Godā Stuti, 20

dhanye samasta-jagatāṃ pitur uttamāṅge
tvan-mauḷi-mālya-bhara-saṃbharaṇena bhūyaḥ |
indīvara-srajam ivādadhati tvadīyāny
ākekarāṇi bahumāna-vilokitāni || 20 ||

Godā Stuti, 19

tuṅgair akṛtrima-giraḥ svayam uttamāṅgaiḥ
yaṃ sarva-gandha iti sādaram udvahanti |
āmodam anyam adhigacchati mālikābhiḥ
so ’pi tvadīya-kuṭilāḷaka-vāsitābhiḥ || 19 ||

Godā Stuti, 18

cūḍā-padena parigṛhya tavottarīyaṃ
mālām api tvad-aḷakair adhivāsya-dattām |
prāyeṇa raṅga-patir eṣa bibharti Gode
saubhāgya-saṃpad-abhiṣeka-mahādhikāram || 18 ||

Godā Stuti, 17

viśvāyamāna-rajasā kamalena nābhau
vakṣaḥ-sthale ca kamalā-stana-candanena |
āmodito ’pi nigamair vibhur aṅghri-yugme
dhatte natena śirasā tava mauḷi-mālām || 17 ||

The Ashes

I'm quite surprised by how long it has been since I've posted on cricket, but this incident is definitely worth noting: England have finally beaten Australia in Australia, retaining the Ashes. With this, Ricky Ponting has become the first Australian captain to lose three Ashes series (2005 and 2009 in England, and now 2010 in Australia) in the last fifty years, at least.

<CORRECTION>
I realize I miscalculated. England are up 2-1 in the series, which means there is no way they can lose the series. Thus, they are definitely going to retain the Ashes (since they won the last round). However, Australia could still win the final Test and draw the series 2-2. While they won't regain the Ashes, they will at least have the pleasure of denying England an outright series win in Australia. Similarly England will want to win (or at least draw) the fifth Test, in order to pull off a series win in Australia and to actively win the Ashes.

Given that rain is predicted in Sydney on all five days of the fifth Test, Australia are going to have to make a real effort to win this Test. 
</CORRECTION>

Godā Stuti, 16

tvan-mauḷi-dāmani vibhoḥ śirasā gṛhīte
sva-cchanda-kalpita-sapīti-rasa-pramodāḥ |
mañju-svanā madhu-liho vidadhuḥ svayaṃ te
svāyaṃvaraṃ kam api maṅgaḷa-tūrya-ghoṣam || 16 ||

Godā Stuti, 15

āmodavaty api sadā hṛdayaṃ-gamā ’pi
rāgānvitā ’pi laḷitā ’pi guṇottarā ’pi |
mauḷi-srajā tava Mukunda-kirīṭa-bhājā
Gode bhavaty adharitā khalu vaijayantī || 15 ||

Godā Stuti, 14

tvad-bhukta-mālya-surabhīkṛta-cāru-mauḷeḥ
hitvā bhujāntara-gatām api vaijayantīm |
patyus taveśvari mithaḥ pratighāta-lolāḥ
barhātapatra-rucim āracayanti bhṛṅgāḥ || 14 ||

Godā Stuti, 13

nāge śayaḥ sutanu pakṣirathaḥ kathaṃ te
jātaḥ svayaṃvara-patiḥ puruṣaḥ purāṇaḥ |
evaṃ vidhāḥ samucitaṃ praṇayaṃ bhavatyāḥ
saṃdarśayanti parihāsa-giraḥ sakhīnām || 13 ||

On freedom, choice(s), and democracy

Snowed in, I spent all of today reading a very interesting book by Prof. Loren J. Samons II of Boston University, with a very provocative thesis. The book's not-so-subtle title, What's Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, belies its careful argument. Although the bulk of the book involves a close study of historical sources in order to examine the actual practices of the government of the Athenian polis, the author's overarching motivation is not the reassessment of contemporary perceptions of a long-extinct society merely for the sake of historical understanding. His point, rather, is to 

"present and foster criticism of modern democracy … [that is] aimed at the philosophical foundations of democracy, the popular conception of democracy, the practice of representative government through democratic elections, and the social and intellectual environment generated by democratic thought and practice in contemporary America" (p. 1). 

