When did civilization begin?

World's first nude sculpture? 

If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic representation of a woman - a carved ivory statue of a naked female, dating from 35,000 years ago. 

The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking, including complicated language. [link]

As you know, every time Hindu leaders say anything, the seculars go after it like a pack of wolves and tear it down. The seculars go particularly crazy when things are written down.

Murli Manohar Joshi wrote the preamble to the BJP election manifesto. There is something about Joshiji that throws seculars into a hissy fit.  Among other things he was criticized for trying to take away the independence of autonomous educational institutions. Years later, his successor in the UPA Government were making similar moves. India's "liberals" continued writing articles criticizing the moves by - Murli Manohar Joshi.

In any case, the Hindu published a scathing critique of the above mentioned preamble, written by unnamed "eminent historians".

Since then many rebuttals and rebuttal to rebuttals have followed and some of these can be found by searching "India was shining".

We have no problem with the article. Well, maybe except one:

India is not the most ancient civilisation. Civilisation is generally defined as having city cultures and that would make Egypt, Mesopotamia and China older.

Says who? Also, "generally' isn't a particularly good argument. Either there is an objective criteria to define the start of civilization, or there isn't. You can not dispute one generality with another. In any case, where exactly is this rule defined? Could be some obscure guideline "eminent historians" follow but google definitions don't even throw up the word "city" once. 

If civilization is indeed city based, can we say 60% Indians are uncivilized? Then of course we run into the bigger problem of defining a city. Can we say major Maharashtra towns which get less than 8 hours of electricity and lack drainage are cities? Can we say cities must have wide and safe roads? The state of Maharashtra saw 12,000 deaths in road accidents in 2008. 

Is India shining? You could argue India is not shining right now, although secular people may not agree. We could say, a civilization must shine. If "eminent historians" can pull a rule out of their arses, so can we. Yes we can! 

As you can see, defining civilization in this manner opens up numerous issues. So, let's define civilization when pornography began. By this definition, clearly civilization began in Germany, 35,000 years ago. So, Murli Manohar Joshi is perhaps wrong but so are "eminent historians". Civilization did not begin in some Muslim or Communist country as they would like to believe.

Of course we are just kidding.  The opinion space used to be a monopoly of "intellectuals" and as we all know monopoly isn't a good thing. We believe civilization began when blogging was invented. See, how easy it is?