varnam

Animation after animation clearly shows that the world has become a much better place since the 70s, in every aspects. Globalization has brought dramatic changes to the lives of billions of people across the world, for the better. The world has become much more equitable across and within countries.[The best video you will see today via barbarindians]

A new book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light contains some of the confession letters of Mother Teresa in which she doubts her faith. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu who was born in the Republic of Macedonia moved to India in 1929 to become a nun. It was on September 10, 1946 that she experienced "the call within the call", a mystical union with Jesus, in which she reports hearing the words of Jesus and started her missionary work.

For people around the world, this Nobel peace prize winner was a  the selfless social worker who always was there to look after the poor and the dying. She herself did not see her work that way. While talking to Christopher Hitchens, she mentioned that she was not a social worker and  she was working to expand the number of Catholics and did all her work for Christ and the church.

The new letters, which she asked to be destroyed, reveal that she doubted the existence of God, heaven and the soul. This period of darkness started around the same time she started her missionary work in 1948 and lasted  her entire life. Her spiritual life was similar to that of St. Paul of the Cross, who went through "dark night", but recovered after 45 years, but unlike St. Paul, she never found the light. Mother Teresa finally came to the conclusion that Jesus was not true. ( "What do I labour for? If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true")

Even when she had this realization, she did not display it in public and she continued to save souls for the church till her very end. She expressed her doubts to her superiors and they convinced her that what she was experiencing was the same sense of abandonment that Christ experienced on the cross. Present day priests say that she is a role model since she did not waver from her path even during doubt and this humanizes Mother Teresa as a role model for all seekers.

Others think that she was involved in verbal deception, telling something to the public which she herself did not believe. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a scathing book on her, thinks that she was like one of those Communists who could not believe that the ideology failed.

"There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.[Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith]

See Also: On Point: Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

(via Indian Economy Blog)

Define Irony: Malayalees opposing globalization.

The Kerala model of development, as an alternative to market economy has been touted by economists like Amartya Sen, but it turns out that the money order economy of Kerala is not practically applicable to any part of the world, including Kerala.

Plagued by chronic unemployment, more Keralites than ever work abroad, often at sun-scorched jobs in the Persian Gulf that pay about $1 an hour and keep them from their families for years. The cash flowing home now helps support nearly one Kerala resident in three. That has some local scholars rewriting the Kerala story: far from escaping capitalism, they say, this celebrated corner of the developing world is painfully dependent on it.

Without migrant earnings, critics say, the state’s luster could not be sustained. The $5 billion that Keralite migrants send home augment the state’s economic output by nearly 25 percent. Migrants’ families are three times as likely as those of nonmigrants to live in superior housing, and about twice as likely to have telephones, refrigerators and cars. Men seeking wives place newspaper ads, describing themselves as “handsome, teetotaler, foreign-employed” or “God-fearing and working in Dubai.” [Jobs Abroad Support ‘Model’ State in India (via email from Mohan)]

When it comes to understanding the life of Jesus, one has to rely on the Gospels which were composed decades later. Considering that the Gospels, both the canonical and the heretic like the Gospel of Judas were written with the aim of glorifying Jesus, the bias in it would not be, let us say, minuscule.

The Gospels were not first hand accounts, but oral tradition written down much later and from the Gospels it cannot be decided what is historical and what is not, for the authors of Gospels were evangelists, not historians. Students of Israel's history and early Christianity are warned not to confuse the events described in the Old Testament and New Testament as actual events.

Pope Benedict in his new book on Jesus of Nazareth claims that the tale of Jesus is not myth, but then suggests that since the Gospels  are divinely inspired, faith is required for understanding the text. There is no problem with such a statement coming from a religious leader writing a book for liturgy, but it looks odd in a book which claims to be about the historical Jesus. This has upset the New Testament scholars because the Pope asks for inner openness to understand the spiritual insights and the divinity of Jesus.

Fourth, Jesus did not understand himself to be God. According to Mark 10:18, when someone addressed him as “good teacher,” Jesus responded by insisting, “No one is good except God alone.” Whether this reflects Jesus or Mark or both (scholarly opinion is divided), such a statement cannot be twisted by theological exegesis to support a claim for Jesus’ divinity. Therefore, the pope does not deal with such passages, since they clearly contradict his fundamental thesis.

