Fun with Indian science

Today I'm going to try and lighten the mood, and perhaps make you think.  Or at least make you giggle.  Or maybe I'll offend you, if you believe that God has an animal's head.  If nothing else, I'll make myself laugh, which is the better part of committing mass murder or something equally stupid.


My story starts with this article I found on BBC:


India's junior education minister, Satyapal Singh, raised a few eyebrows on Wednesday when he said that engineering students needed to be taught about ancient Indian scientific discoveries, including the fact that the plane was first mentioned in the ancient Hindu epic Ramayana.

I know this story well, as Charles Berlitz mentioned it in His The Bermuda Triangle.  The Ramayana told of an ancient nuclear (it seemed) war between two Indian civilizations some 10,000-odd years ago.  Complete with planes fueled by mercury (the element, not the planet), which prolly would have caused a toxicity problem had they not destroyed everything in the war itself.  Berlitz used this story to account for unconfirmed stories that the Harappan site of Mohenjo-Daro was radioactive and had a bottom layer of fused glass.  Other than Berlitz and his source, I've never seen bupkiss else about the radiation or the glass.

The article continues:

A speaker at a prestigious science conference in 2015 told his audience that the inventor was really a sage named Bharadwaja, who lived about 7,000 years ago.
Captain Anand Bodas, a retired pilot and head of a pilot training facility, also claimed that India had interplanetary aircraft thousands of years ago, along with sophisticated radar that was superior to today's systems.


And there is so much evidence for it!    Other neat claims were presented in a linked article, which included:

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a gathering of doctors and medical staff at a Mumbai hospital that the story of the Hindu god Ganesha showed cosmetic surgery existed in ancient India.


This one almost resulted in a spit take for me.  You see, that "cosmetic surgery" he alluded to was the attachment by the god Shiva (Ganesha's daddy) of an elephant's head to his son's body, after first decapitating him in a case of mistaken identity.


"We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant's head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery," he said.


Okay then.  Even allowing for size differences, I have one big difficulty with this whole charming myth- if they were able to put an elephant's head on the body, why not just put HIS head back on?  Did Shiva chop, go back to bed, and get up the next morning, and say to himself, "Crap, I better find a living head to stick on him, before the wife notices"?

In another loverly scientific report, we have this:


The education minister for the western state of Rajasthan said in January that it was important to "understand the scientific significance" of the cow, as it was the only animal in the world to both inhale and exhale oxygen.


Uh-huh.  And what evolutionary niche would that help cows fill?

In another story:

A national textbook for 11-year-old students created uproar in 2012 when it was discovered that it said that people who eat meat "easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes".

And that explains the gang rape problem in India how?


In what can only be described as a complete distortion of history, a social science textbook believed to have been taught to 50,000 students in the western Indian state of Gujarat declared that Japan had launched a nuclear attack on the US during World War Two.

Hm.  That must have been when that great midwestern town of Hiroshima was destroyed.