Silver Lining

"Every 

               cloud 

                            has 

                                    a 

                                        silver

                                                     lining."

Brilliance !!!

Mumbai Indians finally won their first game of IPL 2024.

I am not supporting Mumbai Indians this year. Reason is simple, they did not handle the succession planning well. Rohit Sharma moved out as captain when he himself didn't know. Thats the height of miscommunication.

I understand what Harsha Bhogle is trying to say in all his blogs and on Cricbuzz, so many times other places :), that one wonders why is he so vehemently ignoring the fact that succession was not handled well. I love Mr Bhogle as a cricket commentator but his more and more desperate YouTube posts, he has started reminding me of Ellsworth M. Toohey :). 

Anyways, this blog post is not about Mr Bhogle, who I again think is one of the best cricket commentators in the world today. This blog post is about Mumbai Indians. I always supported Mumbai Indians ever since IPL started because of the great Sachin Tendulkar, who was the first captain. Then stayed with them during Ricky Ponting era and then Rohit Sharma. Rohit Sharma won them all their trophies and it's no secret that he is one big part of why Mumbai Indians is one of the richest franchises.

Anyways, they won their first game in 2024. And that's the problem with brilliance. People like Rohit Sharma, Jaspreet Bhumrah - they will try and do their best even if they might not succeed all the time. And now with Surya Kumar Yadav joining the squad, the list is now long. So three brilliant people trying to get Mumbai Indians to win.

Even if this is the case, I believe in Hardik Pandya. I believe that eventually, Hardik's captaincy will overshadow the combined brilliance of Rohit, Bhumrah and SKY :). 

So, that's where my money is - on Hardik Pandya.

4. Gyan Mimansa or Epistemology of the Darshans

I think before we get into the details of various philosophies, it is very important to understand the epistemology or the theory of knowledge or also called in Sanskrit - Gyan Mimansa. Gyan Mimansa deals with the process of acquisition of knowledge. How does the specific philosophy define its methods of acquisition of knowledge. In Indian Philosophy, these methods are called pramaan or pramana or in English, evidence. The evidences are known methods of acquiring knowledge. In India philosophy, there are six fundamental pramaan or evidences - each of the darshans, either aligns to 1 or more out of these six.

The top three where there is a general consensus are pratakshya pramaan (perception), anumaan pramaan (inference) and shabd pramaan (testimony). The other three are unmaan pramaan (comparison), anupalabdhi pramaan (non-perception) and arthapatti pramaan (postulation, deduction).

Pratakshya pramaan is about interacting with the objects directly using the 5 senses of touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing. Basically believe anything you can experience and nothing else. This also means not believing what one has not experienced. In itself, it can be limited and confusing. 

For e.g., if I haven’t been out of my country, I will, with the above logic not believe that other countries exist, or at night, I might think of a rope as a snake and react to the rope as I react to a snake. So pratakshya pramaan in itself might not be always very complete, but it is definitely the most powerful of the pramaans. 

Anumaan pramaan, as the name suggests deals with the drawing an inference. For e.g. if I wake up in the morning and see that the ground outside is wet, there are some dark clouds and some places are water clogged, I can infer safely that it might have rained some time before I woke up. Another simple example, is that if I see light and smoke coming from someplace, it is fair to infer that there might be fire burning causing this. Anumaan pramaan is considered to be the second bedrock of the evidences for gaining knowledge.

Shabd pramaan or testimony is another of the top three which most darshans have agreed are important way to acquire knowledge. Testimony means taking the word of experts and learning from them. They can be exerts in their fields, teachers, books, other scripts like Buddha scriptures or Vedas. This also means that based on the above example for praktshya pramaan, if one has not visited any other country, they can listen about it from someone who has been there and as someone who has superior knowledge, can be a great way to acquire knowledge.

The first three are more or less self-explanatory and very logical to follow. There are three more which requires some thinking and creativity. 

Upmaan pramaan is gaining knowledge by comparing, simile or as it is called in Sanskrit, upma. For people who have read Kalidas, they will know that Kalidas is considered to be superlative when it comes to Upma, it’s said Upma Kalidasasya, means “simile should be like Kalidas writes”. 

The process of knowledge gaining here is my comparison to a known object and drawing parallels to the unknown. For e.g. if someone wants a landmark for reaching a place, one can describe - “there is a building there of similar colour like the ping building in our locality, but that other building is much smaller, only 4 storeys compared to 20 storeys building in our locality, and like there pink building in our locality, it also has external staircase on the side”. Now this description can help the person find the landmark where they want to go as they can start with first finding that building which has been described.

