[Applause] it's a pleasure and an honor to welcome Rajiv um who I consider both friend and of course a colleague um to the Washington DC area Rajiv uh is also like many of you um a um a scientist a computer scientist and a physicist but 20 years ago decided to devote um his life to the study of India Indian civilization and um Indian spiritual um Traditions um he was of course a very successful entrepreneur prior to that and I guess that success sort of allowed you to to spend the next sort of phase of your life in doing the work that you have um he's been an author and is a prolific um writer um he blogs he's a very popular in the blog of spere and Huffington Post and paos and uh first post and state of formation and on and on it goes so for those of you who haven't heard of him um you only have to Google his his name to find out um All About Him um his most recent book uh being different the one that he's going to talk about today is really sort of the distillation of his 20 years of um study and serious scholarship he also by the way have to run his own foundation called The Infinity Foundation um and um being different essentially brings to the foreground um the elements that make India and Indian civilization distinct from other parts of the world but specifically the West um and in the book um it's it's interesting uh it's fascinating I I read the manuscript a couple of years ago for the first time and I was absolutely riveted uh by um um because as an Indian even though I grown up in India born and raised in India have lived in this country for quite a long time I just felt that I had never heard or seen um in writing um what being Indian really means and articulate it as well as it is and what was particularly interesting was sort of the comparison that I presents of with the west and sort of being bicultural and having the Cure and indan American that was of of great interest to me um so Rajiv will will certainly talk to you much more about the book it is important to know that he's had um the book is already a bestseller it's been out for two months and it's a best seller in India it's waves but one of the audiences or a couple of the audiences that have been really interested in the book uh which should interest this group here is um the technical scientist uh the scientific community in India has found um being different to be of great interest to what they do uh and to their knowledge of of um India um the business Community has found it very interesting as well and I'm sure many of you here so combine business or technology and you will find in Raj will talk about this um a lot more that in his book he explains that there is a very distinct Indian way of doing business um and of thinking through scientific uh issues um I think this book is great not just for Indians uh but also for for westerners who trying to know more about indiia so with that rajie welcome thank you well thank you for inviting me and thanks for the wonderful introduction I'm delighted to be here okay I was uh hosted at IIT Madras okay in November we had a session on this book and a couple of professors came in gave their comments and discussions and a whole evening with the student Q&A and more recently IIT kpur spent an evening there I've uh also given talks at Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore uh in terms of management it was mentioned management people are very interested so there was a seminar at IIM Bangalore and also uh there's an organiz worldwide organization called the Young Presidents organization YPO These Are Presidents of company of a company before the age of 40 and they have chapters all over and the YPO of Chennai hosted and then the YP of Kolkata hosted so I've been around and in the recent trip I went to the Baba Atomic Research Center which as you know is the Brain Trust of uh nuclear science and all that and have a wonderful evening with Scientists uh I wasn't sure how interested they would would be in matters of civilization and culture but they were extremely interested and it came out in the Q&A and uh they pulled more out during the Q&A than I I was uh presenting myself so my uh since my background is in uh as a scientist and then in business world and I decided to sort of go into a journey of self-discovery and self- exploration not only about my my own personal life but also me as an Indian and and see what what is distinct who are we and what do we bring to the world that's important so the primary audience of all my writings is actually myself I'm trying to write to clarify my own ideas and then the sharing with other people uh became a kind of a natural offshoot started with presentations and blogs and then people started wanting more articles and books and so books started coming and that's how I I ended up here I didn't uh leave the business world with the thought that I M to become a writer but it sort of evolved that way now my theme has always been u in this 20 years has been the things about India its civilization its history its spirituality its culture those sort of things and I found a whole lot of uh ignorance misunderstanding misinterpretation in the US school systems one of the books there called invading the sacred was the a book about uh uh you know distortions and uh ISS stereotypes basically stereotypes in the school system lot of it unintended uh just out of uh you know ignorance because that's how during the colonial era We Were typ cast um and then I've written more books the more recent one uh the most recent one which is what what I want to talk about being different is about