Ten Times I Bowed to the Genius of Ancient Indian Gurus (and Still Counting)

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Ten times I Bowed to the Genius of Ancient Indian Gurus (And Still Counting!)

Sahana Singh

20 min read·

Aug 25, 2024

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Artistic depiction of a forest university in ancient India. (From Revisiting the Educational Heritage of India by Sahana Singh)

When you open your eyes in a colonized world, you don’t even know that another world could exist. You go to school and learn rhymes like “Baa baa black sheep” and “Jack and Jill went up the hill” which have zero relevance to your life and slowly begin to speak in an alien tongue, which then gives you filters through which to look at the universe. You begin to think that all useful knowledge, especially science and math is a gift to the world by western scientists. Unless something has been certified by the western universities, it is pseudo-knowledge. Such was my understanding too, until two decades ago, I found a book — Vedic Aryans And the Origins of Civilization by Dr NS Rajaram and Dr David Frawley — that crashed into many of my long-held assumptions. Many more books appeared and epiphany followed epiphany. I had reached the edge of a vast ocean — the ocean of Indian Knowledge Systems.

Let me now string together some of the mind-boggling gems that I have picked. As I go on more dives into the ocean, I will keep adding to my treasury.

When we learn the English (Roman) alphabet in kindergarten, we sing A,B, C, D all the way to Z but no one really knows why the letters are arranged in…