Sangom Sir,
Most of your posts are objective, but they are at times more critical of Hindus and brahmins than others. The Indian society as a whole failed the Indian state to rise to the challenges of the times.
Shri Narayanan,
I am a smartha brahmin and supposed to be so starting from my Gotra Rishi. Even so, it has been my nature to say what I sincerely feel is the truth and that has brought lot of criticisms until one or the other of my observations benefitted any of my firends/relatives when they change their attitude towards me.
(1) During your youth you must have seen the "Victoria" horse carriages in Bombay as also the jatkA-vandis and mATTu vandis in native Kerala and Tamilnadu. None of the jatka-wallahs thought of providing the comfort of cushioned seats etc. to their customers in the interiors of the southern states.
You may recall that many of our old people would not travel even by a single-bullock cart; it was considered inauspicious. They will take only a 'pulpAy' for their seat because anything touched or used by the low-caste cart driver was unwelcome and, in any case, our old brahmins would not even drink water until they got down from the bullock cart, took bath and changed their clothes because of the 'aSuddhaM' caused by sitting in that cart. In such a situation supply of a cushion would definitely have been an object of abomination; so which cart driver would have exercised his brains about a cushion?
So, you see, the brahministic culture was such that it throttled almost all innovations.
(2) We read about "Gears & Pullys" in our fifth standard general science books (around 1960s), but geared bi-cycles came into common use only by 2010. Same thing about shock absorbers or pneumatic tyres.
Bi-cycle itself was the Sahib's innovation and, for quite some decades brahmins looked at it as something unholy. Its plain leather seat was again 'aSuddha' even when I learned cycling and so I had to come home through the agraharam back door and take a bath before entering inside the house! If the cycle had a stuffed seat with a fabric cover, then this aSuddham multiplied very many times in intensity!
What we had in villuvaNDis and even horse carts of those days were primitive kind of wrought iron shock absorbers only I think (correct me if I am wrong.) but it was for the cart driver or the bullock/horse to think of any innovations about the shock absorbers because the passengers were not much bothered about comfort.
I am not sure whether pneumatic tyres would have been suitable for the untarred country roads we had back in those days; any sudden puncture might have broken the neck of the bullock/horse. But we could have attached, by nailing, tyre tread on to the wooden wheels and this sort of innovation was introduced, here and there, by around the late 1950's. Blacksmiths were not interested in modifying the iron girdle put over the wooden wheel and used to demand huge charges.
(3) We all talk about ahimsa being the "original" idea of Indians and debate whether the thought originally came from Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism. But none of us contemplated much on the cruelty of nailing horse-shoes on horses and oxen. If human beings can wear shoes without "nailing" the shoes on to their feet, such a possibility should exist for fitting horse shoes too, I feel.
Nailing horse shoes or bullock shoes is still the accepted method. I am told that the nailing itself, if done carefully, does not cause any pain because the hoof is insensitive. I feel even in western countries this is even now the accepted method. A shoe made of leather will also tear apart after the horse takes a few steps, that is the kind of force exerted.
(4) None of the Indians, including IIT-ians and doctrates in physics did even basic innovations on common things like the above.
(5) You, me, your father, my father et all paid income-tax and various other taxes to subsidize the education of the brilliant minds at IITs, who couldnt even bring about basic improvement in the quality of life to Indians. Instead the said IITs produced bridge players and anarchists like Arvind Kejriwal.
(6) Education during the congress rule was mostly mass production units of clerical staffs and nothing more.
(7) And we had communists opposing them, who wound do mass agitations against introduction of computers, but will not teach their comrades to total up five numbers correctly.
These are all known, and possibly unchallengeable facts. What is relevant is why our IITians even did not innovate at all. I feel it has to do with our age-old culture. Brahmins are accustomed to a living without much hard physical work like tilling the soil, climbing the coconut or palm trees, digging wells or ponds, managing an "Ettam" all day long till sunset, for irrigating his farmlands, and so on. Brahmins had the mumbo jumbo of exotic sounding mantras with which they could convince the rest of the people that they were in possession of some unknown, mysterious and divine kinds of powers in themselves. And it was the brahmins who monopolised study as an avocation. Hence, there was no innovativeness left.
Many of these things/thoughts I did tell my father when I was a kid, but I was silenced by these words "aamaam, nee periya C V Raman. Vaaya moodindu padi porum". I would believe the same situation would have prevailed in most of average Indian homes and there were no takers for innovations.
So we were actively encouraged to keep the "study part" distinct from its application part.
We must recall that at the time of Independence, brahmins were on the verge of losing out on every front and the only sure thing before them was english education, a clerical job and income therefrom. Families also used to be large, with 6 or more siblings and so the father, the only earning member, had somehow to see his children settled in life. Ours was not the kind of parent-child system which existed abroad; parents were rather over protective and overly concerned about their sons, especially. Hence you might have heard those discouraging statements. But that is immaterial today.
BTW, so much is being made about Sundar Pichai, etc. What innovation/s did he orginally make? Was he also not a glorified employee in whom the promoters of the company developed trust?