uh the question what what is there about the Indian mind and the Indian tradition which is sufficient which is radically different from the Western uh worldview now there is a term I use called Western universalism which means that the West's idea of History philosophy science values uh because of the West Power became Universal so the education system which spread into places like India being Western influenced uh people there started thinking that this is the universal gold standard and so uh people in the former colonies like India um evaluate their own culture against the West as the gold standard and they sort of aren't sufficiently educated or aware of Their Own civilization to be able to reverse the process and say okay according to our gold standard how are they so there's some interesting things that um uh are worth talking about in that regard China is contesting Western universalism China has come up with uh the idea of Confucian thought and confusion universalism confusion universalism is a term of coin confusion ethics confusion modernity and what they mean is that uh we are becoming modern but that doesn't mean we have to become uh Western we can remain Chinese and follow our traditional philosophy of the confusion way and within this within the parameters of our confusion way we can also be as modern and scientific and technological as anybody else so we intend to be number one in all these domains but the Chinese n REM remains and the Japanese never ceased to be Japanese even though they came up with the best technology and science in so many ways and you find that even in Europe the French are very French they are very distinct about what it means to be French they don't like it if you mix them up with an Englishman or say it's all the same they don't like that and Russian is very clear about what what's the history and the whole mindset of being a Russian so the question keeps coming up and lot of business people want to ask as now they're going around the world cutting deals they're finding out that when they do a deal involving a Chinese he's very clear about his sense of identity the Japanese is very clear the French guy is very clear the British guy is very clear so who are we in terms of our civilizational identity and uh the idea that we'll sort of melt and give up and surrender and sort of join Western universalism uh you know we may think that that is the universalism but all these other places I mentioned don't think so they they are they are very clear about their own distinctiveness and distinctiveness is not necessarily superiority it just means we're different it just means that we are this way and you know somebody else is some other way it's not a question of Superior or inferior it's just a question of wanting to honor and respect one's own distinctiveness now uh if you look at the history one of the things I'm doing is my Foundation is started a 20 volume series on history of Indian contributions to science and technology uh somebody called Joseph nidam did 30 volumes in Cambridge he did 30 volumes on Chinese science and technology and every University studying China looks at that as a reference work nobody had done something similar for India so we decided we should do it we have nine volumes done and we have a few more in the pipeline if you look at the history of Indian Science and Technology it it's filled with huge amount of pioneering work in things like Metallurgy steel zinc distillation which was pioneered in India uh textiles ship building water harvesting civil engineering on and on there's several fields in which Indians did extremely well and this is quite well documented and you may you might be thinking that this phenomenon of Indian technocrats and highly skilled uh knowledge workers going to other countries is something recent uh as if it's happened for the first time but I'd like to tell you that this is also a very common Trend in the early early centuries uh you look you see many Arab sources talking about Indian PHS in their hospitals Indian astronomers uh Indian uh Indian knowledge workers uh you see China importing a whole lot of Indian knowledge workers into China uh with great respect bringing them as sort of distinguished thinkers so the export of India its knowledge workers has been around for a very long time uh the the earliest uh Records in Greece and Rome talk about uh importing Indian steel a kind of Steel called Woods Steel W TZ steel uh which was very tough and that was used for making weapons and swords and shields because you couldn't pierce it and it was sold like gold you know it was very valuable and only India had that technology so uh you find quite a lot of export of uh knowledge workers and Technology uh a person in University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where I'm on the chair of the you know governing board for the India studies program a person there who's a historian of Portugal went to find out about more about the Portuguese trade in Goa and you know he wanted to find out how did they make such a huge Empire with a little Colony there why were they there what were they doing and he had the Indian government open up various old archives which nobody had bothered to read and he found that the major item of trade was medicinal plants so India what what has been classified as spices is actually medicinal plants it's not that somebody's you know taking some regular spice you wouldn't build an Empire out of that but these were medicinal plants uh and Portugal was importing this and re-exporting supplying most of Europe so Portugal was