india

www.fretnotgospel.com/india.html

by Noah Arthur

References - Books
Enchantment of the World - India, Erin Pembrey Swan, Childrens Press, Chicago, 2002
Internet
I ndonesia: History, Geography, Government, and Culture, Infoplease.com, 05/22/07
Council on Foriegn Relations, Terrorism Havens: Indonesia, December 2005
Canadian Press, Islamic Hardliners Chip Away, March 4, 2007
Popular Entertainment and Islam in Indonesia, Wall Street Journal, April 2007

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by Noah Arthur

India

FIRST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT INDIA
India is the worlds largest democracy.
India's government is a mix of United States and British government. It has a president and vice president, plus a prime minister and a cabinet of ministers.
     The prime minister is the main decision maker. He or she often uses the president as a puppet to speak and make decisions through. The prime minister, president, vice president, and cabinet of ministers are all in the executive branch of government.
     In the legislative branch is the parliament, made up of three groups. In the Judicial branch is supreme court, high court, and subordinate courts. The parliament deals with issues that affect the people, such as money issues.
    Even though there are many religions, India is a democracy, and the world's largest democracy.
     Hinduism is the main religion of India, with eighty per cent of the Indians following it. This religion has more than 330 MILLION different gods and spirits.
     Some Hindus believe that all religions should peacefully exitst together. Others beat up Christians and Muslims, trying to forcibly convert them to Hinduism.
     The most important Hinduholy books are the Vedas. These are also the earliest written ones. Another important holy book is Mahabharata. This is the story of the gods.
     The main gods are Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Brahma creates the universe, Vishnu maintains it, and Shiva eventually destroys it. This cycle repeats infinitely.
     The city of Varanasi and the Ganges river are considered sacred. It is believed that if a person dies and is cremated near the Ganges, they will have instant spiritual peace, or "moksha."
     Hindus believe that the hard way to get moksha is to do enough good in life. The measure of this good is called karma. If a person does very little good, he or she will be "reborn" as an insect. If the person does more good, they will be reborn as a higher animal.

Country of the Month

by Noah Arthur

People
     The Indian population is slowly growing. A worry of the government is that the population will outgrow its food supply. In some areas, people are being taight about birth control.
     Cities are crowded and busy, with rushing people, honking cars, and domestic animals wandering loose.
     More than a billion people live in India. Most are Indo Aryans. These people are descended from the Aryans of the north and the tribes of the Indus Valley.
     In the south are the Dravidians. They are shorter and darker skinned than the Indo Aryans.
     In many areas of India there are Adivasis, or tribe-people. They too are descended from the Dravidian and Indus Valley tribes.
     In the north are Mongol and Kashmiri people.
     There are many different languages in India. Generally, they are of Dravidian origin in the south, and Indo Aryan origing in the north.
     Some northern ones include Kashmiri, Punjabi, Assamese, and Sanskrit. In the south are Tamil, Malayalan, and Kannada.
     The languages are so different that there is trouble with communication. Englush is often used to help communication. It is often taught in schools. Hindi is the most widely spoken language.
     Indian cities are hard places to live. Constant noise and stench, overcrowding, and little food. there are so many people in and India city that there is not room for many indoors.
     Sometimes, even orphaned children are forced to live on the streets and beg or do hard labor all day every day.
     Some people have jobs but not real homes. Places called slums are where scrappy shacks are built in a group in an unused space.

Geography
India has in it the Himalayas, the highest mountains on earth. They are in the northern areas of the country, and are wet, cold, and snowy. But in the foothills there are tropical rainforests.
     Three big rivers flow from the Himalayas. The highest mountain in India is in the Himalayas. It is Kanchejunga mountain at 28,208 feet high.
     In central India are the Thar desert in the west and the Indo Gangetic plain in the east. The plain is good land for farming, and there is much done on it.
     In the south are the mountains of the Eastern and Western Ghats. In the Western Ghats there are tropical forests similar to those found in Arizona.
     South of the mountains is the dry, infertile Deccan Plateau. Here, the dry season is long and the wet season not very wet.
     The Indian cold season lasts from October to January. The hot season from February to June, the wet season from June to October.