The comparison to something known provides the guidance to find the right knowledge.

Anupalabdhi pramaan is something which is conspicuous by not being there. The cricket matches during pandemic had no crowds, lack of crowds during a T20 match provides knowledge of the seriousness of the pandemic.

The last, but not the least is the Arthapatti pramaan. Arthapatti deals with deduction or derivation of information based on data. If we say that all stars generate heat and the Sun is a star, then it can be deduced that the Sun must be generating heat as well. Another example here is that if a person is awake all night as they work at night, then it's a safe deduction that they might be catching up on their sleep during the day or if Prakash is the son of Dr Banerjee but Dr Banerjee is not Prakash’s father, then its fair to say that Dr Banerjee must be Prakash’s mother.

Various darshans accept Arthapatti as a valid way of gaining knowledge.

We will go in more details on pramaan when we get in details of each of the darshans but just summarising here a bit.

• According to Sankhya, Yog and Vedanta (some sub-schools from Vedanta), acknowledge their epistemology to be through Pratakshya, Anumaan and Shabd pramaans.
• Even Nyaya believes the means of acquiring knowledge through Pratakshya, Anumaan, Shabd pramaan, but adds Upmaan or comparison as the fourth means of acquiring knowledge.
• Vaisheshik darshan acknowledges only two means of acquiring knowledge through Pratakshya and Anumaan. Although they also acknowledge in the Vedic teachings and word of Vedas. Buddhist philosophy has similar belief when it comes to pramaans as Vaisheshik darshan, and although they do not believe in the word of vedas, they believe in buddhist scriptures and what has been written by Gautam Buddha and other gurus.
• Adwait Vedanta and Mimansa darshans acknowledge all six pramaans for gaining knowledge.
• There is only one darshan which believes in only one pramaan. That darshan is Charwaka darshan and they believe only in pratakshya pramaan.
• Jain darshan has a very details epistemology but it is slightly different than the above, we will discuss it when we get into those details.

3. History of Bhartiya Darshan

The earliest teachings where Bhartiya darshan starts are the Vedas. There are four vedas, Rig Ved - considered to be the oldest written text in the world. Yajur Ved, Sam Ved and Atharva Ved.

Each vedas are sub-divided in four parts, Samhitas - mantras and rituals to invoke the divine, Aranyak - Aranya means van or forest, so this section contains methods of living a good life for people living in the forest. The third section is called the Brahmin, or methods of ceremonies, karm-kand for various rituals. It is also said that the people who were doing the ceremonies and rituals eventually took the name Brahmin from this section of Vedas. The last section of Vedas, which is the end of Vedas - Vedant, or where Vedas reach their completeness, are called the Upnishads. Upnishads, as a word means sitting next to a Guru or teacher and get the teachings or discuss the fundamental questions.

It’s important to understand the context here, that the written language took time to develop, and so in India culture, the teachings were initially imparted verbally. Hence the Upnishad gets its word. Upnishads are the first reference to what we call deeper philosophy. The other three sections of Vedas mostly concern on rituals and methodologies for ceremonies.

It’s safe to say though, that Indian philosophy starts with the Vedas and the Upnishads.

So who wrote Vedas? There are various thought processes around this. Some philosophers believe that Vedas are written by God. Some who do not believe in the existence of God believe that Vedas were not even written by God, but they are the language of the nature. Nature cannot really write Vedas, and so there would be people who collected all the teachings and put them in a structure. The credit of consolidating the teachings and knowledge of Vedas is broadly given to Ved Vyas. 

Ved Vyas has been a super human who has been credited with consolidating Vedas, writing eighteen Puranas, writing the Mahabharat and hence the Geeta. This seems to be a lot of work to be done in one lifetime. Swami Vivekanand believes, that Ved Vyas might not be one person but like Parshuram, more of an institution of many people who have worked on these topics over time. Some scholars also believe that Badarayan, who wrote Brahmasutra was also none other but Ved Vyas.

The teachings of Vedas and the Upnishads continues for at least a thousand years before the society started deteriorating into more ritualistic ways and left the thoughtfulness and reasoning. The process of bali or sacrifice had taken over the society and new thinkers around sixth century BC had started realising that the movement away from tark or reasoning.

