My Two Paisa's Worth

Calculus From Kerala

2007-01-10T22:09:00.000-06:00

You were probably told that the discoverer of Calculus was one of these two gentleman --- the Englishman Newton or the German Leibniz (my academic ancestor!). I'm here to tell you that you were lied to. If this BBC radio show is to be believed, the first known Calculus text is the Ganita Yuktibhasa written by Jyesthadeva in AD 1530 in Malayalam ! This was more than a century before Newton and Leibniz appeared on the scene.

There is also this pdf-presentation by S.G.Rajeev of the U of Rochester with more details about the Kerala school and the contents of the Yuktibhasa. Part of the difficulty in translating it into modern mathematical notation is, apparently, that it is written in verse !

A brief history of Indian contribution to Mathematics (gathered from the radio show and the pdf-presentation):

Number System: Numerals representing numbers (rather than collections of dots or strokes). The Brahmi numerals (250BC, symbols 1--10 but no zero). The zero is first seen in the 4th century (Bhakshali(?) manuscript). The "placeholder" system of representing numbers spreads from India through the Arabs (as testified by Said Al-Andalus, the historian from 11th century Cordoba). Europeans had a hard time getting used to the zero and the Indian number system, despite the enthusiastic efforts of Fibonacci (who learned it from his childhood in 11th-century Algiers as the son of a diplomat).
Aryabhatta (6th century, Patna, Bihar) who wrote the Aryabhattiya. His main original contribution is in summing (finite) series.
Bhaskaracharya (12th century) wrote the "Lilavatti" an elementary text. He made contributions in "Pre-Calculus" eg. calculating the movement of planets in smaller and smaller (but not yet infinitesmal) time instants.
Madhava and the Kerala School (13th-16th century). Infinite series (with series expansions of pi, sine, cosine and arctangent, building on Aryabhatta's finite series) and integrals (according to Prof.Rajeev's presentation). While Madhava's works don't survive, his students' works do, and they cite him (like all honest scholars should).

I found all of this starting from Robin Varghese's post at (the excellent) 3 Quarks Daily.

Cash Cameos

2006-11-14T21:58:00.000-06:00

If you like playing name-that-cameo (and can get past the pretentiousness, perhaps) you might like this video. Maybe I'll post the names at some point. Or you can do so in the comments. I'm not sure who the first guy is (who talks about Cash's wearing black).

San Diego

2006-11-09T23:49:00.000-06:00

What did I find in San Diego ?

Sunny skies and palm trees :

This cover of the San Diego Weekly Reader :

Yes, it's a Sikh man tying his turban. Here's a closeup.

And this pen that's also a 128MB memory stick. Did I mention the sun and the palm trees ? And some talks and posters and stuff.

I also learned that 'El' and 'La' are the masculine and feminine versions of the word 'the'. So you have 'El Hombre' (the man) .vs. 'La Mesa' (the table). (Incidentally the hindi/urdu word for table मेज ["Maze"] is also feminine as far as I remember. I suspect Arabic is the link language). 'Los' and 'Las' are the plural counterparts of 'El' and 'La'. I knew about 'San' and 'Santa' being the masculine and feminine versions of 'Saint'. We were wondering about 'Santa Cruz', as Cruz sounds like a man's name. It turns out that 'Cruz' means 'Cross' and, for whatever reason, is feminine. Spanish place and street names make a lot more sense now.

Book tag

2006-10-31T19:15:00.000-06:00

Thanks for the tag maisnon !

1) One book that changed your life?

I can't think of one that's literally changed my life but a book that resonated with me on a personal level is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. I read it long after it came out and wasn't sure it could measure up to the hype. It described a world that I was really familiar with but had never before seen described in print. And described so accurately on so many levels --- not just the recognizable characters and places and happenings, but also her use of language. Those word-games that she plays, that some might think frivolous, I thought, captured the way Indian kids use the English language. [Ok, I'll stop trying to be M.Kakutani now. Or M.Vij, for that matter]. I was also relieved to finally be able to answer the question "You're Indian, but why is your last name an anglo-saxon first name ?" with "Read this book".

2) One book you have read more than once?

I was going to say that the exciting prose and plot of [insert-textbook-name-here] kept me coming back for more, but realized that there isn't even a textbook that I've read all the way through twice.

3) One book you would want on a desert island?

A Practical Guide to Ship-building ? Yes, another cop-out (with apologies to GK Chesterton).

4) One book that made you cry?

Hmmm. The only one that comes to mind is "What's So Amazing About Grace" by Philip Yancey. My younger, less cynical, less skeptical, self was easily moved by stories of selflessness and grace. Later when I heard the song "Grace" on U2's ATYCLB I was convinced that Bono had also read the book [and according to the internets, I might be right].

5) One book that made you laugh?

Only one ? There's Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson which describes some interesting characters that Ronson spent a lot of time with. In my mind Ronson, Sedaris and Dave Eggers form the TAL posse of really funny writers (because TAL is where I first heard them). Ronson, like Sedaris, also has a hilarious voice (literally). When I read his stuff, I hear his voice reading it to me in my head, and it's even funnier.

6) One book you wish had been written?

How to have your cake and eat it perhaps?

7) One book you wish had never been written?

I hate to be a downer here, but ... The Left Behind series ? I do not need to have read a sentence of that tripe to wish it had never been written. When a piece of fiction forces a literalist nineteenth-century interpretation on an allegorical first-century text, bad things happens. What bad things you ask ? Otherwise mild-mannered, (presumably) well-meaning people start cheering for ethnic cleansing, the destruction of the environment and nuclear war.

8) One book you are reading currently?

White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I've been reading it in tiny bites for several weeks now and I hope to finish it during the 8+ hrs that I'll be spending in aircraft this week.

9) One book you have been meaning to read?

I've been meaning to get through the second half of Life of Pi after I abandoned it halfway and was told that there was a payoff at the end. My friend's copy has been lying unopened on my shelf for several months now.

It's hard to choose who to tag from my vast readership. Perhaps I'll go with the 'B's'. So badmash, bdeshini and brimful --- you're all tagged (whenever you get around to reading this post, that is).

Goodman on Colbert

2006-10-05T16:07:00.000-05:00

Irony will meet its opposite when Amy Goodman is on the Colbert Report tonight. I expect it to be a good interview as the best Colbert interviews are when his guests play it completely straight and leave all the humour-generation to Stephen. Also, being in character means Colbert doesn't need to suck up to his guests (hint, hint JS).

Note to Comedy-Central: Please fix your slow, clunky, site with its often undependable video-streaming. Perhaps you can learn from MSNBC; whose site we have no complaints about (well, except that it doesn't like Firefox). The cheapskates and freeloaders of the world demand it !

Hugo's book club

2006-09-21T19:46:00.000-05:00

I was watching my daily dose of over-the-internet news bulletins (MSNBC,CNN) and thought I saw footage of Hugo Chavez holding up a book by Chomsky during a UN speech. The reporters didn't mention it and were more focused on his "Diablo" line, and so I figured that it was old footage. But today I find out on Democracy Now, that he did in fact do what I thought he did.

And then from Google News/CBC I read the following. "Hugo's book club? Chavez speech sparks sales for Chomsky"

Author Noam Chomsky got an unexpected boost in sales after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez cited one of his books in a speech to the UN General Assembly.

At the start of his talk Wednesday, Chavez held up a book by Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people.
"The people of the United States should read this ... instead of … watching Superman movies," the long-time critic of U.S. foreign policy later told reporters.
The unexpected promotion had a surprising effect on online bestseller lists.
Hegemony or Survival, originally published in 2003, had jumped into the top 10 of Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com as of Thursday afternoon.
A deeper look at the Amazon results shows an even more profound impact. The online bookseller also charts what it calls "Movers & Shakers," books that have seen a sudden rise in popularity in the last 24 hours.

At the moment the two versions of the book are ranked #2 and #19. This reminds me of the report of the Iraqi prime-minister also being a Chomsky fan (atleast according to Tim Russert).

TED

2006-09-05T21:12:00.000-05:00

A post is long overdue, so here's a link my friend sent me today.

It's a collection of talks from TED. I'd never heard of this conference before. TED stands for "Technology Entertainment Design". Ignoring the fanciful name, it's a collection of 20-min talks (video and audio) from an interesting group of people --- from A.Gore to Z.Frank.

I haven't seen them yet, but they come highly recommended, so I look forward to doing so soon. The speakers include this smart,funny lady, and this excellent teacher/presenter whose class I've had the pleasure of being in.

Interestingly, the organizer Chris Anderson is a missionary-kid from South Asia who says that he "went to a wonderful (American) school in the Himalayan mountains". I'm pretty sure he means this one.

All Night Vigil

2006-07-15T17:06:00.000-05:00

There was a story on NPR earlier this week about a new recording of Rachmaninoff's "All Night Vigil" by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Here's an excerpt of the recording [streaming mp3].

The NPR piece had other details about Rachmaninoff's composition. Not much of a church-goer, he wrote it in response to the Russian WWI war effort. He considered it one of his best works, wanted it to be played at his own funeral and wanted to be buried in Moscow. But then the 1917 revolution happened and that was not to be. He ended up dying in Beverly Hills and buried in NY.

I hadn't heard this piece of music before and I was blown away by it. Then again I'm a sucker for the genre (liturgical choral music ?) --- including this, this and even this. It's amazing what can be done with an a cappella choir.

Another reason I like it is that I hadn't heard much music from the Russian Orthodox Church before i.e. on "this side" of the schism. It's a mystery to me how the music from one branch of the church gets to be breath-taking, while the music from another branch, not many nodes away, is... ~~not so much~~.[At this point I was going to link to an mp3 that reflects my memory of the not-so-harmonious singing of the orthodox churches I've attended. But I haven't really been able to find one. Instead I found this recording of the Divine Liturgy in Syriac/Arabic. It is not exactly pitch-perfect and I don't understand a word, but it's really beautiful in it's own way. What it reminds me of, apart from the music of Indian orthodox churches of course, is the a cappella choral music from the movie "In the Bedroom". The music from the movie is listed as "Bulgarian Traditional" and performed by the Newark Balkan Chorus. If I remember correctly (I can't find an audio link), that singing was also slightly anti-harmony and really haunting.]

Vellore Mutiny: 200 years ago today.

2006-07-10T20:52:00.000-05:00

Manish at Ultrabrown reminds me of an event that took place 200 years ago in a place that I am very familiar with. Quoting Outlook Magazine :

On July 10, 1806, exactly two hundred years ago, as the moon shone over the ramparts of the Vellore fort, at 2 a.m., Indian sepoys rose in a bloody revolt against the East India Company’s garrison. As shrieks and gunfire pierced the quiet, the sepoys shot at English officers, fired into the European barracks and massacred the sick in their hospital, leaving 14 British officers and 100 soldiers dead. In the counterattack unleashed at 9 a.m. by Colonel Robert Rollo Gillespie’s men, who rushed from Arcot 14 miles away, 350 Indians sepoys were put to death…
This little-documented event was the first major rebellion against the emerging British Empire in colonial India. It cost the governor of Madras, Lord William Bentinck, his job.

The last time I was home, I took a walk along those ramparts and took some pictures of the Fort (built "in the 3rd quarter of the 16th century") and the temple within it (a few decades older). Here are some pictures. The complete set is here.

The fort with the town in the background :

The entrance to the fort that leads out onto what used to be a drawbridge (I think):

Sentry posts (?) along the ramparts:

Jalakanteswara temple :

A[n old ?] banyan tree inside :

A [colonial era ?] tennis court :

The Battle Of The Blues in Berlin

2006-07-08T10:24:00.000-05:00

When the Azzurri play Les Bleus on Sunday, I know who I'll be cheering for.

