srican

The Master turns 78 today

2009-06-10T21:16:00.006+05:30

It has been more than 16 or 17 years, but I still clearly remember the first concert I heard of my idol Sri M.S. Gopalakrishnan. It wasn't live -- it was, in fact, a recording of an AIR National Programme of Music. It took only one song - the very first one, the nATakuriJji varnam -- and I was a fan. And remain one to this day. The songs that he played in that concert (they are etched in my memory: rAma bhakti in zuddha baGgALa, zObhillu saptaswara in jaganmOhini, E tAvunarA in kalyANi, a sindhubhairavi bhajana) all remain my personal favourites.

I can go on and on about him, but I am in the middle of a busy work week. So here are some links instead:

The thread on rasikas.org discussing the Master.
MSG concert recordings from sangeethamshare.org.
MSG concert recordings from sangeethapriya.org.

Marathi is a South Indian language

2009-03-22T20:40:00.006+05:30

The classification of Indian languages into Dravidian and Indo-European is well known. I would like to propose a new classification based on pronunciation -- South and North Indian.

1. Pronunciation of the vowels 'ai' and 'au'
If the vowels rhyme with "why" and "cow" respectively, the language is South Indian. If they are pronounced like "way" and "cause" respectively, the language is North Indian.

2. Pronunciation of the conjunct consonant 'jJa'
If it is pronounced as 'gya', the language is North Indian.

3. Pronunciation of the aspirate 'pha'
If the consonant is pronounced as F, the language is North Indian.

4. Extent of eliding the vowel 'a'
This criterion is more of degree than black-and-white. The extent of elision is close to 100% in North Indian languages.

In the case of Marathi, it meets all the criteria except the third. Observe how a Marathi speaker pronounces the words vaidya, gaurava, jJAna. Also note the non-elision of the vowel 'a' in the names Ranade, Thackeray and Fadake, and in the Varakari chant 'viTThala, viTThala.'

By the same token, Sanskrit is a South Indian language too.

Naming the NRI progeny

2009-03-07T22:46:00.005+05:30

Indian names are tough to pronounce correctly. Even by other Indians. Countless are the people to the north of the Vindhyas who bravely tried to make it through "Venkataramanan" or "Ananthapadmanabhan" or "Kodhandapani" but got lost in between. (Also, if the question "How do you say 'Parithi Ilamvazhuthi'?" is not already a part of the IIM or IAS interviews, it should definitely be.) And everyday in Tamilnadu, "Geet Sethi", "Hrithik Roshan" and "Vajpayee" are brutally dismembered in public sight.

So, it is needless to mention the extent Indian names are mauled abroad.

Considering the huge exodus of Indians (mainly to the US) in the last decade and their need to label their offspring, this knotty problem deserves to be examined in some seriousness. What kind of nomenclature can the proud NRI parent bestow on the child such that the name, when it comes out the American mouth, is recognisable? Or to ask the question differently, how does the American manage to tear to shreds this seemingly unmispronouncable name? Is there a method to his madness?

Given the nature of the English alphabet, it is impossible to guarantee that any particular name, however simple, will be perfectly pronounced. But reducing the possibility of mispronunciation will in itself be a laudable goal.

Stress

Purushothaman and Thripurasundari, San Jose, CA, are blessed with a beautiful daughter. They decide to name her Uma. Just three letters, what could go wrong? It's even the name of a Hollywood actress. Alas, the name gets mangled to Oo-muh. Subramanian, professor at a reputable Texas university, scarred by the experience of being addressed as "Submarine-man", decides to give his son a very short name - Siva. Unfortunately, it becomes See-vuh.

In English pronunciation, all words have at least one syllable that will be stressed. Catalysis. Technology. Algebra. So if the name has all short syllables, such as Ravi, Guru or Siva, it will surely be mispronounced, since some syllable will be elongated due to stress ("Raavi", "Gooru"). And with feminine names, if they end in A, you need some syllable other than the last to be long. This is because, in most English words, the last syllable is not elongated -- especially if it ends in A. (Contrary to the common misconception in our country, the stress in the word "India" is on the first syllable, not the last. Same with "China".) So names such as Uma, Sarika or Lathika will nearly always go wrong. But we can take advantage of this fact with Sanskrit masculine names -- Rama (rAma) will work well, but not the feminine Rama (ramA). Partha should be fine, too.

Even if the name does have a long syllable, the spelling must clearly indicate it. For English words, the native speakers have an idea of which syllable to stress. But for foreign names, they are not quite aware. For long I (I), use EE. For long U (U), use OO. Soorya rather than Surya. Praveen instead of Pravin. Sreenath instead of Srinath. (Since I spell my name "Srikanth", an American colleague pronounces it "srik-ANth".)

AB and AJ

If an NRI is addressed as AB, what is his name likely to be?

Atal Behari
Amitabh Bachchan
Aravamudhan Balakrishnan
None of the above

The right answer is, of course, 4. AB is how "Abhi" will be pronounced. And AJ is how "Ajay" will be.

As in "abiotic", "asymmetric" or "asymptotic", the A-prefix will be pronounced as E, not a (as we do in Indian languages). So Arun, Ashok, Amar, Akash, Aditya all suffer from this disadvantage.

Tom/Thomas

There are two main conventions in India for romanising the consonant "ta." In the south, it is "tha" with an H. In the north, there is no H. While the latter will be correctly pronounced by the Spanish or French, the former is handled better by the native English-speaker. Note the difference in pronunciation between tin and thin, tree and three. I feel that the southern convention will work better in English-speaking countries. Karthik, Shanthi, Samith, etc.

However, for the consonant "da", the southern convention (with H) works no better than the northern one. (Gandhi is always Gan-dee.) So, Adithya is better than Aditya, but Adhithya is not more useful.

English-like

Certain names that look like English names work really well. Smitha is one. ("Smith" with an A.) Laxman is a good choice too.

Beware

Remember how in the early days of Tendulkar's career, his name was pronounced by English/Australian commentators as "Sa-shin"? This was probably because the spelling is similar to the word "sachet", pronounced "sa-shey" because of its French origin. This is why Indian names of the pattern *chit, such as Archit or Sanchit, can go wrong. (Ar-shit, San-shit) If the surname is Dikshit, better get it changed to Deexit(h) or Dixit(h).

Thoughtfulness

2008-08-11T05:56:00.001+05:30

From Sanjay Subramaniam's blog:

In my personal experience I have given several non-mic concerts. The most recent being one in Europe. The best part was that they provided mics with monitor speakers just for feedback, whilst the audience listened to the true sound as they would like to call it.

Tamil 'sha': Unicode to the rescue

2008-08-03T21:04:00.003+05:30

In the previous post, I had argued for including the Grantha letter 'sha' in Tamil. I was very happy to find out that Unicode 4.1.0 has already done so. Its code-point is 0x0BB6.

It looks like this version of Unicode was released in March 2005. This means that Tamil fonts created before, such as the default one in Windows XP, will not have this character. If you are interested, you can download the "Lohit" tamil font, which supports the new code-point. It should work on Windows and Linux. (Not sure about Mac.)

As I feared, there were some anti-Sanskrit folks who fought against this character. From a Unicode mailing-list thread on this subject:

Sanskrit is always seen a wanton intrusion [sic] to destroy all Indic languages and cause confusion. Tamil has been defending itself for hundreds of years.... Unicode is not the entity that should decide the demise of the ancient and sophisticated Tamil, like the demise of all other Indic languages.... 0BB6 must be deprecated. 0BB6 was encoded illegally by Unicode.

I am pleasantly surprised that, inspite of this, 0BB6 made it through.

Right now in translipi, I use ச to transliterate 'sha' into Tamil. This is fine for the cases where it is accompanied by a vowel. However, when it appears as a pure consonant or together with other consonants, ச is conventionally pronounced 'cha' in Tamil. This is not very satisfactory; the grantha 'sha' letter fits the bill perfectly here. However, since not many fonts support it yet, translipi will go along with ச for 'sha' for some more time.

One more character for Tamil

2008-07-27T21:10:00.006+05:30

Most Indian scripts, as we know, are derived from Brahmi. This is true of the Tamil script also, but in its case, it somehow seems as if one person sat down and customised the alphabet to suit the Dravidian language, before making it public:

There are no characters for aspirates.
A single character is used for both voiced and unvoiced sounds. E.g., the character க represents the guttural sounds 'ka' and 'ga' (and also 'ha'). The character ச is used for the sounds 'ca', 'ja' and 'za' (and sometimes 'Sa').

To represent certain sounds from other languages unequivocally, it borrowed a few characters from Grantha, the script used for Sanskrit in Tamilnadu. ஜ for ja, ஷ for Sa, ஸ for sa, ஹ for ha. These additions mostly sufficed, even for Arabic/Persian loan-words and Muslim names.

But not anymore. A large fraction of the current generation of Tamil-speakers bear names that are Hindi-like. Venkatesh (veGkaTez) where the traditional version would have been Venkatesan. Shankar as opposed to the traditional Sankaran. Satish or Akash, which were never prevalent in the previous generations. And there is no Tamil character which can unambiguously represent the za sound.

As of now, we make do using ஷ (Sa) which is not the same sound at all. I feel time is ripe for Tamil to make space for one more character from Grantha () to represent za. (In fact, this character is already present in Tamil in the symbol for zrI.)

However, given the anti-Sanskrit leanings of Tamil scholars, I am not sure if this will happen.

Sri Santhanam

2008-07-26T21:31:00.001+05:30

From today's Hindu:

On one occasion, while introducing Maharajapuram Santhanam to the audience at a felicitation function at the Music Academy, [Semmangudi] said: “He is my guru’s son. When he was a little boy, I would toss him up in the air and play with him, but now [sizing him up with his eyes], I can’t quite manage that.” [Link]

A related observation from the Music Season of 1990:

Still the person who attracts most crowds is Maharajapuram Santhanam and the present theory in Madras is that this attraction is purely gravitational. [Ramesh Mahadevan]

It's been long

2008-04-27T21:40:00.005+05:30

In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It's called Karoshi. I don't want that to happen to anybody in my department.

The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.
— Pointy Haired Boss, in a Dilbert cartoon

Things were (and still are) tough at the workplace for quite a few months. Many times, it is the Dilbert cartoon I have quoted above that has helped me retain sanity. This is the main cause of my long silence.

Till I can post next, here is a mp3 version of a classic shellac recording of M. Balamuralikrishna with my idol M. S. Gopalakrishnan on the violin, for your listening pleasure. Any further words are redundant.
- - -

I am also pleased to inform you that sahityam.net is coming along well, with both the content and the traffic increasingly slowly but steadily. It has received some good words and has also attracted a few contributors. The bulk of the content is due to the sterling efforts of Sri V. Govindan. (An example: Nada sudha)

On Kannada

2007-11-04T01:45:00.000+05:30

Yes, yet another post on Kannada. But this time, it's on the raga -- not the language.

Kannada is a vakra janya of Sankarabharanam. The ArOha-avarOha: SGMDNṠ ṠNṠDPMGMRS

The avarOhana indicates that we can descend to D only from NṠ. Therefore, ṘṠD is invalid. It should be ṘṠNṠD. Of course, the same applies when we have to descend to R — we have to pass through GM first.

Here is a transition diagram of the notes. (Click on the diagram for a bigger version.)

(The notes in green are the rAga-chAyA swaras.) This diagram immediately reveals the important cycles of this raga. GMG, MDPM and ṠNṠ. This is an advantage of this representation. The cycles may not be readily apparent from the mere mention of the aroha-avaroha. This can be helpful for improvisation. (E.g., MDPM-GMDNṠDPM-GMRS)

As we saw in the avaroha, there are two 2-note cycles present - MGM & ṠNṠ. In addition, the raga permits three more 2-note cycles, which are however not "compulsory" (it is not mandatory to traverse these cycles): SRS, MPM & PDP. Indeed, this raga is wickedly vakra:

I have used dotted transitions to indicate that they are "non-compulsory" and can only form a 2-note cycle. That is, they cannot be used for forming a longer non-cyclic path. For example, the sequence MPDNṠ is invalid. But MPMDPDNS is legal. It is difficult to indicate such features using just the aroha-avaroha.

Some Kannada pieces:

bhajarE bhaja mAnasa by TR Mahalingam [MP3]
inta kaNTE kAvalenA by Subhashini Parthasarathy [MP3]

Kannada for the North Indian (Part II): Nada to Kannada

2007-10-21T21:13:00.000+05:30

We now present the Spoken Kannada Bootstrap post. This takes you from a non-Kannada speaking person (a Can't-nadiga) to a Kannadiga in a single post. In this, we take advantage of the liberal definition of Kannada in the cities. We will discuss here the minimal disguise needed to pass off as a native speaker.

Wildcard 1: mADi

mADi is the respectful imperative "do" (kIjiyE). Words of any language, when combined with mADi, become Kannada. Scenarios:

You are on a bus and wish to get down at a signal; but the door is closed. How do you ask, in Kannada, to open the door? Ans: "Door open mADi."
You are a Hindustani-speaking owner of an FM channel. What Kannada slogan do you devise that urges your audience to enjoy themselves with your channel? Ans: "Mast majaa mADi."
You are in an autorickshaw and notice your boss a little distance in front of you. How do you harness your indepth knowledge of Kannada in order to avoid him? Ans: Say to the driver, "U-turn mADi!"

You can Kannadise your phrases a little further by throwing in the word swalpa ("a little") as in, "swalpa adjust mADi," or "swalpa A/C reduce mADi."

Wildcard 2: hOgi

hOgi is the respectful imperative "go" (jAyiyE). This is the magic word without which you should not hire an autorickshaw.

"Right hOgi."
"Left hOgi."
"Straight hOgi."

I just realised that, of the languages I can speak, I don't know the native word for "left" or "right" (or even if know the words, am not sure which means "left" and which "right") in a single one.

Wildcard 3: koDi

koDi (the vowel is a short O) is the respectful imperative "give" (dIjiyE). Useful for shopping.

"Dairy milk chocolate koDi."
"[Your favourite movie] DVD koDi."
"Nair, singal cup tea koDi."

You can substantially enhance the Kannada quotient of the koDi-sentences if you know the Kannada numbers. (Click here for a guide.)

"eraDu kilo apple koDi."

If you know the numbers, you can even eliminate koDi sometimes.

"Shivaji Nagar - mUru ticket." (Three tickets to Shivaji Nagar.)

Interrogatives

In Kannada, all questions that elicit a boolean response end in the vowel -A. This fact can be exploited as in the following cases:

To ask "Is a day-pass allowed on this bus?" -- Bus pass allow-a?
To ask "Does this bus go to Majestic?" -- Majestic-a?
To ask if lunch/dinner is available at a hotel -- Meals ready-a?

Of course, to understand the responses to your question, you need to know the Kannada for "yes" (haudu) and "no" (illa). And you must now be able to guess what the friendly Udupi fast-food person means when he asks you "Idli sambar-a?"

The A-suffix is also used in framing multiple-choice questions, as below:

To ask if someone is coming by bus or auto -- "Bus-a, auto-a?"
To find out the mode of payment -- "Cheque-a, cash-a?"

Okay-a?

Yehudi chala sukhama, Paganini sannidhi seva sukhama

2007-10-14T00:05:00.000+05:30

I have read about the Western classical violin maestros: Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh and others. Today I was absolutely thrilled when I found their videos on YouTube.

Yehudi Menuhin playing Paganini's Perpetual Motion. It simply takes your breath away.

More Menuhin delights.

Jascha Heifetz playing the Paganini Caprice No. 24.

More Heifetz videos.

I always thought of the violin virtuosi as thin folks with long and lean fingers. With Menuhin and Heifetz, I was proved right. However, when I found David Oistrakh, I realised chubby multi-chinned people could be maestros too.

More videos of the Ranatunga of the violin world.

Other maestros:

* * * *

A couple of days back, I came across the show Italian: The Language That Sings on NPR, which said:

Even when it isn't sung, the Italian language sounds like music...

