Well, I was thinking about the brazenness of the charltans in India who go by various titles: baba, Sri Sri, etc.
Let's take one in point — the Yoga guy, Rama Dev. His real name is Ram Kishen Yadav but that's besides the point.
What is outrageous is what he offers: yoga can cure everything. I suppose he is not the first one who discovered the virtues of yoga. Others have spread yoga out in the West as well during the sixties when people in the West were looking for an alternate model of living.
What makes me angry is to see these third-rate illiterate folks go on criticizing the ill-effects of science, the dangers of science, while all the while benefiting from science in a hundred different ways.
This guy has become rather famous in a short time (not to mention the multiple Sri guy) due to the availability of the electronic media. People of India are rather lazy to indulge in really deep and hard intellectual pursuits like reading books and so they like to switch on the TV. And you have these charltans peddling nonsense on various channels and their ideas tend to reinforce the idiotic notions that Indians already have inherited from their ancestors. So, the stock of these jokers has risen.
So, you have the hilarious circumstance of a joker like Ramadev criticising science while not being afraid to use airplanes for his journeys or using microphones to teach his stupid lessons.
It's of course fundamentally the idiocy of the people that lends legitimacy to these charlatan jokers.
It's not fair that such an illiterate person should be allowed to question the validity of scientific principles in whatever domain. It's easy of course to point to the limitations of science in terms of its inability to cure certain illnesses: AIDS, or some forms of cancer, etc.
Of course, people still ultimately die. Science has not yet made man immortal. Neither has any of these jokers.
But it's astonishingly stupid of people just to ignore all the triumphs of science, all the gadgets that have made our lives so much easier, all the diseases that ARE curable thanks to medical science, all the miraculous technologies from cell phones to rocket science.
For a better critique of these shallow god men, here's an article:
http://nirmukta.com/2010/04/22/yogi-in-politics-a-rationalists-thoughts-on-baba-ramdev/
Let's take one in point — the Yoga guy, Rama Dev. His real name is Ram Kishen Yadav but that's besides the point.
What is outrageous is what he offers: yoga can cure everything. I suppose he is not the first one who discovered the virtues of yoga. Others have spread yoga out in the West as well during the sixties when people in the West were looking for an alternate model of living.
What makes me angry is to see these third-rate illiterate folks go on criticizing the ill-effects of science, the dangers of science, while all the while benefiting from science in a hundred different ways.
This guy has become rather famous in a short time (not to mention the multiple Sri guy) due to the availability of the electronic media. People of India are rather lazy to indulge in really deep and hard intellectual pursuits like reading books and so they like to switch on the TV. And you have these charltans peddling nonsense on various channels and their ideas tend to reinforce the idiotic notions that Indians already have inherited from their ancestors. So, the stock of these jokers has risen.
So, you have the hilarious circumstance of a joker like Ramadev criticising science while not being afraid to use airplanes for his journeys or using microphones to teach his stupid lessons.
It's of course fundamentally the idiocy of the people that lends legitimacy to these charlatan jokers.
It's not fair that such an illiterate person should be allowed to question the validity of scientific principles in whatever domain. It's easy of course to point to the limitations of science in terms of its inability to cure certain illnesses: AIDS, or some forms of cancer, etc.
Of course, people still ultimately die. Science has not yet made man immortal. Neither has any of these jokers.
But it's astonishingly stupid of people just to ignore all the triumphs of science, all the gadgets that have made our lives so much easier, all the diseases that ARE curable thanks to medical science, all the miraculous technologies from cell phones to rocket science.
For a better critique of these shallow god men, here's an article:
http://nirmukta.com/2010/04/22/yogi-in-politics-a-rationalists-thoughts-on-baba-ramdev/
Comments
Post a Comment
Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts ...