Finding scientific reasons for practices or principles prevelant in India

This post will run continuously, getting updated with more information.
The intention is to find plausible reasons for practices/principles in India which are being followed at their face value. People do no have an answer to 'Why?' when asked.

I am starting off with a only 2 which I can remember just off my head...

1. Every person is born with a certain number of breaths allocated to him.
So, maybe this is a a suggestion to  breathe deep..good breathing..pranayaam.

2. Have curd before going to take an exam.
Proven that a tense mind plays with your stomach, resulting in acidity etc. Curd counters the acidity.

Things that we are leaving behind

Reading about the discovery of the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilizations, I realized that most of the information we have about them is from the things these civilizations have left behind. We've been able to decipher some and maybe not all of it. Similarly, what are we leaving behind? We're leaving behind the virtual world, passwords, cryptography and so much more which cannot run without electricity and batteries and computers. A few thousand years down the line, anyone trying to find out what we did in our days will have to learn not only the alphabet, but also physics, electricity generation, power usage, understand how to use computers, password management, cryptography..and much much more.

Not only this, but from BCP-DR perspective too, there is so much knowledge required to run things today, that if even a part of humanity was wiped off coz of a natural disaster it might take a long time to get things running back again....and maybe right from scratch.

There are efforts on to document this knowledge already.

I found some very interesting web portals, which you also might appreciate.

http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/cd3wd/index.htm

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page

Blaming someone for the culture that erodes

Everyone seems to have an opinion these days that the Indian culture is being eroded, and each of these people has sought to blame someone or something for it, ranging from Hollywood to technological innovations (true story!). I believe it is not the culture but the practices which are impacted. I did not realize this myself until I read through Geert Hofstede's theory on this. There is a huge difference between culture - national, organizational..and practices. But what may be affecting the culture? If I assume the reasons for continuity of culture, then maybe the work-life balance, where we don't get enough time to spend with our family might be one. Like a knowledge transfer from one exec to another, we inherit culture from the previous generation. Maybe we are not spending enough time on the inheritance....maybe we don't have enough time for it..but these are all maybes. What is definitely changing is practices. And they have been changing since Harappa five thousand years ago. More on that later.. Anyone interested in Geert Hofstede and his research on cultural dimensions must visit www.hofstede.com. I havn't read his books, but they are at the top of my to-read list now.

Commentary on SMJ EP05

From projects to organisation, we see a need to have a top-down approach to bring about major changes or paradigm shifts. It becomes more pertinent in the case of a country. All seems to be in place as far as the constitution and the judiciary is concerned (but we seldom do everything that is right in the court of law.) If we have to stop talking and discussing castes, the political parties have to do their bit too. But, they all went ahead and set a bad example when they wanted caste data to be collected for the 2011 census. No doubt the change will happen coz of ppl, but then why do we need leaders? Aren't they supposed to show the direction we are heading towards?