varnam

What he has found are the remnants of the culture that built the Buddhas – one of the most lavish and powerful kingdoms of ancient Central Asia.

Recently Tarzi's colleague, archaeologist Mickaël Rakotozonia, stood in a steady drizzle, surrounded by mud-brick houses, and gestured to two ancient towers almost lost amid the jigsaw of earthen walls here.

Between these two towers, he speculated, might have been a gate into the Kingdom City of Bamiyan, home to the creators of the two stone Buddhas carved from a nearby cliff some 1,500 years ago and destroyed by the Taliban.

But the Buddhas are only the most obvious example of this country's ancient riches.

"My new discoveries have put old discoveries in the background," says Tarzi.

He and Mr. Rakotozonia will continue searching for the Buddhist's Kingdom City this summer and autumn and the team will perhaps also begin excavating test pits near Shar-e Gholghola, the citadel capital of the Ghorid Empire, which followed the Buddhists.

The white hill city, encrusted with the ruins of centuries past, was destroyed in the 13th century when Genghis Khan conquered Bamiyan. According to legend, he was so furious that his son was killed in the siege that he killed even the mice of the city, leading to the name Shar-e Gholghola, which means the City of Screams.

To the north, archaeologists are excavating the city of Balkh, supposed birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster and location of Alexander's marriage to Roxana in 327 BC.[In Afghanistan, 900-foot Sleeping Buddha eludes archaeologists]

Usually neolithic rock art sites like Bhimbetka, Karabad, Shamla Hill, have images of  anthropomorphic figures performing various activities. The rock art site at Kupgal village in Bellary, Karnataka, has something more fascinating: dolerite boulders which emit musical tones when struck by granite. The boulders found on top of hills, which were called Peacock Hill by the British and Hiregudda (Big Hill) by the locals, have grooves on them and only when those grooves are struck, music is produced.

The rock art tells us a bit about the people who created them. The most common object depicted in their art is the Zebus or the the domesticated long horned humped back Indian cattle. The cattle appear in various images, sometimes alone, sometimes facing each other and sometimes being hunted by stick figures with bows and arrows. In some images cattle are shown with three horns and there is also a depiction of a ritual involving the burning of cow dung.

After cattle, the second most popular image is that of the anthropomorphic ithyphallic figures, depicted having sex, using bows and arrows, raiding cattle, riding animals and dancing. Besides this there are images of other animals like elephants, tigers, deers and symbols like ladder and foot prints.

The location of some of the art is on difficult to reach rock formations located at great heights and it was definitely not Jehangir Art Gallery for even the viewers had to take risk insurance. The present locals perform a ritual called Pitlappa Puja in August and during the ceremony only a few men climb to the top of the hills. One theory is that the rock art was done as a part of some ritual related to cattle and fertility which involved music, like the Shamans.

If you get a bunch of archaeologists, geologists, biologists and anthropologists in a room, you can be sure that it will be one boring party. If you want to get them charged up, like Chris Dodd on O'Reilly Show, all you need is ask the question: How did Mammoths become extinct in North America?

Around 10,000 years back something happened in North America which caused  the extinction of the mammoth, mastodon, horses, camels, American lions, cheetahs, saber tooth cats and giant bears all of which roamed around the grasslands from Alaska to Central America. The theories for the extinction of the mammoths and mastodon include a) hunting by the Clovis people b) rapid change in vegetation due to climate change and c) killer viruses. Now a new theory states that the cause is a supernova explosion which happened 41,000 years ago.

According to this theory, debris from the supernova fused to form comet like objects and one such comet may have hit North America, triggering a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. It was not just the animals that were affected, for even human activity seems to have ceased around that time.

According to the new theory, 7000 years after the supernova blasts, an intense blast of iron-rich grains that hit earth and evidence of that has been found in 34,000 year old mammoth tusks. Then 10,000 years before present, a 10 KM wide comet hit North America. Analysis of the particles found at Clovis sites have revealed that their composition is similar to lunar rocks and other lunar meteorites that fell on earth.

When Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session last month,  his prayer was disrupted by some anti-abortion activists who shouted "No Lord but Jesus Christ", "There's only one true God," and ''this is an abomination''. To understand the hatred of the hecklers, Rajiv Malhotra writes that one should understand that there is a systematic creation and distribution of misinformation by an army of "scholars".