This is where the philosophers divided themselves into two branches, one who believe in teachings or vedas or aastik, and those who do not - nastik.

While most of us have heard of words aastik and nastik, the most commonly known meanings of these words now a days are theist and atheist. The words aastik and nastik are not used in this context in Darshan shastras. The broad level meaning of these words, as used in the Darshan are  “orthodox” and “heterodox” respectively.

Scholars have a broad level agreement that there are nine India darshans, six aastik and three nastik darshans. The aastik darshans can be further sub-divided in three parts, 2 darshans in each part. This is because they mostly go together, one is the concept and other is the implementation of that concept. The non-vedic or nastik darshans also are very deep, at least two of them, Bodh  and Jain darshan. 

Vedic or Aastik darshans -

• Sankhya and Yog
• Nyaya and Vaisheshik; and 
• Vedant and Mimansa

Non-vedic or Nastik darshans -

• Bodh darshan
• Jain
• Charvak

We will get into the details of these darshans in the next sections.

I would just like to discuss the difference between philosophy, science and dharma or religion. Dharma means various things in India, the most commonly used meanings of dharma are not religion, but is duty or essence. For example, Rashtra-dharma means duty towards the nation, swadharma means duty towards self. The other usage is - Agni ka dharma hai, jalaana, which means, “the essence of fire is to burn”. 

There is also a third usage, which was used in the Geeta - 

Yada yada hi dharmasya, glanirbhawati Bharat,

Abhuthanam-dharmasya, tadatmanam shrijanmyaham 

This means -

“Lord Krishna tells Arjun - Whenever dharma will be maligned and adharma takes over the world, I will take avatar to reestablish dharma.”

The word dharma which is being used in this context is for “righteousness” or correctness.

While there are many more meanings of the dharma, these three were most used in India. When Britishers came, other than looting India of its wealth, they also wanted to spread Christianity and so they wanted a Sanskrit word to map to their word “religion”, that’s when dharma as a word started getting used for religion also.

Anyways, the difference between religion, philosophy and science in a nutshell is that religion provides simple answers to complicated questions, these answers might not be correct but simple enough for general people to understand. Religion is a belief based system. Philosophy thinks about the complicated problems and comes up with reasoning to come up with answers, these are not simple and not easy to understand by most people. The reasoning from different scholars for the same question might be different and they all might reach different conclusions. Science uses empirical evidences to come up with answers to questions, scientists do experiments, uses mathematical models to come up with solutions to questions. This also means that some things might be right but cannot be proven and hence is not part of science yet. 

I think philosophy starts with a thought and the scholars bake the thoughts with reasoning or tark, Overtime, some of the things get proven with the help of experiments and become part of science, the rest remains part of meta-physics or philosophy. Religion almost runs in parallel to the stream of philosophy and science as a belief based system.

The important thing is to understand though is that one cannot really read or understand philosophy by ignoring sciences. Today’s philosophy is tomorrow’s physics and today’s physics is yesterday’s philosophy. 

2. Introduction to Bhartiya Darshan

Bhartiya darshan is considered to be the oldest. They say that when basic needs of survival and food were fulfilled, human being started thinking of deeper issues concerning them. 

In the west and rest of the world, the earliest evidence of philosophy is found around 6th century BC. Thales of Greece is considered to be one of the first philosophers. Pythagoras, for the mathematics enthusiasts, was also in this same century. 

In 5th century BC, some of the most influential philosophers were Heraclitus, who saw the world as a constantly in flux, changing. He said “No person can step into a river twice”. This is very similar to Bhuddha’s philosophy of kshnabhangwaad, or khsnikwaad. Buddha also said the same sentence as mentioned above which was said by Heraclitus. Other important philosophers for the 5th century in west were Socrates and Democritus. Many of the texts available from Socrates’ time are in a dialogue form. Many of them with his disciple, Plato, himself a distinguished philosopher. Socrates gave the concept of dialogue or argument to prove a theory. This is the first time we see problem solving by shasthrarth in western philosophy rather than by belief system. 

Democritus was the person who has conceptualised “atom” for the first time. He said that the world is formed by much smaller objects which are called atoms and its the collection of atoms which form the large objects. The more scientific definition of atom was later given by Niels Bohr in early 20th century.

As we come towards 4th century, the most prominent philosophers in western world are of course Plato, Socrates’ prodigy and Aristotle. .

