The Swinging Sixties

The wild cosmic dance slowed down its whirling.  The stars and the moon snapped back into their places.  The earth returned to its orbit.  The attack of vertigo ended.

For those who have not experienced it vertigo is merely a word.  Perhaps the name of a forgotten film or a medical diagnosis.  But to those hapless creatures who are whirled around its little finger like a toy it is apocalypse. 

Why is the swirling dizziness so frightening?  The answer is simple.  Lack of stability.  We don’t value it till it is lost.  The stability does not have to be real.  Mother earth which is spinning like a top affords us a virtual stability like no other object in the universe.  And yet its value is realized only during those calamitous moments of an earthquake.

Then why don’t we just sit on our backsides and enjoy the stability?  The evolution provides the answer.  The moment man became a biped he lost all claims to a stable gait and was forever condemned to walk, run and fall and thus was set upon the long road to progress.  The unstable posture was an evolutionary choice.  A man can always crawl on all fours if need be but who has ever seen a goat running on two hind legs?  That is why the goat eats grass and we eat goats. 

Even so man has always sought stability in every walk of life.  This tempers the natural adventurous streak in humans and prevents needless destruction. As we graduate from the thrill seeking teenage to the more sedate thirties we abandon the motorcycle for the far stabler cars.   No one wants to stay in an absolutely still pond of water where every ripple is anticipated with a thrill.  But nor are we comfortable on the stormy high seas in a canoe.  Most of us would rather be on a river cruise with its gentle rocking and the musical lapping of the water on the side.  Those who achieve it have made it in their life.

Countries like Saudi Arabia are prosperous not only because of the oil wealth but the extraordinary political stability.  Iraq with nearly the same amount of oil is wallowing in misery.  Neither model of governance is particularly appetizing.  The controlled chaos of the Western democracies is far more appealing.  The current results of the Indian elections might nudge us towards that happy mean.

Do I want a return of the vertigo? No way.  I will not dare ride a roller coaster ever but nor do I want the boring arm chair.  I am now heading for the garden swing.

Haily Dalvi

6^th July 2014

Innovativeness in Indians

Is the ability to innovate racially determined?  This is a very loaded question which only the very bold will dare to ask.  We pride ourselves in our technological prowess especially in the IT sector.  But do we have any really innovative products or processes to boast about?  What there is appears to be incremental improvement on existing products, perhaps done in a cost effective way.  But there is not a single path breaking invention that can be cited.  This has been so for the past several centuries perhaps longer.
It is commonly believed that only a small proportion of of our billion plus population is educated and hence the pool from which the inventions arise is small.  This is simply not true.  We have an extremely large pool of 'educated ' people.  Better facilities and conducive environment is also cited as another excuse for the superior ability of the western culture to produce invention after invention of really revolutionary magnitude.  But the same civilization has produced results in far more adverse conditions.
Quite a few of the inventions and the discoveries have been made by persons with little education and even lesser means.

We had the advantage of western and specifically English education for over a century.  It is often said that the British wanted to produce clerks for the Raj and hence gave us poor education.  I have not seen any proof of that.  The British students learnt the same things that our forefathers learnt. Even learning by rote which is supposed to kill initiative and imagination was followed in the British public schools.  They may have changed the system now but the major inventions of the nineteenth century still took place when the old system was in place.
Japan is an advanced nation and carries the tag of an honorary western country.  But is it really innovative?  Its strength lies in borrowing other peoples' ideas and improving on them and delivering a better finished product.  They certainly did not suffer from Western colonization and do not have an excuse of foreign exploitation etc.
African continent too is barren as far as ideas are concerned.  It was the cradle of mankind.  Yet very little progress was seen there.  It was not isolated from the world. North Africa was in touch with the advanced civilizations throughout history.
Some examples like the invention of zero will be cited to prove our innovativeness.  But compared to our population the number is too small, close to the famous zero.  Even the populations of Brahmins and the so called upper castes was not small.  Hence there were enough numbers from which a decent number of geniuses should have sprung up.
I hope I am  wrong in the above assessment.  I welcome a few budding geniuses from you to prove me wrong.  I will be the happiest person then.