While they were gone, my mother expressed disappointment about the meager quantity of the ash she had received. But soon it was our turn for a private interview, and no sooner were we alone with Baba than he materialized a little silver urn for her, overflowing with vibhuti. “It was as if he had heard what I wanted,” my mother breathed.
The encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known. He has a habit, disconcerting at first, of turning his palm quizzically outward and staring off into the distance, as if silently interrogating an unseen, all-knowing source. Sometimes he scribbles in the air with a finger as if dashing off a note to a celestial messenger. And then he says things which are sometimes banal, sometimes profound, and sometimes both (if only because so much of what he says has become worn out by repetition and frequent quotation, including in signs on the streets outside). His manifesting gifts from thin air is startling; he “transformed” a metal ring worn by one of the Iranians to a gold one, then returned his original to him as well.
But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.
Everything at his complex is staffed by volunteers who rotate through Puttaparthi at well-organized two-week intervals; while we were there, the volunteers were all from Madhya Pradesh, and it was to be Orissa's turn next. Many left distinguished positions behind to serve. (“I once asked a man washing a window where he was from,” mused a visitor, “and he said he was the Chief Justice of Sikkim.”) The free hospital in Puttaparthi, which I visited, is one of the best in India; many reputed doctors volunteer their services to him. Sai Baba has built schools and colleges, and is currently undertaking a project to bring irrigation to a number of parched southern districts.
The next day I drove from Bangalore in a different direction, to the campus of Infosys, India's leading computer technology firm. It, too, wore the clean and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no temples here, no pavilions thronged with devotees. Instead, escorted by the company's affable CEO, Nandan Nilekani, I saw the world's leading software museum, a state-of-the-art teleconference center, classrooms with sophisticated video equipment, and a work environment that could not be bettered in any developed country. Infosys is a world leader in information technology services, providing consulting, systems integration, and applications development services to some of the biggest firms in the world. Infosys's then thirteen thousand staff (known in the company's argot as “Infoscions”) worked in over thirty offices around the world. In Bangalore they sit amid lush landscaped greenery dotted with pools, recharge themselves at an ultramodern gym (“the best in Asia,” Nandan said lightly), display their creativity at a company art gallery, and enjoy a choice of nine food courts for their lunchtime snacks. I marveled at the sophistication and affluence visible in every square inch of the campus. “We wanted to prove,” Nandan explained, “that this could be done in India.”
Sai Baba and Infosys are both faces of twenty-first-century India. One produces rings out of the ether and urges people to be better human beings; the other deals in a different form of virtual reality and helps human beings to better themselves. One runs free hospitals and schools; the other seeks to bring the benefits of technology to a country still mired in millennial poverty. In the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared dams and factories to be “the new temples of modern India.” What he failed to recognize was that the old temples continued to maintain their hold on the Indian imagination. The software programs of the new information technology companies dotting Bangalore's “Silicon Plateau” may be the new mantras of India, but they supplement, rather than supplant, the old mantras. Programming and prayers are both part of the contemporary Indian reality.
Sai Baba and Infosys are emblematic of an India that somehow manages to live in several centuries at once. On our way out of Puttaparthi, my mother and I had a brief word with a devotee who was lining up to buy a packet of vibhuti to take home with him. “What do you do?” I asked.
“I am,” he replied proudly, a cell phone glinting in his shirt pocket, “a project manager at Infosys.”
46. The Prehistory of Indian Science
WHILE WORKING ON A SHORT BIOGRAPHY of Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Invention of India), I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists. He made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers’ money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world.
Nehru's establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology (and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) has produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the United States as one from MIT or Caltech, and India's extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.
And yet the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. I was reminded of this yet again by a remarkable book, Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi. Teresi's book studies the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science, and though he ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians and other Africans, it is his references to India that caught my eye. And how astonishing those are! The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together twenty-four centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. The Vedic civilization — broadly, that of Aryan India from 1500 B.C. to 500 A.D. — subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat. By the fifth century A.D. Indians had calculated that the age of the earth was 4.3 billion years; as late as the nineteenth century, English scientists believed the earth was 100 million years old, and it was only in the late twentieth century that Western scientists estimated the earth to be about 4.6 billion years old.
If I were to pick one field to focus on, it would be that of mathematics. India invented modern numerals (known to the world as “Arabic” numerals because the West got them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. (“In the history of culture,” wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, “the invention of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.”) The concept of infinite sets of rational numbers was understood by Jain thinkers in the sixth century B.C. Our forefathers can take credit for geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; the “Bakhshali manuscript,” seventy leaves of bark dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era, reveals fractions, simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, geometric progressions, and even calculations of profit and loss, with interest.