A Hindu economic conference

Though recovering from an acusticus neurinoma operation and still severely handicapped, I took the risk of flying to Hong Kong (the lure of that city was just too strong) to participate in the World Hindu Economic Forum on 30 June and 1 July. And I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

Conferences of academics, especially in the field of religion and Asian Studies, tend to be disappointing. Everybody reads his very own paper while nothing actually happens. Well, I can live with that as it is the occupational hazard of scholarship. But academics should be pursuing truth, and in my field, truth is often absent from the meetings. And in some of the questions I specifically pursue, I see rather too many colleagues making fools of themselves. Here, it was different.

First of all, by composition this was not the kind of conference I am used to. Though a few professors of Economics participated, most people present, even among the speakers, were businessmen. They were businesslike and meant business. This starts with the keeping of time. Whereas I have witnessed panels where one of the scheduled speakers ended up not speaking due to shortage of time, i.e. because the chair had allowed the earlier speakers to go on and on, here everybody effortlessly kept to his allotted time-span. The businessmen also got their website ready, and donated money to get their organization running. That’s different from the complicated situation prevailing in academia. It also had to do with the sense of initiative of the local Hindu (mainly Sindhi) community and of the conference’s no-nonsense originator, the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s General Secretary Swami Vigyananda. Of course the Sangh Parivar (“family” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) can get things done, but this man was getting something very good done.  

Hindu businessmen are not like Indian academics. They have succeeded, not by greasing the right palms or conforming politically, but by their own initiative, inventiveness and work. That success was what for once I got to see here. To be sure, I had seen Hindu businessmen – at conferences meant to be academic, where they had donated money to make the conference possible and in return got some speaking time (and used it to make fools of themselves by giving their opinions on things they didn’t understand). But here they spoke on their own achievements, and that was more impressive. Many existing and new projects were presented. Space, the environment, banking, and of course ICT, Indian businesses are active everywhere. A very optimistic speech was also given by Anil Kumar Bachoo, deputy PM of Mauritius, who invited Indians to settle in his country and accelerate its progress.  

Profs. Subramaniam Swamy, Gautam Sen, R. Vaidyanathan and Subhash Thakrar had their speeches printed in the conference book. The economists developed a postcolonial framework for India’s regaining its rightful place in the world economy. As a Westerner, I should note that the speakers were not impressed with the advantages America still has, and they laughed at Europe with its crisis. One reason for their optimism was demographic, another was ethical. Among the major economies, India has the youngest population, but it also has an ancient system of morals and of cosmology that works better than Western individualism. 

You want some criticism? Well, here goes. This conference was full of patriotism, which is allowed, but sometimes they overdid it. “I am the richest man in the world – because I am a Hindu”, said a Mister Alpesh Patel from Oxford. At a time when so many poor Hindus succumb to the lure of conversion to Christianity, the statement seemed unduly triumphalistic. Some of the non-speaking attendees gave their opinion at the table and I found their antipathies to the West less than realistic. Thus, I heard a few people fumbling about Western conspiracies against India, when I know for a fact that Westerners generally don’t care about India; and those few who do, see India as a bulwark against China and the Islamic world, worthy of our sympathy and support.

And of course, the proceedings of the conference only were what we got to see. Speakers who announce that they will donate so much money to a good cause are a familiar sight. But I know Hindu organizers who remain skeptical till the money is in, because people seek prestige and photo opportunities and therefore make such announcements without meaning them (or meaning them sincerely but later getting influenced by their families to be more careful with the family assets), so the actual giving never comes through. However, this being a business conference, these fears may be unfounded, and the money may have really materialized. At any rate, they came across as very successful and very Hindu.

Holiday in Eisenach

What a holiday! It was an idea launched by my 18-year-old son, who is an aficionado of classical music. So we went to Eisenach ( in the former Communist Germany’s province of Thüringen), birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach.

