If you were to look at continental or any western food for that matter, it is mostly bland because they use limited ingredients. You can have it for one day or one week and then you'll want to try something else. Back home in India, we use multiple masalas and ingredients in a single recipe.
The addition of every masala gives a unique flavour to the recipe and most of our spices have high nutritional value. Today, thanks to people like master chef Vikas Khanna, people in the western countries are taking special interest in Indian food and appreciating it too.
Every year, we make about 1, plus films in more than 20 different languages. So what if our films have not won an Oscar? If we look at the entire package -- our content, story telling and execution has improved by leaps and bounds.
We have actors like Irfan Khan, Rajkumar Rao whose performances are at par with international actors. Our films make crores of rupees too, which is why foreign investors and film makers want to collaborate with us. We have made films on low budget with bold subjects and social messages as well -- which is why our films are appreciated at international film festivals. Like it or not, the credit goes to Ramdev Baba for bringing yoga into your drawing room and making it so popular.
In fact, the science of physiotherapy finds its roots in yoga. The postures, the techniques are all inspired from yogic mudras. People world over are slowly realising the fact that if you spend 15 minutes of your day doing yoga, pranayam and meditation, you will cut your medical bills tremendously. After all, little drops of water make the ocean.
True to its principles as a land of freedom, democracy and peace, India has been the largest troop contributor to the United Nations Peacekeeping Missions since its inception.
But India has never invaded or attacked a country. In recent times, India has welcomed large numbers of refugees from Sri Lanka, Tibet, Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who fled from religious and political persecution.
Some people hold that the concept of India as a nation was a British invention. According to them, there was no connection binding all the people of the subcontinent before the advent of the British. Then Persians came and called it Hindu.
Sindhu and Hindu combined to form the name Hindustan, which continues to refer to the entire land of the Hindus. Our homeland has also been called Bharat since time immemorial. Once upon a time, India was a land of fabulous wealth and great advancement. The British were certainly not the first to unify India under their political rule.
Thousands of years ago, India was governed by the same code of laws and rulers when the mighty Mauryan Empire spanned across most of the subcontinent. Rock edicts and pillars inscribed by Emperor Ashoka stand witness to this fact in many far-flung parts of our country. India had cultural and spiritual unity thousands of years before the British came. Around years CE, Jagadguru Adi Shankaracharya travelled from his native Kerala in the far south, to important holy pilgrimage centres for the Hindus across the length and breadth of the land.
He established Sringeri Sharada Peetha in Karnataka in the south, Govardhan Peetha in Puri in the east, Jyotirmath in Badrinath high in the Himalayas in the north, and a matha in Dwarka in the West, spreading his message of spiritual enlightenment from the mountains to the seas surrounding our homeland.
Our ancient places of pilgrimage drew saints and pilgrims from all over the land. Consider the example of Puri on the coast of Odisha in eastern India. Puri is one of the four holiest Hindu Char Dhams. Through the ages, saints and sages came here seeking divine enlightenment.
Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, prayed here for 24 years. Srimad Vallabhacharya travelled from his birthplace in the distant south and visited Puri, where he performed a seven-day recitation of Srimad Bhagavad Gita.
He also travelled to Gujarat in the west to establish his spiritual philosophy, Pushtimarg. The mathas and meditation spots of these saints continue to exist in Puri, though many are neglected and encroached upon.
With lakhs of active mosques, India can boast of numbers larger than any other country, including the Islamic world. Zoroastrians came to India in waves over several centuries to escape religious persecution in their native Persia. I remember with respect the Catholic nuns who affectionately taught us in school.
Through the ages, India has made great contributions to world civilisation. The art of seafaring and navigation was born in the mouth of River Sindh or Indus over 6, years ago. Archaeological excavations in the Harappan seaport of Lothal in Gujarat throws light on their advancements in shipbuilding. In eastern India, sailors set sail from the mouth of the Mahanadi river for the islands of Indonesia and beyond.
The Indus Valley Civilisation prospered 6, years ago because of technological innovations such as drainage and sewerage systems. Its significance lies not only in its size—some million Indians are 15 percent of the planetary population—but also in the questions raised by the path India has chosen in domestic and foreign policy.
This nation is the largest functioning democracy, with regular and freely contested elections. Modern India is also a test of two middle-ground philosophies. As an early proponent of non-alignment in international politics, India has attempted to establish a [middle] position between Western and [communist] oriented states.
Over the years, its leadership in carving out a Third World posture demonstrated that there is a viable route for nations who did not want to take sides in Cold War politics, an approach which many other nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have followed and hope to sustain.
India's economic policies have also broken new ground. They were the first large-scale test of the modern mixed economy: central government planning with a combination of both private and public ownership of economic enterprises. It is perhaps still too early to evaluate the results. On the one hand, poverty remains [widespread] and unemployment is high.
On the other, Indian agriculture has performed much better than either Soviet or Chinese agriculture. India now feeds her population and has imported hardly any grain in the past four years. Also, India now ranks as the ninth largest industrial economy in the world. A further significance of India today comes from the geopolitics of South Asia.
Bordering the Indian Ocean into which the Persian Gulf flows, it is a key location in an era of oil logistics. Add the proximity of Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China, and India's situation becomes critical to the tensions and interactions of current global politics. From this perspective alone, apart from the many human, cultural and other reasons, it behooves thoughtful people around the world to make efforts to understand this vast and vital nation.
It is possible to say almost anything about India and have it apply to some part of that subcontinent. India is a land of [poverty] and, in some ways, of plenty. It is a nation both powerful and weak, ancient and modern, climatically dramatic in its contrasts. The very term "India" implies a unity which exists more as a tentative political form than as a human and socio-cultural reality.
From the intertwining of its complex history with contemporary society, one can distill five important features which will perhaps give us some aids in understanding modern India. The first feature to remember when thinking of India is its diversity. It is a country in which there are 15 official languages, over minor languages and some 3, dialects.
Twenty-four languages have more than one million speakers each. The largest spoken language is Hindi, but this is the mother tongue of only about 40 percent of the population. Often Indians cannot understand each other and frequently use English as a link or administrative language. But language is not the only diversity.
There are four principal social groupings, what we sometimes call castes, and several thousand sub-categories of the castes. Although predominantly Hindu, all the world's major religions are represented in India. Ethnic differences also [abound]. This mosaic is culturally extraordinary. It is a source of divisiveness in a nation where particular loyalties have a deep meaning, both spiritually and physically.
Given this diversity, it is remarkable that India has remained and grown, and continues to grow, as one nation. A second feature is the depth of culture, which contrasts with the newness of the nation in its present form.
0コメント