varnam

The area around the shore temple has changed a lot since I visited the place almost 15 years back. Now that it has been declared a World Heritage Site, the area around Narasimhavarman's 7th century Shiva temple is beautifully maintained.

The Shiva Linga inside the Shore Temple.

Pratibha Patil, the virtual unknown, whom Sonia Gandhi picked up as the candidate for the President of India just to shut up Prakash Karat has established an albatross-neck relationship with the Congress Party. Her blame on the origins of the purdah system on Mughal invaders has created a new job position in the party for a Shane Warne level spin master. This statement by a candidate of a party which has been trying to white wash Indian history for the past half a century has upset all the secular fundamentalists.

The ultimate secular cuss word was used - pro-RSS. Her views were found to be similar to those of Hindu fanatics. Clueless newspapers like Deepika (Malayalam) said that Ms. Patil should not have made irresponsible statements (statements which affect vote bank) and provided the convincing argument that even the Congress spokesman disagreed with her, while in fact the Congress spokesman Param Navdeep said that it was an established fact that women were a target of aggression during the Mughal rule.

Eminent historians were immediately called into action by beaming the bat signal into the night sky.

Nandita Prasad Sahai, who teaches a course on the gender history of medieval India in JNU, says that there is
no consensus amongst historians about the precise period when purdah originated in Indian society.

"Historian Kegan Paul traces the practice of the custom back to the Vedic period. And anthropologist Patricia Jeffrey says that seclusion and veiling of women was not unknown before the Muslim invasion. It appears that a social ideal recommending women to remain in seclusion to mark their complete loyalty towards their husband already existed," she says.

"Most historians consider the Muslim invasion as a watershed when purdah is said to have become more widespread as a defensive reaction in troubled times among the Rajput royalty trying to protect their women. In fact, the case is unproven in the absence of statistical material that could establish a change in the extent of the practice of purdah . It seems plausible, however, that the practice became more widespread amongst the Rajput royalty in trying to imitate the custom of the new ruling classes," says Sahai. [Experts lift veil off purdah origin]

Some months ago, I recall a North Indian lady talking about the cultural differences she experienced when in South India. Visiting relatives posted in Kerala, she made a pilgrimage to the famed Shri Krishna shrine in Guruvayur. Upon entering the temple she devoutly covered her head -- only to be sternly reprimanded by a priest who told her that this was against Hindu conventions.

The temple guardians at Guruvayur were quite right. I don't know how many readers would have stepped into the National Museum in Delhi (sadly ignored by most visitors to the capital). The wealth of treasures in the museum is so great that it has actually spilled out into the lobby. One of the first pieces of sculpture you can see -- before coming even to the ticket office -- is a marvellous statue of the goddess Saraswati, from the Chauhan period as I recall.

The goddess of wisdom is portrayed without any covering on her head. So are depictions from thousands of years of Indian history, from the dawn of civilisation on the banks of the Sindhu through the Mauryas, the Guptas, and other dynasties. But as time passes -- and you enter the galleries showing Rajput miniatures from later periods -- the veil makes its appearance, until even Adishakti Parvati has her face partly covered.[The debate over Muslim separatism in the US]

While the Mughal era started in the 16th century, the Muslim invasion started much earlier with the invasion by Mahmud of Ghazni against the Rajput kingdoms and rich Hindu temples like Somnath, Varanasi and Dwaraka in the late 9th century. In the last quarter of the 12th century, Muhammad of Ghor established the Delhi Sultanate and sometimes the word Mughal rule is used incorrectly in a broader sense to include the Turkish and Afghan rulers as well. 

One more attempt was made to push the date of the purdah system to pre-Muslim era by Vasha Joshi of Institute of Rajasthan Studies who suggested that the veil was prevalent in Rajasthan during the 11th century, much before the Delhi Sultanate. This remark was based on the existence of separate quarters for women called the jenani deorhi in medieval Chittorgarh fort which in no way implies the existence of the purdah system.

The Gandhara sculptures show women with band like head gear, but even that cannot be called the veil. Face covering was completely absent in India till the 11 -12th century and they are not present in the Ajanta paintings. Slowly the head covering starts appearing with the arrival of Muslims with a 1250-1275 book in Jaisalmer showing a woman covering the back of the head using the sari.

Pratibha Patil did nothing wrong, but stated a historical truth. Her only mistake was that she picked the wrong community to blame. Instead, if she had blamed the caste system or denounced Brahmins, it would have been accepted without debate that she was the person with the perfect secular credentials to be the President of India.

When members of the Royal Navy were captured by the Iranians in March, the Iranians made sure that the British were decently humiliated. The sailors had to apologize for straying into Iranian waters and later  thank president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for magnanimously releasing them. The entire nation could do nothing, but watch this public humiliation in silence. Now displaying something called spine, the British have knighted Salman Rushdie providing employment opportunities for suicide bombers. The Iranians are upset and made the usual remarks.