I hesitate to offer a summary of the book for fear of oversimplifying its complex, historically sensitive argument. Very crudely put, Prof. Samons: 

Godā Stuti, 12

prāyeṇa Devi bhavatī-vyapadeśa-yogāt
godāvarī jagad idaṃ payasā punīte |
yasyāṃ sametya samayeṣu ciraṃ nivāsāt
bhāgīrathī-prabhṛtayo ’pi bhavanti puṇyāḥ || 12 ||

British architecture, urban planning, and decay

This is a powerful, hard-hitting essay by Theodore Dalrymple at the City Journal, describing the post-WWII destruction of Britain's stunning architectural heritage by urban planners who were high on Modernism and Brutalism and a whole lot of other "isms"s that promised utopias and kinda sorta underdelivered. Dalrymple uses his pen like a fine sword to slice and dice and skewer the grand plans of the postbellum planners. Worth reading in its entirety, but here are some quotable quotes.

On the energy with which post-war planners approached the reorganization of British cities:

"The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause."

On the typical attitudes of the planners towards the people, and on their opinion of themselves (this point is repeatedly made in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State):

"Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built … [A]s rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers."

A hilarious description of one such "successful" modernization project, the replacement of the library of Birmingham with a modern design:

"[T]he magnificent Victorian library of 1866 [was] pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie."

Writing about the most recent architectural phase in Britain, Dalrymple notes first that people throughout the country have woken up to the necessity of protecting their architectural heritage, and that the new generation of architects is less drunk on the intoxicating wines of "ism"s, but then goes on to note:

"With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship."

A remarkable essay, and worth reading in full, and absorbing.

The beautiful innocence of childhood

A beautiful, evocative message about the necessity, and the redemptive power, of hope, from over a hundred years ago. It is the response of the editor (presumably) of the New York Sun to an eight-year old girl who wants to know if Santa Claus really exists. 

Godā Stuti, 11

dig dakṣiṇā ’pi pari paktrima-puṇya-labhyāt
sarvottarā bhavati Devi tavāvatārāt |
yatraiva raṅga-patinā bahumāna-pūrvaṃ
nidrāḷunā ’pi niyataṃ nihitāḥ kaṭākṣāḥ || 11 ||

Godā Stuti, 10

tātas tu te madhu-bhidaḥ stuti-leśa-vaśyāt
karṇāmṛtaiḥ stuti-śatair anavāpta-pūrvam |
tvan-mauḷi-gandha-subhagām upahṛtya mālāṃ
lebhe mahattara-padānuguṇaṃ prasādam || 10 ||

Godā Stuti, 9

mātaḥ samutthitavatīm adhi Viṣṇucittaṃ
viśvopajīvyam amṛtaṃ vacasā duhānām |
tāpa-cchidaṃ hima-rucer iva mūrtim anyāṃ
santaḥ payodhi-duhituḥ sahajāṃ vidus tvām || 9 ||

Godā Stuti, 8

bhoktuṃ tava priyatamaṃ bhavatīva Gode
bhaktiṃ nijāṃ praṇaya-bhāvanayā gṛṇantaḥ |
uccāvacair viraha-saṅgamajair udantaiḥ
śṛṅgārayanti hṛdayaṃ guravas tvadīyāḥ || 8 ||

Godā Stuti, 7

valmīkataḥ śravaṇato vasudhātmanas te
jāto babhūva sa muniḥ kavi-sārvabhaumaḥ |
Gode kim adbhutam idaṃ yad amī svadante
vaktrāravinda-makaranda-nibhāḥ prabandhāḥ || 7 ||

More on truth and fiction and myth

This post, by a rabbi on Christmas, speaks to a question that I have often wondered about. I've chatted earlier about the differences among truth, fiction, and myth, and Rabbi Rami's response to both Christian literalists and to atheists / agnostics is worth pondering over:

“Myth” is not the same as “falsehood.” Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.

This is especially important in our society today because we have forgotten the difference between myth and fiction, conflating both with the category of the unreal, which is then automatically compared unfavorably with the real, which is seen as truth and (implicitly) as accessible through only one method—whether scriptural literalism or scientism. And having (awesome!) TV shows called Mythbusters doesn't really help the reputation of myths either.

This was known to thinkers of the past, most notably Ibn ‘Arabī, who exalted the power of the human imagination as a way to access something of value about the real and the true. As Rabbi Rami beautifully puts it:

If we reclaimed the power of myth, and understood its role in our lives, we could reclaim the world’s religions as keepers of myth and train clergy to be guides to myth who can help us live out the mythic and imaginal dimensions of our lives through acts of compassion and contemplative spiritual practice.

The rational without the imaginative is robotic; the imaginative without the rational is hallucinatory.


