Monday, 25 August 2025

Pushpak Vimana and Myths of Flight Across Cultures

 ✈️ Pushpak Vimana and Its Parallels: Myths of Flight Across Cultures

🔍 Is Generative AI Biased Against Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS)?

Recently, there have been growing claims that Generative AI tools are biased against Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). One example often cited is the case of Pushpaka Vimana — the flying chariot mentioned in the Ramayana.

It is true that some AI models like DeepSeek are openly aligned with national interests (for instance, they avoid responses critical of the Chinese government). But when it comes to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the question is: Is it biased against IKS?

To check this, we can apply a simple test:

  • If ChatGPT accepts other cultural myths about flying objects (Greek, Mesopotamian, Norse, etc.) as scientific facts while dismissing only the Pushpaka Vimana as myth → that would signal bias.

  • But if all such flying objects across civilizations are consistently treated as mythical rather than scientific, then it shows ChatGPT is applying a uniform standard, not bias.

👉 In other words, the issue is not whether Pushpaka Vimana is labeled myth, but whether different knowledge traditions are treated with fairness and consistency.

This raises a larger question for us as educators, researchers, and technologists: How do we evaluate Gen AI’s handling of cultural knowledge while ensuring it does not perpetuate epistemic bias?

One of the most fascinating debates around Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) is the claim that ancient India already had advanced technology. The Pushpak Vimana from the Ramayana is often cited as proof that aircraft existed in antiquity. Modern science, however, calls it a myth.

This raises an important question:
👉 Is GenAI biased against Indian culture when it calls Pushpak Vimana a myth?

The short answer is: No.
GenAI applies the same standard to all cultures—Greek, Norse, Chinese, Mesopotamian. Their flying chariots, ships, and winged devices are also treated as mythological imagination, not as technological fact.


Myths of Flight Across Civilizations

Human beings have always dreamed of flight. Long before aeronautics, our ancestors imagined gods, heroes, and mortals soaring across the skies. Here are some striking parallels to Pushpak Vimana:

🌸 Indian Mythology

  • Pushpak Vimana – The flying chariot of Kubera, Ravana, and Rama. It could travel anywhere at will. In today’s pseudoscience, it is sometimes interpreted as evidence of advanced aviation.

🇬🇷 Greek Mythology



  • Helios’ Sun Chariot – The sun god rode a golden chariot pulled by winged horses across the sky.

  • Pegasus – The winged horse carrying Bellerophon into battle.














❄️ Norse Mythology



  • Skidbladnir – A magical ship of the god Freyr that could fly, sail, and even fold into a pocket.

🐉 Chinese Mythology

  • Immortals on Dragons and Cranes – Daoist sages traveled through the skies on mythical creatures.


🌍 Mesopotamian Mythology

  • Celestial Boats of the Gods – Vehicles that carried deities across the heavens like Solar Barque


Science or Myth?

  • None of these stories—Indian or Greek, Norse or Chinese—meet the modern criteria of scientific evidence.

  • They are regarded as myths, symbols, or allegories.

  • For example:

    • Pushpak symbolizes divine order and the victory of dharma.

    • Daedalus’ wings symbolize human ambition and the dangers of hubris.

    • Helios’ chariot symbolizes the cosmic cycle of day and night.


Why This Is Not Bias

Some argue that calling Pushpak Vimana a myth is a Western or GenAI bias against (Indian Knowledge System) IKS. But this is not true.

  1. Equal Treatment Across Cultures – Pushpak is called a myth, but so are Daedalus’ wings, Helios’ chariot, Pegasus, and Freyr’s ship.

  2. No Special Privilege – Greek myths are not upgraded to “technology.” They, too, remain myths.

  3. Shared Human Imagination – These stories reflect a universal human longing for flight—centuries before modern aeronautics.

  4. Cultural Fairness – GenAI is consistent. It does not single out India; it applies the same standard everywhere.


✨ Conclusion

When GenAI calls Pushpak Vimana a myth, it is not dismissing Indian culture. It is recognizing what it does with all world cultures: myths are powerful, symbolic stories of human imagination, not blueprints of ancient engineering.

The lesson here is important—GenAI is not biased against IKS. On the contrary, it places Indian mythology in the same universal category as Greek, Norse, Chinese, and Mesopotamian myths. Far from devaluing them, this comparison highlights the shared creativity of humanity—our timeless dream of taking to the skies.


👉 This perspective not only defends IKS against charges of dismissal but also opens up a global comparative study of mythology. Myths of flight remind us that across cultures, humans looked at the sky and imagined freedom, divinity, and transcendence long before the Wright brothers ever built their aircraft.