I hadn't watched that much soccer before this World Cup [thanks to my deprived upbringing --- I remember devouring the sportspage of The Hindu during the 1990 WC, while my friends watched it on TV :( ]. So I was looking forward to finally seeing what I had previously only read about in newspaper reports - such as the entertaining style of play by the south americans .vs. the more staid (northern) european style. But except for Argentina (check out the gorgeous 24-pass setup to this 2nd goal against Serbia-and-Montenegro), the south americans (read:Brazil) didn't really deliver. The French, on the other hand, did give us some beautiful soccer. Check out this video of Zidane vs. Brazil (one of many video tributes): I now understand a little better why everybody uses words like "genius", "legend" and "best player of his generation" to describe Zidane. This interesting article from the Guardian covers a lot of ground:

Zinedine Zidane's journey from the rough back streets of Marseille to Madrid has been marked by racism, political controversy and superlative football. The world's best player tells Andrew Hussey of his pride in his Algerian heritage, his rage to be the best - and reveals why his talent can still be engulfed by flashes of violence

Ignoring France's internal communal problems for a moment, it's nice to see white, black, north-african and south asian (!) players all on one team. With players with roots in the Caribbean (Thuram and Malouda), Argentina (Trézéguet), the Congo (Makélélé) and India (via Mauritius), the diversity of the team is thanks partly to colonialism of course.

Italy looks like the slightly stronger team, but France have made a habit, recently, of surpassing expectations --- almost not qualifying, recalling players from retirement and having trouble in the early rounds. Hopefully that streak will continue for one more game so that Zidane can retire with a final, second World Cup victory.

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-07-01T17:12:00.000-05:00

I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" yesterday. I found it informative and well done. I think it has the potential to really move this issue into the public consciousness. So I'm doing my part to publicize it. Go watch it. And then do something.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to take out the recycling, then ride my bike to the grocery store, and bring back my groceries in my reusable grocery bags :). But giving up long hot showers is going to be difficult.

Go watch the movie.

Friday Football Frenzy

2006-06-09T18:32:00.000-05:00

From Crooked Timber comes a post with two pieces of World Cup history, or atleast World Cup commentary history. As Kieran Healy writes :

...here are two terrific bits of World Cup commentary, both much better than the now-hackneyed “Gol” guy: a clip in Arabic from Kuwait vs Czechoslovakia in 1982, and one in Dutch from the last minute of Holland vs Argentina in 1998. Both commentaries are out there in the realm of religious/sexual ecstasy.

Watch the video clips (thanks YouTube !) and you'll see what he means.

First the Arabic, and then the Dutch.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to decide on which team to back. I'm tending towards Angola --- for mostly non-soccer reasons. I'm hoping they'll do a Senegal.

More difficult is going to be the incorporation of the phrase "Dennis Bergkamp !" into my World Cup watching experience. Maybe I'll make it my new all-purpose exclamatory phrase.

That explains the suspicious looks

2006-05-30T09:21:00.000-05:00

I took this picture on a beach in Goa some time ago. It shows the menu of a beach-side restaurant --- in Russian ! Today I read this (via SM news) : "Goa Police ponder: Are Russians buying land for drug deals?" ---

Tourists from Russia, especially those staying in Goa on long visas, are coming under increasing scrutiny after allegations that East European drug cartels are attempting to turn Goa into a base for their activities.

That explains the suspicious looks I got when I tried to take the picture.

And further down in the article :

There is talk about the Calangute-Baga-Candolim belt being taken over by benaami Russian owners in the past several months.

Benaami ? Another hindi-urdu word enters the English language (atleast according to the South Asian press).

Singh Samples Shakti

2006-05-28T19:02:00.001-05:00

I was listening to Talvin Singh's "Distant God" (from this album ) on Launchcast. The first few bars sounded very familiar. He seems to have borrowed the opening bars of the track "Two Sisters" from the great Shakti album A Handful Of Beauty. I didn't find that fact on the internet so I'm putting it down here for the record. Perhaps it's listed on the liner notes. Also for the record, I prefer Shakti to TS.

Mahmoud Wears A WWJD Bracelet

2006-05-09T17:12:00.000-05:00

The weblog at Christianity Today Magazine picks up something that other commenters on the Ahmedinajad letter seem to have not mentioned. In a post titled Ahmadinejad: What would Jesus do? he writes :

The leaders of Iran and the United States have had no official communication since 1979. This week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke the silence and wrote a letter to President Bush, largely criticizing his actions in the Middle East as being inconsistent with Christian faith.
"Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ, the great Messenger of God," Ahmadinejad wrote, "But at the same time, have countries attacked: the lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed?" (That's a cleaned up version from what appears to be a somewhat poor translation.)

Ahmadinejad criticized the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the treatment of prisoners, support for Israel, U.S. actions in Latin America and Africa, and several other items.
"My students ask me how can these actions be reconciled with … duty to the tradition of Jesus Christ, the Messenger of peace and forgiveness," he said. "If prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph, or Jesus Christ were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior? Will we be given a role to play in the promised world, where justice will become universal and Jesus Christ will be present?"

More here.

Interesting.

Not The Internet I Signed Up For

2006-05-07T13:23:00.000-05:00

If you are reading this, you might be concerned about the attempts by cable and phone companies to change the internet, that you know and love, for the worse.

From http://www.savetheinternet.com/ :

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment -- a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you -- based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn't speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.
This isn’t just speculation -- we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet's gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Telus -- Canada's version of AT&T -- blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom the company was having a labor dispute. And Madison River, a North Carolina ISP, blocked its customers from using any competing Internet phone service.

More here.

For some amusement you can also read, former Clinton Press Secretary, Mike McCurry's ridiculous attempt to defend net-non-neutrality. Except for paid lobbyists like McCurry, this movement has broad support from everybody from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds to Larry Lessig (to the very cool CUWin !).

The Short Life of Sdhbin Hrothr

2006-04-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I found an envelope in my mailbox addressed to Sdhbin Hrothr. "Interesting name", I thought. I like figuring out people's ancestry from their last names. (ex. If your last name ends in '-ian' your ancestors were likely from armenia, or if it ends in '-ji' they're likely from gujarat, possibly via east africa, etc.) But this one was a real stumper. With the constantly changing student population in town, a significant proportion international, it wouldn't be surprising if a person with an unusual name moved and forgot to update his address with the university. A little searching on the web and the university directory didn't help. There didn't seem to be anybody alive that shared that first or last name. So the envelope ended up on the pile of paper on my desk.

Today I was frantically searching for my W-2 (monday is tax day) and found the envelope again. I decided that it was time to do something about it; either send it on to Mr.Hrothr or throw it away. So I opened it --- very guiltily, I might add. (That's what decades of singing this and saying this will leave with you --- much guilt. :) How's that for a Good Friday tie-in ?).

Inside was a letter addressed to... me! What was a letter to me doing in an envelope addressed to Mr.Hrothr ? Did somebody switch envelopes ? How fortunate that even after the envelopes were switched the letter ended up in the hands of the intended recipient!

But of course, as you might have figured out already, Sdhbin Hrothr did not exist. At least he no longer existed now that I'd opened the envelope. I had just killed him. He was the creation of my imagination and a careless typist --- a typist whose roving wrist, resting millimeters away from where it was supposed to, inadvertently created encrypted text.

I'm surprised the postman delivered it. They claim to deliver only if the name on envelope matches the one on the mailbox. I wonder if he figured it out or simply ignored the name. Perhaps the post-office is adept at decoding encrypted names.

I really like the name Sdhbin Hrothr and I'm looking for an opportunity to use it. If Hrothgar is a name (of a King in Beowulf and this actor --- thanks google toolbar instant search suggestions), I don't see why Sdhbin Hrothr can't be one too. So if you are ever in need of a made-up name feel free to use it. Tell people that it's Danish, or Hungarian, or Xhosa, or Uighur or whatever. They might believe you.

The WMP shuffle

2006-03-29T08:17:00.000-06:00

Ipod shuffle guessing game from brimful. I set my windows media player (for want of an ipod) on "shuffle" and wrote down the first line of the first twenty songs that played (barring repeated artists and first lines containing song titles). Your job: identify the song or the artist and enter it as a comment. As the guesses come in I'll cross the songs off. No googling ! Here's the list :

Pebble by pebble, sand grain by sand grain, shore turns to sea, shore turns to ocean
~~Gonna close my eyes girl and watch you go running through this life darling like a field of snow~~ David Gray "The one I love". Exactly cookiemonsta.
~~Huh! Yeah, we're comin' back then with another bombtrack. Think ya know what it's all about.~~ RATM "Know Your Enemy". Right band maisnon..
~~In the next world war, in a jackknifed juggernaut, I am born again~~ Radiohead "Airbag". ads got it.
I forbid you maidens all that wear gold in your hair to travel to Carterhall
The night was black, the roads were icy, snow was fallin', drifts were high
~~The waiting drove me mad. You're finally here and I'm a mess~~

Pearl Jam's "Corduroy". That's right brimful. I'm not ashamed to be a PJ fan.

~~Here comes that awful feeling again. Welcome the ugly animal. I hold my breath to watch you swing~~ R.E.M "Circus Envy". Exactly maisnon !
~~I need an easy friend. I do, with an ear to lend.~~ Nirvana's "About a Girl". brimful again
~~You're in an all-girl band. Your futon's second hand. Your parents understand, but you don't care~~ Barenaked Ladies "Alternative Girlfriend". Great job Maitri !
~~I don't want to hear you whisper I don't want to orbit your world ...~~Cake "World Of Two". Maitri again.
Everyone has choice when to and not to raise their voices. It's you that decides which way will you turn
Oh I do believe in all the things you say. What comes is better than what came before
It's happening all the time when I open my eyes I'm still taken by surprise
~~So this is christmas and what have you done. Another year over a new one just begun~~ John Lennon "Happy X-Mas (War Is Over)" Good job andrea.
West indians, black americans, west indians, black americans
~~I never felt magic crazy as this I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea~~ Nick Drake "Northern Sky" Great job Manoj !
Are your garments spotless are they white as the snow
~~When I'm walkin' these streets. And I'm countin' my steps. And I'm draggin' my feet 'cause I ain't ready yet~~ Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris "I Remember You" Great job Amelie-Freak !
Baby, I really, really love you now. I think you should stop your cryin

Jambalaya / Paella / Pulao

2006-03-27T20:37:00.000-06:00

Some googling in relation to my previous post lead me to the Wikipedia page on Pulao/Pilaf, which they describe as :

a Middle Eastern and Central Asian dish in which a grain, such as rice or cracked wheat, is generally first browned in oil, and then cooked in a seasoned broth. Depending on the local cuisine it may also contain a variety of meat and vegetables.

Down at the bottom of the page under "See Also", they list Paella and Jambalaya. It hadn't struck me before how similar these three words are to each other. Surely they have a common root ? Wikipedia says that the root dish is Persian or Uzbek:

One of the earliest literary references to Pilau can be found in the histories of Alexander the Great when describing Sogdian (an Eastern Iranian province probably the birthplace of Alexander's wife Roxana and geographically situated in modern Uzbekistan) hospitality

It's easy to believe that it spread to Iberia to become Paella :

The Arabs probably introduced Pilaf to Iberia. Spanish paella was more than likely a standard Moorish method for cooking rice - with no wasted water, important in desert regions like North Africa.

And I'm convinced that Jambalaya is a distortion of the same word. But not everybody thinks so:

It may derive from the Spanish dish paella, possibly brought to Louisiana when Spain controlled the territory comprising the future Louisiana Purchase, although many other theories exist, including the notion that it is a combination of the words jambon (French for ham), à la (French for in the style of) and ya-ya (West African for rice).

Perhaps it's a mix of several words, if that's possible.

In related news, "some scholars think" that the words for Rice in many European languages is derived from the Tamil Arisi :

Indian scholars claimed that the word for rice in Western languages had a Dravidian root and that ris, riz, arroz, rice, oruza, and arrazz all came from arisi (Pankar and Gowda 1976).

Yes, discovering similar words in different languages is my idea of fun.

You call this a date ?

2006-03-27T19:13:00.000-06:00

Last week was Norooz/Nowrooz (Persian new year) and my Iranian friend brought some food to the office. When explaining what went into it he said he didn't know what it was called in English but in Farsi it was called "Tamr-Hindi". "Tamr-hindi" ? Tamarind ?

Yes, it turns out that the word Tamarind is derived from the Persian/Arabic for "Indian Date" : Tamr=Date and Hindi=Indian. And further, everybody from the Portuguese to the Latvians to the Japanese refer to it by some variant of "Tamarind".

