deleted the old pinned tweet by mistake!! but wanted to share & savor this most generous review of my book 'The Dharma Forest' by Pratap Bhanu Mehta here.
Kind of surreal to take a photo of the singularly inspiring Bhagat Singh -- a revolutionary voice in 1920s India, who was hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 -- run it through the Heritage AI algorithm, and see him reanimated.
The Library of the Sakya Monastery, southern Tibet, built in 13thCE, one of the largest collection of Tibetan and Indic manuscripts and block-printed books, over 44,000 texts, shelves reach height of 10 meters. Cataloguing began in 2005...
a video shared by the physicist Prof Ed Witten
Prof V. Balakrishnan at IIT Madras explaining Why is Quantum Mechanics So Confusing?
[I am in awe of how he traverses, sentence after sentences, idea after idea - without a pause but also unhurriedly. What a great teacher.🙏]
Swami Vivekananda probably would have laughed at such algorithmic efforts to reanimate photos, but as a great believer in the powers of science to improve material aspects of human lives, he would have probably wanted to understand the details of how it all works.
"Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA shows the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother & a Denisovan father."
It was hard to find a quality photo of Lokmanya Tilak, but this worked. Tilak urgently deserve a new reappraisal as one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian mind. A reformist & revivalist of traditions, a believer in the power of mass media before most Indians could read.
drawing the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, using Italian Renaissance era influences | paintings by Giampaolo Tomasetti — he drew 23 large sized paintings which is now housed in Florence, Italy.
[a thread with a few of those paintings]
What an extraordinary musical mind! I am awestruck by how she can sing in a language she doesn't speak, & get its velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and labial sounds so perfectly, so effortlessly. Here, in Malayalam, and she does this in so many other Indian languages...
The great master and teacher Aurobindo wrote, when he was young, a revolutionary spirit, and a restless mind, nearly a century ago: "The Time has perhaps come fot the Indian mind, long pre-ccupied with political and economic issues, for a widening of its horizon."
Munshi Premchand, half bemused, at the newfangled inventions that have come up 80 years after his death. If he were alive, he would probably have used some of it--perhaps, even a novel about of a farmer who wants to buy a computer for his daughter--in his vast oeuvre of writings.
an elephant called padmanabhan, who served the temple of Guruvayur in Kerala, passed away today at age of 84, after 66 years in the temple. as a child I used to love watching him stand there amid his fellow elephants, imperious, magnificent to behold, and yet kind to children.
A young Kasturba Gandhi -- again, high quality photos are hard to come by -- here, probably taken during her stay in South Africa (I could be wrong), where she traveled to, raised children, & discovered the contours of her own social commitments before returning to India in 1915.
yesterday, in a documentary, i saw this colorized photo from the 5th Solvay Conference, 1927.
out of curiosity, looked up to find youngest was Heisenberg (26 years old) and the oldest was Lorentz (sitting to Einstein's right; 74 years).
would make great setting for a novel.
There is a novel waiting to be written abt an Indian genius who has figured out a way to make money off Westerners, who want to signal their moral superiority & burnish their revolutionary creds, by feeding them disprovable facts abt India. A dark post-colonial revenge fantasy.😌
Workers across India are holding a massive general strike today, with several major unions involved and up to 250 MILLION workers
They're protesting the neoliberal economic policies of the right-wing BJP government, demanding state social support programs
#TIL
that Shammi Kapoor was one of the first users of the Internet in India
He was the founder & chairman of the Internet Users Club of India. I can't wrap my head around how someone like Shammi Kapoor was in the thick of the internet movement in India?
I did some digging 👇
I once sat next to Farooque Sheikh on a Shatabdi from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. Around Surat, a man wanted to take a photo with him. Sheikh obliged. After the photo, the man said: "Om Puriji, you are my wife's favorite actor." Sheikh thanked the man and sat down to read his newspaper.
Perhaps the newfound [in a cave in Meghalaya] Indian fish which is 1.5 feet long & 10times heavier than 250 other known subterranean fish species, and is potentially blind due to lack of light, could be an example of “speciation & evolution in progress".
a thread on photos of Indian temples that I had saved up over the years from various sources.
[in many cases don't know the original photographers, so can't credit them. my apologies]
as a poor undergrad, Tuesdays for me meant ISKCON's free lunches . their guys wd drive an hour to univ, serve students & return. the food was modest but healthy, but also gratifying. they asked for nothing in return. not even your name. there was, i realized, free lunch after all
I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple (
#ISKCON
). I loved it.
#SteveJobs
Kerala Man Grows 400-Tree Forest in 3 Cents of Land! | Once an arid rock-strewn patch, the land now teems with lush green creepers, shrubs and trees – all thanks to a 53-year-old man who believed that forests could grow in cities too!
"More than 22,000 people have been admitted to hospital with heat stroke, nearly half of them elderly, emergency officials say.
On Monday, the city of Kumagaya reported a temperature of 41.1C (106F), the highest ever recorded in Japan."
A thread of Indian paintings, from 1900 to 2022, arranged according to year of creation. One painting per year.
Many works & artists missing. 🙏
My hope was to *see* the changes in Indian aesthetics—from Colonialism to Covid.
Duryodhana in Bhasa’s play, ‘Dutavākyam':
“Kingship belongs to princes who defeat their foes. It is not [gained] by begging in the world, nor by charity to the poor. If they want to win sovereignty, join in battle; or else go to a hermitage where the tranquil minds live."