There is a lesson from this for us. Now that China is making noise about Arunachal Pradesh (in the spirit of Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bade Bhai) we can follow the British model and cause some discomfort to the Chinese. One great way would be to ask the Prime Minister of India to give the keynote on the first 'Conference for an Independent Tibet' organized by Friends of Tibet from June 23-24, 2007 in Delhi. Later in the day we could organize a discussion on the teachings of Falun Gong and compare their spiritual practices with Indian spiritual techniques.

Yes, it is juvenile, but sometimes it is the best way to get the message across.

It was the failure of Jawaharlal Nehru and V K Krishna Menon and those in India's ministry of external affairs who were their advisers to understand the Chinese mindset, which led to the national humiliation in the Sino-Indian war of 1962.

Repeated warnings from the Intelligence Bureau about the large-scale Chinese intrusions into the Aksai Chin area of Ladakh and their construction of a road there were not only ignored, but these disturbing developments were kept away from the knowledge of the public and Parliament. They fondly believed that they would be able to make the Chinese see reason and withdraw from this region by observing a policy of silence and not articulating our concerns in public. Their fond hopes were belied.

It was not the Indian intelligence and security forces which were responsible for the 1962 debacle. It was the political leadership, which was living in an illusory world of its own creation [Tawang: Some Indian plain-speaking at last!]

Not much has changed from the days of Nehru in terms of preparedness, but now it is hard to hide such information from the public and Parliament and that in turn forces the  Ministers to make hard hitting public statements.

Talking to journalists in Shillong on June 16, Mukherjee said 'he had made it clear to his new Chinese counterpart that any elected Government of India is not permitted by the provisions of the Constitution to part with any part of our land that sends representatives to the Indian Parliament.'

The minister added: 'The days of Hitler are over. After the Second World War, no country captures land of another country in the present global context. That is why there is a civilised mechanism of discussions and dialogue to sort out border disputes. We sit around the table and discuss disputes to resolve them.'

Antony told journalists in New Delhi on June 18, 'China has been building infrastructure (near the Line of Actual Control). We are also building infrastructure. Nobody can prevent both sides. There is nothing wrong in that. They have the right to build infrastructure on their territory. We have the right to do that on ours. We are also trying to hasten the development of our infrastructure. They have their perception (about Arunachal Pradesh). On our part, we are very categorical that Arunachal Pradesh is part of India.' [Tawang: Some Indian plain-speaking at last!]

I wish they tried some of our suggestions as well.

Adrianus  Melkert, a Dutch politician who is also an associate administrator at United Nations Development Program has threatened to retaliate against the United States if it tries to get to the bottom of what UNDP was doing in North Korea. The UN Board of Auditors found that the UNDP violated many rules by  hiring staffers selected by the North Koreans, paying their salary directly to Pyongyang, and inspecting only a few projects. UNDP had no idea for what purpose the North Koreans were using the money for and Melkert did not like the American enquiries into the gory details of what his organization was doing and hence the anti-American stand.

When it comes to human rights activism, the United Nations would give the Booker prize winning verbal terrorist a run for her money. The UN's new Human Rights Council, formed last year to replace the much discredited UN Human Rights Commission,  has decided to halt all investigation into Cuba and Belarus while continuing investigations of Israel. In fact  Israel is the only country mentioned by name by the council.

The very notion that Israel, a vibrant democracy surrounded by fanatical religious dictatorships seeking to hurl it into the sea and the only nation ever formally censored by the HRC, is a bigger threat to human rights than the totalitarian dictatorships in Cuba and Belarus is a crude slur on the intelligence of every person whose tax dollars fund the United Nations. How can the UN possibly claim any moral legitimacy to address human rights issues if it proceeds in this manner? The saddest thing of all is that this salaciously fraudulent enterprise is actually a replacement of another UN group that was so corrupt it had to be abolished.[Annals of HRC Fraud at the UN]

Isn't it time the UN is moved from New York to Pyongyang or Havana?

The discovery of the Gospel of Judas has not only given as an insight into the formation of present day Christianity, but has also exposed the non-spiritual techniques the Church Fathers have used to promote the Gospels they favoured.

Why do these conclusions continue to be drawn by biblical scholars, as if the canonical gospels are any more accurate (or "peerless") theologies and histories than the non-canonical gospels? All these texts are theologies, and whether or not they are "peerless" depends upon where you are standing. None of our texts are histories, let alone accurate histories. And how much historical information we can actually reap out of any of them, and the procedures for doing so, are questions more problematic than not.

As for the accuracy of the Church Fathers' descriptions. Their accuracy is not how I frame any discussion of a normative debate. The Church Fathers passed on false information, ill-informed interpretations, and fabricated stories in their struggle against those forms of Christianity that they hated. As the old saying goes, "All is fair in love and war."

As scholars, it is our job to stop buying into the normative rhetoric, and figure out what was really going on on the ground. The Gospel of Judas helps us tremendously in this venture. We can see that it was not connected with Cain or the Cainites as some of the Church Father testimony suggests. It is written by Sethians, for whom Cain was an evil Archon! The evidence from the Gospel of Judas leads me to conclude that the Cainites were a fantasy of the Church Fathers, a result of their war to become the dominant form of Christianity.[Short Article on Gospel of Judas]

While Biblical scholars claim that the Bible is not history, the more Catholic than the Pope types like Max Muller have used the Bible to produce imaginary dates for the composition of the Vedas based on the creation of the world sometime in 4000 BC. Unfortunately those imaginary dates are still taken seriously.

