[Music] Indian knowledge systems let us call it as IKS as a short acronym to that before we even try to understand what is IKS what does it contain and so on I think it will be very useful to start by asking why do we need IKS I think we should spend a little bit of time on that and then let's get into the other details as we know IKS has a very long history you know the Indian civilization as such is been there for a very long time modern Western Scholars have dated it anywhere between 5000 to 8000 years back whereas we look at the indigenous sources and the belief systems and so on according to them it is a very very ancient period almost time immemorial so anyway the point that we need to understand is that a country with a very long surviving civilizational history ought to have accumulated knowledge over its long period of existence I mean it's a simple idea right you know people are there they think through it they come with new ideas and so on therefore a country which has been surviving for a eight nine ten Millennia whatever it is ought to have also accumulated a lot of knowledge just couple of examples the Indian Woods steal was used to manufacture what was famously known as Damascus blades and despite several attempts by the metallurgies in the past it was not possible to replicate the the properties of the wood steel exactly the composition of the wood Steel India's contribution on the other hand in the fields of number systems mathematics astronomy uh even in the first Millennium CE culated slowly it went into the West why are the Arabic region and so on so there are a lot of you know evidential literature which suggests to that and the other thing is this ancient knowledge in India was actually preserved and transmitted orally until a few centuries back you know paper and printing are all only a few hundred years back so therefore this entire knowledge was transmitted orally and due to major changes in the educational system introduce about 200 years back in this country there was an Abrupt end to this process of knowledge transmission and the continuity was almost last so you know what has been going on came to a certain end sometime 200 years back so today moment you say you know Indian knowledge system or ancient Indian wisdom whichever way you want to call it there are certain things that are you know quite obvious for example if you ask what is it right you know some people may say it is mythology people may say it is nothing other than God or religion so therefore it has religious prescriptions long list of do's and don'ts ah then people say some of them say matters of Blind Faith a few people may say signs meta science and so on all these are observations of otherwise well-educated rationally thinking good thinking people this is what they think about Indian knowledge systems it's been a very sort of a dominant View now if you ask where is it people will say almost it is extinct and or they may say well It is incomprehensible uninteresting and so on and it is too difficult to call out so these kinds of ideas we have about ancient Indian wisdom or Indian nervous system as you may call it so if you ask why do we need it some may say it is useful for chanting mantras and for some rituals some others feel it is mere unqualified glorification of the past no material gains people often ask Will it provide two meals a day for the poor will the society be any better now at this point I want to tell that if you launch a 600 million dollar satellite on the orbit it will not provide two meals a day for the poor I would only put a comma and say directly it may happen indirectly just to give you an example we may put a satellite for you know climatic you know observing the climatic conditions and so on so when we put a satellite in it it works well then we understand rainfall patterns which can help the cultivation patterns the you know food productivity can improve and that way it will help so indirect benefit in the same way Indian alert system can provide a lot of ideas which will in turn help us do things better and therefore in that way indirectly it can feed two meals a day for the poor and so on ah there are a few people who also think well Indian oil system has something useful certainly but we can always translate them into English you know translate it into some other language and then read it why do we have to you know look at it in original and so on so these are some of the popular thinking that we have so therefore given this kind of a perspective people use Indian knowledge system today in a variety of ways what they do is they probably keep it in a Puja room because in its after a religious and so on so therefore you can you know every day take it out put two flowers and then keep it there don't even open and see it or abandon it completely that's the easiest way to start because we don't find anything useful there or use it simply for taking positions without even knowing what it contains so there are people who talk about certain scriptures and they take positions Without Really knowing what it contains or simply you know use it for glorifying the past so these are the ways by which Indian oil system is used whereas in this course we want actually go beyond all these and show something very useful and interesting that we can get out of Indian knowledge systems basically why do we need Indian ordered system can be argued even different ways see we all know issues of business government and Society are as old as rocks and rivers as long as people existed there were problems so they would have solved the problems therefore they would have found methods of solving it I think there is Merit in understanding that simply because we can't say only now we became intelligent and people who lived 2000 years back did not know how to solve problems we can't say that God blessed our ancestors also with a cauliflower in their head as much as you and I have and so on and thirdly there is something called path dependence which is a very important Concept in progress the path that we can walk forward is a function of the path that we have already worked so it's very important to know what has happened so far so for all these reasons it is required let me very quickly give you two other reasons why we need in a more realistic and a more specific sense IKS is not about merely knowing about some ancestral knowledge and past and so on it's very important to protect received wisdom because that lies Economic Security and national pride and it is very important to document traditional knowledge to provide evidence of prayer knowledge and so on so you may ask why do you need all this I'll give you two examples to know why you need all this and U.S company was actually awarded a patent for neem as a pesticide and neem as a pesticide has been in use in our country for thousands of thousands of years but unfortunately we failed in our efforts to get the U.S patents on products of the neem tree canceled we could not do it simply we couldn't do it because we didn't have we didn't know what we have in our repository and so on another example on the other side is csar you know our Council for scientific and Industrial Research successfully Force the U.S patent technology office USPTO to revoke a patent it granted on use of powder turmeric for wound healing but it required a lot of effort we have to go back to our Corpus and then read and understand and establish that we knew this knowledge much before then what was being claimed so therefore we need Indian knowledge system for a variety of reasons it defines the context for several aspects of day-to-day living for every individual it is a manifestation of human intellectual achievements regarded collectively over by the society over a period of time we need that and without this continuity of thoughts it will be very difficult to make further progress as I was already saying and we can avoid Reinventing the wheel in some cases and this knowledge is very very important because we are in a global intellectual property rights regulation and patent laws regime so we need it it's very very important for us to have it so therefore the ancestral knowledge will give us identity it will give us a certain dimension of culture we are all you know culture is the basis on which we even look at our identity and it preserves a received wisdom and as I was telling you this patent and so on it can also give us enormous economic value so therefore all that I would like to say is instead of merely glorifying the past or abandoning it or putting it in a Puja room and so on what we can do with Indian knowledge systems is first of all get to know first hand what it is and then we can explore new paradigms because of the knowledge that we gain through what our ancestors have done and I think that is is the approach that we would take in this course and we will go through some of these interesting ideas as we go along thank you [Music] foreign