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Facts about India !

Part -3
 J. Robert Oppenheimer,
American nuclear physicist
(1904-1967):
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into
the sky, that would be like the splendour of the
Mighty One. . . . Now I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds.“
Oppenheimer "the father of the atomic bomb" quoting
from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita upon
witnessing the mushroom cloud resulting from the
detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb in New
Mexico, U.S.A., on July 16, 1945.
“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this
century may claim over all previous centuries. “

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 Victor Cousin,
French Philosopher
(1792-1867):

"When we read the poetical and philosophical

monuments of the East –
above all, those of India,
which are beginning to spread in Europe –
we discover there many a truth,
and truths so profound,
and which make such a contrast with the meanness of
the results at which European genius has sometimes
stopped,
that we are constrained to bend the knee before the
philosophy of the East,
and to see in this cradle of the human race the native
land of the highest philosophy.“

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 Hu Shih,
former Ambassador of China to USA
(1891-1962):

"India conquered and dominated China

culturally for 20 centuries without ever
having to send a single soldier across her
border.”

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 Dr. Arnold Joseph Toynbee,
British Historian
(1889-1975):

"It is already becoming clear that a chapter which

had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian
ending,
if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the
human race.

At this supremely dangerous moment in human

history,
the only way of salvation for mankind
is the Indian way."

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 Albert Einstein
(1879 -1955):

“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect

about how God created this universe
everything else seems so superfluous.”
"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us
how to count, without which no worthwhile
scientific discovery could have been made.“

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 Will Durant,
American historian,
(1885-1981):
"India was the motherland of our race,
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's
languages;
she was the mother of our philosophy;
mother, through the Arabs, of much of our
mathematics;
mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals
embodied in Christianity; mother, through the
village community, of self-government and
democracy.
Mother India is in many ways the mother of us
all".
“Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance
and spoliation, India will teach us
the tolerance and gentleness of the mature
mind,
the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul,
the calm of the understanding spirit,
and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living
things.”
 Sir William Jones,
Jurist,
(1746-1794):

“…The Sanskrit language is of wonderful

structure, more perfect than the Greek,
more copious than the Latin and more
exquisitely refined than either.

“... a stronger affinity than could possibly

have been produced by accident; so
strong, indeed, that no philologer could
examine them all three, without first
believing them to have sprung from some
common source... ”

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 Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Philosopher
(1803-1882):

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was

the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us,
nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene,
consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in
another age and climate had pondered and thus
disposed of the same questions which exercise us.“
“The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends,
has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly
countenance seen through a rich veil.
It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose
trifles.
The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land
of trifles. ...all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ...cheerful
and noble is the genius of this cosmogony”
“When India was explored, and the wonderful riches
of Indian theological literature found, that
dispelled once and for all,
the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation.
- Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently.”

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 Arthur Schopenhauer,
German Philosopher
(1788-1860):
"In the whole world there is no study
so beneficial and so elevating as that
of the Upanishads. It has been the
solace of my life – it will be the solace
of my death."

“It is the most rewarding and the

most elevating book which can be
possible in the world. “
“I believe that the influence of the
Sanskrit literature will penetrate not
less deeply than did the revival of
Greek literature in the fifteenth
century.”

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 Henry David Thoreau,
American Philosopher
(1817-1862):
“…In the morning I bathe my intellect in the
stupendous and cosmological philosophy of the
Bhagavad-Gita in comparison with which our
modern world and its literature seem puny and
trivial."

“…Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I

have felt that some unearthly and unknown light
illuminated me. In the great teaching of the
Vedas, there is no touch of the sectarianism.

It is of ages, climes, and nationalities and is the

royal road for the attainment of the Great
Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am
under the spangled heavens of a summer night.“

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 Mark Twain, American Author (1835-1920):
“This is India!
The land of dreams and romance,
of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty,
of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels,
of famine and pestilence,
of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps,
of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle,
the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues,
of a thousand religions and two million gods,
cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech,
mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-
grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with
the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations – the
one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an
imperishable interest for alien persons,
for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor,
bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see,
and having seen once, by even a glimpse,
would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest
of the globe combined. Even now, after a lapse of a year,
the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me and I
hope it never will.”
 Ken Wilber
American Philosopher and Author
(b-1949):

“Larry [ Warchowski ] is just about

as philosophically /spiritually well
read as anyone you're likely to find,
and The Matrix films are a stunning
tribute to that fact.
Larry said that when he found Ken's
work, "It was like Schopenhauer
discovering the Upanishads."

