Monthly Archives: March 2021

“Indians – A Brief History Of A Civilization” By Namit Arora

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Book Review by Ruchira Paul

“The warrior like Aryan invaders from Central Asia swept over India and supplanted its older religious and linguistic traditions with their own due mostly to the absence of any meaningful resistance from the inhabitants of India’s western borders and central plains. The Aryans brought with them a proto Indo European language which later developed into Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scriptures and liturgy. They introduced the tradition of fire worship, a pantheon of gods very similar to that of the Greeks, the practice of burning their dead and Sati (burning the living widows of powerful men on the funeral pyre of their husband), the caste system and horses. The caste system most likely took root quickly in India because the light skinned invaders saw the darker skinned natives as an inferior class of humans. The original Aryan Vedic religion evolved to adopt and incorporate older indigenous gods such as Shiva and some powerful female gods who went on to become leading deities in the Hindu tradition. Despite the fundamentalist Hindu right’s claim that the Aryans and their language Sanskrit were entirely of local Indian origin, modern day linguistics and genetic studies convincingly point to an Aryan migration trail radiating east and west towards Persia, South Asia and Europe from a region in Central Asia.”

 Hindu-Muslim relations India have been studied and there is much to examine and contemplate especially in light of the rise in Hindu nationalism in present day India which describes the Muslim rule in India as an unmitigated disaster. In that context it is fair to ask why India did not go the way of Iran, another ancient Aryan civilization with an old established religion and a magnificent history of scholarship, art, architecture and warfare that converted almost entirely to Islam after the Arab invasion while India remained a majority Hindu entity throughout the almost 700 years of Muslim rule. (At the time of the Indian Independence in 1947, undivided India was about 25% Muslim)

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A vision for agriculture

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( A worth reading article on how farmers are reverting back to old healthy ways of raising livestock-f.sheikh)

We know how to replace toxic, intensive livestock raising with beautiful, efficient grasslands. Do we have the will?

It hit him about 1:30 on a Sunday morning last September, as he hurried to combine the last of the corn and beat the building thunderstorms: ‘Why am I killing myself to feed these cows? Why am I scraping and hauling their manure to the fields, milking three times a day – for a check that doesn’t cover the bills?’ Chatting at the local coffee shop, Zeke and his buddies discussed the pros and cons of managed grazing as an alternative. Most of them dismissed it as ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘good for the hippies but not real farmers’. But Zeke had heard stories of it saving a farm or two, so he figured: ‘What do I have to lose? I’m not payin’ the bills this way!’

Progress has manifested itself in odd ways in agriculture. Grass farmers say: ‘Animals have legs, and plants have roots, for a reason.’ Allowing cows out to harvest their own feed and spread their own manure is the most profitable means of producing meat and milk. But, somehow, agricultural science has encouraged farmers to mount a treadmill of increasing yields of milk or meat by increasing the amount of production per unit input. This means reliance on three intensive practices: first, genetic alteration for higher plant feed and animal yields; second, the application of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and growth compounds; and third, concentrating livestock in barns and feedlots where they can be fed a carefully balanced, high-priced diet, and their excreta is collected and redistributed elsewhere. These strategies were wildly successful with respect to increasing yields. But they have come with two general downsides that are inescapable: first, the profits of the system accrue mainly to the suppliers of seed, pesticides, fertilisers and genetics; and second, the costs of the system accrue to all of society in the form of devastating environmental degradation.

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