India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

Post by 77pt77 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #77

India has been getting high on its own supply for a few years now. The narrative is that all knowledge originated in ancient Indian texts and was stolen by the west. Even the ISRO chief made a comment in this vein a few days back. Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter.

Post by RajT88 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 7:43 PM UTC

sriram_malhar wrote: post #52

screye wrote: post #23

This makes no sense to me. This highly unlikely to be a political move. Science education is not political in India. Evolution, abortion, chemistry are not debated at all. This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous. > In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the conte…

Ah, you are not reading the situation right. The fascist elements have hijacked the term "science". Nowadays, it is science if you say that cowling protects against atomic radiation ([1]) or you say that ancient India had interplanetary travel ([2]) .. note that the latter was at an official track at the Indian Science Congress on science in ancient India. If the vedas said something, that is science. If the white ma…

Post by SpaceManNabs » Wed, May 31, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

ta_vf7xjd34cc wrote: post #92

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #79

Kinda wild to see comments on here saying that India's slide into religious fascism isn't a big deal. "We/Indians don't politicize science" "There are many education authorities" I think this is only affecting a particular grade, but we already have seen the slow rollout of other efforts. You can't normalize politicians saying stuff like "our ancient civilization had nuclear energy". edit: surprised that I wasn't imm…

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Post by samarthr1 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

SAS_SBS wrote: post #118

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter. If education was just chanting this half the day the world would be better off. I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner." I mentioned the US landed on the Moon first, and he said "would rather have not landed on the Moon than live in a country w…

Indian here. Your exchange doesn't surprise me one bit. The Hindu nationalists are some of the most delusional, ultra-nationalistic, racist morons out there. Many of them think India is going to be the next superpower and economic miracle out there. There's a large number of them working in big tech, and they'll say how fantastic India is, now that there are very high-paying tech jobs available there (almost all of t…

Post by throw74775 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

rajup wrote: post #130

Bhilai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science. Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body[1] and then claiming presence of test tube babies in ancient times[3] On the other hand, Union Hea…

> Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body There is evidence for plastic surgery being known in Ancient India through works of Sushruta/Charaka. Leaving apart the sewing of an elephant’s head on a human body, which was prob…