Were its author not the pope, this book would garner no other academic attention than to be cited as an embarrassing gaffe that would soon gather dust even on church bookshelves. But because it comes from the pen of the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, and casts reason squarely before the juggernaut of faith, the intellectual scandal it represents must be denounced—if only on behalf of those Roman Catholics whose native honesty compels them to engage in historical-critical exegesis [AN EMBARRASSING MISREPRESENTATION via Forbidden Gospels]

The article gives a brief over view of the under water archaeology efforts in Dwaraka and Mahabalipuram

Another significant discovery has been at Mahabalipuram. For years, this ancient port town, off the Tamil Nadu coast was known to sailors as the town of seven temples. Present day Mahabalipuram, however, has only one shore temple. The popular belief is that there were six more temples here, which later got submerged.

Excavations by NIO in 2002 revealed some amount of truth in these tales. According to Vora, underwater investigations showed the presence of the remains of walls as well as large stone blocks, which seemed to correspond to the time period of the surviving shore temple. Excavations carried out by ASI in 2005 also revealed the remains of two structural temples, found near the shore temple.

''These findings provide prima facie evidence about what was earlier regarded as merely folklore,'' says Vora. Folklore and legends in fact, have the potential to provide many clues which help in underwater archaeology, a field whose scope, incidentally, is not merely limited to the sea, but extends beneath all water bodies. [Silent secrets of the sea]

The time between the decline of Indus Valley Civilization and the birth of Buddha in India was a period of turmoil for the Hebrews. During this time, the wandering Hebrews returned to Canaan (a region approximating to present-day Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Lebanon and Syria) and joined other tribes that had not moved to Egypt.

The twelve tribes united under Saul. Saul's successor was David (of David and Goliath fame) and it was David's son, Solomon, who built the temple in Jerusalem honoring God. About 300 years later, by 586 BCE which is about 23 years before the birth of Buddha, Chaldeans or Neo-Babylonians conquered Judah and destroyed Solomon's temple.

Some of the Jews who survived fled to Egypt and the others were exiled to Babylon. When Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he freed the Jews and encouraged them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. This freedom did not last long and by the time of the decline of the Mauryan empire in India, the Romans were in control of Jerusalem.

In 70 CE, the Roman general Titus Flavius placed a siege around Jerusalem by digging a trench and building additional walls. Anyone caught fleeing was crucified. During this siege many Jews hid in a drainage canal and escaped through the city's southern gate. This drainage canal has been discovered underneath the rubble of the Second Temple, under what was the main road during the time.

The channel was buried beneath the rubble of the sacking, and the parts that have been exposed since it was discovered two weeks ago have been preserved intact.

The walls — ashlar stones one meter (3 feet) deep — reach a height of 3 meters (10 feet) in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the main road's paving stones, Shukron said. Several manholes are visible, and portions of the original plastering remain, he said.

Pottery sherds, vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple period were discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age, Reich said.[Archeologists find ancient tunnel used by Jews to escape Roman conquest of Jerusalem]

On August 4, 70 CE, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and along with it, the Second Temple which was built by Cyrus.

Islamic terrorists, this time from Pakistan, continue their fight against Buddhist rock carvings.

There was, however, no damage to the image of the sitting Buddha carved into a 40-metre high rock in mountains 20 km north of Mingora, a town in the scenic Swat valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad.

A group of masked-men tried to destroy the carving on Tuesday, said provincial archaeology department official Aqleem Khan.

"Militants drilled holes in the rock and filled them with dynamite and blew it up," Khan said on Wednesday.

"The explosion damaged the upper part of the rock but there was no damage to the image itself," he told Reuters.[Pakistani militants try to blow up Buddha carving]

A Thai depiction of Rama-Ravana battle

Lazarus was a man who lived in the town of Bethany near Jerusalem. When he was ill, his sisters called for Jesus, but by the time Jesus reached, Lazarus was dead. In the presence of the mourners, Jesus had the stone of the tomb rolled away and called for Lazarus and he got up and walked in his grave clothes. Besides this story, the gospels contain other miracles attributed to Jesus like walking on water, converting water to wine and feeding a large crowd with a few loaves of bread and fish.