But they're all wrong, according to this site:

Native to tropical Africa, the tree grows wild throughout the Sudan and was so long ago introduced into and adopted in India that it has often been reported as indigenous there also, and it was apparently from this Asiatic country that it reached the Persians and the Arabs who called it "tamar hindi" (Indian date, from the date-like appearance of the dried pulp), giving rise to both its common and generic names. Unfortunately, the specific name, "indica", also perpetuates the illusion of Indian origin.

Pi stories

2006-03-14T13:59:00.000-06:00

Apparently today, March 14th, is PI.-day (3.14, get it ?). Actually, as my Greek Calculus instructor once informed us, PI is correctly pronounced "P" (just like the equivalent English letter). [In a related story, a Greek physics grad student teaching assistant told me that he once got back evaluations from his students which said that he did a good job at everything except pronouncing the Greek alphabet correctly !]. But back to PI.

Not long ago I was called in to mediate a dispute between an 8-yr old girl (my cousin) and her mechanical-engineer father. My cousin's teacher had told her that if you wrote down the decimal expansion of PI, the sequence of digits would go on forever without repetition. Her dad then took out paper and pen and divided 22 by 7 and showed her that the digits did in fact repeat. I, of course, had to inform them that the teacher was right and that PI is only approximately equal to 22/7 and, in fact, is irrational (even transcendental) and therefore can not be expressed as an integer over another integer (in the process perhaps causing long term damage to the sacred bond of trust between father and daughter). I suspect the assumption that PI is exactly equal to 22/7 is more common among people who learnt math without calculators.

I'd like to say that I took out pen and paper and wrote out the proof of the irrationality of PI, but sadly they had to take it on faith. I did find it on the internet later though. Before I direct you to the proof, I hope you notice the time-stamp on this post. Getting the post in exactly at 3.14 1:59:26 was a complicated task involving synchronizing the clock on my PC to Blogger's clock and then making sure that the first key was hit just as the second digits turned to 26. Ok, here's the proof thanks to Helmut Richter.

Four of Each

2006-03-11T14:03:00.000-06:00

I'm back ! The pleadings of my hordes of devoted readers have been heard ! First I shall fulfill my obligations as a tagee (thanks badmash), even if several months late. If the blogosphere was full of people like me, memes would never spread --- good thing or bad thing I don't know.

4 jobs
1. Shelver of books at gigantic university library: mindless tasks made bearable by Walkman and the gaining of library-related trivia (ex. Tchaikovsky is filed under "ch" not "t").
2. Undergrad Teaching Assistant: lead discussion sessions and tasted the heady feeling that comes from knowing more than everybody else in the room.
3. Undergrad Research Assistant: Varied programming/computer-related tasks often related to automating laboratory data-gathering.
4. Grad-Student/Researcher: I could do this forever and you wouldn't have to pay me that much more really. Sadly it looks like this too might be coming to an end soon.

4 movies: This is a little hard. I don't have all-time favorite movies. So I've made this a list of 4 movies I can watch repeatedly (if it's on TV for example). I had to look at the imdb list to remember some names.
1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
2. Austin Powers
3. Office Space
4. Pulp Fiction
4 places I've lived
1. Houston, TX
2. Chicago, IL
3. Kodaikanal, India
4. Cochin, India
4 TV shows
1. The Daily Show
2. The Colbert Report
3. PBS: Frontline
4. This American Life (Ok, it's not TV but it's one of the best things on the any media. Check out this week's incredible show "Habeas Schmabeas".)
Phew! That means I don't have to list the more embarrassing ones.
4 vacations
1. Muscat, Oman (surprising nice secluded beaches)
2. Mahabalipuram, India (annual childhood family winter-vacation)
3. Coonoor, India (annual childhood family summer-vacation)
4. Colorado, USA (memorable spring break)
4 foods
1. Appam and stew
2. Chicken biriyani
3. Injera (i.e. Ethiopian appam)
4. Chocolate-chip cookie dough ice-cream.
Note to badmash: I promise I didn't copy items 1&2 from you.
4 places I'd rather be
1. In my grand-uncle's vallam in the river beside his house.
2. Doing "the 3-day hike" in the Palani hills near Kodaikanal.
3. Traveling somewhere I've never been: an "Amazing Race"-like world-wide trip preferably.
4. In a real city: London perhaps.
4 sites
1. Sepia Mutiny.
2. Google
3. Gmail
4. Sitemeter :)
4 bloggers whom I'm tagging: Since everybody's done this already there's nobody left to tag.

Enterprising Ancestor

2006-01-11T18:10:00.000-06:00

Here's an excerpt of an email about my great-great-grandfather OP. He lived in Kerala about a 100 years ago :

[OP] could not manage with income from rice farming, he had a family of ten children, seven of them girls... In those days the government (of Travancore) had the monopoly of sales of salt and 'karappu' (ganja), besides claim to all teak and sandalwood trees whether grown on private or government land.

[OP] would not take this lying down. He imported karappu on his own without payment of dues to the government.. Although many of his progeny may call him a smuggler, there was more to it. Remember the people had a tough time and karappu would give them some relief and solace..

I think that makes me the great-great-grandson of a drug dealer (and activist ?). It's hard to imagine, but maybe people back then really were a lot more tolerant about what is and isn't acceptable to be consumed.

The author of this email, and the justification of his grandfather's activities, is my remarkable, technology-embracing, 80-year-old grand-uncle. He lives in a beautiful house beside a gorgeous river (shown above when a little overrun by weeds).

Tracking Back

2006-01-04T17:24:00.000-06:00

Two things that might not be from where you think they are :

The phrase "My Bad": appears to have originated with Manute Bol (the lanky Sudanese NBA player). This blog-post [via Ennis] traces the phrase back from its usage in a Harvard classroom, back to its popularization by the movie Clueless, via "urban" basketball courts, and possibly to the Golden State Warriors to Manute himself --- a speaker of the Dinka language.
...the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily). Says Arneson, "I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase." And Ben Zimmer's rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.
USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.
[link]
It's funny because I distinctly remember that the first person I heard using the phrase was this blonde kid from North Carolina.
And this post [via this SM comment] traces the samosa/ samoosa/ samsa/ sambusek/ burek back, not to India, but to Persia, and describes its spread all over the world "from Cape Town to Singapore to Tashkent to Tel Aviv" and Oman, I might add , where they call it a Samboosa.
Food historians have established, however, that the samosa originated not in India, but in Persia. The sanbusaj, originally a Persian term for any stuffed, savory pastry or dumpling, started showing up in Persian, Arab and Turkish literature starting in the 9th century, when poet Ishaq ibn Ibrahim-al-Mausili wrote verse praising sanbusaj.
The first mention of the proper samosa was in Amir Khusrao’s 13th century memoir of Delhi’s royal court, when he mentioned “samosa prepared from meat, ghee, onion and so on.” There was also the legendary explorer Ibn Battuta, who in India, wrote about the sambusak: [link]
My office-mate will be happy to know that the Persians are finally getting the credit that they are often denied [eg. Rumi (sometimes called Afghan), Algebra/Algorithms (credited to the Arabs) and the Persian Gulf (a.k.a Arabian Gulf)].

Staccato signals of constant information

2005-12-30T16:42:00.000-06:00

I had to park my car at O'hare airport for a few days. I googled "ohare parking" and saw this ad ("sponsored link") among many:

Pride O'hare Park $7.50
www.PrideParking.com Family Owned - 24 Hr - Free Shuttle Free Online Reservations!

I clicked on the link and made my reservation.

So internet advertising does work after all and can save you a little money ($13-$7.50=$5.50/day). Ok, that might not be news to most people but I think what's so cool/elegant is how effective plain text can be; and that's what people seem to like about the Google aesthetic. There isn't a need for fancy images, just compose a short line of text with important details such as the price and the effectiveness-per-bit of your ad goes through the roof.

Now that I've used Pride Parking; I'm also happy to report that I don't have any complaints --- they're friendly and prompt and my car was in the state I left it (I could quibble that the actual rate is $8.25/day if you include taxes, but a little misrepresentation in advertising is to be expected). It's nice to see tiny businesses benefit from the internet.

In other news about Google is this anecdote from the British Medical Journal [via 3quarksdaily]:

For all the benefits technology provides, it does provoke anxiety. In a recent letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, a New York rheumatologist describes a scene at rounds where a professor asked the presenting fellow to explain how he arrived at his diagnosis. Matter of factly, the reply came: "I entered the salient features into Google, and [the diagnosis] popped right up." The attending doctor was taken aback by the Google diagnosis. "Are we physicians no longer needed? Is an observer who can accurately select the findings to be entered in a Google search all we need for a diagnosis to appear—as if by magic?"...

and

Google has won the battle of the search engines, at least for the time being (see example in table), and its more serious minded offspring, Google Scholar, is rapidly gaining ground. Within a year of its release Google Scholar has led more visitors to many biomedical journal websites than has PubMed (J Sack, personal communication, 2005). Once they discover it, many medical students and doctors prefer Google Scholar...

I have found the same about Google Scholar. It's hard to imagine what research was like before search engines. And Google Scholar often brings up more relevant results than the search engines of the journal's own website.

Marco says

2005-12-15T20:39:00.000-06:00

I sometimes catch the show "The World" on the radio (yes, I'm a public radio ~~nerd~~ listener). I'd say the part of the show that I've learned the most from is the "Global Hit" segment where Marco Werman, their music guy, talks about music from around the world. Things I've learned ? :

Today Marco talked about his pick of albums of the year. And on the list is the first-ever album from the all-star duo of Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. The excerpt that he played on the show sounds really great. You might remember Ali Farka Toure from his album with Ry Cooder, or from the song on that album that was used in a memorable scene from the movie Unfaithful (which I guess I've just admitted to having watched). I know Toumani Diabate from his interesting album with Taj Mahal where they explore the common roots of the (Southern American) Blues and Malian music. (incidentally also introduced to me on a public radio show from many years ago). I recommend that album (and the liner notes, btw).

On a show of a few months ago, was a surprising revelation about a very familiar hymn. The hymn "How Great Thou Art "/"O Store Gud" is well-known to protestant congregations from around the world, including India. I've always found it inexplicably moving --- inexplicable because I can't say the words are particularly meaningful (or even agreeable). The tune always struck me as being unusual and I wondered if it had a non-European origin. It turns out, atleast according to Marco Werman, that it does. It's from Madagascar, by way of Norwegian missionaries from the 1860s ! I've not found other sites that repeat that claim and I've seen the tune listed as being everything from Russian to Swedish. The Madagascar story sounds very plausible though and most interesting. One legacy of the Norwegian missionaries is their careful cataloging of old folk tunes from Madagascar. The show also has an example of a Malagasy folk song about a snake that morphed into a Norwegian Lutheran hymn. Here is audio of the show.

Farm in Africa

2005-11-30T20:40:00.000-06:00

My grandparents had a farm in Africa at the edge of the Indian Ocean. It was in Mtwara, Tanzania --- right on the sea-shore, I am told. This faded photograph shows my grandfather with the carcass of a lioness that had been caught trespassing. Here's one that shows my grandmother sitting, uncomfortably and in a sari, on the same lioness. I'm guessing the posing with the lioness was my grandfather's idea.

I like these old photographs as they show my grandparents in a time and place and in circumstances that I am not used to seeing them. My grandfather looking dapper in a white suit and various interesting hats, my grandmother at a "sundowner" (I don't remember ever seeing alcohol in my grandparents house in Kerala), my grandfather on a motorbike, with the rest of his soccer team (who seem to have had a penchant for interesting headgear). And then there's this adorable (and nicely framed) picture of my mother and her two siblings:

I'm in awe of my grandfather's spirit of adventure and perseverence that would take him, a high-school graduate, from the village of Kumbanad in Kerala to running a successful agricultural business in a far away land. It appears that Kumbanad, a village that I have visited precisely once in my life, has had an especially strong culture of emigration. This Outlook magazine article talks of how the village today is made up of old people whose children and grandchildren are in foreign countries.

At the time the first step to finding a job overseas was to go to Bombay. Not long after graduating from high-school he did exactly that. It was in his office in Bombay that he met my grandmother (as I was surprised to find out, knowing how involved he was in his children's marital decisions). While in Bombay, after several attempts, he found a job with a company in East Africa.

