Baba Ramdev, NCBI, Mineral Oil

Bab Ramdev is a figure head of Yoga and Patanjali Ltd. in India. He became famous for his yoga teachings around the country and due to  his liaising with influential people. Through his yoga and public appearances he earned popularity among the people and gained the capability of manipulating them by using their nationalist emotions. He has a staunch pro Hindu and pro BJP stance.

Though he gained his popularity because of his Yoga classes, but now he is known more for his company called Patanjali. He himself does advertisements for many of Patanjali’s products and because of his image as a yoga guru people blindly fall for his products. He boasts about his food and cosmetics products being all natural and condemns all the similar products being sold by other companies for being just harmful chemicals.

In one of his advertisements regarding Mustered oil he claims that a USA based agency called NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) has proven that adding mineral oil to Mustered oil leads to cancer and hence Patanjali is the only company that is preparing Mustered oil that is free from mineral oil and is prepared by natural process. There are few things that Mr. Ramdev ignorantly doesn’t know about, that NCBI is not the kind of research center that does such kind of research. It is a federal government center that maintains several databases to store publicly available biotechnology related data. The research paper that is shown in the Patanjali’s advertisement is actually a research paper that is stored in NCBI’s PubMed/PubMed Central literature database. The actual research is done by someone else and not by the NCBI itself. Ramdev did not even bother to show the title of the research paper that claims such an evidence and nobody even knows if there is a statistically strong evidence to support this hypothesis.  Claiming that NCBI has proven something is actually stupid. It is similar to saying that Google tell us that cancer is a disease. Google doesn’t tell anything it just gives you a list of websites that carry your searched terms. Google itself doesn’t have those pages. However, people in India are so blinded by his aura that they just given into whatever he says on the national television.

Apart from Ramdev’s mineral oil nonsense, he is also very loud about his food products being FSSAI approved as though every other food product in the Indian market is not FSSAI approved. His biggest bullshit is that every other product is made up of chemicals that are not good for humans. One should explain to him that even natural products are chemicals themselves and not all of the them are good for humans. Snake venom is a natural product, is it good for humans? Pathogenic bacteria and virus are natural, are they good for humans? No, not everything thing that comes out of nature is good for humans.

One of the things that really irritates me is that he doesn’t like to call India as “India” instead he prefers to call it by its Hindi version “Bharat”. According to him India is a word given to us by the Britishers and he despises it. Ironically all his products are named in English and on their packages everything is written in English including the phrase “Made in Bharat”. He simply uses nationalist and Hinduism stance to emotionally manipulate people to fall into his prey.

I don’t know how long would it take for India to eradicate such phony people out of the country. It may probably never happen because the divide in India due to caste and religion is so deep that people would always find one or the other way to hack into the hearts and brains of Indian masses.

Does BJP wants Indian masses to remain uneducated?

Ever since Modi government took place, their policies have received extreme reactions from the public. Initially they were seen as a progressive group of leaders which now turns out to be nothing more than a religiously motivated, anti democratic and self righteous bigots. Until now their decisions have mostly impacted people economically however, with the recent events their decisions are going to hamper the education of children, higher education and even scientific research.

Disclosure of UP budget by the CM Yogi Adityanath has revealed highest cuts on the secondary education. It is not something welcomed among the educated people, but surely it doesn’t matter to many with less education and awareness. Yogi bhakts are instead praising Yogi for his decision to increase budgets for primary education. Their argument is that primary education is more important than secondary or higher education. In my opinion also getting primary education is a fundamental right of every child in the country, but if you look at the bigger picture then primary education can only teach children how to read, write and speak. It doesn’t provide them with the ability to reason, understand complex political agenda, contribute in science and technology or make a decent living for themselves. This is what BJP is looking for to education people enough to make them capable of casting votes for BJP and do not question their policies.

In addition to hike in primary education budget they have also increased support for students hailing form backward classes, which is again a vote bank politics. Supporting poor and needy is important in any society, but supporting one group of people on the basis of their caste rather than economic condition is just trying to create a divide among the people. BJP has always been very good in clustering people into groups of their own and others.

Apart from the cuts in secondary education budgets BJP has also severely decreased funding for scientific research. Many of the projects have been shut down including some of the pilot projects that were running for more than a decade and were at their final stages of completion. Budget cuts had costed the jobs of many brilliant research associates forcing them to quit their scientific career.

Every government in India proclaims that they will remove corruption from the society and BJP boasts about it. However, they have forgotten that corruption is a mindset and culture of uneducated people and it can only be eradicated by supporting education at every level of a persons developmental stage.