Book Review: Agnostic Khushwant: There Is No God!

With Fifteen chapters "Agnostic Khuswant- There is no god" tries to highlight the dogmatism and irrationality associated with religions across the world. The authors are of the view that religious scriptures must be seen as books of literature and not as rule books as many things in such books are questionable and lack logical reasoning. The authors dare to challenge rituals, religious processes and Godmen. 

In the last two chapters the book is critical on the Dalai Lama and Swami Vivekananda. Some of the quotes of Vivekananda provided in the book makes a typical Hindu rethink about the high position provided to him. For example, the book says around 100 years ago Swamiji had predicted that Europe will crumble in another 50 years. 

The authors have provided some description about the source and basic tenets of all religions. However, what distracts a reader is disproportional discussion on Shikh religion. Again it is difficult to find out how much of the quotes are result of selective absorption, selective retention and selective distortion. Authors at many places have provided quotes leaving it to the reader to interpret. At some places the book lacks natural flow and structure, some concepts/information are repetitive in nature. 

The book will be a great read (except a few chapters) if you have been blindly believing religion and rituals. It will make you think. If you believe every creation needs to have a creator and God is that creator, the book will simulate your intellect to ask who has created God. 

Not a great read if you have already done some research on religion and its origin; if have evaluated logically the rituals and their significance.

Is India Growing?

Most of us are happy that India is among the top most countries in terms of GDP growth. Some of us sincerely believe that higher GDP growth with translate into better quality of life for the larger section of the society. Can we accept GDP growth as the only parameter to measure growth of a country? Shouldn't overall development be our prime concern? Does higher GDP growth essentially translate into better quality of life?

To be very frank, most of the popular media, politicians and contemporary discussions have conditioned our mind in such a way that we believe India will become superpower soon. It is crucial to understand the fundamental factors that make a county developed.

No doubt, ancient India used to be an advanced civilization comparable, in some cases better than the western civilization. However, with industrial revolutions, dynamics of nations evolved in a rapid pace. The most crucial revolutions could be clubbed into three broad categories:

• IR A: 1750 to 1830 (Steam engine, railroads etc.)
• IR B: 1870 to 1900 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum)
• IR C: 1960 onward (computers, the web, mobile phones)

Let us decode how the major inventions have impacted quality of life in the most parts of the world. IR A and B have made transportation easier and most of the works that were performed manually by human beings are now performed by machines. As a result the quality of lives of people have improved, they live their life in a more meaningful and dignified way. All these industrial revolution started in western world.

Now countries that have fully extracted the value of industrial revolution have been able to provide better life to its inhabitants. We call them developed countries.

Coming back to India, forget about IR A and IR B, we as a nation are still struggling to prevent hunger death our citizens. Though many well qualified Indian believe that we are a truly emerging superpower as we are well ahead many countries in IR C, i.e., computers, the web, mobile phones etc.

It doesn't require any complicated analysis to understand when people of India are yet deprived of the basic benefits of IR A, when many of us still carry water and other heavy things on our back; how can we claim to reach IR C. And can we shut our eyes to poor education system, poor health care, and lack of drinking water, electricity even in SEZs and growing cities?

We need to differentiate the distinction between moving on the path of developing nation and making a selected few developed. What India has managed to provide better quality of life to a selected few, purchasing power of the rest of the population remains low despite high inflation.

Many of us still don’t understand and unfortunately not exposed to poor performance of this so called emerging superpower in social parameters. Forget about China, India is lagging behind Bangladesh in most of the social parameters. Its irony that the way our media highlights GDP, IIP figures; don’t highlight social parameters. 

Hope sooner India will prioritize its activities and would start focusing in extending the benefits of Industrial Revolution to larger section. Making the rich section richer will not make us a super power, rather we will get entangled in complicated issues like the Naxalite problem. 

When Bangladesh which has poorer infrastructure, GDP growth rate, private sector can perform better than us in many social and health parameters; we need to admit our collective failure in providing better life to our people. And the example of Bangladesh is sufficient to prove that better quality of life doesn't necessarily depend upon high economic growth.