…Scientists at the Anthropological Survey of India claim to have found evidence of an ancient brain surgical practice on a Bronze Age Harappan skull. The skull, believed to be around 4,300 years old, bears an incision that indicates an “unequivocal case” of a surgical practice known as trepanation, says a research paper published in the latest edition of Current Science.

Trepanation, a common means of surgery practised in prehistoric societies starting with the Stone Age, involved drilling or cutting through the skull vault, often to treat head injury or to remove bone splinters or blood clots caused by a blow to the head.
…The procedure has, in some parts of the world, also been associated with religious rituals and “to ward off evil spirits”. However, in the case of the Harappa skull, the trepanation was intended as therapeutic as there is a clear indication of cranial trauma in the form of a visible linear depression, probably resulting from a severe blow, says the study by A.R. Sankhyan and G.R. Schug.

There is evidence too of healing, “indicating that the victim survived for a considerable time after the operation,” the paper adds.

Why has this not been reported elsewhere in media? Google news tells me that the only other mention of this news-story is in The Telegraph (from Koklata). Strange.

Related Posts: Sushruta and Plastic Surgery, Make Your Brain Work Faster – in just 80 mins!, Phototherapy in Ancient India and posts in this category: Indian Medicine and Ayurveda

“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”

The “Dr Shukla” mentioned in the article is Dr Aseem Shukla and what he is talking about is the “take Yoga Back movement..Below, some excerpts from his recent article on “The theft of Yoga” (emphasis added):

Nearly 20 million people in the United States gather together routinely, fold their hands and utter the Hindu greeting of Namaste — the Divine in me bows to the same Divine in you. Then they close their eyes and focus their minds with chants of “Om,” the Hindu representation of the first and eternal vibration of creation. Arrayed in linear patterns, they stretch, bend, contort and control their respirations as a mentor calls out names of Hindu divinity linked to various postures: Natarajaasana (Lord Shiva) or Hanumanasana (Lord Hanuman) among many others. They chant their assigned “mantra of the month,” taken as they are from lines directly from the Vedas, Hinduism’s holiest scripture. Welcome to the practice of yoga in today’s western world.

..The Yoga Journal found that the industry generates more than $6 billion each year and continues on an incredible trajectory of popularity. It would seem that yoga’s mother tradition, Hinduism, would be shining in the brilliant glow of dedicated disciples seeking more from the very font of their passion.

Yet the reality is very different. Hinduism in common parlance is identified more with holy cows than Gomukhasana, the notoriously arduous twisting posture; with millions of warring gods rather than the unity of divinity of Hindu tradition–that God may manifest and be worshiped in infinite ways; as a tradition of colorful and harrowing wandering ascetics more than the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali, the second century BCE commentator and composer of the Yoga Sutras, that form the philosophical basis of Yoga practice today.

Dr Aseem Shukla’s photograph, courtesy: University of Minnesota

Why is yoga severed in America’s collective consciousness from Hinduism? Yoga, meditation, ayurvedic natural healing, self-realization–they are today’s syntax for New Age, Eastern, mystical, even Buddhist, but nary an appreciation of their Hindu origins. It is not surprising, then, that Hindu schoolchildren complain that Hinduism is conflated only with caste, cows, exoticism and polytheism–the salutary contributions and philosophical underpinnings lost and ignored.

…The Los Angeles Times last week chronicled this steady disembodying of yoga from Hinduism. “Christ is my guru. Yoga is a spiritual discipline much like prayer, meditation and fasting [and] no one religion can claim ownership,” says a vocal proponent of “Christian themed” yoga practices. Some Jews practice Torah yoga, Kabbalah yoga and aleph bet yoga, and even some Muslims are joining the act. They are appropriating the collective wisdom of millenia of yogis without a whisper of acknowledgment of yoga’s spiritual roots.

Not surprisingly, the most popular yoga journals and magazines are also in the act. Once yoga was no longer intertwined with its Hindu roots, it became up for grabs and easy to sell. These journals abundantly refer to yoga as “ancient Indian,” “Eastern” or “Sanskritic,” but seem to assiduously avoid the term “Hindu” out of fear, we can only assume, that ascribing honestly the origins of their passion would spell disaster for what has become a lucrative commercial enterprise. The American Yoga Association, on its Web site, completes this delinking of yoga from Hinduism thusly:

“The common belief that Yoga derives from Hinduism is a misconception. Yoga actually predates Hinduism by many centuries…The techniques of Yoga have been adopted by Hinduism as well as by other world religions.”

