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Organizing The Rationalist Movement In Uttar Pradesh

Narendra Nayak — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:00:09 +0000

Uttar Pradesh (UP) is the most populous state in India and is known to be one of the most backward too. In National politics it is always said that the party that comes to power in UP will eventually rule the center (a bellwether state, as they say in the Uniter States). It is hence necessary that a strong rationalism movement is built up in UP if a national level impact is to be effected.

We have been trying this for a long time and have developed contacts with a good number of affiliated organisations and committed individuals from this state. But what is needed is a presence in all the districts and an effective network of dedicated workers. Through organisations like Arjak Samaj, which has thousands of members, and the Social Development Foundation which also has many dedicated workers, we have been trying to create a network in this state. Premanand had conducted training programs here two decades ago and a few volunteers who could explain miracles were thrown up. There are some activists who have learnt the tricks and have been performing and explaining them on their own. But to develop a rationalist movement we need much more. We have been struggling to develop a network which would be broad based as well as active, but we have not succeeded so far.

After Premanand’s first workshop in the 1990s in Lucknow, a few of the trainees developed their skills, and have now started training others too. But there have been a lot of limitations for them. I too have conducted a number of training programs in various places, but the impact had been very, very minimal. In terms of social development, this state ranks somewhere near the underdeveloped countries of sub Saharan Africa. Although it has contributed more than half of the Prime Ministers of the nation and great national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Ram Manohar Lohia etc., the situation has not improved. The people of this state are very superstitious.

So, last year when Dr.S.K.Singh, the director of the Voluntary Institute for Community Applied Science (VICAS) told me that he had applied for a grant from the NCSTC for conducting four training programs to cover all the 60 plus districts of this state, I was very happy and thought that we could use this opportunity to build up a good network here. After eighteen months of work, I am glad to announce that we have made a start that appears to be quite promising.

The first training program, catalysed by the NCSTC and conducted by VICAS, was in Allahabad in the month of January, 2009. We had a training program for thirty activists who had come from around 15 districts. It was for five days and it went on quite well.

At that time we had a fire walk on the banks of the Yamuna river which was filmed by a number of TV channels and we got some of the best footage we ever had of this event. Impressed by this, one of the channels called Sahara Samay invited me to their studio for a live phone-in program. Although we had some publicity, it did not make a great impact.

Some of the trainees for that program have been active in the field but even there the program is projected like a magic show or an entertainment program and not as a means to develop scientific temper. Then, after about a year, the same organisation contacted me for a series of training programs in the same state. This time they were organised in Lucknow, Allahabad and Baghpat. To each of these, around thirty activists from various organisations had been invited. The training programs were to start from the 1st of June and end of the 17th. After these four programs we would have covered all the districts of the state in terms of training activists from each of them.

First of the series was held at the Youth Hostel, Lucknow from the 1st of June. The number of participants was around 25. But we made an impact on the media persons who had come to cover the event. There were a number of reports in newspapers and the training program went on reasonably well.

One of the reporters who had come to cover the event was the Bureau Chief of the India TV channel of Lucknow. She was very impressed by our work and invited me to their studio for a live program on the 5th of June . That program started at 7 pm and went on to 9.30 pm. There were other participants who were at the Delhi studio. A considerable amount of time was devoted for our exposure of the so called miracles and that program made a huge impact via the media.

On the next day I went to Allahabad for the next training program and by that time the media was ready. We had about thirty participants here though the number went up to forty in the next few days. Many were those who had read about it in the newspapers and wanted to learn things. We had to tell them that they could be only observers and were not eligible to use any of the other facilities like lunch. However some of them expressed great interest and took part.

Click to play all 5 parts of Prof Nayak’s appearance on News 24 India

It was at Allahabad that the media really started taking interest in us! I was invited to the studio of the Sahara group and went on air at 4 pm on a channel called as Sahara UP - Uttarakhand. On the same evening, at 6pm, I was invited live on another channel that was part of the same group, called as Sahara Samay. After the hectic activity of the day, when I was relaxing, there was a phone from a channel called Live India TV. The live program was supposed to be for 30 minutes but went on for an hour. As soon as the program was over I was invited to come on the very next day to Delhi to their studio for a live program there. I had to refuse as I had my training program to look after.

The next day i was to go to Baghpat for another 5 day training program and there was a free day in between the two. But, the channel was so insistent and they sent someone to meet me at the railway station at Meerut where my journey from Allahabad to Baghpa was supposed to end by train, and I was taken to Delhi for a live 2 hour program. During this presentation, I was helped to a great extent by Mr.Pramod of VICAS, Allahabad, who was helping me with the training too.

I think that that live program was the real turning point. We started getting calls from dozens of TV channels asking for where our next program would be and what it would be. Many of them came to the place, Aryabhatt College of Engineering and Management, where our training program was going on, and one of them wanted a live program in their studio.

That channel was India TV and we went live on a Sunday at the prime time-9pm. In two days we were to perform some of the very sensational ‘miracles’ like getting buried underground, removing fried things from hot oil with bare hands, preparing tea with fire on the head etc. It was a great surprise to us that this program done on the 15th June was covered by 17 TV channels including 2 live!

Those who were covering it live had brought their OB vans and were waiting for the events to happen. The print media gave us wide coverage with some of them making features and half page write ups. It also helped that two girls who had come for the training, Sanju and Anju, were bold enough to get buried for 2 hours and then come out and walk on embers!

The UP programs were the most successful to date as for as the media coverage was concerned. The organisers of the Training program VICAS and the department of the central govt, the NCSTC were immensely pleased with the results and we are sure of their co-operation in the next training programs. In fact we have lined up a lot of programs for this state. We propose to have district level training programs first and train activists from all over the district and send them to the field to convey our message of scientific temper to the people. I plan to go with the team for a few of these training programs and then let them continue the process. During these programs, those who have been already trained by us will also take part and help in the process. After about a year of developing activists, we plan on building a state-level organisation whose task shall be exclusively devoted to the spreading of our movement and educating the people about the need for scientific temper.

In this part of India it is very necessary to create a spirit of enquiry and scientific temper among the people. We hear of so many atrocities and dangerous superstitious practices that it would need a whole life time to just make a list of them. The large population, lack of medical facilities and superstitions put into the minds of people from a very young age make the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh. Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh the most backward in India. Unless we build up strong movements there to go to the people and develop their critical faculties, the nation is not going to progress.

That is one of main reasons why the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations has decided to focus on these states for the coming years. We have already managed to start one such in Bihar called as the Bihar Rationalist Forum. We hope to start one in Uttar Pradesh too within a year. That would mean that we have managed to cover the two most populated states of our country and probably the most superstitious too.

How the movement develops in these states shall be a pointer to how it is going to fare in the rest of the Hindi belt. While we have a presence in Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh we are yet do develop in Chattisgarh and Rajasthan. We have to bring these states too into our ambit as soon as possible.

Professor Narendra Nayak is the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA). He regularly tours the country, giving demonstrations and holding workshops to develop scientific temper.

Heretics, Rebels, Reformers And Revolutionaries - Part 1

Prabhakar Kamath — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:35:23 +0000

In this series of articles, we will study the stories of heretics, rebels, reformers and revolutionaries who attempted to overthrow organized priestly religions all over the world. In the first article of this series we will study how the first great revolution against ‘Brahmanic’ religion was launched in Egypt in 14^th century B. C.

Priest-Kings And Temples

In the dawn of ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, priests were practically the rulers of the land by virtue of their skills in magic, medicine, astronomy, temple architecture, literature, and knowledge of various gods, which they created to represent some aspect of nature. Temples were their power bases. They held sway over people in a given community, and established rules of social conduct within that community. They deluded common people into believing that their gods would fulfill their desires and protect them from evil forces. They gave the society the internal stability, and by means of great personal sacrifices, they safely conveyed civilization from one generation to another. In the process they earned much gratitude of common people, and became wealthy and powerful. Before secular kings came on the stage of history, there were the priest-kings.

Kings And Palaces

The Intellectual priestly class in ancient civilizations suffered from two great weaknesses:

1. They just could not subdue their jealousies of other priests in charge of temples dedicated to other gods, which led to chronic conflicts among them.

2. They were not able to effectively fight off barbaric tribes marauding their lands.

These two problems required creation of secular kingships. The fighting men chosen to be kings built an army of able-bodied men who could protect the society from external aggression, and wage war on other lands to increase their wealth, power, and territory. In the language of Brahmanism, they were both Dhananjaya (Conquerors of Wealth) and Paranthapa (Enemy Burner). However, with the kings came their palaces. Now palaces became the second center of power in the ancient societies. As secular kings became more powerful, they began to hold sway over people’s lives by virtue of their muscle power and wealth. However, the priestly class did not totally surrender to the kings. Instead they manipulated kings into believing that their rule must be shown to the public as granted by the grace and will of the gods, who just happened to reside in their pockets. Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.), the founder of the first Babylonian empire, acknowledges the supremacy of Sumerian gods by beginning one of his inscriptions, “When Anu and Bel entrusted me with the rule of Sumer and Akkad…” (H. G. Wells). Conflict between priestly class and kings is a universal theme in the history of all civilizations. As we read in my earlier articles, Upanishadic revolution to overthrow Brahmanism was led by Kshatriya sages.

God-Kings Of Egypt

In Egypt, however, Pharaohs, as the kings were known, with the connivance of the priests, declared themselves as the earthly manifestation of various Egyptian gods such as Osiris, Hathor and Amun Ra. Due to the enormous power derived from their purported divinity, and authority over people derived from their prowess in war and public service, they were able to muster enough manpower to build colossal monuments to their glory such as pyramids, temples and Sphinx. To prevent diluting their divine blood, they married only immediate relatives of opposite sex, such as sisters or cousins. Anyone marrying outside the ‘divine clan’ was subject to social ostracism, which, of course was in the domain of priestly class. Even though the power and authority of the Pharaoh living in relative isolation of their palaces was seemingly absolute, the priests of great temple-casino complexes such as the ones in Karnak and Luxor, held considerable amount of stranglehold on the Pharaohs as well as the populace. As long as the Pharaohs toed the line drawn by the priests, their power base was secure. If they crossed that line, they would do so at their own peril. Inevitably, such a delicate balance of power would certainly receive a jolt sooner or later.

Seeds Of Revolution

An incident happened during the rule of Amenhotep III, a Pharaoh of 18^th Dynasty who ruled from 1386/88 -1349/50. He fell prey to his lust for a beautiful damsel of Syrian/Semitic extract by the name of Tii (“Tee”), and made her his principle wife. This did not sit well with the priests of the chief god Amun Ra. The priests did not hide their dislike for Tii or her offspring. Amenhotep III did another thing to offend the priests. He took an obscure sun god known as Aten, and elevated it to the position of the chief god, while tolerating other gods side by side. (We read in my articles on the Bhagavad Gita how Upanishadic sages took the mysterious spirit Brahman invoked by Brahmins at Yajnas and elevated it into ‘all-pervading Universal Soul Brahman’; and Bhagavatas promoted prince Krishna of Mahabharata epic to the status of Parameshwara.) Thus provoked by Amenhotep III, the priests of Amun Ra became angry, vengeful and turned on his entire family. They did not treat the offspring of Tii well, particularly her second son who came to power later on as Amenhotep IV. Hate for the priests of Amun Ra grew in the heart of Amenhotep IV. It is said that Tii further fuelled the fire of hate in the heart of her son. Now a struggle began between the priests of Amun Ra and the family of Amenhotep III.

