Apr 30, 2007

Heat Tsunami

Per this link from today's newspaper the heat tsunami is official: Heat wave in parts of North, Central India I'd've been more alliteratively creative Heat Tsunami Hits India

This year a person not only born in India but raised at Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, assumes the office of the President of the royal Institute of British Architects.

In a Hindi interview that I have recorded he did mention cutting down energy use in buildings. A building in Harare (I forget which African country it's the capital of) was inspired by a young girl's comment to her architect father. She said, why don't you learn from the ants.. In a David Attenborough program for children she hd heard and remebered that ants design their habitate for an ambient temperature that is conducive for their eggs - better craft-creatures than huneybees and humans? Well they brought the energy costs down 90% or so they claimed.

Traditional Indian home design was smarter until we gave it up for what our British masters pushed us to. I know, during my childhood the temperatures went higher than now but they were not uncofortable. Now with intesive 3-crop irrigatede paddy cultivation we have stifling moisture, malaria and all of the water borne stuff.

There's a psychological as well as a scientific factor. I've never been seriously bothered either by external heat or Himalayan cold because I understand that the problem is not external but internal. Our thermostats get confusing signals from the fans and airconitioning and central heating we turn on - and the way we bundle ourselves up. I recall there was a need once for me to walk barefoot on ice for a few miles wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts. I had no problems later. The other person who was with me had...

In this regard, I take partial inspiration from Morarjee Desai, a former prime minister of India. The man even refused to be vaccinated. When they said, they'd have to cancel his state visit to Britain he said no problem. They can check my body for bugs. If I don't have any - and if I won't catch any in Britain, why vaccinate me? If you are scared I am carrying bugs, vaccinate yourselves... Once, while he was PM, he was 86 then, his plane crashed in Assam; the crew was killed but the man walked 7 kilometres alone from the wreck to the nearest village and declared, " I am your country's prime minister - go get some help."

My neighbors say "It's very hot" I say, "I'd no time to notice".... But when I mention the heat its my way of creating an opening... Anything designed by God cannot be inconvenient to creatures. Sure, bodies suffer and die; but what the heck; per the Bhagwat Geeta there's a perennial sale on for bodies at the Divine Wal Mart. Buy One Get three, free.....

Einstein on atheism

"The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres."

- Albert Einstein

Those who believe they are free, are free

Mamai Vansho jeevalokay --
Created in the image of God -
presumes there's free well at source and essence, but

Muktabhimaano mukto, cha baddho baddhabhi maanya pi

expresses the Hindoo thinking well -
Those who believe they are free, are free;
those who believe they are tied up, are indeed, tied up...

Ya mati saa gati

As the mind, so does your condition become

Govardhan's Travels by Anand, Review

Tr: Gita Krishnankutty Penguin Pages: 442; Rs: 350

Man At Large An excellent translation, which has authentically captured the distinct, and, at times, stentorian, voice of Anand.
Anand’s Malayalam novels have few Malayalees in them. That, in fact, is his strength. Shorn of regional dialects or slang, local flavours and nuances, received wisdoms, cuisines and micro-histories, he audaciously writes his pan-Indian stories in his unique idiom.
In Govardhan’s Travels, Anand takes over a character in legendary Hindi writer Bharatendu Harishchandra’s play Andher Nagari, in a brilliant crossover.
In Bharatendu’s play, a whimsical king finds out that the noose is too small for its intended convict and wants to use it on Govardhan instead. It fits Govardhan’s scrawny neck perfectly.
In Anand’s novel, set free by Bharatendu himself, Govardhan, the archetypal victim, begins his travels that respect neither chronology nor distance. The novel moves seamlessly from the British period to Mughal times to more recent days. Here Kalidasa converses with Mirza Ghalib, Thyagaraja consoles an aging Umrao Jaan, and Galileo argues with Kepler. Soon you realise that Govardhan’s travels can have no possible ending. When last seen, he was journeying with a row of ants. Very little is lost in Gita Krishnankutty’s excellent translation, which has authentically captured the distinct, and, at times, stentorian, voice of Anand. Reviewer N.S. Madhavan

Masses, unite! To buy? To fight?

The Capitalist Myopia does not allow the 'westoxicateds' to see this huge mass of people - the Indian (and the Chinese) establishment and middle class - as anything more than a market - consumers for Obnoxica Inc. stretched up to and beyond the horizon.

Few remember that Napoleon as well as Gäñdhi transformed them into successful "fighting machines."

AIDs money for classrooms?

Today's Hindi newspaper has these two headlines on page three:

AIDS MONEY SPENT ON FIVE STAR SHINDIGS. It says India receives Rs 150,000,000,000 crores for Aids work. Only 5-10% actually gets spent. The rest is siphoned off. (2) 75,000

SCHOOLS HAVE NO CLASS ROOMS. It gives details and says of those that have 73% in Nagaland, 77% in Meghalaya, 66% in Asam, 64% in Mizoram, 57% in West Bengal and 55% in Orissa have classrooms that need to be torndorn and rebuilt because they are dilapidated.

Man: The Builder still needs enclosures, ie. houses

A house is a means for a preferred enclosure, modulation and use of space. Even as Early Man was discovering Fire and inventing the Wheel, his search for the House Beautiful had begun.

Ten thousand years after Civilization – allegedly, The Era of Man: The Builder – is supposed to have begun, most people own a house only in their day dreams. A house is one of the most easily identifiable, minimal manifestations of civilization, which word, coincidentally, shares a common etymological root with civil engineering. The perennially transient descendant-dwellers of slums and shantytowns of Early Man are never allowed to forget, the search for the Enclosure Ideal is still not over.

Enclosures are so basic, it is impossible to even think of fulfilling the basic roti-kapada-makaan-shiksha-chikitsaa-rozegaar needs of our species without them.
  • Grains and fertilizers need storage.
  • Sheds and shops are required for making and selling cloth.
  • Human families need homes.
  • Schools and hospitals are necessary for education and medical support.
  • Factories, offices, studios, workshops, laboratories, are enclosures where people work.
  • People also need such enclosures as stadia, auditoria, restaurants, art galleries, discotheques, dance halls, temples, gompaas, churches, mosques and synagogues for the fulfillment of their cultural, social and emotional needs.
  • Mausoleums such the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal even ensure (supposedly) immortal life after death.
Enclosure problems just do not have a one-time solution. Place and era specific solutions often cause problems elsewhere and in else time.

Apr 29, 2007

Natural resonance of the spoken word

I've always found I have a greater affinity and engagement when I listen to a sentence spoken by a person than reading it as text.

Sounds, Voices and music are sources of natural resonance.

Most of us do internally voice what we read to get at the resonance. That helps, too but in that there this subtle ego-investment.

Apr 28, 2007

Sanskrit selected by NASA as best language

A recent NASA project investigated a corpus of 150 human-computer languages to find Sanskrit the most appropriate as the mediating language for cyber-human interfacing. NASA researcher Rick Briggs says on , "(T)here is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one“.

More expansively supportive of this, is Vyaas Houston's essay, Sanskrit and the Technological Age

NASA's theoretical finding is backed up by experience, I will share one example. I know a U.S. born-raised and resident linguist whose first language until college was English. Before he came across the above "life-changing" NASA report, he was an IT consultant-professional. Upon understanding the implications of the NASA report, this far-seeing visionary and global-patriot, who had studied postgraduate Sanskrit at Columbia U, switched to teaching the language to U.S. corporations. Commenting on his bilingualized mind, he had, in paraphrase, once said that after (using) Sanskrit, “coming back to English felt like walking in sludge".

Greek Pres. Greets Indian Pres. in Sanskrit

April 27, 2007 10:23 IST: It was a pleasant surprise for President A P J Abdul Kalam when his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias greeted him in Sanskrit at the banquet ceremony hosted in honour of the visiting dignitary. Read more...
I think it's a Big Day for the world moving in the direction of what NASA found years and years ago, viz., that Sanskrit is the most appropriate language for global as well as cyber discourse.
Perhpas a Mark Shuttleworth or a Nicholas Negroponte will smell a purpose in this direction, or maybe, a Steve Jobs or even a Bill Gates will smell money in this.
Bringing Sanskrit to the children of the world as their main language after their native one is, in my opinion, the single notable service our generation can do for the future - aside, of course, putting the Humpty "climate" Dumpty on the wall. Maybe, there's link between the two that only I am accursed to see.

