at times but also kind and gives in to weaker passions sometimes. And although he might have earned a name for himself in history books as winner of several battles, we see him not so victorious on the personal front because there the sword does not work. The mighty conqueror finds himself unable to elicit any love from his first wife, Ayisha. "He had never seen her smile—not once. A smile might have softened her and, in turn, softened his feelings towards her. Instead, lying with her seemed almost like sleeping with a warm corpse—no response, no passion, no engagement, just those unblinking dark eyes seemingly focused on the middle distance as he spent himself in her unresisting body."

This is one battle Babur might have loved to win the most.

Quantum Consciousness or God?

2009-08-17T03:11:00.001-07:00

Kuldip Dhiman

God is not Dead: What Quantum Physics Tells us About our Origins and How We Should Live
By Amit Goswami.
Jaico.
Pages 310. Rs 295.

Aristotle showed us that whenever we ask the "why" question, four explanations or causes could be given. They are: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. If we take the example of a chair, wood is its material cause. Formal cause shows us what a thing is; in other words, it identifies it—we might think in terms of the shape of the chair. The efficient cause is the reason for the object to be. In case of the chair, the efficient cause is the carpenter. And the final cause explains why the chair was made, or what was the purpose (teleology) behind making it. Chairs are made so that people can sit on them.

With the rise of modern scientific thinking, the last two causes are no longer considered because they would suggest that the world was created by a supreme being. This is not acceptable to modern materialistic science. As scientific thinking began to hold the imagination of thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche made his bold proclamation a century ago: "God is dead".

Amit Goswami declares the opposite in God is not Dead, and he uses the presuppositions of quantum physics to justify his claim. To be sure, Goswami is not a saffron-clad swami dabbling in quantum mechanics to pass off his religious beliefs by using scientific terminology. He is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics for the last 40 years.

Goswami argues that scientific materialism cannot give us a complete explanation of the world as there are aspects of the phenomenal world that are impossible to address within the materialist framework of science. Where, then, lies the solution? The solution, says Goswami, could be found in quantum physics — the science of the subatomic realm.

Very briefly, in Newtonian physics, objects are determined things, but in quantum physics, objects are possibilities from which consciousness chooses. The stress in Newtonian physics is on objectivity, that is, the person conducting the experiment is just an impartial observer; he does not interfere in the experiment in any way. But when we enter the world of subatomic particles, subjectivity becomes important as it influences the physical processes.

For instance, light waves sometimes act like particles and particles sometimes act like waves depending upon how they are observed, this is called wave particle duality. Further, matter can go from one spot to another without moving through the intervening space—this is called quantum tunnelling. Instead of the certain world of macro level physics, in quantum mechanics, the entire universe is nothing but a series of probabilities that depend upon a sentient observer. And once subjectivity enters, consciousness cannot be treated as mere by-product of biological processes, because it actively shapes the outcome of the experiment.

In the micro realm, objects remain as waves of possibility until they are brought into manifestation through the act of observation. Quantum objects are waves of possibility of consciousness. "Consciousness, not matter," says Goswami, "is the ground of being, in which matter exists only as possibilities. Through the act of quantum measurement or observation, consciousness converts possibility into actuality, by collapsing waves into particles or things, at the same time splitting itself into a subject that sees and objects that are seen `85. In other words, quantum thinking allows us to treat mind and matter, internal and external experiences on equal footing, extending causal efficacy and importance of both."

But how does this prove the existence of God? When we observe the world, our consciousness chooses among the quantum possibilities to collapse an actuality of experience. This way, we create our own reality. It must, however, be remembered, that we do not create reality in our ordinary state of consciousness, but in a non-ordinary state of consciousness called unified consciousness or universal consciousness. And it is this unified consciousness that could be called God, but this God is not some patriarchal figure sitting up in the sky controlling the affairs of the world.

Goswami further argues that neither Darwinian random evolution nor Creationism can explain the origins of life, but the evolution guided by unified consciousness. There are the fossil gaps, for instance, which cannot be understood in any other way but by thinking of intelligent design through quantum evolution. Evolution is not a gradual process, rather it undergoes quantum leaps at times. The missing links prove that in the past, we have had epochs of evolution in which quantum leaps of creativity took place.

Using these basic assumptions of quantum theory, Goswami shows us that we can answer questions relating to soul, mind, creativity, reincarnation, paranormal phenomena, ESP, dreams and more importantly, mystic experience. In fact, he interacted with several mystics to understand the mysteries of reality.

This book is an interesting addition to scientific literature. Goswami writes clearly and argues intelligently, and is among a handful of Indians who can write on science. But without belittling the author's effort, it must be said that the concept of applying quantum theorising to understand the metaphysical and spiritual realm is not altogether new.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090816/spectrum/book2.htm

Spare the rod, but not the discipline

2009-08-12T07:43:00.001-07:00

Corporal punishment is to be deplored, not regimentation.

By Kuldip Dhiman

Another child is beaten up, another teacher is penalised, and the debate is suddenly alive: whether we ought to spare the rod or not. And this debate, like most others, swings from one extreme to the other. While my parents often told my teachers, "If he misbehaves, don't tell us, just thrash him thoroughly"; most parents now would take the school authorities to court for 'touching' their little ones.

Those who propose to banish corporal punishment in schools, suggest as alternatives positive behaviour techniques like communication, reasoning, conferences with students for planning acceptable behaviour, parent-teacher conferences about student behaviour, use of staff such as school psychologists and counsellors and above all love and affection. Good suggestions, but hardly practicable in an over-populated country like ours where in many areas the schools are overcrowded, understaffed, teachers are poorly paid, and often there is no school building at all.

It is believed that corporal punishment leaves emotional scars on children's mind, and they grow up to be violent and unruly adults. Those who hold this line might be surprised to know that recent studies show that the percentage of people who had committed violent crimes has been almost identical among those who were spanked and those who were not. While I am not a supporter of corporal punishment, I argue that we must evaluate the problem rationally rather than jump to conclusions out of mere emotional responses. As is often the case, whenever we hear about a case of corporal punishment, we often blame the teacher without hearing her or his version of the story, just as in a case of a traffic accident involving a car and a cycle, the car driver is presumed guilty and beaten up even if the cyclist was at fault.

But what is corporal punishment in the first place? While it is recognisable in extreme forms like caning and whipping, what about milder forms? More and more forms of punishments are being defined as corporal punishment these days, so much so that one day even scolding a child for misbehaving might be classified as corporal punishment.

While love, communication and reasoning are to be preferred to the rod, we must not forget that in most cases, our classrooms are packed with about sixty to seventy children. The hapless teacher cannot be expected to reason with those who habitually not only misbehave, but also bully him and other children in the classroom. A patient teacher might try love and affection once, twice, or even thrice, but on the fourth occasion is likely to loose his cool. Don't parents themselves beat up their children after trying other milder methods? Why should it be any different with the teacher who does not have to deal with two or three, but over sixty children all day! Besides, it is often difficult and time-consuming to reason with a child of secondary school level. If the teacher tried to reason with every single errant child, he would have no time left to teach. And experience shows that children do like some degree of firmness on the part of the teacher, and they have scant regard for a teacher who is lenient.

In most cases of corporal punishment, it is often not clear who is to blame, the teacher or the child or the parents. Because adults and children influence each other, argues developmental psychopathologist Michael Rutter, it is not always clear whether an adult's hostility is the cause or the effect of a child's misbehaviour. Family disruption and conflict and ineffective parenting do contribute to and aggravate many childhood problems, but many of these problems are also rooted partially in genetic endowment and grow out of a complex transactional process in which children affect and are affected by their elders and their wider social environment. It is high time to move beyond the simple view that parents and teachers alone are to blame for children's behavioural problems.

While corporal punishment should certainly be deplored, regimentation and discipline must be enforced at all costs. After all why do we send children to school? So they could learn to work with others, learn social customs, learn to cooperate and compete with peer groups.

But discipline must not be confused with coercion, for discipline could be instilled in children without coercion. Experts like Robert E. Larzelere, suggest that disciplinary responses could begin with less severe tactics, such as reasoning, but proceed to firmer tactics when the initial methods achieve neither compliance nor an acceptable compromise. This is consistent with many studies showing that a combination of reasoning and punishment is more effective than either one alone and with new evidence that this sequence enhances the effectiveness of milder disciplinary tactics.

Every child is unique, some are naturally well-behaved by disposition, while others need to be disciplined, and there are those who only understand the language of the cane. It would be unwise to treat all of them with one method. In the case of children belonging to the third category, school authorities could have a long hard talk with the parents instead of beating the child black and blue themselves.

Ayurveda and healthy life

2009-03-15T02:57:00.001-07:00

After getting a doctorate degree in reproduction biology in India, Dr Vinod Verma studied neurobiology in Paris University. She later started exploring the ayurvedic system, and is now working hard to make its usefulness known to people. Excerpts from an interview with Kuldip Dhiman

The pace of life has changed drastically, creating all sorts of health problems. What cure does ayurveda have for lifestyle ailments such as obesity?

Dr Vinod Verma feels that ayurveda is the mother of all other medical systems

Well, health problems are there because we have forgotten the age-old tradition of ayurveda, which is not merely a medical system but this enormous wisdom is for leading a healthy and happy life with total well-being of the body and the mind. Emphasis on achara-vyavahara (lifestyle) is the primary wisdom of ayurveda. One should live with desha and kala (space and time).

I have made a mantra in my book, Ayurvedic Food Culture and Recipes, for teaching the fundamentals of ayurvedic nutrition—eating what, when, how and how much. All these factors have to be learnt individually and should be co-related. The whole ayurvedic food culture or other aspects cannot be learnt in a day. Otherwise, there was no need for me to write so many books.

Bad food with chemical fertilisers, artificial colours and flavour, bad quality fats, too much salt and sugar are some of the causes of over-weight and obesity.

Each individual should learn about the fundamentals of ayurvedic lifestyle and make an effort to remain healthy

Weight can vary due to constitution and structure of the body. One should take care of the shape and form of the body. There should be no extra hanging flesh. Let me give some suggestions for the benefit of your readers for balancing weight. Do surya pranam 12 times (it takes 10 minutes) after drinking a glass of hot water in the morning, or go for a half-an-hour walk. One should eat strictly three times a day, and absolutely nothing in between. Fill the stomach two-thirds, as ayurveda suggests. One-third of the stomach should be left for digestive juices. Never sit down after main meals. It is advised to walk at least 100 steps after the meal, or get involved in other activities that need body movements.

Eat your dinner at least two hours before going to bed, and lastly, drink a glass of hot water after getting up in the morning and before going to bed at night. Following these nutrition principles of ayurveda, not only will you be able to control your weight, but you will also get rid of minor stomach problems.

Does ayurveda have cure for psychological ailments like depression, stress, anxiety?

Ayurveda has cure for psychological and mental ailments. But the way your question is formulated, you have a mindset of modern medicine, which has a capsule-and-injection culture. In ayurveda, the treatment means a lot of other things besides aushadhi (medicine) — nutrition, external application of heat and other ointments, yogasanas and pranayama, japa for spiritual therapy, etc. If we compare the modern methods of therapy and ayurvedic treatment with food, the former is fast food, which gives rise ultimately to bad health, and the latter is a gourmet meal prepared with great effort and love, and has a rejuvenating effect on your body.

We live in a highly competitive world. As a result, there is a tremendous pressure on children to do well academically. Have you got any tips for sharpening the brain cells?

The stress and pressure are not only managed by sharpening the brain cells. One equally needs a good training in sattvic (pure) thoughts, which today's parents are not providing. For promoting memory, one should powder the following products and take a tablespoon of these with hot milk everyday: cashew nuts—5 parts; pepper—1 part; pippali—1 part; coriander—1 part; mullethi—1 part; saunf—1 part. There are many other products also in ayurveda but this is a simple home remedy people can make themselves.

You are involved in research. Tell us about it, and how it will help people in general.

My research involves gathering practical wisdom of ayurveda from all sources in the country and making it available to the common people for the benefit of health, promoting strength and preventing ailments. There exist so many simple solutions to complicated problems. To give you a simple example, I have cured many people of their nagging stomach problems by making them follow the eight principles of ayurvedic food culture.

All this is only possible with the personal efforts of each individual. Vaidyas and doctors are meant for emergencies and to treat ailments, and not for your headaches, cough and cold.

Each individual should learn about the fundamentals of ayurvedic lifestyle, make a conscious effort to remain healthy, enhance strength by taking rasayanas, make all efforts to prevent ailments, eat organic, well-prepared wholesome food with variety of herbs and spices, detoxify the body from time to time with some special products, do the inner and outer cleansing of the body, and make sure that the mala is excreted properly.

Is ayurveda scientific?

Yes, absolutely. It is very specific about pharmacology of products, their effect on the body, balancing of a drug, dose and frequency. In fact, it is the mother system of all the other medical systems of the world. It is a pity that some sadhus and religious cults are trying to use it to their own advantage and present its distorted version to the world. They ask people to be vegetarian, not eat onions and garlic, and so many other things like that. Ayurveda describes thousands of properties of garlic. Charaka has described 64 kinds of wine, and has given description of every possible meat.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090314/saturday/main3.htm

Belur: Sheer poetry in stone

2009-03-10T03:44:00.001-07:00

by Kuldip Dhiman

HEAVENLY guardian angels welcome you as you enter the ornate doors of the temple; a bevy of voluptuous apsaras and dancing girls tempt you with their sensual curves; scenes illustrating the two epics are there to entertain and inform; the gaze of the principal deity overwhelms you as you enter the inner sanctum. These are the splendours of Belur and Halebid where the sculptors of the bygone age seem to have stretched the art of sculpture to its very limits.

They may not be as well known as the Khajuraho temples, but the temples built by the Hoysala Dynasty between AD 1050 and 1300 in Karnataka epitomise the artistic splendour of their time. The singular feature of these temples is the obvious shit of emphasis from architecture to sculpture. Granite appears to have become modelling clay in the hands of the sculptors of the magnificent statues that are on display. The first of the Hoysala temples, the Chennakesava temple of Belur and the Hoysalesvar temple of Halebid, are the very paradigms of Hoysala art. The construction of both these temples began in AD 1117.

The 38 splendidly carved bracket figures of the Chennakesava temple illustrate the concept of the ideal woman according to the social mores of the 12th century. These highly ornamented curvaceous and rather plump beauties, called Mandanikas, are clearly the pieces de resistance that the temple has to offer. This, however, does not mean that other figures that adorn the temple are in any way inferior. Apart from gods and goddesses and apsaras, there are rows and rows of highly decorated elephants. The guides at Belur and Halebid challenge you to find two elephants that are exactly the same. Then we have the exquisitely carved lathe-turned pillars of the main hall. Heavily bejewelled buxom dancing damsels adorn the four central pillars of the main hall. Surprisingly the temple does not have a superstructure (tower), thus making us wonder if it was left incomplete.

The Madhavaraya temple and the Kappechennigaraya temples are the other attractions in Belur. Although not as well known as the Chennakesava temple, the Madhavaraya temple deser-ves a visit. The pillars of this temple are most intricately carved. The central ceiling, according to Gerard Foekema, "may in fact be the most elaborate one in the whole of India.

In the huge garbhagrha there stands a giant cult-image of Kesava, the form of Visnu .... In an inscription on its pedestal, and in two other inscriptions regarding the erection and consecration of the temple, the deity is called Vijayanara-yana".

Now we move to the Hoyasalesvar temple of Halebid, just 15 km to the north-east of Belur, and 30 km from Hassan. It was constructed 10 years after the Chennakesava temple and was left incomplete in spite of 80 years' hard work that went into it. In reality this temple complex is made of two identical temples joined together. Gerard Foekema observes: "The lavish series of large images, stretched out over the full length of the back of the temple, is the most glorious achievement of the Hoysala sculptural art. It is unequalled in wealth and richness, and unequalled in size and extension. From the architectural point of view the temple is also unequalled but, sad to say, less successful".

This temple is also studded with finely crafted figures of gods and goddesses and dancing beauties. Then we have the relief sculptures depicting elephants, lions, swans, and scenes illustrating the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Another scholar observes: "Likewise, the four doorways of the temple, the lintels and guardian angels (dwarpalas) — all subjected to heavy ornamentation — give the impression of being the work of a master goldsmith rather than a sculptor".

Belur and Halebid are very well connected by road.

There are regular tourist coaches, and conducted tours from Bangalore and Mysore. Those wishing to explore the area leisurely might stay at Hassan and make daily tours to the temples. Hassan has a number of good hotels and restaurants.

Take twice or thrice the number of film rolls you expect to shoot because the marvellously sculpted apsaras of Belur and Halebid can make the most stingy person to overshoot.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98sep06/sunday/head6.htm

Drona’s very own temple

2009-03-10T03:21:00.001-07:00

By Kuldip Dhiman

"THIS is the only temple in India which is dedicated to the great teacher Dronacharya," the priest of the Drona Shiva Temple, Shiv Baadi, declares emphatically. As you stroll through the woods, your mind begins to wander. Is this the home of the legendary Dronacharya?

Was this forest house his famous gurukula? Is this the spot where the great teacher trained Arjuna and the rest? Believers accept the priest's words without much ado; skeptics ask for evidence: Alas! there is none.

The legend says that Yayati, Guru Dronacharya's little daughter, was intrigued by the daily disappearance of her father. He would go into the forest and return after a few hours. When she could no longer hold her curiosity, she asked her father about his long absence. All of her questions were met with vague, evasive answers, but the little girl was adamant. She wanted to know the truth.

"I want to go with you, today", she said one day, blocking his way.

"No, my child' you are a little girl. I will take you along when you are a bit older."

But Yayati would not listen and in the end Dronacharya had to give in.

"My dear, your curiosity is understandable. I bathe in the Swaan river every day and then I proceed to the Himalayas, the abode of Lord Shiva. One must have the Lord's blessing and spiritual powers to undertake such a pilgrimage."

"Then, please teach me. You are after all the greatest teacher in the world."

Dronacharya held the little girl in his arms and asked her to recite Om Namo Shivaya. Yayati took her father's words seriously and began to chant the mantra everyday. Soon Shiva appeared, and on seeing that a little girl was chanting his name, he transformed himself into a little boy, and began to play with her. Yayati was very happy for having found such a lovable playmate.

One day, Dronacharya asked his daughter what she did in his absence. She told him about the little boy. Dronacharya was happy that at last his lonely daughter had found a companion to play with. A few days later, on his way to the Himalayas, Dronacharya realised that he had left something behind by mistake. When he returned home he saw his daughter playing with a little boy. It did not take long for Dronacharya to realise who the boy was. The great teacher bowed in reverence, and Shiva had to reveal his identity. Yayati could hardly believe her eyes. Shiva was extremely pleased with her devotion. He blessed her and said that her little village would be one of his favourite places.

Later Dronacharya installed a Shiva-linga on that very spot, and renamed the place Shiv Baadi. Although the present priest believes that 'the Shiva-linga we see today in the sanctum of the main temple is the same that Guru Dronacharya installed about 5,000 years ago', he has no historical evidence to support the claim.

Whether Guru Dronacharya lived here or not, the Drona Shiva Temple does look like an ancient gurukula. Perched on the top of a small hillock, and surrounded by a clump of dense trees, the temple transports you to another age.

But apart from its association with Dronacharya, the temple has nothing much to offer — in terms of its architectural design or aesthetic beauty. However, two rows of samadhis (graves) on the far side of the temple's courtyard look interesting. They are dedicated to sages Ganga-giri, Ichcha-giri, Tamesh-wargiri, Somagiri, Harigiri and many others. The priests tells us that 'these saints meditated here for years, and later buried themselves in the ground below and left this world. These samadhis are dedicated to them'. We see no inscriptions or dates on these graves, but they certainly look quite old. Behind the graves, you can see many. Shivalingas and other idols that were installed by various saints and followers. Just a few places away, is the cremation ground — a Shiva temple always has a place for cremation next to it, we are informed by the priest.