Pharaoh Amenhotep IV Launches Monotheism

Amenhotep IV succeeded his father upon his death, following two years of co-regency. He set out to destroy the entire priest-dominated Egyptian polytheistic religion, which had evolved over at least two thousand years. Realizing that the only way to undermine the power of the priests was to take their gods away from them, he rejected Amun Ra as the supreme god, and elevated Aten the Solar Disc to the position of the Only Supreme God as declared in the hymn, “O Sole God beside whom there is none!” This declaration of One Supreme God –monotheism- has echoed through the centuries in Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. It has been speculated that Moses got the idea of monotheism from Akhenaten as evidenced by his First of Ten Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before Me,” and in Islam’s oft-repeated utterance, “There is no god but God.” In fact, its echo could be heard even in the monotheistic Bhagavata creed as uttered by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, “Surrender unto Me alone” (18:66) and “Worship Me alone” (9:22).

Amenhotep IV Becomes Akhenaten And Attacks Old Religion

Amenhotep IV changed Amun in his name into Aten, his Supreme God, and called himself Akhenaten. He named his son Tutankhaten, whom we now know as Tutankhamen (king Tut). Akhenaten built many huge temples for Aten in Thebes and systematically knocked down old temples dedicated to Amun Ra as well as other gods. He abolished all different quarrelling sects. Disgusted by the narrow-mindedness and oppressive atmosphere created by the priestly class, which completely dominated his capital city Thebes, he built a new capital at Amarna, 180 miles north of Thebes. He named his new capital Akhetaten. He banished priests from his capital and banned their ancient religious ceremonies. In his religion, one could relate to Aten directly, without brokers. He dictated that his statues should be as realistic as possible so that his subjects would see him as he is rather than as an awe-inspiring phony figure as dictated by the priestly rules of sculpturing. Defying the priestly tradition, he portrayed his wives and children with him in the carvings so that his subjects would see him as having a family life just like them. He made sure that the Sun Disc with radiating rays was depicted in all his portraits. Thus he became the first king in history to initiate a revolution to overthrow the ancient polytheistic religion mediated by hoards of corrupt and powerful priests, and establish a monotheistic religion without priests.

The Priestly Backlash

Akhenaten did not live long. He died around 1334 B. C. after ruling Egypt for seventeen years, and his revolution died immediately thereafter. As Ashoka the Great did, he underestimated the weed-like power of priests rooted in two thousand years of Egyptian history. The priests had merely bent with the wind. As soon as the winds blew away, they came back to power and immediately began to destroy every temple and palace Akhenaten had built so lavishly. They used the debris of the demolished buildings as the filler material for the foundations of their new temples built for Amun Ra. Akhenaten’s successor Tutankhaten was about eight years old when he was put on the throne, and he could not rule the country without the guidance of experienced priests. The priests renamed him Tutankhamen to reflect his renewed allegiance to Amun Ra, and made him a puppet in their hands. Like Brahmins did to Ashoka the Great after his death, they wiped out the names of Akhenaten and his family from the history of Egypt. Thanks to their thoroughness, Tutankhamen’s tomb remained intact till Howard Carter discovered it in the early part of twentieth century. Grave robbers did not know such a king existed and so they did not look for his tomb!

Why Akhenaten’s Revolution Failed

Ordinary people, who had been bewildered by the new religion of Atenism, reverted back to the comfort of worshiping their old animal-headed gods by means of their traditional rituals and festivals conducted by their trusted priests, no different than 21^st century Hindus finding solace in worshiping elephant-headed god Ganesha or monkey god Hanuman. They could better relate to these gods in their cool stone temples than to the Sun Disc in the burning desert. The concept of a Sun Disc as the Supreme God was too abstract for their simple minds, just as people of post-Vedic period found it difficult to relate to the concept of all-pervading, invisible Brahman as replacement for various anthropomorphic Vedic gods. Besides, unlike Ashoka the Great, Akhenaten did not appoint a huge cadre of emissaries to spread the message of his new religion far and wide. Ashoka’s incessant effort resulted in Buddhism becoming the dominant religion of India for a thousand years, and one of the great religions of the world to this day. Besides, unlike Ashoka, Akhenaten did not undertake great community projects such as building wells, tree-lined roads, hospitals, etc. to serve the public and enhance his own stature. Some historians say that because of Akhenaten’s preoccupation with his religious revolution, he neglected his kingly duties; did not wage war against potential enemies as expected of Pharaohs, nor maintained proper diplomatic relationship with his neighbors. Others have provided evidence to contradict these claims by quoting correspondence in the clay tablets unearthed at archeological sites in Amarna. In any case, the truth is whereas in the beginning of his rule Egypt was very prosperous, by the time he died, decline had already set in. Thus ended the first great revolution against ‘Brahmanism’ of Egypt.

Lessons From Akhenaten’s Failed Revolution

Akhenaten was a revolutionary, but unlike Ashoka the Great, he was not a visionary. It is clear from all the available evidence that Akhenaten attempted to overthrow the old religion of Egyptians by brute force rather than by means of clever set of strategies and tactics. He did not understand the limitation of power of even God-Kings, and the extent of power of priests over the minds of common people. He did not understand the reality that to reform or overthrow a well-established priestly religion, he needed to take small steps, and carry people with him by means of reasoning, education, sympathy and support. He did not realize that for a new ideology to take roots and spread, he would need the services of thousands of dedicated emissaries and selfless volunteers. He underestimated the power of priests over the minds of simple folks, which they had gained over two thousand years by means of great personal sacrifices. He seemed driven more by hatred for the priests than by genuine desire to reform Egyptian religion. Besides all this, he failed to understand that the new ideology or religion must be so down-to-earth that even common people should be able to relate to it.

Atheists should note that Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam took deep roots only because thousands of dedicated missionaries sacrificed their lives to promote them. No one can convert another person to his way of thinking without making great personal sacrifices. Modern day Atheists dedicated to enlightening common people about stupidity of religion will do well to take note of the lessons from the Story of Akhenaten’s Revolution.

(To be continued)

Read Dr. Kamath’s series on The Truth About The Bhagavad Gita here.

Dr. Prabhakar Kamath, is a psychiatrist currently practicing in the U.S. He is the author of Servants, Not Masters: A Guide for Consumer Activists in India (1987) and Is Your Balloon About Pop?: Owner’s Manual for the Stressed Mind.

Science and Scientists

Vinod K. Wadhawan — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:27:13 +0000

1. Preamble

As somebody said, science is what scientists do. And scientists are human too. Some of these humans have great difficulty in reconciling what science tells them with what they learnt from various sources when they were young and impressionable. So they may unconsciously look for ‘loopholes’ in the scientific premises and reasoning, particularly when it comes to fundamental questions about life, mind, and the universe.

In science there is always a cutting edge, or the frontier line where things are hazy. There is debate among experts as various alternative models are compared and contrasted. The beauty of the scientific method is that it is ruthless and without regard for authority (but see below!). Truth prevails ultimately, sometimes after a prolonged debate about what is the best way of interpreting the available data. When more data come in, science has no difficulty in dumping even its most cherished theories if necessary.

Sometimes, of course, the debate continues endlessly. This is particularly true for the highly counterintuitive quantum theory. To me the most important thing about this theory is that it has been phenomenally successful in explaining a vast multitude of natural phenomena, even though we do not have all the answers. Science accepts it because there is no better theory known to us that can be more successful for explaining what we see in the world around us.

To me it is not important that the quantum theory is counterintuitive. I see no reason why the laws of Nature should be always comprehensible to us. We emerged on the cosmic scene very very recently, but the laws of Nature have been there all the time.

But, as I said, scientists are human too. They do have their failings and weaknesses and gut feelings. We all know about Einstein’s reservations about the quantum theory of his day. His views fell by the wayside. But tomorrow if Einstein turns out to be right, no problem. We would then have an even better theory at hand. That is how science progresses.

2. The Copenhagen interpretation

There was this well-known debate between Einstein and Bohr about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Bohr’s viewpoint prevailed, and this gave him enormous, even undue, authority in scientific circles. If a proof is needed, look at the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ (CI) of quantum mechanics he gave in 1927, jointly with Heisenberg (another venerated scientist). According to the CI, people and the equipment they use exist in a classical world which is different from the quantum world. A quantum state is a superposition of two or more states, but when it interfaces with the classical world (at the moment of measurement), there is a collapse of the wave function (randomly) to one of the alternatives, and the other alternatives disappear. The CI was put in ‘by hand’ as an additional postulate of quantum mechanics.

I have given some more details of the CI in an article on ‘biocentrism’ I coauthored with Ajita Kamal, published here.

What was done there was to juxtapose the CI with a number of later interpretations. To me it is clear that the CI has been superseded by better interpretations.

So much for science. Now let us look at the scientists part of it.

Among the earliest persons to openly challenge the CI was Hugh Everett III, when he put forward his ‘many worlds’ interpretation. But on the scientific scene at that time he was just a kid (a student at Princeton University in the mid-1950s) compared to stalwarts like Bohr and Heisenberg. [To us in India this is reminiscent of the Chandrasekhar vs. Eddington episode in cosmology.] A. H. Wheeler was the Ph.D. supervisor of Everett. Peter Byrne has written about this story in an article in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American. In 1956 Wheeler took the draft dissertation of Everett to Copenhagen to convince the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences to accept it and publish it. He had ‘three long and strong discussions about it’ with Bohr and Petersen. He also showed the work to many others at the Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics, including A. S. Stern.

Stern dismissed the work as ‘theology,’ and Wheeler himself was reluctant to challenge Bohr. The thesis had to be whittled down to a quarter of its original length. This abridged version also appeared in Reviews of Modern Physics. Young Everett eagerly looked forward to the reactions of the physics community. All he got was stony silence, such was the awe that the name Bohr inspired (and that continues in some quarters even today). Discouraged, Everett left physics and worked on military and industrial mathematics and computing. As the Editors of Scientific American wrote, ‘He died when he was just 51, not living to see the recent respect accorded to his ideas by physicists.’

3. Entanglement

Bohr, of course, was quite consistent in his views about the basics and limitations of quantum mechanics. This came to the fore again in his reaction to Einstein’s and others’ views on ‘quantum entanglement.’ Now this is another esoteric feature of quantum mechanics that challenges our intuition very seriously. And yet there is no immediate danger to the present edifice and acceptability of quantum theory. Why? The answer comes from experiment, namely the fact that quantum computing is already a reality.

The entanglement feature of quantum mechanics is about the spooky ‘action at a distance’: Two particles behave synchronously without any intermediary, no matter how far apart they are. This nonlocalityfeature bothered Einstein and others, as embodied in the famous EPR (Eistein-Podolsky-Rosen) thought experiment published in 1935 in a paper with title ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ EPR argued that the answer to the question is ‘No.’ They took the position that nonlocality is not something real, and therefore quantum mechanics does not provide a complete description of reality.

Bohr did agree with this conclusion, but for his own reasons (see, for example, the article by Albert and Galchen in the March 2009 issue of Scientific American). He argued that we should not even try to read from the equations of quantum mechanics a realistic comprehension of the world. This was in line with what he did in the Copenhagen interpretation mentioned above; namely, introduce one morepostulate or axiom by hand when interfacing the microworld with the macroworld.

Thirty years later John Bell wrote his famous paper in which he established by mathematical proof that the real physical world is indeed nonlocal, no matter what EPR or Bohr believed to be the case. He showed that no local (as opposed to nonlocal) theory can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics because the predictions must always satisfy the now-famous Bell’s inequalities. This meant that the concept of locality was indeed incompatible with quantum theory, so the actual physical world in indeed nonlocal. Both Einstein and Bohr were wrong, though for different reasons.