<UPDATE>
Sheldon Pollock has written a fascinating article on the Mīmāṃsaka and literary theorist Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, whose Hṛdayadarpaṇa ("Mirror of the Heart") was a response to, and a critique of, Ānandavardhana's game-changing Sahṛdayāloka. Sadly Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka's work is no longer extant, but elements of his ideas have survived and Pollock masterfully reconstructs his ideas from these stray references. He notes that 

"Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka did not just borrow a term here or there from Mīmāṃsā, however, as scholars like Ānandavardhana did; he borrowed, and in doing so rethought, an entire conceptual scheme." (p. 144)

But what relevance does this have to truth and fiction and myth? The school of Mīmāṃsā, of which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka was an acknowledged master, is best known for its resolute defence of Vedic orthodoxy against all other intellectual players in classical India, most importantly the Buddhists, but also the Hindu Naiyāyika natural theologians and the Vaiyākaraṇa grammarians. Pollock points out that "Mīmāṃsā's views on the nature of discourse were the most sophisticated of any in the premodern world; only recently have Western scholars begun to make real sense of its complexity, and many aspects await serious clarification" (p. 149). Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka applied and adapted this complex theory of discourse to the world of literature, and in doing so drew important distinctions among different domains of language.

Pollock summarizes:

As Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka was at pains to make clear, the output of literary discourse is thus as different from other discursive genres as its input: just as literature's dual treatment of wording and meaning differs from that of both scripture and itihāsa [history] (where wording has primacy in the one case, and meaning in the other), so does literature differ in it [sic] effects: whereas scripture leads to moral action and history to knowledge, literature leads to pleasure." (p. 161)

Elsewhere Pollock presents a very interesting analogy offered, apparently for the first time, by Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka:

"[W]orldly knowledge is in the province of historical discourse, which can thus be likened to a friend who advises; moral precepts in the province of scripture, which can thus be likened to a master who commands; and literature in the province of rasa, which can thus be likened to a beloved who seduces." (p. 152)

References

Pollock, Sheldon. "What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian Aesthetics." In Sheldon Pollock, ed. Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Goldman. Delhi: Manohar, 2010, pp. 143-184. Available for download here.

</UPDATE>

Godā Stuti, 6

śoṇā ’dhare ’pi kucayor api tuṅgabhadrā
vācāṃ pravāha-nivahe ’pi sarasvatī tvam |
aprākṛtair api rasair virajā svabhāvāt
Godā ’pi Devi kamitur nanu narmadā ’si || 6 ||

Godā Stuti, 5

asmādṛśām apakṛtau cira-dīkṣitānāṃ
ahnāya Devi dayate yad asau Mukundaḥ |
tan niścitaṃ niyamitas tava mauḷi-dāmnā
tantrī-nināda-madhuraiś ca girāṃ nigumbhaiḥ || 5 ||

Godā Stuti, 4

kṛṣṇānvayena dadhatīṃ yamunānubhāvaṃ
tīrthair yathāvad avagāhya sarasvatīṃ te |
Gode vikasvara-dhiyāṃ bhavatī-kaṭākṣāt
vācaḥ sphuranti makaranda-mucaḥ kavīnām || 4 ||

More stunning nature

I cannot communicate the experience of seeing the entire sky over Lake Þingvallavatn light up over and over again as wave upon wave of green and orange light washed over it, illuminating not just sky but also lake and shoreline. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the actual experience is worth many thousands of pictures (or videos)!

Aurora Borealis timelapse HD - Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

This beautiful time-lapse sequence depicts the aurora borealis over the Norwegian city of Tromsø. Not quite the same as being there, but it will have to do!

Stunning nature

Phytoplankton bloom off the Chatham Islands, to the east of New Zealand. 

Image taken from NASA's Earth Observatory page.

And here is a much larger version of the same image, with far greater detail. Truly gorgeous, a glimpse into the wondrous forces that govern our world—atmospheric, oceanic, geological, and biological.

