I have been egged by many people to write the next post, so I shall attempt to scribble something :-p
This ones for Lakshmi and Mr. SS (not Neta and not Chin!!) :-)
Of late, have been having a lot of discussions about a lot of things..but one thing that has surfaced a lot is India- it's past and to a slightly lesser extent, the Hindu religion! One interesting point that Chimney brought up and which I liked is: There is no Indian mythology - it is all Indian history!!! The stories from Ramayan and Mahabharat, about Indian Gods etc, which the West likes to call mythology, are actual events that happened and not some myth! Another thing that is largely unknown is the existence of civilization even before the Aryans came to India! The thing people are not aware of is that a lot of these facts were distorted by the British since they, probably could not accept the fact that Indians could have an older civilization than what the Brits knew and that it was much more advanced than those found elsewhere in the world.
We Indians are largely to be blamed for this as well, since we are not proud of our history and have hardly invested time and resources to find and provide conclusive proofs for these things. IIRC, there was recently some evidence found proving the existence of the stone bridge mentioned in the Ramayana! But how many people know about it? We have evidence of Harappa and Mohenjodaro civilizations, but it is not taught properly even in India, forget elsewhere in the world! Chimney even gave an example of what is taught about Indian history in the US (unfortunately I don't remember exactly what it was :-p), but it was something vague and inaccurate!
There are a lot of points which have come up, but it would take an entire day to list those :-p
But the idea behind this post is to get people thinking and where possible educate the rest about facts! We are doing our part by educating our non-Indian friends to the best of our ability :-)
And yes, the other topic I mentioned, Hindu religion, am not delving into details since that can quickly snow-ball into an argument about religions :-)