This programme reminded me immediately of the position of Telugu in Carnatic music. Telugu is also considered a musical language and has been hailed as "the Italian of the East." The poet Subramanya Bharathi famously called it sundara teluGgu.

The musicality of the two languages has been attributed to:

... the fact that most words end in a vowel. Not only does this make it a very suitable language for opera, it also means that once you are familiar with its rhythms, it is a comparatively easy language to pronounce. [Link]

On coming to Bangalore, I observed that Kannada words end in vowels too. Sample:

nArAyaNA ninNna nAmada smaraNeya sArAmRtavenNna nAligege barali [mp3]

Doesn't that sound as sweet? Does it not bleed when pricked?

Probably, their vowel-ending does not fully explain their status as musical languages. On Italian, the NPR programme explains:

So many of these musical forms—sonata, cantata, aria—started in Italy," Hoffman says.
"Plus, Italian musicians were in positions of prestige all over Europe, so it became the lingua franca."

Possibly similar reasons exist for Telugu too?

Introducing Sahityam.net

2007-08-09T00:22:00.000+05:30

As the frequency of posts would indicate, the last six months was a tight period at work. This had forced me to shelve (among other things) a particular pet project of mine. During a lean stretch, I was able to work on translipi, the embedded-text transliteration tool. (See the sidebar to try it out.) Though worthy of an independent existence, translipi was originally conceived as a component of this project. Finally, it is now ready enough for release: Sahityam.net (Beta).

Targetted at Carnatic Music enthusiasts, students and professionals, Sahityam.net is a wiki for all things concerned with Carnatic lyrics, usually called sAhityam. Its goal is to facilitate accurate pronunciation and understanding of the lyrics as well as to serve as platform for everybody to collaborate in creating such a repository.

While the software is ready to use, there isn't enough content and documentation yet. This can be built up over time together with everyone interested. I invite your participation in the wiki. Anybody can edit a page, but creating new content requires registration (which is a simple process).

So, please do have a look and let me know any comments for improvement.

Kannada for the North Indian (Part I)

2007-07-14T00:38:00.009+05:30

A reader Sohan Mahanto submitted the following comment at my post Language Tidbits:

I wish you could help new Bangaloreans like me on how to pickup the local language (Kannada). Some basic practical examples like talking to autodrivers, busconductors, maids, the dukaanwalah etc. Most of my colleagues are North Indians or non-locals and are all in the same boat. As for the locals, they all know Hindi. So [there is] no chance for people like us to learn Kannada.

I was myself planning to put up a Kannada tutorial sometime. Sohan's comment spurred me on to actually get down to the task.

Disclaimer: Kannada is not my mother tongue. (Fortunately, that turns out to be an advantage since I can then suggest ways to learn the language as a non-native.) And I am no scholar either. So if you try the "Kannada" learnt by supposedly following my tips on your maid-servant and get slapped on the cheek, you have my sympathies; but I assume no legal responsibility.

I plan to do this tutorial in a series of posts; and these are targetted primarily at the folks from the northern states. But fellow peninsular Indians may also find something of value.

So here we go.
- - - - -

Kannada is a part of the Dravidian family of languages. North Indian languages, as we all know, belong to a separate clan, the Indo-European. Now, this might give an impression that Kannada is very different from the North Indian languages and that learning it might be a daunting uphill task. This is not true: I would like to point out that it took (in 1816) the scholar Alexander Duncan Campbell 30 whole pages of his grammar text to demonstrate that South Indian languages are a different family vis-a-vis the North Indian languages. If it took so much effort to distinguish the two families, there must indeed be a lot of similarities between them. So even if the task of learning Kannada is not easy, it may not require a Himalayan effort. Perhaps just a Vindhyan one.

While the Kannada language may belong to a different family-tree, the Kannada script is descended from the same ancestor as are all the other Indian scripts — Brahmi. And this is where we will begin our study from. I will compare the Kannada script with Devanagari to highlight the similarities, but the same can be done with any other northern script too.

The Kannada Script

The Kannada varNamAlA is represented in the same format as the Devanagari one. First the vowels a to au, together with the anuswAra and the visarga. Next come the consonants falling into different rows - beginning with ka, ca, Ta, ta, pa, ya, za and terminating in ha.

The extra letters (not present in the northern scripts) are:

the short vowel e (pronounced like the E in "get")
the short vowel o (pronounced like the O in "poetry")
the retroflex consonant La (equivalent of the Marathi ळ)

A large number of Kannada characters bear such a close resemblance to their Devanagari counterparts that I believe that the script can be learnt in a week. Only a little amount of imagination is needed to discern the similarities.

Let's consider, for instance, the Kannada character ka (ಕ). First, take the Devanagari ka and remove its "helmet." Next, rotate it by 90 degrees anticlockwise.
And lo behold, the Kannada ka!
Character kha is as easy. Take the Devanagari kha, remove its inner circle and its helmet too. Next, circle up the bends.

And here it is:

Some more examples: Ga.

cha:

Ta

Na

na

Va:

You get the idea now. I leave the other characters as an exercise. (Link: The complete alphabet.) As I said before, all that is needed is a little imagination.

Using other mnemonics:
ma:

ha:

(1) In Devanagari, a number of letters are formed out of the following shape:
... such as:
Similarly in Kannada, the following template:
... gives rise to:
(2) In Devanagari, some letters are written the same way, except for the fact that in one, the "head" touches the helmet, and in the other, it does not. For example, in the letter म (ma), the head touches the helmet. But in the letter भ (bha), it does not. Otherwise, they both look alike. Another example is the pair, घ (gha) and ध (dha).

Similar cases exist in the Kannada script too. The letters na (ನ) and sa (ಸ) are written alike except that the latter's head does not touch the helmet. So also, the letters va (ವ) and pa (ಪ). In the non-touching cases, note the small circle in Devanagari and the dot in Kannada.

(3) When the letters get together to form words in Kannada, their helmets do not merge into a common roof (as it happens in Devanagari). The helmet of each letter retains its independence. That is:

व + न = वन (The helmets merge.)

But,

ವ + ನ = ವನ (The helmets do not merge.)

(4) A very important note on pronunciation. In Indian scripts, every letter has an implicit "a" sound. क is "Ka," not "K." But in North Indian languages, the letters sometimes lose this vowel depending on their position in the word. E.g., in the word सोमवार, pronounced somvaar, the letters म and र lose the implicit "a" vowel.*

This does not happen in Kannada (or any other South Indian language, for that matter). In the example above, the correct pronunciation in Kannada would be so-muh-vaa-ruh.

For a lot of North Indians, this tendency to clip off the implicit A vowel is a difficult habit to unlearn. But practice, practice. Every time you catch yourself saying Kor-mang-laa, go to your company pantry and punish yourself by consuming a cup of caffeine. And then say aloud a hundred times, Ko-ruh-mang-uh-luh.

As another example, consider the following word:

ವನ

It is correctly pronounced va-nuh. Not van. The word means, as you may have guessed already, forest.

Exercise: What's written here?
ಜಯನಗರ

Vowel Marks (mAtrAs)

The Kannada vowel diacritical marks. These are quite simple too. There isn't much for me to say here.

Conjunct Consonants

(1) In Devanagari, when two consonants combine, it is the first consonant that is modified. The second remains unaffected. For example,

ध् + व = ध्व

In Kannada, the opposite is true. The first is unaffected:

ಧ್ + ವ = ಧ್ವ

The second consonant is written as a subscript to the first; but otherwise there is no change in its form.

(2) Besides becoming a subscript, some consonants have a totally different form when participating as the second. These are listed here. Some examples:

ದೊಮ್ಮಲೂರು (dommalUru or Domlur)
ಬನ್ನೇರುಘಟ್ಟ (bannErughaTTa or Bannerghatta)

In their modified forms, these consonants resemble their Devanagari counterparts much more than in their simple forms.

(3) As in Hindi, the anuswāra is used as a substitute for nasal consonants. E.g.,

ಇಂದಿರಾ ನಗರ (iMdirA nagara)
ಬನಶಂಕರಿ**(banazaMkari)

- - - - -
Other parts of this series:

Part 2: Nada to Kannada: Basic introduction to Spoken Kannada.

* Bengali and Oriya are probably exceptions. jana gaNa mana, Bengali names like Aurobindo, Subroto and Oriya names like Satchidananda Mohanty, etc. suggest a Sanskrit-like pronunciation.
** In Dravidian languages, words do not end in a long "I" vowel.

The Anuswara (or) How usability trumps grammar

2007-03-18T23:04:00.001+05:30

The anuswAra is a curious beast. Though it is grouped with the vowels in the alphabet, it is not one. Nor is it a consonant. It is non-aligned, taking no sides in a bipolar world.

In our epics we have read of celestial beings that can assume any form according to their whim — now a hideous monstor, now a bewitching damsel and now a piece of rock. The anuswAra has turned into such a creature. Sometimes it seems like Ga (gaMgA), sometimes Ja (paMcAyat). Elsewhere it sounds like Na (pAMDava), or na (zAMti) or ma (paraMparA).

The anuswAra has now ended up as a wildcard placeholder for any nasal consonant. Correctly, in all the examples above, the respective nasal consonant should have been used. (gaGgA, paJcAyat, pANDava, zAnti, paramparA). In fact, in Tamil, where the concept of anuswAra is absent, this is how these words are written*.

So then, what exactly is an anuswAra and where should it be used? Being neither a vowel nor a consonant, the anuswAra does not have an independent existence. It is a product of sandhi. (This implies that it cannot be used at the end of a sentence or a stand-alone word.) Let's explore this with some more examples.

sam +
gIta = saGgIta
cAra = saJcAra
darbha = sandarbha
pradAya = sampradAya

That is, when m is followed by any consonant from the first four rows of the varNamAlA, it (the trailing m) is converted into a nasal of the same type as that consonant.

It is only when combining with the remaining consonants (semi-vowels, sibilants, etc.) that the trailing m becomes an anuswAra.

sam +
yOga = saMyOga
rakSaNa = saMrakSaNa
vatsara = saMvatsara
sAra = saMsAra
zaya = saMzaya
hAra = saMhAra

How does the anuswAra sound like? In other words, is it Simha, Sinha or Singha? None of the above. The pronunciation is as follows:

The anuswAra is an after-sound, a nasal sound following a vowel. It is sounded through the nose only and should be independent of mouth position. [Wikner (PDF)]

The anuswAra is one of the simplest symbols that can be written (or read) — it is represented in most Indian scripts as either a dot or a circle. Since it is also a nasal sound, it has become a comfortable substitute for all the nasal consonants: It is easier on the hand (and the eye) and one doesn't have to remember which of the four (Ga, Ja, na, Na) to use in a particular context.

Usability wins everytime.

- - -
* Therefore, this post may not make sense when viewed with Tamil transliteration.

PS: I owed Manjunath a post on anuswAra for a long time. (See the discussions at these posts: One, Two, Three.) Finally, here it is.

Introducing translipi

2007-02-26T21:14:00.000+05:30

English is inadequate to correctly represent Indian-language words. This problem is especially painful for me, since this blog often deals with subjects whose vocabulary abounds in Indic terms. "Mayamalavagaula." "Kadanakutuhalam." "Nadanamakriya." I rest my case.

I could write these terms in (say) Tamil, but this would put non-Tamil readers at a loss. The script each of us is most comfortable in, is different.

This problem is now solved.

translipi (see the side-bar, if you have not noticed it already) transliterates these terms into the language you are most familiar with. For now, there is dEvanAgari, kannaDa, malayALam, tamizh and telugu. For folks like me who are most comfortable in English, there is also the Roman script with enough diacritical marks stuffed in to specify (almost) every Indic character uniquely.

Do let me know your thoughts!

* * * * *

A doubt: Is the pronunciation of the Tamil characters ந and ன identical (as I have always believed)? If so, is there any grammatical rule which specifies when to use one and when the other? For instance, ன is never used at the beginning of a word and ந never at the end.
- - - - -

Update [3 Mar]: Once Ambarish (see the comments) pointed out how ந and ன are different, it seemed so obvious and logical that I wished to kick myself for not figuring it out before. So we use:

ந at the beginning of words (நலம்) and when immediately followed by a dental consonant (தந்தை).
ன elsewhere (தினம்).

But on further cogitation, I am a bit confused. Now, by the rules above, how do we explain குடிநீர் (which is unlike தன்னீர் — or is it தண்ணீர்)? Help!

Audava-Audava Raga Sangraha

2007-02-18T02:41:00.000+05:30

The mELa-karttA classification system has served the sampUrNa rAgas well. However, the janya rAgas are still a wilderness; they deserve a Periodic Table of their own.

I have put up a scheme for the Audava-Audava (pentatonic) ragas at http://srikanthsubram.googlepages.com/audava.

Update [19 Feb]: A question. Can anyone tell me the basis on which a (janya) raga's parent is decided? E.g., why is the janaka-rAga of nAgasvarAvaLi considered harikAmbhOji and not, say, cakravAkam or zaGkarAbharaNam?

Intonation in Carnatic concerts

2006-12-17T21:31:00.000+05:30

The term Intonation in music means, put simply, producing notes that are in tune. It is what we would call zruti zuddham. (Or, in other words, being a "suswaraM Ramjhi.")

The most important factor for producing a note in tune is possessing an accurate aural perception of that note. Once this is present, intonation is developed by practising to match the note we produce with this standard. (In Carnatic music, of course, we do not have an "absolute note" -- they are all relative to the chosen reference SaDja.) Thus, for perfect intonation, a keen sense of hearing is absolutely essential.

When performing in large halls, musicians hear their own instruments only very faintly. And there isn't enough echo either.* So, intonation becomes a big challenge. Now, an accompanying Carnatic artiste has a tougher problem -- he needs to be able to hear the main performer as well. Furthermore, an instrument that is initially tuned perfectly to the taMbUrA, may go out of tune during the course of the concert; and the musician needs to be able to detect when this happens and correct it based on the taMbUrA that is droning some distace away on the platform. (And, to repeat, "I can't hear no nothing!")

Usually, to enable the performers to hear themselves, a speaker system (called a monitor or "fold-back") that is directed towards the platform is provided. However, I have never seen one in a Carnatic concert. In addition, few concert venues are actually auditoria built with necessary acoustics for a music performance. Many are just open spaces with asbestos roofing (Ayodhya Mandapam, YGP Auditorium, etc.).

Given all these hurdles, I am amazed how our musicians perform with perfect intonation. They are practically performing deaf.

- - -
* An extreme case would be a recording studio, whose walls are built to expressly prevent any echoes. This is why (as we have seen in movies scenes featuring a studio recording) the artistes are supplied with headphones.

Update (20 Dec): I have found a related Wikipedia entry -- Foldback. Excerpts:

The provision of foldback (or monitor) speakers is essential to performers, because without a foldback system, the sound they would hear from front of house would be the reverberated reflections from the rear wall of the venue. The naturally-reflected sound is delayed and distorted.
... On stages with poor or absent foldback mixes, vocalists may end up singing off-tune or out of time with the band.

Update 2 (26 January): A post from an excellent blog (by Ramnarayan) I stumbed upon says:

Young vocalist Savita Narasimhan clarifies that the musician on the stage rarely asks for the volume to be turned up for the listeners. He or she is actually asking for help with the feedback (or fallback) so essential for the performer on stage. “Often the vocalist cannot hear the percussionist or violinist and vice versa. The musician’s request to increase the volume of the monitor is misunderstood and the technician increases the volume for the audience.”

Decongesting Usman Road

2006-12-01T09:57:00.000+05:30

In Madras, the Usman Road/Panagal Park area (in T. Nagar) is a major bottleneck for vehicular traffic. The volume of traffic is itself high, but the place also has a number of popular shopping centres to add to the problem. During festive seasons, the place can rival the Kumbha Mela or the Mahamakham for the sheer mass of humanity that descends here to shop. And as we know, in India, festive seasons are spread all round the year. The situation has turned even worse since Saravana Stores opened a new branch, its second in T. Nagar, on Usman Road this year.

