Coupling Physical & Social Sciences - An ancient art but not to be attempted by dull-witted moderns !!!!!

Here is a book-review, giving us an idea of its contents.  The question raised in the book (highlighted in yellow) is fallacious !!! (to put it mildly). The paragraphs occurring before the question,  are on track. But the question itself and the  offered solutions  to the question raised, are preposterous, judging the contents.  

Consider the following sentence from the review. (red color text)  “Our economic activities are becoming information-dependent and many products and technologies process only information and so consume less energy.” Our own experiences belies this sentence !!! Just try to recollect the number of computers and printers we (only ourselves) had changed/thrown-out/exchanged in the last say ten years. Obsolescence  is  the  twin-brother of technology, and generates lot of wastage. From the tenor of the review, we are lead to conclude that the authors  have not fully understood what entropy really is and thus this book is bound to mislead.

A brief take on this subject  ie Entropy,  is given in my blog-page http://msradha.blogspot.in/2013/04/caution-men-at-work-about-karma.html

The book review :- 

 The real price of development N. BALASUBRAMANIAN

Many sins are committed in the name of development. We are becoming aware that much of what were hailed as achievements over the past few centuries were actually “sordid boons.” Curiously, the words ecology and economics have a common root, okios , which means ‘habitat’ in ancient Greek. But dialogues between economists and ecologists/environmentalists on how to achieve development with the least incomprehension of, and violence to, habitat have been of recent origin.

The strain imposed by development has been measured using a number of Indicators. In its report released on September 27, 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal — oceans have warmed, snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen and greenhouse gases have increased — and there is a 95 per cent chance it is all manmade. The living planet index based on a number of indicators of biodiversity has fallen in the poorer countries. Materials Footprint is increasing by 6 per cent for every 10 per cent increase in GDP. Earth Overshoot Day is the day every year when we have consumed natural resources at a rate beyond what our planet can replenish and have produced more waste than can be reabsorbed. In 1970 it fell on December 29. Advanced by two days every year, it fell on August 20 in 2013.

Physical and social sciences

Physical and social sciences together must address the problems of growth and its implications.  To the growing community of scholars who are equally at home in both sciences, the book’s emphasis on “the role of entropy law of thermodynamics in making the basic assumptions regarding a development model” is encouraging. Frederic Soddy (not mentioned in the book), a Nobel-prize winning chemist, was the first to introduce thermodynamics into economics. Working with Rutherford, he split the atom and was the first to produce and name isotopes. Aware of the destructive power he unleashed, he wanted to improve the economic system, which was not in a position to act on scientific advances. So he shifted his career to economics and came up with radical ideas in the 1920s. He was derided by economists and none of them quoted him for 70 years, but he was rediscovered recently.

The book makes the point that development increases entropy, and asks: “Can growth of human knowledge and technological progress reverse the effects of entropy law and delink economic growth and rise of entropy?”

The role of knowledge and human values in directing development cannot be over-emphasised. Our economic activities are becoming information-dependent and many products and technologies process only information and so consume less energy. The internet changed the way we consume energy. To what extent can we uncouple economic growth from energy growth? How soon can we have a grid of wind, solar, geothermal and tidal energy, and next-generation nuclear fission and fusion, and energy from nuclear waste?  Advanced diesel engines with low compression ratio and the consequent benefits resulting in much higher fuel efficiency, and electric transport, can prove game- changers. We can prospect for materials in space colonies. These involve uncertainties and we must also get better at technology forecasting. 

Clean technologies with minimal reduction in productivity are the concern of all countries: a rise of 2.5 per cent in global temperature will reduce agricultural productivity by 6 per cent in America but by 38 per cent in India.

The author covers comprehensively 14 interrelated topics relevant to the title of the book. A background in mathematics is needed to understand the concept of sustainable development and the ideas of Partha Dasgupta and Nardhaus. There is even a mathematical model to choose an optimum family size (my next wedding present!). The data in the book refer mostly to India, although a few tables draw information from the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and the UN.

Among some minor blemishes, the description of photosynthesis is sketchy. In the accompanying chemical equation — the only equation in the book — a chemical formula is written without saying it means glucose. It is hoped that the next edition will have more recent data in the tables. In the current edition, some of the data go back to the 1990s.

