About Us

Indic Studies Foundation, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, seeks to promote a comprehensive and more accurate realization of the Indian Civilizational experience in the world, particularly in the United States and India. While India regards herself as a Civilizational Power, the image that India evokes is far removed from that of the Indics as they see themselves.

The situation is fraught with far more contradictions or as the social scientist would put it ‘cognitive dissonances’, than may appear at first sight. On the one hand inordinate attention is paid to preventing India from achieving a modicum of military power. No nation has suffered the plethora of sanctions and condemnation for such a length of time as has India, ostensibly for the crime of breaking the nuclear monopoly of the UN Security Council Permanent 5. In Greek Mythology Prometheus is the God of Fire, chained to a craggy rock in the Island of Scythia. His crime – Prometheus had shared the secret of fire with mankind, thereby giving them the means for sustenance, warmth and to provide material goods with the metals that could be forged with fire. This so angered Zeus, that he had him chained to the rock in a barren Island. So also did the US try to punish India for trying to harness the fire of the nucleus in the service of the poorest of mankind and in the defense of its people. So blatant is the unique nature of the characterization of India and so lacking in Universality that the situation has been termed as a Nuclear Apartheid by Jaswant Singh, India’s erstwhile External affairs minister and aptly so in the view of substantial percentage of Indians.

As we will demonstrate in our first presentation, some of the best minds in Europe have devoted their life to the study of the vast literature as well as the archaeology of India only to misinterpret it or even trash it in very unambiguous language .In those instances where Indologists like Max Mueller have made favorable statements about the contributions of the ancient Vedics, it turns out that their private views were greatly at variance with their public pronouncements and that in reality his contempt for the Vedas was total and scathing. Such is the honesty of Western scholarship, where the pronouncements of a man hired to denigrate the Indic civilization is so venerated that the dates he arrived at in a very cursory manner and which he himself repudiated later on in his life have become the foundation for the chronology of events in ancient Indian history, a chronology that we feel while being vastly incorrect is also misleading . Such scholarship today would almost certainly not qualify as a good term paper much less a PhD degree at any of the better schools in the West.

A great deal of attention is vouchsafed on denying the antiquity and extent of the Indic civilization and thereby granting India the respect ,which the Indics feel is rightfully hers, due as a consequence of her valuable contributions to human civilization. Further almost the entire western media starting from the Economist magazine to the Washington Post has been consistently critical of India’s economic performance and especially scathing in individual instances such as the liberation of the Portuguese enclave of Goa and the declaration that India would henceforth be a Nuclear weapons state. It is as if India could get nothing right. It is understandable that Europe would be antagonistic, particularly since the independence of India set the ball rolling for the dismantlement of the Colonial empire. There is however no apparent reason for America to take an anti Indian stand right from 1948, when they voted against India on the Kashmir issue. There is even less reason to depict the Sanatana Dharma in the demeaning light in which it is generally portrayed in the media today.

In those instances where the Indics have sought to correct the record, such as in the case of the blatantly egregious conjuring of the Aryan Invasion Theory they have been accused of nationalistic bias. Never mind that when it was postulated by Max Mueller it was never put forth other than as a conjecture and a hypothesis, and as admitted by Max Mueller himself that ‘no power on earth will be able to determine the true age of the Vedas’. Never mind also that the original endeavor to study the ancient texts was explicitly in order to denigrate them and to demonstrate to the Indic all that was reprehensible in their tradition. In other words the initial motivation to study these ancient texts was purely political and was by no stretch of the imagination , an academic exercise. So ,to suggest now that the debate has turned political is to ignore the fact that it was always political since its inception ,when the British chose to use every means at their disposal to prolong their overlordship of the Indian subcontinent

We have been perplexed and could not find adequate explanations between these seemingly contradictory viewpoints where on the one hand great attention is paid to ensure that India is not accepted within the first ranks of countries by virtue of her size, geography, Civilizational reach and even economic and military power while at the same time maintain with monotonous regularity that India is an inconsequential third world country with nothing of lasting value emerging from the Indic civilization. If indeed India was so inept and as some would maintain so hopelessly incompetent in governing herself, then surely she should be of no major threat to anybody much less a superpower . Therein lies the cognitive dissonance, and it is up to the Indic to recognize it as such and take steps to unravel the motivations for such a transparently contradictory posture.

While I am a native of Andhra Pradesh I have had the good fortune to have been brought up and have had my education in various parts of India including, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. I matriculated from Andhra University in 1955. Among the schools which I have attended are St.Xaviers College, Bombay, Karnatak University, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. My highest degree is a Ph.D in the area of Engineering Mechanics. My professional and technical interests include Mathematical modeling of Mechanical Devices and Engineering Structures, Identification of mechanical systems, Mechanical Design Automation with successful research and development engineering experience in the Information technology, aero-engine and energy industries. I have worked for various companies including IBM (from where I retired), Lawrence Livermore Laboratories., General Atomics and Pratt and Whitney

I have significant interests in a wide variety of subjects including ontological principles in science and philosophy, Ancient Indian history, Vedas and Vedanta, Mathematical Sciences in India during antiquity, the growth and evolution of civilizations to name a few

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