Saravana Stores is a huge shopping centre that sells everything -- clothing, footwear, home appliances, kitchen utensils, jewellery, sweets, etc. etc. etc. All at a low price. The (lower?) middle-class loves this shop. People flock to T. Nagar from all round the city (and from suburban areas too) to shop at Saravana Stores.

Decongesting this part of T. Nagar has been a tough question so far. The roads are too narrow to contruct any flyovers. Not that the Corporation (or is it the CMDA?) is interested in solving this issue, for it has permitted construction of huge shops here with no provision for parking.

But it looks like there is still some hope left: Walmart is coming to India, in partnership with Bharti Enterprises.

Some Indian blogs have been looking at Walmart as another grocery supermarket (like FoodWorld), but it's much more than just that. In my opinion, shops like Saravana Stores are a better approximation. If Walmart sets up shop in Madras in a well-connected place (maybe close to another local rail station) Saravana Stores is up for some competition. This is likely to draw away some percentage of the shoppers from T. Nagar.

Of course, "Walmart" is not the right name to have in Tamilnadu (Vaal = tail in Tamil). An alternative that can't go wrong is "Bhar(a)ti Murugan Stores" -- both Bharati and Murugan being immensely popular figures in the state. They can even have a logo with a laughing Sam Walton in it and call him Sami Annachi.

"Yaha to bilakula theeka hai"

2006-11-24T22:59:00.000+05:30

Spoken languages tend to clip off syllables for ease of pronunciation. Hindi comes to mind immediately for its propensity to drop the lagging A's. somvaar (Monday), kalpnaa (imagination), din (day). But, this can be seen in other languages too, including the south Indian ones. In Tamil, eppadi (how) becomes ep'di and saayangaalam (evening), saay'ngaalam. No Kannadiga calls his capital Bengalooru, it's just Beng'looru. And in that city, any autodriver will gladly take you to Basavan'gudi.

However, the literary (or even plain written) language does not permit this latitude. The Tamil signboard on Dor'saami Road in Madras will only say Duraisaami Saalai. In Bangalore, the common man's Dom'looru is still, on paper, Dommalooru. The integrity of the syllables is maintained in the formal language.

Except in Hindi.

The Hindi newsreader will elide the lagging A's as eagerly as the rickshaw-wallah. The student at a college canteen and the scholar declaiming on a podium would both say, "Yeh to bilkul theek hei." Why is this so?

In my opinion, it's due to the influence of the Persian- and Arabic-speakers who migrated into northern India. And it's not so much due to their language as due to their script.

The Semitic scripts all share an interesting property -- they have no vowels. Their words are represented using only consonants. Such a script is called an Abjad. The word "Hindustan" (e.g.) would be written HNDSTN.

Contrast this with the Indian scripts: We do have vowels. In addition, every consonant character possesses an implicit vowel A. क is not K, but Ka.

Now let's take the word Mehel (as in Taj Mehel) and transcribe it in an Indian script, but with an Abjad spirit:

Mehel --> MHL --> Ma-Ha-La (महल)

Or take Neher (canal):

Neher --> NHR --> Na-Ha-Ra (नहर)

Or, Matlab (meaning; not the software):

Matlab --> MTLB --> Ma-Ta-La-Ba (मतलब)

Such a practice might have started with Arabic/Persian words, and eventually caught on with all words in Hindi.

Because of the Abjad influence, the letters, when at the end of a word, lost their implicit A vowel. And elsewhere, they picked up new sounds such as the short E vowel - as in Mehel or Neher. This vowel sound was not present originally in any north Indian language.

But for other vowel sounds already available in Indian scripts (such as i, e, u) the Persian/Arabic words must have been written in the traditional Indian way - Bi-La-Ku-La (बिलकुल).

History lovers' Paradise!

2006-09-06T12:42:00.000+05:30

Google News Archive Search.

Moksha!

On Celestial Pachyderms

2006-08-08T21:03:00.000+05:30

Today, I was listening to a Ragam-Tanam-Pallavi by a yesteryear vidwan. The pallavi was in Tamil and went:

ten-pazhani vaDivElanE, devayAnai maNavALanE*

The pallavi refers to the deity Muruga/Karttikeya. He is considered a bachelor in the north** but is twice-married down south. His second wife is called dEvayAni in Sanskrit and dEvAnai in Tamil. Gods and goddesses in Tamilnadu have two names - one each in Sanskrit and Tamil.

In this pallavi, the vidwan wishes to refer to the deity in relation to his wife, i.e., "O Husband of such-and-such-a-person." But he confuses the two names, dEvayAni and dEvAnai, of the goddess and ends up with the hybrid dEvayAnai, which means "Divine Elephant" (yAnai = elephant, in Tamil)!

- - - -
* தென்பழனி வடிவேலனே, தேவயானை மணவாளனே
** Whether it's north of the Vindhyas or that of Tirutthani, I am not sure.

Language tidbits

2006-08-04T21:58:00.000+05:30

A large number of Bangaloreans can speak Tamil. But there is a simple way to distinguish the native speaker of Tamil from a Kannadiga who learnt it: Where the former will use app'DiyA ("is that so?"), the latter will say AmAvA. As in:

"nALaikki Madras pOrEn." ("I am going to Madras tomorrow.")
"app'DiyA / AmAvA?" ("Is that so?")

This is because the Kannada equivalent of app'DiyA is audA. And audu ("yes") translates to AmA in spoken Tamil.

* * *

In my opinion, a Tamil-speaker can learn Kannada easier by comparing Kannada expressions to their equivalents in formal (rather than spoken) Tamil. This is because Tamil words are often shortened when used colloquially and the similarities between the two languages may not be readily apparent.

For example, vanduviTTu ("after coming") becomes vandu'TTu in spoken Tamil, but the Kannada bandbiTTu is closer to the first form. So also, vandukoNDu (becomes vandu'NDu) & bandkoNDu; vanduviDu (becomes vandu'Du) & bandbiDu.

* * *

Did you know that in Sanskrit, the letter व which now has the sound V, was originally W?

Of the consonants in the Sanskrit alphabet, य, र, ल and व (which make up the penultimate row of the Varnamala) are considered to be "semi-vowels," as each of them is formed when two vowels combine. य (ya) arises out of the sandhi of the vowels इ (i) and अ (a). That is,

इ + अ -> य
And,
ऋ + अ -> र
ऌ + अ -> ल
Finally,
उ + अ -> व

When the vowels उ (u) and अ (a) combine to form व, as you can see, the resultant sound is better represented by W. I am curious how it evolved into a V. I find this surprising since the W sound is after all easier on the mouth than V.

And the preponderance of W's in the names of Sri Lankan cricket players (Wickremasinghe, Samaraweera) makes me wonder if, in Sinhalese, the letter has retained the original sound.

* * *

Hindi has a number of dialects - Khadiboli, Braj-bhasha, Awadhi, etc. But few may know of the existence of a southern dialect of Hindi. It's called Carnatic Hindi, the language as sung by Carnatic musicians!

The main languages of Carnatic music are, of course, Telugu, Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada. A share of the pie was given to Hindi by the royal composer Swati Tirunal, who created 36 songs in the language. One of them begins:

रामचन्द्र प्रभो, तुम बिन
जाने कौन खबर ले मेरी!

A Carnatic musician would pronounce it thus:

rAmachandra prabhO, tuma bina
jAnE kauna khabara le mErI!

... without eliding the 'a' sounds as a Hindi-speaker would do (tum bin jAne etc.)!

And I approve of it. Such a pronunciation gels with that of the south Indian languages (including Sanskrit) that a Carnatic aficianado is attuned to.

Meera bhajans, when pronounced in Carnatic Hindi, appear an integral part of the Carnatic repository:

morE to giridhara gopAla
dUsarO na koyI...

... while a playback of MS Subbulakshmi's Hanuman Chalisa

SrI guru charaNa sarOja raja
nija mana mukura sudhAri

... runs seamlessly from that of any south Indian household regular such as the Siva Panchakshara Stotram.

- - - -

PS: I apologise to all readers for the long silence.

Good Manners and Language

2006-02-24T00:07:00.000+05:30

Germans can be grumpy, unpleasant people—and it's not because of post-Nazi guilt or a diet filled with bratwurst, says one American researcher. It's because of their vowels. Hope College psychology professor David Myers says saying a vowel with an umlaut forces a speaker to turn down his mouth in a frown, and may induce the sadness associated with the facial expression. Myers added that the English sounds of "e" and "ah" naturally create smile-like expressions and may induce happiness. [Link]

Quite a few buses in Bangalore do not have a conductor. In such buses, of the two entrypoints, the one closest to the driver would only be open. As we board the bus, the driver himself would issue tickets. Soon a crowd would build up at the front, due to their inexplicable fascination to hang out near the doors. And the driver would be walled in by a human fortress around him, rendering him unable to issue tickets to the new passengers. And he can't resume driving until the tickets are given out. Besides, he also has to deal with the honking massive traffic build-up behind the bus. In such an unenviable scenario, the driver would plead with the people around him repeatedly, "Ulagada hogi! Ulagada hogi!" (Please move inside! Please!)

I cannot imagine such a scene happening in Madras for two reasons:

1. No driver would have agreed to the additional work of issuing tickets. All proletariat would have united in a strike.
2. Let's assume the drivers (by some miracle, or threat of arrest by Amma) consented. Now, if the passengers suffocated him at his seat, he would eliminate the problem by a simple technique of hurling a volley of expletives at them.

What is the cause for the Kannadiga drivers' politeness?

A friend took an autorickshaw from his home for a long ride in Bangalore, at the end of which he realised he was... without his wallet. Had this occurred in Madras, the aatokaaran would have combined with others of his ilk to perform my friend's last rites -- after collecting everything of value on his person. All the Bangalorean, on the other hand, did was to offer to collect the amount from my friend's house the next day.

Now, here I must add that there are many autorickshawmen in Bangalore who are quite as skilled at fleecing us as the famed ones of Madras are. But they do so with that good grace that makes getting fleeced a much less unpleasant experience.

What makes the Kannada-speaking autodrivers more mannered?

While a student, if Mysore Vasudevacharya (the celebrated composer and musician) committed a mistake in his lessons, his guru would upbraid him severely but referring to him throughout with the honorific Acharyare. (Harken gentle sir, may I declare thee a blundering moron?)

Now consider this.

In (colloquial) Kannada:

	Singular		Respectful (Plural)
Go	hogu	2 syllables	hogi	2 syllables
Do:	madu	,,	madi	,,
See:	nodu	,,	nodri	,,
Put:	haku	,,	hakri	,,

Contrast this with (colloquial) Tamil:

	Singular		Respectful (Plural)
Do:	sei	1 syllable	seyyunga	3 syllables
See:	paru	2	parunga	3
Put:	podu	2	podunga	3

or Hindi:

	Singular		Respectful (Plural)
Go:	ja	1 syllable	ja'iye	3 syllables
Do:	kar	1	keejiye	3
See:	dekh	1	dekhiye	3

or even Telugu:

	Singular		Respectful (Plural)
Go:	vellu	2 syllables	vellandi	3 syllables
Do:	chei	2	cheyyandi	3
See:	choodu	2	choodandi	3

There it is, friends. Being polite and respectful is much easier on the mouth in Kannada. For every verb spoken, you are spared 1 syllable or more, compared to the other tongues. And in addition, employing the respectful plural takes the same effort needed for the casual singular: Same price, more value.

The Chief Architect of Kannada (let's call her Kannada Thayi, or KT for short), when she sat down after a hearty meal of bisi-bele-huliyanna to create the language, must have had respectfulness as one of her major design goals. And she achieved it by the simple (yet ingenious) method of making verb plurals user-friendly.

Therein lies another important lesson for all of you: If you seek to create a language that should escape degeneration with time, keep it easy on the mouth. Yes-sir, "easy on the mouth, easy on the mouth" - that's the cry. Or you will find that the resounding "Avarai azhaithukondu varungal" ("Please bring him along" - Tamil) would end up as the tepid "Adha itnu va" in the tongues of the hoi-polloi.

Blogger stumbles upon Indian grammatical law

2006-02-23T18:40:00.000+05:30

Today, blogger Amit Varma independently invents rules of euphonic combination, present as the laws of Sandhi in the Indian languages.

Ah, Bliss.

2006-02-06T17:56:00.000+05:30

My room-mate and I both are from Madras; so when we go to our respective homes, we travel together. But the last weekend, he stayed put in Bangalore while I went.

On meeting him on my return,

Me: It was Ratha Saptami yesterday.
Room-mate: What is Ratha Saptami?
Me: It means my mother makes sweets. I had Chakkara Pongal and Carrot Halwa. You?
Room-mate: @#$%& you.

A Delta of Fertile Minds - Thanjavur's Contribution to Music

2006-01-31T20:57:00.000+05:30

At different times in history, certain regions become centres of immense creative output: Madurai in the Sangam Age (Tamil literature and music), Vienna in the 17-18th centuries (Western classical music) and Bengal in the 19th century (literature, science, etc.).

Similarly, the Cauvery delta region of Thanjavur seems to have been the happening place in the 18-19th centuries, as far as Carnatic music is concerned.

Ruled successively by Vijayanagara (Nayaka) chiefs of Karnataka/Andhra and Maratha kings of Maharashtra, this Tamil area saw an immigration of Telugu-, Kannada- and Marathi-speaking people. Such diversity resulted in a glorious cross-pollination of culture, one of whose fruits is the Carnatic classical music.

A slew of composers emerged, creating works in different languages (Telugu, Tamil, Sanskrit and Marathi). The important names are Seshaiyengar, hailed as "mArgadarzi" or Pathbreaker; Uthukadu Venkata-kavi, whose Tamil and Sanskrit works include the famous alaippAyudE; the Tamil composers Arunachala-kavi, creator of the rAma nATakam and Gopalakrishna Bharati, whose magnum-opus is the nandanAr caritram. The pinnacle was reached with the Trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri, who are known too well for me to go into details.

These compositions were created in various formats. In addition to the well-known kRti, is the Natakam (opera), exemplified in the bhAgavata mELA form. It consists of plays in Telugu and Marathi which are performed by an all-male cast of Telugu speakers from Melattur village in Thanjavur.

Of all these works, the ones that deal with Krishna-bhakti are always... erotic! One such is the kRSNa lIlA taraGgiNi, composed by Narayana Teertha (who moved in from Andhra). And Tyagaraja, who was as orthodox as they came, created the zRGgAra-laden opera naukA caritram. Other “madhura-bhakti” formats are the padam and jAvaLi.

Besides the intense composing activity, important strides were made in musicology as well. Venkatamakhin wrote the caturdaNDI prakAzikA, that deals with the 72 melas. This was refined into the Mela-karta raga system as we know it today by his grandson Muddu Venkatamakhin. Some of the kings were scholars themselves: Tulaja wrote the treatise saGgIta sArAmRta.

Furthermore, the bhajana sampradAya took shape here around this time. The primary gurus of this tradition were Bodhendra Saraswati and Sridhara Venkatesa (popularly known as "ayyAvAL"), a local of Telugu ancestry. (The late Swami Haridas Giri was the most visible face of this sampradAya in recent times.) This system was made rich with contributions from the earlier Kannada as well as Marathi (abhang) bhajana movements.

The Marathi settlers (thanks to their rhythm-dominant abhaGgs) also helped develop the mridangam techniques. This is evident from the Carnatic terms, chapu (as in the tala "Khanda Chapu") which is probably from the Marathi "chhaap" छाप; and mora (rhythmic patterns) from "mohra" मोहरा. (In fact, their influence can be seen in other spheres too - the original name of Bharatanatyam "sadir" and the famous "sambar" come from Marathi.) One of the foremost mridangam exponents was a Thanjavur Marathi, Nanasama Rao (aka Narayanaswami Appa).

