Eid Mubarak 2020: Dr MM Basheer!
On this 'Eid Mubarak' day, it is gratifying to listen to a speech on Bharathiyata (being an Indian), Sanatana Dharma (a way of living), and Arsha Bharata (Vedic way of life) by Dr MM Basheer, a retired medical doctor, scholar, and also a popular religious activist and speaker.
His explanations of the philosophies contained in the Vedantas and Upanishads, his deep understanding of the Bhagavad Gita, and his extensive knowledge of Sanskrit are phenomenal. In his speech he often narrates various incidents of Ramayana and Mahabharata and points out their dharmic principles.
These are two of his engrossing and absorbing speeches in Malayalam:
This first one is of 1hr 30m duration.
This is only 24m.
It seems what kindled his interest in Bhagavad Gita and Sanskrit was through Swami Chinmayananda's Gita Yajnam talk in Trivandrum in 1972 during his student days. He mentions about the rich language of Sanskrit in which the meaning of a word can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on the context.
This reminds me of my own initiation into spirituality in 1972 when I had just joined VSSC (ISRO), Trivandrum.
That time I attended a 7-day course on Transcendental Meditation (TM), a specific form of silent, mantra meditation, invented by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The course instructor was a Swiss gentleman, who on the last day of the course, gives a personalized Mantra to each student. This mantra was a Sanskrit word that rolled off his tongue with great difficulty! During those days, TM was a rage among teenagers the world over.
Dr Basheer talks about the ancient sage Sushruta who conducted the first surgery in the world, established the principles of post mortem and forensic science, and whose picture adorns the Operations Theatre in the Trivandrum Medical college, where he studied. Sushruta is regarded as "the father of surgery" on account of the detailed accounts of surgery to be found in his work, 'Sushruta Samhita' 600 BCE, that addresses all aspects of general medicine, and is considered a foundational text of Ayurveda.
Then he moves on to Aryabhata, the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, and whose major work, Aryabhatiya in 500 CE, a compendium of mathematics and astronomy has survived to modern times.
Most of his speeches are long but you will be fully engrossed in them.
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