The influence of Bohr’s line of thinking was so strong and persistent that there was resistance to Bell’s work also. But this situation has changed gradually. I quote from Albert and Galchen (2009): ‘From the early 1980s onward, the grip of Bohr’s conviction — that there could be no old-fashioned, philosophically realistic account of the subatomic world — was everywhere palpably beginning to weaken.’

4. Ockham’s razor

The philosopher Ockham advocated the use of simplest possible explanations for natural phenomena: ‘Plurality should not be posited without necessity‘. The proverbial Ockham’s razor cuts away complicated and long explanations. Ockham declared that simple explanations are the most plausible.

In science, as also in mathematics, we always have some axioms to start with, from which we derive theorems etc. Axioms are something we accept without questioning. If we choose wrong axioms, we get theorems which contradict experiment, so this is not so serious a problem because it is self-correcting. The more serious problem is: How many axioms we should choose?

An extreme situation is wherein we ‘explain’ everything in terms of axioms only, so we have a huge number of axioms, and there is no theory worth the name. Leibniz (1675) was amongst the earliest known investigators of this situation. He argued that a worthwhile theory of anything has to be ’simpler than’ the data it explains. Otherwise, either the theory is useless, or the data are ‘lawless’. The criterion ’simpler than’ is best understood in terms of information theory, particularly its more recently developed offshoot, namely algorithmic information theory (AIT).

Gregory Chaitin is a pioneer of AIT. To understand the essence of the AIT, consider a very simple example. Take the set of all positive integers, and ask the question: How many bits of information are needed to specify all these integers? The answer is an absurdly large number. But the fact is that this set of data has very little information content. It has a structure which we can exploit to write an algorithm which can generate all the integers, and the number of bits of information needed to write the algorithm is indeed not large. So the algorithmic information content in this problem is small.

One can generalize and say that, in terms of computer algorithms, the best theory is that which requires the smallest computer program for calculating (and hence explaining) the observations. The more compact the theory, the smaller is the length of this computer program. Chaitin’s work has shown that the Ockham razor is not just a matter of philosophy; it has deep algorithmic-information underpinnings. If there are competing descriptions or theories of reality, the more compact one has a higher probability of being correct. Ockham’s razor cuts away all the flab. Let us see why.

In AIT, an important concept is that of algorithmic probability (AP). It is the probability that a random program of a given length fed into a computer will give a desired output, say the first million digits of π. Following Bennett and Chaitin’s pioneering work done in the 1970s, let us assume that the random program has been produced by a monkey. The AP in this case is the same as the probability that the monkey would type out the same bit string, i.e. the same computer program as, say, a Java program suitable for generating the first million digits of π. The probability that the monkey would press the first key on the keyboard correctly is 0.5. The probability that the first two keys would be pressed correctly is (0.5)² or 0.25. And so on. Thus the probability gets smaller and smaller very rapidly as the number of correctly sequenced bits increases. The longer the program, the less likely it is that the monkey will crank it out correctly. This means that the AP is the highest for the shortest programs or the most compact theories. The best theory has the smallest number of axioms.

In the present context, suppose we are having a bit string representing a set of data, and we want to understand the mechanism responsible for the creation of that set of data. In other words, we want to discover the computer program (or the best theory), among many we could generate randomly, which is responsible for that set of data. The validation of Ockham’s philosophy comes from the fact that the shortest such program is the most plausible guess because it has the highest AP.

In the Copenhagen interpretation described above, Bohr’s action of adding one more postulate or axiom by hand was unwarranted, as later developments in quantum theory have demonstrated.

5. Pseudoscientists

The narrative so far is enough to illustrate the difficulties we humans face in understanding the nature of reality with our limited collective intellect and other resources. But fortunately we scientists have with us the power of the scientific method of enquiry, which is no respecter of authority. As Bell’s work has shown, both Einstein and Bohr held wrong views about nonlocality. Good science is self-correcting.

There is so much that science cannot answer. But the big question is: Is there ANY other way of getting these answers? No. There is none.

Some questions are indeed very difficult to answer, but scientists keep trying. The incremental progress may be slow, but there is progress nevertheless.

The unfortunate fact of life is that not many humans have the requisite training and mental discipline demanded by the scientific method. They MUST have an answer always. If science cannot provide it at present, they do not have the patience to wait. They just invent answers by introducing more and more axioms (incidentally, this is what is done by most religions). Here is an example.

Deepak Chopra, a medical doctor, who also uses at times the language of quantum mechanics in his discourses and writings, posted an article on the Huffington Post. Here is an excerpt:

‘I consider myself scientific at heart, and so I depend upon a theory as well. Its basic premises are as follows:

We live in a universe that exhibits intelligence, self-regulation, and creativity.

Consciousness preceded the brain. It created life and went on to create the brain itself.

Consciousness is primary in the world; matter is secondary.

Evolution is conscious and therefore creative. It isn’t random.

At the source of creation one finds a field of pure awareness.

Pure awareness is the source of every manifest quality in the universe.’

Anybody is welcome to subscribe to a theory of his/her choice. My response to the above statements is as follows:

It is only a belief.

What is the basis for making this assertion?

Again just a belief.

Prove it.

Just wishful thinking.

That’s what YOU think.

What can any scientist do with the kind of ‘theory’ Chopra subscribes to? I want to invoke Ockham’s razor. If you introduce as many axioms or premises as Chopra wants to, then there is just about nothing left to be derived from those axioms. Practically everything is axiomatic in this ‘theory.’ Ockham’s razor will make mincemeat of Chopra’s set of premises!

Chopra goes on to give a list of questions which science cannot answer at present. So what? Is there ANY better way of getting those answers?

If somebody is a mystic, I have no problem with that. What is not acceptable is peddling mysticism under the garb of science, or rather pseudoscience. And one cannot be ’scientific at heart’ and yet be innocent about the rigours of the scientific method of acquiring knowledge and understanding.

Chopra uses the word ‘consciousness’ again and again. I draw the attention of the reader to my article here.

As I argue there, it is not possible to define consciousness in an unambiguous scientific way. How do we discuss it and investigate it when there is no agreement on what that word really means?

There is nothing sacrosanct about the set of axioms and premises on which modern science is based. Any other set of axioms can be fine if it leads to theorems and conclusions and intellectual progress better than what the existing science has achieved. Deepak Chopra’s set of premises is quite typical of the thinking to which even some scientists subscribe. These people usually are apologists for their religious beliefs. I want to suggest something to them. Why not try to build up the edifice of a self-consistent parallel science based on such axioms? Take the axioms of your choice, and take as many as you want (or rather as few as you can), and see if you can produce something superior to the existing scientific framework. If you succeed, I shall be the first one to proudly walk over to your camp. Why only me? The whole of the existing structure of science will just fade away, because it would have been superseded by something superior.

6. Concluding remarks

The scientific method is among the greatest achievements of the human mind.
Science is impersonal, but scientists are not. Scientists come in all shapes, sizes, conditionings, egos, and biases. Their subjectivity does slow down the progress of science, but not for long. Ultimately the best theory prevails.
Even the best scientific theory holds only till a better one comes along. Scientists have no compunction about dumping their pet theories in favour of better ones. This is true intellectual humility, not commonly seen in non-scientific or unscientific circles.
All those who love and respect science should try to ensure that it is not hijacked by pseudoscientists to meet their covert or overt agendas.
Some questions are inherently very difficult to answer. But there is NO method other than the scientific method for getting the answers.

Introducing The Bihar Rationalist Forum

Narendra Nayak — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:45:34 +0000

Bihar is one of the largest and most populous states in India. It also happens to be the most backward. However, the state has had a relatively glorious past. Bihar is well known for its intellectual achievements right from the time of Buddha. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi started his freedom struggle from Motihari in this state. One of the most well known movements of the post independent India against the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi was started by Jayaprakash Narayan who was a Bihari.

In spite of such a progressive history, Bihar has become a state riddled with superstitions and obscurantism. For the past five years we have been associated with running a campaign in Bihar to inculcate scientific temper among people. It all started when a Minister of State for Science and Technology of the Government of India and the Member of Parliament from Navada, Sanjay Paswan, honoured tantriks at a public ceremony.

His claim was that these people have extraordinary powers and they can do things like walking on embers, catching snakes with bare hands etc., and hence needed to be honored for those achievements. The director of the Patna planetarium had invited Premanand to his institution to conduct a training program to debunk these claims.

During this program Premanand met Prof. S.P.Verma of Science for Society, Bihar, who invited him to conduct this program for his organisation. This was for the Year of Science Awareness program. Next June, Premanand wanted me to go along with him for the training program in which people from each of the districts of Bihar had participated.

Prof. Verma wanted to follow that up with a tour of Bihar to visit each of the districts and conduct programs there. But at that time, Premanand was not well and he wanted me to go on tour by myself, which was the beginning of the relationship with this organisation. They have a presence in each of the districts of this state, and a well knit network of workers, sympathisers and good organisers.

They are also members of the NCSTC Network and conduct the Children’s Science Congress each year at the state and district levels. This organisation, the Network for Science and Technology Communication, a section of the Department of Science and Technology under the Ministry of Human Resource Development has been a major catalyst for the development of our movement in the country. They have sponsored a number of miracle exposure training workshops which have been conducted by Premanand and now by me during which we have had the opportunity of meeting and training hundreds of activists many of who have later on joined the movement.

Though the Year of Scientific Awareness was over, the relationship continued and the movement grew. We had a number of programs going on with funding from various sources and sometimes even from personal funds. That led to the identification of a number of activists, organisers and those interested in the movement. We all felt the need for an organisation which can and should take up issues related to scientific temper without fear or favour.

The existing organisational set up had a few problems with projecting vehement stands on many issues, as it conducts a variety of activities of various types involving a large number of people. Taking radical stands on issues would alienate some of them and result in affecting these activities. The proposal to start such an organization was a discussion point between us for quite some time. This April we had a round of training programs covering almost all the districts of Bihar, and we have identified some of the activists who could be involved in building up this movement. In order to bring them together we decided to hold a meeting on the 20^th of June, 2010.

The meeting:

The meeting was held at the department of Chemistry at the Patna University. There were about 35 members from about 12 districts. Although the distribution was not uniform, the fact that this number attended was quite encouraging. The meeting was initiated by a discussion on the need for such an association and the ways to go about it. There was good participation from the members present who presented their view points and ideas. In the morning session it was decided that the formation of such an organisation was necessary.

The post-lunch session started with the discussions about the type of organisation to be started. It was decided to defer this decision of the type of legal entity to be formed until a larger and more representative body could be formed. So, it was decided to form an ad hoc committee and it was named Bihar Rationalist Forum. This organisation would work to strengthen the rationalist movement in Bihar by its various activities.

The following were the resolutions discussed and passed:

1. To affiliate the organisation to FIRA.

2. To constitute committees for the following:

a. A panel of those who would demonstrate so called miracles and explain superstitions.

b. A panel of experts who would investigate and explain paranormal phenomena.

c. An academic panel of experts in various fields who could answer queries of the members about the paranormal.

3. We also decided to conduct seminars, workshops, and discussions to expand the horizons of knowledge of the members and also those interested.

4. To bring more interested, committed and dedicated people into the movement and also to create a state wide network with members in all the districts.

A managing committee was elected from among the members present. The ad hoc office bearers were also elected. The following is the list:

Ms. Seema Singh- President.

Mr. B.Suman- General Secretary

Mr. Umesh and Mr. Munindra Jha Raushan - Secretaries.

Ms. Kirti- Vice President.

Ms.Poonam- Treasurer

Prof.S.P.Verma was requested to be the mentor and he readily agreed. The President of FIRA was invited to be the patron and that too was agreed upon.

The number of young people, women and activists gives us the hope that the movement will go forward in the right direction and address the target membership.