Thus evolved our music - in a cultural melting-pot that was Thanjavur.
- - - - -

Other recent blog-posts on Carnatic Music that are great:

Suraj's Crash Course in Identifying Ragas
Sunil's If Music be the Food of Love

Cry "Wolfgang!"

2006-01-25T18:12:00.000+05:30

The world celebrates the 250th birth anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the great Western Classical composer, this Friday (27th January). Thousands of people are gathering at Salzburg, Austria, his hometown.

On this occasion, an excellent set of concerts, tributes and other audio programmes are featured on the non-profit radio station NPR. Check them out!

[Link via Yossarian Lives. Pic: Wikipedia.]

More links on Music: http://del.icio.us/srikanths/music

Harmonium - Sarangi Wars, Redux.

2006-01-05T00:27:00.000+05:30

A while ago at a Hindustani concert by Padma Talwalkar, seeing the accompanying harmonium unable to keep up with the fluid voice of the singer made me wonder why this instrument was preferred to the sarangi or the violin. I expressed my thoughts in the article How the Harmonium Came on the Hindustani Stage.

I didn't know it when I first wrote this article, but the harmonium was banned in AIR concerts for 30 years from sometime in the 1940's. This is surprising. Though the instrument can't probably reproduce the high-speed taans or certain types of gamakas, it's got a rich continuous tone that only a very good violinist with impeccable bow control can match. This is a very desirable quality for an accompanying instrument. Banning the harmonium, I feel, was draconian.

In the late 1960's, the Sangeet Natak Akademi invited experts to a seminar to discuss this ban. Excerpts from the seminar proceedings were posted in the rec.music.indian.classical group and make a very interesting reading. V.H. Deshpande, an AIR artiste, while presenting his case for the harmonium, brought up the important topic of the role of an accompanist in a concert:

[W]hat is the role of an accompanying instrument? I submit it is to create a musical atmosphere, and inspire the artiste by bringing him into his best singing mood. Further, the accompanying instrument must keep the continuity of singing to heighten the musicality of the performance and make it more more entertaining and in effect more pleasing. This it is expected to do by following the main artiste closely with or without a little time lag and also at times being played independently in the interludes, generally calculated to excite and inspire the principal to do better than before. I dare say that the Harmonium by its powerful, constant and sustained notes not only abundantly satisfies all these requirements but satisfies them in a far greater degree than any of the stringed instruments...

It is said that Sarangi can reproduce the exact tonal nuances and meends and gamaks. This is alright only if the resonating strings allow it to remain in accurate intonation. But let me ask, whether exact reproduction is at all necessary for an accompanying instrument, whose role is only complementary?

A certain P. V. Subramaniam from Delhi makes an eloquent case for the harmonium as well:

It is not realised that as in the case of other aids to music the Harmonium has undergone great refinement. Today's version of the Harmonium is capable of providing a whole range of tonal excellence unavailable in other musical instruments... Present-day Harmoniums have three-reed-boards joined together with provision for air-release in a zig-zag fashion ensuring softness of tone and melody.

In the far South, before the days of cant and dilettantism, Perur Subramanya Dikshitar, the Harmonium Wizard, used to accompany the great classical vocalists... Dikshitar played on a highly sophisticated Harmonium. There are many gramaphone records testifying to his instrumental excellence while accompanying a maestro of the calibre of Palladam Sanjivi Rao. These records have also been broadcast over the Radio. The heavens have not fallen. They are in one piece.

This gentleman, P. V. Subramaniam, is none other than the much-feared Carnatic critic Subbudu!

Read the whole thing.

More on the Harmonium vs Sarangi debate:
In the For Sarangi team: Kishori Amonkar.
In the For Harmonium team: Rajan Parrikar.

Who doesn't love a good fight?

Our languishing music heritage

2005-12-23T22:36:00.000+05:30

India has an astonishing wealth of music. Besides the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions that we all have heard of, there are a number of lesser known ones such as:

Panns: The Tamil region since ancient times has had a well-developed music system, mentioned in the Sangam literature and extensively discussed in the 2nd century epic Silappadhikaram. The Tamil bhakti texts (circa 7th century AD) such as the Thirumurai and the Devaram were set to panns (ancient ragas). Unfortunately, large parts of this music was lost after Malik Kafur's raids in the south. Whatever remains has been assiduously preserved by a dwindling number of odhuvars, who traditionally sing these hymns in temples. The panns are believed to have had considerable influence on the development of the Carnatic ragas.

Abhang, the bhajans of the Marathi saints, Namadev, Jnaneshwar, Tukaram and others, who were bhaktas of Vitthala. To this day, their itinerant followers, called the varkari panthis, celebrate the names of the Lord in these songs of intense devotional fervour. The abhangs even spread to the Thanjavur region (which was ruled by Marathas) and were merged into the divya-nama tradition of Tamilnadu.

Vachanas: In the 12th century, a Shaiva movement was founded in Karnataka by Basaveshwara. A revolutionary, he fought caste, glorified manual labour and condemned ritualism. The ideas of Basava and his followers (cutting caste and gender) are expressed in Kannada poetry, called vachanas. The original melody of the vachanas are probably lost; they are now sung in the Hindustani style.

Such wonderful, but little known, music deserves a wide audience, but unfortunately there are few recordings widely available.

Recently I met a gentleman who has recorded such music, but is unable to find anybody willing to market them. He has produced the Thirumurai sung by an odhuvar in the original pann system, abhangs by varkaris as well as basava-vachanas. Marketing people expect a well-known name on the label for reasons of commercial viability, but the authentic sources of such music are unknown and poor persons languishing in remote villages or temples. The gentleman I met is very commited to such an undertaking; he has set up his own studio for this purpose; he also has a keen attention to detail evident even in the aesthetically created jackets for the CDs.

Do readers have any suggestions as to what could be done to market such productions? I was thinking along the lines of setting up an e-commerce site. Probably Yahoo! Store is an option to consider; does anyone have experience with such stuff? Or better ideas?

Update:

Suraj Kumar, a Carnatic enthusiast and guitarist who works at Amazon, suggested:

I talked to folks. Seems the Amazon Advantage Program will fit you right. BUT... are you trying to sell only to India? or Will this include global audience as well?

The good thing is the kind of systems that we have in place that would help you as a seller. Firstly, when you decide to sell via most online stores, the route is quite long. You as a publisher / producer will have to go to a distributor and the distributor would place your product on a lot of different places (amazon, barnesandnobles, etc.,.). But you end up paying up a lot of cuts. This would be advantageous if you expect a whole lot of audience purchasing your product (like you are selling iPods).

This is why the amazon Advantage program is beneficial for small sellers.

More suggestions from Shivku and Sivaram in the comments below.

Thanks a lot everybody!

Update 2: The details of the pann recordings: (These were produced by him for Kosmic Music, not for his own fledgling company.)

1. Pann muraiyil Thirumurai (3 volumes - audio cassettes)
2. Pann muraiyil Pasurangal (2 volumes - audio cassettes)
Both by Muthukandasami Desikar, the odhuvar at the famous (Rock Fort) Thayumanavar Temple, Trichy.

The panns covered are:
Nattapadai (Gambhira Natta), Sigamaram (Malavagowla), Thakkesi (Kambhoji), Kolligouvanam (Navaroz), Megharagakurinji (Neelambari), Pazhamthakkaragam (Arabhi), Vizhakurinji (Saurashtram), Thakkaragam (Kambhoji), Nattaragam (Panthuvarali), Sevvazhi (Yadukula kambhoji), Kausikam (Bhairavi) and many more. (I am too lazy to type all of them.)

These cassettes are also listed on the Kosmic Music site.

Panini couldn't write? - Sanskrit scholar answers

2005-12-22T17:13:00.000+05:30

"Was there no writing in Panini's (the famous Sanskrit grammarian's) time?" I had wondered sometime back, and if the phonological ordering of the Sanskrit letters was his contribution.

Sunil, the blogger at the wonderful Balancing Life, was extremely kind to take up these questions with his Sanskrit professor, Dr Richard Salomon, an expert on ancient scripts. Dr Salomon's responses reveal rather interesting facts. A lot of thanks to Sunil!

Read Dr Salomon's thoughts here.

Rain and Cricket in Madras

2005-12-07T23:43:00.000+05:30

The water scarcity of Madras is world-famous. The last time the city had a normal monsoon was when K. Veeramani organised that grand annadānam at the Triplicane Parthasarathy temple.

The people as well as their benign rulers in the government tried all they could, but the drought never really came to an end. Jayalalitha sent up airplanes to seed clouds; the pilots sighted the first cloud only after reaching Cherrapunji. After this incident, Amma stopped smiling. Karunanidhi set up rainwater harvesters to catch water from even light showers; however, the sun blazed away without any break. This is when, in protest against the sun, the Kalaignar took to wearing goggles.

The sign was clear - the gods were unhappy.

One day it really seemed like it would rain. The sky was grey; the sound of thunder was booming; lightning was falling all over the place. This was the result of the Varuna Japa conducted (like this one) at the Kapaleeswara Temple: Priests stood in waist-deep water (obtained from distant villages at a great expense) praying for so many days to propitiate God Varuna. R. K. Narayan got inspiration for his novel Guide from this ceremony.

Finally, there was... ah, no rain. The priests had got their vedic gods wrong. Varuna may indeed at one time have been the bringer of rain. But later, as this article tells us, his stock fell and he was supplanted by his rival Indra, who was now the True Rain God. The varuna japa was a gross miscalculation - it was akin to greasing the palms of the official at the Public Works Department, when you should have been bribing the one at the Central Public Works Department.

So, you may ask why is it that everytime a cricket test or one-day international is scheduled or staged at Chepauk it pours in torrents. What, haven't you heard the crowd at the Chidambaram Stadium chant "Ind-ra! Ind-ra!"?

Book times are here

2005-12-01T21:07:00.000+05:30

"Why buy that book when you can get it from the library?" my parents would say. In accordance with their advice (now, also approved by a Nobel laureate), the bulk of my reading came from my school and neighbourhood libraries. And guess what I found in my (software) organisation's library - The Penguin History of Early India!

Having started earning and all, I let myself more leeway these days on buying the stuff. My choice tends to be:

Nonfiction on subjects that interest me or
Fiction I don't tire of after a single read. The first read would come from a library of course!

And it's a good time for book-lovers in Bangalore. Just a couple of weeks before was the Bangalore Book Fair and now there is the Strand Book Sale. For the former, booksellers from different parts of the country came together at the Palace Grounds. I got a couple of Telugu books that I would not have normally found outside Andhra; the History of Tamil Literature from the Sahitya Akademi stall at a 50% discount; and a Sanskrit primer from Motilal Banarsidass.

As I was going around the place, I heard a recording of Purandaradasa compositions in the Tanjore Namasankirtana style, which immediately took my fancy. The sellers turned out to be Giri Traders of Madras.

The Strand Book Sale that I visited yesterday offers (the Sale is still on) considerable discounts, starting at 20% and going upto 80. I bought a P.G. Wodehouse (Uncle Fred) omnibus at 25% less. However I could not find the collection of Somerset Maugham's short stories that I was looking for, or anything much on Western classical music.

Still, if you are in Bangalore and love books, don't miss the Strand Sale!

Our metrosexual pantheon

2005-11-15T22:44:00.000+05:30

Ages ago, my friend Vijayanand asked me something for which I still don't have an answer:

Why do our gods look so feminine?

Is it Ravi Varma's legacy?

Our ancients couldn't write? (Updated)

2005-11-12T16:16:00.000+05:30

The traditional way in which Sanskrit letters are arranged in the varṇamālā has a phonological significance. A subset:

	Unvoiced		Voiced		Nasal
Guttural	k	kh	g	gh	ṅ
Palatal	c	ch	j	jh	ñ
Retroflex	ṭ	ṭh	ḍ	ḍh	ṇ
Dental	t	th	d	dh	n
Labial	p	ph	b	bh	m
		Aspirated		Aspirated

In an interesting post, Dr. Kerim Friedman says:

The sounds are listed in order of where in the mouth the sound is produced: gutturals (produced in the throat) first, and labials (produced by the lips) last, with a steady progression in between[1]. I am curious when this ordering became standard.
[via]

In response, I referred him to a Hindu report, where one Dr B. S. Ramakrishna attributes this scientific arrangement to Pāṇini, the famous Sanskrit grammarian.

However, Dr. Ramakrishna errs when he makes a reference to Devanagari:

[Pāṇini]'s well-researched arrangement of the alphabet of Devanagiri (sic) script was a unique effort.

The Devanagari script, used these days for Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi, came into existence pretty late - in the 13^thcentury A.D. There is no way the 5th century B.C. grammarian could have written in this script. Even the earliest known Indic scripts, Brāhmi and Kharoṣṭhī, are attested only from the 3^rd century B.C. So which script did Panini employ?

Or rather, could he write at all?

[Panini] anticipates much of the methodology of modern formal grammar: his grammar is generative and in some respects transformational. It cannot, however, be compared very directly with modern formal grammars, since its form is geared to the needs of oral transmission, and Pāṇini could not avail himself of the mathematical symbols and typographical conventions of the written page. The work was so brief that it could be recited from beginning to end in a couple of hours. [2]
[Emphasis mine.]

It is not known whether Pāṇini himself used writing for the composition of his work. Some people argue that a work of such complexity would have been impossible to compile without written notes, while others allow for the possibility that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads.' [Wikipedia]

We know that the oral transmission of texts was emphasised, but does this mean there was no written form of Sanskrit till the 3^rd century B.C.? I think it improbable.

So when Vināyaka broke off a part of his tusk to transcribe the Mahabhārata, to write in which script did he break it off?

* * *

Update: Dr Richard Salomon, via Sunil, provides the answers:

On the phonological ordering:
This is an interesting, but not simple question. The "ka-kha-ga-gha" order, or better, the "varna-samāmnāya," is hard to date precisely. Panini (who himself is hard to date) doesn't use it as such, but his own technically devised special ordering, the Siva-sūtras, is usually understood to presuppose it. It actually occurs as such only in relatively late technical texts such as Prātisākhyas. All of this suggests that the varna-samāmnāya ordering principle goes back well into the BC period, but no more specific or definite answer can be meaningfully given.

If there was writing in Panini's time:
The other question is whether Panini's system presupposes or requires writing at all. This has been quite controversial, but most scholars nowadays would say no; it can be, and probably is, a purely oral/mnemonic system. (Some European "armchair" scholars of earlier decades thought this was impossible, but direct acquaintance with Indian pedagogy and oral traditions have convinced later generations of western scholars that it is quite possible.)

This does not however mean that there was no writing in Panini's time; this question remains open, especially since we don't know exactly what his time was. Most reputable scholars nowadays tend to think about 5th or 4th centuries BC. Writing systems that might have been familiar at the time in his area (Saalatura, now in NWFP, Pakistan) include Greek, Aramaic, and Kharosthi. But since the earliest actual specimens of Kharosthi and Brahmi date only from the time of Asoka (3rd c. BC), it remains uncertain whether they had developed yet by the time of Panini. This is still quite controversial, but the tide of opinion nowadays is that Brahmi, at least, was invented quite late, i.e. in the Mauryan period. A better case can be made for an older date for Kharosthi (5 or 4th century BC), but there's no firm evidence.

These are questions I am very much interested in and have written/am writing about... You can also check my Indian Epigraphy book (esp. ch. 2) from 1998--but it's already out of date. Interesting developments are happening these days in the study of the history of writing/literacy in ancient India.

On writing and the Mahabharata's Vinayaka legend:
[T]he legend of Vinayaka is a late accretion. But then the date of the Mahabharata is--here we go again--a big problem. Most scholars would put its final form to a relatively late date, sometime in at least the early AD period.