Apr 27, 2007

Where “Good Morning” came from

Here is my theory of where “Good Morning” came from:

In the desert, out on the west coast of India, one of the standard morning greetings, in translation, used to be, "Have you had a good breakfast?" The words used, with a questioning sound were "gûr-mäni?" Gûr is the common north Indian word for jaggery. Mäni is a pita-type of coarse patted, flatbread made from pearl millet, or bäjrä that is made on a low fire. My theory is the English "Good Morning" comes from “gûr-mäni" and never mind what the lexicographers, and language-historians of English say. What do they know any way?

IMC - The Indian Middle Class

The European genesis and evolution of "Middle Class" is generally well understood. But the transfer, acceptance and currency of this nomenclature to the intellectual discourse in cultures peripherally affected by Europe’s industrial hysteria have created cognitive confusion. In China, an exception-instance, the phrase is discouraged. There, they speak of the "Middle Stratum". But like the water hyacinth, this semiotic import is ‘core-valued’ as a ‘given’ in most Indian societal analyses [ii].

As one, by comparison, fortuitously born and school-educated in an economically-advantaged environment, I have, to get my bearings here in India, had to do a fair bit of thinking on the IMC-phrase. Most of my real thinking has found expression in Hindi. It is not the size of a learned tome but a monograph. What follows is a best-effort English rendering of my thoughts.

I find that when applied to a group of people here in India, the IMC-phrase appears little more than a convenient, but inappropriate, cosmetic that attempts to make a very old exploitative situation appear politically correct and palatably contemporary.

Since it’s often used in India as a synonym for westernization/industrialization/modernization, an intellectually brilliant clarification that uses a more accurate phrase, 'the westoxicated', instead of ‘the IMC’, is noteworthy [iii]. Sadly, no remedies are therein speculated upon, or offered.

I see the IMC as both the problem and - under possible appropriate reorientation - an exemplary means to the solution. It is a problem because most of its social participation is phony and its 'productivity', not only a fake, but shamefully exploitative and immensely resource-draining.

A highlighting-digression on post-1947 Indian governance that enables IMC-members unprecedented security, near-absolute unaccountability and blatant dominance, regardless of the superficial democratic processes, will aid understand the two examples [iv] cited herewith. The present Indian constitution, for instance, can be characterized as entirely by, of, and for the IMC Bäbûcracy.

Before 1947 – when, on the sub-continent, there were 500+ kingdoms that had been brought under the British heel - the survive-&-thrive strategy of most IMC-networks was comparable to that of the outlaw power-structure that operated globally under different names [v]: (a) Disguise under convenient labels; and (b) Subvert the local power systems by all possible means. This ‘voluntary vassalage’ and compliant complicity in exploitation, enabled them to retain their hierarchical positions that had first been created by distorting and corrupting the caste-system [vi].

This remarkably-consistent-over-eons, chameleon-like felicity of the IMC to get in phase with the dominant elements in the social matrix has no parallel. Day before yesterday, IMC spoke Sanskrit; yesterday, to please its Mogul masters, it learnt Persian and Arabic. Until WW-II, it was the Queen’s English’s ‘received pronunciation’. Today, IMC call-center-jobbers train for the California accent.

A unique feature of this is that while, in comparison, the attempt to interpret Christianity to validate racism, slavery etc. finally lost much of its steam, in India Hinduism was most successfully and thoroughly corrupted to get religious sanction for behavior that is different only in name.

For example, socio-religious divisions based on work and position in life - and not birth - were made to take a U turn to make the reverse sanctified and acceptable.

Hindu thought anthropomorphizes everything into an organic whole system, be it the Universe, the solar system, the earth and its species of life, including human groups. The "head", "arms" “torso" and "feet" are called 'varña' - a Sanskrit word with nine other meanings and fifty-eight derivatives [vii]. Varñäshrama Dharma is a dynamically holistic Hindû way of social organization.

Few today know that the 'caste-system', or Jäti-prathä, originates in skills-grouping. Without contradiction, I have speculated that the birth-related 'Jä’ in 'Jäti' is a misheard-corruption of a similar sounding knowledge-related syllable, spelt variously as ‘jnä/gnä/gya/’ in the Roman script. In Gûjerät, for instance, people still ask for your ‘Gnäti’ [a collective noun for ‘Gnäta(s)’, meaning ‘(which) skills-community (do you belong to)?’ The answer can be ‘cobbler/goldsmith/carpenter etc).

While many, including Mahätmä Gändhi, tried to exorcise the aberrant, by-birth-determined caste-system from the collective Hindû mind, enduring, broad-based success still eludes. This pernicious anachronism is now rolling back under increased global connectivity. Perhaps, what is still missing is the theoretical knockout that I have alluded to in the previous paragraph. I am reconciled that the transformation is Kabuki and not cataclysmic.


____________________________________________

[ii] This is because Indian intellectuals, while they superficially but perpetually maintain a mutually-bickering mode, are more pliant, less discriminating, ingratiating even, to the external influence of received wisdom. In a perverted way, they are proud of being aliens to their own land and culture.

[iii] Extract from a January 2000 Times of India Edit Page Dipänkar Gûpta essay titled < 'Westoxication' Syndrome> in which he credits Iranian intellectual Jaläl-älé-Ahmed for coining and bringing this word into popular intellectual use. Mr. Gûpta says, and I Quote:
["Unlike westernization which implies the establishment of universalistic norms and the privileging of achievement over birth, westoxication is the superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West.....Westoxicated people are not westernized in the true sense of the word at all. They use their privileges of birth, their superior access to wealth and power to flaunt their social distance from the rest. The places the Westoxicated inhabit and the lifestyles they exhibit are alien from what the majority are familiar with.....When people complain against westernization what they often fail to realize is that they are actually railing against westoxication….As the distinction between westoxication and westernization are not kept alive, the hearts of the liberals go out to the westoxicated whenever they are under attack. This only legitimizes on a larger scale the ideological pronouncements of fundamentalists and communalists. As a result the optical illusion that merges westoxication with westernization gets disseminated on an even wider-scale. This allows the westoxicated, too, to take refuge under the skein of secularism and modernization which only does true westernization more harm than good. Secularism appears as a shibboleth and a cover for the westoxicated. There is always the possibility that those against the westoxicated, need not always be communal or fundamentalist in their orientation. Yet the way….liberals line up behind the westoxicated tempts others to forsake the high ideological achievements of true modernization and westernization….India has been lucky because democracy has taken the edge off the mass anger that the westoxicaed usually succeed in generating (elsewhere).]

[iv] Per the Sept 24/04 Times of India item on p. 04 the Orissa government's PR department disburses Rs. 90,000,000/= as staff-salaries out of its total annual budgetary allocation of Rs. 110,000,000/=. Per an item in the Sept 29/04 The Hindu on p. 10, fourteen departments and 260 signatures are involved before flowers can be exported out of India.

[v] as ‘the East India Company’, the ‘British Empire’, ‘the United States of America’ and recently, under the leadership of George W, Bush, as ‘the Coalition of the Willing’.

[vi] This had become endemic at least 2000 + years ago. The most notable effort to remove these interpretative distortions was made by Krishna, who, today is deified more as an avatär than as an always-relevant preceptor. The followers of the Bûddha, who held sway over the subcontinent by their alliance with power - a condition similar to the alliance of the Church and the fiefdoms in Europe - threw the baby with the bathwater and, under the guise of nihilism, became so hedonistic and corrupt that it took an uprising to extirpate Buddhism out of India; but only after the best of its precepts were planted outside in Asia. This was quickly followed by the Moguls and British periods.
[vii] Thus in a human society, knowledge-workers(Brähmins), are identified as the 'head', security-personnel* (Kshatriya) are the 'arms', entrepreneurs(Vaishya) are the 'torso' while the utility-providers(Shûdra) are the 'feet'. Similarly, the various social positions in life were called 'äshrama'. Children and youth, busy with various explorations, are said to be in Brahmachayäshrama. The family-householders are in the Grihasthäshrama. When their children have grown and married to enter this äshrama in the joint family, their middle-aged parents are freed from their house-keeping responsibilities, to enter the Vanaprasthäshrama, where the activities’-focus of these 'elders' is the community and its relationships to other communities. Finally, those that can amongst the old (above 75), enter the Sanyäsäshrama, while the infirm and the sick are looked after within the joint family with ample help from the community. This self-disciplining, dynamic combination 'Varñäshrama' way of social life is one of the bedrocks of Hindû Dharma, which also has another name that would roughly translate as “The Eternal Code of Conduct”. It hardly needed any external 'governance' because it created self-regulating, lateral-vertical omni-syntegral connections in the social community whereby each person knew what his/her social role and obligations were.