My grandparents' time in Africa, especially after the birth of their children, is quite well-documented in several photo albums. When I was at home recently I scanned in the oldest of those albums: faded pictures and all. It appears that his first appointment was in the Hasani Estates in Makanya (near the Tanga Railway Line), in the north of the country near the border with the Kenya. After a couple of years there they moved down to Mikindani in the south (near the Mozambique border) where my grandfather worked at the sisal estates. Sisal is a kind of plant fiber used for making rope. The Mikindani Sisal estate appears to be owned today by the same family that owned it then --- the Karimjee/Jivanjees. Here's a quote from a now-dead web-page that was cached by google :

Karimjee Jivanjee Estates Ltd was founded in 1939 to look after agricultural interests. The firm consisted of fifteen plantations growing sisal, coffee, coconuts, kapok, rubber, timber and fruits.
However acquisition of estates had commenced in 1921 with the purchase of Derema Coffee Estate in the Usambara Mountains. Derema is the oldest recorded estate in Tanganyika being formed in 1891 by the German East Africa Co. Production on Derema was changed from coffee to tea in 1933 following the damage inflicted by coffee berry disease and the 194o's saw the addition of Monga and Maramba Tea Estates in the Amani Forest.
Sisal estate acquisitions commenced in 1922 but the company's original Mtwara sisal estate was acquired by the British Government in order to create Mtwara township and harbour.
Karimjee Jivanjee Estates reached its peak in the early 1960's with sisal production at 12,500 tons per annum and tea production at 550 tons per annum.

In 1956, less than a decade after he got to Africa, my grandfather branched out on his own; starting his own estate in Mtwara (close to Mikindani) with cattle, poultry and cashews.

Tanzania has had a particularly comopolitan history because of its indian-ocean coast. Starting as early as the 8th century, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese (possibly this guy?), Portuguese, Germans and Brits played a role. The Sultan of Oman controlled Zanzibar and the Tanganyikan coast from atleast the 18th century. The Germans started colonizing the area in the 1880s, and the Brits took over after WWI. The Germans built railway lines and introduced Sisal.

There have been Indians in East Africa for centuries. The Karimjee-Jivanjee family got to Tanzania in the 1830s (!). I'm not sure exactly why so many people from one particular part of India (Gujurat/Cutch) moved to East Africa over the past couple of centuries. Names that end in jee: Karimjee, Vassanji, Verjee, Nagji, Tyabji, Bhanji are all from a particular ethnic/religious group --- the Bohra/Ismailis of eastern India.

When I was an undergraduate in Texas, I was sitting at lunch one day with a kid of Indian-East-African origin (with a -ji last name). And we found out, to our astonishment, that his family came from Mtwara --- the same small town that my grandparents built their estate in.

My mother's Tanzanian past caught up with her when she worked in Oman for a short while in the 90s. As the Sultan Of Oman ruled Zanzibar until the 1960s, Oman has several citizens of Zanzibari origin who speak Kiswahili (rather than Arabic). So my mother was able to understand what her colleagues were saying even when they thought she didn't (though she owned up shortly).

When we were kids in Kerala my grandparents used to speak to each other in Kiswahili when they didn't want us to understand. And my aunt and my mom, though much less fluent, try that occassionally even today.

Unlike these other East-African Sepia Mutiny commenters, I can't claim much more of a legacy from my grandparents' east-african sojourn. They moved back to Kerala around 1970. Here's a set of some of their pictures.

Not Just A Slab Of Meat

2005-11-19T11:35:00.000-06:00

This is an MRI image of my heart. My friend who works on MRI imaging needed real data of a beating heart so I volunteered. Now my heart gets to be displayed in a paper. With a little luck, maybe one day it'll be as ubiquitous as the picture of this lady.

Being in an MRI machine is an interesting experience. Perhaps not so enjoyable if you're claustrophobic or if you're really ill.

Puerto Rico

2005-11-05T13:12:00.000-06:00

This is where I was a week ago.
I didn't know academic life could get this luxurious.
A few more pictures :

Stolen Childhoods

2005-10-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

This is a still from the documentary Stolen Childhoods about the use of child labour around the world. Some of the more egregious examples are from the Indian sub-continent [I'm tempted to speculate about why that is, but maybe I'll save that for later. One interesting related fact --- the carpet industry in India took off after Iran banned the use of child-labour in their carpet industry in the 70s]. Children like the little boy in the picture are forced to work on carpet-looms for hours a day, physically abused (beaten, chained to their looms) and denied a normal childhood.

If you find this unconscionable, the website has a whole list of suggestions for things you can do. Among them :

If you buy a carpet, make sure it has the RUGMARK label
Support Kailash Satyarthi's Bachpan Bachao Andolan ["Save Childhood Movement"] that rescues children from businesses that employ them.
Relatedly, if you think people at the bottom of the global economic chain don't deserve to be screwed over as much as they are at the moment, buy Fair-Trade Coffee, Rice [via Sepia Mutiny] or whatever else you consume. [Another interesting fact from the movie : coffee farmers in kenya get paid 1/40th of the price paid by the consumer in the US]

Greek Song ? Sounds South Indian to me.

2005-10-15T11:11:00.000-05:00

I just caught the track "Greek Song" (on Launchcast, naturally) from Rufus Wainwright's album Poses. Mid-way through the song there is a bit of accompanying violin that sounded distinctly carnatic to me [here's a real audio sample]. After a few minutes of searching I find out that it is, and the violinist is Anjana Srinivasan. It's just a few bars repeated several times. Don't ask me what raagam. It works extremely well in the song --- maybe it has something to do with Wainwright's glissando-heavy style of singing. The other Indian connection on the album is Wainwright's nice cover of the Beatles' "Across The Universe" [from the era of their use of indian music] whose chorus goes "Jai Guru Deva".

Houston Evacuation

2005-09-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

My friend from Houston is leaving the city and heading up to IL. He sent an email update this morning from somewhere in north-east TX. This excerpt gives a good idea of the crazy situation down there:

We left Houston late Wednesday night (or early Thursday morning, if you will) at 03:00. Leaving the city per se was rapid; we got to the airport (25 miles to the north) within an hour. But it was a complete disaster from there. We averaged 5 miles per hour for quite a long way. Highway 59, which goes north-north-east toward Arkansas, was one disaster area. Many people ran out of gas. If the hurricane has any real strength (as reported), people will be in serious trouble. Drivers were behaving in a crazy way, driving either on the grass or in some situations in the opposite direction lanes (with opposite traffic!!!) and the police did nothing. We saw one major crash and numerous stalled/stranded vehicles.
Finally, after 19 hours we got onto an empty sideroad. Until then every effort that we made to navigate around the catastrophe didn't succeed, because the sideroads were also clogged.
Our gas was reasonable. We ended up with a third of a tank left. Obviously on the highway there was ZERO gas, but once we got onto previously mentioned sideroad, there were gas stations with lines but with the precious commodity. We managed to refuel and finally got something to eat. (We had been drinking water all along but because of the insane traffic couldn't really stop anywhere; it was 2-3 hours between any two junctions on the road.)
After gas and food, we slept very well at a rest area. It was full with people from Houston, and obviously there are no hotels in Texas....

Filhos de Gandhi

2005-09-12T19:06:00.000-05:00

Yahoo's launchcast continues to expand my musical horizons. At this moment it's playing a great little song with an intriguing title --- "Filhos de Gandhi" by Gilberto Gil. Both artist and song are completely new to me.

Finding the lyrics here didn't help in figuring out what the word Gandhi is doing in the title of a Brazilian song. (My portuguese is very rusty :) --- a translation into english would be appreciated).

A few minutes of googling later, I now know that Gilberto Gil is a famous brazilian singer (in the league of Caetano Veloso --- who I have heard of). Filhos de Gandhi ("Sons of Gandhi") is a musical group that performs during Carnival, and according to wikipedia:

In 1949, a group called Filhos de ~~Ghandi~~Gandhi began playing afoxê during Carnaval parades in Salvador; their name translates as Sons of ~~Ghandi~~Gandhi, associating black Brazilian activism with Mahatma ~~Ghandi~~Gandhi's Indian independence movement. The Filhos de ~~Ghandi~~Gandhi's 1949 appearance was also revolutionary because, up until then, the Carnaval parades in Salvador were meant only for light-skinned people.

But what exactly the song says is still a mystery. Here's the portuguese :

Omolu, Ogum, Oxum, Oxumaré, todo o pessoal
Manda descer pra ver Filhos de Gandhi
Iansã, Iemanjá, chama Xangô, Oxossi também
Manda descer pra ver Filhos de Gandhi
Mercador, Cavaleiro de Bagdá
Oh, Filhos de Obá
Manda descer pra ver Filhos de Gandhi
Senhor do Bonfim, faz um favor pra mim
Chama o pessoal
Manda descer pra ver Filhos de Gandhi
Oh, meu Deus do céu, na terra é carnaval
Chama o pessoal
Manda descer pra ver Filhos de Gandhi

Thank you bsnl.

2005-08-27T06:40:00.000-05:00

My flight is delayed by 30 min, but thanks to bsnl I have free wi-fi access in chennai international airport. What I looked for and could not find in ORD and DXB, I find in MAA.

On The Trail Of Tipu Sultan

2005-08-25T11:52:00.000-05:00

Tipu's sword. British Museum, London. Notice the tiger emblem.

Tipu Sultan's legacy has turned up in all of the places I've visited this summer. Tipu was the son of Haider Ali --- a common soldier in the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad who worked his way up to become king of his own kingdom. Tipu, from his capital in Srirangapatanam (near Mysore), put up a fierce resistance to the Brits until his death in battle in 1799.

View from Fort McHenry, Baltimore of the harbor and cannons.

The first place I visited, and the one with the most tenuous connection to Tipu (which I first learned of here), is Fort McHenry, Baltimore. With the help of Congreve Rockets, the British tried to capture the city of Baltimore (and this fort) from the Americans in the war of 1812. William Congreve invented the rocket (a picture of which is displayed in the fort), when he was fighting on the British side against Tipu in south india, by reverse-engineering and improving on the rockets that Tipu used against them. Above is a view of Baltimore harbor from the walls of the fort.

View from Vellore Fort of the town and hill-top fort in the distance.

The Brits, with the help of the Nizam's army, defeated (and killed) Tipu in 1799. They kept many of his things, and imprisoned his family in Vellore Fort (a stone's throw away from where I was born and brought up). Here's a picture of the inscription in the fort and, above, a view from it's walls.

Inscription in Vellore Fort.

At the top of this post is a picture of his sword that I saw displayed in the British museum in London when I visited recently. It's a little blurry but you can make out the emblem of the tiger (Tipu's personal symbol).

Tipu's connections to Hyderabad are strong. His father used to be in the Nizam's army. His brother-in-law might even have been married to a woman from the Nizam's court/entourage --- if the (persian) women of the court didn't look down on him as being of lowly south-indian "peasant stock". (I suspect, like many things in India, this had much to do with skin colour). Tipu tried to convince the Nizam to align with the French and not the Brits, but they didn't listen. Infact they did the opposite and aligned with the Brits in defeating him and, proving Tipu's suspicions right, cheated the Hyderabadis of their conquests. Rather than dividing Tipu's captured territory between them, they gave it ~~away~~ back to the more pliable Wadyars [who were the rulers of Mysore before Tipu came along]. These and other tales of British treachery can be found in William Dalrymple's White Mughals [which I'm back to reading at the moment]. I spent several days in Hyderabad, but was too busy attending, and helping run, a wedding to be able to take relevant photographs.

Who Would Jesus Assassinate ?

2005-08-24T07:48:00.000-05:00

Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler writes :

Pat Robertson suggested this past Monday that the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, be assassinated by operatives of the United States government! Though his comments are newsworthy because of his following in the 700 Club and his political stature and role in the political religious right, his comments however are out of synch with everything that has been handed down to us from the teachings of Jesus Christ. What I am suggesting here is that Pat Robertson and individuals of his ilk are not practicing or preaching Christ but have become adherents of a political movement in this nation that attempts to use Christianity towards their own narrow political ends. I believe that there is a role for Christianity in the events of the world, but the teachings of Christ leads us to love one another, strain and stretch to understand each other, and dare to know each other enough that we come to an understanding of one another and from that create a world that is not built on might and winning but on understanding and unity. Clearly the comments of Robertson defy the framework we find in the gospels of Jesus Christ.

