The Subjective Stance

Anybody who is working in Indian academia will sooner or later encounter a retired or about to retire scientist who has discovered, at the end of a career devoted to roundworms or turbulence or whatever, that the truths of quantum mechanics or particle physics are to be found in the Veda's or Vedanta. Not suprisingly, the Wikipedia article on Vedanta has a whole section devoted to this topic and has more references for Vedanta and Physics than Vedanta per se. The pattern is remarkably invariant: it doesnt matter whether the scientist has worked in solid state mechanics or mathematical modeling, the locus of interest in science and spirituality is always Quantum Mechanics or Particle Physics and the Indian Philosophical system of choice is almost always Advaita Vedanta, which is a particular form of Vedanta philosophy. The former predeliction can be partly explained by the kind of physicists who have taken interest in Indian Philosophy: Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm, who were bo...

Those of you who have read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games will know that it has its share of Hindi words in it, including an amazing variety of swear words. Interestingly, these words are presented as is , without italics , without any effective translation in the text and without a glossary at the end. I think it is the first time that a major Indian English novel has been presented without any apologies to the expected Western readership. Now, you may think that this unapologetic Indianism is a cute affectation on Chandra's part, and may be it is that too, but I also think that it is a sign of growing confidence amongst Indians that they can engage with modernity on their own terms. In fact, I am going to come out and declare that the match is over and the visiting team has won, i.e., (a) India, as a culture, has swallowed and digested western modernity. (b) From now on, the most innovative philosophical, intellectual and cultural trends are increasingly going to come from pla...

I am back in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England, just like the narrator in Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English August") for a week. It feels about the same as when I left the place four months ago to go to India, but I had an intense experience of culture shock in the London airport. All those gleaming aisles and fancy stores and nicely laid out boards indicating where to go to get food or catch your flight - it seemed too ordered, too rational to me. Everything was there for a purpose, there was a higher power that had made a plan for our stay in Heathrow and we humans either had to conform to that higher power or suffer in silence. Nothing in India is ever organized in such a Cartesian grid, where everything has a place (or to be more precise, where nothing is out of place). Its in London that I realized that I have gotten used to the organic structure of Bangalore in the last four months. Was it Galbraith who said that its a functioning anarchy? I think that's wha...

The Hindu reports : "Bangalore: H.T. Sangliana, Bharatiya Janata Party MP, on Saturday announced the setting up of an `Anti-Corruption Front' to fight corruption, which, he said, was eroding public life and democracy. The former Commissioner of Police told presspersons here that the suspended Assistant Commissioner of Police Sangram Singh, an accused in the stamp paper racket, who had been released on bail, had joined the Front. Mr. Singh was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the stamp paper racket. " Ummmmm..... if you were starting an anti-corruption front, wouldn't you want to recruit someone else as your first candidate?

I was talking to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad about various issues in the embodiment and enaction of knowledge. As we all know, western philosophy has a hard time acknowledging that knowledge is embodied - read this insightful if somewhat bloated book by Lakoff and Johnson to get a cognitive science critique of classical western approaches to knowledge. Anyway, I am not going to gripe about Plato et. al. this time. Ram and I agreed that in the Indian traditions embodiment is quite well accepted - in fact it is enshrined in the pedagogical process itself, for we say that without a Guru, there is no hope for the seeker to get knowledge. Unlike the modern person (including me), who can just pick up a book and try to learn Advaita or Nyaya or whatever, the traditional student would have been forced to study with a Pandit. Of course, even a book is embodied, but its not the same as sitting, discussing and arguing with a qualified teacher. Be that as it may, one could say that the Indian tradit...

I have been talking to my friend, Sushumna, about the differences between Indian and Western (religious, literary etc) traditions, from the point of view of anthropology, which led me naturally to the question "to what extent are cultural differences cognitive differences?" Traditionally, in the west, this question of cognitive difference is discussed in terms of the Whorfian, "Language influences Thought" paradigm, which basically says the Indians (or Eskimos) are different from Westerners because Indians believe in A while Westerners believe in B, and that Indians have belief A because their languages have some particularity that biases them towards believing A while westerners have belief B because their languages have some particularity that biases them towards believing B . But, as S.N Balagangadhara points out in his study of Indian religious traditions, The Heathen in His Blindness , cultural differences can cut deeper - in fact they are not diferences betwe...