Ancient Net truths

The author of Critique of Pure Reason and German philosopher Immanuel Kant told us that a priori knowledge, like knowledge of metaphysics, is true by definition. Thus tautologies, mathematics and other such bodies of knowledge are valid simply because they are true by definition. They are unlike empirical knowledge, in so far as we don’t need to verify them by experiments or observation—they are true by definition.

The “Revivalist School of Indian Philosophy” would be entirely in agreement with this, especially since whatever they utter is a priori knowledge. Yes, we have just started discovering that the Internet was available to the gods during the time of the Mahabharata. Nary a bandwidth problem that plagues present-day Kurukshetra. When King Dhritrashtra fought the epic battle, he used the Net to communicate with his charioteer Sanjaya who used advanced cybernetics to give a detailed account and description to the vision-impaired king. Naturally, such a battlefield network has to be supported by communication satellites, which too were there, CM Biplab Kumar Deb of Tripura recently pronounced.

Heathens who took to Twitter and other social media sites to challenge his views were duly silenced by trolls generated by saffron cyber warriors, who take inspiration from the ancient warriors themselves. The world has yet to realise the historical wealth of the country. Its focus should be metaphysical, not material. Contemporary history has too many warts that need to be airbrushed; ancient India history provides us with the glory that eclipses the patches of darkness which blot our beloved nation today. Poverty, lack of development, ugly rents in the social fabric, lack of money in the ATMs — these petty problems of the present should be ignored. Internet users should forget about outages and patchy connectivity; they should just remember the glory of the past. We were the first, we were the best, we did it all before anyone else. It is just that in the decades after Independence, we forgot ourselves and dilated with scientific temper and rationality. We should not have done that. Remember, what Kant and other Western philosophers said, we have it all in our Indian schools of philosophy. If you need more clarity, just ask a bhakt, and a thousand will reply in cyberspace.