In sharp contrast to the aesthetically laid out samadhis, the main temple is admittedly an eyesore. It has no artistic, aesthetic, or architectural value worth mentioning. It is one of those plain white temple structures that have mushroomed all over the North. The practice of inscribing the names of donors on marble slabs deserves to be condemned because it adds 'visual pollution' It is graffiti of the worst kind. Can you imagine such ugly slabs on the walls and pillars of the Mahabalipuram Temple, or the Konark Sun Temple. To the right of the main temple, is another unadorned temple, constructed by Saint Baldevgiri about 70 years ago.

However, devotees, who pay little attention to aesthetic features, flock to Shiv Baadi in hundreds. Shivaratri is celebrated with great fervour. Another important occasion is the grand fair that is held on the second Saturday after Baisakhi. Located in Ambota village in Himachal Pradesh, Shiva Baadi is about 4 km from Gagret, if you are approaching from Hoshiarpur, and about 2 km from Mubarikpur, if you take the Chandigarh-Ropar-Nangal-Una road. Shiva Baadi can boast of one hotel that offers fairly good accommodation. To get more out of your trip, you could make Chintpurni your main destination, and spend a couple of hours at Shiv Baadi on your way back.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98dec19/saturday/head8.htm

The abode of Baba Vadbhag Singh

2009-03-10T03:19:00.001-07:00

By Kuldip Dhiman

A SEQUESTERED spot in a deep ravine houses famous gurdwaras Dehra Sahib, Manji Sahib and Beiri Sahib. Millions of pilgrims gather here every year during Baisakhi and Holi. Life gets disrupted as the tiny hamlets of Nehri and Mairhi are flooded with devotees. All roads leading to Mairhi are blocked and vehicular traffic is held up for hours on end. As there are not enough sarais, dharamshalas and hotels, every inch of the hillside gets covered with tents.

The ancient gurdwaras Dehra Sahib, Manji Sahib and Beiri Sahib were founded by Baba Vadbhag Singh. The pilgrims also take a dip in the cool waters of the Darshani Khud, also called the Charanganga, which is supposed to ward off evil spirits. It is believed that when Baba Vadbhag Singh chose this beautiful, secluded spot to meditate, he learnt that the place was full of ghosts and evil spirits. The most powerful spirit was of Nahar Singh.

The spirit tried to overpower Baba Vadbhag Singh with its evil force, but was in turn captured by Baba. Nahar Singh surrendered and pledged to protect the valley from other evil spirits. Thus Baba Vadbhag Singh made Mairhi his spiritual home.

Baba Vadbhag Singh was born to Baba Ram Sodhi and Mata Raj Kaur when the atrocities inflicted by the invading Mughals were at their peak. Vadbhag Singh, even at the tender age of five, would listen intently as his mother read Gurbani and other holy scriptures. Realising that his son was a child prodigy, Baba Ram Singh appointed some of the most learned scholars to coach his son in all branches of knowledge, including the martial arts.

Baba'a parents got him married to Radhaji. After her untimely death, he was persuaded to marry Sanghliji. Although Baba Vadbhag Singh was inclined towards spiritualism, he was forced to wield the sword as wave after wave of Mughal invasions, especially those led by Ahmed Shah and Nassar Ali, had created havoc in the region. When Nassar Ali attacked Kartarpur, Baba Vadbhag Singh fought valiantly but had to take shelter in the hills because he had only a handful of soldiers as compared to over 10,000 soldiers of Nassar Ali.

Not content with shedding blood, Nassar Ali burnt Gurdwara Thamm Sahib to ashes, razed many temples to the ground, raped and converted Hindu women to Islam, and slaughtered cows. To defend the honour of his country and religion, Baba Vadbhag Singh organised a band of soldiers and, with the help of Sardar Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, Kapoor Singh, Adina Baig and others, attacked the mighty army of Nassar Ali. In the ensuing battle, Nassar Ali was captured and later burnt alive.

After the war, Baba wanted to retire to the hills in order to pursue his spiritual goals. While he bathed in the cool waters of one of the valleys, he saw the images of the 10 Gurus. Thus he decided to name it the Darshani Khud and the waters of this khud came to be called Dhauli Dhar or Charanganga.

Later he pitched the Nishan Sahib under a berry tree and began to meditate. But life was not easy as the valley was full of ghosts and evil spirits. The Baba had to fight with all of them. Due to his spiritual powers, he was able to defeat them.

The Baba constructed a gurdwara on a hill nearby and called it Dehra Sahib. Right across it is Manji Sahib, the place where the Baba used to meditate and relax. The Baba soon began to attract a large following and the place came to be known as Mairhi Sahib.

Mairhi is now in Una district of Himachal Pradesh. It takes about four and a half hours by car to reach Mairhi from Chandigarh. Any bus going towards Jawalamukhi, Dehra or Sujanpur will take you to Mairhi.

Fairly good accommodation is available at Mairhi. But during Holi, one must make prior bookings to avoid disappointment as the place is not well equipped to handle large crowds.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1999/99jan16/saturday/head6.htm

Anandpur Sahib and the birth of the Khalsa

2009-03-10T03:15:00.001-07:00

By Kuldip Dhiman

IT was the Baisakhi day, March 30,1699. A large gathering of peasants was waiting anxiously. A strange excitement permeated the air. Something was going to happen. Something that would have an everlasting impact on Indian history. And it would have its genesis in Makhowal, a small hamlet on the banks of the Sutlej.

As the farmers waited with bated breath, Shri Guru Gobind Singh ji, the Tenth Guru, appeared holding a naked sword in his hand. He raised his sword and demanded a head from one of his followers. A hush fell over the gathering. No one demurred. The Guru repeated his words. On hearing his demand for the third time, one Daya Ram of Lahore stepped forward and said: "My head is at your service, my Lord", The Guru took the disciple into a nearby tent and soon returned. His sword was now dripping with blood. He raised his authoritative voice and demanded yet another head. Far from being daunted by the thought of death, another disciple, Dharam Das of Delhi, volunteered to sacrifice himself for his Guru. In the events that followed Guru Gobind Singh made three more such calls and consequently Mohkam Chand of Dwarka, Himmat of Jagannath, and Sahib Chand of Bidar came forward and offered their heads.

The Guru was obviously testing his disciples and was not really interested in human sacrifice. He was so pleased by the devotion of these five followers that he called them the Five Beloved ones or the Panj Piyaras. One of them was a Khatri and the rest Shudras. As the Guru did not believe in caste system, he baptised all of them and announced the birth of the Khalsa. He addressed the dumbstruck crowd thus: "In the time of Guru Nanak, there was just one devout Sikh, Guru Angad; now there are five — totally devoted to their Guru. These shall lay the foundation of Sikhism".

It was a very dark period in Indian history. Aurangzeb's persecution of non-Muslims was at its peak. In his essay Birth of Khalsa, Dr Hari Ram Gupta writes: "Aurangzeb had decided to use all the resources of a vast empire in suppressing Hinduism and converting the infidels to Islam.... In 1668 Hindu fairs and festivals were stopped. On April 9, 1669, a general order applicable to all parts of the Mughal Empire was issued to demolish all the schools and temples of the infidels and to put down their religious teachings". In January, 1670, the biggest temple of Keshav Rae at Mathura was destroyed and the city was named Islamabad... . Hindus employed in public service, including clerks and accountants, were dismissed in 1671. The post of qanungo could be retained by a Hindu embracing Islam. Others who became Muslims received stipends, rewards, government jobs, release from jails, right to ancestral property and other privileges... . Jazia was charged from all Hindus from April 2, 1679".

Guru Gobind Singh was extremely disturbed by all this. Voluntary conversion to another religion is one thing; forcible conversion quite another. The Guru and his family were themselves among the worst sufferers. His father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, had been beheaded on November 11, 1675, by Aurangzeb. Hinduism in those days had become too ritualistic and dogmatic and the Hindus were, according to Dr Gokal Chand Narang, "too mild by nature, too contented in their desires, too modest in their aspirations, too averse to physical exertion and terror-stricken and demoralised, even though strongly attached to their religion. They had religion but no national feeling. Guru Gobind Singh sought to make nationalism their religion". The Guru's aim was Chiriaan kolon baaz marawaan; Taan main Gobind naam kahaawaan (Call me by the name of Gobind only if I succeed in making sparrows kill hawks).

Earlier, it was a custom to drink the water with which the Gurus washed their feet, but as Guru Gobind Singh wanted to instil martial spirit in his followers, and thus change them from Sikhs to Singhs (lions), he proposed to baptise them by water stirred with a khanda (sword). To strike a blow against the class-ridden society, he urged all his followers to attach 'Singh' to their first names irrespective of their caste or creed. He also asked them to always have on their person Kesh, Kangha, Karha, Kaccha and Kirpan (long hair, a comb, a steel bracelet, a vest, and sword). His followers were to celebrate Holi by conducting martial arts, sport, military parades and mock battles. He later baptised about 20,000 disciples and named the place Shri Anandpur Sahib, the city of bliss.

J.D. Cunningham writes in History of the Sikhs: "A new faith had been declared, and henceforth the Khalsa, the saved or liberated, should alone prevail. God must be worshipped in truthfulness and sincerity, but no material resemblance must degrade the Omnipotent; the Lord could only be beheld by the eye of faith in the general body of the Khalsa".

But the Guru was not only a great warrior. He was a great saint, poet, scholar and philosopher too. He had mastered Sanskrit, Gurmukhi and Persian texts. Under his directions major Sanskrit and Persian works were translated into the vernacular language so that the common man could benefit from them. Towards this end he employed 52 poets and scholars. In A History of the Sikh People, Dr Gopal Singh observes: "In Riti Kavya, or traditional poetry, the Guru's poetry is unexcelled in the sweep of imagination, choice of word and phrase, and mastery over metre. There is no metre known to Indian prosody that has not been employed by this Great Master (he experimented with over 250 metres), nor a mood that he has not captured".

There are so many historical places associated with Guru Gobind Singh, but Shri Anandpur Sahib has a special significance. The city has had a very turbulent past, and because of its historical and spiritual status, it is one of the five most important places of worship of the Sikhs. The holy city was actually founded by Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1664. Its older name was Makhowal and Guru Tegh Bahadur had bought it from the then ruler of Bilaspur.

The city is dotted with historical gurdwaras and forts. Gurdwara Kesgarh Sahib, Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, Gurdwara Lohgarh Sahib, Gurdwara Fatehgarh Sahib, Gurdwara Bhora Sahib and Fort Anandgarh are the prominent ones.

Gurdwara Kesgarh Sahib is clearly the most important gurdwara at Anandpur Sahib. It is one of the five important Takhts (seats) of the Sikh religion. The Khanda or the double-edged sword with which Guru Gobind Singh stirred the holy water in 1669 can be seen in this gurdwara. It also houses five other arms associated with the Tenth Guru — Katar, the dagger used by the Guru for hand-to-hand-fights and for hunting; the Karpa Barchha, spear; the Nagin Barchha, spear with a snake-shaped blade; and a musket.

After the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur, Guru Gobind Singh began to plan his strategy at Gurdwara Fatehgarh Sahib. But before tackling the Mughal forces he had to reckon with Raja Bhim Chand of Bilaspur who had sent a force under Raja Kesari Chand to attack Anandpur Sahib. The Guru organised a battalion and ordered Bhai Uday Singh to get ready for battle. Bhai Uday Singh beheaded Kesari Chand and offered his head to the Guru. Guru Gobind Singh was very proud of his victorious army, so he built a fort at the spot and called it Fatehgarh Sahib.

Gurdwara Guru ka Mahal was the residence of Guru Tegh Bahadur, and it was here that the sons of Guru Gobind Singh were born. Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib is very close to the bus-stand and the head of Guru Tegh Bahadur was cremated here. Shri Guru Tegh Bahadur Museum displays paintings depicting the sacrifices made by the Sikh Gurus.

Anandpur Sahib is thronged by thousands of pilgrims during the month of Holi to celebrate the Hola Mohalla. The brave Khalsas display martial arts as well as horse-riding, sword-fighting and other military sport in front of an enthusiastic crowd. The entire city is then agog with feverish activity and it reminds us of the day 300 years ago when Guru Gobind Singh demanded the heads of his disciples, created the Khalsa, and picked up his sword to protect dharma: "For this purpose was I born,

Bear this in mind all ye saints;

To propagate dharma, to protect saints,

To annihilate all tyrants."

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1999/99feb06/saturday/1head.htm

Srirangapatnam: A quaint little historic town

2009-03-10T03:06:00.001-07:00

Although it is only a small town, Srirangapatnam has a wealth of historical monuments. The Sriranganatha Temple is believed to be several centuries old, says Kuldip Dhiman

THE sprawling banyan tree at the confluence of the Cauvery and its tributaries stands alone like a mute witness to the past; shepherds laze about while their cattle graze in the water meadows; priests perform the last rites for the departed souls; tourists focus their cameras to capture the spectacular views of the riverside. The Cauvery itself flows past humming sweet melodies to the sleepy little town of Srirangapatnam.

It only gets a passing reference or a paragraph or two in the glossy brochures; even the tour guides allot only an hour or so to it. Srirangapatnam, unfortunately, does not get the attention it rightly deserves because of the more famous and culturally rich Mysore that is only about 15 km away. You don't have five star hotels here to lure you, nor any glitzy shopping malls to tempt you. Srirangapatnam is not the usual tourist town with pushy tourists guides to bother you and overzealous salesmen trying to palm off their merchandise onto you. It is a quaint little historic town that has so far not attracted builders and property dealers. But perhaps that is precisely the reason why you might think of spending a couple of days here.

Not many know that Srirangapatnam was the capital of Mysore from 1610 to 1799. If we clear the mist of history, we go as far back as the 15th century when it was a small hamlet dedicated to Lord Vishnu, who is also referred to as Sri Ranganatha. Thus the town got its present name — The Port of Lord of the World. In 1510 Hebbar Timmana built a fort whose ruins still form the major feature of the town. This fort stood firm against the French, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Marathas. It was finally conquered by Lord Wellesly of East India Company on April 28, 1799, by slaying Tippu Sultan. There is a small monument at the spot where the body of Tippu was found.

Although it is only a small town, Srirangapatnam has a wealth of historical monuments. The Sriranganatha Temple is believed to be several centuries old. It is said that after the old temple, built in 894 by one of the governors of the Ganga Kings, was destroyed, a Vishnu temple was built in the same place in 1200. This masterpiece of the South Indian architectural school has a five-storey gopuram, and it houses the reclining statue of Lord Vishnu. The 16th century Ganga-dhareswara Temple, and the 17th century Narasimha Temple built by Vijayanagara kings are the other two important temples.

Very close to the Sriranga-natha Temple used to be Lal Bagh, a structure built by Hyder Ali. It was a red building 'with an open balcony or durbar hall overlooking the parade ground'. It was razed to the ground by the British after the fall of Tippu.

Daria Daulat Bagh, or the summer palace of Tippu, is made of wood and it commands an excellent view of the green lawns outside. The construction of the palace was started by Hyder Ali in 1778, and it was completed by his son Tippu in 1789. It is now a museum that has personal affects of Tippu and his family murals depicting the military campaigns of Hyder and Tippu, paintings made by the artists of the East India Company, and a host of other historical memorabilia.

Not far is the Juma Masjid with its tall minarets built in 1784. When Tippu was a little child, a saint predicted that Tippu would be a great ruler one day. The saint asked Tippu to build a mosque if the prophesy was fulfilled. True to his word, Tippu built Masjid-e-ala in 1784. If you climb up one of its minarets you get a panoramic overview of the fort and the rest of the town.

Tippu also built the Gumbaz or the mausoleum which has the graves of Hyder Ali, Fatima begum, and Tippu himself. The walls of the cream coloured Gumbaz are lined with tiger skin. There are also frescoes painted by the soldiers of the East India Company. The grave of the other relatives of Tippu can be seen outside the Gumbaz. Nearby is Masjid-e-Aqsa.

The remains of the dreaded dungeon where Tippu used to imprison British soldiers, and the breach in the wall through which the British entered the fort can also be seen. There is an ongoing controversy re-garding the image of Tippu. His supporters claim that he was a very secular ruler and a true patriot; his detractors on the other hand say that they have enough proof of show that Tippu showed no religious tolerance, although some of his trusted ministers were Hindus.

Just 3 km away from Srirangapatnam is the Ranganthittoo Bird Sanctuary. The sanctuary is a home of herons, egrets, white ibises, open-billed stroks. Boats are available for those wishing to see and photograph the birds nesting and breeding. The bird watching season begins in May and lasts until November.

The Karanataka State Tourism Development Corporation's snug little riverside bungalows are recommended because they are so beautifully sited near a murmuring brook. At 123 km Bangalore is the nearest town with an airport. Having reached Srirangapatnam, it makes sense to combine it with a visit to Somanathapura, Bandipur, Nagarhole, and Mysore.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98oct04/sunday/head2.htm

"I love the landscape rather than photography"

2009-03-08T04:31:00.001-07:00

ALL those who thought black and white photography was dull and uninteresting changed their mind after seeing the work of Mark Lockett at the Department of Fine Arts, Panjab University, sometime back. The breathtaking, monochrome landscapes of the west coast of Ireland were vivid. Mark Lockett, 42, belongs to Shropshire, UK. He is a professional agricultural economist who runs his own dairy farm. The rigours of farm life have not stifled the creative artist in him. In the beginning he tried his hand at painting, but around 1980 he found his métier — landscape photography. In 1990, he had the first place in British Salon of Contemporary Photography. This was followed by Out of the Land, a joint exhibition with calligrapher and letter carver, John Neilson. Mark held his first solo exhibition at Chester City Arts Festival (1996). He was in India with Irene, a friend, at the invitation of the Department of Fine Arts, Panjab University. Mark's exhibition, On the Edge, attracted many viewers when it was held in the city last month. He also screened some of his slides in the seminar room of the Department of Fine Arts. Kuldip Dhiman met him for an exclusive interview, in which Mark talked of his work and life. Excerpts:

Why did you decide to capture the wild land and western shores of Britain, Wales and Ireland on film?

I was inspired by the western reaches of the British Isles, where the land itself is very old, and the weather often harsh and unpredictable. I moved on to photography because I started noticing the changes in the landscape around me. The rapid change in lighting conditions and weather began to interest me and I thought I would try and capture it on film. My photography really started from the love of the landscape rather than the love of the photographic medium. I was never an active member of a photographic society.

Did you attend a course in photography?

No, I have never attended a photographic course in my life. I am totally self taught. I learnt by looking at other work and reading books. I guess I picked information that I really needed, the rest I ignored.

Didn't you have any mentors?

No, nothing like that. I was totally isolated basically. I actually developed my own course. I bought the camera with no real intention of becoming very interested in it. I just thought I will see what comes out and when I saw it I said, oh! these are really good. I must do more. It just developed from there. After about twelve months I became satisfied with the quality of the prints I was getting back. Looking at some of the books I'd bought I noticed black and white work.I thought I would have a go at it myself. I bought a very basic darkroom kit. I was impressed by the results. I thought this was giving me far more scope, and range than what I'd got from the general processing labs. So it developed from there and I became more and more interested in the darkroom side of photography.

A landscape photographer would normally opt for colour, but you chose monochrome. Why is that so?

That's possibly because the way I am. I tend to be somebody who goes against the prevalent trend.At that time it was very unusual, but today black and white is becoming very popular in our country.

Were you influenced by any other photographer?

Yes, by the American photographers,Ansai Adams and Weston. The work of Adams obviously impressed me tremendously as did the quality of the reproduction in the books. I would look at the photographs in the books and wonder how on earth they could be so wonderful.When you look at what is the best, you actually try to reach that stage.

Do you meticulously plan your shoots?

I never plan a trip. If something catches my eye, I take it. If you read magazines or books they will tell you to find your location, study the light, and decide what you are going to take. I am totally unlike that. I will just go for a walk, I will chose a location along with Irene, my friend, who walks with me. And whatever turns up on that walk,I photograph. It is usually at weekends or on holidays, which are often spent in the west coast of Ireland. It is very much a random process I don't have a rigid plan. I know that there is landscape there: what I don't know is a whether the right picture will present itself or not. I know that there are places there that will capture the imagination if the light is right, and if it is not raining. This means driving some distance for a couple of hours. Maybe even a couple of days. When we get there, it could mean walking for one hour or even six hours.At times we have to camp there. My style has very much to do with the way the light affects the landscape.As I mentioned earlier, my reasons for taking landscape photographs is the love of landscape, rather than the love of photography.