The Fruit of Patience is always sweeter

I think there is such a thing as "Heat hibernation" Yes, that's it, I am hibernating.


It has been three days and I still cannot access this blog (a friend is posting this).

I brought this up with my mother, she said, "Son, how many times do I hae to tell you before I die that the fruit of patience is always sweeter. "

I said, "You don't understand. This a blog, they don't grow on trees"

She says sweetly "Makes no difference. The Fruit of patience is always sweeter. "

"But they are not fruit".

"If they are not fruit, why are you upsetting yourself, " she says.

I wish she were George W Bush's Mom. She'd've straightened him faster than you can open a jiffy bag.

Apr 25, 2007

Life as the cosmic converter

As wavelengths go, those which give us colored photons are small fry. Why should they be accorded the honor being a constancy?

I take mass and 'boil' it and 'boil' it. What gets boiled off of the mass is its hyper-excited version. Energy is hyper-excited mass. What causes it to 'cool' off and become 'storable' mass again? Is there a cosmic converter we don't know anything about?

On this planet we see Life acting as a converter. Even here, we don't see Life per se. We get to see it in various 'living' and 'dying' forms - seed to fruit and back to seed; chicken and egg and then back to egg on and on. Is this Life's 'Alternating current' - AC DC AC DC on and on?

These Life forms here loop mass-elements - carbon and the other minerals - and certain energy-wave lengths through them. Leaves convert light, make wood which then burns to release wave lengths of light and heat. This is the extent of our experience.

Surely, there would be Life somewhere that loops and processes other wavelengths. Imagine a wood that gathers radioactive radiations and releases gamma rays when 'burnt'. Can its forms be organized to do so here? Can we make living fuel-cells from these forms? Organic energy storage devices vastly efficient than the ones we make of lead plates and nickel and cadmium. Can we grow and pluck these energy-'fruits' and ''feed" them to our robots and machines?

Can we 'grow' shelter shells to dwell in - chemically sensitive 'living' struts-scaffolding that pick up nutrients from base-troughs to grow 'web- &-skin" that not only takes care of power and HVAC needs but is able to sense and repair damage and is also programmed to be safely biodegradable?

Updating Yahweh: Tetragrammaton Musings

Working with my Jewish friends leads me to muse about the Jewish name for God, Yahveh.

Of course, "Tetragrammaton" - Tetra_gram, resembles "Chaturaanaana", the four-faced name of Krshna.

In reduced form Yahveh is Ya (not yaa) and Vaa (yes vaa) and means, in Sanskrit, "This & That". When you put them together to make a word you integrate their meanings, Interestingly Tat and asi, That tvam (Thou) also have a corresponedence with the former group 'asi,', in Tat tvam asi, is 'is/are' Thou are That as rendered in English. Thus Yehveh can only be 'Yaweh' if it includes you and everything else....

The thing started as a joke: I wondered whether "Up Yours" had been registered as a domain name--upyours.com--if not could any advantage be taken of it... So how about "U-Y.com". but this would be tacky...Mngling and intertwining with this thought had been an interpretation of Krishna Geetaa which in nearly so many words allows you to "customize" God. Bucky Fuller's book, "No More Secondhand God" and his "Ever rethinking the Lord's prayer" -- So one way to kill the hatred/fervor amongst the 'relgious' would be a Wiki version for God that would by "U-Y.edu" and the letters then can stand for Updating Yahweh" Loopy,indeed...

Children of earth, rant Against "W"

I find having to look and read anything in the nonphonetic Roman script on a day in day out basis brings up strong aggressive resistence and repulsion. "Why do I have to stand this nonsense?", a voice inside keeps asking, "This is voodoo script. Who wants to keep deciphering this to figure out that the person is greeting you and not wishing you to go to hell?" Am I dumb that I can't make out which word and meaning is meant when I hear it? Why does English have write, right, rite, wright with all these variations Does it make sense to remember not to write "r-i-t-e" or "w-r-i-g-h-t," right? I omit to mention that I in this screed stands for all the children of the earth, bar none, who have to cope with nonphonetic scripts that exhibit no pattern of any kind from the word go.

What is 'w' -- "dubble yoo" -- doing there? It has a 'd' an 'l', a'y' and an 'oo in it; so can it become a single letter? If it is to be voiced 'hvva' why not call it that ? More important, why can't people find the energy to fight the inertia on this.

There is some hope. I remember listening on Radio Netherlands to a Canadian woman who did some work in this regard... Here is her name and that of the book she wrote from Amazon: "Vexed Texts: How Children's Picture Books Promote Illiteracy by Pamela Protheroe (Paperback - 1992)"

For lasting Peace in the Middle East

How 4 can prevail over 10 for lasting peace in the Middle-East,
or OPEC vs WECOL

– A 139-word tribute to Yasser Arafat –

A leader, re-elected last week, has a 10-word mantra: If you are not with us, you are against us. Also recently re-elected is the leader of a country that was 'settled' by European convict-descendents.  A small island-nation with a criminal rap-sheet longer than any in known history, goaded and allied itself to the actions that coalition-mantra initiated.

For heritage and history, these three have fictional inventions. It is, therefore, appropriate to devise the acronym WECOL (Where English is the Country's Official language) to identify them and their lesser accomplices.

As a fitting homage to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat, the 4-word mantra of OPEC (the Arab-led organization of petroleum-exporting countires and its friends elsewhere, should now be: NO PALESTINE, NO OIL.

This would be an act of courage for Peace, above that of Osama bin-Laden's miguided men.

Apr 24, 2007

The day humans... won't need God

"The day humans will make the sky a skin they can wrap around themselves, will be the day when they won't need God"

- Sanskrit Shloka in ShvetaasvarOpanishaad

Sanskaar

Popular derivative resonances of the word Sanskrit that you may not have had a chance to be familiar with:

Sanskaar - value, as in family/cultural values, habits parents inculcate in children. Opposite is Ku-sanskaar

PraSanskaran - Increasingly used these days for processing or "value adding" natural products into marketable ones - Thus processed food would be "prasanskrit khaaddya"

Apa-Sanskriti - Opposite of Sanskriti, usually meaning "Culture/heritage/tradition etc" the word is often used to mean the consumerist-hedonistic influences of the west

Trees, seven thoughts

TREE - I
As the river
So the tree
Apparently they're skewed
One sideways, the other
'Up' and 'down'
But look again
The branches form the delta
and roots are the rivulets of
'Origin'
The Tree - a vertical river
And the river - a horizontal tree
The drop and the leaf
they look the same
Multiply, therefore by dividing
In this biology and the Veda agree

(If you wish, on Google search type "vedic+mathematics" and see what you get. Too bad, Bucky was most probably not introduced to it. I recall it was 'rediscovered' sometime in the early fifties of the last century - and took its time to get around because, at the time and exceptions apart, most 'mainstream' MDPs discounted 'wisdom' from the 'east' - and the 'east' had been trodden upon and dispossed - and forgotten its 'orientation' too, - and were kind of reinventing the wheel, going through weaponry to livingry.)

TREE-II
Some years ago, National Geographic had a piece about botanists who decided they wanted to study the forest canopy, which is where the 'action' is. So they had themselves dropped on the canopy from helicopter for which they had to devise a large netted hexagon of a radius that would encompass several tree crowns and they had little tents they would crawl into at night. And what was the first thing they noticed? A non-stop water spray. The trees were pulling the water up to the topmost leaves and they were kind of spraying the excess out. The botanists loved it and for six months they learnt to work in that 'clammy' feeling.

Tree-III
The Arid Zone Research Institue in Rajasthan has invented a 'double' pot which needs water every fifteen days. That invention became necessary because conventional sprinkling doesn't work. The air is so dry it plays 'uncle' and takes up the water before it can percolate to the roots and get sucked in. The outside of the outer pot is tarred and its pores sealed so the air can't get to the water which is between the 3" gap between the walls. This gap is covered by a plastic ring so the air can't get to it. The waer then is sucked by the plant through the pores of the inner pot. They discovered that the plant doesn't need a shower of water sprinkled from the top. All it needs is for the earth to be damp.