Saturday, 23 August 2025

Transformative Role of Universities in a Changing World

 The Transformative Role of Universities in a Changing World



This blog is on an orientation address (24 July 2025) by Prof. Dilip Barad for new university students, highlighting the transformative period in education driven by global technological advancements like generative AI and national policy changes such as the National Education Policy. It outlines the historical evolution of universities, tracing their roots from ancient gurukuls and academies to the establishment of the modern university system in the 11th-12th centuries, particularly the University of Bologna. The address then explains the three core principles of a university as enshrined in the 1988 Magna Carta Universitatum: academic freedom in research and teaching, the inseparable link between teaching and research, and the university as a centre for free inquiry and dialogue. Finally, it stresses the importance of evolving teaching methods as students progress to postgraduate studies and introduces new digital resources and platforms, like online e-libraries and the "One Nation One Subscription" scheme, to enhance the quality of research and learning, particularly overcoming language barriers with AI translation tools.

The speech in Hindi can be listened here:





AI-generated video summary:

This Hindi speech was uploaded on Google AI tool notebooklm. This AI tool generated this 5-minute video summary from this 14-minute speech:




AI-generated text summary:

Navigating the Tides of Change: Your University Journey in the 21st Century
Good morning to all students, faculty, and dignitaries! We stand at a pivotal moment, a "very good morning" indeed, as we embark on a discussion about the university's crucial role in education. The world, our nation, and even our state are experiencing a powerful "wind of change".

A World in Flux: Embracing Paradox
Globally, we are witnessing the climax of technological innovation, particularly with Generative AI and Artificial Intelligence. The speaker ponders how this will reshape our education and lives – whether it will "disrupt, destroy, or give a good shape" to them remains to be seen. Nationally, we are in the fifth year of implementing the National Education Policy (NEP), grappling with its spirit and application across all levels of education. At the state level, new Common Acts and Statutes for Public Universities are bringing their own set of challenges and experiences.
This era of profound change echoes the sentiments of great literary figures. Like Wordsworth's reflections on the French Revolution – "to be alive in that dawn was bliss, but to be young was heaven" – we find ourselves in an exhilarating, yet uncertain, time. Charles Dickens' opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities perfectly summarize our current state:
• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
• "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."
• "It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness..."
We truly have "everything before us, we had nothing before us". In this paradoxical landscape, understanding the essence of a university is more vital than ever.

The Enduring Spirit of Universities: From Ancient Gurukuls to Modern Academia
The concept of organized learning is ancient, with the Gurukul system in India and Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum in Greece. Later, institutions like Nalanda, Taxila, and Vallabhi Universities flourished in India, primarily focusing on Buddhist philosophy, alongside mathematics and science.
However, the modern university as we know it emerged in the 11th and 12th centuries with the founding of the University of Bologna in Italy. A critical development in the mid-12th century (1155-88) was the inclusion of Academic Freedom in its charter.
Fast forward to 1988; to celebrate Bologna's 900th anniversary, the Magna Carta Universitatum was adopted. This charter reaffirms the fundamental values of a university. Many prestigious Indian universities, including Banaras Hindu University, JNU, University of Kolkata, University of Delhi, University of Mumbai, Visva-Bharati, Anna University, Kurukshetra University, and Punjab University, along with Gujarat's Maharaja Sayajirao University, have signed this Magna Carta.
The Magna Carta Universitatum outlines three core principles that should guide every university:
1. Freedom: Research and teaching must be intellectually and morally independent of political influence and economic interests.
2. Inseparable Link between Teaching and Research: These two aspects cannot be separated. Students are encouraged to become active participants in the pursuit and deepening of knowledge. When you join a university after graduation, you transcend being merely a "student" to become a "scholar," actively engaging in research.
3. Centre for Free Inquiry and Dialogue: Universities are places for open investigation and debate, characterized by a spirit of openness to dialogue and a rejection of intolerance.
These three principles form the enduring vision of a university that we strive to uphold.

The NEP's Vision: Evolving Teachers for Evolving Minds
The National Education Policy (NEP) is designed with a specific "spirit" in mind: teachers should change as students progress through different educational stages. This is because teachers develop a specific mindset tailored to the age group they teach. Just as a primary school teacher might not be suitable for high school, or an 11th/12th-grade teacher for a college, the NEP advocates for a change in teachers when students move from undergraduate to postgraduate and research (PhD) programmes.
This transition is crucial because at the postgraduate and research levels, students are expected to become scholars, embracing both research and teaching simultaneously. If teachers remain the same, students might not be able to develop new perspectives or break free from undergraduate learning patterns. The university's postgraduate and PhD programmes are the "peak of the pyramid" in our education system, a place for advanced learning and scholarly pursuit.

