“Great Minds on India”
Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao
Metro India News Paper (14-09-2016)
Recently,
during my visit to United States of America, I had been to Houston for three
weeks. During my stay there among others I met Dr Murali Ahobila who presented
me the book “Great Minds on India” edited by him. It
is written by Salil Gewali, a post graduate in English Literature from Meghalaya state. Salil started his career as a freelancer
in the late 1980’s. His articles and letters appeared in several local and
national newspapers and are read with much fear and admiration. Salil Gewali
rose to fame for this research-based book. It has also been translated into
Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Nepali. Murali
gave the Telugu copy also.
“Great
minds on India” speaks volumes about author’s concerns for the country and its
culture and values. He shows immense amount of nationalist approach, patriotism
and a deep reverence for the intellectual prowess of the ancient literature and
their authors. For his intellectual refinement, Salil Gewali gives credit to
the ancient scriptures such as Vedas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita besides
the works of western scholars like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Emerson, Carl
Sagan, Alan Watts and Aldus Huxley. He says great minds like Voltaire, T.S.
Eliot, Friedrich Hegel, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, Emerson, Thoreau, Erwin
Schrodinger, Mark Twain and so on had drawn sufficient intellectual nourishment
from Indian ancient literature, the facts which are hardly known to the general
masses in India.
Murali Ahobila is a former National Research
Council Scientist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Murali also worked as scientist at
the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston. Murali a product of Andhra University who received Doctorate from the Sagar
University Madhya Pradesh conducted research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and Bhabha Atomic
Research Center (BARC), specializing in geochemistry and Cosmo chemistry. Professor Roman Schmitt of Oregon State
University impressed by Murali’s thesis offered him a place in his laboratory
to conduct the lunar sample study which he accepted and joined in 1975. This
gave him a unique opportunity to study the lunar samples collected by Apollo
(USA) and Lunar (USSR) missions and contributing to our understanding of the
origin and evolution of Moon!
Dr. Murali in 1984 received the US National Research Council (NRC) Senior
Associate Ship (American Academy of Sciences) Award. This award was based on
his single page proposal that he can decipher the causative factors for the
sudden extinction of Dinosaurs on our planet. He worked in NASA Johnson Space
Center and at the Lunar and Planetary Institute to conduct these studies and
proved that an asteroid impact on our planet 65 million years ago caused the
Dinosaur extinction on our planet.
While working in Lunar Base Research Team at Lamar University to study
the volatile inventory of the lunar samples, Murali submitted a detailed report
(Helium-3 content of the lunar soil as the future energy source for mankind) to
NASA. As part of Space Science and Technology Education Program (SSTEP) Murali built a mobile Planetary Rover Unit and
the Mission Control Room facilities with audiovisual and communication link-up
between the two referred to as the Planetary Rover Unit (PRU). Murali has the
distinction of collaborating with scientists from different countries and
guiding a number of students. He is the author and coauthor of more than 100
publications in international journals, apart from a number of unpublished BARC
and NASA reports to his credit. He received numerous awards and recognitions
for his research/scholastic accomplishments and contributions to improve the
science and math skills of the school students in USA.
Three patches that were flown over five million miles during the first
mission of Texas Sat aboard space shuttle Endeavour on STS-69 were presented to
Dr Murali in recognition to his support for the Lamar University experiment
that flew with the mission by Jim Jordan Director Lamar University Earth and
Space Resources Laboratory in 1995.
Education enrichment award by the same university was also given in
1993. The Lunar landing education
committee honored him in 1994 for his dedication and volunteer spirit in
supporting the silver anniversary of the lunar landing and in 1969.
The book Great Minds on India is a compilation of valuable quotes from
a cross section of all time great people and celebrated thinkers drawn from all
over the world. They include among others: Celebrated American born British
Poet, author of Waste land, philosopher and critic of the twentieth century and
who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948; Fredrick Hegel the
greatest German philosopher and writer; William Wordsworth one of the greatest
poets, thinkers and leaders of the romantic movement in England and who was
honored as Britain’s Poet Laureate for seven years; Ralph Waldo Emerson great
American author, essayist and known for leading Transcendentalist movement of
the mid nineteenth century; Mark Twain celebrated prolific American humorist, satirist
and writer; 1922 Physics Nobel Prize winner and exponent of atomic structure
and quantum mechanics Niels Bohr; famous German philosopher, writer and
philologist and considered to be one of the foremost Sanskrit Scholars of his
times Max Muller; eminent prolific English novelist, journalist, sociologist
and philosopher HG Wells; note English novelist Aldus Huxley, German Nobel
Laureate and the greatest scientist of all times Albert Einstein etc.
All these celebrated thinkers and intellectual giants talk of ancient
Indian wisdom and the time tested teachings of our seers. To quote from some of
them: “Indian philosophers’ subtleties make most of the great European
philosophers look like school boys” (TS Eliot); “Effervescence of myths and
legends, religions and philosophies, music and dances and the different styles
of architecture helped India to be more creative in history than any other
nation” (Hegel); “The Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal
compensation, unfathomable power and unbroken peace…the avatars of Brahman will
presently be the text-books of natural history” (Emerson); “India is the land
of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of
legend, great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive
materials in the history of man are treasured up in India” (Mark Twain); “I go
into the Upanishads to ask questions” (Niels Bohr); “The conception of the
world as deduced from the Veda and chiefly from the Upanishads is indeed
astounding” (Max Muller); “In Hinduism tolerance is not simply a matter of
policy but an article of faith” (HG Wells); “The Bhagavad Gita is the most
systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind”
(Aldus Huxley) and “We owe a lot to the Indians who taught us how to count
without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made” (Albert
Einstein)
As written in the foreword by former education minister Meghalaya Manas
Chaudhuri it is a universally acknowledged fact that Vedas are the oldest known
human documents in terms of religion, philosophy and literature. The quotes of
the celebrities as recorded in the book should be an eye opener to all those
who criticize Indian Ancient thought process, philosophy, Hinduism, Brahmanism,
Vedas, Upanishads etc. End
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