Tree IV

A single, large emergent forest tree pumps some 200 gallons of water per day into the atmospere. Through this process, one acre of tropical rain forest releases 20,000 gallons of water into the atmosphere daily for cloud formation. That's twenty times the amount the sea contributes through evaporation for the same surface area.

Tree V

Q. Why are most Hindoos vegetarian?
A. Per one of the ways they have understood their heritage, there's a link between drought and meat eating. This was thought to be bizarre - until they did some research to find out what has caused the Great Brown Spot on the Australian continent - an area so dry and large that,even today, most humans live on the fringes of the continent, near the oceans.
It turns out that until about 10,000 years ago, Australia was, like India, annually visited by monsoonal winds. So first the slash and burn farming cut down the trees and the place became grassy that would survive the summer by becoming tumble weed. Then the Europeans can and brought their plants and started the wool business in a big way. The grazing sheep would cut down the life span of the grass even shorter. Researchers at Cornell found out that the dying/killed plants were somehow able to send out pheromones that signalled "We are going. We won't need water any more." And the winds got the message and the monsoons stopped visiting Australia. There was no one there to pull them in!


Tree VI
Every year when green things inhale carbon to put out buds, shoots, leaves and stems, the biosphere inhales. When the leaves fall and molder on the ground, the biosphere exhales. It is one of the most beautiful, regular and global of all cycles in nature.
If you pause to listen, you can hear the breathing of the forest; and if you pause deeper, you can feel the breathing of the planet. A forest takes one breath a day. The planet takes one breath a year.

Tree VII
Then.. he told them about the Earth Woman. He madethem imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred millions old - was a forty-six-year-old woman - as old, say, Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was, For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chako said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared (Vyom says - Note the coincidence in age). The first animals, creatures like worms and jelly fish, appeared only when she was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

'The whole of human civilzation as we no it,' he said, 'began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life. As long as it takes us to to drive from Ayemeneem to Cochin.'

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chaco said, the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, kiterature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.

'And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be - are just a twinkle in her eye' he said grandly".... Arundhati Roy in

Avatär, Mahpûrûsh, Sajjan or Dûrjan?

Four easy criteria that decide whether you are an Avatär, a Mahpûrûsh, a Sajjan or a Dûrjan.
If you take little but give you're #1,
If you take a little but give more you're #2,
If you're giving and taking is about equal you're #3
But if you take more and give little you're #4.

WWW: Wine Women and Wantonness

The White Man strikes Asia again with the Internet! We're snared in the World Wide Web.

A local wag said WWW stood for Wine Women and Wantonness.

Never a moment for contemplative meditation! This is what will cause the downfall of the Hindoos!

Phonetic English - A horse designed by a committee


Scripts are believed to have evolved from pictographs. Some scripts, like the Chinese script, for instance, are still pictorial. Over time obtaining information via these scripts subtly creates viewing habits in the human mind. These scripts, which are visual cues for sounds, dicscipline and, in some cases, even prejudice our conduct. The habit these scripts impose on us, in turn, subtly inform and influence our perspectives, relationships, and behavior.

As there was no one like Panini to order and organize the alphabet of the Abrahamic languages - which was adopted by the Roman, mainly their monks in the Roman Catholic Church. The Church lots of power over the affairs of people who lived beyond the borders of present day Italy and, as a result, their script came to be used for all the languages in Eurpoe.

The Indic languages - spoken in most of Asia except
the Oriental countries like China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia - are generally believed to be more ancient
the Abrahamic and European languages. They did experiemnted a lot in creating scripts and you can see that a large country like ours, which in many ways, comparable to the whole of Europe, has many scripts - Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali and so on. At a fortunate point in time we had Panini, who organized the alphabet and Grammar of the parent language, Sanskrit, so well that, although our scripts are different, all of us use the same alphabet and grammar.

One of the things he did was create a vowel system that made all these Indic scripts phonetic. In a stroke of genius,
when these vowels were attached to consonents, a set of marks, or maatraas, around them told you how to pronounce it. As an example, in having to write 'ko' in the Roman script you need to write the 'k' and, next to it, the vowel ''o'. But if you were to to do this in the Devnaagari script you simply add the maatraa of the vowel 'O'.

When you read words in the non-phonetic Roman
script, part of your mind is busy acessing your 'pronouncing archive' so that when you have
deciphered the spelling by looking at group of the vowels and consonents in front of you and figure out how to pronounce it. In this situation of having to use up some resources to access the memory of the sound of the word you are forced to minimize your attention on what is in front of you. If you stop to notice you will find that in reading English words in Roman script you pay more attention to the first few letters of the word and surmise the rest from context. If the first few letters are' journ' you will surmise from context that the others are either 'ey' or 'al.' You will not really look at them. This is true of wording ending in 'tion' or 'ing' and you seldom 'see' them but surmise from context. I call this habit, 'the skipping mind' because, our attention is, like a flat stone thrown horizontally over a pond, will skip over its surface - i.e. make only brief contacts with it - a few times before it sinks.

You can now see that by limiting yourself to the habit using the Roman script you invite a perceptible loss of acuity and sensitivity in perception and unsustained attention during a relationship event.

In the case of the Devnaagari script, you do not have
to go to your memory bank to find out how a particular group of letters has to be pronounced because the script is phonetic. So this frees up your mind to 'see' what is in front of you. Furthermore, as the maatraas surround the consonent, you have to first look at it, and then around it, for them. In this situation the mind is developing the habit of focusing on the central core and then on its periphery. Instead of the 'skipping mind' you have a mind that is always in balanced contact with what is in front of you.

One reason, why people from India are perceived to be 'smart' and 'brainy' is the way they relate to their scripts and the habits they acquire in doing so.

While we are certainly One-up in our alphabet, grammar and our script, we have to understand that, as bad money chases the good money out of the market, the perceived dominance of English, the Abrahamic alphabet and the Roman script today, is something need not be slaves to. Indians are lucky to have what they have, thanks to their forbears. But they will be pitiable if they will let it go for a
short-term advantage. If I were a dictator, I would say, "Learn and use English, its A,B,C,D, and its
nonphonetic script which burdens you with having to memorize the spellings of thousands of words, by all means, if you have to get ahead, BUT ONLY if you do not give up what is not only yours, but, in comparison, far superior.

Rämdév - the potential to be a true holy man

Rämdév - a homegrown phenomenon here in India.

This post was building steam since yesterday.

You must have gathered by now that not many "holy men" cross the bar I set for them. Rajneesh/Osho, the Iskon man Prabhupaada, Transcedental meditator Mahesh Yogi - they don't make it even though they do have many plus points. Sadly, too, the Relativity man, Einstein, is also in this group.

I look for a thought & action balance that resonates with me. Yes, I know this to be the conceit of a lesser man.

Despite his lack of scriptural erudition, Mahätmä Gäñdhi did achieve that balance spectacularly. And inspite of it, so did Shäshtri Pändûranga Åthävalé. I would bracket Bucky Fuller as "holy", too, but I am afraid my Bucky friends would object.

Today I have chosen to talk a bit about some one who shows the potential to be "holy" by my lights. His name is Rämdév.

He has been on my radar these 5-6 years as a Yoga teacher. He has become the darling of the Indian establishment, the middle-class especially, the non-anglophilic ones He is controversial and takes on the high and mighty. He keeps a respectful distance from the RSS. His local devotees have presented me with his Yoga CDs and they are okay - in fact impressive No highbrow bullshit. No marketing gimmick.

Last month I heard him on BBC-Hindi and liked the way he is shaping up. Bold, fearless, simple, rustic even. I heard him out twice to get a better sense of his soul.He now has funds and followers and this where things can go awry. But there was this picture in a newspaper recently showing him donating blood and telling everyone, it is good for you. So, I expect the blood banks will be inundated. Or, someone might set up a Rämdév Blood bank operation.

I haven't checked out Google links to Ramdev, but I picked up a magazine that was lying around with my mother's things. It's the December issue of a Hindi monthly put out by Rämdév's people. It's first article is 5 pages long devoted to the pomegranate . This is followed by a page long commentary-continuation on one of the Upanishads. A refreshing and unusual prioritization and juxtaposition! The other details that grabbed my attention are the name of the magazine Yôg Sandesh Editor Acharya Balkrishna
www.divyayoga.com divyayoga@rediffmail.com
Printers & Distributors gulshanrai@diamondcomic.com


On page 17 - they count from the front cover - there's a list of 19 items you can order and I shall mention here 3-4 that are available in English.
#1 Präñäyäm Rahasya Rs 50/= (13 languages incl. Eng)
#2 Yôg Sädhanä va Yôg Chikitsa Rahasya 125/= (ditto)
#3 Aushadh Darshan Rs. 30/= (10 languages incl Eng.)
#18 Video CD Yôg Sädhanä Rs 110/= (Eng.Version)
#DVD Yôg Vijñyän 1 & 2 Rs 199/= (Lang. not specified)
Aside from these there are audio cassettes, charts and literature. Shipping's extra.