The denigration of Hinduism influences the way Americans relate to Indians. Andrew Rotter, an American historian, in his book on the US foreign policy’s tilt against India and towards Pakistan during the Nehru era, cites declassified documents revealing US presidents’ and diplomats’ suspicions of Hinduism. They regarded “Hindu India” as lacking morality and integrity, and its “grotesque images” reminded them of previous pagan faiths conquered by Christians, such as Native Americans. American ideas about India are intertwined with stereotypes about Hinduism.

There are domestic implications concerning the diaspora as well. The great American meritocracy has enabled us to succeed as individuals, and many Indians see American Jews as a role model. But it took the Jews over half a century of organized lobbying and litigation by organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, to establish their religious identity in public life. The lesson Jews had learnt in the European Holocaust was that their individual success could easily be used against them if their civilizational identity was defamed. Indians also faced hate crimes in New Jersey when the Dotbusters targeted Hindus. Recent rants by Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs generate xenophobia against Indians for “stealing” jobs from “real” (i.e. white Judeo-Christian) Americans.

As Indian-Americans stand out for their individual success, while US economic standards deteriorate, we may one day regret having neglected the projection of a positive civilizational image. Unlike many other ethnic and religious groups, we have not adequately engaged US universities, schools, media and think-tanks deeper than the pop culture layer of cuisine, Bollywood and fashions. On the contrary, many Indian writers have fed the “caste, cows, curry” images of India. [Was the US Senate Attack on Hinduism an isolated Instance?]

Warren Hastings

In 1834, there was a controversy in British India over the language to be used for Indian higher education. On the one side there were the British Orientalists who wanted to use Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and on the other side there were the Anglicists who had this Raima Sen type scorn for Oriental languages and Indian culture and wanted to enforce English. Macaulay landed in India at the height of this debate and soon published is famous Minute, which sealed the case for the Anglicists. Macaulay thus became immortalized, with natives who exhibit contempt for their culture being labeled Macaulay's Children.

The significance of Macaulay's Minute, the drama behind the decision and the consequences of the decision can be understood better by taking a look at the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, the attitude of English towards Indian culture, the role of Evangelicals in the decision making process and asking the question: Who the heck was Charles Trevelyan?

India before Macaulay

Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India from 1773 to 1785 had a respectful view of India and wanted the Englishmen to learn the language and culture and blend in. Hastings found the Calcutta Madrassa for training Muslims in Islamic Law and Jonathan Duncan found the Sanskrit College in Benares for the preservation and cultivation of the Hindu laws, literature and religion. In the College of Fort William in Calcutta, the employees of the East India Company had to learn Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, six Indian vernaculars, Hindu, Muslim and English law before being appointed as judges, officials and administrators. The college had the patronage of Orientalists like Sir William Jones, best known for his observation that Sanskrit bore resemblance to Latin and Greek and James Prinsep, who deciphered Asoka's inscriptions.

Charles Trevelyan

The first signs of dissent came in 1792 from Charles Grant, a British politician and Evangelical, who proposed English education instead of Indian vernaculars mainly as  a way to undermine what he called the Hindu fabric of error. Introduction of English, he reasoned, would show Hindus how absurd their religion was and dispel many of their myths. The spread of English arts, science and philosophy, along with the spread of Christianity, according to Mr. Grant, would enable the Indian people to rise to the level of human beings.

Initially the East India Company maintained a policy of religious neutrality even denying permission to missionaries to work in the country. When the charter of the East India Company came for renewal before the Parliament in 1813, the Evangelicals, including Zachary Macaulay, father of Thomas Macaulay, had become influential as to add a provision allowing missionaries to enter the country legally, as well as provide public funding for Indian education. The wording of this Charter Act of 1813 would be subject to intense scrutiny by Thomas Macaulay during his time in India.

Thomas Macaulay

Thomas Macaulay arrived in India on June 10, 1834, the same time Charles Darwin sailed the Pacific Ocean on HMS Beagle and one of his first acts as the legal member of the education council was his Minute, that famous document, which defended the views of the Anglicists.

Macaulay was of the opinion that there was no point in perfecting the vernaculars, since there was nothing intelligent, but falsehood in them. In his Minute, he noted that he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, but was convinced that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. On the other hand, whoever learned English had access to the vast intellectual wealth of the wisest nations of the earth and the literature available in English is valuable that the literature of all languages of the world together.