The rest of his article is here.

The people you meet

2005-08-15T15:36:00.000-05:00

My seat-mate from LHR to DXB was a British accountant travelling to Baghdad to work on auditing the Iraqi government. How do you get from London to your office in Baghdad you ask ? One way : take a regular airline to Dubai. Go to the cargo terminal (!) to board another plane to Baghdad. Why the cargo terminal ? Apparently because letting too many people know that there are flights from Dubai to Baghdad might attract their (f)ire. But once you get to Baghdad the hard part has only begun; because you've got to take the notoriously dangerous airport road to the city. So you catch the once-daily 3AM, heavily-armed, military convoy from the airport to the city. Along the way you might see rockets, or if you're lucky --- harmless flares, directed at you.

I also had this broad-ranging conversation with this guy travelling from the U.S. to Islamabad. We talked about the tech industry, the stock market, the british education system (A-levels, GCSE and how there seems to be grade inflation these days) and, while he was reminiscing about his senior-year undergraduate project in his college in pakistan --- about Haar Wavelets. Who knew that Haar wavelets would be fodder for a conversation with a stranger in an airport.

How Geevarghese became Jorge

2005-07-31T11:21:00.002-05:00

Speaking of the dragon and St.George, whenever I tell people that Varghese is the malayalam equivalent of George I feel like they don't really believe me. It's not surprising because those two names sound so different.

It's easier to believe if you realize that St.George --- the person after whom christians all over the world named their children, was likely a speaker of Aramaic, and was probably known to his friends as Giwargis. He is believed to have lived in the 3rd-century in Asia-Minor (born in Lydda --- in modern Israel, and died in Nicomedia --- in modern Turkey), left the Roman Army, and was tortured and killed for his faith. He was so popular that he's been named patron saint of several things including :

...England,... Georgia, Moscow, Catalonia, Malta, Lithuania, the scout movement, soldiers and skin diseases.

It's instructive to examine the geographical pattern in the variations of his name. Going from west to east, roughly, the list is :

Jorge (Spain : pronounced 'Hor-Hay')
George (England : pronounced 'Jorj' :) )
Georges (France : pronounced 'zhorzh')
Giorgio (Italy)
Giorgiy (Slavic countries: the 'G' is as in 'gun', not as in 'George')
Yiorgos (Greece)
Girgis (Egypt and the Arab world)
Giorgis (Ethiopia)
Gewargis/Giwargis/Givargis (Syriac-speaking communities of the middle east: Assyrians of Iraq for example)
Geevarghese/Varghese/Varkki (Kerala)

Here Be Dragons

2005-07-30T19:38:00.000-05:00

I took this picture from my friends' backyard in baltimore a couple of weeks ago. The flag in the picture, mostly hidden, is that of a red dragon on a green-and-white background. When I saw it I thought of Chinese dragons and guessed it was a flag from East-Asia. But, a little googling later, I was surprised to find out that it's actually Welsh.

Welsh Flag

Bhutanese Flag

Dragons have, interestingly, independently appeared in the cultures of Europe and East Asia. Apart from being the symbol of the Welsh people, the dragon has been the symbol of Chinese Emperors, and appears on the national flag of Bhutan. Here is a site that talks about the history of dragons in the west from the ancient Greeks, through medieval Christianity (St.George and the Dragon --- a myth that may have been inspired by the Greek tale of Perseus and Medusa). East Asian dragons appear to be linked to their Buddhist origins in India (and some dragon/serpeant-like creatures called Nagas in Indian mythology --- never heard of them).

One theory why dragon-like creatures have appeared independantly in such different cultures is that when people found dinosaur bones, they fleshed out what creatures they thought they belonged to, and created these dragon myths.

Shoulders of Giants

2005-07-24T09:29:00.000-05:00

The Mathematics Genealogy Project keeps a record of the academic genealogy of mathematicians (and almost-mathematicians). I looked up my genealogy and was surprised to find, a few steps up the tree, French and German mathematicians from several centuries ago who are household names today (ok, atleast if your household consists of mathematicians, scientists or engineers):

	me
	\|
	my advisor
	\|
	:
	:	(six generations)
	:
	\|
	Felix Klein
/	\
Julius Plucker	Lipschitz
\|	/		\
Christian Gerling	Dirichlet		Ohm
\|	/	\	\|
Carl Gauss	Poisson	Fourier	Langsdorf
\|	\	/
Johann Pfaff	Lagrange
\|	\|
Abraham Kaestner	Leonhard Euler
\|	\|
Hausen	Johann Bernoulli
\|	\|
Wichmannshauser	Jacob Bernoulli
\|	\|
Mencke	Gottfried Leibniz

Perhaps this is a bit premature as I haven't actually got my PhD yet. Still, it's humbling and inspiring to have these giants as academic ancestors.

Chee(na) Malabar

2005-07-06T17:42:00.000-05:00

I pointed some of my relatives to the Zheng He story that I talked about in my previous post, and they came up with more possible remnants of the Kerala-China trade link. Zheng He's journey was actually near the end of many centuries of Kerala-China trade --- shortly after Zheng's journey the chinese emperor decided to re-isolate the country and shut down their merchant navy. Consolidating things that I mentioned in my previous post and things I've since found out about, here's a list of possible remnants of the cross-cultural contacts. I also found that many of the things on this list have been talked about, with more historical detail, in this article on the interesting site peppertrail.com.

The items are listed in order of decreasing plausability. To start with are three things that are explicity referred to as being Chinese by people in Kerala :

1. Cheena Vala "Chinese Fishing nets". My attempt to find images of nets in modern-day china that are similar to the ones in cochin proved fruitless, but I did find pictures of nets in vietnam and cambodia that look like the cochin nets and appear to be referred to in those countries as being from china. As Ammini Ramachandran of peppertrail.com says, some of the fishermen who man the nets in cochin, wear east-asian-looking conical hats.

Fishing Nets, Kochi, India

Fishing Nets, Chau Doc, Vietnam

2. Cheena Chatti "Chinese Pot" a.k.a a Wok. This is an essential tool in the making of Appams (described by Madhur Jaffrey to be a "cross between a french crepe and an english muffin") --- one of my favourite foods and one that far too few people know about. You need the hemispherical wok to swirl the batter to create the spongy (muffin-like) center and crisp (crepe-like) outer ring of the appam.

3. Cheena Bharani "(Large) Chinese vessel". Although I don't recall seeing one, they are apparently used widely in the "production & storage of 'Uppu Manga', a method of utilising ripe mangoes for long term use as a curry" [according to my uncle Ninan]. Here's a picture of one that I found courtesy of Binu Mathew's page of photos.

4. Porcelain : I haven't seen any myself but, according to the peppertrail.com article, there is old Chinese blue and white porcelain to be found in houses and antique shops in Kerala that is a legacy of trade with China. Levathes' book talks about the factories that were set up in China to produce large quantities of porcelain for export and says that "ample quantities of chinese porcelains have been found from the Philippines to East Africa".

5. Elaborate Sloping Roofs :My grand-uncle George pointed out the similarity between roofing in traditional homes in Kerala and East Asia. While this might be a function of similar environments generating similar artifacts, I think it is remarkable that temples in Kerala have the multiple-layered, sloping roofs that are so similar to temples in east asia but so different from temples in neighbouring regions (like Tamilnadu, which have tall stone gopurams).

Vadakumnathan temple, Thrishoor, Kerala

Buddhist Temple, Kyoto, Japan

6. Boats : This is also questionable, but some claim that the similarity of the river-boats of Kerala (vallams) to the river-boats of East Asia (sampans?) is also a legacy of the Chinese cultural interaction. I report you decide :

Vallam, Kerala (courtesy Raghu Ramachandran)

Sampan, China (courtesy darrellpeck.com)

7. Martial Arts : Some martial arts websites refer to Kalaripayattu, the traditional martial art of Kerala, as the mother of all martial arts. One controversial theory (proposed not just by wishful chauvinistic Indians, but by some East Asian sources as well) is that in 520 AD the Buddhist monk Boddhidharma travelled from South India (presumably Kerala) to the Shao Lin monastery in China and taught the monks there the martial-art that later became Kung Fu. There is really very little evidence to support this story, and as the wikipedia page indicates, many disagree with this theory, but it would be nice if true.

Kalaripayattu

Kung Fu

Rotund Ming Eunuch In Kerala

2005-06-23T17:51:00.000-05:00

Chinese Nets in Cochin

From Sepia Mutiny comes the interesting tale of the many voyages of the Ming admiral Zheng He (pronounced JUNG HUH) and his huge fleet of ships. Why I hadn't heard of this impressive man before today, despite knowing of Vasco Da Gama and Marco Polo, is clear evidence of holes in my school history curriculum. Particularly interesting to me is the story of Zheng's visit to India --- specifically the malabar coast. I remember the picturesque "Chinese fishing nets" from my childhood summers in Cochin but never really found out how they got there.

Following up on a recommendation by an SM commenter, I borrowed Louise Levathes' "When China Ruled The Seas" --- a book based, among various other sources, on the official Ming scribe Ma Huan's account, Triumphant Visions of the Ocean's Shores. Jumping ahead to the chapter entitled "Destination:Calicut" we find :

In autumn of 1405, the fleet of 317 brightly painted junks with a total crew of more than 27,000 [!] men was ready to depart from Nanjing....The destination of the treasure ships was Calicut--- the powerful city-state in Kerala on the west coast of India that had a market for spices a rare woods that attracted traders throughtout the Indian Ocean.

The chapter doesn't have a lot about Calicut itself, and mostly describes the journey to Calicut (called "the great Country of the Western Ocean" by the Chinese) via Java, Sumatra and Ceylon. It talks of the Chinese influence on the economies and politics of all the countries they visited --- including their role in the installation and toppling of the rulers of Ceylon and Calicut. An interesting detail described is the Chinese rendering of the story of Moses and Aaron that they heard in Kerala (possibly from some of my ancestors ?):

...the Chinese heard for the first time the curious story of a holy man called Moses and the incident involving Aaron and the golden calf, which they wrongly assumed had taken place in Calicut and was linked to the Hindu veneration of the cow.

Levathes also includes the inscription on the stone tablet that Zheng erected in Calicut "commemorating the warm relationship between the two countries".

Also via SM I found this well-written 2001 article from Time Magazine describing Aparisim Ghosh's search to find Zheng He's legacy in Cochin and Calicut, spurred partly by Ghosh's interest in the chinese fishing nets that he knew from his cochin childhood. He finds a plaque posted by modern-day Cochin municipal office saying that nets were brought to Kerala between 1350 and 1450, and, intriguingly, "Guangzhou-made porcelain tiles" in the floor of the old jewish synagogue of Cochin. In Calicut he finds "Silk Street" --- the Chinese Quarter of 15th century Calicut (?!), but no proof of the chinese presence, not even Zheng He's commemorative plaque. He does find what he thinks might be the way the Chinese and Indian traders did business :

[A] secret ritual, practiced by spice traders for over a millennium: the bargaining of prices. Buyer and seller clasp right hands under a towel or handkerchief and, thus hidden, make offers and counteroffers with a system of finger signals...
...This undoubtedly is how the admiral's minions conducted negotiations while they were here. (Ma Huan's account, Triumphant Visions of the Ocean's Shores, cites deals sealed by the clasping of hands.) The finger-code system was devised to allow traders from all over the world to do business here without having to learn Malayalam, the local language. The towel keeps the deal-making under wraps, a useful precaution in an overcrowded bazaar where the next man might try to undercut you.

Another commenter mentioned the presence of a chinese community in Quilon (Kollam) at that time. Levathes confirms that the Chinese traded with Quilon and Cochin even before Zheng He got there. And some googling lead me to this sentence ( of questionable veracity, if you ask me) trying to link Quilon's chinese past to the present:

Traces of a once prosperous trade with China are still seen in the form of Chinese fishing nets, huge Chinese water pots, blue and white porcelain and sampan-like boats.

I don't know about the blue and white porcelain. Ghosh's account also mentions the water pots (Chinna-Bharani). But sampan-like boats ? Are they saying that vallam-like boats are exclusive to kerala and south-east asia ? Interesting if true.