The historians of the 1^st century wrote nothing about Jesus and so modern day scholars have to rely on the gospels, which contain stories like these to find out details of the historical Jesus. Instead of dismissing the story of Jesus as a myth, biblical scholars  look for places mentioned in the gospels, conduct archaeology and  try to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus.

All epics have a seed story which then gets layered with exaggeration, poetic imagination and addition by later scribes. Mahābhārata started out with the name Jaya with just 8800 verses by Vyasa. It increased to 24,000 verses when it was recited by Vaisampayana and it reached the size of 100,000 verses when it was recited by Ugrasravas, the son of Lomaharsha. Theravada Buddhists have a version of Ramayana in the Jatakas which does not have the abduction of Sita.  While Biblical scholars  affiliated with prestigious universities in the west look at texts, they know that the texts contain theology and modifications, but still try to find out their historical basis. No such work was done by the ASI or the Central Government.

In Stanford University, there is a course called The Historical Jesus, which attempts to disconnect Jesus Christ from Yeshua, which was his actual name. (Christ just means the anointed one, like how Buddha means  the awakened one). There are many Biblical scholars who look at the scriptures from a historical perspective without getting into theology. Biblical archaeology has led to the discovery of structures like the  Pool of Siloam, Second Temple, Shechem temple, Jericho's walls and artifacts like Ebla  cuneiform archives, Arad ostraca, and Caiaphas  family ossuaries. If the story of Jesus was dismissed as a myth, none of this would have happened.

When it comes to providing  support for such research, the Archaeological Survey of India does not have a good track record. Few years back, there was an effort initiated by Jagmohan to conduct archaeology along the path of Saraswati river. The excavations at Adi Badri in Haryana revealed a 300 AD Kushan site. Excavations in Dholavira in Kutch revealed one the world's oldest stadiums and sign boards. These excavations would have revealed more about our past, and answered questions like: Were the Harappans the Vedic people, but the project was scrapped. While there have been some excavations in Hastinapur and Kurukshetra, archaeology related to Ramayana is non existent.

While the  Government is sure that Rama did not exist, historians disagree. A. L. Basham writes that Rama may have been a chief who lived in the 8th or 7th century BCE who did not have any divine attributes. He goes on to write that Rama and Dasaratha were insignificant chieftains, who were ignored by the Puranas, but whose exploits were remembered, elaborated and magnified by by bards. Rama's father-in-law, Janaka of Videha, is mentioned a few times in literature and Basham says, is definitely a historical figure. Romila Thapar, our favourite eminent historian and disciple of Basham, says that the original version of Ramayana was an exaggerated version of local conflicts occuring between the expanding kingdoms of the Gangetic plain and the societies of the Vindhyan region.

The ASI has ignored the work of historians and have not tried to find the details of the local conflicts which resulted in Ramayana. They have not analyzed Ramayana from a historical perspective like the Biblical scholars and they have not conducted archaeology related to Rama, but still have concluded with confidence that Rama was not a historical figure.

See Also: Faith, fact and fiction, The Ramayana, the Sethusamudram and Indian Archeology

In 1993, novelist David Leavitt, known as a "gay writer" for his early novels and story collections, wrote the book While England Sleeps which was inspired by Stephen Spender's autobiography World Within World. The book had some explicit sex scenes which did not go well with Spender and so he sued. The publisher eventually removed those passages.

In 2007, he has returned back with the same theme with a book titled The Indian Clerk, and the protagonists this time are Godfrey Harold Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujam and the book is about their relationship. Leavitt's speciality is in writing a rare type of literary fiction in which he takes people who really existed and plays around with the facts. His second speciality is in writing explicit sex. This would be like Jeffrey Kripal meeting Harold Robbins, but with the defence that it is  historical fiction.

Alice claims to be easing his culture shock, while Hardy hopes to develop his mind. In both cases, however, their fascination has a sexually predatory edge: Hardy “cannot deny that it excites him, the prospect of rescuing a young genius from poverty and obscurity and watching him flourish. ... Or perhaps what excites him is the vision he has conjured up, in spite of himself, of Ramanujan: a young Gurkha, brandishing a sword.”