sort of the middleman bringing these things and supplying most of Europe uh you find that places like nalanda University and 20 other universities in North India were like today's Harvard or MIT or Stanford they were attracting the brightest of the brightest from all over Asia uh not imposing or conquering or going there with an army to impose on them and put the the Indian ideas on others but actually people from other countries were soliciting were soliciting this knowledge the uh Emperors in U China were routinely sending their the cream to places in India for higher knowledge uh southeast Asia places like Cambodia Thailand IND Indonesia uh you know Vietnam were sending were not only sending their smartest kids to learn but also were endowing uh endowing colleges and endowing programs in places like Nanda because they were so uh you know appreciative of what they were getting in return and though um all the Nanda University Library was destroyed by Invaders uh the knowledge about nalanda that we have today is reconstructed from foreign students records so you have Chinese foreign students who came and studied there for many years and students from various countries and when they went back in their own languages they have written Diaries which got published which have been preserved so when uh so there's a multivolume series on nalanda what was its curriculum what was life like who was the faculty and that is reconstructed from foreign students accounts so this shows that India as a knowledge economy which is a buzz word nowadays knowledge economy is not necessarily something very recent it has been there for a while and you find that U the u u the the U uh oldest city uh you know known cities a complex of cities the harapan Indus Valley sarasvati Civilization Hara doav doav is in Gujarat uh is is an amazing uh amazing feat and we've done a few volumes of that in our foundation and plan to do a few more and the former director general of the archaeological Survey of India who passed away recent few years ago he was the editor the editor editorial board of of the series uh he's the person who actually discovered Dava which is the world's oldest port and when you look at uh the civilization it has over 2,000 settlements 2,000 towns and Villages some big some small spread over area half the size of Europe so it's a very large place and uh from Afghanistan Pakistan India Punjab Rajasthan Gujarat kind of place right up to Delhi and this civilization lasts over 2,000 years so you have a huge civilization scattered lasting a very long time and you see the technology of tiles you see the technology of weights they have binary weights the weights are the ratio of 1 is to 2 is to 4 is to 8 and so on binary weights uh binary the length width height of the tiles also binary ratio uh and yet there is no evidence that this was centrally administered and centrally controlled it's very decentralized because you have a whole lot of towns which seem selfcontained they they there is no it is not like in other civilizations like Mesopotamia or Egypt where you have one big Emperor's big fortress where the emperor lived and then everybody else is living in tents it's not like that there is no one big fortress first of all so there is no huge uh center with a lot of power or a lot of wealth it's all decentralized one bedroom two-bedroom Flats like a middle class like a very egalitarian middle class so we we we keep hearing about you know our society being very hierarchical forever but the physical evidence of archaeology from the harup civilization doesn't show that to be the case when it happened why it happened we don't know but certainly at that time it seemed to be a very flat Society with a whole lot of people more or less equal with uh running water drainage systems very interesting U so we are doing this kind of work to understand our civilization better this also refutes a myth that Indians are mystical and not and otherworldly and they they neglect this world and they're not materialistic and they're all spiritual and they they don't they're not interested in material welfare because you don't find that you find the medicine improving over time the medicine practice you find steel manufacturing improving over time you find the city the cities becoming more sophisticated over time so you find that the idea of advancement is definitely there and the idea of looking after Society society's needs is definitely there so the while we have a great SP spiritual tradition also it it is not that there hasn't been a material civilization as well this is kind of interesting one of the reasons I wanted to embark on this very ambitious 20 volume project is to refute the claim that the Indian philosophy uh will require westerners to come and rescue us and save us because we will become kind of indices and incapable of uh really helping ourselves in a material sense if you look at the history until until the colonial era uh the history is quite prosperous in India in a material sense the Cambridge uh history of world economics uh looks at all the civilizations and how they were doing at various points in time and it says that until 1750 India was 24 25% of the world GDP and China was about the same little higher so more than 50% of of the world GDP was India and China and what is called the West which consists of Europe and United States was less than 10% at that point in time and 100 years later the West became like 70 80% from less than 10 that's called the Industrial Revolution and India went down to 3 4% so there's a 100-year period of deindustrialization