Prelude on "Malabar"

2005-06-19T18:07:00.000-05:00

At the episcopal service I attended this morning, I was surprised to see the word "Malabar" appear in the bulletin. Both as the name of the tune to which we sang a hymn, and in the title of the organ prelude (Prelude on "Malabar" by Leo Sowerby). A little googling lead me to this page which includes this statement :

Words: Syriac Liturgy of Malabar; tr. Charles William Humphreys (1840-1921); alt. Percy Dearmer (1867-1936) Music: Malabar, David McKinley Williams (1887-1978)

So it appears that Charles Humphreys lifted the words of the hymn from the "Syriac Liturgy of Malabar", and David Williams set it to a tune that he called Malabar, and later Leo Sowerby wrote a variation on that tune that he called Prelude on "Malabar". I was hoping for something more intriguing, but I guess it is evidence that the cross-cultural pollination was not just in one direction.

Cornwallis: random facts

2005-06-16T19:55:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, I caught a few minutes of a radio show about early U.S. history, and heard them talking about a Cornwallis. The name was, of course, known to me from my ICSE history classes of many years ago. I knew him as a British Governor General of India.

It turns out that he played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. According to wikipedia he lost an important battle to another famous person :

Between January 2 and January 4, 1777 Cornwallis fought the American Continental Army at Princeton, New Jersey, led by General George Washington. The Americans surprised a detachment of Cornwallis' troops and pressed the attack until encountering the main body of Cornwallis' force. After this first engagement, the American army slipped away in the night before Cornwallis could counter-attack. The Battle of Princeton was seen as an American victory, although it was actually a confused series of skirmishes without a decisive defeat for either force.
In 1780, Cornwallis led British forces in the Carolinas against Nathanael Greene.
After a textbook siege by American and French forces, Cornwallis surrendered to the allied forces, bringing to a close the Battle of Yorktown, on October 19, 1781, and thus ending the war. He was ultimately blamed for losing the war to the colonists.

This story of the migration of a few brits from their american colonies to their south-asian ones, after their defeat in the revolutionary war, was familiar to me from William Dalrymple's White Mughals (a book that I haven't completed despite having borrowed it more than a year ago from my university library). And skimming through it I find the following passage (on p.23):

James Kirkpatrick's counterpart as British Resident in Delhi was the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, an old friend of Kirkpatrick's elder brother William....His father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, the family fled to Canada, and thence to London where David entered the company's army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and having made India his home vowed never to leave.

This post was partly inspired by this one.

Julia Sweeney Is A Genius

2005-06-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

Julia Sweeney (who you might remember playing androgynous Pat on SNL) has a piece called "God said Huh ?" on last week's episode of This American Life. It's a story about herself and God (or as the TAL blurb says " Julia Sweeney, a Catholic, tells the story of how her faith began to crack after reading a most alarming book ... called the Bible."). She's funny and honest, and I don't disagree with her or have answers to the questions she raises. Maybe when I do I'll update this post.

Here's the real audio stream. Her piece starts at minute 29:00.

It includes her summarization of some not-so-familiar stories from the Bible, including :

"...and this mob forms outside and they yell, 'send out those two angel-like men to us so we can have sex with them'. And Lot yells, 'No', which I think is a basic rule of hospitality --- don't give up your guests to be raped by an angry mob. But then what does he say next ? 'Instead of the men please take my daughters and rape and do what you will with them they're virgins'..."

Don't look at me: it's in the Bible.

Catching up with the digital music revolution

2005-06-10T18:54:00.000-05:00

Screenshot from Launchcast

I know revolution is a pretty strong word (and particularly overused on this blog, i might add), but I've tried Yahoo's Launchcast radio for the past couple of months and am very pleased. For $2.50/month (if you pay for 12 months at one time) you get to hear a stream of music, commercial-free, and tuned to your personal taste, skipping past songs you don't like. I've been able to hear music that I was previously very familiar with, much that I was familiar with but hadn't heard in a while, and a lot that I was completely new to me.

Some of the music I've been happy to be reacquainted with : Cake (unique brass-heavy pop), Nick Drake (70s brit-folk, i recommend his "best-of" album Way to Blue), Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Asian Dub Foundation (brit-asian answer to RATM), System of a Down (especially their 2002 album Steal This Album whose existence I was previously unaware of) and Bruce Cockburn (canadian folk). I must admit to also having the nostalgia-inducing experience of listening to music from earlier times in my life (the Bangles, Def Leppard, Silverchair).

Among my favourites of the completely new stuff : Eisley (cherubic-sounding radiohead-inspired upbeat pop from Tyler,TX. I like the track "Plenty Of Paper".) , Jeff Buckley's absolutely breathtaking cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (I like his version of Dylan's "I shall be released" also), David Gray (brit-folk), DJ Cheb I Sabbah (algerian berber-jewish DJ with a CD full of indian music --- what the ?), Orchestra Baobab (senegalese band with a cuban sound), Jai Uttal (rock interpretations of bhajans), My Vitriol (brit-sri-lankan guitar rock)...That list could probably be a lot longer but I'll stop.

What I like about the service :
- Access to a large catalog: now I can legally and cheaply listen to music I like without being restricted to my CD collection. Unlike satellite radio you can skip past music you don't like.

- Eclectic mix : Speaking as someone who until recently listened to music on CDs, and for whom changing the music usually meant pressing eject, changing the CD, and then hitting play, I really like being able move from, say, Femi Kuti (nigerian funk/jazz) to Rage Against the Machine to Fairport Convention (brit-folk) to U.Srinivas without raising a finger. Also listening to a particular musician/genre in small doses means that I get bored less easily and appreciate the music more.

-Potentially cheaper and fairer music distribution system : An internet-based distribution system seems like it could save by not involving the manufacture and shipping of those quaint plastic discs. Also by having listeners directly rate the tracks they listen to, the musician knows exactly how popular his music is. Ideally the system should have a low barrier of entry to musicians and let listeners decide exactly what music succeeds or fails: a more perfect marketplace.

-Potential to share music : you can listen to the music that others are listening to by listening to their launch station. While it is not an accurate representation of a person's taste (because of all the new music in the mix), it probably gives a rough idea. When I've got tired of my own station I've listened to the other stations --- both the genre-specific ones or individual member stations. The potential to build communities of listeners with similar tastes seems vast. Let me know if you have a launch station so that I can share in your music.

What I don't like :
- No repeats : While there is a forward skip button there is no backwards skip or repeat button.

- Limited control : If there is a specific track/album that you'd like to hear you can't be sure that you'll hear it. All you can do is go in and give that track/album the highest possible rating so that the probability that it will be played is increased. For example I just found out that Jeff Buckley covers Nusrat (!) on his Live at Sin-é album. So I gave that track the maximum rating and hit skip several times but didn't get to hear it.

-Clunky software : while the stream of the music is usually uninterrupted by buffering delays, the associated browser (that allows you to browse through artists, albums, genres and stations) is slow. It is a beta release so I expect they're working on improving it.

Actually for a few more bucks a month I could upgrade to their "Yahoo Unlimited" music service which would save me from my first two complaints. For the moment I'm going to be happy with getting music that I'm particularly desperate to hear multiple times, from my local public library.

I swear they're not paying me.
UPDATE : A couple of hours after that post went up I got the following email from a co-founder of launch-cast(!). Nice.

Ashvin,
Thanks for the kind words about LAUNCHcast on your blog. Let me know if you ever have any more feedback about the service!
Sincerely,
Todd Beaupre
Director, Personalization (and LAUNCHcast co-founder)
Yahoo! Music

Old Churches In Kottayam: we used to be Nestorian ?

2005-05-22T23:16:00.000-05:00

View from Valliapally

When I visited Kottayam (in early January) I asked my aunt if there was anything really old to see there. She suggested we visit the Pally (church/mosque) area --- a part of town with two sixteenth-century churches and a thosand-year old mosque. The churches --- Cheriapally ('Small Church') and Valliapally ('Big Church'), and the mosque (which we didn't have time to visit), are all not far from the Meenachel river (mentioned, I believe, in Arundhati Roy's A God of Small Things). My grandfather grew up in the area --- in Thazhathangadi, by this river.

First a brief history. The christian community in Kerala has been around for a long time (ever since St.Thomas visited in AD.52 they say). Supposedly, the community was small and struggling until the fourth century when Thomas Knai, a christian from Persia, arrived with his large family and many others. Mr.Knai, by the way, was fleeing persecution from the Zorastrian Sassanid rulers of Persia. Because of active trade in the Arabian sea the church in Kerala kept in moderate contact with the church in Persia (sometimes known as the Nestorians) for the next several centuries. Finally the Portuguese imperialists arrived. On encountering the christians in Kerala they decided that they were heretics who needed to be brought under the authority of the pope in Rome. They were fairly successful in convincing people of this (and catholics are the largest group of christians in Kerala today), but many resisted. So in 16?? a group of christians took an oath (known as the oath of the Coonan Cross) to resist the Papal advances. They wrote to several orthodox churches (I presume the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople etc) for help. By this time their old brothers the Persian church had become weak and 'retreated to the mountains', and the first to reply to their appeals for help were the Syrian Orthodox (also known as the East Syrian Church and disparagingly as Jacobites or Monophysites). [Disclaimer: all these labels come with a lot of theological baggage, and I am in no position to decide their accuracy. I use these terms out of convenience. A lot of my knowledge comes from Samuel Moffett's book A History of Christianity In Asia, which portrays both Nestorians and Jacobites quite sympathetically.] The remaining orthodox christians in Kerala thus came under the hierarchy of the Antiochian patriach. There were a few more theological and political bifurcations of the church (and more european imperial meddling) in the centuries to follow.

Inside Cheriapally

Before my visit to these churches my knowledge of this history was fairly sparse. I was not aware, for example, of our change in affliation from the so-called Nestorians to, their theological rivals, the so-called Monophysites. I went to Cheriyapally expecting not much more than to take a few photographs perhaps. Instead we got a personal guided tour from the very welcoming priest of the church (Fr.Mohan ?). He took us inside, drew aside the curtain in front of the Madhbaha, talked to us about what we saw and related that to the history and theology. What most surprised me about what he said was how strong the Portuguese influence was on the appearance of the church.

Cheriyapally was built around 1575 --- after the Portuguese landed and before the Coonan Cross Oath happened. The general architecture is european --- the facade reminds me of the churches of Goa. So are the murals on the sides of the altar. Some of the more recent murals on the far side of the altar have distinctly Catholic themes (such as the crowning of Mary by the Father,Son and Holy Spirit). Then there is the influence of local Hindu temple architecture --- for example in the wood carvings inside the church, and the oil lamps in the outer wall of the church.

Persian/Nestorian Cross

Nor far from Cheriyapally is Valliapally. Today under the jurisdiction of the Knanites, it was built about 25 years before Cheriyapally. While the church is only about four and a half centuries old, it contains two granite crosses from much earlier --- believed to have been created in the 8th century. These crosses were brought to Valliapally from an older church in Cranganore/Kodungallur (a formerly active coastal trading town). The inscriptions are in Syriac... and Pahlavi (!) --- the pre-arabic alphabet/language of Iran/Persia (completely surprising to me because I was unaware of the Persian/Nestorian link). Also significant is that the cross is distinctly Nestorian. The pamphlet that I picked up in the church says that a similar Nestorian cross is found in a church at St.Thomas Mount, Mylapore, Madras (where Thomas is supposed to have been martyred). Incidentally the cover of Moffett's book shows a "rubbing from the cross on the "Christian Monument" at Hsian (Xian), Shanhsi Province, China, A.D. 781" i.e. another Nestorian Cross. The base of the Valliyapally cross and the Chinese cross share that same floral looking design. Valliyapally also has some strange looking imagery and temple-influenced carving. Unfortunately on our visit there was no knowledgable priest to explain the significance of all this.

The set of all my photos is here. On my list of places to visit on future trips : the 1000-yr old Thazhathangadi mosque (incidentally Islam also first arrived in India in Kerala via the arabian-sea trade), the St.Thomas Mount church (and Nestorian cross) in Madras, and Kodungallur (or wherever there are older relics of Kerala's christian past).

I Am Not A Linguist

2005-04-14T12:15:00.000-05:00

As I commented on Sepia Mutiny's Vaisakhi post of yesterday, I was struck by the similarity in the names for the spring/harvest festivals in a few different cultures.

