Category: Daily Noise
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On the Indian Knowledge Systems Calendar from IIT Kharagpur
(This article also appeared in Raiot.)
My alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, has created a condensed history of Indian knowledge systems in calendar form. Lavishly produced, it is being widely shared and praised on social media. Sadly, it brims with lies, misleading ideas, and fanciful fictions. Rather than educating to inform and delight, it seeks to inflate cultural pride by taking liberties with the truth. Let me explain.Early India had many solid achievements in advancing knowledge but this calendar’s authors miss loads of them while twisting the rest into convoluted descriptions laced with Sanskrit jargon. For instance, they ignore the Harappans entirely—their fine urban planning, precision weights, hydraulic engineering, the first indoor toilets, and a relatively egalitarian society with no standing armies or temples. Instead, they begin with legendary Vedic sages. It’s as though they can’t acknowledge that the roots of any knowledge system could possibly lie earlier and outside of the holy Vedas. They also repeat the absurd claim that Sanskrit is ‘the root of the entire Indo-Aryan branch in Asia and systems of European languages.’ No, it’s not. Sanskrit is just another branch of the family, like Persian and Greek.
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A New Shunya!
I’m happy to announce a major update to Shunya.net! It has a cleaner look, fewer ads, more readable article pages, a slideshow on all photo pages, and attractive banners that change with each refresh. Of course, all this comes with the same great content that made you a regular visitor in the first place! 🙂Check out the new home page. To explore the article pages, read, for instance, my recently expanded article on linguistic hierarchies, Decolonizing My Mind.
To explore the photo pages and the slideshow, visit, for instance, the Victoria Falls page from our recent trip to Zambia.
Category: Daily Noise -
3QD Philosophy Prize 2012 — A Request
Me watching Giants beat Dodgers (5-2) on 7 Sept ’12Dear friends, 3 Quarks Daily is running its 4th annual contest for the best philosophy blog post on the Internet in the last 12 months. Dozens of nominations have come in. Browse the alphabetical list of entries here.
I have two of my posts in the running, both of which generated animated discussion:
Category: Daily Noise -
Ecce Homo of Zaragoza
Ecce Homo, a fresco painting on a wall of a Roman Catholic church in Zaragoza, Spain, is in the news lately. It is being called “the worst art restoration projects of all time”, done by an elderly woman of the flock (the “restored” version is on the right). I have to disagree though! I mean, think about what Ecce Homo means. It means “behold the man”. Had you visited the church, you would have walked right past the peeling fresco of Jesus. The “restored” version however captures your attention; you behold the man indeed, even if it is accompanied by a shaking of the head and the thought, “What happened?! How can someone screw it up so badly?” The bottom line though is that she was super successful in making the painting live up to its name. We are compelled to behold the man!
The “restored” image also prompted this thought for me: what if Jesus did actually look like that? Would anyone have listened to him? 🙂
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3QD Arts & Literature Prize
Dear friends,The voting round for the 2011 Art & Literature Prize at 3 Quarks Daily is now open.
Browse the alphabetical list of all 69 entries here. My review of Joothan: A Dalit’s Life is in the running (#4 on the list).
Category: Daily Noise -
Ten Years of Nothingness
Observing anniversaries is often a way to mark the passage of time, celebrate small achievements, and reflect on the journey. It can also be an exercise in self-absorbed narcissism. ☺ Be that as it may, I’d like to observe a minor milestone in my creative and online life. Earlier this year, Shunya completed its 10th anniversary. I created this website in 2000 to share my travel photos from around the world—photos that were fading away in cardboard boxes—and to learn web publishing. It was to serve as my web address, and perhaps become a quiet record of a personal history. (“Shunya” means the number “zero” as well as “void” or “nothingness” in Buddhist philosophy.)The site has since evolved much and now includes prose by me and others, photo essays, and videos. A big expansion came when I took a two-year break (2004-06) to visit 100+ destinations in 20+ Indian states. As a result, nearly half of the ~15K photos on Shunya are from India, the rest from ~50 other countries. In the last two years I’ve added a host of essays to it, including ones I’ve written for 3 Quarks Daily as well as by others on this group blog. I’ve even made new friends through Shunya, found long lost ones, and received many notes of appreciation.
Encouraged by the inquiries I got out of the electronic blue, I also began licensing my photos based on the buyer’s means and ends. Over a hundred organizations, including 15 museums, 25 academies, and 35 publishers have since licensed photos from Shunya. I’ve given away quite a few for free, especially to progressive non-profits, students, and starving artists. They have inspired paintings (samples below) and adorned calendars, posters, music CD jackets, slideshows, brochures, ads, postcards, websites, and book and magazine covers.
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Seafaring Hominids?
Archaeology seems to be undergoing an explosion of new finds in the past decade or so. More and more, new information is completely scrambling old assumptions about human evolution and early modern human and hominid culture.The latest amazing find was written up yesterday in the New York Times:
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
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Where the Hell in KGP?
As many readers of this blog know, I went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT, KGP) in West Bengal. Years later I visited my alma mater again and wrote about it here. Guess what I found today? Those familiar with Matt Harding’s heartwarming dance videos from around the world (Where the Hell is Matt?) will likely relate to what it has inspired the students of IIT KGP to do. (via Pran)
The soundtrack is the same as in Matt’s video — a Bengali poem written by Tagore (Praan, or “Stream of Life”) and turned into song by composer Garry Schyman and Bangladeshi-American Palbasha Siddique.