of India and the industrialization of Europe it's a very interesting mathematical correlation so while while you read about the industrial revolution of England it is always shown as some kind of a great event that they did it on their own and they had they were somehow Superior people and the figure out all of this and the role of the colony is in supplying the wealth in supplying the technology in supplying sometimes the labor and being the finish the market for finished goods is seldom mentioned but actually if you look at the 1800s records the British British made very concerted efforts to ban uh steel production in India to uh to really go and persecute uh people who were textile manufacturers uh when these Technologies were being relocated and ramped up in the British uh Industrial Revolution so when people talk about India is developing economy I I prefer the term redeveloping because redeveloping shows that it it already had some advancement it already had some prosperity and for there was a decline and now it's trying to be have a Renaissance come back so it is whereas development makes it look like it was all sort of dark and primitive and tribal and backward and now west is coming to civilize so I think that linear theory of History which which is a heelan idea that everybody goes through the same stages and the West went through and the the non-west is sort of backward they are where the West used to be and they have to in order to bring them up they have to to copy the west and become like the West so and the West is always going to be ahead of them I mean that is just not true if you look at the facts that's just not true so um the some of the the scientific U claims are quite uh impressive from the Indian tradition and I'm not referring to things that can't be proven i i in our series we don't include things like a claim that there was flying saucers in the Mahabharat or something bu IM on because when somebody asks me you know I had a big fight with Orthodox thinkers who say okay you know why aren't you including uh you know aircraft which I mentioned in the Mahabharat I tell him that I need physical evidence I mean you need to show me a plane or a wheel or a wing or you need to show a landing strip or you need to show me something something because a scientist wants empirical proof just because someone wrote it it could have been fiction could have been imagin in ination could have been a proposal which nobody implemented I mean there's so many architectural proposals that never get implemented so maybe it was somebody's wild imagination but whether they really existed or not you can't prove until you can show evidence then in Mahabharat there's also talk about people say this talk about nuclear bombs so I always tell them that and I told this to people in bhaba atomic research because they all nuclear scientists I said you know if there was a nuclear bomb there would be a radioactive crator so somebody has to take me to a place with the guer counter and said there was a nuclear bomb because there's a radioactive Creator and no one has shown us that so I can't believe that so I'm very skeptical uh scientific mind I don't accept things just because it is Nostalgia or chauvinistic or I I don't believe in that kind of stuff I'm pretty hard knows scientific mind and applying that standard I find some amazing contributions amazing contributions that withstand uh scientific scrutiny for example there is a Sanskrit text where it it says this is this particular formula gives you the velocity of light and that velocity of light is exceeding the accurate it's not the most accurate as per today but it is like 99% accurate now how would somebody uh have any idea about the velocity of light there is no evidence that there was a measuring instrument at that time there's no evidence no claim that they measured it but how did somebody in it or where did he get this idea from we or not but we cannot deny that there is such a thing and similarly the value of pi very you know accurately written so a whole lot of these uh calculations these theories are verifiable today uh but we do not understand how someone figured this out at least as of now we don't understand there's a lot on the mathematics infinite series the idea of infinite decimal things that are required prerequisites for calculus a few hundred years before decart and Newton start using these things uh you know mathematicians in Kerala and various other places in India are filled with volumes of this sort of thing and B's theorem predates the Pythagoras Theorem by several centuries and in fact is a more General theorem of which the Pythagoras theorum is a special case so if you look at all this the question is uh a question that comes up is how did uh the Indian scientific mind make these discoveries and one of the things I discussed in one of the chapters I believe chapter uh four is uh the Indian is there an Indian way of Science and I raised this question at the Baba Atomic research and it generated a fantastic discussion during Q&A and later on over dinner there very fascinated by exploring these kind of ideas um then the another area of Indian knowledge which is seldom appreciated because the only knowledge given credit is sort of spiritual mystical uh knowledge which is of course very profound but another area which is practical is the whole area of uh value for society uh you know people are people are generally not when they study the Indian traditions they are not studying nastra which is the etics uh the theory of dance the theory of Arts uh you know which is