Vaisakhi/Baisakhi is the name of the harvest festival/new year's day in the Sikh Calendar. According to this commenter Vaisakhi is about renewal and the end of winter. In fact the new year in various indian linguistic groups (that follow solar calendars) is known by some variation of that name (for eg. Baishakh in Bengali, and a little less similarly, ~~Vishukkani~~ Vishu in malayalam --- ok the malayalam one is a little bit of a stretch, but it does have the ~~B/V-sh-k~~ B/V-sh pattern). The first month in the Sikh calendar is Vaisakh.

These words sound a lot like a set of related words describing spring/"renewal" observances in judeo-christian traditions: Pesach (passover in judaism), Pascha (Easter in eastern-orthodox-speak), Pesacha/Pesaha (easter-week in kerala; atleast Maundy Thursday is known as pesaha wyazhazhcha i.e. Pesaha Thursday). Also Pascha/Easter is the start of the year in Orthodox churches.

Sounds like more than a coincidence to me. Is the similarity simply because they are all indo-european languages, or is it because of something more recent ? I don't know. But perhaps if enough people agree that the relationship sounds plausible, people will start believing it. I imagine that's probably how a lot of etymological research is done anyway.

Which came first, Carroms or Pool ?

2005-03-25T00:34:00.000-06:00

The similarities between the games of Carrom and Pool (8-ball billiards) are obvious. Both involve using a striker/ball to knock one of two sets of other discs/balls into pockets.

The primitiveness of carrom equipment compared to billiards equipment would suggest, to me atleast, that the latter was derived from the former. Perhaps even that European colonists, inspired by watching carroms in South Asia, invented billiards ? But Wikipedia and Carrom.org both say that, despite its present-day prevalence in South Asia, the origins of the game are obscure. According to Carrom.org :

Some say it was the invention of the Maharajahs of India, while many in India believe it may have been introduced by the British. Some books on international games include Burma, Egypt and Ethiopia as possible sources, all of which leads us to conclude that, at this time, no-one knows where carrom originated.

And all Wikipedia says about the history of billiards is that the cue was invented in 1735. But Wikipedia does say this about the variant of Billiards known as Carom or Carambole :

Carambole billiards (or carom) is a billiards game developed in the 18th century in France. The game consisted of two white cue balls and a red object ball. The red ball was called carambola after a red fruit.

What ? So the name is of European origin ? Maybe the derivation was in the other direction then ? And then I find this page about the fruit, which says :

This minor crop was introduced to Africa and South America by Portuguese traders but it is believed to have originated in Sri Lanka and the Moluccas.

And this about the origin of its name :

Carambola was originally a Portuguese name, and goes back to the Sanskrit "karmara", which means 'food appetizer'.

The story of cross-cultural fertilization includes this:

To the English living in southern Asia, the carambola was known as the Coromandel gooseberry.

Trust the Brits to totally screw-up a name in its anglicization.

The mystery of the origins of the games remains...

Televised Revolution

2005-03-04T21:48:00.000-06:00

At the risk of sounding like an inveterate watcher of left-leaning documentaries, I have another one to recommend. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is an irish-made film on the attempted coup on the government of Hugo Chavez in April 2002. The film-makers picked a fortuitous time to be in Caracas making a film on Chavez -- just when some people tried to overthrow his government, and managed to get some jaw-dropping footage of it all from within the presidential palace. Whatever your political point of view, I'd recommend watching this film to simply get a chance to see a coup taking place from close-up.

In brief: Venezuela is a land of great oil wealth (third largest producer of oil in the world?), but also a land of great inequality. Chavez, an outsider to the ruling class, is democratically elected in 1998, replacing the two parties that have dominated Venezuelan politics until that point. [The film does say that Chavez had previously attempted his own coup in the early 90's (and failed) and served time in jail as a consequence]. I'm not surprised that the ruling elite does not like him -- what with his talk of redistributing wealth (especially oil wealth) and all. But Chavez has devoted supporters, especially among Venezuela's working class. On April 12th 2002, the old guard manage to take control of the palace and hold Chavez prisoner. Chavez's supporters pour out onto the streets and surround the presidential palace, and this inspires some palace guards to retake control of it and hand it back to Chavez (within a couple of days).

One of the more fascinating aspects of the film is the manipulation of media. All the private TV-channels,owned by the old guard, are rabidly anti-chavez, while the president gets to use the state-owned channel as his mouthpiece. A lot of the action during the attempted coup is the tussle for control of that state channel. There is an interview with a journalist, who used to work with a private news channel, who quit when asked to edit footage to make it look like it was Chavez's supporters that were the cause of the violence. The reaction of the US government (via Ari Fleischer) to the overthrow of a democratically elected president is something like "he had it coming". The NY times had a similar take on it in their editorial the next day.

I make no claims for the objectivity of the film-makers, but Chavez does come through as a very sympathetic figure. I'd highly recommend watching the movie from start to finish (though I was deprived of the last ten minutes because of a faulty video cassette), but if you can't wait to watch the whole thing you can see an excerpt here.

Redemption Song

2005-02-13T19:01:00.000-06:00

Picking up where we left off in the comments-section of the last post, I just heard this week's episode of This American Life. It tells the incredible story of Colin Warner who, in 1980, is given a sentence of "fifteen years to life" by a New York court for a murder that he did not commit. When four competent lawyers are unable to reverse his sentence, his friend Carl King works on setting Colin free. As the TAL writeup says,

"[Carl] becomes a do-it-yourself investigator. He learns to read court records, he tracks down hard-to-find witnesses, he gets the real murderer to come forward with his story"

And with the help of lawyer William Robedee, they succeed... after Colin has spent 21 years in jail. Part of the reason for Colin's long jail-time is that because he knows he's innocent, whenever he comes in front of the parole-board he can not pretend to be sorry for what he's done and is denied parole every time. And after all of this he gets out of jail and forgives the people (the witnesses who lied, for eg.) who were responsible for getting him in there.

At the end of the piece Robedee is quoted as saying

"If Colin Warner lived in Texas or Louisiana he would have been dead a long time ago. And that would have been the end of that."

Another well-told true story from This American Life, with the added bonus of the caribbean accents of the protagonists (with one segment where this guy goes back and forth between caribbean english and its american translation) and some rasta-speak.

Mercy bears richer fruits

2005-01-30T19:30:00.000-06:00

I just attended a screening of the excellent movie Deadline at Boardman's Art Theatre. It's about the death penalty and how George Ryan , the republican governor of Illinois, decided to enforce a moratorium on executions after it was found that the system was deeply flawed. He made this decision after appointing a panel to study death-penalty cases in the state. The whole process was sparked by some students (some still in high school!) who, in a Northwestern class on investigative jounalism, proved the innocence of a person on death row. This lead to a series in the Chicago Tribune with a more comprehensive study of all death penalty cases in the state.

One of the memorable moments of the film is hearing Richard Nixon (of all people) railing against crime and pledging to be tough on it. "Anti-crime" legislation that he signed lead to the supreme court reversing it's 1972 ruling, and reintroducing the death penalty in 1976. Also, we find out that the mentally-ill man that Bill Clinton signed away to death in 1992 actually told his jailors at his last meal that he would save his dessert for after his execution. And finally there was a clip of Pres.Bush in an electoral debate during the 2000 elections speaking of how certain he was that every one of the many (about 150?) people that were put to death by his state under his governorship was guilty as they had access to the texas justice system. I suspect that his favourite philosopher, with all that talk of forgiveness and not casting the first stone and turning the other cheek, also might disagree. Perhaps he'd change his mind if he watched this movie.

Despite the examples i just cited, the movie was extremely restrained. Scott Turow, one of the people on the governor's investigative panel, reflects that very reasonable tone. He talks of how through the process his views on the death penalty moved from favouring it to opposing it.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with Kirsten Johnson (one of the film-makers), a member of Murder Victims Families For Human Rights, and Gov.Ryan himself. I think I recognized one of the Trib reporters who appeared in the movie, in the row ahead of us. If the questioners accurately reflected the audience, it seemed like they were preaching to the choir. One of the last was an imposing looking man who talked of how he was in prison for a couple of years, and his interactions with people on death-row lead him to the deep conviction that the death penalty should go. He said that he was at this screening to find out for himself if Gov.Ryan really shared his convictions, and ended by urging Ryan not to lose a night of sleep thinking about his decision as he had done the right thing. In the movie Ryan quotes this other Illinois Republican who said "I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice". Amen to that.

I know the Indian justice system is deeply flawed (for eg. 75% of indian prisoners have not been convicted of crimes ---- they're either on trial or awaiting trial), but I'm glad that they very rarely put people to death.

Expanding the debate

2005-01-24T18:34:00.000-06:00

I caught a commentary on Morning Edition this morning. I think she's right : there are probably many who are "anti-capital-punishment", "anti-war", "pro-environment", "pro-public-spending-on-social-programs" AND "anti-abortion", who therefore don't feel comfortable with the available political options.

Along similar lines, I'm glad this guy is making himself heard and seen.

Hill-top Fort, Vellore

2005-01-11T06:18:00.000-06:00

View from inside hill-top fort.

On Dec 26th I visited an old hill-top fort with my father and some of his friends. This fort is located about 17Km from Vellore. Getting to it requires driving past Bagayam on the Arni Road, turning left about 10Km past Bagayam, and driving all the way to the village closest to the Fort. (I forgot to write down the name of the village. I think it's something-Kottai. 'Kottai' meaning fort.). According to my GPS, the village is at 12deg46.358'N and 79deg10.150'E, and the Fort is located at 12deg46.651'N and 79deg9.766'E. The fort is not easily seen from the main road.

These friends of my father's have been visiting local historical sites for many years now, and my father has joined them on a few. They acted as our guides for this trip and told us that this is only one of about 25 forts in the Vellore area. I was aware, of course, of the main Vellore Fort (built by the Vijayanagaras in the mid 1500s), and the hill-top fort (built by Shivaji ?) on that nameless hill east of Vellore, but was completely unaware of the other ones.

Pillared mandapam

They lead us from the village, through the fields, presumably towards the top of the hill. Suddenly, at the base of the hill, there appeared a stone structure covered in greenery. It appeared exactly like you'd imagine the ruins of a long-abandoned building would. Except it was in very good condition. It was a little pillared hall (mandapam). The pillars were carved with floral,religious and other imagery. Also notable was the apparent absence of cement or other kinds of bonding material, and how the extremely straight edges of the stones fit perfectly against each other.

The path up the hill is very thorny. Ezhumalai (guy from the local village) who very generously lead us up the hill clearing the way with his sickle, told us that until recently the face of the mountain was fairly bare. The forest service planted these thorn bushes to make it look more green. Closer to the top of the hill are man-made steps and walls --- presumably built to improve access to the fort.

The fort at the top of the hill has a few concentric layers of walls, most of which are in great condition. Along the walls of the fort are a few doorways. Though they're missing the actual doors, the cavities for the door-posts still exist. We made our way through one of these door-less doorways into the fort. Inside the fort are a few surviving structures - a pillared hall and entrance-way, and a storage room (occupied by bats) with almost no light (known, appropriately, as 'irrutu(darkness)-mandapam'. Other examples of the carvings within the fort are this carving of Hanuman (?), two figures on a pillar, and this carving above a doorway showing two battling warriors --- one on a horse and another on an unidentified animal.

Cool hidden room.

The builders came up with ingenious ways to use wind and water to beat the heat. Dug through one fort-wall, is a narrow curved passage leading from the inside of the fort to the rock-face outside. Standing inside the passage is like standing in front of an air-conditioner. Similarly in the middle of the fort are steps leading down to a partially hidden cavernous room. This room with a pool of water at the bottom, is shaded by the branches of a banyan tree above and is also very cool. There were a few other man-made pools of water around the fort. In this arid region having access to a source of water makes much strategic sense to a fort-builder.

Our (amateur) guides weren't certain of the age of the fort ---- if it was from the time of the Pallavas (who ruled from Kanchipuram from the 4th to 9th centuries), Cholas (who ruled from Thanjavur until the 13th century) or the Vijayanagaras (who ruled from Karnataka starting in the 14th century). They pointed to signs indicating that it might be more than a thousand years old --- such as certain distinctive engravings on the wall, and the presence of these flat long bricks (supposedly used by the Pallavas). I'm not convinced that it's that old. I'd be curious to get a dating from a more authorative source (leave a comment if you are one).