Unlocking Knowledge in the Digital Age: Resources at Your Fingertips
While we acknowledge potential limitations in infrastructure or the need for international-level facilities, the current global technological era is opening new doors, particularly through online and virtual platforms. Your university is committed to providing access to unparalleled resources:
• Online E-Library Access: If you've opened a library account, you should have received an email granting access to the university's online e-library application. This platform provides free access to thousands of articles from JSTOR journals, a subscription that is otherwise very costly for individuals and even institutions. The aim is to encourage you to rely on quality journal articles over guidebooks or "cheap study material".
• Breaking Language Barriers with Generative AI: For those who find English a barrier, the excuse is now obsolete. Generative AI (like ChatGPT or Gemini) can instantly translate any English article into Gujarati (or other languages) within minutes. This advanced machine translation is far superior to older versions, eliminating linguistic limitations in your pursuit of knowledge.
• One Nation One Subscription (ONeS): Beyond what the university subscribes to, the Indian government has launched the ONeS.gov.in scheme. This initiative provides free access to a vast array of high-quality journals. To access this, you must use the university's network—be it in the library or your department—ensuring you utilize this quality material for your teaching and research.
In choosing this university, you have made a significant decision, and we are grateful for your trust. We are committed to making your two-year journey excellent, filled with quality education, research opportunities, and lifelong memories.

Thank you, and welcome to this exciting phase of your academic life!



AI-generated mind map:



Saturday, 16 August 2025

Uncomfortable Truth Hindu Nationalism

The Uncomfortable Truth: How Well-Intentioned Ideas May Have Paved the Way for Hindu Nationalism



What if I told you that the intellectual framework for the Hindu rashtra—the very ideas that underpin its current rise—weren't solely built by those in saffron robes and khaki shorts?
What if, for decades, some of India's most celebrated, radical, and progressive intellectuals, in their noble quest to decolonize the Indian mind, inadvertently sharpened the very knives now being used to wound the Indian republic?
This is the difficult, uncomfortable, yet profoundly important argument laid out with devastating clarity by scholar Meera Nanda in her latest book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. It's a crucial point to grasp because an idea that originates in a university seminar doesn't simply remain there; it travels from academic journals to political rallies and ultimately influences the laws that govern our lives. This is the story of how seemingly well-intentioned academic theories became strange bedfellows with political forces, contributing in five crucial ways to the current landscape.

1. Turning Criticism into Treason: The "Mental Slavery" Mantra

The academic theory initially sounded radical and even noble. For years, influential postcolonial thinkers, such as Ashish Nandi in his book The Intimate Enemy and Parachhati, argued that the gravest crime of colonialism wasn't just the theft of resources but the "colonization of the mind". They posited that Western ideas – concepts like science, rationality, secularism, and the rule of law – constituted a "mental cage". To think within these frameworks, they argued, was to be a "pathetic copy," suffering from "mental slavery".
Does that phrase, "mental slavery" (Gulami Ki Maansikta), ring a bell? It should, because it has now become the official ideology of the Indian state. The Prime Minister himself frequently speaks of shedding this "slave mentality," dishonestly lumping centuries of Mughal rule with the British Raj as "1200 years of slavery". This very premise forms the backbone of massively popular books like J Saiak's India That Is Bhat, which openly calls for the tearing up of the Indian constitution on the grounds that it is merely a "colonial document".
The connection is direct and chilling: the postcolonial left provided the Hindu right with both the intellectual framework and the moral legitimacy for their project. They made it fashionable to view universal ideas as "foreign poison". Consequently, when you now defend scientific temper, you're not just engaging in policy debate; you're branded a "Macaulay putra" – a child of the coloniser. When you advocate for secularism, you're not upholding the constitution; you're accused of possessing a "slave mentality". This weaponisation of an academic critique has transformed genuine dissent into accusations of treason, shifting the battleground from reasoned debate to identity-based denunciation.

2. Making Science Just Another Belief System: The Relativisation of Truth

Another powerful academic idea that took root was the notion that modern science is not a universal truth. Influential figures like Wandana Shiva and Claude Alvarez argued that science was merely an "ethnoscience," specifically that of the "Christian West". They claimed its objectivity was a myth, and therefore, it was arrogant to judge traditional Indian knowledge systems, such as astrology or ritual healing, by the standards of modern science. Their core assertion was that "all knowledge systems... are equal".
The result of this relativisation of truth has been, as the video states, an "absolute carnival of absurdity promoted by the state itself". We've seen preposterous claims at the Indian Science Congress that ancient Indians flew airplanes. The Ayush ministry, flush with public money, makes dangerous and unsubstantiated claims about curing everything from COVID-19 to cancer. Even "Vedic mathematics" – a collection of calculation tricks that are neither genuinely Vedic nor truly mathematics – is now being pushed in schools, packaged as ancient wisdom.
The logic is simple and insidious: if science is just one Western way of knowing things, then "who's to say that Vic science isn't the Indian way?". By flattening the intellectual landscape and stripping away the authority of universal truth, these intellectuals created an intellectual vacuum. Into this vacuum, "state-backed superstition [has come] marching proudly under the flag of decolonization".