It was also decided that the next meeting of the ad hoc committee would be held at Hajipur in September and hosted by the president Ms. Seema Singh. The members present also contributed to the funds of this forum and the president also handed over the contribution on behalf of FIRA.

Professor Narendra Nayak is the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA). He regularly tours the country, giving demonstrations and holding workshops to develop scientific temper.

‘Freedom Of Speech’ in India- Case Studies: Islamist Zakir Naik, Maoist Rebels, Film Actress Kushboo, Artist M.F. Hussain

Ajita Kamal — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:38:15 +0000

A series of high-profile incidents over the past few months have stirred up conversation among Indians online on the subject of freedom of speech. Not surprisingly, parallels between the cases have been drawn at will to make ever possible argument for and against every side of the debate. This article is an attempt to look at the subject of free speech from a democratic and humanistic point of view.

I begin by outlining the essentials of four cases from the recent past. This will be followed by a short discussion on the notion of freedom of speech. Finally the implications of this discussion will be applied to each case.

PRESENTING THE CASE STUDIES

1. Zakir Naik Banned from UK and Canada

The man in question is a self-styled medical doctor turned Islamic preacher who delivers lectures, holds debates and answers questions in front of large audiences worldwide, all in the effort to spread the ideology of Islam. Naik is known for his hate-filled propaganda, delivered with a self-pretentious smugness designed to carry all the appeal of a tough inner-city kid wrangling his pants around his knees as he delivers one cheeky ad hominem after another on the MTV show “Yo’ Mama”. Its nothing short of cheap, logically incoherent, crowd pleasing rhetoric- going for the PWND factor. This image is the vehicle that he uses to promote a deceptively sugar-coated extremist ideology. He works with an Islamic television channel and also frequently travels India and abroad, spreading his version of fundamentalist Islam.

Naik has been in the news recently after being disallowed entry into the UK and Canada. Both governments within days of each other rejected his application to enter their respective countries on his speaking tour of the world. Naik is appealing against both the bans.

2. Verbal Support of Maoist Rebels Banned

The ongoing Maoist insurgency against the government of India and the people who abide by its constitution is comprised of members belonging to various indigenous tribes in the forests of Central and North Eastern India. The Communist Party of India, Maoist, (not to be confused with the CPI Marxist) has been designated a terrorist organization by the government. The Maoists have been responsible for much destruction of life and property in recent years, as they fight the government supported incursion of mining companies into their lands.

Early in May of 2010, the Indian government released a statement warning that those who speak in support of Maoist terrorists could be prosecuted, under Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

3. Supreme Court Clears Film Actress Kushboo

In 2005, Indian film actress Kushboo was charged on 22 counts of obscenity because she said in an interview that it is acceptable for women to have premarital sex, “provided safety measures are followed to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases”. There were mass protests in Tamil Nadu where Kushboo was worshiped by some as a goddess. Needless to say, the temples built in her honor were destroyed after this incident. In April of this year, the Supreme court dismissed all 22 charges brought against her.

4. Artist M F Hussain Gains Citizenship in Qatar

India’s most celebrated artist in modern times, Muqbool Fida Hussain, took up Qatari citizenship in February of this year. Hussain was awarded the Padma Shri 1955, the Padma Bhushan in 1973, the Padma Vibhushan in 1989 and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986. He gained notoriety in 1996 when pieces that he had painted in the 70s were reprinted in a Hindi magazine. Initially 8 cases were filed against him which eventually escalated to a large number of cases (about 900 or so) spread throughout the country. More details here.

In 2006, the death threats and acts of vandalism increased, forcing Hussain to spend an increasing amount of time abroad. His decision to take up Qatar’s offer of citizenship requires him to give up his Indian citizenship.

ON FREE-SPEECH

What does it mean to be Free to Speak?

Popular conceptions of political ideals vary depending on the cultural mindset of the population in question. In secular democracies the freedom to speak as and when one wishes is tempered with a sort of commonsense that many find comforting. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t agree that some forms of expression should not be permitted. The problem then is that in practice very few of us can agree on where to draw the line. It is because of this that we must pay attention to the semantics involved in formulating such principles.

Common wisdom on the notion of freedom of speech is that we are free to say anything we want as long as our speech does not impinge upon the ‘fundamental freedoms’ of others. The idea is that one’s freedom of speech must not cause ‘harm’ to others. This sort of reasoning leaves much unresolved, because in reality the problem of deciding what counts as ‘fundamental freedoms’ or ‘harm’ is not so simple. In fact, the reasoning often seen in the media and as popular opinion is simply designed to ignore the question or pretend that it has been answered. The problems begin just shy of where commonsense ends.

The law, when it is shaped by such general commonsense notions, remains ambiguous. Such ambiguity is often necessary, given that moral problems are almost always situational. However, there are practical limits to such ambiguity. These limits are to be determined by objective facts and logic.

Limiting Ambiguity Using Logic and Reason

In order to present a clear understanding of the problem, we must focus on understanding the semantic and political philosophy behind the idea of free-speech.

“…there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.“

John Stuart Mill

This excerpt is from Mill’s seminal work ‘On Justice” which has been instrumental in shaping modern conceptions of the rights of the individual in a democratic state. Let’s see in detail what Mill was talking about.

The freedom to criticize/express all ideas is a stranger to every dictatorship on the planet. The one thing we know for sure about freedom of speech is that the more it is practiced in a country, the less oppressed the people. This includes the freedom to criticize everything, including the state itself. It also includes the right to support any idea, however repugnant that idea might be to you or I. So, it is clear that such freedoms are a good thing. But how do we reconcile this right to support any idea with the ambiguous notion that freedom of speech must not impinge on the fundamental freedoms of others?

According to Mill, there are two major clauses to free speech. The Harm Principle and The Offense Principle. The first is valid (examples of use include hate speech, incitement of violence and making death threats) and the second is not (examples of use include blasphemy, criticizing an ideology, supporting an ideology/religion). This is the foundation of logic and reason over which we can build an appropriately malleable legal structure. Without such a logical framework, the ambiguity is a tool of oppression. The rest of this section is concerned with understanding the democratic interpretation of the harm principle.

Understanding the Harm Principle

The only valid restrictions on freedom of speech are those that are clearly meant to prevent harm. However, governments must go about doing this without stripping us off our freedom to offend. We must find a balance between the two. But how do we determine where this line lies? The only way to practice such a balance is to restrict the law to criminalize only those aspects of speech that clearly are intended to cause harm. Consider a case of hate speech, incitement of violence or making of death threats. A clear and intended causal effect must be drawn between the act of expression and the harm done. This is the only legitimate way in which the Harm Principle can be evoked to restrict certain forms of speech.

In order for an act of speech to violate the harm principle, it must call for and/or intend harm against individuals, and/or target specific locations or events. That is, one must express intent towards furthering specific harmful acts for the harm principle to be violated. On the contrary, if an act of speech expresses support for the notion of harm, or argues that harm is the only way for something to get done, it cannot be construed of as violating freedom of speech. This is the nuance that is often missed. One instance involves verbally endorsing an act of physical aggression (with the intention of furthering said act). The other is about simply supporting an ideology (without calling for harmful action). Of course, the ideology can have unintended harmful consequences, but that is immaterial. It can be argued that every influential ideology has harmful consequences, including yours and mine. This distinction between action and ideology makes a world of difference in real situations- the type of situations that such laws are meant to help navigate. The reason why we need this clear distinction is to avoid ambiguity in practice. This distinction prevents abuse by governments that want to get rid of certain popular ideas, under the pretext that they are “terrorist” ideas.

Note: In this case, ‘harm’ must also be defined in logical and reasonable terms. I will forgo that discussion here.

How Intent Separates Ideology from Action

There is possible overlap between support for ideology and support for action, which is why the distinction between discussion of ideas and the intent to harm is important. For example, it is perfectly OK for us to discuss the merits (or demerits) of destroying Israel or Palestine (just as an example). But if we demonstrate an intent to destroy Israel or Palestine by supporting specific actions, that should not be protected under free speech.

In order to clearly understand the role of intent, the colloquial interpretation of ideology must be properly qualified. Intention is the key dividing factor here. Accordingly, we must separate pure ideologies which have do not include intentions, from action-based ideologies which do. For the sake of convenience, we classify the former as ideology and the latter as action. Intention to cause harm is the difference between the two. Ideologies are very complex sets of beliefs, and no ideology is a self-contained entity. The only way we have of preserving freedoms and removing ambiguity is to clearly distinguish ideologies from acts that are intended to harm. This is the form of the word ideology that we must use to preserve democratic freedoms. This is very important, because politics, like everything else, needs careful analysis of the semantics used.

Free Speech and Free Society

In general, countries with citizenry that are relatively more free have a better understanding of the distinction between support of terrorist ideology and conspiring to commit acts of terror. In India as with much of the world, we are unfortunately unable to find such nuance in our political dialogue. The justification for allowing any ideology to be freely proclaimed and discussed is a whole different subject. I will not venture to tackle it here, but suffice to say that such freedom is one of the most highly valued commodities in the “free world”. In fact, it is the reason why the “free world” is so relatively “free”. The instant we begin adding restrictions to the free discussion of ideas we are in authoritarian territory.

Countries of the World Ranked According to Press Freedoms- 2008, Reporters Without Borders

However, when speech does indeed demonstrate intent to cause harm, democratic governments have a duty to prosecute the speaker. The failure of this clamp-down on certain kinds of speech is also a failure of democracy.

Note: In a democracy, you are free to choose any platform that is willing to express your views, but you may not demand that a private entity provide you with a platform to air them.

REEVALUATING THE CASE STUDIES

1. Zakir Naik:

Why is Naik considered controversial in the UK and Canada and not in India? India has faced more Islamic terrorism than either of the other two countries, and yet Naik has not been the target of the Indian government.

A closer look at some of the most vile of Naik’s statements offers some clues. The one statement of Naik’s that has been quoted the most in the aftermath of the recent incidents is this: “If he (Osama) is terrorizing the terrorists, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, every Muslim should be a terrorist.’

Terrorism is an ideology, and a repulsive one at that to any civilized human being. But, as we have seen in the discussion above, specific terrorist acts must be described and endorsed before one can be accused of violating the harm clause. So, in my opinion, the above sentence, if taken by itself, is not grounds for prosecution. However, there are other statements made by Naik that, together with the above statement, conspire to discredit the notion that Naik is not endorsing violent acts. Specifically, Naik has made it clear multiple times that the ideology- the specific form of Islam- that he supports, requires homosexuals and apostates be put to death. Can you imagine him saying such a thing about Hindus? If Zakir Naik came out and said that the belief system that he is promoting on TV and using loudspeakers requires all Hindus to be put to death, he would be behind bars quicker than you can say “inshallah”! It is, however, socially (and apparently, legally as well) acceptable in India to say such things about homosexuals and kafirs.

By endorsing specific harmful acts against innocent civilians, through the process of spreading a particular extremist ideology that, by Naik’s own admission, absolutely requires those acts, Zakir Naik has violated the harm principle. He should have been prosecuted for hate speech and incitement of violence by the Indian government, long before Canada and the UK made clear the hateful deception that he represents. Naik’s fault is not the fact that he has defended and even promoted the idea of terrorism, but that he has clearly and explicitly endorsed specific acts of terror.

2. Maoist Rebels:

Under the conditions set by the democratic interpretation of free speech, the newly passed amendment to Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967 is a violation of our right to freedom of speech. There are two clear arguments to be made against the law..

a. The law is deliberately ambiguous.