Now,I have this quixotic plan: Rämdév has not only the Indian middle class - India's problem and potential solution, perhaps impacting significantly on the whole world - by its balls*, as it were, but has seriously taken on the big pharmaceutical companies and the Indian ministries fronting for them**. I like this fighter.

Early on in my Mass Housing Maya essay*** - or was it the Inside Outside article? - I had spoken of the enclosure problem as the "taproot" of all the other basic problems of human kind.

Rämdév is not aware of the Bucky idea of "reforming the environment" to 'reform/change' human habits/behavior. And if this could be done he'd do more for health and education*** - the former is his pet theme - than all the berbs and Yôgäsanas put together. Can this be done? Can this be even contemplated and considered?

Maybe.. yes but.. we don't know if it'll get us anywhere... But there is this thing about the Indian Middle class. It is obsessively impressed by outsiders, especially, of the white, Ennglish-speaking variety with U S U K connections.

War President

Bush proudly says he's a War president... It's a little like saying "I am a Syphillis President"

Wisdom and Weap


I like that Sanskrit calls weapons 'shashtra' and wisdom/scriture/knowledge etc "Shaashtra". The resonance is terrific and onomatopaic shhhhh but also as always 'tra'.

I spent the better part of the last hour making it presentable to 'western' eyes and the result is the attachment titled "wisdom & weapons".

About the latter, one of the meanings in the dictionary is "there are eighteen of them...names.. in which the sages have shown the actions and duties that are of benefit".... Then there is the unusual use of the word shaapa. Usually it means a curse but heer it means the "power of knowledge" (perhaps, to cause mental anguish/pain")

The second, green+highlight part says, in the vedas instruct thta "youth is worthy of a bow"; and the upanishads have this litany of attributes that deserve to be called youthful


-Everything always takes me back to Sanskrit. I like it. Then almost everything needs to me to render it in English in keyboard script. I hate that part.

IOU: Information, Outformation, Useformation

IOU: Information, Outformation, Useformation

The formations must enter equilibrium; a tri-quilibrium, if you will.

This IOU Triquilibrium (Information-Outformation-Useformation) is not yet globally concepted or locally implemented.

The World-Bank-admitted Global Disparity Ratio, revised by the Brookings Institution at an unsustainable 135:1, evidences this.

Perhaps NIŞTHÄ can catalyze triquilibrium-customizations within the afore-identified Triangle and beyond.

Planning is essential, plans are useless

“Planning is essential, plans are useless.”- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I would modify his words a bit, and change it to,

“Making an effort is essential, but effort is useless.”

Or attempting achievement is essential, but achievement is useless. We are doing creatures, we keep doing and doing; sometimes it appears that things have succeeded, and people applaud, but anyone who has achieved knows that there is so much more and better that can be done; very seldom are we satisfied with the effort that has been perceived as successful.

Westoxified

Westoxified: The state of being intoxicated with Western ways, to the detriment of other, local, more life giving and healthy ways.

I got lice in my hair

During an interview in his native Bengali
The sitarist Ravishankar was asked,
“What makes you so creative?
How can you keep on composing new Raagas?”
And in his answer whose force can ony be understood in Bengali,
the master said, “Maathaay poka achchey”
(Translation:- I got lice in my hair. meaning they keep me scratching all the time)

The energy used to strike a typewriter key

The energy used to strike a typewriter key is 20 millijoules, a millijoule being one watt per second taken to 10 to the negative 3rd power; that keyboard-striking energy is a full order of magnitude larger than the energy a flea expends in hopping from one spot to another.

- Vaclav Smil in Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization

When there’s “cycle” there is no “Michael”

I struggled with my computer today, as usual, and that brought to mind this song:

When there’s “cycle” (Net-connectivity) there is no “Michael” (power) and when there is Michael, there is no cycle.

- Bollywood song

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

Worship is connectivity

The word for ‘worship’ is ‘bhakti’ which means ‘achieving connectivity.’ There is another word for connectivity ‘Yukti’ from the same root ‘Yoga’ - also really meaning combining/ connecting. Finally there is this word Shakti.

The 3R’s of oral teaching: Remember, Recall and Reflect.

The 3R’s of oral teaching: Remember, Recall and Reflect.

bhôg-yôg-rôg

There is this triad of words bhôg-yôg-rôg*.

Of these, the one in the middle becomes less unfamiliar to the ‘westerner’ as it is ’spelt’ as ‘yoga’. I hate this practice because in the effort to make the ‘o’ correctly sound as ‘ou’ as in rogue, the ‘a’ monkeys with the sound of ‘gu’ and makes it ‘ga’ as in Vôila!

Rôg (pronounced ‘rogue’) pertains to ill-health and here, it is not limited to the physical kind but to mental as well as emotional ill-health. On this, more another time.

Here, I wish to talk about Bhôg. It can mean an offering, usually of food, and relates to ‘consumption’. But in Sanskrit this word has a much wider scope than its English equivlents have.

For instance, Indreeya-bhôg (there is no hyphen) roughly means all that our five senses latch on to and receive.

Another distinction is that when they do so, with a higher intent in mind, the activity gets a different word Yajña. A simple illustration would explain this easily. If you are drinking and eating with the intent of quenching your thirst or appetite it is bhôg; when the arrow of intent points to something loftier (e.g. one’s spiritual evolution and development) then it is Yajña. (This word is now in a hopeless ritualistic situation in India).

In the current issue of the slim and affordable ‘Tatvadeep’ monthly that I subsribe to (its the only print material I pay for), Shäshtri Pändûranga Åthävalé has taken up ShlKrþñaGeetä, chapter 4 (29-32) and he explains that after your senses have been employed for a higher purpose, the Véda allow their use for self-pleasure or bhôg. He says, over time, when people forgot this ‘protocol’ and used their senses only for pleasuring themselves, dharimic-reactionaries rose to castigate this and said you are not allowed to do anything that pleasures your body because this can make your senses go wild. Shäshtri-ji cites the Bûddha, and the 24th Jain tirthankar, Mahäveer, as two the two famous reactionaries.; and he boldly says, “This is not Tatvajñäna (Essential Wisdom)
He adds that Bûddha and many other faiths, ask you not to get married. This is contrary to the Hindoo/Sanätana/Védic teachings.

——————-

*For some ‘ancient’ reason, while writing them in the Roman script many people add an ‘a’ at the end of these and many other words. The practice may be a nod to the requirement that the last consonant needs a vowel so that you can voice it. When there are no specifying vowls all consonants are assumed to have the ‘u’ sound as in ‘but’. But if it is the last letter in a word most people tend to pronounce it as ‘u’ in ‘put’. While ‘a’ at the end tends to have the sound as in ‘far’ its use may have been seen as the lesser evil.

The Owl of Minerva

Hegel is saying that death is the great clarifier. We only come to grasp an historical epoch or a form of consciousness retrospectively, when it is over and finished.

“The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

- G.W.F. Hegel, preface to The Philosophy of Right.

We think forward but understand backward

We think forward but understand backward.

- Louis O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 18. Quoted by Joseph M. Felser in “After the Revolution, or, Paradigms Lost: Outsiders, Anomalies, and the Future of ‘Forbidden Science’.”

The greatest poem ever known

I like to quote the first and last verses of this by Christopher Morley:

The greatest poem ever known / Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold / Of being only four years old….
And Life, that sets all things in rhyme, / May make you poet, too, in time–
But there were days, O tender elf, / When you were Poetry itself!

The full version below…

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature’s great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee-

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life’s queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange Divinity still kept.

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
May make you poet, too, in time–
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were Poetry itself!

If all good people were clever

If all good people were clever, and all clever people were good
The world would be better than ever, we thought it possibly could.
But somehow ‘tis seldom or never, that the two hit it off together
For the good are so harsh to the clever, & the clever so rude to the good.

– Elizabeth Wordsworth

I own a company

I ‘own’ a company where the boss and its single employee are the same person.Life is easy for the boss because ‘he’ can always keep an eye on the employee without having to install fancy survelliance equipment.