You seem to avoid human figures altogether in your landscapes.

Yes, very much so. The only time I include humans is when they are in silhouettes to make shapes. I think it detracts from the beauty of the landscape when one has a recognisable human figure in it.

Unlike most landscape photographers who try to capture beauty it is texture and form that dominate your work.

Yes, I emphasise the shape, the texture, and the form rather than a pretty view. A lot of my work is based on the formation of clouds, the interplay between the sky and the land. I am constantly watching how clouds move, and how the light changes.With black and white this is very obvious. Colour can actually destroy what you are trying to say.

Do you manipulate your images?

It depends on what you mean by 'manipulate' just a little dodging and burning that's all, and of course, sometimes toning. I also sort of dabble with alternative processes. In the exhibition there are a few examples of Gum Bichromate process. This was one of the earliest photographic processes that was very popular in the 1890s.It lay almost forgotten for decades, until its potential received recognition in recent years.

Is there money in such kind of work?

No, I earn my living from farming. Photography is a serious hobby for me. It would be difficult, you would never make a good living from it.

Have you managed to get some photographs here?

Yes, in Delhi I was taking pictures all the time. It is amazing how everywhere looked, there was something different from what I was used to, the colour, the movement, the people, the clothes, I just could not believe it. I would love to take landscape here because it is very different from our own. Certainly, when we get up into the hills of Lahaul Spiti, it's going to be a huge inspiration for me. I have brought plenty of film!

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98nov22/sunday/view.htm

"Best photographers have a real heart for the land"

2009-03-08T04:22:00.001-07:00

SHE has worked with legendary photographers and journalists like Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Larry Burrows, and all those great names in modern journalism. Armed with a degree in English from the Berkeley University, she was all set for an academic career, but destiny had better things in store for Helen Veret. In 1964 she met up with the Editor-in-Chief of the Life magazine, Hugh Moffet. Impressed by Veret's impressive credentials and her vivacious personality, he offered her the job of editorial assistant. More than 30 years on, Veret is still with Life. "You can see, I have been hooked by Life," she says with a broad smile. Now she is Life's picture-editor, operating from a small office in Paris. Her files are full of famous photographs that Life is famous for. Work begins at noon in her Paris office. Her only other colleague is an American journalist. Vivacious, full of life and also an authority on fashion, Helen is a woman with a contagious love for life. Helen Veret was in Chandigarh along with her architect husband and she gave a lecture here at the Alliance Frances. Kuldip Dhiman met her for an exclusive interview. Excerpts:

What exactly do you look for in a photograph?

A good photograph is a good photograph. An original photograph is one that surprises you; makes you ask questions. It is different. A good picture is a picture that you will always remember, that sticks in your mind. For example when you talk about the Vietnam war, the best pictures that come to your mind are those taken by Larry Burrows. There is a really classic picture shot by him that has a wounded black soldier trying to help a white GI, who is nearly dying. This picture is predominantly green. The green colour strongly accentuates death and misery of war. This photograph highlights the sorry plight of two soldiers who in peace time would not even say hello to each other. And here they are in hell trying to help each other. Oh my God! I get goose pimples when I think about it. That is my idea of a great picture. Then we have another one from Larry Burrows where you see a soldier in a helicopter. He is sitting next to the dead body of his best friend. So, monsieur a good photograph is a good photograph- cest tout!

Do you also suggest stories from Paris?

You see, I work part time. I come to the office at noon and look at all the papers to know what is happening around the world. I try to find potential news stories that have some sort of a link with the USA. We cannot suggest a story from Europe that does not have any connection with the USA. For example, our last story was about some homeless people of New York — very poor people. One was a scientist with no job! You see, these people had jobs, but are desperate now. So, what do they do? They decide to build a raft to cross the Atlantic! When we heard about them, we decided to do a story on them. We organised a helicopter and sent a photographer and a journalist. I, of course, did all the legwork — the organising and the coordinating part. That involved making phone calls to New York to check when the photographer was arriving and did he need an assistant or not. It was a six-page story; completely conceptualised in France, of course, with the okay from New York. If we feel fashion is extraordinary this year and there is a new designer who is different, we suggest it to one of the editors in New York, who goes to our managing editor, Isolate Motley, and discusses it with her. If she likes it, we get the okay.

Photographers visit our office all the time. I look at their work, and if they are good, I hire them for some future story. Then, New York, sometimes, asks me to dig out some old pictures — maybe of World War and a wounded soldier, famous generals, stuff like that. You always have to say 'Okay, don't worry, you will have it by tomorrow. They don't like to take a 'no' for an answer. It is a kind of game, and I really love it.

You have worked with some of the great names in photo journalism, haven't you?

Yes. When the circulation was ten million per week, we had a whole list of photographers who were the very best in the world. Cartier Bresson worked for us; so did all the other great names in photography: Robert Doisneau, Larry Burrows, Edward Newton and Harry Benson — the guy who did those marvellous portraits of the Beatles.

Wasn't it the golden age of Life?

Golden age, bien sure, from our point of view. It is terrible to say, but great pictures were there to be taken. We had the Vietnam war, the Biafra, and the six-day war in Israel. We lost one of our very talented young photographers there on the very first day.

When one thinks of Life, it is usually the big black and white images that come to one's mind — those stark and bold images.

Yes, of course. When I think about those great days of Life, it is always black and white. They do publish black and white now, but I am sad to admit, colour has invaded all the magazines... all the magazines. But remember colour is fragile, it fades,whereas a black and white print of Cartier Bresson's shot in 1939 is still magnificent.

From being a premier weekly selling ten million copies, Life stopped publication in 1972. It resumed publication again in 1978. But the magazine that set high standards for journalism, is finding it hard to justify its existence. What ails Life?

In the olden days, Life was full of news. And Life was the best magazine in the world. Then television invaded our drawing rooms, and you know the rest. Nowadays, a reporter risks his life and goes to, let's say, Bosnia — bombs are falling everywhere, he comes back with great pictures to his agency. Unfortunately, it is usually too late. Very few magazines in the West now publish gloomy pictures. All of them are turning into society-magazines. They want to speak about the Princesses, film stars, celebrities, models. On the cover you might see Princess Caroline of Monaco, or you might have poor Lady Di. You know, to have good news pictures accepted, you have to be very lucky these days. That's why news photographers, most of whom are so dedicated to show what is happening in the world, are a disappointed lot now. We at Life try our best to promote good photo journalism. We have a section called the Big Picture.

After having worked with legends like Bresson and Avendon, how does it feel to work with young photographers?

The new photographers are very active. It is difficult to make a comparison. But definitely, Henri Cartier Bresson will remain a historical fact. Why? Because he is a very cultured man, he is such an exceptional character, a very sensitive man. In my opinion, his best years were between 1936 to the end of the great war. He is incomparable. It is not easy to measure up to a genius like him. The young ones are also good, but they are too young. Mind you, Bression celebrated his 90th birthday last August! I must tell you he looks as fresh as a cucumber. You would think he is 65. He doesn't have anything nice to say about contemporary photographers. He does a lot of sketching now. He used to drawings when he was young, and he has gone back to it. He always criticises photography, but I know — since he is a very good friend of mine — that he loves photography.

Has the information explosion affected news journalism?

"Yes. But I am very old-fashioned, I dare say. I am not for all these image transfers that are done over the computers from one country to another. But it is very convenient. I think the job of the picture researcher is going to disappear. Even the job of the picture editor might become redundant. We might have only one picture editor in New York and why not? It's convenient, it's cost-effective, it's quick. But I don't think all this is going to glorify the quality of pictures: not at all. But I dare say, when I see a very good retrospective of a good photographer... oh what a joy to see some really good prints! Or to see great pictures in a book. I always say that I prefer to see a set of pictures in a book. What a joy! I have a theory, I know photographers are going to be very mad at me for saying this, but I believe that photography is not meant to be exhibited. Painting — yes: photography no. There is always a glare on the photographs when they are exhibited. Of course, to be known, you have to exhibit. I always prefer to look at a photograph in a book.

Do you have a say in the layout?

Unfortunately not. We make a selection, send it to New York, where it is again short-listed by the picture editor there. They then discuss the layout with the art director and the editors. The final layout is, most of the time, a surprise for me. I usually say I would not have done it that way.

How does one become a Life photographer?

The simplest thing is to come to us with a story, not different pictures: we are not interested in different pictures. We see how the photographer has treated the story. When a photographer comes to us and say that he/she has pictures from, let's say, India. I ask her for how long she was in India. If she says 24 hours, then I am not interested. You cannot capture the essence of a country in such a short time ... when you just zoom past a country — no. The best photographers are those who know the people, the customs; they have a real heart for the land. If you don't have your heart beating for what you are doing, the work is no good. Everything comes from the heart. Otherwise, you give a modern instamatic camera to a four-year-old girl, and voila, she can take a picture. What really makes a great photograph is — imagination!

This feature was published on January 31, 1998

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1999/99feb07/sunday/view.htm

Untiring Healer of the Mind

2009-03-04T03:07:00.001-08:00

Interview by

Kuldip Dhiman

Dr N. L. Dosajh. — Photo by the writer

While it is normal for most living beings to suffer from some kind of physical ailment, human beings are unique for they suffer from a number of disorders that do not appear to have a physical cause, these are mental disorders. And there are doctors who specialise in treating such disorders. Dr N. L. Dosajh has spent his entire life in the service of those who are tormented by the demons of the mind.

"Mental health is a very serious matter", cautions Dr Dosajh, a highly experienced psychoanalyst, "unfortunately, in our country we do not take it seriously. There is a stigma attached to seeing a psychiatrist. If mental health is neglected, it could lead to serious problems. After a stage, the patient could become a problem to not only to society but also to himself. Professional help should be sought at the earliest"

Although, nudging ninety, Dosajh refuses to call it a day. The main cause of mental ill health, the doctor says, is a drop in the level of consciousness. "When consciousness is at higher levels, an individual is in perfect mental health, but when it drops to lower levels, neurosis is the result, and the lower you go, the more neurotic you become. The major reason for the weakening of consciousness are repression, conflicts, complexes, frustrations and setbacks in life."

To get to the root of the mental disorder, Dosajh interviews the patient as well as the family, and even friends. Often, the repression is so severe that there is a great resistance from the patient to reveal the inner conflicts as most of them are sex-related. Usually the patient is totally unaware of them, and is unable to tell the doctor anything much about the problem. In such cases, various other methods are used to delve into the unconscious of the patient. "I use free association, Rorschach inkblot test, hypnosis and so on. If none of them work, I try to get clues from the patient's dreams. Or I might ask the patient to make up a story, and from the patient's imagination I get hints about the cause of neurosis. It is only after a thorough analysis, I decide on the right technique to be used for a cure which varies from patient to patient, upon the seriousness of the disorder and so on. There are no short-cuts or readymade formulas here."

Using his wide experience, Dosajh devised his own test called the D-Test. "When you undergo a D-Test," explains the doctor, "three sheets of paper with 12 rectangles, are presented to you. Each rectangle has on it a few lines. You are asked to make further additions to the lines and draw any figure that occurs to you. You have about an hour and a half to finish your drawing, and it is not necessary to be an artist to complete this test." Based on the figures the patient makes, Dosajh gets clues to the unconscious cause of their neurosis, and only then he decides on the nature of cure, be it stress-relieving exercises like yoga and meditation, autosuggestion, hypnosis, or in some cases even medication. "But I try to avoid the use of medicines as much as possible. I prefer rejuvenating the life force and the mental energy of the patient." With these improvised techniques, the doctor has cured dozens of patients suffering from schizophrenia, personality disorders, and so on.

The major influence on Dosajh's life is Carl Jung on whose theories he based his own work. Others who inspired him are Sigmund Freud, G. Murphy and the behaviorist, B. F. Skinner. Dosajh realised that Indian tradition offered many effective techniques, and it was worthwhile including them in his therapy. Interaction with Shri Akhand Swami of Gangotri in the late 1930s, and Swami Sivanand in the 1950s further honed his skills. He was also greatly influenced by the teachings of Swami Akhilanand, Geraldine Coster, Shri Aurobindo, Mahesh Yogi, Bloomfield Harold and Kory Robert B. Using the foundations of western psychology and Indian systems, he fused yoga and meditation with psychoanalysis to create his own theory which he calls New Personality Theory.

In his long career, Dosajh was recognised by the professional community in many ways. In 1956, he was sent as a UNESCO Fellow to work at the International Institute of Child Study at Bangkok and was a Guest Professor at the PGI for over 20 years. Despite an illustrious career and a huge volume of published work (15 books and over 50 articles in journals), there are no takers for his new book Science of Mental Healing. "One publisher agreed to print it but said I would have to first shell down two lakh rupees."

All these setbacks are compensated when his former patients call on him and spend some time at his home. Just a few days ago, Sarita whom he cured of severe schizophrenia when she was about 25 bought him a lovely gift. When the doctor refused to take it, she said, "This is a small gesture to thank you for the gift of life you gave me."

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040620/spectrum/main5.htm

God under the microscope

2009-02-23T03:00:00.001-08:00

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett.
Penguin Books.
Pages 447. £3.25.

Review by Kuldip Dhiman

WHEN science started making earthshaking discoveries by challenging ancient dogma, many felt that religion would not survive the rational onslaught for too long. Religion, however, is flourishing even in this modern age of space exploration, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. It seems that there is something about religious belief which modern education and science are unable to shake off.

Religion is supposed to spread love and peace, yet if we turn the pages of history, we find that religion is the cause of many of the wars and atrocities committed on humans by humans. In this age of international religious terrorism, most of us have begun to wonder what religion is, why is it so important for so many believers, why is one religion so intolerant of others, and do we need it after all?

When such questions are tackled by Daniel C. Dennett, who is one of the most influential philosophers of our time, we ought to listen to his analysis carefully. He has written highly acclaimed books like Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Brainstorms, Consciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves. In the present volume, he tries to make an objective analysis of religious phenomena with philosophical and scientific rigour. Making use of the multi-disciplinarian Darwinian approach, he tries to explain the origins of religion, folk religion, group cooperation, ethics, social control and host of others concepts such as consciousness, intentionality, artificial self-replicators, memes. The issues that he deals with are too complex, technical, and varied to be discussed here. The reader ought to have some familiarity with philosophy and science to grasp the depth of the argument.

However, we can briefly say that Dennett's project is to study the all- pervasive phenomenon of religion scientifically. This might sound quite an impossible project because religion and science are seen as contradictory concepts. How can one study religion scientifically? To catch the stick from the other end, how would scientists react if someone tried to study science through religion?

Dennett is too thorough a philosopher to not foresee this objection. What does he mean when he says that religion is a natural phenomenon? Does he mean religion is a natural phenomenon like rain, wind, and lightning? By 'natural' he means that religion is not a supernatural phenomenon, and there are no miracles or magic involved in it. And even if miracles are involved, then the best way to show that to doubters would be to demonstrate it scientifically. Refusing to play by these rules, he points out, only creates the suspicion that one doesn't really believe that religion is supernatural after all.

"Notice that it could be true that God exists," argues Dennett, "that God is indeed the intelligent, conscious, loving creator of us all, and yet still religion itself, as a complex set of phenomena, is a perfectly natural phenomenon."

What is religion, after all? Dennett defines religions as "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is sought". The definition is not exhaustive; his concept of religion is quite constricted, and he himself admits that his idea of religion is largely based on Judeo-Christian tradition. But being an internationally influential philosopher, he should have studied other religious traditions in depth. Modern scientific method requires that no evidence be ignored or glossed over. Dennett does not appear know that there are religions which do not see God as someone sitting up there and controlling the affairs of the world, that there are religions that believe everything that we see is not separate from God, that there are religions that do not talk about God or soul at all, and that there are religions that might appear to be materialistic to us.

Coming back to Dennet's thesis, we might ask if it is possible to understand through a materialist standpoint something that purports to be totally non-materialistic and subjective? Dennett thinks that it is possible, and he feels it is important that religious beliefs that have been taken for granted for thousands of years be questioned thoroughly. Why? Because he believes that it is very important to break the spell of religion to show that we could live a good life even without religion. He is right here. There is a widespread fallacy that religion makes us good human beings, that it gives meaning to life. In fact, most atheists are good people and they do not feel that life is without meaning. All the misery wrought upon the world is not by atheists, but by people who kill, loot, and torture in the name of God.

Dennett has done an excellent and thorough job from a materialist viewpoint, but we must remember this viewpoint has its own limitations. The kind of proof the scientist or materialist philosopher needs cannot be given. But we might ask, if scientific proof is the only kind of proof admissible in a rational inquiry.

Bertrand Russell, an atheist to the core, was once asked what he would say if after his death he found himself confronted with God. He replied that he would say, "God, why did you make the evidence for your existence so insufficient?" Believers on the other hand say that whatever we see around us makes it eminently clear that God exists. Logic is used by both parties to prove the existence and non-existence of God.

The fight continues.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090222/spectrum/book4.htm

Ethical dilemmas in workplace

2009-01-21T07:06:00.000-08:00

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Kuldip Dhiman

Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life
by Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver.
Harvard Business Press.
Pages 240. $24.95.

DO ends justify the means, or is it the other way round? Such questions have kept moral philosophers arguing for centuries. Most of us are deeply influenced by ethical philosophy, but when it comes to real life, we often violate our cherished moral codes saying — everything is fair in love and war. In everyday affairs, we often dismiss minor ethical compromises that we make all the time. We find comfort in thinking that, for all practical purposes, we are within the limits of acceptable moral behaviour.

However, the authors do not accept such excuses. For them, the real world, the world of business and workplace are actual test of our moral standards. According to them, deception, stealing, and harming are most common ethical transgressions people make.

Quite often we do not realise that we are doing something wrong because we have a natural tendency of making compromises and rationalising. But making compromises or rationalising our improper actions is only a way of justifying our misdemeanours.

In a world, where the competition is cut-throat, is it possible to be morally correct all the time? "Yes, it is," the authors say. No doubt we might have to face difficulties, but it is better than resorting to immoral or unethical practices. In the long run, it is honesty that sets you apart; it is honesty that wins trust of your colleagues and customers.

We might say that it is easy to give sermons to others, but Ronald A. Howard, one of the authors, claims to have actually practised what he preaches. He turned down a lucrative defence contract rather than compromise with his moral beliefs.

Considering the fact, that every situation could be tackled through various options, the question arises how does one make the final choice. The authors say that people often make ethical choices reflexively. When caught in a dilemma, especially when we have to make decisions in an instant, we are often guided by certain preset ethical values that guide our actions. In moments of danger, for instance, as we have to act quickly, we do not have the time to consider moral implications of our actions. At such times, we make use of readymade options. A second way we make choices is by rationalising an otherwise-not-so-ethical choice. We think we are reasoning, but we are actually rationalising. What is the difference between reasoning and rationalising? When we reason we analyse the situation and form judgements, and when we rationalise, we try to justify an action which we deep down know is not right.

The authors further talk of prudential, legal, and ethical actions. An action is prudential when it is guided by self-interest such as financial gain, loyalty to others, friendliness, thriftiness. Here we weigh the options and do what is the best possible in a given circumstance. An action is legal if it is done according to the legal system of the land, although it might not be entirely moral. And finally, an action is ethical if it is in accord with our predefined notion of right and wrong. The classification is not all that neat however because illegal actions might be prudential, unethical acts may be prudential, illegal acts may be ethical.

The authors take up these issues in separate chapters, and show us how to deal with ethical dilemmas. Excellent though the book is, its price is rather too high for the Indian reader.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090118/spectrum/book2.htm

The Science of Day After Tomorrow

2008-09-28T06:48:00.001-07:00

Kuldip Dhiman

Physics of the Impossible
by Michio Kaku.
Allen Lane, Penguin Books. Pages 330. £8.

COULD we one day develop weapons that could shatter an entire planet to smithereens? Could we make people and objects invisible? Could we design machines that would generate their own energy? Is it possible to launch spaceships that travel faster than light?

In Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku takes us on a singular scientific journey to find answers to such questions. The main purpose of this exploration, however, is to make science popular. Teaching science is not easy, especially theoretical physics, but the author makes an interesting juxtaposition of science fiction on one hand and hard science on the other to lure the reader into the fascinating world of force fields, gravity, matter, antimatter, subatomic particles, black holes, wormholes, parallel universes, anti-universes.

Michio Kaku, who holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, cites examples from popular science fiction novels and films to make his exposition lively and interesting. He confesses that it was science fiction that inspired him to become a scientist.

Good science fiction writers these days have a competent knowledge of science and natural laws, although they sometimes stretch their imagination to suit their plot. Of course writers like Arthur C. Clarke have shown that scientists could learn a thing or two from fiction.

The writer tells us that some of inventions and gadgets mentioned in sci-fi literature are theoretically possible, while others are not, at least not with the science we know. However, to say something is not possible at all is not very prudent. For instance, the great physicist Lord Kelvin declared in 1899 that radio had no future, heavier-than-air machines would never be possible, and X-rays would prove to be a hoax. All these have actually happened. What was impossible yesterday is commonplace today.

Most of us fantasise about becoming invisible, reading the future, travelling to other galaxies, and going back in time. Examining these fantasies thoroughly, Kaku divides them into three categories: Class I impossibilities are those that are impossible today but as they do not violate the known laws of physics, they might be possible one day. Teleportation, antimatter, psychokinesis, and invisibility come under this category. Time machines, hyperspace travel, travel through wormholes are Class II impossibilities. They will take thousands of years to develop. And Class III impossibilities violate the known laws of physics, so as far as we are concerned they are really impossible. But if they ever materialised, they would change the world beyond our imagination.

At a deeper level, this book is an excellent introduction to the development of scientific theories and concepts. History of science shows that some ideas are born through sheer genius, and there are those that are products of happy accidents. And some ideas begin with a particular individual, but they are eventually developed by a string of others over centuries. There are also cases of near misses. For example, James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the classical electromagnetic theory among other things, might well have come up with the idea of relativity over a hundred years before Albert Einstein. But oddly enough, Maxwell did not realise that his equations allowed for distortions of space-time.

We now move on to the latest in the world of science. Frenzied research in the last two centuries has upturned our conventional scientific wisdom. The Newtonian theory, for instance, does not allow teleportation as objects do not move until a force is applied upon them, and they do not suddenly disappear and appear elsewhere. But this happens all the time in the quantum domain. We might ask if one could use the laws of the quantum theory to create a machine that could teleport people? Surprisingly, the answer is a qualified 'yes', says the author.

The book then focuses on something that has kept theoreticians busy for the past hundred years. In the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein gave us theory of special relativity, and Max Planck advanced his quantum theory. The former theory gives an excellent account of the macroscopic world, and the latter of the microscopic world of atomic particles. The problem is that these theories are incompatible with each other. Since one of the fundamental principles of science is to have one theory to explain all phenomena, physicists have been trying to unify these two theories without much success.

A heightened enthusiasm is seen among physicists with the formulation of the string theory. It just might successfully unify the quantum theory with gravity, but there are five ways in which this could be done. In 1994, Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Paul Townsend of Cambridge University speculated that all five string theories were in fact the same theory, but only if we add an 11th dimension. From the vantage point of the 11th dimension, all five different theories collapse into one. And the bewildered scientists are back to square one.

Making science as interesting as fiction, Michio Kaku's fascinating book is sure to inspire many youngsters to take up science, just as he was in his childhood by reading science fiction.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080928/spectrum/book5.htm

The Man Who Came Back

2008-09-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

A short story by Kuldip Dhiman

First published in October 1999 in All Hallows, The Journal of The Ghost Story Society, British Columbia, Canada.

The man, who had been in a coma for more than two months, showed some signs of movement. He opened his eyes slowly. In the dark of the night all he heard was the harsh sound of his own breath. And there were bells faintly jingling somewhere far away. Soon the unbearable cacophony of city traffic began to pound his ears. Presently he heard the sound of screeching tyres, followed by a loud crash. Then there was silence for a very long time.

As he lay there, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, he heard a faint, disembodied voice. What was it? Someone was calling him. Yes, it was a familiar voice. He must go; he really must-but where. ..and how?

'Oum Kaali ...Mahakaali ...Oum Kaali ...Mahakaali ...Hey Shambhu ...Lord of the gods, Lord of the Himalayas, serpents, bhootas ...ganas ...give us your power. ..Oum Kaali. ..send us your messenger. . .'

Divya Beliappa, the dusky woman with the husky voice, was invoking Lord Shiva, the destroyer, and the goddess Mahakaali, the force, the energy behind the universe. The others present in the room watched Divya with bated breath as she chanted her mantras. Suddenly, her eyes became so intense that they could have frozen any moving object. Moments later her entire body began to quake violently, and with her left hand she scrawled in the Tamil language the letters corresponding to the English P, R, and A on the notepad she held. 'Oum Mahakaali ...Yes, who are you? Tell us your name. Go ahead. ..go ahead. .. why have you stopped?' As she said this, Divya began to quake even more violently, and then collapsed. Somesh, her husband, quickly sprinkled some cold water on her face. A few moments later Divya opened her eyes. All energy seemed to have drained from her body.

Dr Nalini Krishnamurthy turned her video camera off. Divya looked at her and the other friends in the room apologetically. 'I'm sorry, it doesn't seem to work today. We might try again a little later. Let's go out and sit by the pool, shall we?' She was quickly regaining her composure and becoming her usual cheerful self.

While Divya went to join her other friends, one of the guests approached Dr Krishnamurthy. 'Nalini, would you mind if I asked you something?' 'Go ahead,' the doctor smiled, running her fingers through her long hair.

'Do you really believe in all this bullshit?'

The doctor shrugged her shoulders, 'Well, I don't know. I'm as curious as you are.'

'But you've devoted all your life to parapsychology. Have you ever seen a yourself?'

'No, but there are hundreds of cases around the world. ..,

'Yes; and it's always second-hand information. I have yet to come across a person who has seen a ghost himself. I believe this possession business is nothing but self-hypnosis. And our Divya uses a strange mixture of tantra, the occult, and clairvoyance. It's all rubbish.',"

'You could be right. Let's join the others.' .

They were nine of them, five women and four men, all classmates; and of course their spouses and children had come along too. For the past ten years they had been meeting at Divya and Somesh's lavish bungalow overlooking the Jayamahal Park. The 261h of April had a nostalgic significance, for it was on that day that the class of 1975 had scattered like dry leaves, never to be together again. But against all the odds these nine had somehow managed to keep in touch. No one knew what had happened to most of the others. It is a big world. As they sat by the pool reminiscing about old times, Divya Beliappa heard her ten-year-old Son's voice. 'Maa, there is someone at the door.' 'Who is it putta?' she asked.

'I don't know,' replied the boy, 'but he says he wants to see Divya Iyengar.'

'What?' She arched her eyebrows. 'Who is this who still remembers me by my maiden name? I have forgotten it myself.' She laughed softly to herself. Then she saw the man who had followed her son to the pool.

Everyone stared at the bearded intruder. He was a bit flabby, and there was something odd about his manner, something unnatural. He had a forlorn look, so hard to describe. He waited for their reaction for some time and then said, 'Why are you looking at me like that? Haven't you seen a human before?' He wore an amused smile. Then he directed his gaze towards Divya. 'You'd be Kishmish?'

Divya was shocked, for Kishmish had been her nickname in school. She took a good long look at the man but failed to recognise him. The stranger was clearly disappointed. 'So you guys have forgotten me, eh?' There was a hint of sadness in his tone. He came forward and proffered his hand. Still they showed no sign of recollection, merely looking at one another and then at the stranger. The intruder walked towards Somesh. 'Somu yaar, at least you should remember me. We were the worst of enemies in school,' he laughed. 'No wonder you never invite me to any of your reunions.'

Somesh drew a blank and looked towards Divya for help. ' All right, we admit that we can't place you,' said Divya. 'Now will you please tell us who you are?'

'Take three guesses! ...Okay, I'll give you a hint. When did you finish school?'

'1975,' Divya replied.

'Well, I left in November 1970. Dad got transferred to Ambala Cantt.'

'Oh, my God!' she exclaimed. 'That's ages back!'

He looked disappointed. 'Why do people only remember the friends from their last year in school? Why do they forget the ones who left earlier?'

They looked at him, his long beard, his drooping eyes, his loose skin; trying to recognise the waxen face. Divya, who was rather proud of her photographic memory, tried hard to place the visitor. November 1970; that meant she was in class seven. She tried to picture her classroom in her mind's eye. An image of the old school building appeared. She heard the sound of children laughing, screaming, shouting, fighting. Little girls in white tops and navy-blue skirts, and boys in white shirts and navy-blue shorts. She saw the P .T .Master flaunting his cane; the class teacher Lata Deshpande writing something on the blackboard, the science teacher rushing to the teachers' room with a pile of notebooks; the Drawing Master joking with the students; the vendors selling jaamallahabad, kalleykai, puttani, and time pass outside the school gate. She tried to focus on the hazy faces. There was Kalpana Rana, her closest friend at the time. Another face. Who was it? What was her name?

Oh! We called her Billy, because she was cat-eyed. Another face, another nickname. A boy this time. They used to call him Langur, the one who broke his arm once. Another nameless face emerged, and then another. ..but where was the boy standing in front of her as a bearded man now? She tried hard, but her memory failed her.

'Can't remember? I'm not surprised,' the mystery-man said, 'Okay, do you remember the guy who always had squirrels in his bag?'

Divya jumped with surprise. 'Oh, shit! That's you! Ummm ...wait, I'll remember now.' She looked at the others for help. 'Yaar, now I remember. ..what was the name yaar? We used to call you. ..' She remembered the face of a porcupine-haired boy, who tamed, of all the things, squirrels. 'Got it! ' she cried, 'we used to call you Porky. Right?'

'So, Kishmish, you only remember me as Porky?'

'Come on; all of a sudden you return from the grave and expect us to remember you after I so many years? It's your fault, you never kept in touch.'

'Yeah, that's true, but it's not easy, you see,' he said ruefully. 'At times I tried, but I couldn't . . .'

'Don't make silly excuses,' Somesh said, and made a drink for the forgotten man. Divya stood close by, gazing at the sky. 'Got it!' she announced in triumph. 'Oh! got it. Prabir Dutta, right?' The man smiled. 'Oh, Prabir! It's been so long.' As Prabir Dutta joined the others and exchanged gossip, something bothered Divya.

Something was wrong somewhere. This man, Prabir Dutta; something was not right about him. She did remember the porcupine-haired boy-the squirrels in his bag, how he used to scare the girls with them-but the man before her looked nothing like him. Faces change over the years, sometimes beyond recognition, but still something remains: a familiar way of smiling, some odd gesture, something. Can one really change so completely? He must be an impostor. But how did he know so much? It was amazing. As Prabir reminisced about his school days, Divya suddenly interrupted. 'Do you remember once when it was the physics exam, and you were caught cheating? And the Princi, S. N. Thakur, thrashed you in front of everyone?' 'S. N. Thakur who?' He was a bit annoyed. 'When I was at school, the Princi was K. D. Dwivedi, and just before I left, V. V. Srikantaiah had taken over.' He gave her a stern look.

'Hey! are you trying to test me? I should have brought my passport ...'

He put his hand in his coat-pocket and, much to their surprise, produced a squirrel. Some of the children came running to look at it. 'Want to play with it, eh?' he asked. He placed the squirrel on a boy's palm and said, 'Don't be afraid, it won't hurt you.' The children took the squirrel to the pool-side and began to play with it.

Divya felt very sorry for him. What right had they to suspect him? If he said he was Prabir, then he must be.

'Sorry yaar, it's just that you look nothing like the boy we knew. Tell us about yourself.'

'1 will. But let me know about you guys first.'

'Shall I start?' Divya looked around at the others with a smile, then turned to Prabir.

'Well, after school I did my post graduation in History. And as you can see, I married Mr Somesh Beliappa.' She coughed artificially and continued. '1 have a son; there he is. Much to the disappointment of my well-wishers, I never took up a job. I'm not the bright and ambitious Divya Iyengar you knew.'

Prabir looked at Somesh. 'Lucky bastard, marrying your childhood sweetheart! But Divya lyengar sounds better than Divya Beliappa.'

Somesh smiled in response. ' And Divya Dutta would have sounded even worse.'

'You haven't changed,' Prabir laughed; and the gossip session was on. They all related their adventures or misadventures after leaving school, and updated Prabir on others who weren't present. 'You remember Dinesh Kulkarni? Such an idiot in school; now he's the G.M. of Escorts. Shrimati Rao is in Singapore. And you remember T.K. Ananthamurthy, the genius who always got ninety-nine per cent marks, and who we all thought would become a research scholar? Well, he went astray, became a drug addict. This one eloped with his friend's wife, this one married his secretary. That ugly duckling Yamini Ganapa hy-she won the Miss India title last year. Can you believe it? And that lanky guy; what was his name. .. Bhaskar Shetty ...what happened to him. ..,'

'He died in a road accident in Kenya in 1989,' said Prabir. And where is Razia Khan these days?'

'She committed suicide in 1985, because her in-laws troubled her.' It was Prabir again. 'You seem to be reading the obituaries regularly,' laughed Somesh. 'Come on; tell us about yourself. , 'What do you want to know?' He gave a wan smile and looked around. 'Nothing much happened. Dad got transferred from Bangalore to Ambala. Life then changed totally. , 'What happened?'

'Oh! that's a long story. I'm not supposed to disclose the details about my past. In fact, I'm not supposed to be here.'

'Now, don't tell us that you're The Spy Who Came in From the Cold!' joked Srinivas Bhatt, one of the guests.

'You said it. What's the time?' he asked. 'The guys up there must be looking for me.'

'The guys behind the Iron Curtain, you mean?' Somesh quipped.

'It's a lot more impenetrable than that. You see, I'm really not supposed to be here.'

While the others were engaged in catching up with old times, Nalini began to walk towards the swimming pool where the children were playing. She panned her camera across the scene, and zoomed in on a small girl by the water's edge. Suddenly the child lost her balance and fell into the pool. Nalini dropped her camera and ran towards the pool. On hearing the screams of the little girl the others also charged towards the pool; but before anyone could do anything, Prabir dove in and scooped up the frightened child.

The girl's parents thanked Prabir profusely. Somesh waited until the excitement was over, then said, 'Prabir, come with me. You need to change your clothes. Mine will fit you fine.' Prabir stood for a moment and looked at the children, then at his friends. 'The water is so deep and cold, ' he murmured to himself.

'Not really,' Divya reassured him, 'it's no more than six feet.'

'Water can be very dangerous. And then there are the weeds. ..'

Somesh glanced at his wife, then touched Prabir's arm and motioned towards the house. The two men left, and the group remaining by the pool fell into small talk. A few minutes later Somesh returned, looking flustered and worried.

'What's the matter? It looks like you've seen a ghost!' Divya joked.

'Perhaps I have.' Somesh was not smiling. 'I got Prabir a change of clothes and showed him to the bathroom. He seemed to be taking an awfully long time, so finally I pushed open the door, to see if he was okay; and I found the bathroom empty!'

' You must be joking, ' said Divya.

'Not at all; come with me. ,

A flurry of excitement went round, and everyone went into the house to have a look. The bathroom window was open, and it was large enough for a man to escape through. It made no sense to them.

'I'm sure that guy was an impostor,' Somesh said.

'I doubt it,' interrupted Sarabjeet Singh. 'He knew too much about us. ..about our past.

No one could have told him about the little childhood episodes, the nicknames. ..'

'Hey, look here!' Nalini Krishnamurthy drew their attention to the notepad that Divya had been using earlier in the evening. Everyone turned their eyes to the letters scrawled on it.

P_R_A . . .

'Prabir!?' they all gasped in unison.

*******

'Prabir Dutta?' S.K. Raju, the Drawing Master, wrung his hands. 'Let me think. Which batch would he have been in?'

'He was in our batch, sir, but he left the school in 1969 or 1970,' said Divya.

'That's a long time back! Can you describe him?'

Divya described what she remembered of Prabir Dutta. Mr Raju had to tax his memory, but he finally remembered.

'Oh! Got it!' he exclaimed. 'Isn't he the one who always had squirrels in his schoolbag, and was forever playing truant? Oh, the rogue. ..that bloody chotley fellow splashed ink on some of my paintings because I had to beat him once. Aiyyo, such beautiful paintings, from my college days. Where is he now, I wonder? And why are you asking about him?' Divya told him about the mysterious visit of the man calling himself Prabir Dutta. Mr Raju was quite intrigued. 'Okay, we'll trace that chotley fellow. Let's go and dig up the school records first. , With the help of Chandre Gowda, the Head Clerk, they unearthed the dusty old records.

After a long search, they finally found what they had been looking for: an old brown file with the title 'Class VII B (1970)'. Divya held the file in her hand, and trembled with nervousness, as though her childhood was about to be re-enacted. She finally mustered up her courage and opened the file.

On the first page, the names of all the students were written in ink that was now fading. Zenobia Postwala ...Sadhana Bari ...S. Tharini ...Neena Joshi ...Divya's heart beat

uncontrollably. She had not seen most of them for years, forgotten their names, in fact never spared them a thought. Where were they now? Who knew? Happy, unhappy, successful, unsuccessful, married, divorced? She wished there was some way to make contact, even if it was only to say hi.

She read further. Srikumari Pillai ...Lynn Alvares ...Rajini Desikan ...Then her heartbeat almost stopped. Yes, there it was, large and clear: Prabir Dutta. She turned to the corresponding page. His record was there, and at the end was his permanent address.

********

The old woman in the typical middle-class home opened her door to find a man and a woman outside.

'Namaskara,' the man said, 'I am Somesh, and this is my wife Divya. We are very old friends of Prabir's. You must be his mother. Is he at home?' 'Do come in.'

They were shown into the house. After they were seated, the woman asked, 'So you want to see Prabir?'

'Yes,' Divya said. 'We were together at school, you see.'

'How come you remembered him after so many years?'

They looked at each other in silence. Then Divya said. 'Well, we lost touch, actually. Three days back we had a get-together, several of us who were at school together, and then ...'

She repeated the entire story .The old woman sat in her chair as if frozen.

'It can't be. It simply can't be. He could not have come.'

'How do you mean? We saw him with our own eyes!'

'Don't you people know?' The old woman was silent as Divya and Somesh looked at each other, puzzled. Finally she said quietly, 'Prabir died in 1971.' 'Don't say that!' cried Divya.

'I am his mother; I ought to know,' the woman replied, with sadness in her voice. 'We had to leave Bangalore as my husband got transferred to Ambala. You know how It is in the Air Force. Prabir joined the Central School there and was soon back to his old ways. One day he played truant as usual, and with some of his friends went to a nearby lake for a swim. .. he. ..he never came back.' Her eyes became moist and her voice choked a little. 'The lake was full of weeds.. ..' She looked at the framed photograph of Prabir that was hanging on the wall, and then at Somesh. 'Had he lived, he would have been your age.' 'But who was the man who came to our party? How did he know so much about our childhood?' asked Divya. ..

'I don't know,' the woman said. 'I don't know.'

*******

Next morning Divya woke up earlier than usual. After making her tea she lazily spread out the newspaper. She scanned the headlines and turned the page, then glanced over some of the advertisements. She was about to go to the next page when a small boxed notice caught her eye. It was an obituary, and the photograph was familiar. She nudged her husband. 'Hey, wake up. Look what we have here.'

When Somesh saw the photograph his heart grew cold. 'It's Prabir! What is going on?' The message read; In Fond Memory of Madhu Shah who left us on 28^th April. 1994.

Grieving wife, children, and parents. ' The address given below was familiar: just two streets away, behind the Gulabi Girls High School. Somesh and Divya were there within the hour.