Macaulay did not think that it was British duty to educate the lower classes directly. His goal was to teach the educated class, create what he called "enlightened natives" and get them to diffuse the knowledge to their countrymen. He wanted to combine vernacular with English instruction whenever possible since English language was the avenue by which people of India would arrive at all valuable knowledge. With English, the enlightened native would have access to accurate information on all subjects and could make considerable advances in life.

Macaulay's letter to his father

When Macaulay landed in India, the British were debating on the language to be used for higher education in India. On the one side there were the Anglicists and evangelicals who wanted English for political and religious reasons and on the other side there were the Orientalists who wanted to use Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. With his  Minute, Macaulay ended the debate.

The draft prepared by Macaulay would have been signed by William Bentinck without any changes, but on news leaking out that the Government would abolish the Sanskrit College and the Madrassa, thousands of Hindus and Muslims protested. The Government declared that it would not abolish any school and with just a change in the sequence of paragraphs, the order went out. William Bentinck decided that the objective of the British Government had to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives. He also ordered that the printing of Oriental books should cease at once and no new stipends should be conferred on Oriental colleges.

Though he was a moderate Evangelical, Bentinck too was convinced of the superiority of Western ideas to Indian ideas and institutions. Besides this, economic considerations also led him to the conviction that English was the means by which ideas were to be transmitted in India and he was responsible for replacing Persian (a Mughal hangover) as the official government language and the language of the courts. He also required the use of vernaculars as the language of the lower courts.

Remember what happens when Asterix and Obelix meet the Roman Army? While the soldiers go flying up, their sandals remain on the ground. Recently a foot print made by one of those Roman hobnailed sandals, immortalized by Goscinny and Uderzo, have been found in a wall surrounding the city of Sussita in Northern Israel.

The city of Sussita is located east of lake Kinneret, which is more famous by the biblical name, Sea of Galilee. It was around the Sea of Galilee where Jesus preached, recruited four of his apostles and the Sermon on the Mount was given on a hill overlooking the lake. The city was destroyed in 749 CE by an earthquake.

There is no precise date for the foot print, but it is believed to have been made when Romans ruled the region, such as during the time of Jesus. In fact, this is not the first such foot print as well; that credit goes to the one found in Hadrian's wall in Britain.

There are two theories for the origins of this foot print.The region around Israel was an outpost of the Roman empire and most of the construction projects were run by the cities themselves and not the Roman imperial system. One theory says that legionaries or former legionnaires would have participated in the construction of the wall. We don't know if the legionary groaned, "Join the army they said. It is a man's world they said!".

The second theory says that the sandal owner could have been someone who left active service and never returned his military equipment. The basis of this theory is an inscription by two residents of the city of Sussita who had left Roman military service.

Even though India had issues recognizing Israel, there were no second thoughts about asking Israel for help during the wars with China and Pakistan. Even when the Palestinians had no issues with India recognizing Israel, we chose to be more catholic than the pope. Fortunately people outside the country are establishing close relationship with the Jews and learning quite a bit from them.

Much of that synergy is happening in the Bay Area, where Hindus and Jews have been coming together to network, talk politics, share dance steps and, yes, get married. Hindu and Jewish groups estimate there are about 300,000 Jews and upward of 200,000 Hindus living in the Bay Area. Community leaders acknowledge the two groups have a lot in common: a shared emphasis on family, faith and education; homelands that are young democracies with a history of foreign occupations; and, especially in the Bay Area, high visibility in the tech industry.

But by far, they said, the strongest force behind the friendship has been the growing ties between India and Israel — two countries with a history of hostile relations with their Muslim neighbors.

They've also been willing to rally to one another's side. When protesters disrupted the first-ever Hindu prayer to open the Senate's daily session in July, Jews stood alongside Indians in decrying the incident. And when Bay Area Jews face off against protesters in San Francisco calling for people and businesses to dump their Israeli assets, they're not alone.

"When we stand out there counter-protesting, we found that members of the Hindu-American community always stand shoulder to shoulder with us," said Lisa Cohen, who has taken part in a number of rallies and protests. That friendship, she added, is just going to get stronger. "They have been there with us through thick and thin," she said, "and the more I'm around them, the more I find that we have so much in common." [Jews, Hindus in Bay Area discover common ground]

In South Eastern Iran, near the city of Jiroft, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a large wealthy city some time back. This city which would have existed around the time of the Harappan civilization was more than 2 square kilometers and was dominated by a large fortress for protecting the town.