But for the employee life ain’t easy at all. ‘He’ feels ‘he’s working for a slave driver - no pay, no perks, no weekends or regular working hours. Of course, the employee can go AWOL, or be tardy. But remember ‘he’ is the boss, too!

It’s a hell of a company which makes no profit because it never makes a sale. All it does is turn over all its turnover - give its products away for free.
It only has ‘overheads’. How can anyone make any money with such a business model?

You’d think this company would go out of business tomorrow morning. The problem is that both the boss and employee are happy in their roles. One does the thinking, the other is responsible for implementing. They are both so busy there’s no one to keep the ledgers, do the book-keeping - or hire lawyers.

On -ject

What is this English phoneme -ject?

-ject tagged after everything it could lay it hands on.

  • There is only One, all inclusive Subject. And it’s all-inclusive nature means there are no objects left to object to this One Subject being the all inclusive Subject.
  • Any other who tries becomes abject and then becomes a reject.
  • Then the One Subject injects a little bit of One subject into the reject and includes this hitherto abject who was objecting into the One all inclusive omni Subject.

On Tolerance

If you grew up, live in and/or are connected to places where flora and fauna thrive, you will be more happy and tolerant than if you grew up playing video-games and, as adult, spent your time operating keys, switches, knobs and buttons.

This planet, Earth, is mostly biochemical, with a dash of gravity and magnetism thrown in for “seasoning”. Living creatures have to spend millions of years to evolve and adapt to it. Imposing faster, electromechanical rhythms on this planet stresses this complex web of mutually-supportive, variegated Life.

In turn, they begin to consume more than is good for them because they become insecure, aggressive, intolerant, competitive and destructive.

Species far more ignorant and indolent than us survive and thrive easily on Earth.

Not ignorance but an imbalanced activism, which even our simian cousins cannot match, is our problem…

“Teaching the Facts Of Life in a Changing World” to those BORN alive and kicking - is, if not phoney and foolish, but also facetious and false.

It is true, the land, air and oceans of Earth have been - courtesy of human hyperactivity - badly bruised; but its poles, axis, spin and orbit are as yet untampered.

We are threatened not so much by the multiplying poor - warmongers and the forces of Market Capitalism leave them little else to do, besides twiddle their toes - but by the misdirected electro-mechanical hyperactivity of (essentially greedy) intellectual and educated fools who, due mostly to self-generated stress, can seldom even claim to have clean bowels and bladders!

To make tolerance a key word - and a deed - in the 21st century, we must create and live with our children in an environment that is able to balance its biochemical* and its electromechanical constituents.

If, with our machines, we persist in our hostility to Earth, we will make it progressively less welcome and hospitable to our species; we could then either face slow or rapid obliteration, or, under a delusional sense of self-glory, try to run out into the irradiated blackness of Space, where, in its mind-boggling loneliness, some of us might try to create a world of our own smart folly.

Wouldn’t that be a little like Adam and Eve falling from Paradise all over again?
———
*Includes biomechanicals - all mobile avian, marine and terrestrial life. All its motions arise from biochemical activity in its ‘musculature’.

The need for Namastu Vastu

Unlike English and the other ‘modern’ languages, the beauty of Sanskrit is that, with intelligent and patient practice, one can navigate to new shores of meaning without the help of a dictionary. This Paper on conventional beliefs, myths and Västû, begins with an etymological deconstruction of the word that should open the door to revisit, possibly meditate upon, and reinterpret the basics.

When it is now possible to build cities floating on the sea, or in the air, Västû Vidyä remains encrusted with many myths and dissonances. How must it be approached, understood, taught and practiced today? In a world where geostationary space-stations and interplanetary human travel are feasible, where astronauts routinely see 16 sunrises and sunsets in 24 hours, where kits are available to make houses that can revolve 300o, what do the words ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘east’ and ‘west’ really mean? Can there be directions that can really be called ‘up’ and ‘down’?

Despite overwhelming and conclusive proof to the contrary, Euclidian and Västû myths persist - and are propagated blithely to the next generation - about what really a point, a line, a plane or a solid is. Is Västû limited to just one hemisphere? Hoary axioms ought to be periodically re-checked; if necessary, recalibrated, revised; and, if desirable and useful, reintroduced to our young through innovated syllabi.

With the brief and preferred deconstruction – followed by a few comments that the scope of this paper allows on bindû, rekhä, and piñda, - I aim to show that Västû Vidyä, when studied and practiced in a certain way can, at the very least, be spiritually liberating. Beyond serving the mundane but relevant bread-&-butter functions, a sharper focus, denser concentration and, above all, a dedicated application to the discipline, can offer its students and emagineers insights into the elegance that engulfs the Universe and an understanding that is liberating. Yä Vidyä sä vimûkteyé

OVERVIEW

Before they can become conventional beliefs and myths, thoughts establish deep, sinuous roots in the social psyche. A speculative journey - exploratory, eclectic and occasionally faltering - to them may, or may not, take one to the real beginnings of words and meanings, but it can summon up from within the understanding that asks for courage in discarding that which has been cherished and has served its timely function, but now shows itself as timed out and, therefore,inadequate.

An over-arching motivation for this essay is my affirmative and unapologetic svadéshô-bhûvanatrayam variety of matriotism. I believe India has the wherewithal to reacquire intellectual leadership of the human species. But for that preeminence to occur in the foreseeable future much that is internally Augean has to be swept and cleaned up.

In our zeal to protect our ancient-memories-&-experience-based smärt-a-ness we are insufficiently attentive to fifteen other components of the minds of our young that are inexorably getting corrupted by the detritus of a world whose organizing systems are falling apart. This is dangerously contrary to our culture. Will we succumb to those who - terrorized into vain and witless violence and exhibiting arrogant infallibility - say ‘vayam rakshämah’ to us this time? For the Hindu mind and culture, it is not enough now to survive; it must once again prevail if the Védic diktät, Kriñvantô vishvamäryam is to be obeyed.

Leaving those myths and beliefs prevailing in the design, construction and usage of human habitations and communities to those more familiar and competent in that area than I, this Paper attempts to address conventional beliefs and myths in the light of a meaning of the word ‘Västû’ that is at once more basic and holistic. As I have never been a tenured or temporary teacher anywhere, my agenda is somewhat different from mere academic kite flying.

Architects in modern India, frequently run into practitioners of Västû Vidyä. This is because both do

deal with buildings and habitations - with directional locations, orientations, inter-relationships, functions, modules, entities, components, material-use, timing and sequencing of various shapes and forms, and so on.

How these shapes, forms, angles, frequencies and magnitudes come to acquire three-dimensionally habitable and useable architectural reality - a preferred and modulated enclosure of space - is a process that, in the case of Västû Vidyä today could accept better illumination. It is clear that at a conceptual and planning level, the västûkärs and sthapatis of the past sparingly, if at all, used so-called ‘plane geometry’ that is dinned into school-age children who later become architects, draftsmen and engineers; yet what they chiseled and hewed out, sculpted and assembled in stone is awesome.

A house is one of the most easily identifiable, minimal manifestations of civilization, which word, coincidentally, shares a common etymological root with ‘civil engineering’. Ten thousand years after Civilization – allegedly, The Era of Man: The Builder – is supposed to have begun most people own a house only in their daydreams. Even as Early Man was discovering Fire and inventing the Wheel, his search for the House Beautiful had begun. And, as his perennially transient descendant-dwellers of slums and shantytowns are never allowed to forget, the search for the Enclosure Ideal is still not over.

Enclosures are so basic, it is impossible to think of fulfilling the basic rôti-kapadä-makän-shikshä-chikitsä-rozegär needs of our species without them. Grains and fertilizers need storage. Sheds and shops are required for making and selling cloth. Human families need homes. Schools and hospitals are necessary for education and medical support. Factories, offices, studios, workshops, laboratories, are enclosures where people work. People also need such enclosures as stadia, auditoria, restaurants, plazas, condominiums, art galleries, discotheques, dance halls, temples, gômpäs, churches, mosques and synagogues for the fulfillment of their commercial, cultural, social and emotional needs. Mausoleums such the Pyramids and the Täj Mahal even ensure (supposedly) immortal life after death.