Godā Stuti, 3

tvat-preyasaḥ śravaṇayor amṛtāyamānāṃ
tulyāṃ tvadīya-maṇi-nūpura-śiñjitānām |
Gode tvam eva janani tvad-abhiṣṭavārhāṃ
vācaṃ prasanna-madhurāṃ mama saṃvidhehi || 3 ||

Godā Stuti, 2

vaideśikaḥ śruti-girām api bhūyasīnāṃ
varṇeṣu māti mahimā na hi mādṛśāṃ te |
itthaṃ vidantam api māṃ sahasaiva Gode
mauna-druho mukharayanti guṇās tvadīyāḥ || 2 ||

Godā Stuti, 1

||    atha Śrī-Godā-stutiḥ    ||

śrī-viṣṇucitta-kula-nandana-kalpa-vallīṃ

śrī-raṅga-rāja-hari-candana-yoga-dṛśyāṃ |

sākṣāt kṣamāṃ karuṇayā kamalām ivānyāṃ

Godām ananya-śaraṇaḥ śaraṇaṃ prapadye || 1 ||

Godā Stuti

śrīmān Veṅkaṭanāthāryaḥ kavi-tārkika-kesarī |
vedāntācārya-varyo me sannidhattāṃ sadā hṛdi ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,
endowed with śrī,
(saffron-maned) lion among poets and philosophers,
supreme teacher of the Vedānta
—may he be established forever in my heart!

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha, often referred to within Śrīvaiṣṇava circles with the greatest of reverence as Śrī Vedānta Deśika, the Teacher of the Vedānta or, more grandly and formally (as my grandfathers always referred to him), as Swāmī Śrīman Nigamānta Mahādeśika, was easily one of the most brilliant individuals to have ever lived. He set his formidable intellectual powers to work in service of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community, establishing a philosophical, theological, and poetic edifice upon the foundations that had been laid by other intellectual giants before him (such as Śrī Rāmānujācārya, who is perhaps the best-known of the early thinkers, at least outside the community). What has fascinated so many people, both within and without the Śrīvaiṣṇava community, is the depth and breadth of Śrī Vedānta Deśika's work; as Steven P. Hopkins puts it,

"Along with working in three major languages of his southern tradition—Sanskrit, Tamil, and Māhārāṣṭrī Prākrit—Veṅkaṭeśa was a master of many genres of philosophical prose and poetry. He wrote long ornate religious poems (kāvyas) in Sanskrit; a Sanskrit allegorical drama (nāṭaka); long religious lyric hyms (stotras and prabandhams) in Sanskrit, Māhārāṣṭrī Prākrit, and in Tamil; as well as commentaries and original works of philosophy, theology, and logic in Sanskrit and in a hybrid combination of the Sanskrit and Tamil languages called maṇipravāḷa ('jewels and coral')." (p. 11, An Ornament for Jewels: Love Poems for the Lord of Gods by Vedāntadeśika)

Work is now being done in the Western academy on Śrī Vedānta Deśika not just as poet or philosopher alone, but as someone who combines the two, who uses the creative tension between these two poles of human intellectual capacity to explore more fully the limits of human thought and to convey in language some truths about the universe, God, and man. This combination of poetry and philosophy is particularly interesting in Śrī Vedānta Deśika's stotras, which are devotional poems of short-to-medium length (anywhere from four to a hundred verses) addressed to different manifestations of the Śrīvaiṣṇava conception of the Divine.

In this month of Margazhi (mārkali), when it is customary throughout the Tamil lands to sing, recite, and listen to the Tiruppāvai hymns of the saint-goddess Āṇṭāḷ, I hope to translate the Godā-stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika, twenty nine verses in Vasantatilakā and Mālinī meters that are addressed to Āṇṭāḷ (whose name was Godā in Sanskrit, written as Kōtai in Tamil). I will be using the beautiful LaTeX version prepared by Sunder Kidambi, generously made available at this site. This will be my first attempt at translating a short-ish devotional poem, and I hope to constantly update and refine my translations over the course of the month. I beg you to indulge me, to forgive me for my mistakes and to not take offense at my missteps, and to correct me so that I may produce the best work I can.

<UPDATE>
I found this link at the old Bhakti-list archives to a person's account of Sri Velukkudi Krishnan's exposition of the Godā-stuti and of its connections to the Tiruppāvai (and to other texts held sacred by the Śrīvaiṣṇavas).
Thanks to more Googling I found this complete, excellent translation of the Godā-stuti online. I will avoid referring to it as far as I can so that I can claim some level of originality, but it certainly seems like a very useful resource to draw upon when stuck.
</UPDATE>

True wisdom

This pearl, from pg. 2 of Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent, is particularly relevant to me right now as I procrastinate, neither working (as I could be) nor sleeping (as I ought to be).

Had I been Laotse, I would have added the following maxim—which I think is the quintessence of Taoist philosophy:

The Sage falls asleep not 

because he ought to 

Nor even because he wants to

But because he is sleepy.