In one of the tombs, there were burial chambers in which beads and other precious materials were scattered around. Lapis and turquoise beads, chlorite and copper vessels were found indicating that the residents were affluent. While pottery from one site was dated 4000 B.C.E, researchers found a bustling metropolis nearby dated 2550 - 2400 B.C.E.The affluence of the residents of this site came from trade. Archaeologists have found lapis from Afghanistan, shells from Pakistan, vessels from Indus and game boards from Ur in this city.

The different cities excavated have revealed that they all did not have a monolithic culture, but they had their own individuality with their own pottery styles and art. Three tablets discovered in the cities had unique iconography and there is debate on if it was really a writing system.Unlike the ancient civilizations, the one around Jiroft is not around a river or near the ocean and so it is believed that bullock carts and camels were used in the over land trade route.

Previously only the civilizations around the Tigris and Euphrates, Nile and the Indus were mentioned as ancient civilizations. While Mesopotamia is usually called the cradle of civilization, the discovery of places like the ancient cities near Jiroft has led to an expanded view of the origin of civilization. According to the new view, many urban centers existed along the arc from Iraq to India and these trading communities  adopted the technologies, architectures and ideas from other civilizations.

(The Vishnu temple at Angkor Wat - Photograph by Srijith)

The Khemer kingdom of Cambodia,  known for the construction of magnificent temples like Angkor Wat, had a domain that extended from south Vietnam to Yunan China in the North and westward till the Bay of Bengal. The city's economy was based on rice and a network of reservoirs, canals and bridges were  built to move people and goods.

The Khemer engineers  changed the direction of rivers for growing rice. The water system had canals in the North that funneled water into the city center and then from the city center a series of distributor canals sent water to the southern region.

The general reason mentioned for the demise of this kingdom is an attack by the Thais in 1431. But now scientists think that the demise happened much before, due to the evils of urban societies, like ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown. Now there are more discoveries on what happened to the Khemer kingdom.

A ground sensing radar provided by NASA has revealed new information about the Khemer kingdom. We now know that it was larger than present day Philadelphia and Phoenix, but with much less population. This radar has also identified new man-made ponds and long lost temples in this  preindustrial low-density complex centered around the Angkor Wat temple.

There is more evidence that the fall of this civilization might have been due to over exploitation of land.

"Our research shows that Angkor was certainly extensive enough, and that land-use was certainly intensive enough, to have impacted profoundly on the regional ecology," Evans told LiveScience.

Angkor was surrounded by a vast expanse of rice fields that would have required extensive forest clearance. Over time, the intense farming could have led to serious ecological problems, including those associated with deforestation, overpopulation, topsoil degradation and erosion.

The consequence of overexploiting the environment isn't the only lesson Angkor's fate has for modern society, Evans said. Angkor required a massive infrastructural network of canals and roads to keep it running.

"This increasingly complex elaborate system would have been very difficult and expensive to maintain," Evans said. "This is obviously something to bear in mind, considering that many cities in our contemporary world are expansive, low-density urban sprawls as Angkor appears to have been." [Urban Sprawl May Have Doomed Cambodia's Angkor Wat]

Lumbini was the place where Buddha was born, but Lumbini Park in Hyderabad is the place where 10 people were killed along with 32 others who died in another explosion near a popular eatery. Many others were saved, not because of any great work by Indian police, but due to the ineptness of the terrorists.

After the Mumbai terrorist attacks on the trains, Home Minister, Shivraj Patil told the media that he knew such an attack was going to happen, but since no one told him the time or place and so he could not prevent it. This time the intelligence agencies knew that explosives were delivered to terrorists in Hyderabad in March 2007.

The first page in an Indian passport has a request from the President of India to let the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need. The Congress party seems to have requested such privileges for Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami terrorists carrying eight kilograms of military-grade explosives within the country as well.

We say this because some aggressive policing would have protected the city, but the Congress Governments, both at the center and the state, chose not do so so because it would not have gone well with people who worship Gen. Musharraf and Osama bin Laden. Thus when the Government possibly could have prevented this incident, it did not, for fear of upsetting the vote bank.

Then the Congress party big wigs have to ask themselves, what good is a dead vote bank?

(Cross posted at INI Signal)

Word processors like Microsoft Office or Star Office chain you to a computer. Instead, if you opt for hosted services like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, your word processor is accessible from anywhere an Internet connection is available. Hosted services, like Google Apps, are powerful and requires no setup or maintenance. The software and hardware are updated without the user even having to know about it and whenever there is a problem in the service, the host will take care of it. Thanks to Bush administration, now a hosted democracy service is available for countries like Pakistan and Iraq.

