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By: Bal Ram Singh
January 14, 2006
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Sometime in November 1988, I suffered from a minor upset stomach problem
(I had slight abdominal discomfort), and visited my physician, Dr. Vastola,
in Madison, WI.
As Vastola started questioning, he paused on my answer to his
question,“What did you eat yesterday?” I had replied: vegetable curry,
rice, and bread. He appeared to have hit upon some treasure, further
questioned me about the contents of the curry, and upon hearing it
contained all sorts of spices, he immediately pronounced I had ulcer.
“But, Dr. Vastola, my discomfort is towards the lower part of my stomach.
Isn’t the ulcer to cause discomfort in the upper part of the stomach?”, I
pleaded. “Hun… hun.., why don’t you get this prescription, and see me
after three days,” he muttered while leaving
the prescription in my hand. I was not sure if he accepted my plea or
ignored it.
I thought whatever he decided must be the right prescription. After all,
he was a trained physician, an expert working for a famous Health
Maintenance Organization, and was highly recommended by my friend, Chinmoy
Ray, who had lived in Madison for 10 years before I got there.
When I reported back to Dr. Vastola three days later that there was no
relief from the prescription, he said, “Well, you do not have ulcer then.
We need to do more tests.”
Since that time, I have become watchful of experts - in politics,
economics, sociology, religion, computers, education, and science - who
shove their ideas down the public`s throat. The world seems to be
suffering from hyper expertise problem, what I would like to label as HEP.
Earlier this year, Professor Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economics
expert at Harvard University, displayed HEP at a meeting in Hong Kong
praising the communist China’s state medical system under the cultural
revolution.
Sen was treading along very well with facts and figures on infant
mortality and life expectancy, especially in comparison to India, when
suddenly he was confronted by Weijian Shan, who had actually lived through
the Cultural Revolution in China as one of Mao’s “barefoot doctors.”
According to an editorial in February 21, 2005 Wall Street Journal
entitled, “A Nobel Prize-winning economist spouts off, and a Chinese
survivor sets him straight,” Shan is quoted as saying “I observed with my
eyes the total absence of medicine in some parts of China. The system was
totally unsustainable, we used to admire India.”
In September 2005, HEP was again at display in Saudi Arabia, when the U.S.
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Karen Hughes, addressed an
audience of 500 women at the Saudi Dar Al-Hekma College in an effort to
impart some American values and expert advice, saying “driving car was an
important part of my freedom."
She received an earful from the burqua-clad women, thought to be backwards
by centuries. "I don`t want to drive a car," said Dr. Siddiqa Kamal, an
obstetrician and gynecologist who runs her own hospital. "I worked hard
for my medical degree. Why do I need a driver`s license?"
"The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn`t happy," one
audience member said. "Well, we`re all pretty happy." The room, full of
students, faculty members and some professionals, resounded with applause.
Very recently HEP raised its ugly head again in California when a German
linguist, Michael Witzel, a professor at Harvard’s Sanskrit and Indian
Studies department claiming expertise in Indian history, culture, and
religion, interjected himself into the issue of sixth grade textbook
portrayal of India in general, and Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, in
particular.
While concerned parents, community educational organizations, and
education experts, had worked out a reasonably acceptable text for social
studies books, Witzel along with several of his like minded colleagues
(including Stanely Wolpert whose sensational books were banned by Indian
government during Indira Gandhi’s days, and D. N. Jha, whose book on beef
eating in India was banned by Indian courts in 2001) wrote a letter to the
California Board of Education, berating Hindus, Hindu scholars, and Indian
Americans, urging “to reject the demands of nationalist Hindu (“Hindutva”)
groups that the California textbooks be altered to conform to their
religious political views.”
Witzel represents a group of remaining colonialist scholars who are trying
to hold on to their view of the existence of an Aryan race, a view that
has been decimated within the past decade by a group of very dedicated
individuals like N. S. Rajaram, S. Kalyanraman, and David Frawley.
They have collected more effective scientific and archeological evidences,
as opposed to linguistics and speculative history, to refute the
existences of Aryan race, ever. BBC recently reported that the Aryan
Invasion Theory among other things “provided basis for racism in the
Imperial context by suggesting that the peoples of Northern India were
descended from invaders from Europe and so racially closer to the British
Raj”.
More modern and scientific data such as genetics supplied by Dr. Panse (a
practicing Hindu and a biotechnology professor) to the CBE was noticed by
a California curriculum commissioner, Dr. Stan Metzenberg, when he
rejected Witzel’s claims on Aryan theories saying: "I`ve read the DNA
research and there was no Aryan migration. I believe the hard evidence of
DNA more than I believe historians." He further commented that Witzel’s
portrayal of Hinduism as ‘insensitive’ and something that Hindus
themselves would be unable to recognize.
All these events go a long way to show how excessive HEP may have resulted
in a massive disconnect between the reality and portrayal of the reality,
and may well be responsible for much the turmoil seen in the world today.
Bal Ram Singh
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This article was first published in
December 19, 2005 issue of
INDIA New England News
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