Today India is delivering the Melian Dialogue to Anglo Canada:
"the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
anybody who wants to know what happens when you take on the predatory quarry mining, land encroachment lobbies in Kerala's high ranges, need only see what happened to Sriram Venkataraman, a young IAS officer who opposed encroachment.
As a student of calculus, if you have struggled to find an intuition for taking a limit [lim t--> 0] -- a remarkable motivation from a 4th century CE, Prakrit text from the Shvetambara Jainas.
Here, the student wants to know what is a 'samaya' or an instant in time.
The Trials of Henry Kissinger -- based on the devastating book of the same name by Christopher Hitchens, directed by Eugene Jarecki, narrated Brian Cox!
Worth watching, if you havent.
in my own experience, a useful first-order of heuristic approximation to map pro- and anti-Modi divide among artists:
artists who think about the world in one of India's many languages versus
artists who think about the world in English...
Interesting contest of artistes. FOR PM Modi (Pandit Jasraj, Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan, Raja and Radha Reddy, Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Wasifuddin Dagar etc) and AGAINST PM Modi (Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi, Anurag Kashyap, Siddharth, Swara Bhaskar etc).
Friends,
Happy to share: the 1st volume of my Dharma trilogy is out this month.
In this book, an all-too-human narrator tell us, and Krishna, about three lives from the Mahabharata war.
over 3 volumes, 9 lives, 9 rasas
Hope you'll read it.
Pre-order:
Some remarkable similarities in words for eleven deities used by the Toda tribes in Kerala-TN border, south India & Sumerian in Mesopotamia.
From the research of Prince of Greece, HRH Peter who studied the Todas in 1939 and in 1949. Images of Todas from 1961 Census of India.
Who discovered/predicted the rings of Uranus?
If you’ve never heard of Bibhas De...
(Excerpt from the great American historian of science, Stephen G. Brush’s book on how theories become knowledge)
@MahuaMoitra
@SEBI_India
"An unheard of UAE based company" is perhaps "unheard" by the reporter or those outside the Private Equity world. This is a Bloomberg story from December about the family who owns IHC, and the family is not unheard of.
One Nation, One Subscription
"The Indian government is pushing a bold proposal that would make scholarly literature accessible for free to everyone in the country.
Rough estimates ~ research institutes in India spend > $200 million on subscriptions/year
I once sat next to Farooque Sheikh on a Shatabdi from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. Around Surat, a man wanted to take a photo w/ him. Sheikh obliged. After the photo, the man said: "Om Puriji, you are my wife's favorite actor." Sheikh thanked the man & continued to read his newspaper. ☺️
"For the moon mission to succeed, everyone needed to put in extra hours. But the ISRO had no financial incentives to offer employees. “We cracked it by offering a free masala dosa and filter coffee at 5 p.m. every evening. Suddenly, everyone was happy to stay on longer.”" 🙏🙏
Madhava (1350-1425) of the Kerala School of Mathematics, he of
π/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - ... & other infinite series. To help the world recognize his contributions, David Mumford, Fields medal winner offers a comparison: "it seems fair to me to compare him with Newton & Leibnitz."
Went to the ancestral home of the mathematician Sangamagrama Madhava in Irinjalakuda, Kerala. Pity there is no state aid to maintain the place. Also went to the family shrine--the arm of the idol in the third image was chopped by Tipu Sultan's invading soldiers.
@drthomasisaac
Sir, assuming you are serious here, some suggestions:
1. Sell off the loss making 30+ PSUs that Kerala state runs..
2. Downsize Treasury, use banks to pay salaries/pensions
4. Mandate minority religious institutions to use TSB. Lower rates.
5. Raise city/Muni debt in intl markets
This concern & angst about history writing articulated by Vikram here has had an extraordinary long life.
Remarkably similar sentiment, albeit from ~1903, from Tagore’s ‘Bharatavarsher Itihas’.
I suspect we’ll hear it again in year 2121.
Why do some themes persist?
The last days of the Mahabharata war by Salvador Dali, according to the DreamStudio AI with some additional prompts that I added. Pretty, well, surreal.
nearly 1200-1600 years before Fibonacci in 13th century another example of recursion, from Sanskrit poetics.
[from a new textbook on Algorithms by Jeff Erickson, who teaches computer science at U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign]
"Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the US is determined to help India in its time of need."
-- raw materials for vaccines
-- PPEs, diagnostics, oxygen
-- funding expansion for vaccines
The great Rahula Sankrityayana travelled in 1930s to Sa-skya, Zha-luRi-phug, and Nor. “In Sa-skya, Sanskrit manuscripts were kept in the so-called Phyag-dpe-lha-khanà (’Manuscript Chapel’).” Here, he writes in 1930s on his discovery of the Pramana-Varttika-Bhashya...
extraordinary scenes at Sabarimala: devout Hindu women enter buses check for & remove young women headed to the temple area, some scuffle follows, the police (also devout) stands there watching unsure what to do next..
since it is Nehru's birthday, I was looking at his old photos. what an historic life he lived amidst empire, anticolonialism, communism, cold war, non-alignment, postcolonialism
for fun, I 'de-oldify'd some of his B&W photos with color.
github code ->
If Kashmir was in Sweden, then the southern tip of India would be in southern Greece; and from east to west, India ranges from Belgium to all the way upto Tatarstan (Kazan).
When somebody says "India is X or Y": useful geographic frame of reference that belies most claims.
The last days of Sri Ramana Maharishi by Henri Cartier-Bresson including a white peacock that wandered as the last hours came near. Thiruvannamalai, 1950.