[Slightly reformatted.]
- - - - - -

Toothsome links

2005-10-31T17:34:00.000+05:30

del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking site," used to maintain what bloggers would call a link-blog. I find it very useful to store and share interesting links I find during the course of my surfing at work and at home (in Madras).

You can view the links I have stored by clicking on "My Bookmarks" on the sidebar.

(I was directed to del.icio.us by my friend Gokul's post.)

- - - - -

Wish you all a wonderful Deepavali!

Bangalore Diary

2005-10-16T22:06:00.000+05:30

Some thoughts after a month in Bangalore:

With young people from all over the country converging here in large numbers, Bangalore resembles a university town. However, this may not be very evident during the weekdays when people are mostly in the workplace.

- - - - -

I have developed a strong liking for idli in these few days. Though I come from Tamilnadu, the home of the idli, it was far from a favourite. The reasons being:

When made in a pressure-cooker (as is usually done at home), idlis are a bit harder than they should be.
I usually had them with molagāi podi, which I realise now is not a great combination.

But these days if I am able to drag myself out of bed in the mornings, it is only due to my longing for the soft sambar-soaked idlis from the nearby Udupi "hotel."

- - - - -

What the name Karthik is in Tamilnadu, Manjunath is in Karnataka. If you hop onto a bus here and holler "Manjunath," you will find at least half the people responding.

- - - - -

The Bangalore traffic has already gained country-wide notoriety. These cartoons are popular email-forwards:(If the words are not clear: Politician - "We have found a permanent solution for the traffic on Hosur Road." Industry representatives - "Wow! Fly-overs? Six-lane Roads?" Politician - "Make the entire road a wi-fi zone, so that people can work from their company bus.")

[via]

Before I moved to my present accommodation (close to my workplace), I used to take two buses to work from my friend's flat. If I did not catch my first bus by 8am, I would take it only after 9:30 to avoid the peak-hour traffic. Thank God for flexible work-hours.

- - - - -

Talking about transportation, I seldom have had to wait at the bus stop for more than five minutes, owing to:

Private buses (there are quite a few).
Chauffer-driven private vehicles, operated on the sly.

Often when I return home late (after 11pm) when the buses are less frequent, it is the latter that would come to my rescue.

- - - - -

Kannada, it seems to me, is a combination of Tamil and Telugu. Take, for instance, the numbers:

	Kannada	Tamil	Telugu
3	mūru	mūnru	mūdu
4	nālku	nāngu	nālgu
5	aidu	aindu	aidu
6	āru	āru	āru
7	ēdu	ēzhu	ēdu

This resemblance is, of course, not surprising.

There are a couple of things, however, that one should remember to do while trying understand Kannada words:

Change H to P (a lot of times).
Change B to V (sometimes).

So when you hear the sentence "Hālu kudibittu hogi," you now know:

hālu -> pālu: milk (Telugu/Tamil)
kudi: to drink (Tamil)
bittu -> vittu: after (Tamil)
hōgi -> pōgi: to go (Tamil/Telugu)

"Go after drinking milk."

Though I know very little Kannada, I have so far not encountered any communication problems. Most autodrivers and shopkeepers also speak Tamil, Hindi and Telugu. How they manage to do this, is beyond me to understand.

- - - - -

If I have to mention one thing that I like the most about Bangalore: The climate. What more will a Chennai-ite ask for?

The Hexal System and the Mela-karta Ragas - Essay

2005-10-09T20:07:00.000+05:30

An old essay of mine, just uploaded:

While doing my bachelor's degree. I was introduced to the mathematical concept of Number Systems. When this is applied to Carnatic music, there emerges an interesting association between The Hexal System and the Mela-karta Ragas.

- - - - - - -

Previous posts on music: One, Two and Three.

Word Verification and its Usability

2005-10-04T21:46:00.000+05:30

Great post! By the way, I have a blog on california home loan mortgage refinance and related stuff that you may be interested in :-) Do visit it!
- A comment on one of my posts

Most blogs are being plagued by the nuisance of spam comments. Apart from giving one the pain of going and deleting them, they also mess up the whole comment section:

9 Comments:

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
By Anonymous, at 3:59 PM

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
By Mike, at 7:18 PM

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
By jon, at 11:45 PM

Actually [...].
That aside....looks like you're being spammed, and i'd recommend turning on word verification (from the template).
By Sunil Laxman, at 2:47 AM

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
By TS, at 11:04 AM

Hi Sunil
[...] Yes, I am getting spammed. Maybe I do the word verification thing but for now I just delete, delete, delete.
By 7:56 PM

[...]
By Charu, at 10:19 AM

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
By Admin, at 3:14 PM

Hi Charu
Yes, Indeed. [...]
By Michael Higgins, at 5:26 PM

Now, Blogger provides a mechanism to prevent these auto-posted comments: Word Verification. There is a price to be paid for this though: by the genuine commenter, having to fill in one more field. If the pain of doing so is too much, it is likely to dissuade him (or her) from commenting, or annoy him even if he does comment.

While the Blogger Word Verification is a good idea, I feel it has made it a little to bad for the commenters by giving a random sequence of letters (RSL) to type. Why:

People type on their keyboard in one of two ways:

1. Type by sight: Look at the keyboard while hitting the keys.
2. Touch-type.

If you belong to category 2, you can read the RSL and simultaneously type it. No issues. However, the general user is not a touch-typist. Which means, he has to read one letter of the RSL, lower gaze to type it... repeating the process for every letter. A pain in the neck -- literally.

There is a simple solution to this: Instead of the random sequence of letters, use a (random) word from the dictionary. One can read the word in one go and type the whole thing out. Alternatively, let the blog owner choose his word of choice, that can be used every time -- as in Sepia Mutiny. I know I need to type "mutiny" and don't even have to spend time reading it.

I had word verification on for a brief while, but no longer do. I just delete the spam. But some popular bloggers are flooded with too much spam to afford to do this.

Usability is an important consideration for any software or website. Wonder how Blogger/Google overlooked this aspect of it.

A new job

2005-09-15T09:39:00.000+05:30

I landed a job at a software organisation in Bangalore early this month. And till yesterday I had no machine or Internet access. Hope that explains my silence.

This being a new (and my first) job, there is a learning curve. And I need to hunt for a flat too. So blogging may be light for sometime.

Mouse or Rat?

2005-09-07T13:13:00.000+05:30

Strange things happen in this city of Bombay! One morning, I am on my way to the office... Suddenly a swirl of crows appear like a black dust devil over Flora Fountain... A massive rat comes scampering along the pavement. People run helter-skelter. The bus queue scatters. I see all this and decide it is safest in the middle of the road; traffic has been halted at the signals. The rat deprived of its human shield makes a dash across the road. Thr crows follow it like a swarm of bees. The rat turns to me for protection. It seeks shelter between my feet, then tries to clamber up my trousers. I yell and leap into the air like a dancing dervish. Rat falls on my foot, fat and clammy like a snake. I scream some more and run through speeding cars and buses back to the pavement.

"Arrey, what kind of Sardarji are you? You get scared of a mouse!" taunts a fellow back in line for his bus. The entire queue bursts into peals of laughter. I am very angry. I want to tell him it was not a mouse (chooha) but a rat. I scour my memory for the Hindustani word for rat. Hindi word for rat. Punjabi word for rat. There is not Indian word for a rat as distinct from a mouse. I resume my journey.

- Khushwant Singh (from the essay "Murdering English," India without Humbug)

On this auspicious occasion of Vinayaka Chaturthi, let us spend some time pondering over a pressing issue: Does Ganesha ride a mouse or a rat?

The best of us bloggers thinks it's a rat. As does the Mumbai corporation.

I am confused. In Tamilnadu, Ganesha has always had a moonjoor (Tamil for mouse) and not an eli (Tamil for rat) for his vahana.

Sadly, Sanskrit does not come to my rescue: mooshika can be translated mouse as well as rat.

This question has been left unresolved long enough. Let's settle it once and for all today.

The Bible Mahābhāshya

2005-09-05T22:58:00.000+05:30

Conservative Christians of the US believe that life is too complex to have "evolved" and so was created by a Superior Being. They are carrying out a campaign to propagate this theory, known as Creationism, by introducing it in Science textbooks. To this, there have been people crying hoarse in defence of Darwinism by employing elaborate logical arguments.

To these hoarse-cryers (HC's) I have to but quote Scott Adams, that Messiah of all cubicle-dwellers:

By definition, people with bad ideas cannot be swayed by logic. If they were logical, they wouldn't have bad ideas in the first place - unless the ideas were based on bad data. If... the "exhaustive research" option looks good for you [for thwarting an illogical idea], you have way too much time on your hands. Plus, it can only work if you're dealing with [one] who is logical and willing to admit error. (Source: The Dilbert Principle.)

Logic is the wrong weapon to fight the Creationists with. (And why do they think they are always correct? Because they are the right-wingers, that's why. Duh.)

I invite the HC's to abandon their Trinity (the God of Logic, His son Darwin and the Scientific Spirit) for some time and try out the practice we Indians have perfected to reconcile science with religion -- the art of interpretation.

Some examples:

Initially physicists thought light waves required a medium for propagation, and required Huygens' idea of an æther "gas" permeating all space. In accordance with this, the Sanskrit ākāśa, one of the pancabhūtas, used to be cleverly translated as "ether." Later, due to Einstein, the existence of æther was disproved. At this cynics would have thought we would be disconcerted, but (ha!) we responded appropriately.
The gunas - sattva (purity, goodness), tamas (stolidity, ignorance) and rajas (passion) - correspond to (guess, guess) the three atomic particles, the positively charged proton, the neutron and the negative electron, respectively.
According to the theory of evolution, life originated in water and later moved to land. To find evidence of this in Hinduism, we are asked merely to turn to the Daśāvatāra. Starting with the matsya (fish), proceeding to the amphibian kūrma (turtle), next the quadruped varāha (boar) and finally the biped human avatāras.

By a proper interpretation and translation, we can read any scientific theory in our scriptures. I am surprised nobody in America has tried this approach to counter the anti-science elements. "See, friend, it's all there in the Bible. QED."

Though my knowledge of the Christian texts is negligible, I shall try to illustrate the approach with some examples.

"The Earth was created by God [only] a few thousand years ago" rather than a few billion years as told by science: When the Bible says a thousand years, it means a thousand divine years, which may not equal the same number of human years. (Just as one Earth year is different from one Moon year.) Actually 1 divine year = 1000,000 human years.
In the garden of Eden, note the significant roles played in the apple-eating sequence by the apple and the snake. Which means the plant kingdom and the reptiles were there before humans came. Ergo, evolution. God may have planned out the process of natural selection and other details of evolution, though.

These are probably simplistic, but you get the idea.

The other way is to go back to the "original" Bible to resolve issues. The American right-wingers may be using some derivation of the first English translation (King James'?). Go back to the Hebrew or Aramaic texts. This would give us enormous flexibility, as these are ancient languages and the meaning of words may have morphed over time. Question the current interpretation of the words and argue that the correct ancient meaning actually bears out the scientific fact.

Sanskritists have been doing this all the time. Michael Witzel of Harvard University adopts this approach to counter right-wing historian David Frawley's proposition of a maritime rg-vedic culture. Witzel argues that samudra (translated as ocean by Frawley) is actually sam+udra, the confluence of rivers. That debunks the maritime theory for good.

In conclusion, all ye defenders of Science, look to us Hindus for help. We have perfected the very skill you require. Come to us for enlightenment.

Or better still, outsource the job.

Sunil's Bharateeya Blog Mela

2005-09-04T14:24:00.000+05:30

Do check out Sunil Laxman's well-presented collection of the best blog posts of the last week. Lots of great reading material.

With Masters of Melody

2005-08-28T16:52:00.000+05:30

'There was again a world of difference between my guru and Mahavaidyanatha Iyer in the care they took to preserve their voice. The latter went to extremes... [H]e was afraid that the tiny flame of the maṅgalārati would cause excessive heat in the body and a spoonful of teertha would bring on a cold! He stuck to a strict diet of rice and pepper rasam. He scrupulously avoided midday naps and practised brahmacharya.

'My guru was exactly the opposite, "Why on earth should one learn music of one has to starve like this?" he would argue. He ate... sumptuously without bothering whether the preparations were cooked in oil or ghee. He slept whenever he liked and as long as he chose to! He would go for his concert in the evening with absolute confidence and return victorious! He would ask with a smile, "Vasu! Who should dictate terms, the singer or his voice?"'

Carnatic music, like any other Indian tradition, suffers from a lack of reliable accounts of its composers and performers. And one of the greatest of Carnatic composers, Tyāgarāja's life is shrouded in legends. In such a situation, Nā kaṇḍa kalāvidaru, Mysore Vasudevacharya's collection of short bios of his contemporary musicians (set in early 20th century), is a wonderful surprise. I read its English translation, With Masters of Melody.

Himself a well-known performer and vāggēyakāra, Vasudevacharya's bios are filled with delightful anecdotes and peppered with a gentle humour. The quote given here at the beginning is his contrast of the rival musicians, Mahavaidyanatha Iyer and Patnam Subramanya Iyer (Vasudevacharya's guru and a famous composer). Also included are accounts of the great veena vidwāns from the Mysore region, Veena Seshanna, Subbanna and Padmanabhiah. Of violinist Tirukkodikaval Krishnaiyer, undoubtedly the Paganini of Carnatic music. Of 'Poochi' Srinivasa Iyengar (and his gargantuan appetite) and of 'Tiger' Varadachariar (and the tiny cap that he wouldn't take off his gigantic frame). And Bangalore Nagaratnamma, the lady who undertook the construction of Tyagaraja's samadhi.

His accounts paint a bygone era - when the gurukula system was still in vogue, where learning was more by listening and osmosis than direct teaching; when the artists depended on patronage of kings and zamindars for their survival; of royal performances and the attendant palace intrigues:

Kuppiah and Appaiah were brothers who [...] once went to Tanjore seeking royal patronage. But, it was not to be as easy as they had thought, for the jealous musicians of the court kept a vigilant watch over those who came from outside lest the King's grace should slip through their fingers.

It was also the age when the artistes had to go against their families' preference for vedic studies and disdain for the pursuit of music.

Reading this book, I was also reminded of Semmangudi Srinivasier's reminiscences, tinged with his characteristic wry humour. I wonder if they have been preserved for the future, as they well-deserve to be.

If you are a Carnatic music aficionado, Mysore Vasudevacharya's With Masters of Melody is something you should not miss!

On doubts and unselfconscious cultures

2005-08-19T11:21:00.000+05:30

My professor at CMU once pointed out how Indian students differ from Americans when asking a question during lecture: we express a "doubt." I had never noticed this difference in phrasing - We do not "question" a professor's point, but just wish to have a "doubt" clarified.

This observation came back to me when I recently read about Amartya Sen's latest book, The Argumentative Indian:

...As a high-school student he had asked his Sanskrit teacher whether it was permissible to say that Krishna [in the Bhagavad Gita] got away with an incomplete and unconvincing argument.

“My Sanskrit teacher told me that maybe you could say that, but you must say it with adequate respect,” Sen recalled.

* * *

On the flight home, I was reading Conceptual Blockbusting by James L. Adams. While discussing the factors crucial for generating good ideas, Adams says,

[The United States'] is a self-conscious culture. New religions, forms, social movements and styles in dress, talk, entertainment and living crop up
continually. Age and experience are venerated only if "relevant"... A very high value seems to be placed on innovation. Yet strangely enough, many individuals value tradition more than they do change. This is probably good... However, as far as good conceptualization is concerned, such an attitude has negative effects.

Unlike the Americans, we Indians carry a rather huge baggage in the form of a long history and hoary tradition. We have, what Adams calls, an "unselfconscious culture," where "traditional forms and ceremonies are perpetuated, and often taboos and legends work against change."

Our politicians are mostly fighting (alleged) historical wrongs. A large percent of our population is still hemmed in by archaic social laws. How much has such a culture actually cost us?