True words of wisdom indeed.

Vois Sur Ton Chemin (Look to Your Path)

I had promised myself not to blog until I got through all the work that eagerly and hungrily awaits to devour me, but this song was just so exquisitely beautiful that I had to drop everything else and post it here. It featured in the 2004 French movie Les Choristes, directed by Christophe Barratier, and was composed by Bruno Coulais.

C'est vraiment une chanson incroyablement belle, et le chanteur Jean-Baptiste Maunier a la voix d'un ange. Voilà!



Les paroles:

Smell and memory

I've never read Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, but I've certainly heard about the famous madeleine episode in which the narrator's experience of seeing, smelling, and tasting a madeleine leads to a flood of past memories (and a voluminous novel!). This is perhaps the best-known contemporary account of the incredible power of the sense of smell, and its profound connection to our deepest emotions. The smell of a favorite dish, of a lover's cologne, of petrichor after summer rains, of a flower: all of these smells can immediately and instantaneously transport us to a different time and place and emotional state.

It is perhaps for this reason that smell plays an extremely important role in Indic culture. David Shulman has written a fascinating article called "The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India" (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 123–133) in which he explores some of the connections among smells, memories, emotions, and aesthetics. 

A Sanskrit benediction

The great sixteenth-century intellectual Appayya Dīkṣita opens his introductory treatise on Sanskrit poetics, the Kuvalayānanda or the "Joy of the Water-Lily", with three beautiful benedictions, or maṅgalācaraṇas, dedicated to the Devī, to Śiva and Pārvatī, and to Kṛṣṇa / Mukunda. I'm trying to read this work right now along with my friends BW and MS, and we worked out rough-ish translations for these verses. The opening verse, in particular, is beautifully structured both in terms of its aural effect and in terms of its coherence of meaning.

amarī-kabarī-bhāra-bhramarī-mukharī-kṛtam |

dūrīkarotu duritaṁ Gaurī-caraṇa-paṅkajam || 1 ||

|| 1 || 

May the lotuses that are the feet of Gaurī,

        resonant with the buzzing bees that are the dense, braided locks of goddesses,

dispel impurity!

As befits a work that attempts to (re)define the hugely complex world of Sanskrit formalist literary theory, this opening verse is worthy of deeper analysis, in order to figure out precisely how it depicst a fully coherent poetic image. In particular, Nirañjan Miśrā's twentieth-century Hindi commentary on the Kuvalayānanda sheds some useful light on the poetic images here. 

Bhavabhūti on language

The Sanskrit dramatist Bhavabhūti is reckoned second only to Kālidāsa in his command over the Sanskrit language, his exquisite depiction of the emotions, and his mastery over the art and the science of literary composition. His Uttararāmacarita is a fascinating and powerful retelling of the seventh chapter of the Rāmāyaṇa, the Uttara Kāṇḍa. This powerful, even tragic, chapter is in fact not included in many versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, in particular Kampan's Irāmāvatāram (also known as the Kamba-ramayanam).

One of the things that makes Bhavabhūti so fascinating is his self-conscious reflection on the power of language and art. While Sanskrit literature in general abounds in such reflection—indeed, there is a Ṛgvedic verse on speech uttered in the voice of Speech personified, which promises to bestow speech upon those Speech favors—Bhavabhūti seems to take it to a whole new level in his work. One verse in particular struck me, because of its self-contained meaning, its particular signification in the immediate context of the play, and its more general meaning in the context of literary works as a whole.

laukikānāṃ hi sādhūnām arthān vāg anuvartate |
ṛṣīṇāṃ punar ādyānāṃ vācam artho 'nuvartate ||

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Given the eagerness with which it is quoted and re-quoted (often without attribution), there surely must be some truth to Benjamin Disraeli's complaint against that body of knowledge which takes as its subject the analysis of aggregates of information. (Perhaps this can be proven statistically!) 

Now I have no problems with the actual content of the discipline; on the contrary, I am deeply fascinated by the complexity and the power of statistics, even given how little I know, and am always interested in learning more about the field. Nevertheless, it seems true that human beings are simply not hard-wired to intuit probability and statistics; we would much rather deal in hard certainties than in fuzzy likelihoods. (Think about how easy it is to catch a ball, and about how complicated the actual physical model has to be to explain it!) This is perhaps why there is such blatant abuse of statistics everywhere, from tabloids to otherwise-respectable economic journals. Were this field of knowledge a living creature, tender-hearted defenders would have undoubtedly established numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Statistics throughout the world by now.