Today it is more au courrant to speak of the ‘Built Environment’. But there is more – much, much more - to it than just land, brick and stone. In ways seldom discussed, much less understood, this ‘Built Eenvironment’ is able to insinutate itself into our very beings to influence our perceptions, thoughts, behaviors and even insights. In his book A Guided Tour of R. Buckminster Fuller author and professor of English literature, Hugh Kenner says, “…(Architectural analogies) locate the conditioned reflexes by which we value…virtually all human behavior and, in fact, Reality…We get our everyday language, hence our criteria, from what we understand of the visible environment, especially from what we understand to be the successful human gestures, the structures that last. But what if we have been misreading architecture…?” Maybe we, too, have been misreading - and ill-practicing - Västû Vidyä.

Humankind’s Price of Fear and what can be done if we reduced it just by 25%


Each square on the chart represents one billion U.S. dollars.

There are one thousand squares. That equals one trillion dollars that was the annual military budget of all the countries on this world in 1993.

Superimposed on these one thousand squares is a small area – approx 25% in size. This area is made up of thirteen approximate rectangles of varying sizes, each representing the amount of money and time to solve a problem that humankind faces.

Once you see problems in this perspective you immediately understand that the money that the few billions of dollars that are being asked for are negligible in comparison to what we spend for our collective fear, which, paradoxically increases the more we spend in search of a security we have yet to clearly define and understand.

If asked by a child, how would you explain our failure to act on this information?

Group Directed Quest For Knowledge

“Japan as Number One: Lessons For America” - a 7,275 word abridgment of a book of the same name - became available from the May 1981 issue of the now-discontinued U.S. magazine BOOK DIGEST. The author is Harvard University Professor of Sociology, Ezra F. Vogel. At the time he wrote the book in 1979, he was Director of the U.S.-Japan Program at Harvard.

At a time when people in the U.S.A. were “…peculiarly receptive to any explanation of Japan’s economic performance which avoid(ed) acknowledging Japan’s superior competitiveness“, Professor Vogel’s remarkable book offered a thorough and detailed comparative analysis of the the two countries, United States and Japan.



Professor Vogel, who had been annually visiting Japan during the previous two decades, found his investigations made him conclude, “Japanese success had less to do with traditional character traits, than with specific organizational structures, policy programs, and conscious planning“. He is sure and forthright when he says, “If any single factor explains Japanese success, it is their GROUP DIRECTED QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE“.

As an example, Professor Vogel points at the awesome translation-effort in post-war Japan. He says, “Since World War II, approximately one hundred fifty thousand books have been translated in Japanese. Not all of these are for conveying information, but the amount of information flowing into English is minuscule compared to that translated in Japanese“. For a relatively small country, often beset by quakes and storms, that is an astounding “batting average” of 4,000+ book-translations per year for thirty years!

Contrrast this with, say, several-times-larger India where, exceptions aside, the quest for knowledge/wisdom/realization/moksha/etc. by its arrogant Hindu elite groups, has been, contrary to the Védic tradition, ätmanômôkshärtha jagadhitäya cha - largely individualized. The number of translations even from their mother-language, Sanskrit, or, for that matter, from English, which they believe is the “international” language, is minscule. Often bound in tattered manuscripts, their efforts have been of negligible assistance to the socio-economic transformation needed even for an honest and dignified survival in harmony with their time and place on this planet.

Amongst them, those who have an understanding of Védic Gûrûkûl-Brahmacharya practices may rightfully claim a measure of pride and solace that the ‘Samasti Siddhänta’ (Vogel’s “group directed principle” taken a theoretical step further to correctly assume, as the late R. Buckminster Fuller did, that even the minimally conceivable point is always a cluster of unresolved events) had originated amongst their ancients.

This, of course, does not much alter the post-Vedic situation during which the roots of bhramañä, vikrati, shôçaña, ûtpeedaña, anasthä, and däatva went deeper and deeper to become acceptable parts of the collective social psyche, the best minds were trying to preserve the ancient wisdom by withdrawing into themselves, or, those that couldn’t do so, to the Himalayas.

A cynical observer might notice the Samasti Principle in India today operating only in group directed indolence, corruption, and a lack of social commitment to take the initiative to reverse developmental disparities in the emotional and corporeal mind-body of India.

Geodule - group housing





English is a stupid language

English is a very stupid language.

But more pertinent is the fact that those who had such a stupid language to learn as their mother tongue were able to overcame nearly all their major habitat handicaps, crossed the daunting oceans, nearly circumvented the globe and established and empire on which the Sun never set.

Of course, they were clever people who, in many ways, were - and continue to remain - stupid and muddled; people entangled and trapped in their own invention - the English language; people, for ever so busy in search of the right word that they seldom have any time left to have the right thought.

English is less a language, more a Band-Aided potpourri of diverse patois, that, in its formal structure, ends up more recondite, obfuscatory and exclusionary, the more it tries to be accurate and precise. As a communicational tool, it is like a wild horse that challenges taming. To call is a ‘ language’ of current global trade and commerce is to admit that it is less an international language, more an international harlot. It is like that law of global finance. Bad money chasing the good money out of the market.

If human speech could be analogized to the states of matter, then some languages, Sanskrit, for instance, have a solid crystalline structure; elegant and uplifting patters of sounds that reach out to express that which is beyond expression.

Others are amorphous and powdery; they have speech patterns that seldom allow anyone to deviate or digress into new territory other than set in the past; the Arabic languages could probably make good illustrations of these. Then there are languages that are like liquids with various degrees of viscosity - languages with engaging rhythms and cadences, French and Bengali, and perhaps, those spoken amongst the Mongol people - Mandarin, Tagalong, Cambodian come to mind.

The folk languages are simple, like cascading streams and gurgling brooks. They usually have rich oral content. Many are without their own scripts. Most are spoken in relatively small regions. Humankind is, per the experts who keep track of these things, will lose most of them before this century is over.

Then there are languages - and English is a spectacular example - which are volatile like gas; lots of volume but little content; hardly any memory informs them. Like a shifty character, they are always borrowing from Paul to pay Peter. To keep alive they have to constantly reinvent themselves. Their grammar is unacceptably defective and their scripts are usually plagiarized. Of inattentive minds, they make miasmic cesspools that bubble with resentment, discontent, anger, greed and aggression. They can, however, can spread like a forest fire burning whatever touches them - heritage, tradition, culture, history, feelings and emotions that belong to communities that are meek and would rather live in peace and contentment.

But those few, who are blessed - the saints and the poets - can take whatever sounds are available to them and create a form of language that is charged like plasma. Their thoughts arc out in all directions and their words defeat mortality. It is a miracle that they are able to immunize their insights from the deformations that are the lot of all thought that is expressed.

Contact Me

The "dadwok" was created by Vyom Akhil (1944-2007) with the help of his friend, Lionel, who continues to post Vyom's work since Vyom's "phase change."


Email: paradaksha -at- gmail.com


Vyom was a resident of
SAMBALPÛR, Orissä INDIA
——————–

Coordinates
21º28′ N, 83º58′ E



Apr 22, 2007

Maya - illusion/delusion

Helping a friend working on the connections between Schopenhauer, Einstein, East and West.

My first comment as a Hindoo is - What if the translations that were available to Schopenhauer were in error? I think Max Mueller did a fair bit and - in fact - got a fair bit right. You have to understand that by the time these Europeans accessed "Hindoo" thought, India had had nearly 1500 years Buddhism "on the rampage" on its land - and influence that became intolerable to "tolerant" India*. Vivekananda has admired the Buddha as a Vaidik but says Buddhism did "sarvanaash" - destroyed everything.... I'll elaborate on this later...

But, to me, the greatest mischief is interpreting the word "Maya". As I understand its best English rendering would be "indeterminate"; but this is not what is generall understood - ost, including a large section of the "Hindoos" understand it is "illusion/delusion"...

Maya can be immediately and easily understood if one recalls and has no cause to disagrees with - what Bucky says: that 99% of what is going on is subsensorial. An expanded meaning would overarch entropy/chaos and the general 'determinism' that embedded itself in European thinking and is still hard to uproot, Einstein's efforts not withstanding - (Universe is stranger than you can think) - or those of Bucky, Heisenberg etc.

A linkage to this 'determinism' leads me to recall my comments on "destiny believers" - the faith-based belief systems that have no 'give' in them; new interpretations are vlue-judged peripheralized as 'cults' 'fringe' by the custodians of the 'Good Word" which have 'sin' as a given , contradicting Divine intelligence, grace and mercy etc.