The real G. H. Hardy famously called his association with Ramanujan “the one romantic incident in my life,” and Leavitt’s Hardy makes the same claim. But what he makes of their relationship is much more subtle than a love affair. Initially frustrated by the young genius’s tendency to pursue several ideas in an associative fashion, Hardy eventually realizes he has come in contact with a mind that expands his notion of their discipline. At the same time, the relationship brings Hardy — emotionally as well as sexually closeted — into the messy realm of human friendship, where even the most well-intentioned attempts to rescue another adult can result in further injury.[Lust for Numbers]

Here is an idea for historical fiction: While flying from Bangalore on a trip to observe the Ram Sethu, David Leavitt 's plane crashes and he gets stranded in a farm somewhere near Erode. As days pass he realizes that no one will rescue him from the paste and colored-paper  exotic East, in which brave Englishmen battled natives for the cause of empire. Soon the lone donkey in the farm starts looking very attractive.

I don't think Leavitt will object because it fiction after all.

Dr. S. R. Rao knows a bit about religious archaeology. As the former director of of National Institute of Oceanography he undertook under water excavations near Dwaraka and the island of Bet Dwaraka and it has revealed a great deal of information about the antiquity of the site.

Dr. Rao believes that the site of Hampi in Karnataka is the Kishkindha of Ramayana.

He said that the culture (seen in Kishkindha) has several Neolithic sites spread over Patapadu and Pusalpadu in Bellary district. Another important site is Bandi Pushala Chenu in Bellary-Kurnool area where excavations of the typical Harappan steatite wheel-like beads are found. These beads occur in all Harappan sites as early as 3000 BC. Bithur near Kanpur, a traditional Ramayana site, had yielded weapons of the culture, archeologically designated as ochre-coloured pottery (OCP), ranging from 1500 to 2000 BC or even 3000 BC near Ghaneswar in Rajasthan.

Excavations at the Neolithic culture site at Mahagara in the Belan valley of Uttar Pradesh yielded rice dated around 4000 BC. Further north-west in Pakistan, the cotton growing Neolithic culture is 7,000 years old (5000 BC). When Rama came to Kishkindha, the Vanaras were the same Neolithic people, whose help he took, said Prof. Rao.

The archaeological dating of Neolotihic culture ranged from 4000 BC in Uttar Pradesh to 7600 BC. in pre-Harappan sites of Pakistan. On this basis, Ramayana should be dated at least to 3000 BC, if not earlier. The Mahabharata, he said, mentioned Ramayana, while the Ramayana did not mention Mahabharata. There is no negative evidence to say that Ramayana was a myth. Ramayana is built on a core of truth depicting the life of a particular people and period, Prof. Rao added. [Ramayana is not a myth, says S.R. Rao]

Two years back The New York Times began a subscription program called Times Select in which access to some parts of the online site was restricted to subscribers. Besides stopping this program, the newspaper is also giving free access to  the archives from 1987 to present.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said. [Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site]

This means that we can get our regular dose of Friedmanism for free from Tuesday.

MC writes about politics in schools and colleges in Kerala

Kerala has been witness to countless student agitations at the behest of their political masters. Violence and senseless destruction of public and private property worth crores occurs every time, and all that we have done is sympathize with them for their criminal acts. Each time we find some justification and excuse to pardon such acts, while blaming police excesses. It is the same senselessness that allows a banner like that in the picture in front of an old reputed institution, now successfully eroded of its reputation and quality. I wonder why the teachers and the principals of these schools and colleges are not ashamed to see that every morning. What is the message we are trying to send across to our children? Where do we put an end to it?

I am very much interested in finding out what Kerala Government does next. This is the government that banned Coke/Pepsi from Kerala based on an unscientific result published by an NGO. The experts have argued that if the same NGO sampled the water samples in and around the country that common people are using they could have found more deadly impurities. Now a study by a reputed institution in India has found that 99% of the tap water supplied by Kerala Government is polluted or has bacteria level greater than one mandated by WHO. Now there is a good chance that since the findings are against the state government they will question the intention of Malayala Manorama or other people involved rather than trying to solve the real issue at hand.