Recently, after seeing that no one Pakistan was listening to him, the General in the labyrinth decided to impose emergency. He  had already signed the order declaring emergency when the phone rang. "Yes, Dick", he probably answered, thinking it was the Lord Voldemort on the line, but it was Dr. Rice. A few minutes of conversation and Gen. Musharraf, who is seen a macho macho man only in India was shredding the document.

"Hey, isn't the hosted service provider saving dictatorship here", you may ask. Calm down, grasshopper. Sometimes to save democracy, you need to save dictatorship. Yes, it is one of those Zen things.

Since Gen. Musharraf is nearing his expiry date, the Bush administration has been looking for a Prime Minister. Sadly, the available ones cannot enter the country. So, there has been negotiations and re-negotiations between Benazir Bhutto and Bush administration officials about a possible deal. Maybe the Bhutto deal won't work out and it maybe Nawaz Sharif. Either way, you will hear it on CNN before the Pakistani people know about it.

We all know Pakistan cannot handle democracy and such outsourcing helps them avoid wasteful expenditures in terms of elections, booth rigging and bullets fired into fellow Muslims. It is not just Pakistan which is having problems in democracy. The ratings of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been plummeting and his opponents in Iraq have decided to campaign against him, not in Iraq, but in Washington D.C. Ayad Allawi, who was the interim prime minister is  paying the GOP firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers (BGR) more than a quarter-million dollars to lobby on his behalf. 

Finally we are sure that a group of armchair quarterbacks in Washington D.C. will do what is right for Iraq. Isn't this kind of democracy wonderful?

Kerala Letter writes that Kerala is now a middle class society (via kuffir)

The proletariat that is constantly mentioned in our political discourse has been steadily shrinking for quite some time. As its strength declines, that of the middle class grows. In fact, Kerala is now a middle class society. Many people discuss contemporary political and economic developments without understanding this.

Marx saw the middle class a section without a future. He expected it to disappear gradually. He thought that a section of it would improve its condition and join the bourgeois and the rest, unable to do so, would end up as working class. Marxists who have accepted this line of thinking claim that the middle class is on the decline. However, statistical data shows that in many countries, including India and China, the middle class is expanding fast.

John Cheeran asks some why Kerala MPs are against the new Salem Railway division

In a federal structure what happens if a new Railway Division has been created? Are these MPs are championing the cause of some of the bureaucrats in the existing Palakkad Division? There no job losses, no trouble to passengers, so what’s the big fuss about?
As far as I know not a single Kerala railway passenger will be adversely affected by the creation of the new Salem Division. All trains that come to Kerala will still come, observing the same schedule, carrying the same passengers. There are no changes at the boarding and alighting points.
The quality of the service will be the same. So why Kerala’s MPs, mainly belonging to the CPI (M) fold, were hopping mad at the Parliament Hall?

And another sight I observed today was even more shocking! Malayalis standing in a queue! God! That's one of the rarest sights you will ever see. I havent seen them stand in a line in banks, or cinema halls, or shops or..anywhere there is supposed to be a queue. Even in church they have to do a stampede, as though God will run away if they dont rush. But today, I saw almost over 50 malayali men stand in one long line, disciplined, quiet and looking very earnest. No points for guessing where: Kerala State Beverages Corporation Limited - Indian Made Foreign Liquor outlet.

One Congressman who got worked up about the Hindu prayer in the United States Senate was Rep. Bill Sali, who said , "When a Hindu prayer is offered [in the Senate], it creates problems for the longevity of this country." Later this intellectual giant, who introduced a bill to reduce gravity by 10%, explained why he thinks Christianity is better than Hinduism.

“Christian principles work, and they show up in a lot of different areas,” Sali said. “Most of the hospitals in this country have Christian names. If you think Hindu prayer is great, where are the Hindu hospitals in this country? Go down the list. Where are the atheist hospitals in this country? They’re not equal.”[Bill Sali's Half-Apology]

Though he did not personally apologize for such remarks, Wayne Hoffman, Sali's press spokesman wrote that Congressman Sali bears no ill will toward Hindus. One of the editorial writers calls him an embarrassment and a Capital Hill sideshow. Then, for his excuse, he is from Idaho where elected officials do worse things.