1. The cow is the favorite animal of the Supreme Personality og Godhead,Sri Krishna.
COW MILK:purest of liquid food!
(From THE AYURVEDIC COOKBOOK by Amadea Morningstar with Urmila Desai)
Dairy is a builder, not a cleanser. Dairy is used as a prelude to some Ayurvedic cleansing. It gives grounding, mass, sweetness, and usually coolness to meals. For these reasons, it is excellent for children, teenagers, pregnant and nursing mothers, those seeking calm and grounding, and convalescents. It is superb for Vata, miserable for Kapha (with a few key exceptions) and at times quite beneficial for Pitta. It offers calories, calcium, protein, and some vitamins. It builds bones and teeth, and in Vata strengthens the heart and nervous system. In Kapha it can do the opposite for the heart, adding congestion where it is not needed. Its cool sweetness is good for tonifying Pitta, if the appropriate dairy products are used.
As Robert Svoboda points out in his excellent book Prakruti, Your Ayurvedic Constitution, dairy has gotten a bad name in health circles more through its methods of preparation and mode of consumption than through its innate qualities. In the West, it is usually served cold, unspiced, homogenized, with other foods, and in excess. Its high-fat content, heaviness and coldness does not lend it to these uses. Served in this way, it can increase one's risk of heart disease, cancer or obesity. Dairy needs to be used skillfully and not in excess.
Cow's milk was highly regarded by the Ayurvedic sages, being lighter and easier to digest than most dairy. It invigorates and works well for both Vata and Pitta, so long as they are not allergic to it. Unfortunately, cow's milk was introduced extremely early to Western babies of the post-war period, for widespread sensitivities to it as a food now. If it agrees with you (i.e. does not cause diarrhea, gas, congestion, or other discomforts) it is an excellent and balancing food, when properly prepared.
Preparation is the key. There has been a lot of controversy over raw versus pasteurized homogenized milk in the last few decades. In Ayurveda, raw milk is recommended whenever possible, and milk is always boiled before serving. This high heat effectively kills bacteria in raw milk. It may also denature the proteins of pasteurized milk further, causing their breakdown into shorter amino acid chains which are then easier to digest. In general, boiling makes it safer and easier to digest; this is especially true when it is raw. The boiling process also warms a usually cold product as will the addition of warming spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and black pepper. A bit of honey added after heating will also balance the qualities of the milk, warming and drying it.
Pasteurization has made the consumption of mass-produced dairy safer in terms of eliminating the chance of bacterial infections for large groups of people. But its lower heating point (15 seconds at 161 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 minutes at 145 degrees Fahrenheit) does not make the dairy more digestible nor does it eliminate the risk of potential viral contamination. The incomplete heating of pasteurization seems to cause the partial breakdown of proteins into tangled coils. These disorganized tangles are difficult for digestive enzymes to hold on and break down. For some people, this raw dairy does not. The homogenization process is another controversial one. It apparently splits the fats down into small enough globules that some pass into the blood stream whole, initiating a complex process which may lead to a greater tendency to create atherosclerotic clots. Whether such a tendency actually exists is still being hotly debated in medical and health circles. In any case, the cow's products extolled by the ancients is not the same as that sold in most markets today.
Cow Protection
Means Good Ecological & Economic Sense
As is only to be expected of people with Western mindset, a national daily's correspondent has slammed the report and its recommendations in satirical terms. The tenor of the report, however, did not surprise me at all, since such westernised minds suffer from an inveterate habit of condemning all things associated with India, Yoga or Ayurveda, till there is an approval from the West. Ignorance is the mother of their arrogance and it leaves its imprint on the issue of cow protection as well. They distort it either to make it appear as a contentious Hindu-Muslim issue, which it is not, or treat it solely as a matter of Hindu sentiments.
