NEW YORK CITY, NY (TIP): Virendra Pandit has published his second book” Return of the Infidel” which was launched in New York on September 18. The gathering included, besides others, Dr. VK Raju who recently launched his book “Musings on Medicine, Myth, and History: India‘s Legacy”, Mentor on the Road Jagat Shah, Mrs. Shah, Harinder Singh Panaser, Sunil Hali, publisher of Indian Express, Prof. Indrajit S Saluja, editor-publisher of The Indian Panorama.

About “Return of the Infidel”

The book deals with the question of rise, decline, fall and revivification of nations and civilizations, which are organic entities like us and our institutions. The author has raked up some interesting questions and essayed to answer them.

*How and why Christianity and Islam are retreating across the world?

*How and why did Gandhi push Pakistan out of India?

*Why is Jinnah Father of the Indian subcontinent?

*And, how have Japan, India and China, in that order, revived like phoenix in the last two centuries?

In author’s own words,” What does a business do to survive when it turns stagnant? It retires debt, sheds flab, invites technological up-gradation, undergoes financial reconstruction and tries to regain its market share. Or, what do we do when our vehicle breaks down midway? We call in the serviceman to repair the dysfunctional automobile and help us resume our journey.

“A similar pattern is observable in the rise, decline, fall and revivification of nations and civilizations, which too are organic entities like us and our institutions. They also follow a similar incremental organic evolutionary process through natural selection and mutation to survive, shed excess baggage of the past, and bounce back as the fittest. There is a difference though: while uncompetitive and ageing humans die, their societies mostly survive through regeneration by inducting disruptive catalysts for mutation.

“How and why do nations, and civilizations, rise and fall with such regularity and clock-wise precision? The answer: when societies and nations turn dysfunctional due to stagnation, they allure alien catalysts to revive themselves.

“Return of the Infidel is about how ancient cultures and civilizations like India, China and Japan did so: Christianity and Islam, the contemporary disruptive catalysts, came to revivify these menopausing societies. Since India, due to its proximity to these catalysts from West Asia (and Europe), had to struggle the hardest until 1947, the book explains this saga in greater detail; but the story of China and Japan, and that of many other breaking-out nations in Asia, Africa and South America, is similar and waiting to be told.

“On the other hand, most Christian nations, after the Crusades, shed surplus population, outgrew Christianity, and embraced Renaissance and modernity. Muslim countries, too, are following the same path: Islamic terrorism is their struggle to remain relevant, eliminate surplus male population within and usher in their own Renaissance.

“The ancient countries used Christianity and Islam only as catalysts to revive their contemporary civilizations, and slowly made these overstaying guests retreat during what we call decolonization. Since our heroes, like our gods, are crystallization of our societies’ collective consciousness and aspirations, these Asian nations incrementally conceived leaders like Gandhi, Mao and Tojo who led their countries to push out the erstwhile catalysts-turned-colonizers. Proselytizing and evangelizing faiths like Christianity and Islam viewed these non-Abrahamic people as ‘Infidels’—and they are Returning now! This return to global reckoning began with Japan in 1905, and is ongoing now with China; interestingly, Japan was the force-multiplier to the bigger and real players, India and China!

“This is the biggest power-shift in the organic world of Homo sapiens in the last 2,000 years!”

About Virendra Pandit

Virendra Pandit is a professional journalist since 1983. He holds a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree and a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Economics from the University of Indore. He has contributed articles on diverse subjects to newspapers, magazines and online publications. Since 2006, he has been working with The Hindu Group of Newspapers as a business journalist.

He is a passionate student of biology and the other sciences, philosophy and psychology, religions and technology, history and culture, linguistics and music, international politics and diplomacy, besides mathematics and cosmogony. His first book, The Biology of History: Ascent of Women, published on Amazon and then by Partridge-Penguin, was welcomed with rave reviews.

He lives in Ahmedabad, India, with his wife, Kalpana.