I don’t have a habit of either celebrating birthdays or taking holidays. This one too lasted only four days. Mainly, I have no money, and little time. But this much I was able to do, and the kids demanded it. So, in just four days, we discovered an area that turned out to have played a central role in German history.

The city has preserved the house where Bach raised his family and wrote his music. Bach was, like modern rock musicians, a heavy smoker and drinker, but also a responsible family father of many children and of course a creative genius. It does me nothing to visit places where it all happened, but now I can say I was in the room where Bach composed most of his master pieces.

The city of Eisenach had also been home to Maarten Luther, so my lady-love Heidi and I visited the Lutherhaus. My attention was drawn not so much by the witnesses of the time, the typical furniture of an old burgher’s house, but by some of Luther’s quotations on display. Thus, he made pro-Jewish as well as anti-Jewish utterances. I had heard of the latter because Adolf Hitler spread this selection of Luther quotations among his soldiers, but not of the former. The Protestants we know in the Dutch-speaking countries are Calvinists, and Calvinism is a positively creepy religion. So, Luther and the good things about him (his stand against Church corruption, his abolition of priestly celibacy) were a pleasant surprise.

The Wartburg, which I only knew as the name of East Germany's car, is the name of a castle that apparently was part of our planning. I didn’t know it at all, the children didn’t know it either but they and Heidi had decided that we should go the local castle. It rained profusely when we climbed the endless steps, especially difficult for a cripple like me. But the sight at the top of the hill was well worth the climb: in two major direction, you saw only forest as far as the horizon. In Belgium, you never get away from the sound of automobiles or the sight of houses but here you still have space. It turned out that this was the place of the musicians’ contest featured in Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser; of Luther’s temporary hiding place (where he was “abducted” for his own safety and stayed under a pseudonym) where he made his translation of the Bible, the basis of the unified German language; and where, after Napoleon’s fall, students had first demanded the unification of Germany as well as civil rights for all its inhabitants. They like to stress this combination, for it proves that there need not be anything authoritarian about German nationalism.

We also visited the house of the Low-German poet and political rebel Fritz Reuter. The city of Eisenach has turned it into a museum where a collection of Richard Wagner memorabilia is also kept. It was about time I learned about him.

We discovered that the megalithic site of Goseck was nearby, so we indulged our love of ancestral mysticism by going there. It was a reconstructed woodhenge, part of the first generation of Megalithic constructions in Europe, nearly 7000 years old. At the site, we learned that the village of Nebra was also nearby, just across the border of the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, so we went there too. Less than 4000 years old, the disc found at the astronomical site of Nebra was part of the last generation of Megalithic artifacts, and a unique piece in the world. It seems that there was a controversy whether the disc of Nebra was genuine, though that has died out now that the newest methods established its age as nearly 4000 years old. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that if the disc was a forgery, it certainly had done its job of making the Germans build a nice museum for prehistoric astronomy. Nebra shows a new Germany, proud of its history and its prehistoric artifacts the way Britain is proud of Stonehenge.

On the way back from Nebra, we visited another historic city, Weimar. This is where after World War 1 a democratic Republic was proclaimed, which had to pay off the debt which the victors at Versailles had imposed on Germany. It didn’t succeed and brought Hitler to power. But success is a poor yardstick to evaluate historic attempts.

While the music lovers in the family visited the Liszthaus in Weimar, I went to the Goethehaus. This was just a bourgeois house of the early 19^th century, worthwhile mostly because of its paintings. I bought a few scholarly books on or editions of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the shop. Franz Liszt was a Goethe lover, who put the Erlkönig (one of Goethe’s most famous poems) to music, but the love was not reciprocated: Goethe didn’t think highly of Liszt. A generation conflict, I suppose.

Anyway, the journey gave me a taste of what all those people are looking for when they start cruising our motorways to go abroad. I don’t think I’ll do much of it again, but at least I had a good time. And it turned out, quite spontaneously, to be more of a pilgrimage (the main valid premodern reason for travelling) than I had foreseen. But now, let’s return to work, it feels so much more like home than the holidays.

