“India is like a donkey carrying a sack of gold on its back. The donkey does not know what it is carrying but is content to go along with the load on its back”

An old saying still worthy to quote.

Indians keep aloof as if they do not know anything about their rich and solid culture background and the asset upon which they build their dwelling roofs. The democratic secular government of India provides its children the most advanced setup of education best available in the world. As soon as they complete the study and receive the certificate, they seek a job outside India. ‘My son is a software engineer in Canada… my son-in-law is a scientist with NASA…” goes on the boastful comments of the great fathers in India. The motive of this migration is simply financial security and the ‘so called’ NRI status. By inculcating the former type of comments, it is etched in the Indian minds is that, to be with India is something substandard. Getting a green card is the most blissful thing in life.

Anything foreign is superior, in the Indian mindset. India is having redundant intelligence in her kids which is being drained towards the West, pining to have a financial dignity. Actually, India is suffering from brain drain. This causes severe loss to the nation, both structurally and functionally. India has no manpower assets even though it has nurtured many. The new generation, along with the support of their previous generation, rates the country as second or third. They are being pursued by the apparitions of the Yankee status co. Those who are hemmed in the mother country are being treated as secondary citizens having the sky line limited to Kashmir or Kanayakumari. The pep talks of the VJs in the foreign channel which is copied to the Indian version, press them to dream the lands abroad. Indians are being tortured both mentally and physically, there. But nobody complains it, only to hide their prejudice. The recent reports from Australia unearth some incidents of it. Here Indians color their hair brown, but they are always treated as black haired and brown skinned, all over the world.

When such deplorable inferences are being rampant now, let us see what the scholars of the globe conferred upon India, what they felt and said about its unprecedented and multifarious self being. It is worthy to keep in mind.

Dr.Arnold Toynbee, British historian

“It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self destruction of the human race…. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way – Emperor Asoka’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of non-violence and Shri Ramakrishna’s testimony to the harmony of religions. Here we have an attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together into a single family – and, in the Atomic age, this is the only alternative to destroying ourselves.”

Romain Rolland – French Nobel Laureate

“ If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India. For more than 30 centuries the tree of vision with all its thousand branches and their million twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay……India has a strange genius for converting what it borrows and assimilating it.”

Earnest Binfield Havell – British writer and Art administrator

“In India religion is hardly a dogma, but working hypothesis of human conduct, adapted to different stages of spiritual development and different conditions of life.”

Paul Jacob Deussen – German orientalist

(He even Sanskritised his name to ‘Deva-Sena’, as a mark of his admiration for Hinduism)

“The great Upanishads are deep, still mountain tarns, fed from pure waters of the everlasting snows, lit by clear sunshine, or by night mirroring the high serenity of the stars… On the tree of Indian Wisdom there is no fairer flower than Upanishads and no finer fruit than the Vedanta Philosophy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer – German Philosopher

(He called Sanskrit literature as ‘the greatest gift of the century’)

“In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. They have been the solace of my life. They will be the solace of my death…. Upanishad teaching is the fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom.”

Will Durant – American Philosopher

“Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States and twenty times the size of Great Britain; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohen-jo-daro 2900BC or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman, and Tagore: faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads, eight centuries before Christ, to Sankara, eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel Prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Asoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect places by the score for Moghul kings and queens – this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.”

Max Muller – German Indologist

“Whoever cares for the historical growth of our language, that is, of our thoughts, whoever cares for the first intelligible development of religion and mythology, whoever cares for the first foundation of what in later times we call the Sciences of astronomy, metronomy, grammar and etymology, whoever cares for the first intimations of philosophical thought, for the first attempts at regulating family life, village life, and state life, as founded on religion, ceremonial tradition and contract must in future pay the same attention to the literature of the Vedic period as to the literature of Greece, Rome and Germany.”

“The mythology of the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Assyrians is wholly founded on the Hindu mythology. The poetry of Homer is founded on the mythology of Vedas and without Vedas the science of mythology would have remained a mere guess work and without a safe basis.

The corner stone of Christian ethics ‘Do unto others as thou wouldst they should do unto thee’ is nothing more than the teaching of the great Yajnavalkya, who says:” it is not our hermitage, still less the color of skin, that produces virtue; virtue must be practiced. Therefore, let no one do to others what he would not have done to himself.”

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