சுட்டும் விழி ("Suttum Vizhi")

தமிழ் மொழி என் தாய்மொழியாக இருந்தும் எனக்கு அதில் எழுத படிக்க தெரியாது. 'ர'-வுக்கும் 'ற'-வுக்கும் வித்தியாசம் அறியாத எனக்கு பாரதியார் போன்ற மஹாகவியின் கவிதைகளை பற்றி பேச ஒரு அதிகாரமும் கிடையாது. ஆனாலும் இன்று நான் அவர் இயற்றிய ஒரு கவிதையின் பொருள் ஆங்கிலத்தில் தெளிவிக்க முயற்சி செய்ய போகிறேன். தமிழர்களே! என்னை மன்னிக்கவும்!

சுட்டும் விழி சுடர் தான் கண்ணம்மா சூரிய சந்திரரோ

வட்ட கரிய விழி கண்ணம்மா வானக் கருமை கொலோ

பட்டு கருநீல புடவை பதித்த நல்வயிரம்

நட்ட நடு நிசியில் தெரியும் நக்ஷத்திரங்களடி

சோலை மலர் ஒளியோ உனது சுந்தர புன்னகை தான்

நீல கடல் அலையே உனது நெஞ்சின் அலைகளடி

கோலக் குயில் ஓசை உனது குரலின் இனிமையடி

வாலை குமரியடி கண்ணம்மா மருவக் காதல் கொண்டேன்

சாத்திரம் பேசுகிறாய் கண்ணம்மா சாத்திரம் எதுக்கடி?

ஆத்திரம் கொண்டவற்கே கண்ணம்மா சாத்திரம் உண்டோடி?

மூத்தவர் சம்மதியில் வதுவை முறைகள் பின்பு செய்வோம்

காத்திருப்பேனோடி இது பார்! கன்னத்தில் முத்தம் ஒன்று.

For the preservation of the Oxford / Harvard / serial comma

As part of my drive towards the use of logic-driven punctuation, I must heartily recommend this post on why it is "vitally necessary to prevent the extinction of the serial comma". As with everything else, it cannot be blindly used: there are cases where a blindly applied serial comma can create, not resolve, ambiguity. I repudiate such reprehensible misuse of punctuation. However, in most cases it serves to disambiguate lists and to clarify information, and in general I prefer to err on the side of too many, rather than too few, commas.


The purpose of punctuation in a language like English must be to convey something of intonation and reading pauses, which are critical to conveying meaning and which cannot be indicated in the language itself, since English lacks the kind of particles that German or Sanskrit possess. Punctuation is like salt: everybody has their preferred levels, but there is always such a thing as too much, and such a thing as too little, of it.

Incredibly beautiful

I don't have words to express how beautiful I find this. So calm, serene, soothing, uplifting. And the music too!

autumn by the lake from Bart van der Gaag on Vimeo.

I was half-expecting Elrond to come riding out of the mist. Take a few minutes out of your day and watch this, full screen, headphones on, cellphones off. Truly stunning.

<UPDATED>
I found the words sung in Stelka Sabotinova's haunting voice here:

"Magic numbers"

Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, asks a few simple questions: Why are drug prescriptions typically given for seven days? Why are items priced at $9.99 and not $10.00? What effects do the names we give numbers have on our attitudes towards them?

A curious, but interesting, NYT op-ed.

History, fiction, myth, narrative, social science, et cetera

Note: I began writing this post a while ago, and then forgot about it. I figured I'd post it for now, with the enormous caveat that it's a very very rough draft written very very long ago. I need to continue thinking hard about these issues.

I've been reading a number of articles by Hayden White recently, which have gotten me thinking once again about a question that I pondered about, piecemeal, a while ago: What are the relationships that bind fiction, history, and myth together? In particular, four of his articles really got my attention: "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" [1], "Interpretation in History" [2], "The Rhetoric of Interpretation" [3], and "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory" [4].

To superficially summarize my superficial readings of White: to value the form as well as the content, as White wants us to do, is not the same as insisting that the form is in fact the content. White's point, as the title of one of his books amply illustrates, is that the form of a historical work itself has content, and that the content of the form is distinct from the content of the work. To put it differently, a text comprises of a content and a form (setting aside questions about context for now); the content is often heavily governed by structures that may or may not be culture-specific; the form possesses an additional level of content that is related to the content of the text in a complicated fashion. Furthermore, this form has a history of its own, independent of the history of the content of the work or of the history being narrated in the content of the work; and this is intimately connected to the literary production of the particular culture and social setting in which this work came to be written.

