A dialogue between Man and God

This is another one of the songs from the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack of the movie Bab'Aziz, interleaving verses in Bengali (from a Baul song, according to a friend) and verses in Persian by Muhammad Iqbal. I don’t know any Bengali, but I can translate the Persian here. It’s part of his Payām-i Mashriq, a collection of Persian poems that is among the last works composed by South Asians in Persian that achieved renown in Iran and Afghanistan.




The original actually begins with three verses in the voice of God, after which follow the three verses that are sung in the video by Salar Aghili, in the voice of Man.

خدا:

جهان را ز یک آب و گل آفریدم

تو ایران و تاتار و زنگ آفریدی

من از خاک پولاد ناب آفریدم

تو شمشیر و تیر و تفنگ آفریدی

تبر آفریدی نهال چمن را

قفس ساختی طائر نغمه‌زن را

“The most beautiful verse in Sanskrit”

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, towards its end, cites a verse from Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, accompanied by the Merton & Moussaief translation. The original Sanskrit reads:

ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdān

paryutsuko bhavati yat sukhito ’pi jantuḥ |

tac cetasā smarati nūnam abodha-pūrvam

bhāva-sthirāṇi jananântara-sauhṛdāni ||

In the words of Merton & Moussaief:

Even the man who is happy glimpses something

Or a thread of sound touches him

And his heart overflows with a longing

he does not recognize

Then it must be that he is remembering

a place out of reach people he loved

In a life before this their pattern

Still there in him waiting

I would translate it slightly differently:

    Seeing something beautiful,

    Hearing something sweet,

He begins to yearn for something—

although he was happy before this.

Surely he remembers something,

if only subconsciously:

        Loves from lost lives

        Indelibly imprinted in Being

We may call it nostalgia; the Germans, Sehnsucht; the Portuguese, saudade; the Persians, دلتنگی; Proust, a remembrance of things past that draws you into une recherche du temps perdu.  Kālidāsa sees in this form of recognition (which, not-so-incidentally, is fundamental to the plotline of the Śākuntalam) something deeply and fundamentally part of being human. Our old loves are never really lost; if they were true loves, sauhṛdāni, minglings of hearts, then they transform who we are for eternity. (And for Kālidāsa, it really is eternity!) They are fixed points within the flux of Being—within human beings, and within Being itself, shot through with human experiences.

What Kālidāsa does not say in this one verse is what we should do with this insight. We may choose to cling on to these points of stability, and to thus anchor ourselves in the past. Or we may choose to cast ourselves into the flow of being, while nonetheless retaining our knowledge of these fixed points, using them like stars to help us navigate uncharted waters.

Are tangent vectors contravariant or covariant?

Correct but annoying answer I: Neither! They simply are.

Correct but annoying answer II: Both! It depends on the person you ask.

More to come on this once I find the time to write up stuff in LaTeX.

UPDATE:
No, I haven’t found time to write things up in LaTeX yet. But I did come up with a great analogy to explain why CBAA-II says, “it depends.”

The core idea underlying the difference between the two is that of active transformations versus passive transformations. What that means is something I’ll get into later. For now, just the analogy:

If I’m wearing jeans that are too short for my legs, there are two ways to understand why this might be the case (other than the possibility that I have very poor taste in clothing, of course):

1. I may have had a growth spurt overnight. (This would be the active transformation as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the passive transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)
2. My jeans might have shrunk after going through the washer-dryer. (This would be the passive transformation, as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the active transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)

My legs thus covary with my height (assuming I grow evenly, of course), and contravary with my jeans’ length. Are my legs covariant or contravariant? It depends on whether the transformation is active or passive!

“A Hymn to Śrī”: The Śrī Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika

It is said that Śrī Vedānta Deśika composed his famous Śrī Stuti when a pious but poor young man came to him for help: he wanted to get married, and needed some money to convince his father-in-law-to-be that he was worth it. No sooner had Śrī Vedānta Deśika finished reciting the Śrī Stuti than a shower of gold coins poured down from the heavens, making the young man rich and making Śrī Vedānta Deśika even more famous than he had been.

What follows is a first draft at translating this most beautiful of hymns praising the Goddess Śrī. All that is good in this comes from the beauty of the original; whatever isn’t, stems from my own deficiencies. May I be forgiven my myriad faults!

|| Śrīḥ ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,

        blessed with śrī,

        saffron-maned lion among poets and philosophers,

        teacher of the Vedānta—

may he be enshrined in my heart forever!

|| 1 || 

Magnificent beyond all measure,

Auspicious even to all things auspicious,

Resting on the chest of Madhu’s conqueror

Ornamenting it by Her lustre,

Felicity personified for all people

        who seek material and spiritual prosperity—

        to you, o Śrī, do I,

                who have no other refuge,

        surrender!