Kerala government recently banned thin plastic bags in the state. However, the ban is only for bags with less than 30 microns (?) in thickness, as these are the bags that are not bio-degradable or recyclable. So, shopkeepers are selling their items in special plastic bags which have some sort of a sign (a seal from the bag manufacturers, for example) on the bags certifying that they are more than 30 microns thick. These bags are freely used by people and are dumped at any place of choice.

Without establishing a system and process for collection and recycling/disposal of all the plastic items (or any wastage for that matter), just enforcing a ban on certain plastic items may not be of much use, I am afraid.

See Also: Notes from Kerala

Till the end of the nineteenth century, historians thought that Greek civilization started around the eight century BCE, about 200 years before the time of Buddha. In 1871, a German businessman,Heinrich Schliemann,  started looking for ancient Greece by excavating sites mentioned by the blind Ionian poet Homer and Schliemann's work led to the discovery of a lost Greek civilization which was named after Mycenae, an important city of that time.

The Mycenianians were Greek speaking tribes who moved into the Greek peninsula around 2000 BCE. This civilization which reached the peak in the period from 1400 to 1230 BCE consisted of several small states, each with its own ruling dynasty. Thus the antiquity of Greeks was pushed back about 1200 years and was pushed further back when British archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered the Minoan civilization on Crete.

Schliemann's contributions did not end there. Interested in the location of Homer's Troy he started digging for it in Turkey. Though British archaeologist Frank Calvert had identified Hissarlik as the site of Troy, his work was over shadowed by Schliemann who published Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he claimed Hissarlik as the site of Troy. This is now accepted by historians.

Even though the site was discovered there were sceptics who claimed that Troy was an insignificant town and such a large war as described by Homer could not have happened there. For the past 16 years more than 350 people have been collaborating on the excavations in the site and their discoveries have resulted in some new facts. Troy, it seems was a large and important city controlling access from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann who has been excavating in Troy wrote

According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the "Trojan War" or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single "Trojan War." However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events--whatever these may have been [Was There a Trojan War?]

If Karunanidhi was alive in late 19th century, he would have told Schliemann that Iliad was a myth and he should spend his time putting up his own pictures all around the city. Thanks to the work of Heinrich Schliemann, Frank Calvert, Manfred Korfmann and many others, it has been proved that there was history behind what was labeled myth.

Rajiv Malhotra's Infinity Foundation has announced the publication of three new books

1. "Emerson and the Light of India: An Intellectual History", by Robert Gordon. National Book Trust, India.
2. The Experience of Meditation, by Jonathan Shear. Paragon Press,
   USA.
3. Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness by Don Salmon and Jan Maslow. Paragon Press, USA.

In his announcement, Rajiv has some interesting information about the second book.

One of the important outcomes from my interactions with Shear over the years has been an incredible treasure trove of evidence on how Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation got co-opted into Herb Benson's "Western Science" and into Father Keating's "Christian Centering Prayer". Both these appropriations are based on TM by erasing the source tradition.

In the case of Father Thomas Keating, the Hindu source was seen as a sort of threat to Christianity's claim of having developed meditation internally, with no positive help from the heathen others. In Benson's case, by ignoring the TM origins of all his "scientific findings" he was able to launch himself as a "Western pioneer of mind science"; then this secured him a lucrative and powerful position with Templeton Foundation where he has been facilitating the migration of these scientific findings into Christian frameworks; and now he is established as the "originator" of the new complementary medicine in US research, hospitals and medical colleges. All this and much more will be elaborated in my forthcoming U-Turn Theory book.

One of the important events in the book of Exodus, which describes the departure of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, is the parting of the Red Sea. Chased by the Pharaoh's army, the Israelites reach the Red Sea and Moses causes the water to part. Once the Israelites cross to safety, the water comes back and drowns the Pharaoh's army.

There have been countless under water archaeological expeditions looking for evidence of drowned Egyptian armies, but all unsuccessful.  In  Simcha Jacobovici's controversial documentary The Exodus Decoded, there was an attempt to find the location of the place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, a scene immortalized in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. After looking at a hieroglyphic which he says depicts the parting of the sea he concludes that Red Sea is not the Red Sea we know, but a small lake known as the El Balah Lake.