Things are changing now, thanks to various phenomena like the Internet and our students encountering new cultures while studying overseas. People are re-examining their baggage, trying to identify the rotten apples. A Good Thing.

This, however, we should hope to do (as was suggested to Amartya Sen) "with adequate respect."

Moved back to India

2005-08-18T11:05:00.000+05:30

My apologies for the long silence.

End-of-program evaluations kept me preoccupied. Once I put these behind, it took time to wind up stuff, shop, pack, etc. Not that I had absolutely no time for blogging (which would be a lie): but once I took a break, inertia kicked in. I needed to force myself to muster up the escape velocity to overcome my laziness.

Now that I am back home in Madras, I shall attempt to make amends.

Bloated prices for boating pictures?

2005-07-21T06:27:00.000+05:30

Last weekend, I went white-water rafting on the Youghiogheny river with six friends. It was exciting without being dangerous, and for the five hours I spent I had good fun. The company that runs this also had someone take photographs at certain rapids, which we could later purchase.

It was a rare experience for me, for there is hardly any water in the Indian rivers to permit rafting (unless one goes to the Himalaya), and I went to buy the photos as a souvenir and to send home. I asked the person at the counter the price. And was flabbergasted to hear this:

$30 for 10 photos, and
$15 for 1

Well! [Multiple exclamation marks]

On the way home I was musing about this pricing scheme... No doubt, the objective was to maximise profits. The more photos you sell, the merrier. So make 'em buy more. Getting one at $15 is outrageous; one would rather buy them @ $3 per, by shelling out 30 bucks.

If one can afford 30 bucks, that is.

So what about students? Or the poor? Or, what-the-heck all 10 of them look the same, and I want only one. Which is why the second option exists. The technical term for this, I believe, is market segmentation. Still as I said before, you would rather buy 10 if you could, for it is better deal.

And one more thing: They sell digital photos, duplication cost of which is practically zero. There are atleast 6 people in every raft. If they are clever enough, they will buy one CD of 10 photos and make copies for everybody, thereby splitting the cost ($0.50 per photo per person). On the other hand, if a single photo were more reasonably priced (say $5) the group might now buy only one photo and copy. Why would they buy only one? (1) As I told you, all 10 of them are similar. And (2) anybody would try to spend as little as possible.

Therefore, by arranging the price thus, the seller is happy (sells more) and so is the buyer.

Any other thoughts?

Engineered for marriage

2005-07-16T04:27:00.000+05:30

I did my undergraduation in a self-financing college in Tamilnadu. It is a "Telugu-minority institution," which means that only 50% of its seats need be surrendered to the state-wide admission authority (which follows the government rules like reservation, etc for admission); the college management can fill the remaining seats with the minority students, in this case Telugu-speaking students, by its discretion. Such seats are filled, mostly, by charging money for admission.

My college, therefore, had a large number of students from Andhra Pradesh who enrolled under the minority quota by paying their way in. They were generally those who had not done well in their school examinations and thus could not get a college seat of their choice by merit. These students would seldom attend classes. They would have an arrear of at least 5 papers (some 10) in each semester. I often wondered why they had no inclination to perform well and land a good job.

Then, someone told me the reason. They enroll neither to acquire employment nor knowledge, ... but because engineering graduates command enormous amounts of dowry in Andhra! Large sums of money, lands, car and more would be theirs if they merely pass all exams, so why worry? The degree helps them graduate to a higher level in the marriage market.

[Inspired by Sunil Laxman's post on dowry.]

The Prophecies of Jayabhaya and Sabdapalon

2005-07-14T14:42:00.000+05:30

I have always been intrigued by the Indian cultural influence in south-east Asia. I have heard of the popularity of Ramayana in those parts, of the Angkor Wat temple, the Bali Hinduism and the considerable presence of Sanskrit words in the languages (Megawati Sukarnoputri, Bahasa Indonesia, Putrajaya). But I know little more and don't remember reading much in our history books either.

Scoble's (mistaken) mention of Indochina whetted my curiosity, and I turned to the treasure-trove that is the Wikipedia to find out more. Needless to say, I wasn't disappointed.

India "influenced the Champa kingdom in Vietnam, the Srivijayan kingdom on Sumatra, the Singhasari kingdom, and the Majapahit Empire [and their descendants, the Tenggerese] based in Java, Bali and a number of the islands of the Phillippine archipelago. The civilization of India influenced the languages, scripts, calendars, and artistic aspects of these peoples and nations." And it all started way back in 200 BC with the Hindu kingdom in Javadvipa.

And in 1942, when Japan took Java from the Dutch, "Indonesians danced in the streets, welcoming the Japanese army as the fulfillment of a prophecy ascribed to Joyoboyo [जयाभय?], who foretold the day when white men would one day establish their rule on Java and tyrannize the people for many years – but they would be driven out by the arrival of yellow men from the north. These yellow men, Joyoboyo predicted, would remain for one crop cycle, and after that Java would be freed from foreign domination. To most of the Javanese, Japan was a liberator: the prophecy had been fulfilled."

More recently, since 1977, "followers of various tribal and animistic religions have identified themselves as Hindu in order to avoid harassment or pressure to convert to Islam or Christianity."

This is what, it seems, Sabdapalon prophesied in 1478.

- - - - - - - -

Also, check out the Sanskrit (and Tamil) loan-words in Bahasa Indonesia.

If all this is new to you (as it was to me), please follow all the links!

The Prime Minister of Indochina visits Redmond

2005-07-14T13:01:00.000+05:30

As I wrote yesterday, who doesn't love a good fight? In the course of my unpardonably long wanderings in the blogland today, I came across a rant by Robert Scoble, the well-known Microsoft blogger, against the remarks of Joel Spolsky, an ex-Microsoftie. To summarise the context, Joel compares Fog Creek (a small software company started by him) to Microsoft, to the latter's disadvantage.

Burning with righteous indignation, Robert enumerates various instances to establish Microsoft's superiority, including the taunt:

"Did the Prime Minister of Indochina visit your offices a few weeks ago?"

Probably not, but the Emperor of Austria-Hungary sure did.

The transition - Newspaper to Blogs

2005-07-12T04:36:00.000+05:30

I grew up reading The Hindu. In Madras, if someone asks you, "Have you read Gautaman Bhaskaran's review in the 'paper?" you do not ask back, "Which 'paper?" But pick up the day's copy of The Hindu and look for the Movie section. So widely read (and respected [1]) is it in the city.

The paper is a bit resistant to change, mirroring the conservative nature of the city itself. Till around two years back, it was fully black-and-white, with no colour even in the photos; finally switching because the London Times (upon which it was modelled) did so. I think, of late, it has become more adaptive. [2]

Of course, in my family, we have always subscribed only to The Hindu throughout. Mother (the earliest riser at home) would hand over the day's edition to Grandfather, who would pore over it from end to end, sipping (as per the Madras tradition) the morning coffee. Next, it would pass on to Father who would browse through it before leaving for work. My brother and I would get hold of it only after getting back from school.

The paper had a number of writers I would look forward to: S. Muthiah on the history of Madras, Nirmal Shekar's reflections on sports, Gautaman Bhaskaran on movies, and P.V. Indiresan's guest articles. My favourite was the Sunday Magazine which would feature Gowri Ramnarayan who writes exquisitely on music, theatre and literature, V. Gangadhar's nostalgic slices of life, and Ramachandra Guha's columns.

What I liked best was the discussions in the form of arguments and rejoinders. The most enjoyable being the flame-war on the Harappan horse (or the lack of it), between Michael Witzel and David Frawley. Apart from the debate itself (Who doesn't love a good fight?), I came to know quite a bit about Sanskrit that I was not aware of before.

After coming to grad school (with the free Internet thrown in), I have now moved on to blogs as the source of news. E.g., India Uncut gives me an eclectic selection of the important and interesting stories from different sources. Other blogs (such as Sepia Mutiny) also host thought-provoking discussions in their comment sections. I have also much profited professionally from the well-written technical blogs, such as Joel on Software, the first ever blog that I came across.

Blogs give a better sense of participation than newspapers. I have seized opportunities wherever possible to flaunt my scanty knowledge, which gives me (atleast temporary) happiness... In addition, being by nature a little shy of meeting strangers, the blog world has made it possible for me to come in (virtual) contact with various people, with novel perspectives and absorbing styles, and be privy to intelligent conversations.

Multiple hours every day, I roam the blogosphere (time I should actually be working), just the way I would be lost to the world reading The Hindu Sunday Magazine for the better part of the weekend.

I have thus gained my third addiction (after books and newspapers) - blogs.

- - - - -
Notes:

[1] The Hindu was started in Madras in the 1900's and is (in Indian terms) an old newspaper. Along with its founder (who was one of the early members of the Congress), it played an important part in the freedom struggle. The idea for the civil disobedience movement took shape when Gandhi and Rajaji met in the residence of its proprietor.

To take a recent example of the respect it commands, a journalist who was molested in a train was given due attention at police station (at least partly) because she was from The Hindu...

[2] Madras, every December, hosts the well-known Music Season, when there are scores of concerts everyday. But for some inexplicable reason, The Hindu would carry the concert reviews only once a week, trying to cover some ten performances in a single article! On the other hand, its rival Indian Express would feature a daily supplement covering the Season in detail.

Enterprising as ever

2005-07-05T18:11:00.000+05:30

I had thought Indians started coming to the US in big numbers only since the founding of IITs.

But it turns out I was much mistaken.

[Link via Sepia Mutiny.]

On Senthilnathan and Geet Sethi

2005-06-30T09:30:00.000+05:30

I have often heard north Indians wonder, "Why is it that south Indian names have an h after t but none after s?" They refer of course to the Karthik Ramamurthys and Sriram Sundaresans, as opposed to the Rohit Guptas and Shashi Sharmas. I have often mused about this myself, and here is a pseudo-scholarly (note: pseudo) attempt to figure out why.

The letter T in English generally has only the hard sound - potato is always पॊटॆटॊ, seldom पॊतॆतॊ. So whenever the soft T sound has to be represented, an H is suffixed to mellow it down, as in thanks. This should explain Seetharaman and Chandrakanth. The same logic is applicable for the D, which never has a soft sound in English - Distance, sudden, etc. Hence Dhandapani. So the moot question is not why southern names have th (or dh for that matter), but why northern names don't.

Let us consider the French word dame (as in la belle dame sans merci): it is read दाम्, or the word tous (as in a tous egards) which is pronounced तू. So do northern names owe their spelling to French influence? This is unlikely, for, with all their silent letters, French words are far less phonetic than northie names. And of course, French never boasted of much territory in the north during the colonial period.[1]

Probably the first people to render Indian words in English were the British who learnt our languages. Sanskrit was studied by a large number of Western scholars, such as William Jones (founder of the Asiatic Society) and Max Mueller. They must have evolved a standard to romanise Sanskrit words, which could have been adopted for Hindi as well. [2] If they had written त as th, they would have had to represent the aspirated t (थ) as thh, which is rather hard on the eye as well as hand. Hence th for थ and t for त. Probably a compromise for readability. Ditto for d and dh.

This however is not all. There are two other interesting th situations:

The Senthilnathan case (northerners beware): In some Tamil names, th is pronounced as it is in the English words there, the and thus. So, Senthilnathan is actually सॆन्दिल् नादन्.

The Geet Sethi case (southerners beware): Here th is neither as in thanks nor as in thus. It the aspirated hard t (ठ), as in boat-house, a sound for which there is no corresponding character in Tamil.

Phew! Now coming to sh. Why don't southern names have it? Well, in Tamil, the sounds s, sh as well as ch are all represented by the same letter ச. Its pronunciation varies depending on its position in a word, as per this rule: Except in the case when the letter occurs twice (in which case it would be ch), always read it as s. Hence Ganesan, Swetha and Viswanathan. However, the other southern languages do have a letter that is the equivalent of श. But it is still pronounced s, probably because of hereditary reasons -- these languages share the same ancestor with Tamil.

Having thus made a valiant attempt to answer the north Indians, I now have a question for them: Why r, and not d, in Baroda, Chandigarh and Chittore?

Notes:
[1] I was watching a Spanish programme sometime back, and came to know that as in French, the Spanish T's are also soft. Maybe it is true for other European languages, such as Italian, Portuguese as well.

[2] There are standards for transliterating Brahmic scripts (under which classification fall most Indian language scripts) formulated early last century. One is the IAST, adopted at the Congress of Orientalists in 1912, which uses diacritical marks on roman characters. Such as

(Another is the Harvard-Kyoto convention, which uses roman letters in a case sensitive way. E.g., gIt seThi, sendil nAdan. However this is of much recent origin, so we can ignore it for the current discussion.)

But I feel there must have been something earlier than even the 1912 IAST.

Rollo meets Babykutty

2005-06-30T07:30:00.000+05:30

'Well, what has become of Rollo? You seem to have mislaid him. Did you break off the engagement?' [asked Eve Halliday.]

'Well, it - sort of broke itself off. I mean, you see, I went and married Mike.... I'm awfully ashamed about that, Eve. I suppose I treated Rollo awfully badly.'

'Never mind. A man with a name like that was made for suffering.'

- P. G. Wodehouse (Leave it to Psmith)

[Link via India Uncut.]

Now try this.

The final call

2005-06-26T05:32:00.000+05:30

I was fortunate to have studied in a wonderful school in Madras called PSBB. Though it liked to pride itself on the academic performances, our school also freely encouraged extra-curricular activities. We had one of the best music choirs in the country, a lot of good quizzers, chess players, a consistent cricket team. And, most importantly, great teachers.

I have fond memories of a lot of them - friendly, encouraging, and caring. One such being Mrs Rani Chandran, who taught me Shakespeare (Julius Caesar and Macbeth). And was she good! She kept us spell-bound and made us look forward to what we all had till then a uniform distate for. The idealistic Brutus (who would murder his closest friend for public good), the shrewd Cassius (if his suggestion, that Mark Antony be finished along with Caesar, had been heeded, the Conspirators would have never had to flee and later die), the mob whose passion could be easily swayed (now applauding Brutus -- the ironical "let him be Caesar" -- and now baying for his blood) and the clever Mark Antony ("Yea, they were all honourable men"), Mrs Chandran brought them all alive.

But competence in teaching was not all. She knew when to be stern, when sympathetic. As a senior member of the staff, she commanded the respect of all students, including those she had never taught. She was also a sharp wit, and would regale us with a quick-fire exchange of repartee with whoever dared. She would spot and encourage talent, especially in English, and draft them into the editorial board or the content team of the school's newsletter.

Some years later, I came to know that Mrs Chandran had left our school. Some said she had moved on to head another institution, some said she had moved to the US. None of my friends knew for sure.

A few months back, I did it -- I tracked her down to a school in Cupertino, CA, thanks to the Internet and Google. I got the email address from the site and sent a message trying to find out if it was indeed my old teacher. I had also given my phone number in case she was not comfortable typing on a keyboard. There was no reply for a month; I came to the conclusion that it was probably a namesake.

Then suddenly on the eve of my graduation she called. We had a long chat and I updated myself on her story. She had come down with a major illness and then needing a lot of rest, had quit my school. Bored being idle, she came to the US to spend some time with her son. While here, on her son's suggestion, she applied for a masters programme at Stanford. She gave the GRE and the TOEFL and was soon in. She described how she enjoyed her time, spending hours in the wonderful library working on things of her interest. After her masters, she joined the Cupertino school as a teacher.

I passed on her email address to all my classmates, and she must have been flooded with mails. Before I left for India, I was planning to visit my relatives in California, and now I looked forward to meeting her as well.

On the morning of Friday, 24th June, 2005, my friend studying in Detroit called me up. He called me up to deliver the shocking news that Mrs Chandran was no more - killed in a gruesome road accident, along with her mother as well as son.

Post-script: Mrs Chandran's son Vikram has created a blog for people who knew her to post their thoughts. Please do!

India's junk yards?