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 Professor Max Muller,
(1823-1900):

"India, what can it teach us?,

"If I were to look over the whole world to find out

the country most richly endowed with all the
wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow,
in some parts a very paradise on earth,
I should point to India.
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has
most developed some of it choicest gifts, has most
deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life
and has found solutions of some of them which will
deserve the attention even of those who have
studied Plato and Kant,
I should point to India.
And if I were to ask myself from what literature we,
here in Europe, who have been nurtured most
exclusively on the thoughts of the Greeks and
Romans and of the Semitic race and the Jewish may
draw that corrective which is most wanted in order
to make our inner life more comprehensive, more
universal, in fact a more truly human life, again,
I should point to India".

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 The Encyclopaedia
Britannica says:
"Man must have an original cradle land whence the
peopling of the earth was brought about by migration.
As to man’s cradle land, there have been many theories
but the weight of evidence is in favour of Indo-Malaysia.”
"If there is a country on earth which can justly claim the
honour of having been the cradle of the Human race or at
least the scene of primitive civilization, the successive
developments of which carried into all parts of the ancient
world and even beyond, the blessings of knowledge which
is the second life of man, that country is assuredly India.“

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 George Harrison,
Beatles
(1943 - 2001):
"For every human there is a quest to find
the answer to why I am here, who am I,
where did I come from, where am I going.
For me that became the most important
thing in my life. Everything else is
secondary."
"Here everybody is vibrating on a material
level, which is nowhere. Over there
[India], they have this great feeling of
something else that's just spiritual going
on. “

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 Lin Yutang,
Chinese writer,
(1895-1976):

“India was China’s teacher in religion and

imaginative literature, and world’s teacher in
Trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar,
phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables,
chess as well as in philosophy, and she
inspired Boccasccio, Goethe, Schopenhauer
and Emerson."

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 Voltaire
Author and Philosopher,
(1694-1778):

"It does not behove us, who were

only savages and barbarians when
these Indian and Chinese peoples
were civilized and learned, to
dispute their antiquity."

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 Aldous Huxley,
English novelist
(1894-1963):

“The (Bhagavad) Gita is one of the clearest

and most comprehensive summaries of the
perennial philosophy ever to have been done.
Hence its enduring value, not only for the
Indians, but also for all mankind. It is
perhaps the most systematic spiritual
statement of the perennial philosophy. “

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 Dalai Lama,
(b-1935):

“Hindus and Buddhists, we are

two sons of the same mother."

Friedrich Mejer :

• “It will no longer remain to be doubted that

• the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece
• have drawn directly from the original well of India,
• that it is to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus
•that our hearts feel drawn as [if] by some hidden urge.”
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 Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936):

“Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle

the Hindu brown. For the Christian riles and the Hindu
smiles and weareth the Christian down ;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone while with the
name of the late deceased and the epitaph drear ,
‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the east’ ".

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 John Archibald Wheeler
Theoretical Physicist, who coined “Black Hole”
(b-1911):

“I like to think that someone will trace how

the deepest thinking of India made its way to
Greece and from there to the philosophy of
our times.”

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 Guy Sorman,
author of “Genius of India”:

“Temporal notions in Europe were overturned

by an India rooted in eternity.
The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring
time,
but the infinitely vast time cycles of India
suggested that the world was much older than
anything the Bible spoke of.
It seem as if the Indian mind was better
prepared for the
chronological mutations of
Darwinian evolution and astrophysics.”
 Adam Smith,
Father of economics, and author of
“Wealth of Nations”:
(1723-1790)

"The difference between the genius of the

British constitution which protects and governs
North America, and that of the mercantile
company [British East India Company] which
oppresses and domineers in the East
Indies[India], cannot perhaps be better
illustrated than by the different state of those
countries."

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 H.G. Wells,
Sociologist, and Historian and Author of
“Time Machine” and “War of the Worlds”
(1866-1946):

"The history of India for many centuries had

been happier, less fierce, and more
dreamlike than any other history. In these
favourable conditions, they built a character
- meditative and peaceful and a nation of
philosophers such as could nowhere have
existed except in India."

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 Jean-Sylvain Bailly,
French Astronomer,
(1736-1793):

“The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus

before some 4500 years vary not even a single
minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in
the 19-th century).

…The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the

oldest and that from which the Egyptians, Greek,
Romans and - even the Jews derived from the Hindus
their knowledge.”

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 George Bernard Shaw,
Irish dramatist, literary critic, socialist spokesman
(1856-1950):

“The Indian way of life provides the vision of

the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves
with unnatural masks.
On the face of India are the tender expressions
which carry the mark of the Creator's hand.”