American and British punctuation

All international students, especially those who grew up in the Commonwealth or went to a Commonwealth-curriculum school, will know the pain of having to switch to the American system of spelling and punctuation. Many refuse to spell words the American way, out of practice or out of a desire to not conform; others change their ways, but inconsistently, with their deeply-ingrained old ways of spelling and writing never really going away, like that accent that always leaves behind its traces.

Of all the differences in writing punctuation, the only one that I truly dislike is the American habit of having the quotation mark in a phrase come at the end of a clause or sentence. Having grown up with the British system, where the logic of the context determines whether or not the punctuation belongs inside or outside the quotation, I've always found the American system misleading. Here's an article that points to the difference between American and British usage, and offers a historical* reason for why this is the case.

I'm certainly guilty of inconsistency, but I deem that to be less of a problem than being guilty of an illogical consistency. I will try henceforth to place my commas and periods where they logically belong, at least in writing where I'm not penalized for grammatical errors!

Is the fishing industry humane?

There's a lot of noise these days about the unsustainable nature of the meat-and-dairy industry, particularly in the United States. Such criticisms target the vast amount of resources that the meat-and-dairy industry consumes, the utterly shocking conditions under which most animals are housed, and the unhealthily high level of antibiotics and other chemicals being pumped into these creatures to maximize their yield. There are clearly serious issues at stake here, although there are no straightforward non-ideological answers.

But what happens under water? What sorts of practices are employed by the fishing industry? How sustainable are our massive yields? Peter Singer's terrifying article called "If Fish Could Scream" argues that our current practices are morally indefensible and ecologically utterly unsustainable.

"Grieve not!"

This is a truly wonderful ghazal by that master of the Persian language, the Lisān al-Ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen, Hafez of Shiraz. I recently read two different translations of it into English, one of them a beautiful (albeit secularized) version by Haleh Pourafzal and Roger Montgomery (p. 54 of their book Haféz: Teachings of the Philosopher of Love), and another, much more literal, much more archaic, version by Wilberforce Clarke (pp. 499–500 of The Divan-i Hafiz). The two translations are hugely different in style, and there are a few points where they vary in semantics as well. I thought I'd give it a shot and produce my own version. It's heavily inspired by Pourafzal and Montgomery, but sticks a little closer to the literal sense of the poem (at least as far as I can understand Hafez!).

Before that though, some of the verses of this ghazal in the inimitable voice of Mohammad-Reza Shajarian:

States and "legibility"

I read a wonderful book by James C. Scott this summer, with the impressively long title Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book is about a lot of different things, and is difficult to summarize into one sentence, but if I simply had to do it I'd say: "The book is an examination of the systematic erosion of locally-generated, locally-relevant, practical knowledge by states over the course of time, and provides sobering historical accounts of particular schemes where human beings went too far with their efforts to superimpose a grand order from above."

Not all such efforts were entirely "bad", of course. The metric system, for instance, superseded a staggeringly diverse variety of measurement systems, each of which was relevant and usable only within a tiny locality. Undoubtedly it's far more difficult for humans to relate to an abstract measure of length like a metre than to a concrete measure like an armspan. But at the same time, this also makes trade and communication harder, especially over large distances. The metric system, imposed top-down, is equally abstract in all places and thus far more suitable for enabling trade.

But there were other cases in which such top-down efforts were not so benign in their unintended consequences. 

"Three Butterflies"

What can I say about ‘Aṭṭār? Would that the well of my words were deep enough!

A truly marvelous poem, so simple as to be recited by a child, so weighty in meaning as to drown an intelligent adult, and yet so beautifully winged as to carry the listener aloft into a world of infinite meaning and experience that is at the same time not separate from our own mundane. Beautifully sung by Salar Aghili.

The words in Persian are (if you didn't want to read the beautiful nastaliq font in the video):

"Waris Shah"

63 years ago, modern South Asia went through its liberating, but bloody, birth. Lest we forget that over a million people died at the moment the modern nations of India and Pakistan were born: this heartbreakingly beautiful poem by Amrita Pritam (recited by Gulzar).


(link and some verses after the jump)

"If I ever get to see you"

Táhirih Qurrat ul-`Ayn (طاهره قرة العین) is one of the most famous poets of early modern Iran. A practitioner of the Bahá'í faith, she was criticized and persecuted on accounts of her bravery and audacity, and was eventually secretly executed. Celebrated as a martyr for the Bábí movement and for women's rights, she is remembered to this day for her actions and for her poetry. One of her most famous poems, گر به تو افتدم نظر, sometimes referred to as "Chehreh beh Chehreh" in English transliteration, has been set to music and sung by a number of great musicians, including the incomparable Shajarian.

