Did you hear this?

[Arun Gupta]

Lakshmi Srinivas <lsrinivas at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>But that's precisely the point :) Why should students
>of IIT read the Gita? Isn't there enough religion/
>popular philosophy already in the ambience promoting
>the "hum kitne mahaan the" worldview?

A.  It is an elective, and not compulsary.

B.  Management folks apparently find something useful
    in the Gita. (For that matter they find useful
    things in Zen.) Why deny them ?

C.  An unrealistic view of "Hum kitne mahaan the"
    stems from ignorance.  Knowledge is the only way
    around it.  A little education will keep us technical
    sorts from coming and bothering Indology :-):-)

D.  Most of our education is "Wo log kitne mahaan the",
    and this causes a lot of minds to lose their balance.
    Far too many Indians suffer from one complex or another
    fostered by the current education system.

E.  IIT students should have the opportunity to learn
    Sanskrit, if they want to.  Instead, we had the
    situation e.g., in IIT Madras, when I was there,
    the only language courses were German and (remedial) English;
    not even modern Indian languages.

F.  Other Indian language courses will follow a Sanskrit
    offering. The whole colonial (West is the only good)
    mindset has to change.  The Marxist mindset (anything
    Indian is bad) has to change.

-Arun Gupta