The idea here is not to talk about western philosophy as part of this paper as that’s a topic in its own right. So I will stop here to draw some parallels from for timelines. During the 6th century BC, India had Bhuddha, Mahavir - Jain philosophy. If you see, both the Bodh and Jain philosophy were trying to counter the deterioration of society who were focusing on more karm-kand part of Vedic and Upanishadic philosophies, and not on the thought (chintan) part. Vedic time is set to be around a thousand years earlier of Bhuddha or Bhagwaan Mahavir. Some people believe that Vedas are more than ten thousand years old and further research might prove vedas to be much older than they are believed to be, but for the purpose of this paper, I will put Vedic time to be around 1700 BC - 1500 BC. Also to mention that Jain philosophy itself is very old as Mahavir was considered to be the 24th tirthanker, so there were 23 more tirthankars before him.

Darshan comes from Sanskrit word “darsh”, which means “to see”. What to see? - is the question, the darshans mostly try and answer the fundamental questions like where did we come from? What is the ultimate reality? Whether it is deterministic or is there free will? There are various paths suggested, complimentary or opposing on how to develop the skills to see and to understand.

Philosophy, on the other hand literally means “love of knowledge”. 

For the purpose of this paper, we will use darshan and philosophy interchangeably.

1. Bhartiya Darshan - Indian Philosophy - Context

Bhartiya darshan, loosely interpreted as Indian philosophy. Though philosophy, which means love of knowledge is different from darshan, which means “to see”. It’s about working so as to be able to see. To see what? Any answers to the most fundamental questions like who am I? What is my purpose etc etc. For the purpose of this paper, I will use darshan and philosophy interchangeably.

This is an attempt to gather in one place what all I have read through various sources.

As this is more of a collection of my learnings, it might have a tendency to be slightly unstructured and hyperlinked. Please bear with me for this.

I will tag all my blogs on philosophy with #BhartiyaDarshan and #IndianPhilosophy.

Kyon Daren zindagi !!

क्यों डरें की ज़िन्दगी में क्या होगा। 

कुछ ना होगा तो तजुर्बा होगा। 

                        - जावेद अख्तर साहब 

My blog is still alive !!!

 I thought Google had stopped the service and I never paid attention to this site after 2020. 

But someone just sent me another link for blogspot and realised that it’s still alive. 

Well, i thought this is good as Wordpress and I don’t see eye to eye much. :). 

So I will be posting a bit here and there on this going forward. 

Happy blogging!!!

Grapevine - Restaurant at HSR Layour, Bangalore

Went to Grapevine once. Tushar suggested that we do a get together there with some office colleagues. Now, this place being in HSR layout makes it very accessible.

The first thing which catches the eye is amazing ambiance. Very nicely done up this place is. Simple set-up, very informal and warm. Small yellow lights all around.

Food also is quite good. Mostly Mediterranean cuisine. Different Types of hummus - all quite good.

Interesting things -

- They serve wine
- Have books lying around you can read
- Have board games one can play
- Have Rubik's cube - 3x3 :)

And most important -
- They make the BEST Cheesecake. See for yourself..

Highly Recommended...

The Red Moon

Uncertain times...

Uncertain times, not moving quick enough in the right direction. I guess its just wait and watch for sometime...

The Business Walk

Starry and I have been consistently walking everyday around 6 am in morning for last 5 years. There would be less than ten days where we might not have gone for the walk over this span. Now for the past two and a half years, Bonnie has also joined us. 

The current walk if I analyse, not that I HAVE to, but I have to anyways :), has style 9 stages. The purpose is simple, Starry and Bonnie to do their business by the time we back :). Hence the business walk :). 

So the stages -  

- The beginning - of course means beginning of walk 

- The meeting - this is where we meet Ramu and Geeta and give them some food. Geeta passed away a few weeks back. May she RIP

- The build up - the buildup towards the business. Smells, the works :).  

- The anticipation - next steps, now the business is close and we are walking and walking 

The Heaven's Gate - not anther stage but this is where we come to a point in the walk where we see an opening and light gushing down from a tree illuminating everything which is dark otherwise due to shadow of the tree.

- The desperation - more than a kilometer done and still nothing. Walk faster... 

- The conducting of business - success at last. Starry is conducting his business. Relief :)

- The march back - walking back towards home, typically a brisk walk 

- The re-entry - re-entry into the orbit. Again back inside the complex. The road crossing and what not 

- The end - and we sit down. And half sleep for 10-15 mins :)