What a holiday! It was an idea launched by my 18-year-old son, who is an aficionado of Classical music. So we went to Eisenach ( in the former Communist Germany’s province of Thüringen), birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach.

I don’t have a habit of either celebrating birthdays or taking holidays. This one too lasted only four days. Mainly, I have no money, and little time. But this much I was able to do, and the kids demanded it. So, in just four days, we discovered an area that turned out to have played a central role in German history.

The city has preserved the house where Bach raised his family and wrote his music. Bach was, like modern rock musicians, a heavy smoker and drinker, but also a responsible family father of many children and of course a creative genius. It does me nothing to visit places where it all happened, but now I can say I was in the room where Bach composed most of his master pieces.

The city of Eisenach had also been home to Maarten Luther, so my lady-love Heidi and I visited the Lutherhaus. My attention was drawn not so much by the witnesses of the time, the typical furniture of an old burgher’s house, but by some of Luther’s quotations on display. Thus, he made pro-Jewish as well as anti-Jewish utterances. I had heard of the latter because Adolf Hitler spread this selection of Luther quotations among his soldiers, but not of the former. The Protestants we know in the Dutch-speaking countries are Calvinists, and Calvinism is a positively creepy religion. So, Luther and the good things about him (his stand against Church corruption, his abolition of priestly celibacy) were a pleasant surprise.

The Wartburg is the name of a castle that apparently was part of our planning. I didn’t know it at all, the children didn’t know it either but they and Heidi had decided that we should go the local castle. It rained profusely when we climbed the endless steps. But the sight at the top of the hill was well worth the climb: in two major direction, you saw only forest as far as the horizon. In Belgium, you never get away from the sound of automobiles or the sight of houses but here you still have space. It turned out that this was the place of the musicians’ contest featuring in Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser; of Luther’s temporary hiding place (where he was “abducted” for his own safety and stayed under a pseudonym) where he made his translation of the Bible, the basis of the unified German language; and where, after Napoleon’s fall, students had first demanded the unification of Germany as well as civil rights for all its inhabitants. They like to stress this combination, for it proves that there need not be anything authoritarian about German nationalism.

We also visited the house of the Low-German poet and political rebel Fritz Reuter. The city of Eisenach has turned it into a museum where a collection of Richard Wagner memorabilia is also kept. It was about time I learned about him.

We discovered that the megalithic site of Goseck was nearby, so we indulged our love of ancestral mysticism by going there. It was a reconstructed woodhenge, part of the first generation of Megalithic constructions in Europe, nearly 7000 years old. At the site, we learned that the village of Nebra was also nearby, just across the border of the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, so we went there too. Less than 4000 years old, the disc found at the astronomical site of Nebra was part of the last generation of Megalithic artifacts, and a unique piece in the world. It seems that there was a controversy whether the disc of Nebra was genuine, though that has died out now that the newest methods established its age as nearly 4000 years old. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that if the disc was a forgery, it certainly had done its job of making the Germans build a nice museum for prehistoric astronomy. Nebra shows a new Germany, proud of its history and its prehistoric artifacts the way Britain is proud of Stonehenge.

On the way back from Nebra, we visited another historic city, Weimar. This is where after World War 1 a democratic Republic was proclaimed, which had to pay off the debt which the victors at Versailles had imposed on Germany. It didn’t succeed and brought Hitler to power. But success is a poor yardstick to evaluate historic attempts.

While the music lovers in the family visited the Liszthaus in Weimar, I went to the Goethehaus. This was just a bourgeois house of the early 19^th century, worthwhile mostly because of its paintings. I bought a few scholarly books on or editions of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the shop. Franz Liszt was a Goethe lover, who put the Erlkönig (one of Goethe’s most famous poems) to music, but the love was not reciprocated: Goethe didn’t think highly of Liszt. A generation conflict, I suppose.