Even Islamic scholars aver that Islam gives no compulsive directive for killing of cow either for religious or mundane purposes. The British shrewdly foisted this issue. They were beefeaters and had no compunctions about killing cows to meet their taste. To their pleasant surprise, they found they could co-opt the Muslims into that category and widen the latter's gulf with the Hindus. The first War of Independence in 1857 erupted as a sepoy mutiny, when an Indian section of the British army refused to teeth cartridges supposedly made from cow/pork fat. Its extreme manifestation was a Brahmin soldier Mangal Pandey, who shot dead Sergeant Wheeler, thus beginning the uprising prematurely.
Bahadur Shah 'Zafar', after regaining Delhi in 1857 for a brief interlude, made the killing of cow a capital offence. Bahadur Shah was not the first Mughal king to make such a proclamation. Babur may have been an ardent Ghazi of Islam, but he, in his letter dated 935 Hijri, advocated his son Humayun to stop cow slaughter in India. As recorded in his famous firman of 1586, Akbar too completely forbade cow slaughter throughout his empire. Then Emperor Jehangir promulgated an order that on Sundays, when Akbar was born, and Thursdays, when Jehangir ascended to the throne, no animal should be sacrificed. Even bigoted Aurangzeb always refrained from making cow-sacrifice during Bakr-Id. We are also aware how in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's kingdom the only crime that had capital punishment was cow slaughter.
Religious and cultural sentiments associated with cow are too well known to bear repetition. But its economic and ecological aspects elude these second-hand Western-minders. In an agrarian country like India, bovine population was considered an asset and an index of prosperity. While cows yielded milk, oxen tilled in the fields or drew carts. India's voice has been one of peaceful co-existence with flora, fauna and rest of humankind. There was an inclination towards complete vegetarianism as reflected in Jainism and Buddhism. Since these philosophies put their faith in transmigration of soul, they desisted from animal slaughter since an animal was also a Buddha in the making. And cow was a mother-animal by every conceivable standard for them.
Serene by temperament, herbivorous by diet, the very appearance of a white cow evoked a sense of piety. Apart from milk, the excretion of cows too was never allowed to go waste. Cow dung, also known for its anti-septic value, is still used as fuel in its dried form. It is used in compost manure and even in the production of electricity through eco-friendly gobar-gas.
The Article 48 of the Constitution says: "The State shall endeavor or organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle." In the 1950s, the Jana Sangh voiced the demand for cow protection as per Article 48 and Mahatma Gandhi's declaration: "Cow protection is more important than even Swaraj." A 1958 decision of 5-member bench of the Supreme Court upheld Article 48 as fully legitimate. One of the members who happened to be from Muslim community called for making Article 48 mandatory since it was still liable to misuse.
Agricultural is still the mainstay of India's economy - cow breeding and cow preservation are integral to it. 75 per cent of Indians live in villages and derive the greatest benefits from cows and bullocks. Despite the compulsions of modernism, tractors are not suitable for Indian land holdings unlike in the US and the UK. In US the land available to each person is around 14 acre; in India it is around 0.70 acre. A tractor consumes diesel, creates pollution, doesn't eat grass nor produces dung for manure. So for Indian conditions ploughing is still ideal. Even Albert Einstein, in a letter to Sir CV Raman, wrote: "Tell the people of India, that if they want to survive and show the world path to survive, then they should forget about tractor and preserve their ancient tradition of ploughing."
While India gets trapped in the fad of non-vegetarianism, there is move towards vegetarianism in the West. There is a widespread belief that beef has high protein content and cannot be supplanted. A clinical dietician's chart will show that beef, with 22 per cent protein, ranks far below vegetable products like soybean (43), groundnut (31), pulses (24). Moreover, excess intake of protein is not good, as it only contributes to obesity, a bane of modern civilisation. To procure 1 kg of beef (or for that matter flesh) it takes 7 kg of crops and 7,000 kg of water. This contributes to water shortage in regions where beef is prevalent.
Long back, scientist James Watson Scott had noted that if food shortages were to be banished from populous countries, the food habits of the people should be altered to vegetarianism, which is fast catching up in Europe. Thus protection of cow makes good economic and ecological sense.
Courtesy: The Pioneer, August 15, 2002links:
http://hkrl.com
http://mothercow.org
http://iscowp.com
http://varnasrama.org [self-sufficient farms]
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.-Thomas Edison