So Hinduism, the religion that has no known origins or beginnings is now younger than yoga? What a ludicrous contention when the Yoga Sutras weren’t even composed until the 2nd Century BCE. These deniers seem to posit that Hinduism appropriated yoga so other religions may as well too!

As some of you may remember, I have written on this before…(also read, The dreaded “H-word”)

For the more curious amongst you, here is what Yoga is really about:

“There is no physical yoga and spiritual yoga.  If it is exclusively physical, it won’t be yoga.  Yoga is dealing with the entirety; it is a union.” – Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S Iyengar

Yoga, from the word “yuj” (Sanskrit, “to yoke” or “to unite”), refers to spiritual practices that are essential to the understanding and practice of Hinduism.  Yoga and yogic practices date back more than 5,000 years — the Indus Valley seals depict figures in yoga poses.

…With the popularity of Yoga skyrocketing throughout the world, particularly in the West, there arise two main points in need of clarification.  First, that which is practiced as “Hatha Yoga” – a form of Raja Yoga – in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a single limb of Yoga: asana (posture). ..this “asana heavy” form of Yoga – sometimes complimented with pranayama (breathing) – is only a form of exercise to control, tone and stretch muscles.  Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate spiritual goal.

Bonus Links: Sandeep’s excellent post on “The Hindu Roots of Yoga“ and Rajeev Malhotra on “A Hindu View of Christian Yoga”

P.S. Please note that I am travelling for the next few days so there may be some delay in moderating and responding to comments. Thank you for your patience and support, as always.

…In a new study reported in the journal Consciousness and Cognition…researchers found significant benefits for novice meditators from only 80 minutes of meditation over 4 days (Zeidan et al., 2010).

Despite their very brief period of practice — and compared with a control group who listened to an audiobook of Tolkein’s The Hobbit— meditators improved on measures of working memory, executive functioning and visuo-spatial processing.

An ascetic, in the Yogasana pose. dated from 8th century.

Image Source: Museum of Trivandrum, Kerala; Courtesy: HinduWisdom.info

The authors conclude that even as little as “...four days of meditation training can enhance the ability to sustain attention; benefits that have previously been reported with long-term meditators.“

The article goes on to talk about something called “Mindfulness Meditation”.  I am keen to hear from those of you who are familiar with Yoga and ancient Hindu meditation techniques, if there is anything equivalent in the practice of traditional Yoga.  Thanks.

Related Posts:

Nanopost of the day…

Benefits of Yoga – reconfirmed

Super Brain Yoga – I want to trademark this!*

Somewhat Related: W’end Links: Nehru, Yoga, Israel and Caste Census

The first is an excerpt from a keynote speech delivered by Sh Sam Pitroda on “India in a globalized world” at Nehru Centre, Mumbai (Thanks Prashant):

…Today, education is definitely on the national agenda. I believe that this is a great window of opportunity because we have a very large young population. We are prepared to invest on education. Our economy is growing at 8 to 10%. But, at the same time, don’t have big dreams that India will become a superpower. I think that we have a lot of work related to disparity, development and poverty. On the one hand, we have this great need for education. On the other hand, we have 300 million people who are illiterate. Our cities are basically dying. We do not have the right infrastructure. We don’t have enough power, we will have water shortages. There are a whole lot of issues that we need to deal with.

But, at the same time, we do have a unique position in the world because the world is going through a crisis of a different kind. This is mainly because the US model based on consumption is being questioned. We have reached a point where that model is not scalable, sustainable or workable. You cannot go on buying things all the time. When the US data comes from retailers during Christmas or Thanksgiving, we find that the world gets all excited if the US spends a lot of money. So people in Korea, China, Taiwan, India feel good. You cannot have 300 million people driving world economy any more. It was acceptable fifty years ago when the wealth was concentrated only in one part of the world. Today, there are a billion people in China, a billion in India and almost a billion in the former Soviet Union. These three billion have the same aspirations as Americans or Europeans. They also want all of the same goods and services. As a result, the Western model of consumption cannot be sustained and this is especially true after the recession.

India will have to evolve a new model…if India has to have a place in the global world, it will, in turn, look for and ultimately evolve a new model of consumption. India has the diversity, the mass, the momentum that is needed to give a new direction to the world.

We have answers in many areas. For example, in health, we cannot go on building expensive hospitals with fancy equipment and high cost surgery rooms and still meet the needs of this country in terms of health cost. We have to go back at some time to use some of our traditional wisdom mainly because there are 12,000 herbal medicinal plants which are unique to Indian climate. Our great grandfathers and grandmothers knew some of these formulas. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t work. We need to go back and look in our tradition and evolve low-cost models.