They were met by the father of the dead man. After listening to their story the old man said, '1 don't know what to make of it myself.' He sank in his chair and lit a cigarette. 'You see,' he said, 'after a serious car accident he was involved in, my son was in a coma for two months. The doctors had given up all hope. But now, after hearing your story, I do remember that something strange happened on the 26^th. We checked everything in Madhu's room and retired early to bed that night. I used to get up in the middle of the night to check if everything was okay. That night, to my horror, I found him missing. He had just vanished.

'We searched each and every room of our house, the attic, the basement, the garage, the servants' quarters, the grounds' ...Some time had gone by. We were about to phone the police and the hospital when my daughter-in-Iaw announced that Madhu was back. I rushed to his room. Madhu was lying on his bed, unconscious. ..as if nothing had happened. ' The old man looked at Divya and Somesh. '1 just don't know what to make of it.'

'Oum Kaali ...Mahakaali ...Oum Kaali ...Mahakaali ...Hey Shambhu ...Lord of the gods, the Lord of the Himalayas, serpents, bhootas ...ganas ...give us your power. ..

'Oum Kaali ...send us your messenger. ..,'

Dr Nalini Krishnamurthy was ready with her video camera. Divya tried once again. 'Oum Kaali ...Mahakaali ...who are you?' her voice rang out. After a while she wrote in Tamil the letters corresponding to P-R-A-B ...

Somesh, who was nearby, could not control himself. 'Hello, Prabir! How are you?'

F-I-N-E

'Thank you for the visit last week. But why did you remember us after so many years?'

F-E-L-T L-I-K-E S-E-E-I-N-G Y-O-U A-G-A-I-N

'Why did you come as Madhu Shah?' I

T-H-A-T W-A-S T-H-E O-N-L-Y W-A-Y

Are you happy over there?'

Y-E-S Q-U-I-T-E

Dr Krishnamurthy pushed a paper in front of Somesh, and he read out the written on it.

'Tell us how is it over there?'

There was no response. .?

'Prabir, tell us how is life over there?'

Dr Krishnamurthy gave him another paper with a question on it. 'What happens after death?' Somesh read. There was no response.

'Porky, are you there?' Somesh said, 'What happens after death? Hello! Porky, please tell us. ..Porky, you. ..'

There was silence for a long time. Then Divya's trance broke and she collapsed. Somesh fetched her a glass of water, and while she recovered, he turned to Dr Krishnamurthy. 'Nalini, what do you make of it all?'

'That's a difficult question to answer.'

'Still, you must have some sort of theory.'

Nalini shrugged. 'Hundreds of cases are being investigated, but we're still in the dark. All I can say is that Prabir, for some reason, felt like getting in touch with us. Remember, he was secretly in love with Divya. Madhu Shah was in a coma, which left him in a state very close to death. We don't know what happens to the soul of a person who is in a coma. Perhaps the soul leaves the body temporarily, and then interacts with departed souls. I think Madhu Shah acted as a conduit. ' She laughed. 'Or perhaps Prabir is still playing truant over there. Old habits. ..'

As Dr Krishnamurthy explained her hypothesis, Divya opened the windows to let in some fresh air. She saw the beautiful gulmohar tree that had stood in her garden for years. There was movement in the red flowers and green leaves of a branch near the window.

A lone squirrel was playing in the branches.

The End

The Sound of Death

2008-09-22T05:00:00.001-07:00

By Kuldip Dhiman

First published in June 1997 in All Hallows, The Journal of The Ghost Story Society, British Columbia, Canada.

Based on the private papers of Donald Anderson, M.D. (1866-1936)

Susan was afraid; terribly afraid. It must have been well past midnight when she entered the study and looked about nervously. I left the novel that I had been reading by the fire, and waited for her to say something. No words came.

'Is anything the matter, dear?' I held out my arms to her. We moved closer to the fire, and I noticed that she was trembling with fear.

'Listen,' she said, 'listen very carefully. Do you hear that? Someone is moaning in pain.'

Did anyone have to remind me of those soft moans and groans? I had been living with them for more than a year; but how does one explain that to a young bride who has just arrived in India from Liverpool?

'You have had a very tiring journey, dear. There is no one here.' I poured her a glass of brandy, and tried to humour her.

'What are those sounds? I have searched the entire house and the clinic, and I am sure there is no one about. , 'My dear, it's rather late. Let's go to bed. It can wait till the morning.' 'No, it can't.' She was determined. 'With those terrible sounds echoing everywhere, how can you expect anyone to sleep?'

She was right. It was only her third night here, and already she had begun to be disturbed by the sounds. I held her hand and drew her close to me. As she trembled in my arms, I decided to tell her the dreadful truth.

'Susan,' I began, 'in spite of being a man of science and a qualified doctor of medicine, I have come to believe in things which I would have dismissed as fraud only a few years ago. During my training at Bart's, if someone had told me that there are men who drink sulphuric acid as if it were a cup of hot tea; that there are men who bury themselves in sand for days and emerge alive; that there are men who walk barefoot on burning cinders; that there are men whose bodies do not age, I would have laughed. In this modern age of science, when man is unravelling the mysteries of nature, how could an educated English doctor be expected to believe in such things? It was not long, however, before I changed my mind.

'In the winter of 1892, I found myself in the snow-covered hills of Simla. I had accepted the invitation of Major Edward Rennick of the 1^st Brigade of the Bengal Horse Artillery. I soon fell in love with the place and, at the major's encouragement, I set up a modest practice on the Mall. There were very few doctors in Simla then, and my arrival was eagerly welcomed.

'Things went on quite well, and my practice flourished. However, it was not long before , I was drawn towards things that my scientific training at Bart's had not prepared me for. Often I went by horseback to see patients in far-flung places and isolated villages, and soon I had learned a smattering of Hindi and the local dialect and befriended the simple hill people, who I found warm-hearted and friendly. Major Rennick shared my interest in the mysterious arts and the customs and traditions of India, and in our spare time we often It ventured into remote villages and met many strange yogis and holy men.

'One fine summer afternoon a runner, Biku Lall, brought a letter from the Major. I opened the note, which read:

Dear Donald,

Would you like to witness something truly extraordinary? Come without at'

moment's delay. Your presence is of vital importance.

'I thanked Biku Lall, and in about an hour was at Major Rennick's magnificent bungalow near the Loreto Convent. The sun was about to disappear behind the mountains when I knocked at the door, which was opened by a manservant, who salaamed me before showing me into the Major's study. .

'Upon seeing me, Major Rennick motioned me to remain silent. In the golden light of the setting sun, which filtered through the windows, I saw a man lying on the floor as if he were dead. The Major tip-toed towards me and led me to another room.

' "What's happening?" I asked in some astonishment.

' "Take a seat." The Majo.r motioned me to a chair, offered me a cigar, then lit one himself and drew on it. "You will soon witness, if you are fortunate, a very singular feat..That man in the study is a highly experienced yogi. I met him last month when I was on a temporary duty at Kinnaur. I had the good fortune to be able to converse with him for some days, and I must tell you that I was greatly impressed by his wisdom. If he could learn English and travel to London, by love! he would draw packed houses."

"But what on earth is he doing lying on the floor?" I asked-

' "He is performing the Shavasana, which translated literally means the Corpse-pose. It is one of the best poses for relaxation." Major Rennick bent forward and added in a whisper. "In my company you have seen many yogis who can hold their breath for hours. But do you know what the man in my study is trying to do?"

'I shook my head,'

' "He is trying to stop his heartbeat."

'My own heart went cold. "What!" I cried. "Why, that's impossible. Surely you can't be serious. He will die!"

'"We shall see," said the Major. "Let us go back to the study."

'Once there, Major Rennick told me that we were to check his guest's pulse every half an hour. As the yogi lay on the floor, I observed that he was a tall man with the perfect physique of an athlete. His face was truly majestic, and his hair jet black, although he did not have the customary beard that most Indian yogis and saints have. I put him at about thirty or thirty-five, and said as much to the Major.

' "He is sixty-eight," he corrected me.

' "Sixty-eight-eight!" I exclaimed. "Good heavens!"

'We both prepared to keep watch on the yogi for some time, but we were to be

disappointed that day, for before long we saw him begin to move. Then he got up and, upon seeing us, spoke in broken Hindi so that we could understand him.

' "Aaj ka din theek nahin ...I am sorry, I am sorry to disappoint you today. Let us wait until tomorrow."

'I was introduced to the yogi, whose name was Hridaynaut Bhardwaj, and he smiled and set me at my ease in an instant. Realising that we felt as if we had been deprived 50 I of some great~ experience, he said, "What I tried to do today is extremely dangerous. There are only two or three yogis in the whole of India who can stop their heartbeat. It requires great training and experience. I am merely a novice in this matter. Main to ab bhi bachcha hoon."

'"How long have you been practising yoga?" I asked.

'"Not very long-about forty years, maybe fifty-I can hardly remember." Without noticing my expression of amazement, he continued, "You see, my Guru strictly forbade me to demonstrate such skills. Demonstrating yogic powers merely to impress others hampers a yogi's spiritual quest. It was only because Major ii has been asking me to show him something spectacular that I agreed. As I did not succeed today, I shall try tomorrow at the same time."

'Later, when we were at dinner, I said, "Hridaynauth, may I suggest something?"

'The man nodded.

' "Why don't you come and perform at my clinic? As I am a doctor, your amazing feat will have more credibility if you perform it at my place of work." 'The yogi smiled faintly, and said in his usual calm way, "I do not have to prove anything to your scientific fraternity. We are not street magicians or conjurers."

' "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way," said I, and explained to him what I had meant. In the end, however, I was successful in convincing Hridaynaut and Major Rennick that the next session should be held at my clinic.

'Next evening at the appointed hour we were ready. I had selected a comfortable chamber on the top floor for the experiment. Hridaynaut Bhardwaj had had an early meal and seemed to be ready. He sat on the floor cross legged, and said, "Dekhiye sahib, you must realise that we are meddling in Some very dangerous business. Please listen to me very carefully." We moved a little closer to him.

' "Although I have mastered yoga to a great extent, I have still not perfected the art of stopping my heartbeat fully. You are aware of my unsuccessful attempt last evening. There are times when I stop my heartbeat at the first attempt, while at other times it takes longer.

What is alarming is that at times I fail to revive my heartbeat when I want to. It revives sooner, or later, on its own. Now, listen to me." He looked at me with his intense eyes. "If I succeed now, I may be in that state for twenty-four hours. For all practical purposes, I will be dead. But as I have just said, sometimes I find it difficult to revive my heartbeat, and in that case it may take longer. Now, this is very important, Doctor. No matter how long it takes you will do nothing to revive me. You will not try any of your medical trickery, because that could be fatal to me. Do you promise me that?"

"I promise," said I.

'"In that case, please leave me alone in this room. Come back after an hour and check my pulse. And remember," he warned again, "no matter how long it takes, you must do nothing. ..absolutely nothing."

'The Major and I waited anxiously in the clinic below. An hour later, when I checked the pulse of the man lying on the floor, I broke out in a cold sweat. There was no pulse. I placed my hand on the left side of his chest, and there was no indication of a heartbeat. I could not believe it. The man before me was dead. I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and looked at Major Rennick.

' "What do we do now?"

' "Don't be too excitable, my dear fellow. We must wait until tomorrow evening."

'I asked the Major to stay, for I was too unnerved to spend the night alone with that body in my clinic. We were awake the whole night, and every moment weighed heavily on my conscience. Major Rennick tried to put up a very brave front, but I knew that he was shaken by the experience. Morning brought little relief, and for the whole day we were on tenterhooks. Finally the evening drew in, and we waited nervously beside the body of the yogi. To our horror, nothing happened.

'I checked the yogi's pulse again and again. With every passing hour our anxiety grew, and as morning drew on, with no sign of the yogi waking, I turned to the Major in some panic-, "Shouldn't we do something?"

' "Have you forgotten your promise?" the Major reminded me.

' "No, of course not. But we cannot leave him like this."

' "There is nothing we can do but wait patiently. He will be fine-sooner or later." , Alas, the Major was wrong. Days went by, but nothing happened. I would check Hridaynaut's heartbeat several times each day, only to be met with disappointment. 'Two weeks passed, but the body, although cold, was not decaying. Surprisingly, Hridaynaut's hair, beard, and nails did not grow. This puzzled me a great deal, but it also gave me some hope. It was clear to me that he was neither in a coma, nor was he j dead. ~ , As the days passed,- my anxiety grew. Major Rennick kept the authorities informed i throughout, and there was an inquiry, which concluded that there had been no foul play of any sort. It was agreed that it was best to keep Hridaynaut at my clinic till further notice.

'1 wrote a letter to The Revd H. S. Olcott, who had co-founded the Theosophical Society with Mme Blavatsky at Adyar, near Madras. Unfortunately, Olcott did not reply; he was probably too busy with the Society's activities following the death of Mme Blavatsky. I also wrote to the Society for Psychical Research in London for help, but no assistance came. They probably took me for a madman.

'Seven months later Major Rennick was transferred to Cabul, and I was left alone with Hridaynaut Bhardwaj. It had been almost a year since that fateful encounter with the yogi.

'By now I had become more or less used to the unnerving situation. I had begun to take my; practice seriously once again, and things might have continued in this way for Heaven knows how long.

'One evening I was invited by my neighbour Mr McKeough, a member of the Simla Amateur Dramatic Club, to the premiere of The Talisman at the Gaiety Theatre. The play was rather poorly presented, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless, and was in a cheerful frame of mind as I made my way back towards my house.

' As I approached the building, however, I was shocked to see that the top floor of the building was on fire. Fires are common in Simla, as most of the houses are made of wood. The firemen battled with the flames and brought the situation under control, but not before most of the top floor had been gutted.

'When the realisation came my head was in a whirl. I ran to the room where Hridaynaut lay. Amidst the smoke I saw the charred body of the yogi. Words cannot possibly describe how I felt that night. 'The next day I informed the authorities what had happened. Their decision was unanimous. The man should be cremated without further delay, and the order was carried out immediately.

'As I tossed and turned in my bed that night, I realised that the matter was far from over.

Some time after falling into a fitful sleep, I woke with a start. I heard faint moans. Someone was breathing very heavily, and it did not take me long to realise who it was. 'I will never forget that night. It was the longest of my life. With Major Rennick gone, I was left helpless. Since then I have lived here with the sound of death. ..alone. .., Susan held me close and stroked my hair.

'My darling, it must have been dreadful for you.' .

'In a way, and especially at first; but I have come to the conclusion that the man means no harm to me. And I have learned to live with the sounds. They are so soft that after a time, you do not hear them; like the ticking of a clock.

'Did you not consider living somewhere else?'

'I did, but the sounds followed me everywhere, even to Dorset. For a while I stayed with Major Rennick, but it made no difference. I wonder why you have not heard them until now; perhaps they were too faint. They grow strongest here. I did not tell you about them because I didn't want to frighten you. And I could not bear the thought of losing you. I am so terribly sorry ...' .

'It's all right.' She soothed me, as one would a nervous child. 'I don't love you any the less. Come, let's go to bed.

Two months later, Susan gave me the good news that she was expecting a child. I was overjoyed; but as the day approached we noticed that the moans in the room were becoming louder. Earlier we could put them aside, but now they were too loud to be ignored easily.

And on the final day they became unbearable. I was alarmed. Would the baby come to some harm? My nerves were in shreds. I sent for a nurse from the Ripon Hospital. In the middle of the night, as my wife writhed in pain and her cries grew louder, I could clearly hear the other sounds which rang out through the house. The nurse heard them too, and almost fled, but I somehow persuaded her to stay.

Later in the night, when I heard the first cries of our baby, I thought my ears were going to explode. The two sets of cries echoed in the hall, and Time seemed to have come to a halt. Then, in an instant, everything went silent.

I went in to see Susan, who was exhausted but otherwise all right. I was also introduced to the baby, whom the nurse was holding.

'Congratulations, doctor,' she beamed, 'it's a boy!' '.

Indeed it was; the healthiest baby I had ever seen. I could have jumped for joy, but instead kissed Susan. There were tears of joy in both our eyes. Then I realised something. I motioned Susan and the nurse to be silent for a moment.

'Susan, listen,' said I, 'listen carefully.'

We heard nothing. There was silence everywhere.

Silence.

THE END.

Iris Murdoch: Writer and Philosopher

2008-09-07T10:20:00.001-07:00

By Kuldip Dhiman

A tribute to Iris Murdoch, one of the leading philosophers and writers of the second half of the present century, who died on February 8, 1999, in Oxford. As well as writing books on philosophy, she wrote 26 highly acclaimed novels. She won the Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, The Sea in 1978.

IN the male dominated world of philosophy, Iris Murdoch carved out a niche for herself. She was a pioneer of existentialist thought in Britain at a time when analytic and linguistic philosophy were in vogue in British universities.

Born on July 15, 1919, in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, Dame Iris Murdoch spent her early childhood in London where she attended the Froebel Educational Institute. Later she went to Badminton School, Bristol. From 1938 to 1942 she studied Classical Mods and Greats at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked for the British Treasury until 1944, and then for two years as administrative officer with the United Nations Rehabilitation Administration; a job that took her to Belgium and Austria. She held the Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge for a year, and she returned to Oxford in 1948 as fellow of St. Anne's College. She would remain there as Fellow and Tutor in philosophy until 1963.

Her first published work was Sartre — Romantic Rationalist which appeared in 1953. Quite early she realised the possibilities of using fiction in order to put forward her views. She believed that the message was more likely to reach the masses that way.

"The novelist proper is, in his way, a sort of phenomenologist. He has always implicitly understood what the philosopher has grasped less clearly: that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once for all."

Murdoch's first novel Under the Net appeared in 1954, followed by The Flight from the Enchanter in 1955. Her other major novels are The Sandcastle, The Bell, An Unofficial Rose, The Unicorn. She won the Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel The Black Prince (1973). Her novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine fetched her the Whitbread Prize in 1974, and she won the coveted Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea. Until she got afflicted with the Alzheimer's disease five years ago, she turned out, on an average, one book a year.

Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell is about the trials and misadventures of an eccentric religious community in Gloucester-shire. "The book has the dense poetic texture," one critic observed, "fanciful originality and visual splendour which we associate with the work of Miss Murdoch. It is essentially a study of two

opposing types of moral and religious conviction". In An Unofficial Rose Murdoch introduced nine major characters, each of whom is looking for love and 'so closely is the web woven that the actions and passions of each are constantly affecting each other'.

Commenting on lris Murdoch's novels, Dr Satya

P. Gautam of Panjab University says, "She explored the existential possibilities of human condition through her fiction. Her novels were not merely narratives of complex situations in which human beings find themselves, but also a perceptive analysis for philosophical insights regarding dilemmas and paradoxes that arise in

everyday life. The central theme of her fiction reflects knowledge of other minds, self-deception, self-knowledge, interpersonal relations, and the role of feelings such as revenge, jealousy, love and anguish."

Although philosophy and literature try to understand the problems of life, Iris Murdoch believed there was a subtle difference in their approach. In a discussion with philosopher Bryan Magee, she once said: "Philosophy aims to clarify and to explain, it states and attempts to solve very difficult highly technical problems, and the writing must be subservient to this aim. One might say that bad philosophy is not philosophy, whereas bad art is still art. There are

all sorts of ways in which we tend to forgive literature, but we do not forgive philosophy.... Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing... Philosophical writing is not self-expression, it involves a disciplined removal of the personal voice... The Literary

writer deliberately leaves a space for his readers to play in. The philosopher must not leave any space."

Though they are different in certain ways, both philosophy and literature are truth-seeking and truth-telling activities: they are cognitive activities, explanations. Murdoch did not believe that the artist has a duty to society. His duty is to art, 'to truth-telling in his own medium', his duty is to try to do his best, and to produce his work with conviction, otherwise it becomes

mere propaganda. "A good society contains many different artists doing many different things; a bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths..." The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world as his own image. I think this particular kind of merciful objectivity is virtue, and it is this which totalitarian state is trying to destroy when it persecutes art."