Culture
     There are many well known writers in India. They include R. Tagore, R. Narayan, and Gita Mehta. Many Indian books and poems are popular worldwide.
     There are several different styles of architecture in India. Much of it is religious and used in temples. Some of the oldest Indian architecture of all was made by the ancient Mughals in the north.
     Their buildings include the famous Red Fort. But the Mughals were Muslim and when they found Hindus and others in India, they knocked down their buildings.
     In some caves in Maharashtra are very old sculptures and frescoes made by Buddhists long ago. Even now there are many great artists in India, as contemporary art museums in large cities show.
     Many artists make small wooden or stone statues, usually of animals or gods.
     India makes more movies a year than any other country. They are advertised on large hand painted billboards. Most indian movies are musicals, and is one does not have enough music, it is considered a failure.
    Cricket is the most widely known and popular sport in India. Cricket is played almost everywhere.
     Most Indians have some cricket in their lives somewhere. In small villages, traditional wrestling is a common sport.
     Music is very common in India, and Indian music is popular worldwide. The sitar is an instrument unique to India. Much of Indian music is religious.
     Much of Indian dance is also religious. Many dances imitate the actions of Hindu gods. there are several main forms of dancing. These include Bharata Natyam, Kathak, and Kathakali.
     Bharata Natyam is a difficult dance performed with the legs bent. Kathakali is from Kerala and involves wearing strings of bells around the ankles. A Kathakali performance can last TWELVE HOURS!

India's Diverse Religions
Islam
Most Indians that are not Hindu are Muslim. There is often fighting between Hindus and Muslims. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world.
     Muslims believe in only one god called Allah. If possible, a Muslim makes a trip to the holy Arabian city of Mecca once in a lifetime.
     Sikhism
Sikhism was started by a man named Guru Nanak in northern India. He made Sikhism trying to combine the best parts of Islam and Hinduism to stop the fighting.
     Sikh men can be recognized by their long, turbaned hair, which they are not allowed to cut.
     Jainism
Jainism's main point is not iilling or harming any creatures. Some Jains wear masks and sweep the streets in front of them as they walk so that they will not breathe in flies or step on any little moths or other insects.
     Buddhism
Buddhism is practiced by only a small percentage of Indians. It was formed by a Hindu prince in the Indian Himalayas who gave up all possessions and was "enlightened." He became Buddha.
     Buddhists believe that there is no god or other greater spirit being. Buddhism involves trying to learn truth by searching withing one's spirit for it. Buddhists believe that the world is an illusion and what conditions a person will be "reborn" in are determined by their actions.
     Christianity
Christians believe in one God, in three individual persons. They are only two and one half per cent of the Indian population. Most Christians live in Nagaland and Kerala. They are the happiest people pictured in the religion section of the book on India.
     Juddaism
Jews make up one of India's, and the world's, smallest religious groups. There is a small colony of Jews in one Indian city.
     Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrians belong to one of the oldest religious groups in the world. They are only a very small percentage of the Indian population, much less than a percent.
     Their religion is fairly simple. The main part of it is simply a god who battles with an evil spirit.

     The rich are very rich in India. They have huge houses full of fluffy cats and fluffy rugs, easy, money-rich jobs, and food available anytime.
     Many people of all kinds get money and food by farming. All sorts of things are grown in India, from rice to grapes to bananas.
     Cattle are also farmed for their milk. Unfortunately, rainforests are cut down in the north for expensive wood.
     The rupee is India's money uniet. Coins are one, two, and five rupees. Bills are five, ten, twenty, fifty, lne hundred, and five hundred rupees. The indian government is in debt to other countries.
Wildlife
India once had wildlife as great as Africa's. But, with the coming of the European people, this all changed.
          There are lions, tigers, leopards, rhinos, and elephants. All are found mainly on national parks. There are also many exclusively herbivorous mammals. These include blackbucks and Nilgiri tahrs. Indian gazelle live on the Deccan Plateau. Another rare big mammal is the black bear of the Himalayas, where it lives near the equally rare snow leopard.
     Much more numerous are the smaller mammals. Rats, mice, mongoose, and giant squirrels are a few of this diverse group. In some places, rats are sacred and allowed to breed uncontrolledly. Hundreds often run around in broad daylight in the middle of the floor in buildings!
     Some of the most abundant Indian mammals are monkeys. The monkey is one of the few things that is invariable present all over most of India. There are several monkey species, and they often live together around Hindu temples, where they are sacred. Monkeys can be found from the wildest rainforest, leaping through the treetops, to the streets of Kolkata. In the city, they do annoying things such as stealing ice cream from little kids.
     There are many bird species in India. The peacock is native to India, where it is the national bird.
     In India's tropical climate, there are many species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), as well as many other insects. The moths and butterflies range from the huge golden birdwing and atlas moth, both at 8 inches across, to the tiny tortricids, at less than an inch. The tiger butterflies are most numerous. They sit on bushes in huge numbers, waiting for even the slowest butterfly collector to pick them off by hand. No net needed here! Tigers range from blue to orange, always with black stripes.