The book will appeal to researchers in the area of development economics and policy analysts /makers and succeed as a textbook . Hopefully, it will stir the conscience of a new generation.

( N. Balasubramanian is Advisor, Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, Bangalore )

Link to the review  http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-bookreview/the-real-price-of-development/article5283383.ece

If Indians try to read and understand the Bible independant of the West..............

If Asians, especially Indians read and try to understand the Bible, independent of the West, what are the likely results.? Will it suffer the fate of Buddhism ?

Here is a book review, which appeared in todays (08/10/2013) of The Hindu. The Book title is “The Bible and

Asia, From the Pre-Christian Era to the Post-colonial Age: R.S.Sugritharajah;  and Published by the HARVARD UNIVERSITY  PRESS, Massachusetts. $ 29.95.

We have no reason to doubt the reviewer Shri K.R.A Narasiah.

In this review I am primarily interested in the condition of India before the machine age and colonialization. In India, of that age, work/labour/karma/production- were organized on the basis of the ‘Karma Theory’. And India was prosperous and rich. The sentences highlighted in green give credence to such a view. India  was the sink of  world’s  gold and silver bullion. Indian manufactures, made using simple tools and ‘contraptions’ were sought across the world. And consequently India was rich. (Apart from this book, statistics are available on the net proving the fact that India was a rich country, and the situation prevalent at that time made this richness distributive.).

The sentences marked in yellow, suggests to us, that our approach to our own culture and religion were negatively influenced by a comprador class, who had contributed to shaping the official education in India. These academicians, gave us wrong ideas about ourselves. And it is still continuing !!! To win the hearts and minds back, now is a Herculean task.

The sentences marked in Red , shows the direct intrusion of  the religion of India, in the Bible. Two possibilities exist for the Indian presence in the Bible. In those ancient days, when the intellect had not waned, knowledge & ideas were never written down, but transmitted orally. This tradition had continued for a long time, but then there was a slow deterioration in communication, the waning of the intellect being a primary cause. When knowledge had to traverse a far distance from the epicenter(India) it got distorted. Alternately we may also consider, that all over the globe, Vedic religion/knowledge  was prevalent, and it slowly started receding  from the various parts, with a trace existing only in India, due to the efforts of the Brahmins in preserving the same .  Supplementary to what is in the book-review, are two blog-postings which show the Indian influence in the Bible.

(1)    http://msradha.blogspot.in/2013/06/the-bible-work-karma-god-in-bible.html

(2)   http://msradha.blogspot.in/2013/04/pauls-st-apologia-for-objectionable.html

Prosperity of a country and its religion are important, because many consider it interrelated. Before the advent of machines, it had been going good for India.  Now ? Should we abandon our ancestral religion ? According to the Protestants, God chooses those, whom  he  favours with riches. http://msradha.blogspot.in/2013/06/the-protestant-work-ethic-and-spirit-of.html But many failed to see the corollary to this predisposition by God. Maybe God himself failed to anticipate what is coming. God’s place has been usurped by riches.

 The Bible according to Asia - Book review  by K.R.A. Narasiah

When the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was written in the mid-first century, the West thought all beyond the Mediterranean was Red Sea. Likewise geographically it was difficult to describe Asia as a continent. The author starts from here and points out that the first group that took the Bible to the East was that of the Nestorian or the Church of the East. Asia was a different region as per Jews’ noting and by the time of New Testament the geography is seen differently. While earlier Asia was portrayed as a place of riches, in the portrayal of the New Testament, Asia is not so appealing. In fact, colonialism created a collaborating comprador class, which subjected itself to the Westerners and conveyed a different meaning to both the people and religion of the West.

The book highlights the three features of this pre-colonial reception of the Bible in the East. First, the Bible did not come from a superior civilisation; the people that brought it were mostly on the fringes of the society and the East was already part of a superior civilisation. Secondly the Bible remained un-translated and therefore not understood. Thirdly, it was not the aggressive instrument as handled by the colonialists, who came much later.

Hinduism & Buddhism

In the seven chapters of the book, the author Sugirtharajah, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham, takes the reader through various stages of the reception of the Bible by the societies of the East. He notes that the Christian writings were affected by Merchandise and Asian Fiction, and material contributed by the important people of the countries practising Hinduism and Buddhism. He also deals with intellectual-converted Christians and their reaction to Bible.

