This is a response to another post in the comment section, but I also wish to share it with all my Facebook friends. It occurs to me that a people without roots is like a plant uprooted and placed in foreign soil or sea life forced to migrate to unfamiliar waters or an animal deprived of its natural habitat. If one listens to the dialects spoken by people of any linguistic family, you can hear the natural landscape, the rugged terrain and the rich soil in their every breath and spoken word. Just as Wordsworth maintained, the most common language spoken by man is filled with the lifeblood of their natural surroundings, environment and the place where they live. When slaves and coolies were taken from their native lands and transported to the Americas, many of them were deprived of their roots like vegetation planted in foreign soil. While efforts may have been made secretly to preserve their culture, there were efforts made by their masters to acculturate them in a new religion and culture where they would be cut off from their roots. Many of those displaced people are now returning to the lands of their ancestors to reestablish those roots and sense of identity. Those of us attached to mother India, the mother of civilization, are suckled to the breast of Indra, the mother goddess and the Hindu religion that spawned her. The civilization that sprang from the Indus Valley draws its nourishment and milk from Indra, the mother goddess from whose breast the three sacred rivers flow, the Saraswati, Yamuna and Ganges rivers. We depend upon this history and mythology as an expression of our identity and we form an attachment to it like plants rooted to their native soil. However far our children travel from their native homelands, they must retain the culture and history of the lands from whence they came. It is part of their identity. They would lose their sense of identity and purpose without those roots. Take an orphan or adopted child who does not know who his biological parents are. There is always a gaping hole in that persons heart, a painful loss of identity that can never be properly filled. Take the illegitimate child who lives with the stigma of not knowing who his real father is. Take the Native children who were taken from their families under the Residential School program here in Canada. Take the children of the Nazi Lebensborn program of World War II, who were taken from their families and native countries to be adopted and raised by German families. In all of these examples, the children live with the pain of not knowing who they are or who their biological parents were. Many of them go on an identity quest later in life to find out who they are, who their parents were and where they came from. Do we people of the Indian subcontinent want our children to end up like this? Do we want to see them live with this loss of identity, not knowing who they truly are? That is why it is important to teach them about their Indian and Hindu heritage. The stories of Lord Rama, Krishna and Shiva are part of our heritage. The learning found in the Vedas is part of our tradition. Even Western scholars and scientists have studied them to explore the secrets they contain, and the yet unreleased truths they hold. It is claimed that the discovery of aluminum and the light buoyant aircraft developed by the Nazi scientists during World War II came from a study of the Vedic texts they read and deciphered. What is referred to as Hindu mythology is not really myth at all but historical fact. It is just that it is shrouded in poetry and symbolism not properly understood by todays audience. When King Ravanan is described in The Ramayana as having ten heads, it is a symbolic reference to his multidimensional consciousness not that he was carrying ten heads on his shoulders. Because many of these references are not properly understood, they seem fantastic to us and we dismiss them as myth. Not so. They are as true and factual as the scientific treatises of today. They merely need to be deciphered and decoded. Immanuel Velikovsky, for example, a good friend of Albert Einstein, discovered that the stories related to Zeus/Jupiter, Athena/Venus, Hermes/Mercury, Poseiden/Neptune, Hades/Pluto were not so-called Greco-Roman myths, but stories related to the true history of the formation of our solar system. It is not that planets are named after the gods; it is that they are the gods. Far from being mere balls of gas or solid pieces of rock hurling through space, they are living and breathing beings, gods in fact. Even our Earth is inhabited by the Earth spirit, Gaia, who is a goddess, a living being with a spirit, and is the Earth Mother who supports the life of all children who live on her bosom and suckle on her breast, including we mere humans. Those of us with roots in mother India must never forget who we are. It is important for us to maintain our traditions, our culture, our religion and languages, as it is an expression of who we are. Sure we can learn from other cultures and even borrow from them what we think is fruitful and beneficial, but we can never give up who we are or where we came from. Maintaining our roots for the benefit of ourselves and our children is essential to our sense of identity and our raison dêtre and sense of purpose in life. Safeguarding our roots must go two ways. Tamils and other ethnic groups with roots in the Indian subcontinent must not only preserve our heritage in the lands we have emigrated to, but we must safeguard our roots at home. It is our responsibly to preserve the rights of people living in our former homeland. If the roots die at home, the roots will also die in the lands of the diaspora. After all it is the mother country that gave birth to us all.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 03:42:48 +0000