Update: Due to attention deficit disorder, I did not notice that they were flying from New York to Mumbai and Brussels (Thanks Vivek)

About 60 elephants, all belonging to Lord Sri Krishna of Guruvayoor, live in Punnathur Kotta located about 3 KM away from the temple. The 10 acre compound is open to public and you can watch them being fed and bathed. The elephants were donated by various devotees including Jayalalitha (The joke is that the elephant asked Jayalalitha, why me, why not you?).

The compound also has a naalu kettu, a traditional rectangular home with a central courtyard, which belonged to the Punnathur Raja which as the two photos below show, remain in very poor condition.

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Her father was a clerk in the Telecommunications department in Delhi and mother a house wife. She was a teacher and then she joined politics. The latest statement filed by Mayavati gives an indication why a career in politics is always better than the Resident Idiot's whipping boy, the IT sector.

UP chief minister Mayawati has assets worth over Rs 52 crore, according to an affidavit filed on Monday by her along with the nomination papers for the Vidhan Parishad. And to add glitter to her wealth, the lady has diamonds worth nearly Rs 50 lakh.

The CM’s assets, including movable and immovable property, bank balance are:

Cash: Rs 50.27 lakh; Deposits in banks, financial institutions and non-banking financial companies: Rs 12.88 lakh; jewellery: Rs 50.87 lakh;diamonds 380.17 carat: Rs 49.75 lakh; a 18.5-kg silver dinner set costing Rs 1.12 lakh.

Among her other assets, the CM has murals worth Rs 15 lakh.

Behenji, as she likes to be called, lists the following commercial and residential establishments as her own in New Delhi and Lucknow. She owns two commercial establishments in Connaught Place, New Delhi, priced at Rs 2.05 crore and Rs 1.27 crore and another commercial establishment at Okhla which is priced at Rs 15.50 crore. [Mayawati reveals assets: Rs 52 crore]

Seventeen of the seers to whom the hymns of the Rig Veda were revealed were women — rishikas and brahmavadinis. They were Romasa, Lopamudra, Apata, Kadru, Vishvavara, Ghosha, Juhu, Vagambhrini, Paulomi, Jarita, Shraddha-Kamayani, Urvashi, Sharnga, Yami, Indrani, Savitri and Devayani. The Sama Veda mentions another four: Nodha (or Purvarchchika), Akrishtabhasha, Shikatanivavari (or Utararchchika) and Ganpayana. This intrigued me so much that I had to learn more about them, but I drew a blank. Who were these wonderful women who were on par with their men and produced the greatest and longest living literature of the world?

In the Vedic period, female brahmavadinis (students) went through the same rigorous discipline as their male counterparts, the brahmacharis. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes a ritual to ensure the birth of a daughter who would become a pandita (scholar). The Vedas say that an educated girl should be married to an equally educated man. Girls underwent the upanayana or thread ceremony, Vedic study and savitri vachana (higher studies). Panini says that women studied the Vedas equally with men. According to the Shrauta and Grihya Sutras, the wife repeated the Vedic mantras equally with their husbands at religious ceremonies. The Purva Mimamsa gave women equal rights with men to perform religious ceremonies. Vedic society was generally monogamous, and women had an equal place.[The equals of men]

Islamic rule in North India saw a sharp decline in the status of women, now relegated to the veil, both as an influence of the new dispensation as well as for their personal protection. Jauhar protected Rajput women from captivity. If women came out of the confines of the home, the new court culture made them either entertainers or chattels, both highly degrading positions. Thousand years of the purdah was to have a highly detrimental effect on women, something from which the northern states have yet to recover.[The equals of men]

Kaveri River as seen in Mettur, Tamil Nadu

River Pamba as seen in Chengannur, Kerala

• Let Your Blog Posts Marinate (4 Steps to Forming Great Ideas): Glen Stansberry gives four steps to create better blog entries
• Paul Graham's guide to writing

  …expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don’t (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence…

• Booker prize winner Kiran Desai

  I work in the mornings and evenings. In the mornings, I am more clear-headed and focused. In the nights, it is my wild, dark imagination that is working. I also listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and keep nibbling at my kababs. In the morning, I work on what I have written in the night, revise and revisit my characters.

• So you want to be a writer

  In good writing, he observed, "every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables." To achieve this effect, one must employ certain "rules of style." He warned budding writers, for example, "not [to] habitually prop your sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation points, but make them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness."

• A Guide to Becoming a Better Writer: 15 Practical Tips

  9. Revise. If you really crank out the text, and experiment, and just let things flow, you’ll need to go back over it. Yes, that means you. Many writers hate revising, because it seems like so much work when they’ve already done the writing. But if you want to be a good writer, you need to learn to revise. Because revision is where good writing really is. It separates the mediocre from the great. Go back over everything, looking not only for grammar and spelling mistakes, but for unnecessary words and awkward structures and confusing sentences. Aim for clarity, for strength, for freshness.