Here is a pre-revolution recording of Shajarian with Mohammad-Reza Lotfi performing the song at the Hafeziyeh, at the Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz.

Torsors, or when only differences matter

This is sort of random, but I discovered something today that answered a number of questions that bugged me in the past. For instance, I never quite got a handle on the difference between points and vectors when doing linear algebra. So you could subtract two points and get a vector; you could add a vector to a point to get a new point; but you couldn't add two points? Umm what? Something else that used to bug me when I did (high school) chemistry was that when electrons transitioned between (quantized) energy states, the only thing that mattered was the difference between the two states, and not the states themselves. I never really understood these things, but I also never really dug deeply enough to figure things out.

Until today, when I completely randomly came across this truly awesome page on the mathematical structures known as torsors. What in the world is a torsor, and who cares? If you look up Wikipedia, you'll get something along these lines:
A G-torsor is a set X for a group G such that for any x, y in X, there is a unique g in G such that

x . g = y.

Extremely enlightening for the mathematical geniuses among us; for me, a pile of gibberish. What the heck does any of this mean?

Natural versus artificial, part trois (with maps!)

An awesome piece from Wired, this time with some pretty stellar maps, that further call into question the divide between the natural and the artificial. Titled "How Mankind Remade Nature," the article is a summary of two ecologists' proposal that we're really entering a new era, that the Holocene age has passed and that we're now in the Anthropocene age.

To illustrate their point, they have produced a series of maps that are similar to the biome maps you can find in geography textbooks (that classify the earth into rainforest, grassland, desert, and whatnot)—except that they have classified the earth based on actual land use patterns. Two such maps, one for 1700 and the other for 2000, show how much we have transformed the earth in just three hundred years. South Asia is especially vivid on this map. In 1700, it was covered mostly in semi-natural woodlands, which were certainly being used by humans, but only lightly. By 2000, though, almost all of the region was covered with agricultural land. The ecologists have called these new kinds of land uses "anthromes," because they are anthropological biomes.

Such a profound change in the nature of the vegetation and land use (coupled with the staggering loss of ecological diversity that is natural (no pun intended) when woodland is cut down and converted into monoculture cropland), the authors argue, is just as radical than earlier geological transitional periods.

Natural versus artificial, part deux

This 2003 article in the Atlantic by Charles C. Mann raises the truly fascinating question: is the Amazon rainforest a human artifact?

Mann begins in the grasslands of the province of Beni, Bolivia ("about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat"), where one can find

an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is [archaeologist Clark] Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. [Anthropologist William] Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Absolutely incredible! And apparently this is by no means an isolated incident in the Americas. A new school of ecologists and archaeologists and anthropologists holds, very controversially of course, that "Indians were here far longer than previously thought, … and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind."

Needless to say, this is utterly at odds with the image of the Native American presented to me in school textbooks. There the impression is created that Native Americans (who are conveniently classified into one bucket, while the incoming Europeans are carefully distinguished on the basis of nationality, at the very least) were some sort of noble savages who lived in complete harmony in an eternal present with pristine nature. This was convenient because, on the one hand, it served to show the evil of the white man destroying this beautiful, naïve, gentle, harmonious culture, and on the other, it served as an implicit justification for the fact that the European strive for progress and perfection would lead to the overwhelming of these people who were frozen in time.

This article showed me just how incredibly simplistic and ridiculously wrong my understanding of the native inhabitants of the Americas was. Just like humans anywhere else, they were smart and sophisticated manipulators of their environments; it's just that they did so in ways so radically different from anything the Europeans had seen before that they naturally assumed that what they saw was wilderness. That, and the fact that European-transmitted diseases often travelled far, far faster than the Europeans themselves, so that even in those cases where Europeans did come into contact with Native Americans, they were likely encountering severely attenuated cultures on the verge of collapse.

The article also fascinatingly points out that this new picture of Native Americans undermines one of the cornerstones of (certain branches of) the environmental movement: that there can be "untouched" nature, and that our goal should be to restore our damaged environment to this state. But what this article suggests is that there never was such a state, and that our efforts to do so are quite artificial indeed. Or, to put it differently, and to reinforce the point I made a few days ago, the line between the natural and the artificial is rather artificial!