2005-06-18T09:50:00.000+05:30

Every state in the US has a nickname - e.g., Pennsylvania is called the Keystone State, California the Golden State. Likewise some states in India have such names too. Andhra is referred to as the Rice Bowl of India.

And Tamilnadu (my home-state) is called, appropriately, the Land of Temples. In fact, the official emblem of the state is a gopuram, the temple gateway tower. One can find temples of varying size, antiquity, denomination and popularity in every village, town and city. Like any other family in Tamilnadu, most of our family's travels were actually pilgrimages, most of the weddings took place close to an ancient temple, and every festival was marked by a visit to the neighbourhood shrines.

Temples are not merely places of "idol worship," but (especially the ancient ones) have deeper spiritual significance as well. They are also the sites of social gathering of the community - Marriages, musical performances, discourses, etc. And performing the customary 3 pradakshinas around the sprawling temples is as good an exercise as any treadmill workout.

However, as I wrote in one of the articles, my visits to most temple towns generally end up only distressing me. The squalour of the mada streets. The bazaars that mar the tranquility of the shrine. Stampedes during major festivities. The granite majesty lost under layers of garish paint that make me wince. The discrimination between pilgrims ("General darshan," "special darshan," "VIP darshan"). Indiscriminate modifications to the original structure. The walls of the sanctum sanctorum covered by bathroom tiles.

The result being totally ungodly.

However, there are thankfully some exceptions. I have noticed that most of the ASI-maintained temples are in a relatively better condition than the government-owned ones. And of the three temples I visited in Kerala, the Vadakkunnatha temple (Thrissur), the Guruvayur temple and the nearby Mammiyur temple, all were preserved close to their original grandeur, unlike the numerous ones in Tamilnadu.

But such heartening situations are few and far between. Shekhar Gupta is right - temples are indeed India's junk yards.

Post-script:
The Indian Express has a series of articles on India's heritage monuments, most of whom are in a sorry state: Hampi (the capital of the Vijayanagara kingdom), the Konark sun temple, the Qutub Minar, the Elephanta caves, and more. They all paint a distressing picture.

The Upanishadic Commencement Speech

2005-06-13T02:01:00.000+05:30

The MIT commencement ceremony, held on June 10, resonated with Sanskrit prayers. A swami then offered an invocation in Sanskrit.

This brought to my mind the Sīkshā chapter of the Taittirīya Upanishad, which contains an address by the teacher as the student departs from the gurukula. It begins thus:

satyam vada (Speak the truth.)
dharmam chara (Follow dharma.)
svādhyāyānmā pramadaḥ (Do not neglect studies.)

And contains the well-known

matr devo bhava (Treat your mother as a god.)
pitr devo bhava (father)
acharya devo bhava (teacher)
atithi devo bhava (guest)

Hooked to the Bookah

2005-06-04T10:12:00.000+05:30

"Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I."

Thus spake Somerset Maugham (in The Book Bag, short story) echoing my own thoughts.

My book reading began with, what else, Amar Chitra Katha, the treasure-house of Indian mythology. I have throughout lived with my grandparents, but they are not the story-telling kind; and these great comics compensated this loss to a considerable measure. My parents would get me a couple of them from the neighbourhood library on their daily walk, and that would account for my enjoyment for the evening.

The Number of Books I Own: Very few. I am a bibliophile all right, but I belong to that sub-class of the specie, called the librari-bibliophile. Most books I read were all borrowed from libraries. I can count on my fingers the books I personally bought. Which may not be surprising, given that I am yet to earn a single rupee. Things may change once I get a job of my own. Which may be soon, if things go well.

Fortunately, I have always had access to decent libraries. There was the Murugan Lending Library (a 10 minute walk from home), the source of my childhood readings. Our school had, not one, but three libraries! One each for Primary, Middle and Secondary Schools. (The latter had in its possession the complete set of the Collected Writings of Gandhi in 15 volumes or something - I am sure it must be the only school library in the whole country that does. Wonder if anybody even touched them.)

The US is verily a book-lover's paradise with its great public library system. The Mountain View Public Library (which I used to haunt) was well-stocked in all departments - fiction, nonfiction, comics, music and videos. Besides just the variety and excellent condition of the books, I loved the entire system - the self-checkout, the email reminders... It (if I may use the expression) rocked.

Needless to talk about the US university libraries. And the inter-library loan. The book which I could not track down in any Madras library, I found at last in the University of Pennsylvania - The Rajaji Story by Rajmohan Gandhi.

Last Book I Bought: Conceptual Blockbusting by James L Adams. (Got it for $1 from a second-hand book vendor at CMU.)

Last Book I Read: The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham (volumes 1 and 2). Maugham's stories are a wonderful study in human emotions. And great for restroom reading! Most stories are of just the right length for one session; and some, two.

Books That Mean a Lot to Me:

Classified by author.

Rabindranath Tagore: My first Tagore novel was Farewell, My Friend, a romantic novel peppered with wit, and with a beautiful ending. Gora, portrayal of a society in transition, and hence still very relevant in today's India. And who cannot be but touched on reading Cabuliwallah?

P G Wodehouse: I am, dash it, an avowed Plum fan. Jeeves is well known, but do read Psmith Journalist. Is there anything else? Very good, sir.

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus is a rishi in his wisdom. A poignant story, seen through a child's eyes.

James Herriot: Delightful stories set in rural Yorkshire, on men and other animals. Get all of them!

Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel (non-fiction). An effort to find out why the human civilisation is as it is.

Books I didn't Complete: Mainly because they were intellectually too demanding to read on working days. Hope to pursue them at leisure.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
Godel, Escher and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.

A book tag has been doing the rounds on blogs. No-one has passed on the meme to me yet, but I have accepted Yazad Jal's open invitation ("All are welcome") and hence this post.

The custom is for me to tag some bloggers of my own. OK, let's see...

Girish, the ustad
Gocool, Microserf
Ramprasad (will he respond?)

[And, wait, should I mail them about the tag? Or should they come to know on their own? I am new to this game...]

I would like to invite all the readers of this post to do their own versions. Please do. And tell me when you are done!

The Desi Spell

2005-06-03T09:18:00.000+05:30

The results of the National Scripps Spelling Bee that took place in Washington are out. The winner (after 19 rounds of competition) is Anurag Kashyap. Tied for the second place are Samir Patel and Aliya Deri.

A test of English spelling, held in a country of native English speakers, is won by students of Indian origin! However, this is hardly a surprise.

Stereotypes really?

2005-05-26T20:12:00.000+05:30

The Girl in the Hat wrote:

Is it true, she asked,
That you
Wash your clothes in rivers
Sleep on nails
Climb up ropes...
Levitate
Burn your widows
Alive...

Hmm. Looks like we do.

The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

2005-05-23T04:23:00.000+05:30

Sometime back, on the urging of my friend PM (an ardent Matrix fan), I watched the first part of the trilogy. At the scene where Morpheus tells Neo, "Free your mind!" and jumps from the top of one building to another, I asked PM, "Have you read Richard Bach's Illusions?"

On becoming a Master

2005-05-16T09:41:00.000+05:30

I received my master's degree from Carnegie Mellon today. The Commencement ceremony (as the Convocation is called in the US) was marked by tradition, colour, and meticulous planning. It was wonderful being a part of it!

Some notes on the occasion:

The academic dress worn on the graduation day is derived from the clerical attire of the monks who taught at the medieval European universities. While all graduates wear the gown and the mortarboard (the flat square hat) with tassel (that hangs down from the hat), it is only the masters who wear the hood.

The hood (originally used to cover the head to protect it from cold) is usually left hanging down at the back, and thus resembles a pouch. Since the monks were sworn to poverty, they could not earn their living. So when they went on procession (explained my professor) the laity dropped offerings into the hanging hood.

* * *

Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and founder of our university, was born in Scotland and was proud of his roots. Carnegie Mellon shares this pride. The checked pattern that make up a Scottish clan's insignia (called a Tartan) is ubiquitous in the campus, lends its name to the university newspaper and makes up the lining of the hood as well.

The other major Scottish symbol is the bagpipe. Like the nadaswaram, this wind instrument occupies the pride of place on all important occasions, including the Commencement. Just as the nadaswaram weaves an atmosphere of sanctity and auspiciousness for the deity that follows, the band of bagpipes (the "Kiltie Band") lends an air of majesty and dignity when leading the procession of university heads and professors.

[And the School of Computer Science diploma award function was inaugarated by a tune from the bagpipe playing robot, McBlare!]

* * *

The Americans are predominantly an outdoor people. On weekends, they love to go hiking, camping in the jungle, biking long distances. Hence their idea of a perfect weather is sun shining brightly, with no showers. However, Nature takes a particular relish in playing spoilsport to their plans: It has been statistically observed that most rain or snow occurs during the weekend. This phenomenon is called Weekend Weather. There is even a joke: "If there is a clear sky after two days of rain, it is probably a Monday."

Thankfully, it was a perfect day for my Commencement, despite it being a Sunday. Probably it is a knack I bring from Madras.

Thy neighbour is a good man

2005-05-07T09:41:00.000+05:30

At Carnegie Mellon, there is what is known as the Reasonable Person Principle (RPP). Put simply, it says, "Expect people to act reasonably." Hence students are not burdened with zillions of rules, and in return are expected not to find technical loopholes that violate the clear intent of these guidelines.

So, instead of saying something like:

"The student together with the delegates, officers, agents, servants, and employees of the Department and the Administrative Bureau, shall be, and hereby are, enjoined, during the pendency of this complaint (including any appeals and/or remands) and until entry of final judgment..."

a lot of handbooks (such as the one for the computing facilities) call upon this principle, or often simply say,

"Follow common sense and RPP."

Mostly the RPP is not even explicitly invoked. A sign on a coffee-maker in the Computer Science lounge reads, "Making coffee is not free. Please drop 20 cents in the bowl for every cup you make."

Even outside CMU, a lot of things assume the law-abiding nature and reasonableness of people.

At the public library in Mountain View (in California, where I stayed before coming to Pittsburgh), people check out ("issue" in Indian terminology) books they want themselves. There is no librarian with a specific duty to issue books and no security guard at the exit to inspect them. Similarly books are not "returned" to a librarian, but simply put into a box. Furthermore, if fine accrues on a book out of late return, members are not barred from borrowing till they pay the dues -- fines are paid voluntarily.
In the case of wrongly parked cars, the police simply place a ticket on windshield beneath the wiper. The owner is expected to go to a court on a specified day and pay up the fine.
But this really takes the cake, merely because the involved parties were all Indians: I visited the Pittsburgh Venkateswara temple this week with friends and we bought tokens for 2 prasadam packets which we had to exchange at a counter. There was no one at the counter (on which all packets were neatly stacked). When we called out, a person from within a room answered, "Please put the tokens in the box and take the prasadam." We dutifully dropped in the tokens; and two packets were all we took!

Another true incident to conclude. A classmate lost her purse, containing college ID and debit cards. Someone had picked it up and tried using the cards (she learnt this later from the bank). On being unable to use it, he put the cards and ID in a cover and placed it on a post-box. It was returned to her by a postman a couple of days later.

I have written a new article

2005-05-02T12:14:00.000+05:30

I was today at a Hindustani concert by Padma Talwalkar organised by Spicmacay at the University of Pittsburgh. Seeing the accompanying harmonium unable to keep up with the fluid voice of the singer made me wonder How the Harmonium Came on the Hindustani Stage.

Look forward to your comments!

A new kind of pollution

2005-04-22T08:37:00.000+05:30

Everyone of us, at some point in our schooling, would have written an essay on "Pollution." So we are well-educated about the evils of air, water, soil and noise pollution. And wait, even light: In major cities which are lit up brightly even in nights, there is never ever sufficient darkness, causing discomfort to all creatures, large and small.

Let me introduce to you a recent member of this gang, window pollution. How many of us surfing the web have not had useless windows popping up all over the place? Annoying. They are a scourge.

One of the worst perpetrators is... (guess who?) the prestigious Indian daily: the Times of India. Dear Editor, it is time you start showing some basic courtesy to your visitors, instead of throwing noisome pop-ups on their faces.

Thank God It's Friday!

2005-04-16T10:18:00.000+05:30

The American likes to celebrate the arrival of the weekend with as much glee as the Indian farmer welcomes the arrival of the monsoon.

Last Friday week, we all gathered (courtesy of the student organisation) to munch french fries with ketchup, sour cream and lemonade. A couple of weeks back we had cake, cookies and soda. Today's fare was fruits, chips and juice.

And it's all gratis: TGIF!

20 bucks for KISS

2005-04-13T10:28:00.000+05:30

Long long ago in Europe, when Leonardo Da Vinci's great-grandfather was not yet born and long beards were the raging fashion on the streets of London, walked young William home from his Sunday school on a misty day. Billy, if we may so call him, knew the scriptures to the letter and all numbers unto 90,000 (infinity was unknown then) were his best friends. His intellect was so sharp, listen ye, so sharp that on his approach his teachers in the seminary would whisper in each others' ears, "Oh, here comes the Razor." Which morphed over the course of time to "Ockham's Razor."

Just kidding! William of Ockham, a 14th century English friar, stated that "Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred." Seth, a CMU philosophy student has created a site that attempts to explain this principle, called Ockham's Razor, in a friendly manner. To see if it was friendly enough, Seth entreated all brave and sporting denizens to rally forth and try out the site in exchange for a score of dollars. I was game and toiled for 90 minutes and was duly showered with riches.

Ockham's Razor can be shortly put as "The simplest explanation is the best." Or shorter still, "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS). Hence the blog's title.

Got your attention, dintcha?

Virus, License and... RMS

2005-04-08T11:19:00.000+05:30

From my rambling reading of various blogs, I always had an impression that open source software, free software, Unix, Linux (sometimes even Mac) users all make up a monolithic camp, united by their common antagonism towards Microsoft. So when I learnt this morning about a seminar on open source licensing, I went to attend just out of curiosity - to know more about the inner workings of the camp.

Before I get into the details of the seminar, let me share with you what a software license is. It is an agreement between the creator and user of the software, generally dealing with copyright. The common "Do you accept the terms?" screen that one sees when installing software is an example of a proprietary license (known as EULA - End User License Agreement). With this hotch-potch introduction, let us get on with the story...

"Infectious" Open Source Software: Spreading Incentives or Promoting Resistance, was the full title. Greg R. Vetter of the University of Houston Law School explained the differences between the Apache (BSD-style) license, the Open Source license and the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the oldest of the open/free licenses; it requires that the code be public and royalty-free and that any GPL software derivative must also be released under GPL. It is the latter provision that Vetter referred to as "infectious." If even a small part of the software I am developing is made of GPL code, my entire software (now, don't cry) should be given under GPL too -- The GPL "virus" spreads to non-GPL code. This was all new to me and I was drinking it in pretty happily, along with the caffeine-free coke that came with the free lunch (pizza!).

After all the questions were asked and answered, the audience began to disperse... when a short, bearded gentleman (with a pot-belly to boot) stood up from a corner and said, "Is there no one here who will say something in support of GPL?" [Long silence.] He continued, "My name is Richard Stallman. I wrote the GPL."

(What happened next? Read on here.)

Playing guinea pig

2005-04-01T06:32:00.000+05:30

Various CMU departments invite students to participate in experiments to collect data for research. I volunteered to take part in an experiment at the School of Psychology for half-an-hour. And yes, I would be paid $5 to compensate for my time...

I would have to interact with another person for ten minutes, by asking each other questions from a list we were given. Before this started,, Ed Lemay, the researcher, said he would give some fictitious details about me to the other person "to gauge the importance of first impressions." I nodded smiling.

The interaction (with Mae, a psychology junior) consisted of questions like "What will you do after graduating," "what was the most frightening experience of your childhood," etc. that we would alternately ask and answer.

