Photo by Tesa Robbins / Pixabay
A lot of unsolicited advice tends to get thrown around when someone says they’re diabetic, with people advocating everything from skipping meals to sticking to a paleo diet. But one Indian minister just took the sugar-free cake. Ganesh Singh, a member of parliament and a representative from the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) believes that to control not just diabetes but also cholesterol levels, all one has to do is speak in Sanskrit.Speaking at a debate in the Lok Sabha on the Sanskrit University Bill that aims to turn three deemed universities into central colleges, Singh cited various US-based research studies and said that speaking Sanskrit “boosts the nervous system and keeps diabetes and cholesterol at bay.”He then went on to discuss other great benefits of this ancient language and claimed that the best way to deal with your computer always crashing is to recode it in Sanskrit, saying “according to a [study] by US space research organisation NASA, if computer programming is done in Sanskrit, it will be flawless.”However, as The Wire points out, both the claims are as pseudoscientific as Gwyneth Paltrow saying she drinks alkaline water with a squeeze of lemon. His words were probably a misinterpreted take on a 2010 article in response to a 1985 study by Rick Briggs, who worked at the NASA Ames Research Center in California that spoke about how computers using natural languages over artificial ones could function better. Even his claims on how Sanskrit can improve the nervous system has no scientific backbone and is more speculation by pro-Sanskrit websites. But despite all the tall claims this minister made, we wouldn’t be too surprised if the reason he so vociferously supports Sanskrit is because he believes this old-timey language gave us the word cow, which was yet another thing he claimed in the same debate.Follow Shamani Joshi on Instagram.
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