This is the relevant portion of the statement, taken from the article:

“Any person who commits the offense of supporting such a terrorist organization (like Communist Party of India (CPI)-Maoist) with inter alia intention to further the activities of such terrorist organizations would be liable to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years or with fine or with both,” a home ministry statement said.”

The article goes on to say:

“It said such action would be taken under Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.”

Free speech can be preserved while respecting the harm clause. This requires a clear distinction in the law between legitimate discussion of ideas and expression of intent to harm. This is clearly missing in the law. A law restricting free speech becomes a tool to be used for suppression of ideas when it is so purposefully unclear. The harm clause could easily be stated very clearly and simply. Why could the lawmakers have not been more clear? One simple change in the language of the law would make it perfectly acceptable. If the law said “… the intention to further the terrorist activities of such organisations”, we would not be having this conversation. This is a simple switch from “furthering the activities of terrorist organizations” to “furthering the terrorist activities of these organizations”, but the effect is dramatic and extremely significant. This switch would remove the ambiguity inherent in the current law, but make the law ineffective as far as stifling of dissenting ideologies is concerned. My argument is that that the ambiguity is deliberately designed and put in place to suppress public expression and discussion of this ideology, through government intimidation.

b. The law is redundant

The new law is redundant regarding its stated purpose of targeting Maoist terrorism. It is not required for the government to do what it should be doing to stop terrorist acts. Whatever the contents of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act prior to the addendum, it was fully sufficient to address Maoist terrorism. The recent change only pushes through one addition that makes any difference- the targeting of the Maoist ideology. This is why the new law is redundant as far as the purpose of targeting terrorism is concerned. It does not bring anything new to targeting the terrorist activities. The sole purpose of this law is to target the ideology.

Both these arguments (a and b) conspire to discredit the proposed intent and to lay unwarranted power in the hands of the government.

Some Additional Points

The tyrannical suppression of the freedom to believe and to propagate particular ideologies is commonplace in dictatorships and rare in true democracies. India does have a lot of freedoms compared to dictatorships and tyrannical regimes, but this is a hard fought and hard earned set of freedoms. In India, we can fight against tyranny confident that someday the truth will prevail, despite the forces that tend to accumulate power. The process of dialogue is key to our democracy, like it is to all democracies. The problem is that when laws are made to target ideologies rather than actions, this freedom to discuss and debate ideas is compromised. It was undemocratic when Stalin banned expression of religion and it is undemocratic if India bans expression of Maoist ideology (this is not the case with the law, but it comes awfully close, using intimidation to suppress ideas).

No ideology is self-contained, including Maoist ideology. Contained within the Maoist ideology is a deeper political ideology with ideological roots in many other systems of thought that must not be censored. It must be debated and discussed in the free-market of ideas. Simply dismissing all Maoist ideology as terrorist is exactly the kind of thing that the distinction between supporting actions (intended to cause harm), and supporting ideology (with no intention of causing harm) is meant to prevent. This sort of attack on an ideology by the government constitutes blatant censorship of ideas, under the pretext of protecting the people. This is exactly the kind of authoritarian government intrusion into public life that democracy is supposed to guard us from.

Under the current law, a professor of political science can easily be arrested for saying that the Maoists have a point. Maybe it won’t stick in court, but in any case this law does not necessarily have to be used to arrest individuals based on their ideological support, in order for it to have its intended effect. It is more about intimidation and control of mainstream culture. An objective observer must look at the language of the law and see how easily this law can be used to shut down political and social dissent.

Finally, I would like to expose a key assumption in the arguments supporting the law- the assumption that censoring Maoist ideology will somehow reduce Maoist terrorism. Where is the evidence for this? I think a very good case can be made that it will have the opposite effect by, for example, driving the Maoist elements underground and away from open and free discussion with democratically-minded and peaceful people. There may be better counter arguments, and there even may be studies on this subject. In any case, this particular point is irrelevant to the case against the law, because the two arguments presented above are sufficient to demonstrate that this law is draconian.

3. Kushboo

The events leading up to the cases against Kushboo, and the eventual dismissal of all the cases by the supreme court, do not deserve to be on this list. But I have included this issue here to make a specific point about free-speech. Adults are free to have consensual sex with other adults. At a much more benign level, adults are free to say so. The cases against Kushboo are an example of a primitive and dangerous slant in the public mindset towards restricting democratic freedoms in India. The only thing scandalous about the conclusion of the events here is that the government didn’t punish those who filed cases against Kushboo for saying there is nothing wrong with premarital sex. The cases were clear examples of frivolous lawsuits and constitute a waste of the court’s time (and are serving to intimidate free citizens). The supreme court should have imposed stiff fines on those who filed the court cases against Kushboo. However, ultimately the blame here lies with the public.

4. M.F. Hussain

As with the case of Kushboo, the issue of Hussain’s paintings and their widespread condemnation by communal elements is more a failure of society than a failure of government. The government’s inadequate response deserves its share of the blame for Hussain having to eventually accept Qatari citizenship, but it was Indian society, polluted by an ideology that demands automaton-like in-group behavior, that was the ultimate force that drove Hussain away.

The standard arguments that I have come to expect from those who support Hussain’s move to Qatar (instead of criticizing those violent factions that threaten his life) have to do with the moral imperatives concerned. “Why does he paint nude Hindu goddesses?” “Why not the Muslim prophet Muhammad?” “Hussain is mocking Hinduism” “Hussain’s ideas are offensive to Hindus” “Hussain is a provocateur”. One is, of course, free to make these arguments, and one may even be right. However, one may not in a democracy expect that these arguments are sufficient cause to take legal action against Hussain.

Those who make these arguments are missing the point about free-speech. Hussain’s motives are irrelevant as long as he is not promoting violent acts against people. The problem is that where religion is concerned, people lose the ability to see that criticism of all ideas is a human right. Moreover, many of those who criticize Hussain’s actions (which are protected under free-speech law) have made death threats and even sabotaged Hussain’s shows and art works. These are acts that are absolutely not protected by the law. Yet the outrage from the Indian community and media has focused on the paintings and the “expert opinion” on whether they constitute “offensive material”, and not on the truly undemocratic abuse of speech by those who have threatened harm against Hussain.

CONCLUSION

To re-iterate, we must draw a clear distinction between discussion of ideas and endorsement of acts that are intended to harm. It is understanding this distinction that can liberate India from the popular undemocratic mindset that is constricting her, preventing the resolution of a vast many social and political issues that need be addressed using reason.

Pseudoscience In The Stars: An Indian Rationalist’s Experiences with Astrology

Narendra Nayak — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:02:35 +0000

My first contact with astrology must have been soon after my birth, because a horoscope is a must-have for every child born in my parents’ community. This horoscope must have also been drawn up by my maternal uncle, himself an astrologer of no mean repute, though in the last decades of his life he used to tell me, “it is not for unbelievers like you!”. My first conscious contact with this ’science’ occurred when I was a schoolboy. A cousin of mine, S.S. Kamath, was interested in investigating astrological claims. He told me of an incident where he had copied Jawaharlal Nehru’s (the then Prime Minister of India) horoscope from a magazine and showed it to an astrologer telling him that it was the horoscope of a salesman in a cloth shop. The astrologer made his calculations and told him that it was that of an ordinary man who would be leading a routine humdrum existence. On being told that the horoscope was actually that of the Prime minister of India, the astrologer wiggled out of the situation making up some excuse.

Another incident involved two of my cousins. They went to another astrologer and posed him a challenge - tell us which one of us is the Doctor and which one is the engineer. The astrologer said that the questioner was the Doctor (it was correct) and the other one was an engineer (not true). When the one who was told that he was an engineer protested and said that he was a chartered accountant- the astrologer said, ”Yes it is the same - both professions deal with calculations!”

The rich use astrology to explain away the misdeeds of their children. We would always hear that so and so was doing all those bad things because of the wrong planetary configurations in his/her horoscope. There would be rituals to counteract these ‘ill-effects’. All these rituals are performed by specialist priests who would naturally extract steep charges for their services! Many a time the one who does the calculations and the one who does the pujas would be one and the same individual! Even when it is not so, we can rest assured that the spoils would have been shared among the various participants. While it is still a matter of conjecture whether the planetary configurations were changed by these rituals, it is beyond a doubt, certain that it improved the economic status of the concerned individuals who were involved in the “diagnosis” and “treatment” of the rich.

My father was a great believer in astrology. When he got into financial problems, he would get up early in the morning and take his horoscope to his favourite astrologer for consultation. I do not know what actually used to transpire between them but in the end he lost everything and we became paupers. One of the reasons my father took so many wrong decisions was because of the sheer confidence with which the astrologer would pronounce decisions. This personal experience of utter set-back was one of the reasons I questioned the veracity of this so-called science.

As a child I used suffer from severe attacks of bronchial asthma. As usual the astrologer was consulted and no surprise this too was due to an evil planetary configuration. The treatment suggested was that I had to feed a dalit woman for the next three new moon days and I’d be cured. I followed it religiously. Needless to say, nothing came out of it. The bronchial attacks continued unabated. Anyway, many years later my father’s favourite astrologer died. The old crook managed to kick the bucket in his sleep when his family members were away on a pilgrimage. The neighbours came to know of it only when the body started stinking after a few days! When I thought out aloud in front of my venerable ancestor as to how some one who could not predict his own death could have predicted things for others accurately as was claimed, my father’s reply was that it works only for others, one can not do that for self! Well, coming to the subject of predicting things for oneself, my eldest maternal uncle was no mean astrologer either. In family circles as well as outside he was quite well known for his ‘accurate’ predictions. As he lay on his death bed his main problem was with his horoscope. He was more than 90 and his worry was that his horoscope stopped at that point. Of course he did not survive for long.

When my mother was on her death bed suffering from cancer, this uncle was consulted and he told my father that it was a passing phase of an evil planetary configuration and would pass away soon. It was my mother who passed away and not the evil configuration. Though she did not want any religious mumbo jumbo with her mortal remains, my father insisted on them. We protested. Finally some one managed to bring a priest who consulted his almanac and came to the conclusion that it was not one but the effect of five evil planets together on the day that she passed away. He also threatened us with calamities if the appropriate rituals were not done to propitiate the planets. When I asked to wait and watch for what would happen if the rituals were not done, my suggestion was not well-received. The prediction that five other members of the family would pass away if the propitiatory rituals were not done has come true! My mother passed away in 1995 and my father too, though a good ten years later! Of course, all other children of my mother are also going to die sooner or later confirming the accuracy of this astrological forecast! Later on I came to know that no one to date has passed away when the planetary configurations were good! So, the priests could always have some appropriate rituals to offset them and naturally could extract more from their gullible clients.

I was born to the community of the Gowd Saraswath brahmins. For this community the belief in astrology is an absolute must. For each and every thing an astrologer is consulted, whether it be a birth, death or marriage.There are many who specialise in ‘matching’ horoscopes for the purpose of marriage. One of my friends who is now no more, was very much concerned about my lack of belief in what he called as the ‘ancient science of astrology’. He told me that he would convince me once and for all about the greatness of this science if I could get my horoscope. I promised to do that and on the appointed day he brought his astrologer friend who was also working in the same bank as my friend. I handed over my horoscope and the astrologer (part time - his full time job was a clerk in a bank) peered at it, wrote a number of things, made a number of calculations and told me a number of things that were well-known. I pretended to be surprised and asked him how he came to these conclusions. He pointed out the various planetary configurations that were the cause for these. He also suggested solutions for the imaginary problems about which I told him and explained them on the basis of his ‘rational scientific’ terms. When all this was over I told him that while what he had said about me was very correct, the horoscope was not mine! It was that of a friend of mine who had left school at the age of eleven. He (the astrologer) had told me that the horoscope was that of a highly educated person with a post graduate degree and on his way to acquiring higher qualifications. The legitimate owner of the horoscope was a primary school drop out! When I pointed this out the astrologer and my friend who wanted to convince me of the efficacy of this ’science’ were both flabbergasted. They tried the lame excuse that the astrologer was a specialist only in matching horoscopes for the purpose of marital alliances! I had to ask them what had prevented them from making that clear in the beginning itself. They had no answer! To me, the purpose of the whole exercise had been clear from the very beginning. In his enthusiasm to convince me about the efficacy of astrology my friend had told the amateur astrologer all about me before bringing him over to read my horoscope! As for the matching of horoscopes for marriage purposes, though I married Asha who was also born in the same community into which I was born, there was neither any religious ritual nor any hor(ror)oscope matching when we got married. More about that some other time.

