India offers maths dunces ancient shortcut

New Delhi:

After yoga and curry, India’s next gift to the world could be the secret to lightning quick mental arithmetic, according to its Hindu nationalist government.

Vedic mathematics, a set of supposedly ancient techniques said to help even the most numerically challenged to conquer difficult sums, is surging in popularity as ministers claim they could hold the key to better education.

From next month, three Indian universities will offer courses in the techniques, while home learners can watch a digital television channel devoted to the subject.

Several thousand teachers have been recruited for private college courses.

Its supporters believe Vedic maths could become a major export. Narendra Modi, the nationalist prime minister has attempted to claim the foundations of swathes of knowledge for India.

It is argued that algebra, trigonometry, Pythagoras’s theorem, the concept of zero and the decimal system all originated in India. Perhaps less credibly, Modi has claimed its ancient thinkers conceived of powered flight thousands of years before the Wright Brothers.

It was a reference to a disputed “Veda”, or ancient writing, held by some to describe air travel between Indian cities and to other planets. He has also claimed that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god, was evidence of early Indian knowledge of plastic surgery.

Vedic maths is a series of shortcuts for complicated calculations, based on 16 verses discovered in the early 20th century.

“I want it to go worldwide. Students in Singapore, United Kingdom, the United States are very interested because it’s so easy mathematics without tears,” said Dina Nath Batra, a Hindu nationalist educationist. One speeds multiplying large numbers by breaking them down to their common bases: To multiply 48 by 52, the numbers are broken into (50-2) and (50+2) and the square of the smaller number (4) is subtracted from the square of the larger (2,500) to reach the answer of 2,496.

Similarly, division is simplified by multiplying the denominator into a base 10 number: 44/25 = 176/100 = 1.76. The government’s promotion of “Vedic” knowledge has prompted fears that education and science are being tainted with religion.

Shashi Tharoor, the external affairs minister in the previous Congress-led government and a former United Nations under-secretary general, said both sides had done India a disservice. He ridiculed Modi’s claim about plastic surgery, but criticised modernists for challenging more probable findings.

He supported the assertion that Pythagoras’s theorem was discovered in India and said Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had also been “beaten to their famous ‘discoveries’ by an unknown and unsung Indian centuries earlier”.