The Secret Behind ‘India’

The culture of the ancient Egyptian civilization does not exist any more!!

The Sumerian civilization does not exist any more

The Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Incas, Aztecs, none of these ancient civilizations exist today..

Even the Chinese is a Communist country today with great destruction of its Buddhist culture by the communist forces..

What exists and survives and thrives even today in the world is the ancient Indian civilization. The same ancient vedic chants are sung by the priests in the temples of India even today, which used to be sung thousands of years ago. The largest portion of the Indian population are the direct descendants of this ancient vedic culture and whose values are preserved and carried by generations even today.

Mark Twain once said India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.

Yet, India at the same time is a land of diversity where people of all religion, language and culture live.

What is the secret behind this?

The answer lies in the way the ancient vedic culture functions. Sarve Jana Sukhino Bhavantu, say the vedas, which means May all people live happily. Ekam Sat, Vipra Bahuda Vadanti say the vedas meaning God is one, learned scholars call him with different names, so no problem whether you call the God – Jesus or Allah or Shiva or Buddha or with any other name!

The very essence of this culture is that it never considers people of other culture or race or religion as enemies or competitors. All humans are equal in the eyes of the vedic culture. There is no distinction made based on race, color, creed or religion. Vasudaiva Kutumbakam say the vedas meaning whole world is a family!

 This essence of vedic culture has created in India a society which neither gets destroyed by any external influences or invading cultures, nor does it destroy the incoming culture or people. It is neither submissive nor destructive, instead it gives its own Indian touch to all the incoming influences and absorbs them into its own culture. The Parsis came to India, Buddhism was born in India, Sikhism was born in India, Chrisitianity entered India, even when Muslim rulers invaded India in the north (even though Islam arrived to India much earlier in the south via Kerala), the aggressiveness had to calm down and got absorbed into the Indian soil with its own Indian touch. Even Christianity has been absorbed with an Indian touch which is quite visible in places like Velankani.

India never rejected any incoming forces, no matter how cruel or aggressive they might have been, nor did it ever try to destroy them, instead based on its all humans are equal culture, India absorbed them all like a mother who does not differentiate between her children. For mother India, it is vasudaiva kutumbakam, the whole world is her family, and all are welcome into her arms.

This I believe is the greatest secret behind the survival of the Indian civilization, and is also the reason behind the great diversity in its land. A mini world exits in India. Even today the millions of Bangladeshi and Tibetian refugees happily live in India.

I will leave you now with these wonderful quotes about India from across the globe.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked. - Mark Twain

In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth. but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing. - Apollonius Tyanaeus, Greek Thinker and Traveller 1st Century AD

Many of the advances in the sciences that we consider today to have been made in Europe were in fact made in India centuries ago. – Grant Duff, British Historian

India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages. India was the mother of our philosophy, of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in Christianity of self-government and democracy. In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all – Will Durant, American Historian

In religion, India is the only millionaire . The One land that all men desire to see and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined – Mark Twain

If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India . – French scholar Romain Rolland

And finally one of my favorite from one of my favorite personality

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