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The world is changing. This is a statement of fact true for every age, nothing new about it, for everyone is living and experiencing the phenomenon of change. It is however not the change as much as the nature and direction of change and its impact on the most ancient civilization on the planet – the Vedic civilization that is of immense importance to all of us. The mutual dynamics of interaction of the Vedic civilization and the tremendous forces at work in this age and the nature of their exchange is of significant consequence to the future of humanity.

There is a great stirring and pull and counter pull that the soul of this most expansive, most potent and yet the most stoic civilization has been experiencing. It is as if, the march of centuries and millenia hardly ruffle a feather, as if, the entire span of human drama we play out as individuals, families, clans, dynasties and nations is but an inconsequential set of images while an entirely different kind of politics is played out in the nature at a cosmic scale. Seeped in an aura of extreme material indifference, the Vedic civilization seems to be fighting its fights, living its life and finding its peace in an entirely different dimension, where entities of interaction are a higher abstraction of our own aspirations and fears.

The projection into this dimension, while critical to understanding the existential truth and truest freedom, can quickly deteriorate into a kind of escapism, to the point of criminal neglect of the present moment and the material world with its obsessive and unforgiving passion for success. Here lies the very seed of ambiguity, confusion and inertia that has come to cloud the genius of Vedic civilization and hence of the present day India, with its attendant disastrous material effects.

In the past 900 years of its existence, the Vedic civilization forgot all about its own body - the landmass of Bharat, call it AryaVarta. With its hallowed Himalayas and holy rivers and mountains and a landmass tread upon by the likes of stalwart divine women and men, veritable avatars of divinity the world never ever saw anywhere else. It was as if for a while, the body mass just did not matter – not even if someone trampled upon, stole away the glittering material possessions or even bled the body white.

The Vedic civilization was asleep to the perceived sense of puny gains and losses, praise and insults heaped upon by people and philosophies who little understood existence beyond loot and lust, spoke of their ancestry in centuries, who needed to create a story and a history of a saviour colored in blood for conquest, more out of mutual fear than for glory, possessed of devilishly selfish minds that could only intrusively steal and subsist on the bloody conquest of lands not their own.

It is the victory of such civilizations and bloody philosophies that has caused the foreign policies of nation states of this present day to be colored by the same reactive value system - deception, deathly hatred and glorified selfishness passing for national interest. And yet, it is not national interest that is to be sacrificed at the altar of international institutions that no one else cares for – something the nascent Indian state made a fine art of. This confusion of causes and effects has been to India's detriment – India the nation state – not India the Vedic civilization.

It is the ignorance of definitions of a Nation, Nation state, civilization and culture that have added to the tangential nature of discourse in the present national life of Indian state, its its polity and its famous English speaking intelligentsia. While the Indian state passed from one foreign civilizational power to another in the last few centuries, the nation was untouched, and what sustained the nation in the hearts and minds of Indians was the love for one's own symbols of civilization - rivers and vales and temples and ancient cities, something that comes naturally to children of the soil, as a child would love her mother, irrespective of who owns her property or how unwell she is.

It is ideas uniting the hearts and existence to the events and geography that define a nation. So while the Indian state passed hands, the nation itself was above reach for anyone save the children of India. The value system and sacred geography and events that predate history itself is something that hazily outlines the civilizational contours of the nation of India.

Such being the nature of multiple levels of confusion of the Indian Intellect in the present day – something that stops Indian state from proclaiming its own civilizational genius, it is but natural to ponder the education system of the present day Indian state. If education were a measure of a humane value system and knowledge of truth, many an unlettered rustic `country` Indian would qualify to be among the most educated in the world. We all have something new to learn from everyone. But to quantify the knowledge of the English alphabet, as literacy is a travesty of the idea of education. This is all the more poignant to see this travesty played out in an ancient land where humility and service were the values taught and learnt in serene natural surroundings of an ashram, and where intellectual brilliance was a consequence and not the cause of education.

The Vedic civilization`s existential reality is seeped in a timescale of the magnitude of a colossus. The ideas of `yuga`, or `dharma` or atman` have no easy translation into any other language. The lusting hordes that fell upon India and still continue to eye India have no concept of cyclical timescales of the truth of cyclical `karma`. The Vedic civilization is content in its assertion `satyameva jayate`, a thunderbolt of a statement from the Upanishads, which means ` truth always triumphs`, which is also the verbal mascot of the modern Indian nation state, which however `secular` could not divorce itself from its source of emotional and civilizational inspiration. And it is not helped by a civilizational genius that refuses to define itself in any expression, and which is rooted in principles and ideals congenial for truth seeking and not invested in personalities.

The impact of these civilizational moorings on the modern nation state of India and on the world at large and the lessons that are imperative will be the subject of the second part of this article.

Raj Tadepalli

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