Economy
     There are many manufactured products made in India. These include cars, shoes, leathers, cloths, and many others. Most of these rely on modern technology to manufacure the goods.
     Some things are produced by family companies on small villages. Most of these are done completely by hand, without the help of a maching.
     Several different cars are produced in India. These include Fiat 101 and Tata Indica.
     The electronics industry is very large in India. Televisions, computers, and radios are made in India.
     But there are things that India just doesn't produce. Things imported into India include oil and steel.
     Coal is India's main mining industry. But there are also others. These include iron, gold, and zinc. Threr are also large offshore oil resources and nuclear power plants.
     Tourism is a large part of India's economy. In 1997, over three billion U.S. dollars were made by tourism. Tourists go to all kinds of places, from historic temples to bird sanctuaries.
    A simple trip to a neighboring big city in India can be a hot, hectic, and stinky ordeal. There are relatively few personal cars in India, so transit is usually public and stressful. In Indian train station is a sea of hot, squished together people with the occasional island of a train standing up. Not all such "islands" aree free of people either. Often, the interiours of buses and commuter trains are so full that the tops are covered in people and luggage as well. In general, transit is over-crowded and extremely stressful. As with ccars, there are relatively few televisions in India. Often, a whole village of people witll crowd into the one house that contains a television. But TV is growing in popularity, and numbers of televisions are growing.   Many people also own cellular phones. Newspapers are also growing in popularity. Ther are newspapers in almost every Indian language.
    About half of India's people are poor. Some of these poor people live in cardboard shacks on the streets and do not eat every day. Some people cannot even get a piece of cardboard to sleep under.
     Getting food to eat is and everyday, neverending struggle for the poor. In many poor families, even young children spend their days from dawn to dusk doing gard labor for money to but food. But there is a growing middle class of people that have a good life, a house, and plenty to eat. The elec-tronics industry employs many of these people.

by Noah Arthur

SECOND IMPORTANT THING ABOUT INDIA
India was a British colony and is still greatly influenced by England.
The British put a trading company, the East India Company, in control of India. The harsh law of these Europeans made life unfair and difficult for the natives. However, some of the things that the Brisish did were beneficial, such as building schools and hospitals. The only Indians who were allowed to be in power were ones who had promised loyalty to Britain. British power seemed to grow stronger every day. The East India Company (EIC) was the main government of the subcontinent. There were signs saying "no dogs or Indians allowed" in some areas.
     The British made many unfair laws concerning the Indians. It was the habit of Europeans in those days to consider anyone who was different from them inferior. The EIC made a law not allowing Indians to have high points in government. They made another law saying that any Indian who did not pay land tax would have everything taken away by the government. Many Indians lost everything to this law.
     All this made unrest among the Indians, and rebellion was high on the minds of the Sepoys, orIndian soldiers taken, essentially as captives, to fight for the Brisish. The Sepoy Rebellion was carried out, and many Indians and British were killed.
     After this, the British threw away the EIC for a better setup. India was simply made part of the British empire. The Indians did not like this. Two political parties emerged to fight the British. One was Muslim, the other Hindu. The Muslims did not just want Indian independence, they wanted a Muslim nation of their own, somewhere within the current Indian borders.
     The British finally issued a document promising eventual self rule, but it did not say when. There was a good chance that it would be many, many years. But they did not seem like the original, unbeatable Britain of before.

Early History
The Dravidians:
Very early on, African like people lived in India, mainly in the south. These were Dravidians, the first people in India. They had a written language and a spiritworship religion.
The Aryans:
After hundreds of years, others invaded from the north. They were Aryans. Some Dravidian tribes mingles with the Aryans and made the modern Indo Aryan socitey of India. The Aryans combined their beliefs with some of the tirbal religions and made early Hinduism.
     The Hindu religion included and still includes the caste system. This is somewhat like an army rank system but applies to everyone in everyday life. At the top of the caste system were Brahmans, Aryan Hindu priests. Down many castes are the "untouchables," the lowest caste. At the time, this bottom caste included all Dravidians. Thet were included there mainly because they were dark skinned. Dark skinnedness does not sit well with Hinduism, and one of the Hindu scriptures says that the "heroic" fighter Indra "defeated the black skin and swept it out of heaven."
   The Greeks And Persians:
Now, much more powerful invaders entered India. These were the first Europeans of any kind in India. First came the Persians. They ruled northern India for a long time, then were overthrown by the Greeks. Alexander the Great was the main Greek to conquer northern India. But it did not last long. The Indians fought hard and the Greeks were pushed out.
   he Mauryas And Guptas:
The first Indian kingdom to rule northern India since the early Dravidians was the Maurya empire. This kingdom was ruled first by a king named Chandragupta. The peak of the Maurya empire was under emperor Ashoka. After him, it quickly fell apart. The next rulers of the north were the Guptas. They too were Indo Aryan people. They were similar in many ways to the Mauryas. The Guptas were advanced in science. They were the ones to discover that the world was round. Eventually, European tribes living in central Asia defeated the Guptas.
   Christianity:
Christianity now came to southern India. It arrived with St. Thomas and quickly spread through Kerala. But a new religion was soon to stop any hope of Christianity spreading to northern India.

