Claims to ancient scientific advances

During a recent visit to Dubai, more than once I discovered evangelists in malls handing out Islamic literature, telling of the religion in simple formats and laying claim to 'scientific' truths propagated by the Quran, which were later picked up by scientists as western knowledge.  i read and wondered at the claims,that sounded rather familiar, if amateurishly argued.     Back home, I found an old book in my personal library, much better argued "Islam and Science" from which those truths had been picked, presumably.

More recently, came recent additions to the compulsory reading list being offered to school students in Gujarat from the father of book pulping, Dina Nath Batra.   In his Tejomay Bharat, he argues that the patent on stem cell therapy for regeneration of body parts was first taken by a Dr. Balkrishna Ganpat Matapurkar!

The good doctor was, it appears, actually inspired by none other than the Mahabharata in which Kunti delivered a baby as bright as the sun: Surya's son, Karan.  That incident, the story goes, inspired  the unable-to-concieve Gandhari to undergo some sort of a hysterectomy that revealed a large mass of flesh in her womb. 

Rishi Vyas was called in.  He immersed the womb in a cold tank with some medicinal additives, after which the mass was divided into a hundred small segments that were immersed in tanks full of ghee for two years.  Those segments evolved into the 100 Kauravas.  Which of the two immersions could have caused their 'evil' nature, one wonders.

The same book also lays claims to TV with the 'divya drishti of Sanjaya giving his king, the blind Drithrashtra a running commentary of the battleground and a vedic motor car aka chariot called ' anashva wrath'  that ran without horse power.   

And after Amar Chitra Katha, we'd grown up assuming that Ravan's  kidnap getaway vehicle that was the   original airplane!!