There was a lecturer in the department of Kannada at the college where I studied. He was an expert in matching horoscopes for marriage purposes and used to be a consultant for many families. His consultations were always at his residence. If any one expressed doubts about the efficacy of his astrological predictions, he would call for his daughters. They would come out and ask him why they were called. Then he would point out to the visitors that all of his daughters who were widowed had been married after he had diligently matched their horoscopes - they had returned home after their husbands had expired and he was looking after them! He used to tell those who had asked about the efficacy of his predictions that his daughters were living proof! Despite such examples, the community into which I was born are obsessed with matching horoscopes for marriage purposes, and many otherwise suitable alliances are called off due to the non-matching of horoscopes!

There are many social service organisations which arrange marriages, and to enlist one has to give one’s biodata along with a copy of the horoscope. I can recall one such incident that happened about thirty four years ago. I was seated in a friend’s office when a gentleman belonging to this community of the Gowd Saraswath Brahmins dropped in and remarked that he was in search of a suitable bridegroom for his daughter who was working in a bank. At that time another gentleman who was seated there said that he had a son who was also employed in a bank. They were quite happy that the match was suitable after they compared the details of the two. But, the final barrier of the matching of horoscopes had to be crossed. So, as per the usual practice, the horoscopes were exchanged for consultation with their respective astrologers, and the two men promised to meet each other after a couple of days. On the appointed day they met and had conflicting accounts of the suitability of the matching of horoscopes. The boy’s father announced that his astrologer had given quite low marks for the match; he said that the marks were only 20%. But, the girls father had exactly the opposite report. He said that his astrologer had pronounced that it was a very good match - the marks were 80%! When the names of the respective astrologers were asked, it turned out that it was the same individual who had pronounced 20% for one and 80% for the other for the same pair of horoscopes. So, my friend who was the owner of the office promised to sort out the matter. He took the same pair of horoscopes and went to the very same person. This time after various calculations, the same astrologer pronounced that the matching was 50% and if everything else was alright they could go ahead with the marriage! This is astrological matrimonial consultation for you.

One could, of course, tell me that I have not studied astrology. I don’t need to. I don’t know how to cook either. That does not prevent me from appreciating or criticising someone else’s cooking or evaluating the quality of food available, particularly when one pays for it at a restaurant. So, when one pays an astrologer it is expected that the services which are paid for should be of a certain quality and that is basically a demand from any sensible consumer. More on my brushes with this ’science’ in my next article.

Professor Narendra Nayak is the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA). He regularly tours the country, giving demonstrations and holding workshops to develop scientific temper.

Exposing The “Miracle” Of Blindfolded Sight- The Story of Ranjana Agarwal

Narendra Nayak — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:30:34 +0000

This is the story of a little girl of fourteen and the ambitions of her mother whom we met at the studios of Live India TV channel on the evening of 18th June. The story begins on this date, when I received a call from the channel asking if I could visit their studios if I was in Delhi. When the call arrived, Shubrum, Rakshi and I were on our way over to their house, after a very important and successful meeting with the present director of Vigyana Prasar Network, Dr.Anuj Sinha. Since Shubrum had a meeting, Rakshi and I decided to go for the live broadcast to investigate the case of this girl, Ranjana. It was the claim of her family and some others that she had the unique power to see blindfolded. Some of these folks also accompanied her to the studio. It was claimed that she had been given a certificate by the Ministry of Human Resource Development that she had the power of seeing with a cloth tied over her eyes! That was supposed to be in recognition of her ‘unique talents’. It was quite clear that this girl who was from a village near Varanasi wanted to go places!

Ranjana Agarwal with her mother who was manipulating her

On the panel which went on air at 9 pm there was an astrologer, an ophthalmologist, Rakshi and myself. The discussions started with the so called “unique talents” of this girl, with some prerecorded footage of her showing her so called remarkable talents! Then the whole drama started. The opinions of the panel were asked.The ophthalmologist said that the phenomenon needed testing. The astrologer, as to be expected, said that it was a case of supernatural powers. Rakshi said that there was nothing supernatural and I promised that by the end of the program I would prove that she had no supernatural powers.

The tests started with a blindfold being tied round the girl’s eyes and a newspaper shown to her. She brought it down at such a low angle that she could read it through the gap between the blindfold and her nose! When I said this was something that anyone could do, the blind fold was tied around my eyes and I was asked to read something held higher. Obviously I could not do that. That was said to be my defeat in round no.1! The discussions continued and when it was Rakshi’s turn she said it was to be seen as to how this girl was doing it. The anchor kept on harping about the unique talents of this girl and how these were recognised by the govt of India, throughout the program!

Then we took a break and there was an argument between the anchor and Rakshi! When the show was off the air, heated discussions were going on. Though I tended to agree with Rakshi, I am a veteran of many such shows and decided to hold my peace in the larger interests of the movement. This was followed by more heated arguments and Rakshi went off the air. But the panel continued without her and so did the nonsense!

Two pieces of cotton were kept on the girl’s eyes and the blindfold put back on. Again she managed to ’see’ a paper held before her eyes, through the same gap. When I suggested that I would put the blindfold properly on her the anchor declined and said that I would get my chance later! That was never to come! In the meantime there were many other superfluous things going on, They were showing footage from Mahabharath, the part where Kunti put her unique powers into Duryodhan etc. The astrologer was harping on about the powers of Sanjay in the Mahabharath who could read written words from miles away! So, I pulled out a currency note from my pocket and challenged the girl to read its serial number from ten feet away. The astrologer backed out saying that the events he mentioned had happened in Threthayuga and it was Kaliyuga now!

Then came the denouncement! The next chance to prove the so called miraculous powers of the girl was another test. She was to have dough applied to her eyes and be asked to read the words. I said that I wanted to participate in this and went near her with two pieces of sticking plaster in my hands. I had observed where the gaps were between the blindfold and her cheeks and wanted to apply the dough to that area. When the ophthalmologist got ready with the dough, the girl complained that her eyes were hurting and that she was having problems seeing! I had anticipated this, as I could see the girls mother signaling to her, apparently out of the sight of all the others, that she should say no! The very sympathetic anchor said that she was a small girl and hence should not be subjected to more trauma! He who was keen up to that stage saying that we would conduct more and more tests to demonstrate these unique powers of the child, suddenly turned very sympathetic when the going got really tough.

I had got ready with the plaster, but there was no question of applying it now as the girl was shedding copious quantities of tears. The whole drama had been planned and carried out in such a way that the girl would be let off when it came to the crunch. She was to be ready to cheat when the criteria were not rigorous, and when really tough tests were to be applied such a drama would be enacted to get her off the hook! But, I was not willing to be a party to this. I was very vehement that the whole thing was a drama and asked why the rigorous criteria of applying dough to her eyes was not done in the first trial. I also wanted to know why I was not allowed to access the girl the first time! There was no need to go on for an hour when the so called miraculous powers could have been exposed in a few minutes.

The whole thing is about TRPs. They wanted to sacrifice a child at the altar just to improve their viewership. It was obvious that the driving force behind the whole farce was her mother who wanted to bask in the glory of her daughter’s unique “talents”. The whole exercise was fueled by the ambitions of the TV channels to improve their ratings. In fact before it went on air I was requested to wait for some time before I expose this girl, as the whole show was to go on for an hour or so.

Those in on this plan wanted the so called special powers of this girl to be certified by us, which is why I had been invited. This invitation led to their exposure and downfall. In the process, the child was hurt and had to undergo humiliation in public. But the very relevant issue here is that the child was put up to this sort of exploitation. The anchor had been talking all that time about a ‘testimonial’ awarded by the Ministry of HRD, govt. of India. I was wondering, on what grounds did the government issue this “testimonial”? How could have this department verified that this girl had the ability to ’see’ with her eyes blindfolded, before issuing the testimonial? The anchor was also bragging about the ‘certificates’ issued by some local govt. medical officers. Who had given them the authority to certify this so called miraculous power?

Edit: On further checking this certification has been verified to be genuine. The target now includes the ministry of HRD, the government of India, which has so carelessly declared that this girl has the ability to see blindfolded.

While the child’s alleged miraculous powers were exposed on the show, what was the gullibility level of those who certified her? Did none of them have any sense as to see how she was reading blindfolded? My conclusion was that Rakshi had been right from the beginning. It was not about the exposure of so called ‘miraculous’ power, but about a greater exposure of how a publicity-hungry parent, TRP-crazy media and gullible public joined to make a celebrity out of an ordinary myopic girl who was peeking at things held under her nose through the gap between the blindfold and her cheeks. The case needs a more thorough investigation by some agency looking out for children’s welfare, because Ranjana Agarwal is only fourteen years old and legally still a child.

Professor Narendra Nayak is the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA). He regularly tours the country, giving demonstrations and holding workshops to develop scientific temper.

Self-Deception As A Coping Mechanism Among Victims Of The Sai Baba Cult

Prabhakar Kamath — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:42:40 +0000

In my previous article we discussed how Sai Baba satisfied his sexual appetite by abusing innocent children with complete disregard to consequences to their welfare. Sexual abuse serves another purpose for Sai Baba: Dominating these children and converting them into his lifelong devotees and henchmen. In a sense, the sexual abuse is ritual castration by means of which he is telling them literally, “From now onwards I have you boys by the balls.” In a highly shame-oriented society such as India, victims feel great deal of shame to admit that they are sex abuse victims, and they are fearful of exposing such a powerful and revered person. This is further made difficult because of social pressure from victim’s fearful well-wishers; fear of corrupt police who do not hesitate to torture or murder accusers in cold blood; distrust of incompetent prosecutors, and lack of faith in the judiciary incapable of separating state and religion.

Almost all these children grow up bodily but not mentally, and they become Sai Baba’s lifelong followers who meekly submit to his demands. Their total submission to Sai Baba is rooted in self-deception. Sai Baba reinforces their slavish mentality by means of gifts materialized by magic, rewards, public praise, bribes and intimidation. Sai Baba becomes the central figure in their lives, and they become almost totally incapable of critical thinking when it comes to their relationship with him as exemplified by Dr. Naresh Bhatia in the Caravan article by Mr. Arora. Fear of Sai Baba dominates their lives. Almost all their actions are dictated by what they think Sai Baba would want them to do.

Victims Indulge In Self-deception

Sexual abuse in invariably associated with surge of intense painful as well as pleasurable emotions in the mind of victims such as fear, hurt, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, disappointment, helplessness, hopelessness, humiliation, frustration, rage, ecstasy, happiness, and host of other painful emotions. Some victims begin to develop doubt about their abuser and ultimately disassociate themselves from the abuser, like the Rahm family in the BBC video did. Other victims indulge in a defense mechanism known as reaction formation. They convert “sexual trauma” into “spiritual healing.” Or, they declare “sex with a fraud” to be “sex with god.” Instead of saying, “My free spirit has been destroyed” they would say, “My spirit has been liberated.” It is impossible to convince these victims that Sai Baba has so thoroughly stripped them of their true identity that now they are nothing more than mindless zombies or straw men.