The Muslims
   The first Muslims in India were wandering thieves. But now a real Muslim power came to northern India. These invaders were headed by Mohammed of Ghori. This Muslim kingdom ruled northern India until the Mughals and Europe barged in.
   Vasco da Gama:
About this time, a Portuguese sailor named Vasco da Gama wanted to sail to India. He did so, and returned with many fancy Indian goods and spices. Europe became very interested in India after he returned from his trup.
   The Mughals:
The Mughals were the first very powerful Muslims in India. They were Asian tribesmen that conquered much of the subcontinent. They were fairly tolerant of the religions that already existed in India, although they did demolish a few Hindu temples. They built many buildings that still stand now, including the Red Fort. Their area was the north, and had capitals in Delhi and another northern city. The south was a Dravidian dominated jungle that the Mughals did not conquer. Their empire fell apart in the early eightteen hundreds.

The British:
The first modern Europeans to have power in India were the Portuguese. They set up trading posts and took control of the state of Goa. Next came the British and French. At first, they were both weak in India and the only way to fight each other was through Indian rulers.
     Finally, the British won and the French left India. The British put a trading company, the East India Company, in control of India.
     There is much to say about the British rule in India. See the inset.

Modern Times
     A man named Gandhi began peaceful protest against the British. He had fought for non European peoples' rights in South Africa, and now he began in India. He had peaceful protest walks and other things, and was eventually put in prison. However, the British were giving in. Independence was coming soon.
     The weak, post WWII British government finally gave in. India was placed as and independent part of the British Commonwealth. Independence had finally come. The first act of the Indian government was to give the Muslims a country of their own, called Pakistan.
     Gandhi, who had been released, was shot by an obsessive Hindu, who thought that he was too sympathetic toward the Muslims.
     India became a republic. It was almost entirely independent from Britain, although it was still a part of the Commonwealth. A man named Nehru (great name) was the first prime minister. He was in power for a relatively short time, and his daughter Indira Gandhi was next. She was popular in her time, and she was a good leader for her people. But her popularity shrank. She was hated by some people because she was not doing anything about the inflation problem. She did not win the next election. But she did win the one after that. After this, she sent troops to attack peaceful Sikh protestors in thier "holiest shrine." She was killed by two angry Sikhs.
     Her son Rajiv Gandhi took over the place of prime minister. But he was assassinated at an election rally later on.

Nagaland
In Nagaland, India there is religious and independence sturggle.The Naga tribes have a long history of headhunting and spirit worship. Now, however, they are mainly Christian because of missionaries and broadcasting of Billy Graham's sermons.
    Nagaland is a small state in the large northeastern area of India bordering Burma. There are sixteen tribes living in the state, including the tribe called Ao. Almost ninety per cent of Naga people are Christian, almost all, if not all, Baptist.
     But life is not all good. The people of Nagaland do not like the Hindu-run Indian government, because it persecutes Christians. Nagaland wants independence from India.
     There are two groups of Christian independence soldiers in the mountains of Nagaland, both of which are supposed to be fighting the Indian government to gain independence. However, the two groups do not agree on what will be done with that independence if it is gained, so the groups are now fighting each other. The soldiers collect taxes from the common people at gunpoint. When held like this, the people must decide whether to lose everything or die.
     Peace talks with the Indian government and between the the two groups have accomplished nothing. the original leaders of both groups are now in exile in northern Europe. It is not known what will happen in future, as all three sides to the fight are equal and unable to win.
     One thing that is known, however, is that Nagaland is still, and will be, Christian. It is said that a poster of Jesus hangs on every wall of an Ao town.