very sophisticated uh often people are not studying cilia uh you know and the whole arastra which is several thousand years before uh uh you know people like uh uh you know the the political scientists of the of the West melli a lot of people like melli way before Europeans political thought very practical thought theories of ethics theories of statecraft and governance uh the the caring for elderly in the ashama system very deeply rooted ideas on looking after the elderly your responsibility towards the elderly in society your responsibility towards animals uh now we have animal rights in the west but this is very recent thing but in India it's a very ancient system and your responsibility towards Mother Nature we have ecology and environmentalism more so from a selfish point of view because like if we dump pollutants into the water the fish will go bad it's bad for our economy or if we pollute the atmosphere uh it'll bad be bad for our health it's not as if Nature has her own rights it's more like for our selfish needs we better look after our asset nature is our asset our property and uh it's not that we are respecting nature as herself we are really respecting it as our property looking up for our own purpose but in our Traditions uh Nature has rights you Nature has rights nature is a living entity and you have an obligation of Duties towards uh preserving and looking after nature so the ethics are not only about myself also about family what in the west is called family values also uh you know particular uh you know duties towards the elderly towards Society towards animals towards the whole Cosmos this is very interesting this kind of a thing and some of these ideas from India entered the West in the 1960s when there was there were hippes and there was the New Age movement a lot of people going to India for answers uh then you know they brought back some of these ideas the idea of the Divine as feminine was an Indian idea brought into uh in the 60s and' 70s into the into the West so India's had an influence uh in in what is now considered the new Western thought and uh sometimes uh well there's a book club which has just featured this book Lively debates have started and so some of the westerners uh critique of my book is that uh when you point out differences uh you are ignoring that many westerners have had similar thoughts and then they name whad and the name Tes shadan and I point out that every one of them actually studied studied India every one of them brought these ideas from India so these ideas of Indian origin got recharacterized reformulated the original Sanskrit got dropped and they got put into a western uh framework and called Western thought and so now you're using the Indian thought westernized as your argument against me so this is a very interesting uh discussion I'm also having um today the Cutting Edge of Neuroscience and cognitive science in MIT Labs National Institute of Mental Health people in Stanford people in Harvard lot of that is based on the study of yogis and Tibetan meditators this has been going on for 25 years because by studying the higher States Of Consciousness that these uh traditional systems are able to achieve they are finding neurological uh you know phenomena which are were previously not considered to be possible so there's something called functional MRIs which allow you to do very very sophisticated scans inside the brain and figure out how the system is Shifting when the person is practicing some technique so the the unfortunate thing which I'm criticizing is that the Westerner who measures the yogi gets to claim credit as his discovery not the yogi who can produce that so the argument I give is it's like uh an athlete who runs a very fast 100 m and the guy with the stopwatch gets uh Bal that you know I I he's a and you call the athlete a subject you know like a rat or something the subject achieved this and I measured it so I get a paper and I you know I get a prize for it so this is what's happening um her Benson in Harvard studied transcendental meditators in the' 70s 60s and '70s and he wanted to take credit for Discovery so he called it the relaxation response rather than Transcendental Meditation and but all the people who were studying were transcend meditators he knows that everybody knows that and so he come up he came up with a huge Empire Harward big grants he got and he's celebrated as sort of the founding discover of this phenomenon yeah and then um uh viasa meditation which many of you might know about has been trademarked mindfulness meditation by John kaben so in Massachusetts hospital and in the US uh Department of Health and all that uh uh you know FDA all these kind of guys they are looking at the scientific claims the scientific benefits medical benefits of uh John Ken's mindfulness meditation so some Indian doctors of mine friend of friends of mine uh one day at a party was saying you know I've come to this I've learned this great uh mindfulness meditation and I can apply it in my practice and I can solve this problem that problem and I said this is an Indian thing it's called with Persona and the guy is having a fight with me because because you know I'm sort of Bringing Down the greatness of what he's learned by telling him that this is your grandfather's tradition and he's rejected all that he's rejected his ancestry and he is now uh learning this from westerners and with some nice jargon and some nice new linguist new technology techniques and all that so so but it's the same principle and this is now become fashionable uh there is a old technique called