3. Attacking Secularism as a Foreign Disease: Undermining a Foundational Principle

For decades, brilliant minds like Tian Madan and Ashish Nandi told us that secularism was an "alien concept to India," a European construct stemming from the historical struggle between the church and the state. India, they contended, possessed its "own natural authentic way of being tolerant".
This sophisticated academic critique has provided a ready intellectual source for the crude political jibe of "pseudocularism" that we hear so often today. The Hindu right doesn't claim to be against secularism; instead, they declare themselves to be for "true secularism that respects the faith of the Hindu majority". This exact logic was invoked to justify the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. New intellectual warriors of the right, from Rajiv Malhotra to the Kent school, have eagerly amplified this very argument: that secularism is a "Christian idea unfit for a dharmic land".
But let's be honest about this "natural tolerance" of the past. What was it, truly? Often, it was the "tolerance of the cast system" – communities living separately and unequally, governed by "brutal divinely ordained rules of purity and pollution". It was decidedly not a tolerance between free and equal citizens. The secular state, despite its flaws, holds the profound promise that an individual possesses rights against the so-called mob. By branding this vital promise as foreign, these intellectual critiques have severely "weaken[ed] the very wall that was meant to protect" individual liberties.

4. Romanticising the "Pure God-Loving Common Man": Fueling Populist Poison

Another academic theory involved the idealisation of the "subaltern" – the ordinary, non-elite Indian – as a "reservoir of pure authentic tradition". The historian Deep Chakraarti, in his hugely influential work Provincializing Europe, even urged us to accept the supernatural beliefs of the people – their gods and spirits – not merely as metaphors, but as reality itself. Their religiosity, in this framework, was cast as a "noble resistance against the cold modern state".
This intellectual romanticisation perfectly mirrors the populist poison disseminated by the Hindu right today. They claim to be the "sole voice of the pure people, the simple god-fearing Hindu, against a corrupt English-speaking dassinated elite". This narrative is the very "engine driving the entire temple movement," from Ayodhya to Kashi. The underlying argument is clear: the "faith of the people must crush the facts of law and history".
In their championing of this "authentic faith," its intellectual proponents conveniently ignored its darker side. They overlooked the "iron cage of cast, the subjugation of women, the violence of superstition". They inadvertently created a false choice: "you are either with the people and their faith or you are a westernized enemy". The Hindu right simply walked into this intellectually prepared space and declared, "we are the people, we are the faith".
The Chilling Warning: A Weimar Analogy
This brings us to a final, chilling warning. Scholar Miraandanda draws a comparison that should make us all pause: she argues that the intellectual climate in India today mirrors that of the Weimar Republic in Germany during the 1920s. There, too, brilliant "conservative revolutionaries" – philosophers like Heidegger and jurists like KL Schmidt – despised liberal democracy. They "launched a total war on reason and science in the name of an authentic German culture". Their intellectual revolt against the Enlightenment, however, did not create the romantic utopia they envisioned. Instead, it "created an atmosphere of anti-rationalism and contempt for democracy that prepared the ground... for the Nazis to seize power".
The ultimate warning is not that these left intellectuals are fascists; that is a crude and false claim. The true danger lies in the fact that their ideas, "when pursued without a vigilant sense of the political consequences," can create a "wasteland where only monsters can thrive".

What Are We, the Citizens, Supposed to Do?

We are supposed to think. To defend reason is not to be a slave to the West; it is to be an heir to India's own magnificent traditions of dissent, from the Buddha and the Lokayatas to Foolkar, who dared to question the gods of their time. To defend secularism is not to be "dassinated"; it is to defend the one principle that allows a nation of a billion and a half people, of every faith and no faith, to live together as equals under the law.
The struggle against communal fascism demands more, not less, of the critical thinking and unflinching, evidence-based reason that these fashionable theories sought to discard. The architecture of our republic, battered as it may be, is the only shelter we have. To help tear it down in the name of an imaginary pure past is to invite a truly dark future.
One must think, and think with rigor. That is the only way.