…Let’s start with education. Education, as we understand it today, essentially implies duster, blackboard, chalk, teacher, classroom, textbook, examinations, grades, certificates…This is based on the way I learnt 50-60 years ago. Today, to learn, one does not need any of this…Who decided that it should take four years to get a degree? For some reason, the entire world follows that. What does a degree really mean? Do you need a degree to do a job?

…Our systems don’t allow that. Our educational systems are not designed to give that seamless flexibility. We are all wound up in trying to promote higher education. But it is all useless.

…If we focus on innovations, if we focus on new infrastructure, if we focus on young talent, I think we will definitely find our place in the globalized world. We cannot make a dent until we address our own basic challenges of disparity, demography and development with a focus on the people at the bottom of the pyramid and inclusive growth.

***

Next, excerpts from Those tears of doom (Thanks Sanjay):

…As I write this, legislators in Karnataka are rushing to declare their bank statement and property to Justice Nitte Santosh Hegde, the state’s ombudsman against corruption. By Tuesday, more than 80 of 224 members of the legislative assembly, including the chief minister, had filed statements of their wealth. The rest were scrambling to do so. If they didn’t, warned the 70-year-old Justice Hegde, a former hockey player, he would not hesitate to recommend a six-month jail term for defaulters.

Don’t get too excited. Justice Hegde resigned last week, partly because the government won’t let him do anymore than recommend.

…When he was appointed as a watchdog against official corruption nearly four years ago, Hegde appeared to have impeccable credentials in a state where one coalition partner was the right-wing BJP, which now runs Karnataka with its old slogan, a ‘party with a difference’. As a Kannadiga, previously a judge of the Supreme Court — as was his father, who made an unusual journey from India’s highest court to Speaker of the sixth Lok Sabha — and a family history tied to the Sangh parivar, Hegde could have made that difference.

Instead, Hegde plunged Bangalore and Karnataka into shock last week as he made a vocal and highly publicised exit as Lokayukta…

The immediate provocation for Hegde’s resignation was a fiddle brazen even by Karnataka’s grand standards: the clandestine shipping of half a million tonnes of impounded iron ore from Belekeri port, 520 km northwest of Bangalore. On Hegde’s orders, Deputy Conservator of Forests R. Gokul had captured the ore in June, along with 40 sacks of forged documents, indicating official connivance and a revenue loss of about Rs 250 crore. Hegde quit when, instead of supporting Gokul, the government tried to stop him. “If I had not resigned, Gokul would have been suspended,” said Hegde. Larger issues frustrated Hegde. None of the officials he charged with corruption ever stood trial. Some are back on the job. No government, state or central, allows Lokayuktas the freedom to go beyond investigation. Permission to prosecute officials and politicians caught with their hand in the till must come from the government. It rarely does.

***

And finally, excerpt from a news-report on “Six Bangladeshis held with fake documents” – not on the border but in far-away Pune, at least 2000 kms from the border (Thanks Vasu-ji):

Pune: Six Bangladeshi nationals have been arrested by the special operations wing (SoW) of the Pune crime branch for staying in India illegally. An Indian national, who helped them forge documents and obtain Indian PAN cards, has also been arrested. (http://epaper.timesofindia.com, date: 1.7.10)

…The police..recovered a fake school leaving certificate…and a pan card…

Gholap had allegedly taken Rs 500 each from the Bangladeshi nationals to provide them with fake documents.

Assistant public prosecutor D L More told the court that custodial interrogation of the suspects was required to find out how they travelled to Pune, who their associates were and how they had come in possession of fake documents.

More asked for time to conduct investigations in West Bengal and to find out whether the suspects were linked with terror organisations.

Try not to worry too much…Enjoy the weekend and please do join the Live Chat tomorrow on News, Mainstream Media and Prejudices (430pm IST). I’m looking forward to chatting with many of you online.

Some Weekend Readings from the past:

Some links for weekend reading – IV (June 2008)

Links and extracts for weekend reading (July 2008)

The MP High Court orders government *not* to make Surya Namaskar and Pranayam mandatory for students…

…even as yoga for kids is now being taught in studios from Minnetonka, USA to Moscow in Russia.

Sigh.

.

Related Posts:

Super Brain Yoga – I want to trademark this!

High-Tech Pranayama

No more “Christian Yoga”

After Christian Yoga, Islamic Yoga*…