Although literature has philosophical elements in it, the writer must not let the philosophical voice become too strong. "I am not sure how far Sartre's plays are, or are not, damaged by having strong theoretical motives. Certainly one sees from Sartre's other novels, and novels of Simon de Beavoir, and I admire all these, as soon as the 'existentialist voice' is switched on, the work of art rigidifies. In general, I am reluctant to say that the deep structure of any good literary work could be a philosophical one.... Think how much original thought there is in Shakespeare and how divinely inconspicuous it is."

Iris Murdoch was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975. The British government awarded her the CBE in 1976. She died of Alzheimer's disease at Vale House, Oxford, at the age of 79. Her husband John Bayley, was at her bedside when the end came. For more that forty years he had shared the ups and downs of life with her. Last year, he drew a very poignant picture of his ailing wife in Iris A memoir of Iris Murdoch. He has to get along with his life without the woman who was his friend, philosopher and wife.

Engaging Vedic exploration

2008-07-08T07:12:00.001-07:00

Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights
by Frits Staal Penguin Books. Pages: 420. Rs 495

Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman

WERE the Aryans the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent or did they come from outside? Is the Indus Civilisation older than the Vedic? When were the Vedas composed? What was the society like? These are questions that have not been so far satisfactorily settled.

Philosopher, polyglot, polymath Frits Staal's thoroughly researched Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights throws new light on these mysteries. The writer spent years in India, obtained a Ph. D. in philosophy, and learnt Sanskrit from a pandit who taught the language to him using Panini's grammar. This is an exhaustive volume that is divided into five parts, each of them deserves to be dealt in considerable detail, but as that is not possible in a short review, we shall not dwell much on some of the better known topics, and focus on some lesser-known facts instead.

For instance, information on a cuneiform clay tablet mentions Vedic gods Indra, Mitra, and Varuna in a treaty between Hittite king who ruled over what is now Turkey, and the king of Mitanni, whose empire consisted of present day Syria and northern Iraq. The Hittite king spoke Hittite, an Indo-European language, and the Mitanni king spoke a language that is very close to Sanskrit. Then there is a treatise written by Kikkuli, a Mitanni writer whose language was also close to Sanskrit. These sources might solve at least part of the mystery: the Indus Civilisation precedes the composition of the Vedas.

Coming to the Vedas, Staal says that they were composed in different parts of the Indian subcontinent and at different times. It is largely accepted that the Rigveda is the oldest of the four Vedas, not only because its language is the most archaic but also because the other three Vedas presuppose what is said in it and quote from it at length.

In popular imagination, the Vedic age not only brings to mind pastoral hymns, sacrifices, rituals and mantras, but also caste system. The writer points out that the Vedic society did not have an idea of caste, as it emerged much later. Although there are terms such as brahmana, they do not refer to caste as such but various kinds of learned people, including sages, poets, and priests. The word kshatriya also has no specific meaning in the Rigveda.

Upanishads took Indian philosophy to its zenith, and the book deals with them in considerable detail. The word Upanishad occurs first after the end of the Vedic period, in the Mundaka Upanishad, which was composed perhaps in fourth to third century BCE. Staal also discusses Vedanta and the philosophies of Bhaskaracharya, Shankaracharya Ramanujacharya, and Madhvacharya. He shows that all of them were inspired by the Upanishads, although their philosophies are quite distinct. During this age great philosophical debates took place, notable of them being between Yagyavalkya and Gargi, the woman philosopher. Part five is devoted to the inter-relationship between Vedas, Jainism, and Buddhism.

Mantras
are not taken very seriously in this modern age, most people think they are nothing but mumbo-jumbo, but their importance should not be overlooked says the author. Staal points out that a popular approach to the study of mantras has been pragmatics, a discipline that is closely related to logic and deals with the indexicals ('I', 'here', 'now', 'today','he', 'she' etc.) that were introduced by the philosopher J. L Austin. It has been argued that mantras are 'speech acts'. By speech acts Austin meant language utterances by which an act is performed. If a priest addresses two people with the words: 'I unite you in marriage'; these are not just words; he has performed an act by which the two are now married to each other. The same words uttered by anyone else would not have the same purport.

Staal, however, holds that mantras are neither language nor speech acts. 'Their powers are different and distinct from the concepts and categories that are used in logic, philosophy and the human sciences. That is in accordance with a simple fact that we have not so far taken in to account: mantras are not confined to humans.' He suggests that we should widen our net and study mantras in context of the animal kingdom. The study of bird song has led to unanimous conclusions with regard to its meaning or semantics, and this is a direction we must explore to understand mantras.

There is no sign of algebra in the Vedic age, though the term mathematics is used in several senses. Readers interested in geometry might look at the appendices for proof of Baudhayana's theorem by Liu Hui and Euclid. As far as astronomy and astrology are concerned the Rigvedic 'contribution to astronomy does not appear to have been very remarkable. It did not distinguish the five planets (graha in later texts) from the fixed stars.'

Staal writes with rare literary skills, vibrant prose, and tops it up with humour. Packed with informative maps, diagrams, illustrations and photographs, this book would add fresh insights to our understanding of one of the most important epochs in Indian history.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080706/spectrum/book3.htm

Emotion of devotion

2008-05-23T04:58:00.001-07:00

Kuldip Dhiman

Understanding Bhakti
by H. P. Sah Kalpaz Publications, Delhi Price: Rs 750, Pages: 286

WHAT does bhakti or devotion mean? At least to the Indian reader, the answer might be obvious. Some might say it is the devotee's love for God, and this might bring the images of Meera and Chaitanya to their minds.

In his well-reasoned book Understanding Bhakti, H. P. Sah shows that devotion or bhakti has many dimensions, and it could be understood through various angles.

It no doubt could be seen as a Hindu socio-religious system, but it could also be seen as 'the purest and the highest form of sublime emotion that human beings ever experience'.

We do understand some of the fundamental human emotions and feelings, so is it possible that we can also understand the meaning and significance of bhakti the same way? Not necessarily so, points out Sah, as bhakti is not a natural instinct like hunger, anger, fear, greed etc. 'Such explanations fail to explain how the feeling of sublime enters into the feeling of fear for an unknown power. Fear generates hatred. It can make the people bow their heads before the object (known or unknown) of fear. Can it also generate or evolve into the feeling of desire-less dedication towards that object?'

Fear is a fundamental emotion that is found not only in man, but in all living beings, but so far we have not observed any animal worshipping or praying. Devotion is peculiar to human beings. "The emotion of reverence in the form of complete dedication towards the unknown centre of consciousness that prompts from the sense of gratitude makes the human beings aware for the first time of what they recognise as supramundane — as contrasted with the mundane in which they grow, live and die."

Sah postulates that bhakti is the expression of gratitude towards the supreme, and it is a very simple emotion though its manifestation is very complex. Furthermore, devotion is a highly subjective experience like love; therefore, those who have not had the taste of it would not understand the mind of the devotee, bhakta, fully. Bhakti is based on total surrender of the self to the supreme. Once this has been done, his entire outlook towards the world, towards the daily problems, and towards scientific knowledge undergoes a sea change.

Sah also discusses some of the famous devotees like Jaideva, Chaitanya, Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, and Sri Aurobindo. This is an exhaustive volume so it is not possible to look deeply into various concepts that are discussed. However, readers interested in religious experience, and students of philosophy of religion would certainly find this book very informative.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080518/spectrum/book7.htm

Head vs the heart

2008-04-14T07:42:00.001-07:00

Reviewed by Prof Ashok Vohra

Emotion: The Essence of Life — An Evolutionary Explanation
by Kuldip Kumar Dhiman. Unistar.
Pages. XVI+160. Rs 295

Long before psychologists and other social scientists, philosophers recognised that emotions are important part of human personality and play a significant role in understanding human beings and their actions.

Emotions not only describe and illuminate causes/reasons of human actions but also motivate human beings to act in the way they do. They don't necessarily have a positive impact on human personality. Because of the sway they hold on human beings, emotions make one prone to excessive and violent acts. They weaken human resolve by impeding judgement, making it irrational.

In the moral domain, emotions by detracting us from the path of duty deviate us from good deeds; whereas, according to Kant and the Bhagvadgita, for example, duty alone determines what is good. They play a significant positive role in the field of art. However, whether emotions play a positive or negative role would depend upon whether they are conceived as impulses without thought or intentional content, or as having some sort of cognitive content.

Emotions are distinct both from bodily appetites, such as hunger and thirst, and from objectless moods, such as irritation and endogenous depression. The first distinction between emotions and moods is that while emotions last for a short time, may be a few seconds or even less, moods and their cognates last for a longer duration. The second and more important distinction is that unlike moods, emotions have objects, for example, one is angry or pleased with something.

Emotions play a major role in the making of our descriptive beliefs, for example, what is happening in the world, as well as evaluative beliefs for example our attitude towards those happenings. So they affect our way of not only seeing an object, but also of our appraisal of that object. For example, all religions advocate emotions like compassion, pity, and charity. But philosophers like Kant, Nietzsche and many others argue that these emotions hurt the self-esteem of the suffering person.

Philosophers' views have now been supported and enriched by advances in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Each discipline has developed its own method of studying, classifying and scrutinising the effects of emotions. After providing conceptual clarifications from early Greek thinkers to Paul Ekman in our times, Kuldip Dhiman in his book defends the nascent methodology of 'evolutionary psychology'. Unlike the traditional methods which lay excessive emphasis on 'objectivity' and 'rationality', the evolutionary psychology is based on the axiom that emotions are not a hindrance in understanding the self, rather they contribute a great deal in our understanding the unknown, hidden aspects of human personality. They provide a key to many of the hitherto unexplained human psychological phenomena.

Dhiman argues that evolutionary psychology is a "very useful framework" and "very dynamic method" of psychology. The defence of Evolutionary Psychology by Dhiman is not for its own sake but with a view to support his own conviction that "the essence of life is individuality, and this sense of individuality comes largely from our emotional profile" because "emotions are involved in an organism's survival" itself.

The author relying upon the insights from anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, neurosciences, cultural studies and other allied branches of knowledge proves that reason and emotions are perfectly compatible. To say that we ought to be solely guided by reason is as wrong as to say that our judgments and ensuing actions should be based on emotions alone. He establishes that through emotion management—emotion expression, emotion regulation, and emotion inhibition—we can develop an effective communication and build a better world around us.

One can whole heartedly agree with Dhiman's conclusion that evolutionary psychology has a great potential and that the in-depth study of emotions which is its starting point is "not only useful and necessary for our existence", but "crucial to our survival".

The book puts in lucid language some of the complex technical terms used in the recent developments in the philosophy of mind in general and more particularly in the area of evolutionary psychology. Each of the illustration by the author is of great help in understanding the emotion under discussion. The book shall be of great interest to experts and the layman alike. The publishers deserve to be congratulated for excellent production at an affordable price.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080413/spectrum/book3.htm

The Ignoble Savage

2008-04-11T04:05:00.001-07:00

Why does man, considered to be the most intelligent creature on this earth, indulge in inhuman acts of violence, arson and genocide as witnessed in Kashmir, and caste-related violence in other regions? Why does this so-called rational being behave so irrationally? It is generally believed that most people are by nature kind and noble and they behave like animals only when they are corrupted by those with a vested interest, like political leaders. This viewpoint is naive and simplistic, says Kuldip Dhiman

"ULTRAS massacre 17 in Doda. According to the police, a group of 10 militants entered Ludar village and dragged 20 males belonging to one community out of their homes and shot them."

You switch off the television in sheer disgust, but such news stories keep appearing with increasing frequency. Whether it is Kashmir, Punjab, the North-East, or the distant Bosnia, Zimbabwe, Palestine, etc., it is the same old story that has been repeating itself for centuries— men killing men. But why? Why does the most intelligent of species in the world behave in such a barbaric fashion? Why are humans so violence-prone, and why is the violence chiefly communal? Why can't we all live amicably?

Religion and politics are often named as the main causes of communal disharmony. We blame the priests and the politicians for exploiting the 'innocent' masses for their own selfish ends. This may sound very convincing, but the fact is no one can exploit unless there is something available to be exploited.

While the minorities are in continual fear of being annihilated, the majority group is equally afraid of being overtaken by the minorities some day. Both groups are uneasy and uncomfortable with real, and often imagined, fear. They thus live in mutual suspicion about the motives of the other group. Political leaders are well aware of this distrust, and know that in a multiracial society only a tiny spark is required to flare up communal violence. Throw a piece of beef in a temple, a cigarette butt in a gurdwara or a piece of pork in a mosque, and a riot starts.

It appears that hatred towards the other group is universal. At a broader level, there is aggression between countries, especially between immediate neighbours; at national level there is aggression between states; at state level between districts and villages. In villages, there is aggression between families, between two tribes, between two villages, between families, between members of the same family such as between husband-wife, or between siblings, between genders, between the same gender and, finally, aggression against one's own self.

It is generally believed that humans are by nature kind and noble, and they behave like animals only when they are corrupted by people with a vested interest— like political leaders. This viewpoint has been challenged by thinkers over the ages.

One scientist, who devoted a lot of his energies studying the aggressive aspect of human nature, was Conrad Lorenz. He reinforced the belief that there is an innate drive for intra species aggression and it finds expression every now and then.

Konrad Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903, in Austria. In 1966, he wrote On Aggression in which he argued that aggressive behaviour in animals is motivated by survival, while in the case of humans aggressive behaviour may be channelled or modified. In 1973 he won a Nobel Prize (shared with Karl Von Frisch & Niko Tinbergen) for his studies on human and animal behaviour.

Borrowing Freud's hydraulic model of the brain, Lorenz argued that when pressure builds up in an internal system, rather like the water in a toilet cistern, the threshold for tolerance might be reduced and just a little stimulus is needed to trigger off aggressive behaviour. What is alarming is that in extreme cases, it may 'overflow' with no external stimulus as we often see in the case of two different communities who suddenly turn against each other in spite of having a fairly long record of peaceful co-existence.

After studying the behaviour of animal and birds, Lorenz came to believe that, like many other animals, we have an innate drive to aggressive behaviour towards our own species. This, he argued, is the only possible explanation of the conflicts and wars throughout all human history, of the continuing unreasonable behaviour of supposedly reasonable beings. Taking a Darwinian perspective and Freud's theory of the death instinct, Lorenz tried to explain this ugly aspect of human nature.

Since food and other resources are scarce, and humans have to compete with the other species for their own kind for survival. Even between members of the same species, such as humans, there is always competition for food, territory and power. Nature's laws are merciless — they favour the strong and that's why aggression seems to be innate in us. Aggression, like any other weapon, is a double-edged sword. To a certain degree it is good for us, but we often lose control of ourselves and indulge in all sorts of inhuman acts.

In his well-argued article Lorenz on Aggression, in the book Ten Theories of Human Nature, Leslie Stevenson observes that the most destructive human violence is not between individuals but between groups, whether organised as in war or unorganised as in communal massacres. At a certain stage of their evolution, our ancestors had more or less mastered the dangers of their inhospitable environment and the main threat facing them came not from predators, but from other human groups. "The competition between tribes," avers Stevenson explaining Lorenz's viewpoint, "would have been the main factor in natural selection, so there would be survival value in the 'warrior virtues.' At this postulated prehistoric stage, those groups that bonded together best to fight other groups would tend to survive longest. Thus, Lorenz offers to explain what he calls 'militant enthusiasm,' in which a human crowd becomes excitedly aggressive against another group perceived as alien and loses all rational control and moral inhibitions. This tendency, he suggests, has evolved from the communal defence response of our prehuman ancestors.

Although we know that most animals tend to fight with one another, the victorious contender seldom kills the opponent if the latter makes appropriate gestures conceding defeat. Humans are the only one, as far as we know, to indulge in systematic mass killing of rival groups (although there have been recent reports about systematic warfare among different groups of monkeys). This is quite perplexing because, according to Darwin's theory, the main duty of all species is to survive and to propagate their own kind so they have more members of its type and, hence, a better chance of survival. Explaining Lorenz's theory, Stevenson says there was no evolutionary need for very strong inhibition mechanisms to stop fighting between ape-men. The more heavily armed animals need such inhibitions to prevent injury to each other, but others do not, at least in their normal environments. With human beings, cultural and technological developments put artificial weapons in our hands— from sticks and stones of prehuman ancestors, through arrows and swords of history, to bullets and bombs, chemical and nuclear weapons of today. The biological equilibrium between killing potential and inhibition is upset. This is how it is that human beings are the only animals to indulge in genocide of their own kind.

Appeals to rationality and moral responsibility have been notoriously ineffective in controlling human conflict. Lorenz reiterated that aggression was innate in us: like the instincts of Freudian id, it must find an outlet in one way or another. Reason alone is powerless; it can only devise means to ends that we decide in other ways, and it can exert control over our behaviour only when it is backed by some instinctual motivation. So, like Freud, Lorenz saw a conflict between the instincts implanted in us by evolution and the new moral restraints necessary to civilised society. He speculated that in prehuman groups there must have been a primitive morality that condemned aggression within the group but encouraged 'militant enthusiasm' against any group perceived as alien.

Being medical men, it was natural for Freud and Lorenz to explain aggression from a biological perspective. But there are others who believe that environment has its own share in shaping human nature.

Lorenz's theory, though brilliant and convincing, is not without problems. His critics accuse him of being unscientific because, as with the Freudian theories, Lorenz's application of the concepts of drive and instinct are not testable by observation and experiment.

To be fair to Freud, Lorenz and other such thinkers, we must not forget that although neuroscientists have done a lot of work, there is very little we know about the mind and how it works. The method of observation, measurement and testing works as far as physical things such as chemicals, solids, or even human organs like the heart, liver etc., are concerned. With modern instruments, we can now very accurately measure a person's heartbeat, or blood pressure. But we still don't know how to measure and test mental processes such as thought and emotion. You might love your spouse or your child, but how can you ever measure it or test it? Sure, one day we might find ways to measure mental processes, but until then we have to make do with whatever theories we have, unscientific though they might appear to be. Besides, thinkers are often way beyond their times and theories that were once rubbished once were later proved to be true. When Einstein presented his two theories of relativity, the scientific community laughed at him because his theories just did not make sense to them. Besides, they were impossible to test at that time as he dealt with space-time and gravity. Ways were found to test them only many years later.

While not taking credit away from Lorenz, it must be mentioned here that he was not the first to suggest that aggression in humans and animals was innate. Over the ages, thinkers have recognised this human trait. Nietzsche was quite vocal about it when he coined the phrase "the will to power," and when he observed that humans are in a continual state of war, and that peace was just a pause in war.

Freud himself devoted his attention to aggression, in fact his concept of the id, ego and super-ego is nothing but a recognition of internal and external conflict in all of us, leading to "collective neurosis."

In the book, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud admits, "In all that follows I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture. At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea. We may add to this that the process proves to be in the service of Eros, which aims at binding together single human individuals, then families, then tribes, races, nations, into one great unity, that of humanity. Why this has to be done we do not know; it is simply the work of Eros. These masses of men must be bound to one another libidinally; necessity alone, the advantages of common work, would not hold them together The natural instinct of aggressiveness in man, the hostility of each one against all and of all against each one opposes the programme of civilisation. This instinct of aggression is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct we have found alongside of Eros, sharing his rule over the earth. And now it seems to me, the meaning of the evolution, of culture is no longer a riddle to us. It must present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and so the evolution of civilisation may be simply described as the struggle of the human species for existence."

The instinct of destruction, argued Freud, when tempered and harnessed (as it were, inhibited in its aim) and directed towards objects; is compelled to provide the ego with satisfaction of its need and with power over nature. Since the assumption of its existence is based essentially on theoretical grounds, it must be confessed that it is not entirely proof against theoretical objections. But this is how things appear to us now in the present state of our knowledge; future research and reflection will undoubtedly bring further light which will decide the question.