Anyway, the journey gave me a taste of what all those people are looking for when they start cruising our motorways to go abroad. I don’t think I’ll do much of it again, but at least I had a good time. And it turned out, quite spontaneously, to be more of a pilgrimage (the main valid premodern reason for travelling) than I had foreseen. But now, let’s return to work, it feels so much more like home than the holidays.

My near-death experience

Today, on my 53rd birthday, 7 August 2012, it is five years to the day that I woke up from a week-long coma, with someone else's heart. On the 31st July 2007, Prof. Rodrigus performed transplant surgery on me, and I remain grateful to her and to all the medics and paramedics at UZA (university hospital Antwerp) for giving me a new lease of life. For most of human history, I should be dead, but clearly somebody up there didn't want me to come just yet. The time is right to speak of an experience I had while technically unconscious.

Before the surgery, visitors had been telling me excited stories about people floating to the ceiling while operated upon and faithfully reporting afterwards about what the doctors were saying and doing during the operation. And about the "near-death experience" of patients who had seen their deceased loved ones in the great beyond, or the beckoning presence of a light or a messiah's face at the other end of a tunnel. Afterwards these patients would live happily and without any fear of death because the experience was so uplifting.

I was skeptical of their stories. A lack of oxygen in the brain (or some similar chemical circumstance) could explain the hallucination of a tunnel, the exact face people see at the end of the tunnel turns out to be culturally determined, and going through an aptly called "near-death experience" affects only people who are still alive, hence just as ignorant about death as the rest of us. And indeed the experience of floating to the ceiling, of seeing deceased family members or of sensing the presence of a messiah didn't happen to me. Instead, something else occurred, either during surgery or during the artificial coma.

Another line of stories, specific to heart transplantations, was that the patient would get the individual memory of the donor. He would remember things that hadn't happened to him but to someone else, viz. the former owner of the organ being transplanted. The heart would be especially sensitive, being rich in symbolism and allegedly even being part of the consciousness apparatus along with the brain. The was even an account of a murder that got solved because the receiver of the victim's heart had a dream in which he saw the whole murder scene and afterwards identified the murderer. And at the least, receivers would get a change of personality under the impact of the donor. As I expected, the doctors said they were presented with these beliefs and these stories at every operation, but they had never seen these phenomena with their own eyes. To my knowledge, they didn't happen to me either.

What happened instead was that, sometime during the coma, either during or after the operation, I became conscious, though the thought of opening my eyes was far from me. This was long before I really woke up from the coma, a long and unpleasant process of mixing real perceptions with hallucinations, so that first my mind and then my room seemed filled with all manner of animals; a bad dream that overwhelmed me at the time but then turned out to be easy to discard and to forget, leaving only awareness of the room and of the smaller medical problems I had yet to face. No, this was a distinctly clear mental perception.

At first I saw very vivid colours. That wasn't me, a Northern European with misty blue-grey eyes, I would be more for hazy colours, right? Maybe this said something about the donor, a painter or simply a Mediterranean? Then everything became black, pitch-black, black like I had never seen. Was this perhaps what being dead was like? Maybe the operation had failed and I had died, right? After all, I didn't know about life after death, there were varying opinions about it, and I remembered a believers' joke about the atheist who died and found to his dismay that he had an eternal soul surviving death. I didn't think of checking empirically whether my body was still there, I only realized that my mind was working, frantically philosophizing away.

And then I realized it. I didn't know if I was dead or alive, but my mind was at any rate still alive. It was seeing and thinking things, therefore it was in existence. Cogito ergo sum! Suddenly the old line from Descartes became existentially meaningful: I was conscious, therefore I was.... well, not necessarily alive in the physical sense, but I was there in some sense of the word. Either I was still alive and in my body, or I was not but then the individual consciousness survived death. At any rate, I was still there. Happy at being reassured about this, I fell into the coma again.