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 Dr David Frawley,
American Teacher, Doctor, Author, Speaker, Historian

“India possesses a great indigenous civilization dating back

to 7000 BC, such as recent archaeological discoveries at
Mehrgarh clearly reveal. It had the most extensive urban
culture in the world in the third millennium BCE with the
many cities of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers.

When the Sarasvati river of Vedic fame dried up in the

second millennium BCE, the culture shifted east to the more
certain rivers of the Gangetic plain, which became the
dominant region of the subcontinent.
Gone is the old idea of the Aryan invasion and an outside
basis for Indian culture. In its place is the continuity of a
civilization and its literature going back to the earliest
period of history.
Unfortunately, over the first fifty years since Independence,
India has not discovered its real roots. Its intellectuals have
mimicked Western trends in thought. They have forgotten
their own profound modern sages like Swami Vivekananda
and Sri Aurobindo who projected modern and futuristic
views of the Indian tradition.
While Westerners come to India seeking spiritual
knowledge, Indian intellectuals look to the West with an
adulation that is often blind, if not obsequious.”

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Please click to advance >
World's Largest Maitreya Buddha Statue
India has started construction of the
World’s largest Buddha statue, it is
being designed to last for the next
1,000 years.
The statue will be situated at
Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, where
the Buddha passed away.
The statue, destined to bring world
peace, will be seated on a throne
17-storeys high, housing a huge
temple with the feet resting on a
Lotus, touching the Earth.

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 Secular Tolerance
"In India today,
we have a lady born a Catholic (Sonia
Gandhi)
stepping aside so a Sikh (Manmohan
Singh)
could be sworn in by a Muslim
(president Abdul Kalam)
to lead a nation that's 82% Hindu.
I defy anyone to cite another country
with such diversity and tolerance to its
political leadership."
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 Goldman Sachs Report of 1 October, 2003 –
"Dreaming with BRICs: The path to 2050"
India's GDP will reach $ 1 trillion by 2011,
$ 2 trillion by 2020,
$ 3 trillion by 2025,
$ 6 trillion by 2032,
$ 10 trillion by 2038, and
$ 27 trillion by 2050,
becoming the 3rd largest economy after
USA and China.
In terms of GDP, India will overtake Italy
by the year 2016, France by 2019, UK by
2022,
Germany by 2023, and Japan by 2032.
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Progress during the last 20 years
Poverty (incidence)
1980s 1990s 2000
44% 36% 26%

Education (literacy rate)

1980s 1990s 2000
44% 52% 65%

Health (life expectancy)

1980s 1990s 2000
5660 69
Source: World Bank (2003)
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 Ex-Prime Minister,
Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee
A treaty was signed on 6 January, 2004, establishing
a South Asian Free Trade Area among the seven
SAARC countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives) in the
region.
India committed to a South Asian Union as the
ultimate objective, with mutual security
cooperation, open borders and a single currency
in Southern Asia in the long run.
"The bonds of ethnicity and culture which hold
together the peoples of this region are more
enduring than the barriers of political prejudice
that have been erected quite recently.“
”….Friends, India is ready to do everything that is
necessary, to walk as many extra miles as may be
required, to make this vision a reality.”

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 Dr. Abdul Kalam, Ex President of India,
father of India’s space, missile and satellite programme
and author of “India 2020 Vision”.
“I have three visions for India.”
“ In 3000 years of our history people from all over the world have
come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our
minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the
Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of
them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not
done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We
have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and
tried to enforceour way of life on them. Why?
Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is
that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857,
when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must
protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
“My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT.
For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see
ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world
in terms of GDP. We have 10% growth rate in most areas. Our poverty
levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today.
Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation,
self-reliant and self-assured.
I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe
that unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only
strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power
but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand.”
India’s population to be the largest in
the world

India is set to overtake China as the world's

most populous nation by 2050.

India’s population is expected to grow from

1.08bn to 1.63bn people, overtaking
China, which is forecast to reach 1.44bn
from 1.3bn currently.

India, will also have the highest working

population in the World — 700 million
people out of 1.1 billion people are young;
the young population will continue till
2050.

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 Annie Wood Besant,
British Theosophical Society,
(1847-1933):
“After a study of some forty years and more of the
great religions of the world,
I find none so perfect, none so scientific, none so
philosophical and none so spiritual than the great
religion known by the name of Hinduism.
Make no mistake, without Hinduism, India has no
future.

Hinduism is the soil in to which India's roots are

stuck and torn out of that she will inevitably
wither as a tree torn out from its place. 
And if Hindus do not maintain Hinduism
- who shall save it? 
If India's own children do not cling to her faith
- who shall guard it?
- India alone can save India and India and Hinduism
are one.”
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