Thinkers and scientists often take extreme viewpoints while arguing their postulates. Some believe that humans shape the environment, while behaviorists such as J. B. Watson and Skinner go to the extent of denying the human mind altogether and emphasising that environment is the only factor that shape human nature. Change the environment and you change the being. With hindsight, we can say that both these extreme approaches are partly wrong. Nature and nurture influence each other mutually, and we cannot ignore one at the expense of the other. In this connection, we might refer to the work of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

When Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, in 1976, the book further heated the debate over whether humans were ruled more by nature or nurture. He noted that discussing the evolution of birds without looking hard at the evolution of their nests, or at beavers, without considering the evolution of their dams, would be prima facie ridiculous. Each is essential to the survival of the other. It is the combination of bird and nest, the combination of beaver and dam, that gives a competitive edge to the animals who build them. Not only does the body of an organism march to the orders of its genes, but so do the artifacts the organism builds or uses. In this sense, the egg uses both a chicken and a nest to make another egg, and so the nest, too, is an evolutionary extension of the egg.

Though our disposition to be aggressive is genetic, it is further reinforced in our minds in our childhood by our parents, teachers and peer groups. Children grow up believing their race, religion, social group, caste and culture are far superior to that of the others. Highly charged stories of heroic victories and humiliating defeats are often drilled into our minds quite early. Vengeance is glorified to an extent that the new generation feels duty bound to settle old scores. Hence society and culture also have a hand in moulding our behaviour. It is a two-way traffic — organisms and environment affecting each other. We cannot afford to ignore either of them if we wish to study behaviour.

Language and memory are unique features that are responsible for the tremendous cultural and scientific achievements made by humans. Yet language and memory are the cause for our misery. Although most animals get violent with members of their own species, they don't appear to have long term memories — they fight and forget. Humans are condemned not to forget. While a strong animal might not go to the extent of killing his antagonist if appropriate gestures conceding defeat are made, humans can't afford to take the chance, fearing that if not the opponent his son or friend might catch up with him some day on a lonely stretch. And for this reason, often an entire family or tribe is massacred. On a broader scale, history books never let us forget the past. Heroic tales and folk songs of wars keep the flame of vengeance alive.

Exterminating the other group, even if it is possible, does not work because new schisms in the new homogenous group develop. Even if India were inhabited by just one race that followed one religion, divisions would soon develop. The best way out might be to have a healthy competition between diverse groups in preference to mindless violence in order to dominate the rivals.

Yes, aggression is innate in us, but it does not mean that intolerable behaviour and bloodshed are justified. A scientist's job is to observe, experiment, test and state the fact however unpleasant they might be because once we know the cause of the problem, we have a greater chance of finding a solution to it. Secondly, when observers say that aggression in us is innate, it does not automatically mean that all of us are violent and aggressive by nature. All it means is that we are susceptible to it in certain circumstances. For instance, most of us are quite capable of committing murder, theft, and other nefarious activities as such tendencies might be in our genes, however, by and large, we don't do these things because other factors such as upbringing, education, or religion inhibit us.

Our upbringing can either turn us into highly intolerable beings, or shape us into a 'noble savages.'

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010818/windows/main1.htm

Philosophical Issues in Evolutionary Psychology

2008-04-07T02:48:00.001-07:00

First Chapter from

Emotion: The Essence of Life

By Kuldip Kumar Dhiman

kuldipdhiman@gmail.com

Published by Unistar Books, Chandigarh

volutionary psychology or evolutionary cognitive psychology got its name from psychologist Leda Cosmides and her anthropologist husband John Tooby, though they are not necessarily its first proponents. In this chapter theoretical foundations and philosophical issues about this theory are laid out, so that what follows in other chapters is better understood.

The argument of this theory is that cognition, which includes perception, memory, language, thinking, emotions, and so on, is best understood within the context of human physical and social evolution. Robert L. Solso explains: 'Take any common event, say the chance encounter with an acquaintance of the opposite sex. Your ability to perceive, evaluate, and remember his or her characteristics is based on our long-standing evolutionary history at work. Thus, cognition (for example, memory) and emotions (for example, lust) are understandable in the man's quest for procreation and survival.'[1]

At the outset it must be stated that evolutionary psychology is not a subject within psychology, such as the study of memory, child development, or social behaviour. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it such as memory, cognition, and emotions. It is a paradigm.

Based on a multi-disciplinary approach, evolutionary psychology is a method of studying and understanding the design and function of the mind on the principles and conclusions drawn mainly from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, but it also includes insights from anthropology, ethology, neuroscience etc. Modern evolutionary psychologists are trying to understand all cognition, as well as brain structures that support the process within the framework of biological evolution and universal environmental forces. Using it as a paradigm, evolutionary psychologists apply it to all the sub-fields that come under it from sensation, to perception, to pattern analysis, to language, to problem solving, to thinking.

The concepts of survival and procreation are central to the evolutionary theory. Inspired by Malthusian ideas, Darwin argued that in principle all organisms could produce much more offspring than they usually do but they do not do so, this is because resources are limited and there is a stiff inter-species and intra-species competition for them. In the face of this stiff competition, individual survival is built in an organism's system. The organism has to survive for as long as it possibly can. Since all life is mortal, the other method of continuing to survive is by passing on its genes to the offspring. It is in this sense that Richard Dawkins coined the much-abused phrase 'the selfish gene'[2]. The core issue is that if an organism is not 'selfish' enough to seek its own survival, nothing would ever get done. The struggle for individual survival and procreation are the fuel of evolution. The concept of survival is a very complex one, and it includes altruism, selfless service, self-sacrifice, celibacy, homosexuality, and other such activities which appear to be contrary to the 'selfish' nature of the gene. Dawkins has argued cogently that what appears to be unselfishness and self-sacrifice are in the final analysis for the good of the individual gene. For want of space, these issues cannot be argued here.

We may now proceed further and note that in order to survive, various organisms have adopted different means, some went in for quantity by rapid procreation, others went in for quality by producing fewer but more complex offspring. This concept has been captured by life history theorists who argue that individuals can enhance fitness in two ways: They can invest in traits that affect age schedule of mortality, or they can invest in traits that affect the age schedule of fertility.[3] Humans invested in a large brain size, the outcome for which was a mind which evolutionary psychologists argue is the single most important element in our success as a species. But we must remember, every evolutionary adaptation is a double-edged weapon; it cuts both ways. The brain makes only two per cent of the human body mass, but it consumes 20 per cent of the body's energy — a very expensive organ indeed in a world short of energy. The mind too, which is a correlate of the brain, is an extremely useful and beneficial adaptation, but it creates problems too, as we shall explore in the forthcoming chapters. Before that, we must ask what is brain? What is mind? Are they two different things? What does evolutionary psychology say?

The Brain and the Mind

The human mind and the way it shapes our behaviour is one of the most fascinating areas of study, yet it is also the most difficult and elusive enterprise. That is because, 'A science of mind,' says Henry Plotkin, 'is an extraordinary idea because the ability we have to do science is dependent upon the properties of our minds.'[4] And this is a major philosophical problem: can a system reflect upon itself?

But, if there is a mind in the first place, it certainly cannot be studied like the other organs of our body. Even so evolutionary psychologists tell us, it is also shaped by evolution. As our brain is the most developed among all the known creatures, it is our major ally in our survival. No feature of humans has played such an important part in human evolution as the brain and mind. This makes the brain-mind complex a prime focus of intellectual investigation.

Evolutionary psychologists see the brain and mind as two aspects of the same system. The assumption is that the brain is like hardware and the mind like software. Way back in 1976, Richard Dawkins drew this analogy in his book The Selfish Gene: 'Brains may be regarded as analogous in function to computers. They are analogous in that both types of machine generate complex patterns of output, after analysis of complex patterns of input, and after reference to stored information.'[5] This information is stored in the form of a highly sophisticated memory and other features like cognition, perception, and emotions that humans have. These in combination make the marvel that is the mind.

Continuing the analogy, Cosmides and Tooby observe that the brain is a machine designed to process information. From this perspective, one can define the 'mind' as a set of information-processing procedures (cognitive programs) that are physically embodied in the neural circuitry of the brain. For cognitive scientists, 'brain' and 'mind' are terms that refer to the same system, which can be described in two complementary ways — either in terms of its physical properties (the neural) or in terms of its information-processing operation (mental).[6] .

Though the brain is a very special organ, there are certain misconceptions about it that must be cleared up at the outset. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that all human and animal organs both external and internal are designed for a specific function; eyes to see, nose to smell, heart to pump blood. These organs cannot perform what they are not designed to do, a nose can't see, for instance. All this seems so obvious that no one bothers to comment upon it, yet when it comes to the brain, traditional theories of psychology have tried to define it as a general purpose mechanism that is capable of cognition, memory, feelings, emotions, problem-solving and so on. These assumptions are challenged by evolutionary psychologists. To them the brain/mind is composed of specialised domain specific circuitry, with each domain performing one specific function only. 'Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that people come equipped only with a set of relatively domain-general faculties such as memory and reasoning, which are applied in equal fashion to diverse problems. Recent research has begun to suggest that human expertise about the natural and social environment, including what is often called semantic knowledge, is best construed as consisting of different domains of competence.'[7] Evolutionary psychologists conceptualise the mind packed with domain-specific programs specialised for solving problems that humans faced in their evolutionary past.

But just as a good workman does not use all the tools in his toolbox when, say, tightening a screw, the mind also chooses specific programs for solving specific problems, otherwise nothing will ever get accomplished. We shall later see how emotions are crucial in letting an organism decide which program to activate at the right moment.

Another important way in which evolutionary psychology differs from most traditional thinking is that it accepts the existence of innate physical and mental features. Following John Locke, the Standard Social Science Model sees the human mind as a tabula rasa, a modelling clay that is moulded by society and culture alone. On this view, innate or inherited traits do not exist at all or are not important. But evolutionary psychology has shown that the traditional narrow view of the human mind though sounds politically correct, is fundamentally flawed.

Environment is a very important factor for evolutionary theorists, so there is no point in asking which is more important the organism or the environment. In The Birth of the Mind, Gary Marcus says that genes are useless without an environment, and no organism could make any use of the environment at all if it were not for its genes.[8] As evolutionary psychology takes the organism and the environment into account, it is markedly different from other schools of thought, which have viewed human nature in isolation. Evolutionary psychology is a holistic approach as it takes into account the smallest unit of evolutionary change, the gene, and also the largest, the environment. Thus it avoids unnecessary fruitless arguments about whether or not a particular behaviour is genetically or environmentally determined.

Let us now consider the presuppositions of evolutionary psychology:

Principle 1: The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits or modules are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate to our environmental circumstances.

Principle 2: Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during their evolutionary history.

Principle 3: Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg according to evolutionary psychology. Seemingly mundane activities like walking, talking, or opening a door are, as robot designers tell us, actually extremely complex activities involving millions of neural computations per second, something far beyond the capacities of the most advanced computer so far designed. Yet, even children perform these activities with ease and almost unconsciously, leading many to falsely believe that mental processes are simple.

Principle 4: Different neural circuits are specialised for solving different adaptive problems as in the example of a Swiss army knife given earlier. This means that the brain is designed on a modular basis; each module is specifically designed to undertake a specific task.

Principle 5: Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind. The argument is that cultural environment keeps changing too fast for our brains and minds to cope with the change. The world has changed dramatically over the past 10,000 years and especially in the last 200 years, yet this period is just an eye-blink on an evolutionary timescale for evolutionary changes usually take place over millions of years. True the human brain has produced artistic, scientific and technological marvels, but it is still governed by the evolutionary forces that existed about three million years ago.

There are certain other conceptual issues that need some clarification. First, we ought to mention that when evolutionary psychologists compare the human mind with a computer, modules, programs and so on, the analogy should not be extended too far. Steven Pinker argues that computers are serial, doing one thing at a time, brains are parallel, doing millions of things at once Computers are fast; brains are slow. Computer parts are reliable, brain parts are noisy. Computers have a limited number of connections brains have trillions. The claim is not that the brain is like commercially available computers. Rather the claim is that brains and computers embody intelligence for some of the same reasons.[9]

Why should we expect the mind to be modular in the first place? One reason is the way evolution works, that is by adding new structures to the existing ones as there is no point in starting from the scratch all the time. 'No one supposes that there could be a general-purpose sensory organ,' argues Peter Carruthers, 'which could fulfill all of the functions of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. On the contrary, what we expect to find — and what we do find — are distinct organs, specialized for the distinctive structure of each domain, and which have been shaped by natural selection to fulfill the function in question. . . . . Likewise, then, in the case of the mind: one should expect that distinct mental functions — estimating numerosity, predicting the effects of a collision, reasoning about the mental states of another person, and so on — are likely to be realized in distinct cognitive learning mechanisms, which have been selected and honed for that very purpose.'[10]

But, in the same volume, Fiona Cowie and Jim Woodward while agreeing that mind is shaped by natural selection, disagree on the point that the mind ought to be modular. They say that it is simply wrong to suppose that modules are invariably superior to general-purpose devices. There would have been considerable selective pressure favouring the evolution of cognitive mechanisms allowing the rapid assimilation of new information and behavioural flexibility, rather than innately specified modules.[11]

A majority of theorists, however, are now convinced that the mind is modular. But the mind is what the brain does, but not everything it does, for the brain does other things such as metabolising fat and giving off heat. Besides, unlike other organs, the brain has a special status which comes from a special thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, an act. That special thing is information processing or computation.[12] And this information processing is an outcome of evolutionary forces, hence the justification of basing the assumptions of evolutionary psychology on theory of evolution.

What does evolutionary psychology say about emotions which are the main subject of this thesis? Like other mental processes, emotions are also evolutionary adaptations which play a crucial role in our survival. Though the mind has domain specific tools to solve certain type of adaptive problems, we cannot activate all the tools at the same time. If we did that, they would cancel out each other's advantage. Not only minimal number of programmes have to be activated, but also the right programs ought to be used. When two or more problems arise, such as hunger and a dangerous predator, the mind ought to get its priorities right. In this, the mind needs a program to assist it, and emotions are such programs. They are among the most important allies in our survival, and this will be discussed in forthcoming chapters.

Beyond this, it is emotions that give us the feeling of being alive, of experiencing the richness of life, they are the very essence of living.

Major concepts in the Theory of Evolution

Before we study emotions on a psycho-evolutionary perspective, it would be worthwhile looking into the philosophical issues in evolutionary theory and clarifying widespread misconceptions and controversies that have dogged it ever since it was first proposed in a systematic manner by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. For these objections come not only from those who are unfamiliar with science, but also from highly educated scholars, some from the scientific community itself. It would not be possible to deal fully with the objections here, as the issue is not only vast but also equally complicated.

People often ask what has evolution, which is a modern biological theory (and by implication a materialistic one), to do with something as abstract as the mind, and how can one propose to examine the role of emotions, which are some of our most subjective experiences, on this theory. This philosophical problem has confounded many thinkers. Susan Langer, for instance, wonders: 'The vexing question in the philosophy of the biological sciences is how something called 'feelings' enters into the physical (essentially electro-chemical) events that compose an animal organism. . . . The fact that we feel the effects of changes in the world about us, and apparently in ourselves, too, and that all such changes are physically describable, but our feeling them is not, presents a genuine philosophical challenge.'[13]

My endeavour here is to show that there is perhaps a way to answer this 'vexing' question, at least partially, at least a little better, and the way is being shown by evolutionary psychologists.

First of all, one might ask what is evolution and what interest has the student of philosophy of mind in it? That the world is ever changing is a fact that was known to ancient Indian and Western thinkers. Heraclitus in the 6^th century B.C. said everything is flux, and we can't step into the same river twice. On evolutionary terms we can say that the world changes but it changes in a gradual manner, and so do the living organisms in it. And since philosophy, as George Thomas White Patrick put it, is an attempt to understand the world, our interest in evolution will depend upon the extent to which it adds to such understanding.[14]

Whether we take a dualist or a physicalist approach to study mental processes like thinking, believing, and feeling, one thing seems to be becoming more and more apparent: we cannot leave the body out of the discussion. It is now not too shocking to state that human nature and culture both have biological roots. In their book Human Evolutionary Psychology Barrett, Dunbar and Lycett declare: 'Unless you are a Creationist, you have to accept that humans have been subject to the same processes of evolutionary change as all other living things on earth. A full understanding of human nature therefore requires an understanding of biological as well as sociological processes . . . . We are products of an interaction between biology and culture, or to put it in its more familiar guise, nature and nurture, genes and environment. To separate the two is a false dichotomy. Many would argue that human nature cannot be reduced to mere biological processes — and they would be right. But to infer from this, as many do, that biology is now completely irrelevant . . . is to commit an egregious logical error.'[15]

Therefore, to study human behaviour by studying its animal origins on evolutionary principles makes sense. This does not, as many fear, reduce humans to animals; rather it can enrich our insights into human psychology and behaviour, and possibly even help us overcome human frailty. And far from reducing the mind to a mere lump of flesh, advances in neurosciences have awoken us to the magnitude of the complexity of the brain and its processes, something no one ever could have imagined before.

Knowledge only takes the myth out of our conception, not the sense of wonder. But knowledge does not necessarily make people give up old belief systems. Evolutionary theory does evoke very strong antagonism among people as it is counter-common sense. In the September 27, 2004 issue of Newsweek, Steven Pinker wrote an article How to Think About the Mind. He said that every evening our eyes tell us that the sun sets, while we know that, in fact, the Earth is turning us away from it. Astronomy taught us centuries ago that common sense is not a reliable guide to reality. Today it is neuroscience that is forcing us to readjust our intuitions. In Galileo's time, the counter-intuitive discovery that the Earth moved around the sun was laden with moral danger. Now it seems obvious that the motion of rock and gas in space has nothing to do with right and wrong. Yet to many people, the discovery that the soul or mind is the activity of the brain is just as fraught, with pernicious implications for everything from criminal responsibility to our image of ourselves as a species. Turning back the clock on the ultimate form of self-knowledge is neither possible nor desirable. We can live with the new challenges from brain science. But it will require setting aside childlike intuitions and traditional dogmas, and thinking afresh about what makes people better off and worse off.

The problem with the theory of evolution is that right from the day it was published it got mired in controversy because people who do not do much serious philosophic and scientific thinking such as journalists, amateur scientists and others got interested in it and began writing on it leading everyone to think, as Jacques Monod put it, that they understand it. Very few of the critics have actually read Darwin's seminal work, their passions are aroused by amateurish interpretation of it in the general media. Another reason for the uproar against it was that it took God out of the conception as He was not necessary. And because biology does not depend upon mathematics too much, most people read books on biology and think they have become experts. While no layman would dare say he is qualified enough to find fault with quantum mechanics, general relativity or Goedl's incompleteness theorem, almost everyone thinks they know enough biology to challenge evolutionary theory. This is because, as humans we think we have a firsthand experiences of our bodies, feelings, thoughts and other mental processes which are 'obvious'. How could we ever be wrong about them? True the subatomic world as shown by quantum theorists is also counter-common sense: all rules of logic and commonsense are turned upside down there, but we don't argue with a physicist because we are not qualified physicists, and as the world of subatomic particles is far removed from ours, we don't care. But it is not the same when we talk about humans and their nature.

Coupled with this is our traditional anthropocentric worldview, the reversal of which is hard to digest. George Thomas White Patrick suggests that 'much of the unhappy and needless antagonism to the theories of evolution in the last century could have been avoided, if Darwin had spoken not of the descent of man, but of his ascent. It all looks quite different when we think of man as the crowning masterpiece of nature's evolutionary methods.'[16]

Another reason for the opposition towards evolution was that, like the Copernican revolution, it was a totally new way of thinking. Darwin seemed to entirely disregard all philosophical traditions that preceded him. He 'started from a new basis by completely eliminating the last remnants of Platonism, by refusing to admit the eidos (Idea, type, essence) in any guise whatsoever.'[17] But he did not stop there; he even disregarded Aristotle's final cause or teleology. Thus in one stroke, he seemed to revolt against the two major systems in Western thinking, the Platonic and the Aristotelian, and this caused great consternation among the orthodoxy. They just did not know what to do with this theory other than condemn it outright.

Some of the so-called scientific objections to the theory were raised in 1859 itself. Darwin answered most of them, and the ones he couldn't were later answered by successive revolutionary breakthroughs made by science. Microbiologists have shown that though evolutionary changes can take millions of years in higher animals, we can see evolution actually happen in front of our eyes at very high speed as in the case of a virus adapting to its antidote. Evolutionary theory has come a long way, but the critics, and especially some philosophers have not updated their knowledge, and still go on criticising Darwin for what he said 150 years ago.

