Picture: Holy Mount Kailash
Gravity wobble puts 1 lb on you
An interesting science news item appeared in London newspapers several years ago. It said that anyone wants to lose weight should travel to India.
Read it verbatim from London Metro News paper:
“If you want to lose weight without dieting, take a trip to India. A new map of earth shows that is where the force of gravity is weakest, so objects are lighter. It means you would weigh one percent less there—about 1.5 pound for an average person. The bad news is Britain is one of the places where the gravitational pull is strongest, so people appear to be relatively weighty.
The findings are presented in a new map, prepared to help NASA plan a five year satellite mission to measure the effects of gravity. It shows the planet is not spherical; it is lumpy, slightly flattened at the poles and bulges around the equator.
A fourteen stone man standing on top of Mount Cayambe, a 19,000 foot peak on the equator in Ecuador would be 2 pounds lighter than if he was standing on North Pole. The density of the ground also makes a difference.”
When I read the news item, I wondered whether this had got any connection to our spiritual inclination. So far no scientific experiment is done to determine this. But Bhagavatham and other Puranas say that Devas wanted to take birth in India. Great Tamil poet Bharathyar says that this is the place where Devas live and saints rush to live (Ref. Jaya Jaya Bhavani….. poem).
John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) says (page 117, Shakti and Shakta,1918),
“India remains still the most important country on earth for the student of religion. In India we meet with all forms of religious thought and feeling which we find on earth, and that not only at different times but also all together even today. Here we find the most primitive belief in ancestral Spirits, in Demons and Natural Deities with a primeval, imageless sacrificial cult. Here also is a polytheism passing all limits, with most riotous idolatry, temple cult, pilgrimages and so forth. And side by side with and beyond the these crudest forms of religious life, we find what is deepest and most abstract of what religious thinkers of all times have ever thought about the Deity, the noblest pantheistic and the purest monotheistic conceptions. In India we also find a priest craft as nowhere else on earth side by side with a religious tolerance which lets sect after sect, with the most wonderful saints, exist together. Here there were and still are forest recluses, ascetics and mendicant monks , to whom the renunciation of this world is really and truly a matter of deepest sincerity , and together with them hosts of idle mendicant monks , vain fools and hypocrites , to whom religion is only a cloak for selfish pursuits for the gratification of greed for money , of greed for fame or the hankering after power.
From India also a powerful stream of religious ideas had poured forth over the West and especially over the East, has flooded Central Asia, has spread over Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, and has trickled through the Further East down to the remotest islands of the East Indian Archipelago. And finally, in India as well as outside India Indian religions have often mixed with Christianity and with Islam now giving and now taking.”
"An examination of Indian Vedic doctrines shows that it is in tune with the most advanced scientific and philosophical thought of the West."
Let us compare it with what others said about India:
Will Durant, American historian: "India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all".
Mark Twain, American author: "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. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only."
Albert Einstein, American scientist: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."
Max Mueller, German scholar: If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.
Romain Rolland, French scholar : "If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India."
(Quotes taken from hinduismabout.com)
When we read all these comments we feel how great India is!
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