uh Yoga Nidra Yoga Nidra is a state of uh Consciousness where your body is sleeping but you're alert so you are awake very tranquil there's no thought very peaceful it's like very Silent Witness very uh you know calm no activity but witness awake and you're observing you're even observing in you're breathing you can be observing you're snoring yeah it's a very amazing kind of a thing that you can get into and there's a Steven leberge in Sanford who studied this for many years and he called it uh uh lucid dreaming and he trademarked lucid dreaming and set up many institutes in different parts of the world to study do R&D on Lu lucid dreaming so he's become very big shot gets a lot of Grants and he's considered a Pioneer and when he was giving a talk in the '90s about all this after the talk I went to ask him that you know is this is this is an Indian thing this is yoganidra so he was very nervous he said of course of course and he started telling me how he knows this Swami and that place and he lived in India for 20 years and he learned it here and there so I said why don't you tell that to the audience and he says because then I'll never get a grant it'll be considered some query it'll be you know nobody will give me a grant it will not be considered science uh it'll be you know so I have to you should be grateful I'm doing your favor because I'm uh giving the Western stamp of approval as if we are getting a benefit if somebody takes our things and puts a stamp of their certificate on it so we have to be grateful for that so those are some of the episodes I just gave you which led me into this uh path of trying to understand and re recover and ReDiscover so the purpose of this is severalfold first benefit is that if you can reconnect what the West has found useful uh and validated in modern scientific terms if you can reconnect the Indian traditional origin of this then you can go back to that origin and see what else is there which they did not discover because you know when somebody comes to your house and takes your art and puts it puts his name on it and hangs it somewhere maybe there's more art maybe there's more value maybe he didn't discover everything and indeed it is the case that they have a kind of a surface knowledge of something very useful and they've gone running to the bank and claiming credit that they have discovered something but if you go back to that tradition and revive it there is you know 100 times more left to be discovered so that's one advantage second Advantage is self alienated Indians with an inferiority complex the way you can turn it around is to say that look these are all kinds of things that others are appreciating others are getting value why are you rejecting so this is kind of like reverse psychology and it works on works on some people and third is to to make westerners more self-conscious about their moral responsibility and I call itth when you harvest the fruit from a tree you must nurture The Roots you harvest the fruits you must Feed The Roots because you got something out of that tree you must give something back for the next year's Harvest if you keep harves tting the fruit and don't nurture The Roots Let The Roots atrophy The Roots will die and it'll be it'll be my opic now one of the uh one of the things that I've uh been asked to do by some people in India uh is uh uh there number of people in India are interested in taking these uh traditional Indian knowledge ideas and finding applications for solving today's problem s today's problems so for instance water is a very serious problem and I'm glad that the program called Wheels starts with w which is water uh I saw a satellite picture in India where there's a certain camera that can tell you uh moisture so many feet below the ground so uh ponds artificial water wells and ponds and lakes that had been dug up traditionally uh which have been covered up with dirt and which have been used as dumping grounds and you know become abused uh can be detected by satellite and there's over 1 million man-made water bodies in India that the satellite images can tell you I saw one in U uh detailed map in Tamil Nadu where what this showed was is a river and that river floods there's 100 uh hours 100 hours in the the whole year when 90% of the rainfall comes in 100 hours this is what they discover if you do a distribution of rainfall hourly then if you pick the heaviest rain hours top 100 uh which is like 4 days uh uh you know gives you 90% of the rainfall this is like high concentration of rainfall so naturally the there's a flood and all this water goes waste and rest of the year there's not enough water so what these people had done traditionally is when the river would overflow they had along the river several man-made lakes and then when the lake these Lakes would overflow they had a second row of lakes and when the second row of lakes would overflow they had a third row of lakes so there have as many as 10 rows of lakes so each uh upon overflowing there a little Canal that little trench that feeds over to the next level and the next level and the next level very very interesting and then these fill up and even uh till the next year you got enough water around for storage purposes so that's an example of a technology uh we're also looking at sustainability you know the the GDP growth rate based on very intensive use of raw material energy very intensive use of uh fossil fuels and very intensive use of other raw material is not sustainable uh we have 7 billion people on the planet uh they are they are now thinking it will not level off at 12 or