What Is Self-deception?

Self-deception is a mental defense mechanism by which some people cope with intensely painful emotions. They avoid becoming aware of, or accepting the truth about, a current life circumstance or person simply because it is too painful or scary to do so. Either they block off their painful emotions by indulging in denial, or they neutralize them by means of screwed-up rationalization, or they give exactly opposite meaning to their experience.

Individuals, political parties, communities and even nations indulge in self-deception. America’s self-deception about Viet Nam war is a classic example of a great nation indulging in this practice. Nazi Germany is another example. Self-deception is common in all countries where religion plays a major part in people’s daily life. Self-deception is a way of life for religious people.

Self-deception As A Quid Pro Quo

Then there are pseudo-intellectuals such as Dr. Michael Goldstein and Mr. Isaac Tigrett of Hard Rock Cafe who continue to associate with Sai Baba because they hate to acknowledge that he fooled them and took advantage of them all these years. Sai Baba did not abuse them sexually, but he screwed them financially or used them for propaganda purposes. In other words, he played them for suckers. Having been involved with Sai Baba for so many years, they would simply look stupid to acknowledge now that he is a fraud. Besides, they must make sense of all the bribes he had given them for their wonderful work and financial support, which have been their proud possessions all these years. Their way of coping with this dilemma is to compartmentalize the problem of sex abuse. Their screwed up rationalization is, “Well, so what? He is god. He is doing good work.” Here is the interview in the BBC video:

Tanya Datta: But even if it was proven to you that Sai Baba was a pedophile and a serial sex abuser, you’re saying it wouldn’t change the fact that he is your guru. (Tigrett laughs at this rather wildly)

Isaac Tigrett: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. He could go out and murder someone tomorrow, as I said, it’s not going to change my evolution, it’s not going to change the good things that have come out of my relationship down there.

Tanya Datta: Does that mean that some part of you believes there could be some truth to the rumors?

Isaac Tigrett: Oh, absolutely I believe there is truth to the rumors.

Tanya Datta: You believe there is truth to the rumors?

Isaac Tigrett: Sure, there probably is, probably is.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the above conversation with Ms. Datta, Mr. Tigrett asserts that if Sai Baba would murder someone tomorrow, his opinion about Sai Baba won’t change. In other words, Sai Baba is above the law and Mr. Tigrett’s devotion to him is unconditional. Incredible as this might seem, this is the hallmark of Brahmanic brainwashing: The Guru is always right, no matter what. Such unconditional acceptance of Gurus has resulted in accepting their nonsensical and deceitful commentaries on anti-Brahmanic scriptures as true.

Self-deception Could Ruin Lives Of Other People

In the third BBC video, when Marissa and Al Rahm’s teenager son reveals that Sai Baba sexually assaulted him, Al reveals that he too had similar experience with Sai Baba when he was 18 years old. Yet he neither warned his son, nor did he hesitate to deliver him to the cunning predator. If you listen to Marissa and Al Rahm carefully you will realize that before they turned on Sai Baba, they were just “intellectual zombies,” incapable of rational thinking in their relationship with him. Now, years after the alleged abuse, they are full of regret. Their son declares that Sai Baba is an ever-present issue in his life.

Here is an example of dire consequences of self-deception on others:

Case study: A forty-five year old white woman, mother of three girls aged 17, 15 and 13, found herself in a bus station two thousand miles away from her home and she could not explain how she got there. Here is her story: She often woke up at night and did not find her husband beside her in bed. Even though she wondered where her husband could be, she did not bother to investigate for fear of knowing the truth. All her three daughters tried to tell her that they often found their father in their bed at night, but the mother avoided dealing with this bad news by telling her daughters not to “cook up wild stories.”

Detailed past history of this woman revealed that her stepfather had abused her. Admitting that her daughters were being abused would result in resurfacing of buried painful emotions. When finally the children revealed the truth to their school counselor, the father was arrested. Unable to deal with the entire horror the patient went into a fugue-like mental state. She wandered off away from her home, and when she woke up from her daze, she was in a bus station two thousand miles away. Her three daughters became psychiatric cases requiring prolonged treatment.

If this woman was capable of rational thinking, she would have investigated where the hell her husband was if he was not in her bed, and finding him in bed with her own daughters, she would have kicked his ass out of the house, reported him to the police, and filed for divorce. She was too busy deceiving herself to do the right thing. A rational person would have taken extra care not to expose her daughters to the danger she herself had been subjected to as a child.

Self-deceiving People Often Develop Stress Disorders

People who cope with highly conflicting emotions in the mind by means of self-deception often end up developing a psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Case study: A thirty eight year old white married woman, mother of two children, suddenly developed severe panic attacks immediately after she returned home from a two-week-long highly enjoyable vacation at Gulf Shores, Alabama. When asked if anything went wrong during the vacation, she denied it. When asked if anything was wrong when she returned home, she denied it. When asked if anything at all was wrong in her life, such as anyone being sick, she categorically denied it.

Since the distance between Gulf Shores, Alabama and Cape Girardeau, Missouri was over 650 miles, I asked her where she stayed in between. She said she stayed overnight in Oxford, Mississippi, where her elderly father lived. When asked how her father was doing, she replied blandly, “He said last week his doctor told him he has a golf ball sized cancer tumor in his liver and he had only three months to live.”

When I said empathically, “Oh! So you are about to lose him!” she burst into sobs, saying, “I am sorry! I was determined not to do this!” I encouraged her to grieve over her father’s impending death, accept the reality of his mortality, and move on with her life. Her panic attacks disappeared in the course of next few days.

The shock of losing her dear father was too much for this woman to deal with and so she indulged in self-deception as evidenced by her denying that anything bad happened. The problem with her self-deception was that whereas she could fool her mind, she could not fool her body. Sensory input about the bad news instantly produced panic attack even after she fooled her mind into believing that nothing bad happened. If this woman was a rational person she would have dealt with this situation by reacting normally -accepting the reality that her old and sick father must die like everyone does, grieving over his loss, and moving on with her own life.

The purpose of counseling victims of sexual abuse is to gently break down their self-deception, help them to accept the reality, make them become aware of, and express, their painful emotions, and show the irrationality of their thinking. People, who are very much in touch with the reality and capable of rational thinking, rarely, if ever, develop emotional disorders. This is because they are quite capable of dealing with the truth, and as the cliché goes, truth has a liberating effect on people.

Dr. Prabhakar Kamath, is a psychiatrist currently practicing in the U.S. He is the author of Servants, Not Masters: A Guide for Consumer Activists in India (1987) and Is Your Balloon About Pop?: Owner’s Manual for the Stressed Mind.

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Fact Checking The Tehelka Radiation Survey- Part 2: Misleading And Incomplete Information

Ajita Kamal — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:28:12 +0000

Last week we wrote about a report by the media outlet Tehelka which, in collaboration with Cogent EMR, conducted Electromagnetic Radiation surveys of Delhi and concluded that radiation levels are well above recommended levels. Analysis by Vaibhav on the forums demonstrated the flaws in the science on which the Tehelka report rested. As Vaibhav pointed out, EMR from cell phones is too weak to cause any structural damage to DNA. However, there could be other long-term effects of low intensity EMR exposure. In this second part I look at a few of the other many inconsistencies in reporter Rishi’s article and comments in the discussion with us on facebook.

Presented below are some of Tehelka’s statements/claims, followed by my analysis:

1. The defense of Cogent EMR: The reporter/representative provided a lot of info on how influential Cogent is, and dismissed Cogent’s involvement in quackery by saying:

Quote:“I did not write an article in any way connected to the products Cogent EMR Ltd sells. So their quackery or otherwise is not related to this article.”

This is strange, to say the least. Cogent has a lot of money to make, and their involvement in providing the data for this survey is a direct conflict of interest, to say the least. What is even stranger is this statement:

Quote:“I couldn’t find any other private concern that conducted EMR audits, and so would be apt for testing EMR levels throughout the city of Delhi. There were government agencies like SAMEER which did this. But why would a government agency undertake a survey which risked showing the government in a bad light?”.

So, it’s OK to trust a private company that has a direct conflict of interest and that makes money selling quack products that rely on distorting the data on the dangers of cell phone use, but it is not OK to trust a government agency designed to safeguard the public and made up of scientists from academia and research institutions, without any ties to industry? This logic sounds like it is designed to feed right into the conspiracy theory mindset.

2. This statement by the Tehelka reporter is just plain wrong.

Quote:“Microwave exposure at levels below the current FCC exposure standard can produce single and double strand breaks in DNA. “

As Vaibhav pointed out, microwave radiation is the non-ionizing kind. Nowhere near the levels that can cause nucleotide damage are found in the environment near residential areas, and all the studies show that EMR levels below the FCC guidelines do not cause nucleotide damage. This entire line of attack relies on the public’s ignorance about the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.

3. Fertility, the great fear of the masculine male:

Quote:“Dr. Agarwal - Director of the Clinical Andrology Laboratory and Reproductive Tissue Bank, and the Director of Research at the Center for Reproductive Medicine in 2006 found that using a mobile phone for more than four hours a day is associated with reduction in sperm viability and mobility of around 25 percent and can cause irreversible infertility in men.”

Now let’s look at the facts. The 2006 study was analyzed by Orac over at scienceblogs:

Quote:“This study has a number of shortcomings that make me take its conclusion with a huge grain of salt. Right off the bat, I note that it’s an observational study, and such studies are fraught with problems. Another huge problem with this study is that the men being studied are not a representative group by definition. After all, they are coming to an infertility clinic.”

Quote:A second problem is that the four parameters that showed a decrease are not independent. They are related, and in this study showed significant positive correlation with each other. If one goes up, all tend to go up, and if one goes down, all tend to go down.

The four parameters mentioned here are sperm count, motility, sperm viability, and percent normal morphology. It is possible that there were other more influential factors involved. Orac goes on:

Quote:However, these problems pale in significance with the single biggest problem of the study: the utter failure even to try to control for confounding factors other than age. Not only did the authors not validate cell phone exposure independently, but they did not examine the occupational history of the subjects or other potential exposures of radiofrequency radiation. The reason this is significant is that there could be a factor common to these men with decreased fertility that is the real cause of their problems that is also correlated with cell phone use.

Orac goes on to point out criticism of the study from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, on the point that the distance between the testicles and the handset when in use is too great for any significant effect.

Quote:“If you’re using your phone for four hours a day, presumably it is out of your pocket for longer. That raises a big question: how is it that testicular damage is supposed to occur?”

This is Dr Allan Pacey.

Quote:He said mobile phone use may be a marker for other lifestyle factors known to affect sperm quality.

“Maybe people who use a phone for four hours a day spend more time sitting in cars, which could mean there’s a heat issue. It could be they are more stressed, or more sedentary and sit about eating junk food getting fat. Those seem to be better explanations than a phone causing the damage at such a great distance” he added.