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A Poll for You News Junkies
Here is a thought experiment for the readers of Shunya’s Notes. Let’s say you have been cut-off from all news for a long weekend and have just been informed that 200 people died in India yesterday from a single event. The only other detail given to you is that the event is one of the following:- A bubonic plague in the city of Nagpur.
- Indiscriminate bomb blasts/shootings by Pakistani terrorists in Mumbai.
- A Naxalite guerrilla attack in Chattisgarh against the police and “class enemies”.
- Shortly after takeoff, a plane crashes outside Chennai.
- Food poisoning at a big marriage party in Trivandrum.
- Indiscriminate bomb blasts/shootings by Indian Muslim terrorists in Mumbai.
- A Hindu-Muslim communal riot in Hyderabad.
- A levee breach that floods and drowns a few villages in Bihar.
- A Hindu pogrom against Muslims in Ahmedabad with tacit support from government officials.
- A chemical industrial disaster in Kanpur (poisonous gas leakage).
Reorder the list such that 1 is the event you find most upsetting,
10 the least (yes, they’re all upsetting but some more than others, right?). I have used copy/paste to create mine
in the first comment; add yours too — but don’t look at mine just yet; finish your own ordering first!(Photo: “India: Liberty and Death” Time
Magazine Cover, October 27, 1947.)Category: Daily Noise -
Phone Sex Theater
Philip Toledano’s upcoming book PhoneSex reveals some of the people behind those 1-900 calls (via Mother Jones): From a few mumbled words, a phone sex operator must weave a bespoke and finely detailed fantasy encounter. It requires a vivid imagination, acting ability, and above all, a deep understanding of the human appetite. What do we crave? What words have the maximum yield? What tone will most effectively reach into a man’s trousers? When to be gentle, and when to demand fealty.
Phone-sex is theater. An artificial passion-play in real-time, directed by a skilled verbal fantasist, with only one possible conclusion.
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Kenya Sings India
A Kenyan choir sings the Indian national anthem. (Click the photo.)
Scroll down the anthem page to see other groups singing other countries’ anthems. This video is from the Pangea Day event, which took place on May 10, 2008.
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Vacation Break
Tis’ the season for travel. Usha and I will be away for 15 days to Northeastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Our mutually negotiated itinerary begins in Warsaw and takes in Krakow, Oswiecim (Auschwitz/Birkenau), Zamosc, Kaunas, Vilnius, Trakai, Riga, Sigulda, Tartu, Tallin, and more. Consequently, new posts may not happen at all (unless of course VP springs into heroic rearguard action). A terrific book I’m reading in preparation is Walking Since Daybreak by Modris Eksteins. Here is an excerpt:
Death of History
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Pangea Day
This afternoon I spent four hours glued to my computer screen watching the live stream of the Pangea Day broadcast, a global film festival hosted simultaneously in Mumbai, London, Cairo, Kigali, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, showcasing short films from new talent all over the world. Interspersed with the short films were video montages of people speaking about universal human experiences—love, anger, sorrow—and short commentaries on human nature and human experience by scientists, activists, and others. The thrust of the event was to promote human understanding by simply presenting a broad sweep of stories that humanize the Other, that break down the categories of “enemy.” And as it meandered toward it’s final minutes, the focus drew increasingly toward the conflict between Israel and Palestine.It proved to be a most rewarding way to spend a Saturday. The films, especially, were frequently touching, thoughtful, and moving in surprising ways. I was drawn into the sense of a global experience of discovery that was unfolding at a million points simultaneously across the world, as millions watched and learned and cried together. And (it must be said) laughed together.
But the coup de gras was during the final moments when a Palestinian and an Israeli member from The Bereaved Families Forum stood up together and told their own stories of loss and forgiveness, and this was followed by excerpts from the documentary Combatants for Peace, by the young Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, previously known for her excellent documentary Control Room (2004).
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Over 1,000,000 Iraqis Killed by US-Lead Invasion?
Here’s something you’re unlikely to see in the US press:
Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.
This is the conclusion of Opinion Research Business (ORB), an establishmentarian, British polling firm that conducted a study in Iraq in 2007. You can see their results on their website here, with an update here. But apparently, this information isn’t newsworthy enough even to warrant discussion in the media.
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Lights, Camera, Action
I am pleased to announce a brand new channel on Shunya — Videos!
Videos should complement the other two channels: Articles and Photos. We will produce original videos besides linking to others on the web. Initially, the original videos will come from the 75+ hours of footage I’ve taken around the world, most during 2000-05—I’ve already posted the first five. When appropriate, I’ll also showcase some of my favorite music from each region, as I did in the White Desert video. Text captions will be minimal, just enough for context. It’s too bad my day job is not as much fun and no one has yet offered to turn my hobbies into a vocation. So a labor of love this remains.This is also the 200th post on Shunya’s Notes in sixteen months. Stay tuned for many more!
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Globalization
Shahnaz Hussain, Fox News, reporting in her British accent on Amsterdam inspired Sexpo in Mexico City (click for video).
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