Investigating Acts of Terror: Adopting Unbiased Approach

Ram Puniyani Hidden in the back pages of some major dailies, there was news that the third Samjhauta bomber was held in MP (16, Dec 2012). National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Rajender Choudhary, near Ujjain in MP. He has been named as one of the bombers in the supplementary charge sheet submitted by the agency. One recalls that in the blast in Samjhauta Express, way back in 2007, resulted in the death of 68 persons, including 43 Pakistanis. The investigation showed that there were...

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What is Meant by Svabhava: Chattopadhyaya and Needham

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s Science and Society in Ancient India (1977) impressed Joseph Needham very much as had his Lokayata (1959). But there was one point on which Needham had some reservations. A series of letters relating to the doctrine of svabhava (lit. own being) and further discussions in person (when Chattoapdhyaya visited Needham in Cambridge) are of seminal importance to the student of Indian philosophy and more particularly of the philosophy of science. Chattopadhyaya...

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Materialism in Indian Philosophy – Part I

M N Roy In India also, the dissatisfaction with the Vedic Natural Religion gave rise to speculations about the origin of things. Some of the earlier Upanishads are fragmentary records of those speculations. But for reasons stated in a preceding chapter, early Indian speculations about the origin of things developed directly into metaphysics and a precarious form of monotheistic religion. Yet, towards the close of the misty Vedic era, approximately about the 7th or 8th century B.C., there rose...

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A Survey on International Atheist Community

Dr. Tom Arcaro, Professor of Sociology, Elon University, US and his team are conducting an online survey on international community of atheists.  It is an exercise in understanding the community of non-believers the world over. Though it is designed to be an international survey, so far it has elicited responses mostly from US and Canada.  Since we think it worthwhile to participate in this exercise to understand ourselves, we reproduce the letter from Prof Arcaro. Atheist...

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Commentators on the Cārvākasūtra: A Critical Survey - Part II

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya  Reverting to the other commentators on the Cārvākasūtra, it may be said that Aviddhakarna, like Udbhata, attempted to interpret the Cārvāka aphorisms from the Nyāya-Vaiśesika point of view, perhaps without being converted to the Cārvāka. Since it is not possible at the present state of our knowledge to determine whether they were Cārvākas converted to Nyāya or Naiyāyikas converted to Lokāyata, as Eli Franco (1997, 142) says, my suggestion—they simply adopted the...

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Signs in the Sky: The Irrationality of Astrology

JV Narlikar With the New Year just around the corner, most people will now be taking stock of their performance in the current year and will be busy making fresh resolutions for the New Year. Anxious to perform better than in the past, they hope to foresee their future. Instead of making a rational assessment and prediction, many people fall back upon superstitions. Making an accurate assessment of this situation and exploiting the weakness of the gullible to the hilt, astrologers do...

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