Although in a different context, physicist Stephen Hawkins laments about this slow pace of philosophers in his A Brief History of Time[18]: 'Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories.' Expressing similar sentiments about evolutionary theory, Dawkins laments that philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.[19]

So, like the aficionados of the Flat Earth Society, uninformed sceptics still go on asking questions that have already been settled. The ignorance about evolutionary theory is so common that even advanced thinkers evaluate Darwin only as a biologist, and besides raising invalid objections, insist that he has nothing to do with philosophy or the science of the mind whatsoever. This is a gross underestimation of Darwin's theory for it has changed the way we think about the world. Writing about the wide impact of Darwin's ideas in the introduction to the 1964 facsimile version of On The Origin of Species Ernst Mayr says: 'Yet few writers in the last 200 years have had so profound an impact on our thinking. This holds for logic, metaphysics, and ethics. It has taken 100 years to appreciate fully that Darwin's conceptual framework is, indeed, a new philosophical system.'[20]

How exactly has evolutionary theory changed our conceptual framework? As mentioned earlier it did away with teleology and goal. Aristotle had taught us that everything has a purpose, but Darwin postulated that evolution has no goal or purpose, though evolution is often linked with the idea of progress, and development towards particular goals. But these apparent tendencies are illusory from the evolutionary perspective. Instead of travelling towards a fixed goal, each species follows an evolutionary journey that has no set duration and no certain destination. Richard Dawkins[21] argues that the basic element of evolution, the gene is blind. It only knows its immediate survival.

But evolutionary theory itself seems to be evolving, and now some theorists are not only filling up the lacuna left by Darwin but also modifying his original postulates. For instance, John Bowlby believes that it is no longer a scientific heresy to say that organisms do have a goal or purpose. In Attachment and Loss, he shows that in talking about behaviour of living beings and also self-correcting machines like guided missiles, we have to take into account the age-old problem of purposiveness and the modern concept of feedback.

Purposiveness is the purpose for which a thing is made, and on the Aristotelian hypothesis, everything in this world had a purpose, even inanimate things. The special feature, Bowly explains, that enables an organism or a machine to behave in a purposive way to achieve a predetermined goal is called feedback. This is simply a process whereby the actual effects of performance are continuously reported back to a central regulating apparatus where they are compared with whatever initial interaction the machine was given; the machine's further action is then determined by the results of this comparison and the effects of its performance are thus brought ever closer to the initial instruction. The simplest form of control system is a regulator or a thermostat, the purpose of which is to maintain some condition constant.

Thus differing from other evolutionists on teleology, Bowlby asserts: 'At one time to attribute purposiveness to animals or to build a psychology of human behaviour on the concept of purposefulness was to declare oneself a vitalist and to be banned from the company of respectable scientists. The development of control systems of increasing sophistication, such as those that control a homing missile, has changed that. Today it is recognised that a machine incorporating feedback can be truly goal-directed. Thus it comes about that nowadays to attribute purposiveness to behaviour and to think if not teleologically, at least, teleonomically . . . is not only common sense, as it always was, but also good science.'[22]

Another major charge against evolutionary theory is that of biological or genetic determinism. From the recent success of the Genome Project and other developments, we learn that genes are related to behaviour, and how they work. This has led some to raise unwarranted fears about genetic determinism. Human nature is a very touchy subject, and James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, says, 'Passions inevitably run high when science threatens to unsettle or redefine our assumptions about human society and our sense of ourselves — our identity as a species, and our identities as individuals. What could be a more radical question than this: Does the way I am owe more to a sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs inherited from my parents, or to the experiences I've had ever since my father's sperm and mother's egg fused together many long years ago?[23]

Even the geneticists concede that genes only partially determine our behaviour, for they are the agents of nurture as well as nature. Experience is a huge part of a developing human brain, the human mind, and a human organism. We need to develop in a social world and get things in from the outside. It's enormously important to the development of human nature. But how much of it is nature and how much instinct, that actually depends on how we look at the problem and what we consider as nature and what as instinct. Darwin himself realised this when he said that 'some actions which at first performed consciously, have become through habit and association connected with reflex action, and are now so firmly fixed and inherited, that they are performed, even when not of the least use, as often as the same causes arise, which originally excited them in us through the volition'[24]. Thus, the boundary between nature and instinct is actually a blurred one.

The fear of genetic determinism arises because of misinformed reports and conclusions about it in the popular press. Theorists have tried to dispel these fears in recent literature, such as Gary Marcus's The Birth of the Mind[25] in which he says that almost everything that is written about genes in the popular press is misleading in one way or another. He argues that in order to understand the way genes shape behavioural traits, we must first abandon popular metaphors like blueprint and recipe. In blueprints he says there is a direct correspondence between the drawing and the building, this is not the case with genes and the cells and structures that make up an organism. If a blueprint is one per cent different from another one, then the building made from it differs by one per cent, but if a genome is just one per cent different from another, it gives rise to a totally different mental apparatus. Then, identical genomes do not make identical nervous systems, for instance the brains of identical twins are similar but are not identical, this applies to their minds as well.

Even if it were possible in theory to produce two exactly people with identical genetic and physical structure, they would soon develop differently because of the unique individual environment in which they would grow, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, which will be discussed in Chapter III.

Now we can consider environment. Emphasising the importance of environment in our development, Matt Ridley writes in Nature via Nurture: 'You can't describe human nature without it. But that process is itself genetic, in the sense that there are genes in there designed to get the experience out of the world and into the organism. In the human case you're going to have genes that set up systems for learning that are not going to be present in other animals, language being the classic example. Language is something that in every sense is a genetic instinct. There's no question that human beings, unless they're unlucky and have a genetic mutation, inherit a capacity for learning language. That capacity is simply not inherited in anything like the same degree by a chimpanzee or a dolphin or any other creature. But you don't inherit the language; you inherit the capacity for learning the language from the environment.'[26]

Then there are others who quietly accept that biology is destiny. As Stephen Jay Gould put it, 'If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change them either by will, education, or culture.'[27] This claim though looks justified is actually unwarranted and evolutionists have been trying to counter it for decades. In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins explains that people don't selfishly spread their genes, genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes try to make sure they get propagated in the next generation. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all but about health and lovers and children and friends.

In his paper Genetic Determinism and Gene Selectionism Dawkins says that human nervous systems are so complex that in practice we can forget about determinism and behave as if we had a free will. 'Neurons may be amplifiers of fundamentally indeterminate physical events; The only point I wish to make is that, whatever view one takes on the question of determinism, the insertion of the word 'genetic' is not going to make any difference. If you are a full-blooded determinist you will believe that all your actions are predetermined by physical causes in the past, and you may or may not also believe that you therefore cannot be held responsible for your sexual infidelities. But, be that as it may, what difference can it possibly make whether some of those physical causes are genetic? Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than "environmental" ones?'[28]

James D. Watson observes that this tendency to prefer explanations grounded in 'nurture' over ones rooted in 'nature' has served a useful social purpose in redressing generations of bigotry. Unfortunately, we have now cultivated too much of a good thing. The current epidemic of political correctness has delivered us to a moment when even the possibility of a genetic basis for difference is a hot potato: there is a fundamentally dishonest resistance to admitting the role our genes almost surely play in setting one individual apart from another.[29]

Conclusion

We discussed the basic principles of evolutionary psychology in this chapter. It was argued that although evolutionary theory is a biological one, its assumptions can be successfully used to explain the mental realm. The mind, like the biological organs of a creature is an evolutionary adaptation to help in survival and procreation. And just as every biological organ like hand, nose, eyes, which are designed for a specific purpose, the brain is also composed of highly specialised domain specific micro-circuits, each designed to solve a certain class of adaptive problems.

We saw that though the mind has domain specific tools to solve certain type of adaptive problems, we cannot activate all the tools at the same time. If we did that, they would cancel out each other's advantage. Not only minimal number of programmes have to be activated, but also the right programs ought to be used. When two or more problems arise, such as hunger and a dangerous predator, or even two or more matters of value, the mind ought to set its priorities right. In this, the mind needs a program to assist it, and emotions are such programs. They are among the most important allies in our survival, and this will be discussed in forthcoming chapters.

It was shown that evolutionary psychology accepts that we come into this world with some features that are innate. Some innate programs are closed, while others are open, that is, they can be shaped by learning. This way, the environment is given as much importance as innate programs. It was shown that explaining the mind on evolutionary terms does not reduce it to biology, rather it makes our understanding of it rich. And by understanding the workings of the mind, we could hope to make better use of it, and also learn to solve the problems that it might create.

But we must accept that in psychology, we cannot be very exact and precise in putting forward and testing assumptions as is the case with physics and chemistry. Actually even the so-called 'pure' sciences are not as exact as they claim to be. The problem with the sciences of life and mind is that right from birth, each organism grows in its own special environment, and is influenced by such diverse and abundant stimuli, that it is virtually impossible to go back into the past and point out the cause of present behaviour. 'If we were dealing with laboratory rats,' points out James D. Watson, 'we could conduct a set of simple experiments, involving breeding and rearing under specified uniform conditions. But, happily, humans are not rats, so illuminating data are hard to come by. . . . But a free society should not shrink from honest questions honestly asked; And what is critical is that the truths we discover are then applied only in ethical ways.'[30]

If human nature were like the material world, the whole experience of being human would be lost. We live and enjoy life because we feel we are individuals and not atomic particles going about in a fixed path. Imagine if all humans behaved in exactly the same predictable way. Life would lose all its charm and meaning. The essence of life is individuality, and this sense of individuality comes from our emotional profile which is unique to us. This is the theme of this thesis, which I hope to defend through the principles of evolutionary psychology.

[1] Robert L. Solso; Cognitive Psychology ; Pearson Education, 2001, p30

[2] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Oxford University Press 2005, p2

[3] Kaplan and Gangestad; Life History Theory and Evolutionary Psychology; David Buss, (Ed.); The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2005, p69

[4] Henry Plotkin; Evolution in Mind: An introduction to evolutionary psychology; Penguin Books 1998, pvii

[5] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Oxford University Press 1981, p49

[6] Cosmides and Tooby; Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions, in Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, M Jeannerette (Ed).; Handbook of Emotions, Second Ed; The Guildford Press 2000, p97

[7] Boyer and Barrett; Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology, in David Buss (Ed.); The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2005, p96

[8] Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind; Basic Books, 2004, p7

[9] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works; Penguin Books, p27

[10] Peter Carruthers, Chapter 15; Hitchcock, Christopher (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in philosophy of Science; Blackwell Publishing, p300

[13] S Langer; Mind: An Essay on Human Feelings; The John Hopkins Press 1967 (Quoted by Bowlby in Attachment and Loss, p106

[14] George Thomas White Patrick; Introduction to Philosophy; Surjeet Publications 1999; p121

[15] Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett; Human Evolutionary Psychology; Palgrave, p2

[16] George Thomas White Patrick; Introduction to Philosophy; Surjeet Publications 1999; p123

[17] Ernst Mayr's introduction to On the Origin of Species on Natural Selection (A Facsimile of the first edition published by Appleby and Co 1859) ; Harward University Press, 1964, p xi

[18] Stephen Hawkins; A Brief History of Time; Bantam Books, 1997, p184-85

[19] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Oxford University Press 2005, p1

[20] Ernst Mayr's introduction to On the Origin of Species on Natural Selection (A Facsimile of the first edition published by Appleby and Co 1859) ; Harward University Press, 1964, p xviii

[21]Richard Dawkins; The Selfish Gene; Oxford University Press 1976, p25

[22] John Bowlby; Attachment and Loss; PIMLICO; p41

[23] James Watson, (with Berry, Andrew); DNA: The Secrets of Life; Arrow Books, London, 2003, p393

[24] Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; D. Appleton and Company, 1905, p39

[25]Gary Marcus,; The Birth of the Mind; Basic Books, 2004, p5-7

[27] Quoted by Dawkins in Genetic Determinism and Gene Selectionism; Burley and Harris (Ed.); A Companion to Genethics; Blackwell Publishers; 2002, p254

[28] Richard Dawkins, Genetic Determinism and Gene Selectionism; Burley and Harris (Ed.); A Companion to Genethics; Blackwell Publishers; 2002, p254

[29] James Watson, (with Andrew Berry); DNA: The Secrets of Life; Arrow Books, London, 2003, p382

[30] James Watson, (with Andrew Berry); DNA: The Secrets of Life; Arrow Books, London, 2003, p394

Life, a never-ending celebration

2008-03-31T11:29:00.001-07:00

March 30, 2008

Kuldip Dhiman

Just Like That: Talks on Sufi Stories
By Osho, Penguin Books, India Price: Rs 295, Pages: 273

IN the early 1970s, the inimitable Rajneesh or Osho was approached by an organisation to speak on Sufism. Being conservative, they begged him to not say anything controversial. Rajneesh agreed, and he gave a series of discourses that left the listeners spellbound. He had shown unseen dimensions of Sufism.

Sufism is a mystic school of God lovers who do not concern themselves with knowledge. They know only love, an undying love of God in which they immerse themselves all the time.

Why love? Why not knowledge? Sufis would say that God can be known best through the heart and not the intellect. That is why the path to God realisation cannot be taught. If it were the question of intellect, the method of uniting with the ultimate truth could be taught, but since it is not in the domain of the intellect, it cannot be taught. Rajneesh says this does not mean it cannot be learnt. What does he mean? Why can't truth be taught? And without being taught, how can it be learnt?

Rajneesh says, 'Truth cannot be taught because words cannot convey it. Words are impotent. Truth is vast, tremendously vast, infinite. Words are very narrow. You cannot force truth into words, it is impossible. And how is one going to teach without words?'

If the truth cannot be taught, why do we see so many gurus and disciples? And what about the saying that without a guru we cannot know the ultimate truth? Rajneesh says that the secret is not in someone finding the right guru, rather if one becomes an able disciple, the right guru will find him. And in the company of the guru, nothing needs to be done, and no words need to be exchanged. The dialogue between the two takes place in silence. The teacher parts the teaching without saying or showing anything because this process is not like that of teaching physics, chemistry, or history. All that a disciple has to do is to show a readiness to learn, show a deep trust in the master, and wait patiently. This is because spiritual learning is not an experience. All experiences belong to the mind and body complex. In worldly experience, there is the person who experiences, and there is an object that is experienced. In the spiritual domain everything is utterly subjective, there remains neither the one who experiences nor the one that is experienced — only the experience remains.

In this lively book, Rajneesh, interlaces his discourses with interesting and highly meaningful Sufi stories, parables, jokes, and anecdotes. All of them show us that life is a cerebration, it is an 'ever-going' feast, but we have made it a problem. Rajneesh argues that life is a wonderful mystery, it is not a problem. Had it actually been a problem, philosophers could have solved it. But philosophers cannot solve it because life is not a mental puzzle that can be solved by logic, mathematics, or analysis. Scientists also cannot solve the mystery because they try to use the method of analysis and observation. The ultimate truth is not an object that can be studied in a laboratory. Artists are closer to life, as creativity is not guided by reason but emotion. Artists enjoy the beauty of nature, they try to capture the myriad colours of reality, but they too are not fully in tune with reality as they live on the mental plane.

The secret of religion is not in taming nature but flowing with it. Life is a never-ending mystery, says Rajneesh, don't waste time solving it, just live it. Religion means to live life, celebrate life, and enjoy every moment of it. This can only be done by going beyond the frontiers of the mind. Then all problems, all dualities, all conflicts disappear — just like that!

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080330/spectrum/books2.htm

Give up the Search and You will Find It - Rajneesh Osho

2008-03-30T08:22:00.001-07:00

December 12, 1999

by Kuldip Dhiman

Tantra: The Supreme Understanding by Osho. Full Circle, New Delhi. Pages 272. Price not mentioned.

Having become sick and tired of the intrigues of business life, a billionaire decides to give everything up and retire to the Himalayas. He goes from peak to peak in order to free himself of his misery. Time flies, and 10-years on in spite of chanting God's name endlessly and in spite of renouncing everything, he is still searching, he is still insecure, still restless, still suffering from insomnia; salvation is nowhere in sight.

Has sanyasa made any difference? Yes! Earlier he was a miserable businessman; now he is a miserable hermit. What has gone wrong here? The very process of liberating himself from the miseries of this world has got this wretched man more and more entangled in the net. Is there a better way out for him? Perhaps there is.

In the book "Tantra — The Supreme Understanding: Discourses on the tantric way of Tilopa's song of Mahamudra", Rajneesh tackles such issues in his inimitable down-to-earth style. This book, which should rank as one of his best, is supposedly based on the teachings of Tilopa, a Buddhist monk who left India and settled down in Tibet.

Mahamudra or moksha is like the illusive and mythical Shangri-La: everyone talks about it, but no one seems to know where it is and how to find it. Sometimes we wonder if it exists all. But what are we seeking and why? Because by becoming a seeker, aren't we merely widening the gulf between ourselves and the sought?

The solution is to give up the search. Mahamudra cannot be found; it has to be realised through self-awareness. "This is the deepest message," says Rajneesh, "of this whole song of Mahamudra: do not seek, just remain as you are, don't go anywhere else. Nobody ever reaches God, nobody can because you don't know the address. Where will you go? Where will you find the divine? There is no map, and there is no way, and there is nobody to say where he is. "No, nobody ever reaches God. It is always the reverse: God comes to you whenever you are ready, he knocks at you door; he seeks you whenever you are ready. And readiness is nothing but a receptivity. When you are completely receptive there is no ego; you become a hollow temple with nobody in it."

But what is awareness, and how many of us really want it? Over the millennia we have actually developed wonderful devices to avoid awareness, and that is because we are so afraid of ourselves. In order to escape from ourselves we have created concepts like morality, ethics, character and discipline. We are humble, polite, compassionate not because we are naturally so, but because we have programmed ourselves like a soldier. "Make a habit," Rajneesh observes, "of always saying the truth; make it a habit, then you need not be worried about it. Somebody asks, you will say the truth, out of habit — but out of habit a truth is dead".

The answer is not to try to be "moral" but to be "natural", because these are two diametrically opposite concepts. "A moral person is never natural, cannot be. If he feels angry he cannot be angry, because morality doesn't allow it. If he feels like loving he cannot be loving because morality is there. It is always according to morality that he acts; it is never according to his nature . . . . Remain loose, natural, aware, watching what is happening. By and by, you will see many things (anger, greed, lust, etc.) have simply disappeared, they don't happen anymore — and without making any effort on your part. You never tried to kill them and they have simply disappeared."

Because you soon realise that anger, greed, jealousy are not bad; they are just absurd. "Remember this valuation," Rajneesh continues, "In morality there is something good and something bad. In being natural there is something wise and something stupid. A man who is natural is wise, not good. A man who is not natural is stupid, not bad. There is nothing bad and nothing good, only wise things and foolish things. . . . There is nothing like sin and there is nothing like virtue — wisdom is all. If you want to call it virtue, call it virtue. And ignorance is there if you want to call it sin — that is the only sin."

Rajneesh later distinguishes between action and action-free work. One thing has to be understood here: there is a great difference between giving up action and becoming free of action. If you don't make this distinction, the giving up of action also becomes an activity, an obsession. "This is what has happened to your monks in the monasteries: dropping activity has become their obsession. They are continuously doing something to drop: prayer, meditation, yoga, this and that — now this is also activity. You cannot drop it in that way; it will come from the back door."

Once you are free from action, you realise that there was nothing actually lacking in you. Every moment of your life is complete, because when you feel complete you live spontaneously, the seeker in you becomes the sought. All sorrows, miseries disappear.

"This is the most fundamental thing in tantra," Rajneesh elaborates, "That it says that you are already perfect. No other vision says that. They say you have to achieve it; they say you have to go, you have to struggle, and you have to do many things and the path is arduous; and it is very very rarely that somebody reaches because the goal is very very distant; and for millions of lives one has to try, and then one reaches; perfection has to be achieved. Tantra says this is the reason why you are not achieving; Perfection has not to be achieved. It has to be simply realised that it is there."

This is a great book, an interesting book, like all other books by Rajneesh.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/1999/99dec12/book.htm#3