something they thought they would it may go up to 15 by the end of this Century so where will the raw material the energy the capital the land for growing food where will that come from with such a high density of population all over the world me this is a this is a question for a new kind of approach to Science and Technology we cannot just go on imagining that you know we just everybody becomes like an American if if 300 400 million Americans have a certain per you know density of automobiles you know per 100 people there's a certain density of automobiles if 1.2 billion people in India want to achieve the same density of automobiles in 1/3 the amount of land the the density of automobiles will be such that India will the India will become a parking lot the whole India like a big parking lot I mean even 20 lanes 40 Lane roads will not be enough because the the sh population is too much so obviously uh the wrong strategy is to mimic the United States because India is does not have the same situation and must uh you know come up with very different priorities on how you give a good lifestyle so there is a role for Indian ways of thinking and Indian traditions uh in order to figure figure out what's a more balanced and uh you know sensible sustainable achievable thing because if every Indian is craving to become like an American is measuring the with the American as a gold standard you will have a lot of frustrated people you will have a lot of disillusion people you'll have a lot of halves and have knots defined based on who's how American who's how less American and that criteria and that yard stick will tear Society apart will be violence and all kinds of social unrest so what you need is something that is achievable on a very large scale scalable the American model of prosperity and modernity is not scalable to on the world scale you cannot have the whole world of 15 billion people in the future all living the kind of per capita consumption of paper we have such a high per capital consumption so many things in this country is just not possible so there are there are needs for alternative uh models and alternative ways of thinking and u u I'll close by introducing One More Concept which is in this book and that is the concept called digestion I I introduced the idea of digestion of one civilization into another it's like a a predator like a tiger eats a deer and then the deer vanishes there's no more deer left because the tiger breaks down the deer's DNA into little little little parts and then it all that is reassembled all that is used as raw material and in the Tiger's body it's reassembled into Tiger's DNA and so the Tiger has skin and blood and flesh and whatever all with tiger DNA in it there's no more de deer DNA left so that is what happens when there somebody gets digested what was considered undesirable about the deer is either left out like skin and teeth they're not taken in or if they're taken in they're excreted as waste because they're of no use now if you take this kind of a model uh civilizations have been digested in the past uh the Native Americans were digested many useful things were taken from them but the Native Americans perished and they just preserved in museums and you can go there and glorify how great they were but they're not a living thriving civilization today uh pre-christian pagans in Greece and Rome and across Europe were persecuted a lot of things were taken like the Christmas tree and the mother child and the Easter and whole lot of symbols and rituals and all these ideas were taken what was considered useful what was interesting was adopted but the pagans themselves were put put away so this has happened to Egyptians this has happened to African cultures and today uh Tibet is being digested into China tiet same way Tibet is being digested in another generation or two it'll be a tourist attraction there'll be nice museums there'll be no living thriving Tibetans the only thing that's prevented them from finishing off the the job is because a whole lot of Tibetan diaspora outside the Chinese control because if there weren't the Tibetan diaspora outside of China they would have finish it off by now so the digestion of a civilization by a stronger civilization has been happening a lot and my concern is that if Indian knowledge keeps getting broken down by the Predator by the neuroscientists by the cognitive scientists by the people who want the patents who don't want to acknowledge the source because they want to eliminate that race who want to claim it's theirs this digestion of Indian knowledge and Indian traditions into what I call Western universalism will basically result in uh the destruction of a civilization so it will not be a living civilization it'll just be sitting in museums for Scholars and the antidote to being digested is to understand what's distinct and different about us that we must Preserve what is it that is of use it's not just for Nostalgia kind of a thing what is it that's useful today that that is distinct about our civilization that's the signature of our civilization that's the DNA of our civilization that we must understand and then we must preserve it as something we cannot negotiate away we cannot just give this up and this book being different has identified four major areas of what these differences are I don't have time to get into all that but there's a chapter on each one of those four so chapters 2 3 4 and five each of them takes one major area of difference and explains it in detail so with that I'll stop thank you very much and I'll be happy to take questions