Jain Carvings

Other things I heard on this trip were how a chinese traveller (Huen Tsang ?) visited this part of the country and described the widespread prevalance of jainism and buddhism at the time. We also heard the rumour that the nearby hindu shrine of Tirupati, might have originally been a Buddhist shrine. They say that the ears of the idol are long like in statues of Buddha. Also, the rumour is that the reason the crown of the idol is never removed is because under the crown is the distinctive hair-style that would give it away as being of the Buddha. What is a blog if not a place to spread rumours ? In that context, here is a picture of jain carvings on a rock-face that my father took on a previous such historical excursions. None of these places are maintained by the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India). With India's overwhelming historical legacy they probably have tough choices to make regarding which ones to support and which ones not to.

All of these photos can be seen here or here as a slideshow.

More Tsunami

2005-01-09T11:05:00.000-06:00

I volunteered at the AID-India office in chennai for a couple of days at the beginning of last week (Jan 3rd-5th). I had heard about them from several sources --- emails from friends, the big tsunami-help blog SEA-EAT and the papers. I was unsure if they could really use my services. But the page of daily updates on their web-site kept mentioning their need for volunteers, and when i called their office they were quite welcoming of short-term volunteers like myself. I showed up at their office (on the third-floor of a building in a residential area in the heart of chennai ) at 10:30AM on sunday (they start slightly late on sundays) to find scores of volunteers milling around the gates. Not long after signing my name up on the sheet at the front gate, I was put to work loading a truck with sacks of drinking-water-pouches. I was impressed with how quickly and smoothly AID was able to incorporate new volunteers into their system, even quickly giving them higher-level responsibilities like managing other teams of volunteers.

At the chennai office i was involved, at various times, in accepting new donations (from varied private individuals and companies who either ship material to the office, or deliver it at the door), sorting the donations (food, water, clothes, medicines, bedding, cooking utensils, stoves etc), loading them onto trucks (see picture above), and delivering them in the field (at a village in the Tiruvanmiyur area called Chennadipakkam(?)). [more pictures here]

Most of the volunteers were local college students. The number of volunteers dropped a little on monday when many from the previous day had to report for their first day of classes. Those that remained included those who were visiting family for the winter break (like me) --- including some who were part of AID chapters in the US, assorted foreign tourists, people who had travelled from other indian cities specifically to help out with the relief effort, and others who volunteered during hours when they were not working or in class. In order to come here many of us had to overcome the protests of our concerned parents, worried that their children might catch horrible diseases in the disaster-zones shown on their tv-screens. I was told that the previous week there were over 50 volunteers a day (the week of the tsunami, and the last week of the holidays for most people). If the tsunami had been a week later it would probably have been harder for them to find volunteers. There was something heart-warming about this motley bunch working together.

The chennai AID office does not normally do disaster relief. The long-term volunteers who I spoke to were involved, for example, in creating supplementary educational materials for the children of the chennai slums. But in their week of providing relief to Tsunami victims, they were learning how to stream-line the process. As donations arrived at the gate, they needed to be sorted. This was especially painful when the donations were not well-labelled and organized, or in an unacceptable shape. Many houses in the neighbourhood of the AID office offered space to store materials. But keeping track of the material over the various locations, with a daily-changing group of volunteers, can be complicated. By the time i left on wednesday, they were talking of outsourcing those duties to professional warehouse managers, and storing all material at godowns.

On sunday i was a part of a van-load of volunteers delivering material to a coastal village a little south of Chennai (Chennadipakkam (?)). The village lost no lives to the Tsunami --- i think this was true for most villages along the northern-half of the TN coast. But there seemed to be fairly significant material loss. Rubble and thatch from the destroyed huts was strewn all over the beach. A team from the electricity board (TNEB) was erecting telephone poles. Those structures that weren't destroyed suffered damage and flooding. The floors of the surviving structures was covered with assorted debris. One surviving (brick) house I saw belonged to the village puppeteer. The door of his hut was broken in half. He had lost his puppets, money and papers that he had stored in his house. In a striking image of the force of the Tsunami, there was a fishing boat that was incongruously present about 200 metres inland, deposited there by the sea past the row of surviving brick houses. I didn't think it was appropriate to take photographs.

The material distribution process involved first counting the number of family members in each hut in the village. Representatives (mostly women) of all the families in the village lined up and were each given a card indicating the number of people (men,women,boys,girls) in their family. Then each person in line was given a set of clothes and bedding depending on the information on their card. We volunteers set up a distribution line at the mouth of the open truck, each pair of us responsible for one item in the set. There were minor hiccups in our method though. For example not every woman in line got the same number of sarees as we overestimated the number in the truck at the beginning. This was partly because some of the sorted bags that were labelled "sarees" contained womens' clothes other than sarees (the fault of those that had previously sorted and bagged them). The whole process took about 3 hours and by the time we were done the sun had set and we had to use a make-shift light from an electricity pole.

All those in line were eager to recieve the clothes we handed out, and they thanked us at the end. But close to where we were handing out clothes was a room overflowing with clothes discarded by the villagers (presumably a donation made by a previous visiting group). As has been said in many other places before, though the villagers might not be rich they don't appreciate getting rags.

In addition to being excited by the way AID used the web to get the word out (including the lists of things that they most urgently need), I was pleasantly surprised to run into a blogger Rahul (they're everywhere!) at the AID office. He told me about IndiaUncut --- the blog of his friend Amit Varma. Amit has a series of about 45 despatches from the field --- from harder hit areas close to Nagapattinam and Cuddalore, starting here and ending here. Here's a link to a sober analysis by an experienced aid-worker Nityanand Jayaraman about the dynamics of aid-givers and recievers in this situation. Also from Balaji Sampath's report I've got a better idea of how little a cog in the wheel I was at AID. I think AID's greatest strength is the way they so enthusiastically mobilize volunteers into their operation, and I'm grateful to have got an opportunity to work with them. I hope the positive fallout of middle-class indian kids working to clear nameless, casteless corpses, a job that's been traditionally forced onto people at the bottom of the caste ladder, lasts longer than this present event.

More sufi rock ?

2004-12-31T05:41:00.000-06:00

I was surfing channels a few minutes ago, and i caught a video on Indian MTV with the fairly startling image of a turbaned sikh male singer, dressed all in white, acoustic guitar in hand, in the midst of the crowds on indian streets. Turns out he is Rabbi Shergill and the song is "Bulla Ke Jana Main Kaun"["Bulla I don't know who i am"?.. my punjabi is a little rusty ;)]. And the song is the usual warm, fuzzy sufi stuff about humanity and God (which always works on me). If this chat site is correct, the words are by Pir Bulleh Shah (familiar to me from 'Bulleya' on Junoon's Parvaaz). I found an interesting article in Tehelka (of all places!) in which Minty Tejpal (brother of, more famous, Tarun) talks of how Rabbi had trouble getting a record deal and the Tehelka folks were among his first supporters. I'm looking forward to adding his CD to my collection of sufi rock/pop (currently 3 Junoon CDs strong).

Speaking of Junoon, Salman Ahmad in a Fresh Air interview from many years ago said an interesting thing about fusing 'western' and 'eastern' music. He said that the difference between Junoon beats and regular rock beats is that their beats were 'side-to-side', while regular rock beats were 'up-and-down'. In most rock concerts you'll find people moving their heads up and down, but the syncopation(?) in 'eastern' beats makes listeners move their heads from side to side. I thought that was an interesting way to put it.

UPDATE : Link to Phat-Phish Records and their page on Rabbi.

Tsunami

2004-12-28T06:35:00.000-06:00

The reported Tsunami death toll is rising by 1000s every hour --- they say it might hit 50,000 (if it hasn't already). The tamilnadu coast (the closest point of which is less than 150km from where i sit right now) has been badly hit. There was a pretty dramatic 'before' and 'after' picture shot by a vacationer Naresh Lalvani in 'The Hindu' today. My family has spent many previous winter vacations in a mamallapuram beach resort much like this one.

The easiest thing to do at a time like this is to give money. And money will probably go a considerable way to provide relief. But with the scores of 'relief funds' available, it's not easy to know which one to give to. Knowing how the government works here, I suspect that giving to govt. funds such as the Prime Minister's Relief Fund is probably not the best option. Then there are funds run by media outlets. I've already heard from my two biggest sources of news at the moment --- NDTV (which is doing a pretty decent job of upto the minute reporting) and the Hindu. But since i don't know of their track record in relief work i'm not sure i should donate to them. Finally there are the traditional NGOs - the Red Cross, Oxfam, World Vision and (a smaller one that i just heard of via email) AID India. A cursory examination of these options suggests to me that World Vision might be a good option because of their many decades of experience in relief, their large size (and, presumably, resources), their location close to the worst-hit areas (Kodambakkam, Chennai) and their financial accountability. Maybe their media presence is no reflection of their competence and they're just good at PR, but they managed to make their way into an NDTV news story on the relief operation in Machilipatnam, put out an ad in today's paper, and be interviewed by Renee Montagne on NPR. One objection i have with them is that while their website says that they are 'Christian relief and development organization serving the poor from all castes and religions in India for over 40 years' their ad in today's paper (which is sure to be seen by a lot more ppl) makes no mention of the Christian bit. Maybe they think a little falseness in advertising (or perhaps 'partial-truthfulness') will help them raise more funds.

UPDATE : A blog devoted to Tsunami Relief --- http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

What I didn't learn in Sunday School

2004-12-25T07:02:00.000-06:00

I've been catching up on some reading this winter break. The first book down is Bart Ehrman's "Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew". I first heard about it some months ago when Ehrman, a theologian at UNC, was interviewed on Fresh Air.

I read the book on the 20hr-odd journey from ORD to MAA (but skipped some chapters to get to the good parts... so excuse me if i've got some of his ideas wrong). He says that the beliefs that we know as core christian ones (the stuff that's in the nicene creed for eg. --- the trinity, the divinity of christ, belief in the resurrection, etc.) are the results of theological battles that were won and lost not necessarily purely on the strength of the ideas. (We're talking about the first couple of centuries here... way before the nestorian controversy etc.) Early christians came up with widely-varying explanations to try and explain/reconcile the various sayings of Jesus, the facts of his death, his position within the jewish tradition etc. And in order to perpetuate their ideas they resorted to some heavy-handed, less-than-noble methods including slandering the opposition and forging documents (including, possibly, some that made it into the New Testament!). And though the eventual winners of the debates (the "proto-orthodox") that wrote the official history (through church historians like Eusebius) made it seem like their ideas were always predominant, in reality ideas that we know today as heresies had a much larger following than previously thought.

Though i found the book very informative, theological-historical research involves more guess-work and conjecture than i would like. There seems a little too much resolution by democracy ("most experts agree"), rather than strong evidence, leaving too much room for ideologically-driven conclusions. Maybe all historical research is like that... I'm probably wishing for too much.

One of the early controversies was about how exactly old jewish practices fit into the new religion: did men still need to circumcised ? Paul was a vocal opponent of the practice. Ehrman writes

His letter to the Galations seethes with white-hot anger. His opponents are false teachers who stand under God's curse. They have "bewitched" their hearers. Those who follow their instructions will lose their salvation. Paul hopes that when they themselves are circumcised the knife slips and they castrate themselves (Gal 1:6-9; 3:1-5; 5:2-4,12)

I don't remember hearing that in sunday school... should've paid more attention.

Blog Post Zero

2004-10-31T17:14:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure that starting this blog is a good idea. But upon the encouragement of a blogger friend I'm going to do it anyway. For my first post i think it is appropriate to link to one of the first bloggers I read. Salam Pax , incredibly, blogged from pre-war Baghdad. He's now an author and Guardian correspondent and documentary-maker (reviews of his film are here and here). He abandoned his old blog a while ago, and rarely updates his new one. Here are a week's worth of updates that he sent in to the Guardian from his first visit to DC (he's visiting N.America with his new documentary). I'd be interested in watching his film but i doubt he's going to bring it to Champaign soon.