Ajay Devgn would be so proud, his chest would become blouse if he knew about the house that meets, adjourns and meets again to engage in the fruitless exercise of writing India’s destiny. Because our destiny lies in the stars. Man may have reached the moon and may know all about stars but never as much as the stars know about us.
An honourable member of our Lok Sabha thumped the desk when he said astrology is the No 1 science. Wipe that smirk off your face because he did not make it up. He read it in an astrology book. You can doubt him, but can you doubt a book?
Ramesh Pokhriyal informed the Lok Sabha about how Indians conducted a nuclear test lakhs of years before Indira Gandhi. "Today we are talking about nuclear tests. Lakhs of years ago, sage Kanad had conducted a nuclear test. Our knowledge and science do not lack anything," he said with his chest expanding to 55 inches in diameter and stopping there, owing to chest expansion restrictions in his party. By the way, this rishi Kanad is not a canard. He actually lived in the 2nd century BC. He died and evaporated with mushroom cloud as a result of the first nuclear explosion.
Our forefathers were definitely far ahead of westerners, in writing fantastic books about technology. All the mathematics of the world is dwarfed by Vedic maths. You hear of cargo flights today. Lord Hanuman flew with a mountain in his hand from here to Sri Lanka 10,000 years ago. In fact, most Indians could fly lakhs of years before Wright Brothers wrongly appropriated the technology. The Ganga was brought to earth from Shiva’s locks by a man called Bhagirath, a grand-old from the Raghuvanshi family of Ayodhya. BJP is reviving the plan to interlink rivers because the technology to create rivers was lost in the nuclear explosion that wiped out all over knowledge, skills and science.
Nuclear radiation is one of the most dangerous things and it can affect generations. The radiation affected the thinking faculties of a generation of Indians and continues to warp some honourable members of parliament. It made Pokhriyal a poet and forced him to adopt a pen name: Nishank. Doubtless. The man doesn’t doubt anything he reads. He is not into questioning literature. You give him Harry Potter and tomorrow he would inform the Lok Sabha about how young school students in the United Kingdom use the broom to fly. “Our prime minister uses it to clean India, Aam Aadmi Party uses it as a symbol but pupils of Hogwarts fly brooms. Vroom!” he would say, conscious of his shrinking chest.
You know where his belief comes from. He became the chief minister of Uttarakhand by accident. For an average speaker and below-average poet, this was an achievement he couldn’t explain. In ancient times, cavemen blamed it on God whenever they couldn’t explain something because their brains had not evolved to understand the universe. So when lightning struck, they said God’s angry. Much later when we understood the ways of nature, we got to know that the flash you see is God clicking your photo because you are wet. Nishank couldn’t convince himself that he could become chief minister, so he blamed it on the stars. And to really believe he was eligible for the post, he blamed it on specific stars. His stars.
But you can’t blame everything on God and Nishank when our prime minister believes Indians pioneered plastic surgery and genetic science before plastic came into being or genetics was a subject. He referred to Lord Ganesha getting an elephant trunk and the birth of Karna.
According to the holy books, Lord Ganesha was guarding the door when his mother was taking a bath. Lord Shiva arrived and he asked him not to enter the house. Shiva, being the angry man he was, beheaded him. When Parvati told him that the little boy was their son, Shiva brought Ganesha’s body back to life by surgically planting a baby elephant’s head. According to Nishank: "It was actually a surgery. The science available to us is not available elsewhere in the world… science or knowledge to transplant a severed head existed only in India."
There’s one problem here. We are what we think and we think from our heads. So when our head is planted on some other body, the head acquires the body, not the other way round. But please stop thinking scientifically or logically because we are supposed to think mythologically. Gods could do anything and Lord Shiva is the biggest God in the pantheon.
One could always ask LK Advani but contrary to popular belief, I don’t think he’s that ancient. I would rather go by authentic books. Karna was conceived because the Sun God impregnated Kunti in a makeshift genetic lab. Or fertility clinic of old days. The Sun not only provides us with light and energy but also children. Please perform a surya namaskar before reading the next paragraph.
I grew up in Bihar, where people love discussing current affairs over there at the tea stall. In the days of the jungle raj, things were worse. The state of affairs was so bad, we would start talking about how glorious our history was. The discussion would veer to facts like Bihar gave India its first president. Then we would go back further into the annals of history to dig out gems like GT Road, first republic on earth, the largest university, Buddha, Mahavir, Arthshastra, Aryabhatta and, of course, Karna, the first IVF baby.
Later I learnt that we Biharis had nothing but our past to hold on to. The present was all goons and guns without glory. The future was dark, like its villages in the night. Both present and future had nothing pleasant to offer that could go with the kadak tea. So we always relied on history and seamlessly crossed over to mythology to feel good about it. Those were the achchhe din. Bharat sone ki chidiya tha. Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti. Then I read Ghaus Khwamkhwah’s Deccani couplet.
Apne desh mein kyan ki mitti sona-chandi kab ugli ji, kaay ku jhooti baatan kar rae, kuchh bhi nahin hai kya bhi nahin hai.
This is the best time India has ever had. We are a thriving democracy with a vibrant economy. India is a knowledge powerhouse like it has never been. We are a confident of going far and competing with the best in the world. These are the most achche din and this government needs to focus on making it better for us as Prime Minister Modi has promised. Our present and future is not at all bleak so as to force us to rely on some glorious period in the past. Period.
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