According to Dr. Zahi Hawass, the story of Exodus is a myth. No, Dr. Hawass is not an ASI official who makes judgement on religious scriptures without doing any work, but Egypt’s chief archaeologist who has been conducting excavations in the Sinai region. So far they have not found any evidence for the accounts in the Hebrew scriptures and  there has been only one find which suggests the existence of Israel.

Then, Egypt is the supermarket of ancient history and tomorrow there could be a discovery which could change the status of Exodus from myth to history.

Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, the head of the excavation, seemed to sense that such a conclusion might disappoint some. People always have doubts until something is discovered to confirm it, he noted.

Then he offered another theory, one that he said he drew from modern Egypt.

“A pharaoh drowned and a whole army was killed,” he said recounting the portion of the story that holds that God parted the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape, then closed the waters on the pursuing army.

“This is a crisis for Egypt, and Egyptians do not document their crises.” [Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say]

Amit Kaundinya's review of Priyadarshan's new movie Dhol  has the following paragraph

Armed with a script that is as old as the Harappan Civilization and with actors who are competing for the Worst Actor Award, director Priyadarshan sets off to make the audience laugh. And as expected he fails miserably. Clichéd scenes, garish cinematography, tiring songs and perhaps the most banal screenplay are what you take back after watching Dhol. [Dhol]

ASI archaeologist Karunanidhi, who also doubles as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, would have explained Priyadarsan's miserable failure as the result of a Dravidian trying to adapt a script as old as an Aryan civilization. Besides this, Priyadarshan also used Aryan actors in a movie which was initially written and performed by Dravidians.

The Saraswati Heritage Project was started by the  culture and tourism minister Jagmohan in 2003-2004 to conduct  archaeological excavations in the region. Then the usual words - saffronization of history, attempts to push the antiquity of Indian civilization were thrown and Congress led UPA Government canned it.

Turns out that there are some smart folks at the ASI for they have quietly continued the project just by renaming it.

But the ASI funded the project from its own resources. "We wanted to bring the search to a logical conclusion," RS Bisht, former joint director, ASI, who coordinated the project during the NDA regime, told DNA. [Sarasvati project is on, under a new name]

See Also: A detailed map showing Indus Valley sites and Ghaggar-Hakra river

Excerpt from Egyptian antiquities By George Long (Published in 1832)

After the 2004 tsunami receded, a naval diving team assisted the Archaeological Survey of India in looking for some structures which were revealed in Mahabalipuram. They found some temple shaped structures covered with marine growth leading archaeologists to believe that it was the remains of the other six pagodas.

Under water archaeology in Dwaraka and the dating of the retrieved artifacts have revealed that the debris is related to the ruins of a city dated to 2280 BCE. Previous under water excavations revealed about 120 anchors. These anchors often had three holes of which the upper one was used for tying a rope and the other two holes for holding wooden flukes.

There seems to be evidence of a submerged city, similar to Dwaraka, near the island of Yonaguni Jima in Japan. Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan, who has been diving there for more than fifteen years has found submerged stone structures which look like a monolithic stepped pyramid. (photos)

Similar to the story of the lost continent of Atlantis and Lemuria, there is an Asian tale of the lost continent of Mu. According to one concept, it was the survivors of Mu who found the Mayan civilization and some folks believe that the structures found near Yonaguni Jima is evidence of Mu.

Sceptics think that these pyramid like structures are natural formations, but Kimura says that he has found quarry marks and characters etched into the carved faces. He believes that the ruins are 5000 years old based on the date of  stalactites, which is around the same time as the ruins found in Dwaraka.

A similar under water city has now been found under the site of present day Alexandria, the city found by Alexander of Macedonia. The city, dated to around 1000 BCE, seems to be the remains of Rhakotis, a town mentioned in histories, but never found.

As evident from the archaeology at Dwaraka, Mahabalipuram, Yonaguni Jima and Alexandria, there is always some historical basis for certain "mythologies". Any decent archaeologist would investigate the sites before jumping to conclusions, unless of course they report to Ambika Soni or T  R Baalu.