Of Science and Ancient Adages

It was a familiar refrain; my grandmother calling us five grandchildren in, from the garden in at twilight, saying that it was time to get washed and ready for supper and bed.

Apparently, this was the time one could not play, even though there was enough light to see! As children, we often felt put out by these commands, that were reinforced by our mothers, the ultimate lawgivers of childhood.

I can now see the science behind the practice of calling us in at twilight; snakes and other animal hunters were out hunting for prey at this time, and my grandmother did not want us to encounter these dangerous creatures.

Another adage we heard was that injuries that happened at twilight took longer to heal! Well, the absence of sunlight, the great sanitizer and destroyer of germs, was likely to leave more germs in the wound and making it more difficult to heal.

Let’s take a look at Vaastu Shastra!

I had never heard of Vaastu till I went to Madras, where I was posted while with Tata Finance. A close family friend who was well versed in Vaastu Shastra spoke of it and of course, I began to research it.

The fundamental principles were that the entrance to the house needed to face the North or the North-east, with the hall or the living room in that section of the house,

the kitchen in the South-east and the bedroom in the South west.

Let’s look at the common sense behind this:

1) The sun would sanitize the north/north-east facing rooms with ultraviolet rays; now the ancients did not know this, but they observed and made empirical deductions, and as they could not explain this, they set it down as a canon.

2) The kitchen is placed in the south-east as Kitchens are hot places any way so they wanted sanitization with out excessive heat.

3) The bedrooms were placed in the South as most of our invaders came from the North and the West because of the protection of the Himalayas in the North and the East and that gave the House owner some time to react, whether he chose to fight or flee.

Modern science brought us modern technology, which enabled more scientific discoveries and we can see the scientific and logical chain behind the empirical deductions of our ancestors.

One of the failings of the method of empirical deductions is that the cause and effect relationship is often mistakenly arrived at and that has given rise to many superstitions that persist till today.

For any society to survive it must analyze its superstitions, finding the science behind some and retaining them while discarding those with no scientific basis. The force of rationality must sift the various beliefs and understand valid empirical deductions and discard the irrational dross that was arrived at by erroneous cause and effect inferences.

Cultural beliefs must be subject to the same scrutiny, with empathy, and what is relevant and humane retained whilst the rest must be considered as emotional drivel.  

Then and only then, can we progress, unhindered by the forces of irrationality, like religion and culture.