All the above discussion is over the 2006 study. In 2008 the same team did another study, this time to observe the direct effect of EMR on semen. They placed semen 2.5 cms from a cell phone on talk mode. They claim that this is the average distance between a phone in the trouser pockets and the testicles. Firstly, this is an exaggeration. Secondly, this is hardly the natural conditions. People do not usually walk around talking on cell phones that are in their pocekts 2.5 centimeters from their testicles. Also, our semen is not exposed as it was in the experiment. Finally, although they did notice that “Semen exposed to radiofrequency electromagnetic waves emitted from cell phones had higher levels of damaging free radicals, lower sperm motility (the ability of the sperm to move and swim) and sperm viability”, they also conclude that “There were no significant differences in DNA damage between the exposed and unexposed groups.” This directly contradicts the claims made by the Tehelka reporter (and by Cogent EMR) that cell phone EMR can cause DNA damage. If these studies are accurate, we must face the possibility that something else is going on, given that biological systems are complex and there are many things that we may be yet to understand. But the effects and the dangers are yet to be conclusively demonstrated. If there is any truth to the claims, it’s legitimacy is being affected by the hyperbole, poor fact-checking, blatant promotion of falsehoods and evident omissions of fact that Tehelka is resorting to.

4. Henry Lai and his unavailable meta study: The reporter states:

Quote:“I would like to bring to your notice a study by Dr. Henry Lai, biophysicist at the University of Washington [Video - http://www.blip.tv/file/3283837 - (2:30 min onwards - till 4:45 min) ]. Dr Lai reviewed 350 studies (175 industry funded and 175 non-industry funded) and found that about half showed bio-effects from EM radiation emitted by cell phones. But when he took into consideration the funding sources for those 350 studies, the results changed dramatically. Only 25 percent of the studies paid for by the industry showed effects, compared with 75 percent of those studies that were independently funded.”

The video clip asks the question “Are cell phones dangerous, like cigarettes are?”. Ignoring the obvious hyperbole and false analogy, there are still some puzzling aspects that remain. For some reason the original study is impossible to find! There are numerous sources online mentioning the study, many of them linking to the other studies they mention, but not one of them links to the meta study by Lai. For example, this article links to all the other studies referenced, but not to the original source. None of the original lines, data, images etc from Lai’s study have been quoted. Just a vague citation. Of course, the study could be real, but the fact that it is not available to be read and replicated, is reason for suspect, especially since it is claimed to be such a seminal study. The reason why this is important is because it is vital that we carefully go through Lai’s sources and see what he considers an ‘Industry Study” and what he considers an ‘Independent Study’. Also, each one of these studies must be scrutinized to make sure what Lai’s criteria was when he interpreted the results of these studies. Meta studies are easily manipulated, and the fact that no one can find the original study is cause for suspect. Moreover, Lai’s original claims from the 90s seems to have been that cell phone use causes DNA damage. This part is rejected today by the scientific consensus. It seems that Lai is his own ‘industry’.

5. Non-existent group: The reporter claims that:

Quote:The Australian Health Research Institute indicates that due to billions of times more in volume electromagnetic radiation emitted by billions of mobile phones, internet, intranet and wireless communication data transmission, almost one-third of world population (about 2 billion) may suffer from Cell Phone Cancer by 2020. Even if 1% of it comes true it will have devastating consequences to so many people.

What’s interesting is that this story is a complete hoax! There is no Australian Health Research Institute, and the above words seem to be taken almost word for word from some sort of propaganda ‘press’ release: See here, here and here.

I did not have time to fact check all the claims made by Rishi, the reporter, but many of the other claims in the reports look suspect as well, especially given that the majority opinion among science-based medical researchers is that cell phone radiation is too weak to cause DNA damage- a claim that Tehelka refutes over and over. In the time that it has taken us to get around to fact-checking and reporting on this issue, Tehelka has conducted surveys in three other cities, Mumbai, and Bangalore & Chennai. As expected, they concluded their reports on a terrifying note. The push by Tehelka to blow up this issue has made it necessary for us to get involved in looking at the evidence from a rational and scientific perspective. This discussion began on the forums and has now been stepped up to a different level. Nirmukta is calling for the big guns to tackle this one.

God’s Own Stockholm Syndrome

Prabhakar Kamath — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:23:11 +0000

In my previous articles, we discussed how Swamis and Babas cleverly recognized that the primary preoccupations of ordinary people were to fulfill their heart’s desires and to protect themselves from imaginary or real evils. They met these deep-rooted psychological needs by the deception of miracles, sleight of hand or even sheer gift of the gab. To fleece the deluded masses and profit from their weaknesses, they built massive temple-casino complexes. They invested a portion of their gains in building colleges, hospitals and other institutions, which gave people the impression that they were doing great socially beneficial services. The reality is that these institutions merely served the purpose of deluding people benefiting from them and silencing their critics. In the process they fulfilled their own desires (sexual and financial) and took care of their own insecurity. Sai Baba and his Puttaparti temple-casino complex is a classic example of this web of fraud bewildering people and profiting from their delusion.

Mind Control By Force And Intimidation

Here is a classic example of how Sai Baba controlled the mind and behavior of a highly educated doctor by the name of Naresh Bhatia as reported by Vishal Arora in Caravan magazine dated June 6^th, 2010:

AND I WAS TO FIND A SIMILAR, dangerous, resilience of faith and disregard for doubt when I met devotee Dr Naresh K Bhatia, who in October 2000 had told the Daily Telegraph journalist Mick Brown over the phone that he had sexual relations with Sai Baba for a total of “15 or 16 years.” He was also aware that Sai Baba had relations with “many, many students from the college and school, and with devotees from overseas.” Also, The Findings, a dossier of testimonies of ex-devotees of Sai Baba on the Web, claims that Dr Bhatia exposed “massive sexual exploitation by Sathya Sai Baba of students, including a report on the physically injurious anal rape of a minor, a boy student, with which he personally confronted Sathya Sai Baba.” This led to “his immediate sacking from his position as head of the Blood Bank at Sathya Sai Baba’s hospital in Puttaparthi and total banishment from the ashrams and all Sai Baba institutions.”

I read his account in the Daily Telegraph and several Internet forums; I wanted to meet the now 59-year-old Dr Bhatia. I went to see him in his house in Noida. The tall, fair man received me very gently and offered me a seat on a veranda next to his living room. There was a six-foot tall poster of Sai Baba on one of the walls. I wondered why he still had a picture of him.

I told him I wanted to know about his relationship with Sai Baba and whether or not the reports on the Internet were true. “What did you find in Puttaparthi?” he asked. I told him many of his former devotees wouldn’t make accusations against Sai Baba. I also complained that there seemed to be no real consequences for Sai Baba. “No action will be taken against him. Nothing will happen to him,” remarked Dr Bhatia. “I will suggest that you do not write the article.” I thought it was his pessimism.

“But why do you think nothing will happen to him?” I asked. “He is God,” he replied. “Is what I have read on the Internet about you untrue?” I asked. “Everything is true,” he said, “but so what?” The bell rang and he went to the door and came back with his colleague. I thought it would be difficult to have a frank conversation now. But Dr Bhatia carried on.

“What is evil, and what is good? Can you separate evil from good? They are two sides of the same coin,” he continued, looking at his friend for his approval, and he nodded. “It is the giving of one’s heart that is more important than giving one’s body. Jesus said if you look at a woman with lust, you have already committed adultery. This means your thoughts are more important than the acts done in body. So if you can give your heart to Sai Baba, what can you withhold? He is the creator.” For about an hour, he carried on with his confusing, contradictory, pantheistic argument.

Before I left he hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, said I was like a son to him and offered help in life. He also gave me a book he’d written, The Dreams and Realities: Face to face with God. The book details Bhatia’s own realization of Sai Baba’s divinity. It was signed by Sai Baba, “With Love and Blessings, Sri Sathya Sai,” and dated 5 June 1993.

Stockholm Syndrome

The case of Dr. Bhatia strongly suggests that he suffers from Stockholm syndrome. Here is an excellent write-up on Stockholm syndrome from Ask Yahoo:

Stockholm Syndrome describes the behavior of kidnap victims who, over time, become sympathetic to their captors. The name derives from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, Sweden. At the end of six days of captivity in a bank, several kidnap victims actually resisted rescue attempts, and afterwards refused to testify against their captors.

While some people are suggesting the recent Elizabeth Smart kidnapping sounds like a case of Stockholm syndrome, the most famous incident in the U.S. involved the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. Captured by a radical political group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, Ms. Hearst eventually became an accomplice of the group, taking on an assumed name and assisting them in several bank robberies. After her re-capture, she denounced the group and her involvement.

What causes Stockholm syndrome? Captives begin to identify with their captors initially as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of violence. Small acts of kindness by the captor are magnified, since finding perspective in a hostage situation is by definition impossible. Rescue attempts are also seen as a threat, since it is likely the captive would be injured during such attempts.

It’s important to note that these symptoms occur under tremendous emotional and often physical duress. The behavior is considered a common survival strategy for victims of interpersonal abuse, and has been observed in battered spouses, abused children, prisoners of war, and concentration camp survivors.

Stockholm Syndrome Is Common In Sexually Abused People

Men and women who were sexually abused for years by their fathers, stepfathers or priests, Swamis and Babas starting at an early age often suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. All of them suffer from serious emotional symptoms such as depression and anxiety, and yet they often keep insisting that they still love their abusers. Not only that, they often resent anyone blaming their abusers for their emotional problems. Very often they claim that they had forgiven their abusers and they still love them. Here is a case study in my practice:

A forty-year-old white married woman, mother of two came to see me for depression of many years duration. During her eighteen-year-long marriage to a highly tolerant man, she had numerous extramarital affairs. She was chronically unhappy with her life and her illicit affairs were her way of finding the elusive happiness.

Detailed history revealed that starting around eight years of age, her father began to have sexual relationship with her. This continued even after she married her husband at age twenty two. She simply could not say no to her father’s demands. Then suddenly, when she was thirty, her father suffered a massive heart attack and became brain-dead. He was kept alive in the Intensive Care Unit for several days. None of her siblings had the courage to pull the plug on him. It fell on the patient to give the doctors consent to terminate all life support and let him die.

The patient’s depression got worse after her father died, not only out of the guilt for pulling the plug on her father, but also because all buried memories of sexual abuse resurfaced and manifested as serious depressive symptoms. In the course of many counseling sessions, she just could not bring herself to condemning her father for years of sexual abuse. Even a faint hint of disrespect for her father in my voice made her resent me for it. She kept defending her father saying, “He meant no harm; that was his way of showing his love for me.” In fact, she confessed to me that during her sexual relationship with other men the only way she could get any pleasure was by thinking of her father.

Is There A Remedy For God’s Own Stockholm Syndrome?

The vast majority of victims of Sai Baba, or any sex-obsessed Swami, are so deeply delusional that they do not believe they suffer from a serious psychiatric syndrome. Naturally, they do not seek treatment. The intensity of conflicting emotions (ecstasy of the intimacy and terror of retaliation) related to their “spiritual intercourse” with their object of worship seems to create a lasting pathological bond with it. Deep in their mind, they seem to relive the pleasure of their past contacts with that object, no matter how illicit, and at the same time, they are terrified of the consequences of condemning that object. They cope with their predicament by indulging in nonsensical explanations and stupid rationalizations such as the one displayed by Dr. Bhatia. His fear is justified by an incident a few years ago when four stupid sex abuse victims attempted to assassinate Sai Baba (read the above Caravan article here). The police in cold blood promptly murdered the assassins. The whole matter was hushed-up by the directive from the highest level of the Government of India. The point is if someone from Sai Baba’s camp decides to kill an opponent of Sai Baba, there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop him or punish him. Sai Baba is absolutely above the law.

Either the rulers of the great country of India, across the board, suffer from Stockholm syndrome, or the great fraud of Puttaparthi, who controls them all with the wave of his little finger, must really be God.

Editor’s Note: Below is the first part of the excellent BBC and CBC produced documentary, ‘The Secret Swami’, which documents the sexual abuse and other alleged crimes of Sai Baba. The remaining parts can can be accessed here: Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7. You can continue debating this issue on our forums here.

Click here to view the embedded video.