By Aditya Aamir
Remember Dr Satyapal Singh? He is our Minister of State for Human Resource Development, IPS-turned-politician with a Masters in Chemistry. The top cop who has Science on his finger-tips and a mastery of putting his foot in the mouth, a feat not even Yoga guru Baba Ramdev can boast of.
And the foot was back in his mouth again, recently, according to media reports. Dr Singh told the world that long before Newton, mantras had codified laws of motion! This after being pulled up for questioning Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. That was the month before last.
In a January curdling of the mind, Dr Satyapal Singh had told a bunch of Vaidiks, no man living or dead – our hoary ancestors – had seen an ape turn to man, so Darwin doesn’t win! He did not mention ‘woman’. That left women in Darwin’s corner – the winning side!
February 28 was National Science Day. If you look at Dr Satyapal’s face, when he raises his eyebrows, not like Priya Prakash Varrier does but in his own patented manner, you’ll notice four (five?) creases on his deep forehead – one crease per ‘wisdom’ and that is four times wiser than the average Joe!
Now, according to Wise Man Satyapal Singh, certain mantras codified the laws of motion much before they were discovered by Isaac Newton. He did not reveal if the giver of the mantras did that after getting hit on the head by a falling apple, if the ‘ancestor’ was even sitting/standing under an apple tree, but it is for a fact that Dr Singh made the revelation at the 65th meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) chaired by his boss Union HRD Minster Prakash Javadekar, who is no less a believer in mantras than him.
“There are mantras which codified ‘laws of motion’ much before it was discovered by Newton. Hence it is essential that traditional knowledge must be incorporated into our curriculum, Dr Singh enlightened his boss at the meeting.
The traditional Dr Satyapal Singh, with a scientific education to boot if he wants/cared to, also said Vaastu-compliance of monuments of education – buildings of schools and colleges – was important for learning. Learning what? CABE is the highest government body for making policy for education. If and when Dr Satyapal leaves the building, it will take a lot of hard work for his successor to get CABE education-compliant. That is for sure.
Dr Satyapal Singh had given heart attacks to many doyens of science when he said that Darwin’s theory was not scientifically correct. If man still had the ape instincts in him, Dr Singh would have been lynched on the podium. Now, there are doubts whether ‘Vaidiks’ are ‘man’ at all, maybe they are gods, some of the 33,000 crore in the Hindutva pantheon, those who we can see with our ape eyes.
The HRD MoS was at a National Science Day event in Delhi. He was asked to throw extra light on mantras codified laws of motion and he, being the cool-headed scientist, refused to do so. Prakash Javadekar had after Singh’s Darwin comments told him to keep his yap shut and he was, if not loyal to Science, loyal to his Master’s Voice, long after HMV went into liquidation, which has to do with economics not science.
“Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral, have said they saw an ape turning into a man… Humans appeared on Earth as humans from the very beginning” is a Satyapal gem that will last longer than Darwin or Newton’s contribution to science.
And don’t even ask Dr Singh to dwell on “from the very beginning” because then he will take us on a journey to Bharatvarsha’s past that will kill all of us in our cradles – yeah, you’ve heard it before, ‘India is the Cradle of Civilisation!’ (IPA Service)
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