When I was alone after the interaction, Ed said calmly that he had told Mae I was a sensitive person who would easily take offence and feel rejected at the slightest unpleasantness! Then he gave me a questionnaire to fill up about my impressions, such as "Do you think the other person was honest with you?" and "Do you think the other person likes to start a friendship with you?" etc.

I answered the questions as truthfully as I could, with most answers neutral tending to positive. For there isn't much you can infer in a brief regulated conversation with a stranger, who was there mainly for the dough too (why else would anyone waste a wonderful evening?)...

As I handed in the form, Ed informs me nonchalantly that Mae was not another volunteer but an accomplice from the same department. No, she was not told anything "about" me in the beginning either. The aim of the experiment was to see how that kind of information would colour my feelings about the person. Pretty neat, eh?

Anti-Indian put-down

2005-03-23T11:44:00.000+05:30

A post on Slashdot, lately very hostile to India because of the outsourcing of jobs, referred to Srinivasa Ramanujan as "the Indian math guy." Hmm...

Books from Google

2005-03-23T11:19:00.000+05:30

Google returns link to scanned copies of books. I googled "P G Wodehouse" & "R K Narayan," and found Introducing Jeeves & Financial Expert respectively.

While this is no match for the sheer volume of Project Gutenberg, it gives the feel of reading from paper, since we get scanned images.

"One dollar! Pie the Professor! One Dollar!"

2005-03-15T10:09:00.000+05:30

American universities celebrate today as π Day. (Guess why?) The CMU Math Club organised (what seemed to me a trifle barbaric) event called "Pie the Professor," with an entry fee of $1. Curious why I called it barbaric? Hint: Pie is used here as a verb. Still don't get it? Watch the video! (1.92MB)

(Click on the thumb-nail picture to view the video.)

Enna, soundu vidare?

2005-03-13T06:27:00.000+05:30

Madras Tamil, that lingo of auto drivers and college students of the south Indian metropolis, has been sighted in Wikipedia! Tuckeraa keedhu ma...

Thanks, PM for the link.

First day at CMU

2005-03-03T10:36:00.000+05:30

It was a freezing day (-5 Centigrade max) when I set out late morning for our first day at Carnegie Mellon, which is a 15-minute walk from our apartment. I was swathed in a muffler, woollen cap, 2 layers of gloves, jacket (over shirt) and jeans (over long john) and two socks each in my sneakers to brace myself against the elements: This was just about enough.

Since I could not cook today (just moved in yesterday), my friends here took me to a guest lecture ("Using Reflection and Abstraction in Software Engineering") - free pizza and coke!

After food, I went round the campus and was taken in by all the facilities here. The sports and fitness areas at the University Center (UC): basketball, squash, badminton, table-tennis, tennis courts and a sprawling football field. There were two gyms: one with machines at the UC and another predominantly with free weights. After seeing the libraries, I felt I would frequent the humanities one (Hunt Library) more than the Engineering & Science Library.

Later in the day, I visited (meaning, had a darshan of the building; not everybody is allowed inside) the famed Software Engineering Institute that revolutionised the way we do software development. It pioneered, among others, software processes (remember CMM?) and software architecture. I don't know how many other universities have a Master of Software Engineering degree.

I returned home at 8:30 in the night by the Escort Service van (run by the university police to take home the students safely in the late hours).

(Click on the thumb-nail picture to view photos.)

Trans-continental migration

2005-03-02T13:26:00.000+05:30

Our course moved from CMU's west coast campus in California to the main campus at Pittsburgh - right across the North American continent. So our class of 19 too effected a mass exodus today, moving into snowy region for the first time. And into a great apartment, thanks to our university.

There was delay in the departure of our America West afternoon flight. So the airport staff transferred us to a Continental airlines plane that was to leave a little earlier. Because of this, six of our friends who could not make it to the airport early enough were forced to miss this flight and others (of the 13 that went on the afternoon flight) could not get their luggage in time to check them in. The airlines authorities got them on a direct flight from San Francisco that night. They did not have to pay again (imagine missing a train in India and getting a free ticket on the next one) but the missed luggage was charged.

On the flight, we were served some snacks, chocolate, chicken sandwich and juice. I could not have the sandwich since I am a vegetarian.

Travelling east, we lost three hours when we arrived at Pittsburgh at around 11 in the night. We were taken from the air terminal to the baggage claim area on a train. I am not sure whether this is because the place is quite a distance away (it was around 5 minutes on the train) or because the climate is such that we cannot walk in open spaces.

We experienced our first snow-fall (as we got down from the van arranged by the university to take us to the apartments). Touching the smooth powdery snow, I realised what a long way I have come from the humid tropical city of Madras. I do not wish to waste any more words - go have a look at the pictures: they tell the whole story!

(Click on the thumb-nail picture to view photos.)

Poetry

2005-02-26T05:44:00.000+05:30

It has been ages since I read any poetry. I cannot remember most poems I studied at school, except for a few that are etched in my mind.

One is Shelley's Ozymandias, where the pedestal of that colossal wreck proclaims: "Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair." Another is Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (much of the Bard's plays is blank verse), taught to us wonderfully by Mrs Rani Chandran. It is after Brutus justifies Caesar's assassination to the people, when someone in the mob cries, "Let him be Caesar!"

Now, thanks to my uncle here, I started Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. And I am hooked...

Excerpts from "On Giving:"

You often say, "I would give, but only to the deserving."
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

And you receivers - and you are all receivers - assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.
Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings;
For to be overmindful of your debt, is to doubt his generosity who has the free-hearted earth for mother, and God for father.

Caught Napping

2005-02-23T00:53:00.000+05:30

Our project team was chasing a deadline for a demo with our main customer. The work hours turned irregular. Sometimes when I was very sleepy, I would feel too lazy to walk back to the hostel (or dorm as they call it here) and would fall into slumber on my chair itself.

Picture courtesy of my project-mates, PM and Rajat.

The Wodehouse Effect

2005-02-15T12:05:00.000+05:30

Valentine's Day (as far as I am concerned) is less a celebration of the antics of the Winged Archer, than it is in memoriam one of my favourite authors, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. For it was on this day, thirty winters back, that the Perveyor of Delight left this world. And left us an enchanting world of erudite butlers and half-crazy earls with their much-despised second sons.

There is Lord Emsworth who prefers pottering about in his garden to attending to his duties as the Master of Castle Blandings. When he is not thus pottering about, he dotes on his prize sow: watching her during day-time, and listening to her breathe in the nights (since it is too dark to watch).

The most famous of his characters is the duo of Jeeves (the omniscient valet: "gentleman's personal gentleman") and his aunt-fearing employer Bertie Wooster, on whom Ogden Nash has written a joyful poem.

But my personal favourite is Rupert Psmith (P silent as in pthiasis, ptarmigan and pterodactyl) the monocle-wearing socialist Cambridge graduate. I have read Psmith Journalist a trillion times.

Wodehouse made woolen-headed half-wits like Wooster and Emsworth heroes. O master, can you please work the same magic with me...

Judgment Day

2005-02-13T12:56:00.000+05:30

For a couple of days I have been pre-occupied by the 360-degree evaluation. In this, we are judged not by the conventional exams, but by the feedback from peers, project stakeholders and professors. This is how the system works:

1. There are 20 of us scholars (yes, scholars [fanfare]) at the PDC. Each of us is given 20 forms to fill in, one for each scholar.

2. These forms have sections on the skills acquired through the various course work we took up. Plus one section on Team and Leadership skills. We have to rate each person on a scale of 5 on different aspects of the skill, giving elaboratory comments. So you can't get back at your PHB team-lead just by saying "This friend of mine is a #$%& dunderhead with IQ less than that of a dead dodo," but must support with substantial evidence indicating how it is indeed so.

3. We then send these filled-up forms to our professor, who would edit the feedback to ensure anonymity. (And to delete flames, if any...) So our carefully constructed feedback in step 2 might be bowdlerised to "Must practise Mensa puzzles twice a day..."

4. Our professor would then send the distilled comments to us. Look Momma, my grade sheet!

A Spot of Mystery

2005-02-06T12:44:00.000+05:30

Is there a difference between "standing erect" and "standing straight?" There is, if you are at the Mystery Spot.

Located in the redwood forests near Santa Cruz (around an hour's drive from here), is a place where the gravity seems to go bonkers. Where balls roll "up-slope," a swinging pendulum comes to rest at an angle to the vertical, where you can climb up walls... Some of my classmates had been there last week and brought back strange tales. Intrigued by them, we (Gaurav, Rajkumar and I) set out in a friend's car.

The gravity exhibits the mysterious behaviour on a hill within a diameter of 150 feet. A guide conducted us to the boundary where lay a level I-shaped platform, one end within the spot and one without. Standing on the outer part, I looked down upon Gaurav who was standing opposite to me at the other end. Exchanging positions, now Gaurav stood taller!

We then walked up an incline to the hill-top where stood a ramshackle wooden house. Outside the house, the guide placed a plank and rolled a ball down; the ball slowed down and faithfully climbed up towards its master... Meanwhile, I was beginning to feel something dragging me towards one side; this sensation grew stronger when I stepped into the house. And all of us were standing at an angle, as was a suspended metallic bob! I found it difficult to walk easily and felt a lot heavier than I am. As Sherlock Holmes would have put it, strange things were afoot...

The guide then did some more experiments with us. In the end, all this left me thinking: True, the house was tilted and this could create a certain amount of optical illusion; but not enough to explain the slanting people, the crazy ball and the giddy feeling.

Mystery indeed...

(Click on the thumb-nail picture for photos.)

Saturday aka Shopping Day.

2005-01-30T12:49:00.000+05:30

I left for Wal*Mart to stock up my weekly inventory. I thought people back home might be interested in the stuff we desi fresh-off-the-boats buy:

Yogurt = thayir, perugu, dahi, mosaru. Or probably there is some difference in the germ that does the fermentation. Or is it co-agulation. I dunno.

M&M = Cadbury's Gems. Evokes childhood memories. I pop a few in twice a day after food.

Store-brand goods. To get the least expensive items, hint: if in Albertson's, buy "Albertson's Chips," "Albertson's Ketchup," and "Albertson's bread." Since I went to Wal*Mart, I got "GV Cookies," "GV Chips," and "GV Bread." GV (stands for Great Value) is Wal*Mart's store-brand.

Dollar Frozen Pizza. The desi student's best friend. Forty Five rupees only - for all emergencies.

Q: What should I buy at a desi store, and not at an American supermarket?
A: Fruits and vegetables. In American stores, they are housed in luxury shelves and given frequent water showers by automatic sprinklers. Really. And there are shop floor assistants whose job is to smile and say "Hi." Who is billed for the five star treatment? I, me, myself. No sir, I am happy with the plain-vanilla Indian shop. Thank you.

Q: What should I not buy at our desi store?
A: Snacks. If you just want to something crisp with your food (I always do) or wish to munch something when you get back from school, do not buy Maami's mixture or Haldiram's bhoojia from Bharat Bazar. Go for store-brand potato or peta or corn chips. With all the money you save, you can holiday on that Caribbean Cruise...

(Please click on the thumb-nail picture for photos.)

Delicious Music and Euphonic Food

2005-01-23T13:04:00.000+05:30

I am an impatient cook - I generally don't enjoy spending too much time making food. In this, my Man Friday is the microwave which I use to prepare rice and boiled vegetables.

But of late, we (my room-mate Gaurav and I) have been enjoying more toothsome dishes, thanks to a third friend (Rajkumar) who joins us during meals. Seated on the floor amidst the vessels and surrounded by soft music, we relish food and banter.

While gathering MP3's from my classmates for making the dinner music CDs, I came upon Rahman's Sangamam film songs. I first heard them during my undergrad days on the college bus's cacophonous player. But still I took to the Carnatic based numbers. A favourite is Saukkiyama in raga Mand.

Listening to these classical-flavoured songs made me curious about how the music is written down such that the playback singer executes it just as the composer had envisioned it. In Carnatic, the music is written down in the solfa notation. There is a lot of music between the documented notes (svaras) due to gamakas, but this can be inferred from the characteristics of that raga. In film songs, the music rarely adheres to a raga strictly, which would make it difficult to re-construct the complete music if it were notated in solfa.

Is there is someone from the film music field who has the answer?

2005-01-22T12:33:00.000+05:30

I have written a new article:

The Grantha Script of Sanskrit. Sanskrit, though present throughout India, never had one common script. In Bengal, it was written in the Bengali script; in Andhra, in the Telugu script. In the Tamil region, the script used was (and to this day in traditional patasalas is) Grantha.

Do go through it. I am eager to know your opinion, so please do post some comment here after reading. Thanks!

Flea Market

2005-01-10T03:11:00.000+05:30

In this part of the US, every few miles apart one can find a city. Mountain View is the closest to my campus; some others are Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose (pronounced San Ho-say). Yesterday I had gone to the city located to our west, Palo Alto. I planned to visit (along with a friend, Rajkumar) the eastern city of San Jose on this last day of vacation. Specifically, the Flea Market.

Flea Market is the American equivalent of Ranganathan Street bazaar plus Mambalam Station Road market. They sell inexpensive clothes, produce (the noun; not as in �to produce�), footwear, furniture and even cars!

This being a Sunday, the bus service that takes us to Mountain View (it is from here that buses that connect to most places ply) was not available. We decided to cycle, but we found that one of the two cycles (called �bike� here) had a flat tyre. Or so it seemed� But on inflating, the air seemed to stay.

Not fully trusting the tyre, with the air pump in my bag, we set out for Flea Market.

The market is located in a huge square ground, with all the shops arranged in row-column matrix. In the first shop, we saw caps, hats and gloves. There was a hat for a dollar both of us took a fancy for. There was only one such, so I let Rajkumar take it.

We spent a little more than an hour walking around the place. I bought gloves and one pound of groundnuts.

From 6:30 in the evening at the university, Martin Radley (our professor) and our class saw the third installment of Lord of the Rings. We were glued to our seats for the full four hours.

To Stanford University

2005-01-09T11:06:00.000+05:30

With the year-end vacation drawing to an end, I thought I should visit my school friend, Vikram, at Stanford University today, for it may not be possible later.

I took the VTA (Valley Transport Authority, the public transport organisation for Santa Clara county) bus to Palo Alto, where the university is located. Generally, whenever I travel somewhere I carry my lunch, to save on expenses. I did not have time in the morning to cook food, and so, just packed some apples and carrots and rushed to catch the bus.

The famous University was founded by Leland Stanford in 1891. He was of humble origins and through his own efforts grow into a millionaire in the railroad business. His son, also Leland, died young and the Stanfords decided to adopt the youth of whole of California as their children in place of the one they lost. They decided to build this university in their son's memory.

The campus is a blend of stately old buildings of stone as well as steel structures of modern architecture. Interspersed here and there are other works of art such as sculptures. There was a wooden totem pole, there was a brass one depicting gay
liberation, and an abstract work in the Business School. But the most famous of all the sculptures is the "Burghers of Calais."

During the Hundred Years war between the England and France, the French king abandoned the beseiged city of Calais to its fate. When governor petitioned the King of England to spare the citizens while doing as he pleased with the city itself. Seeking revenge for enormous loss accrued due to the warriors from that city in the war, the English king offered that if six citizens were handed over to him as punishment the rest would not be harmed. The sculpture is of the six volunteers (all
respected and wealthy citizens) on their way to the English camp. The artist, Rodin, brings out their inner turmoil by depicting their "faltering steps, despairing gestures and anguished expressions."

A few decades ago in India, people travelling Benares would give up eating a vegetable, in memory of the pilgrimage. The trip to Stanford too was a pilgrimage of sorts for me. While taking a photograph, I kept down the food I was carrying and forgot to pick it up. Thus, in memory of the visit, I left behind somewhere in Stanford, my lunch for the day...

Pictures are here

2003-04-28T16:43:00.000+05:30

Invocatory Verse

SrIkAntO mAtulO yasya janani sarvamangalA |
janakaS-SankarO dEvaH tam vandE kunjarAnanam ||

So it begins...