Bottomline: 1. Extract/use relevant Backburner: Get a hold of how/who vetted those translations. Remember: The Moghuls followed the Buddhists during whose time the Macedonians also came a-conquoring. Until about 1600 much that was "Hindoo/Vedic" was lost - Then Mädhavächärya-Säyanächärya & Harihara-Bukkarai set about "picking up the lost pieces" in Vijayanagaram

"The day man can wrap the sky around his midriff like a bath towl will be the day when he'll no longer need God"

I received this joke today, which seems to be a westernized purport of Shwetashwataropanishad 6-20. The joke:

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.

The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're at the point where we can clone people and do a number of miraculous things, so thanks for everything, but we can take over from here."

God listened very patiently. After the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a man-making contest." To which the scientist replied, "Okay, great!"

But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."

The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

God looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"


"God did directly make the dirt by transforming God-self into quadrillions of intercooperative living beings that created the conditions (including that dirt) so that more living things (like us) could develop and thrive."

Even Krishna has to attempt a 'definition' of Brahma in this manner in 13-13 - after admitting in 13-12 that a determination cannot be made.

"Everywhere Brahma has hands and feet, and ears everywhere, too; also everywhere (this creature) has eyes, heads and mouth; finally Brahma exisits after all is engulfed and covered by Brahma-self."

But good Hindoos, like Krishna, also know that there are domains farther than that of Brahma (8-16), domains that, unlike Brahma's, are timeless.

I recall a person reduced the East-West difference very simply. He said "They say 'all are one' - Out of many, one (e pluribus unum). We say 'all is one' - out of one, many.

Hindooism is the best insurance against a life in a padded cell......... As a temporary and pragmatic fence-sitter, I'll rest by saying, "It depends"

Apr 20, 2007

The Greeks were suspicious of democracy

"The Greeks were suspicious of democracy. They felt that people often made bad decisions which went against their interest. People could also be manipulated by demagogues and vested interests."

- Gucharan

I'd rather be an employee in a gaming house than a physicist

I'd rather be "an employee in a gaming house than a physicist".

- Einstein, who despised quantum mechanics, scoffed at the quantum mechanical mode of inquiry.

Apr 10, 2007

Persistence of Incorrigible Dumbness in BBC World Service Scheduling

Yesterday, they interviewed me on the phone apropos of a scud missle I'd CC-lobbed into all their messeage-box slits. If you've the time, you are welome to this bile & vitriol margarita: this heavily tamarind-ed, hot Saambar-Vadaa:

10:47 AM 4/9/2007
"Persistence of Incorrigible Dumbness in BBC World Service Scheduling" could be a nice title for a Ph.D dissertation. But I am not writing one here.In fact, I have planned to - for this occasion - do the opposite - and - in view of your generally knee-jerk patronization to listener complaints - especially so!

I shall shed the polite repertoire of a substantial multilingual vocabulary that is usually available to me and and answer the two questions:

Q. WHAT TO YOU IS BBC WS's USP?
A. BUSINESS, FEATURES AND MUSIC.

Q. HOW DO YOU RATE THEIR CURRENT SCHEDULING FOR YOUR AREA?
A. LOUSY.

The rest of this email is on this schedule issue.

1. When you make your schedule changes, why don't you run them by your listeners? Is the scheduling team deliberately 'rendered' in an MI5 cell? Has the Scotland Yard asked you to keep your schedules a secret because Osama Bin Laden's men could bomb the B B C?
My suggestion: Post the changes you wish to make on the Net two weeks in advance. Let listeners see, comment and vote on them. Then incorporate the pre-feed into the schedule.

I shall now bring up three specific aggravations:

1. BBC ANALYSIS

Which smarty had the brain wave to designate a schedule-frequency to BBC Analysis as if you were broadcasting the Sermon of the Mount? Consider: In the less than an hour's time interval 0700-0840 you air Analysis twice! And, furthermore, you proudly announce each time that the particular edition is available online 24/7!

My suggestion:
Bundle all five analyses programs and put them in the weekend programing alongside such gabfests as Politics U K and FOOC, and leave the online availability for those who wish to change the world with your Sermons of the Mount.
Advantage: You give much deserved 10 extra minutes to Business Daily.

2. BBC BUSINESS DAILY

It makes no sense to have moved Business Daily back to its old slot with a 10 minute advantage. This is the lunch time slot in India and people - even those who work out of their SOHOs - actually take a break. In the last schedule it was sensibly placed at 0830 GMT.
My suggestion: Move Business Daily back to the 0830 slot for south Asia with the 10 minute extention you get from excising the aforestated "Sermon", aka Analysis.

3. BBC FEATURES BUNDLING:

4. There was no need to monkey with this to get a committee-designed horse that you now have. How do you explain that the three daily features are bundled between 0330 and 0500 GMT (when it is forenoon time here) to run almost continuously, BUT they get unbundled during the stretch between 0905 and 1100 with a "World Briefing" unnecessay spannered in at 1005.
My suggestion: Bring Business Daily back to its old slot of 0830. Moving it to 0905 would be even better so it can run for 25 instead of the current 20 minutes followed by the three features that take us to 1130.

Apr 7, 2007

The microscopic world is fundamentally random

Original Title: Rules Of The Roulette.

We can predict the ultimate fate of the universe. But not of the tiny atom.

Followers of the Indian cricket team, at least those inclined to be charitable, might attribute the World Cup debacle to plain bad luck. Well played, boys, better luck next time. That raises an interesting question though: scientifically, is there such a thing as luck? Does chance have any basis in science?

Consider the coin toss at the beginning of a match. You might think there's a 50 per cent chance that the coin will land heads up. But that's not truly a matter of chance. If you were to carefully observe the way in which you flicked the coin with your thumb, if you were to account for the size and weight and shape of the coin, you would be able to predict—correctly, with 100 per cent accuracy—just how the coin would land. The seeming randomness of the coin toss comes about merely as a result of our ignorance of the precise details of the toss. Similarly, when we say there's a 30 per cent likelihood of rain, the indefiniteness of that forecast only reflects our incomplete data on the weather. Randomness, like guessing on an exam where you don't know the answer, stems from a lack of knowledge. As the great mathematician Laplace put it, if we knew everything about the present, "nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before [our] eyes".

Indeed, the great power of physics is its ability to use knowledge of the present to predict the future. Using observations made today, we can predict the height of the tide at noon tomorrow, the time of the first solar eclipse of the year 4000, even the ultimate fate of the universe. And sure enough, experiments confirm that the world is predictable. Drop a stone a hundred times from the top of the Qutub Minar and every time it will hit the ground in 3.8 seconds. It's not a matter of luck or chance. In fact, virtually all our technology relies crucially on predictability. We can drive our cars and microwave our food with assurance because we are confident that when we use technology—itself a kind of experiment—it will yield the same result it did during its design and testing phase.

Yet there is one phenomenal exception. In the early years of the twentieth century, while exploring the properties of atoms, physicists stumbled upon a strange and utterly different reality. Bewildered and confused, they scratched together a new theory to explain what they found. This theory—quantum mechanics—has survived its uncertain beginnings to become the most successful theory in physics today. It is a theory like no other. For the central revelation of quantum mechanics is this: the world is ruled by chance. Yes, the microscopic world is random—not just random because of ignorance, but fundamentally random.

For example, if you try to pinpoint the location of an electron of some atom, you may find it in one place one moment but in a completely different place the next moment. Far from staying put or even following a nice, smooth orbit, the electron jerks around frenetically, haphazardly, like a dancer seen under a stroboscope. That's because—so says quantum mechanics—the position of the electron is a matter of chance. There's even a small chance the electron may pop up on the moon.

Quantum mechanics has transformed the way we do physics. Today, using gigantic particle accelerators, we violently smash particles again and again, over and over, in exactly the same way, literally billions of times a minute, for years. But, unlike the stone dropped from the Qutub Minar, we don't get the same result every time. Because quantum mechanics is based on chance, it offers the possibility of a rare lucky discovery, a Nobel-prize-winning jackpot. Einstein, who despised quantum mechanics, scoffed at this mode of inquiry, saying he would rather be "an employee in a gaming house than a physicist".

The philosophical implications of a world run by chance are hard to accept. "God does not play dice with the universe," Einstein famously complained. And why is it that the macroscopic world of big things appears so predictable, so definite, when the underlying microscopic world of atoms is itself random? All this is very disturbing. Ah, but if only the Indian cricket team had been microscopic, they could really have blamed their defeats on quantum mechanical bad luck.

- from OutlookIndia.com

Blog Archive