The book on the whole makes an interesting study, not just of the religion but of the people who were in direct contact through religious practices, of other regions and their reactions. He asserts, “No culture is pure; it draws on a variety of sources. Such a hermeneutical to-and-fro does not allow one religious tradition to have final say or claim monopoly of a thought or story.”

John Zephaniah Holwell of the East India Company who acted as a temporary Governor of Bengal, was one of the survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and is quoted by the author. In Howell’s Interesting Historical Events. . it is stated that the ancient religion of Brahma was the most ancient and consequently most pure of religions. In fact Holwell appears to have claimed his Chartah Bhade Shastah could act as a catalyst to reform Christianity

.

Books of Joshuas, Judges, Samuel and Kings date several centuries before Christ, and from their time to the first century, India was seen as a rich country with fascinating people and material. In fact some of the fables and personalities from the religious books of India have found their way into the scriptures. Later it became a fertile ground for evangelisation long before colonialism made it a prime target for conversion.

The author deals with the subject dispassionately, and with a remarkable detachment; nowhere he seems to have taken sides with the people he is dealing with, a point which makes the book an excellent read.

The author notes, in the Hebrew literature, one of the seven princes of Persia and Media is called Carshena that could be Krishna of the Hindus. The author feels that the possibility of the presence of Hindu deities cannot be ruled out if the geopolitical condition of the time is considered. That shows that there was not only exchange of merchandise but deities themselves, says the author. He convincingly argues that the extension of Persian Empire to India and the presence of a Hindu colony in West Asia point to the possibility of mixture of the deities long before the common era as in Syria the Vedic Gods were mentioned. The recently discovered inscriptions in Quaseir al-Qadim, near the Red Sea in Brahmi characters refer to two Tamil names. That there was a strong presence of Indians in the area is proved. Several stories told in the Genesis denote the influence of India.

The findings by the University of Southampton during excavations between 1999 and 2003 at Quaseir al Qadim proved this place to be Myos Hormos as mentioned in the Periplus and together with its sister port Bernice articulated trade between Rome and India, especially Muziris .

Tamil influence

In the Book of Kings, mention is made of Ophir and since some Sanskrit names occur in the text, according to Max Muller, Ophir could have been a seaport in India. Ptolemy places it in the mouth of the Indus. Again mention of Almugwood could according to the author be sandalwood from south India. The trade from India to Rome was much more than from Rome to India.

History records that Roman historian Pliny lamented how India was draining Rome of Gold. During the reign of Augustus Romans finding it difficult to pay the Indians tried to send counterfeit coins to India; but as Srinivasa Iyengar notes, “Tamils proved to be too shrewd, for the silly experiment was not repeated.”

Sugirtharajah says that there is a possibility that the Song of Solomon could have been influenced by Tamil poetry Ahananuru. He quotes Chaim Rabin, an Israeli professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages saying it was “written … by someone … and there became acquainted with Tamil poetry.”

In Chapter three, the views of three Asians, Raja Rammohun Roy, J. C. Kumarappa and Hong Xiuquan are analysed. Roy was proficient not only in Sanskrit, but in Persian, Arabic and in Biblical languages. The Baptist missionary who confronted him Joshua Marshman was no match for him. The author concludes that while Marshman was asserting the power of the conqueror, Roy’s was well founded logically.

The importance, the author says, is in the cultural context — the colonial milieu in which the controversy took place. Similarly the confrontation between J. C. Kumarappa a Christian himself and the English Anglican bishop of Calcutta Foss Westcott, in the context of Gandhian movement, makes for excellent reading.

This book is a stimulating work; it explores the complex relationship between the Bible of the colonialists and the conquered. It goes far beyond the conventional studies provided so far, which were mostly one-sided and looked from the colonial point of view. In this work he packs a lot of information such as the complex relationship between the Bible and the colonial enterprise examining in depth some areas that have been overlooked in earlier studies.

The author concludes with a firm conviction that Asian biblical interpretation has been informed by this ‘West’ and has evolved in dialogue with it. Asian biblical interpreters should break away from such a stranglehold now, however, and should initiate and broker new conversations that encourage people to look at scripture anew and transform their understanding.

( K.R.A. Narasiah is a marine engineer who writes fiction and historical works )

Link: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-bookreview/the-bible-according-to-asia/article5211904.ece

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