Raja Ravi Varma's Lithographs

Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)

Raja Ravi Varma lived for a while in Maharashtra and painted many Maharashtrian women. He also ran a press in the town of Malavli. Two Italian curators Enrico Castelli and Giovanni Aprille visited the press few years back and found it in very bad condition.

“When we visited the press, we found rare paintings infested by moth and the owner was planning to sell it off. Even the Archaeological Survey of India did not want to do anything. So we decided to restore them,’’ says Castelli, who owns the Tamburo Parlante museum of African heritage. [Stoned for posterity]

These lithographs (engraving on stone), can be seen in at the exhibition titled Divine Lithography, organised at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Culture and Arts in Delhi. The exhibition is also traveling to Trivandrum and Pune.

India, populated before Europe

Journey of Mankind (The Bradshaw Foundation)

The Bradshaw Foundation and Professor Stephen Oppenheimer have a new theory on the migration of human beings from Africa over 160,000 years. Based on DNA analysis, the conclusion by Oppenheimer is that about 85,000 years ago, humans migrated from Africa to the mouth of the Red Sea. From there they reached India, traveling through Yemen, Oman, Iran and Pakistan.
74,000 years back, there was an eruption of Mt. Toba in Sumatra and the volcanic ash covered India and Pakistan and causing population crash. Following that incident, the Indian peninsula was re-populated. One of the statements by Stephen Oppenheimer is that all non-African people in the world are descended from this group which migrated to India and India was populated much before Europe, Americas and Australia.
While Oppenheimer’s study was based on DNA evidence, there is another archaeological study which confirms this theory. University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James by analyzing fossils, artifacts, and genetic data.
According to them, a human ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, arrived in India about 250,000 years ago from Africa. Modern humans arrived in India about 70,000 years ago and wiped out the Homo heidelbergensis.

The new theory posits that as much as 70,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans migrated east, arriving in India with technology comparable to that developed by Homo heidelbergensis.
“The tools were not so different,” Petraglia says. “The technology that the moderns had wasn’t of a great advantage over what [Homo heidelbergensis] were using.”
But modern humans outcompeted the natives, slowly but inexorably driving them to extinction, Petraglia says. “It’s just like the story in Western Europe, where [modern humans] drove Neandertals to extinction,” he says.
The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of the so-called Hobbits, whose fossilized bones were discovered recently on the Indonesian island of Flores. [Early Humans Settled India Before Europe, Study Suggests]

Like Oppenheimer’s research, Petraglia and James’ research too concludes that modern humans arrived in India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe. So next time someone tries to pull the Aryan Invasion/Migration/Tourist theory on you, ask them, in which direction the migration happened?
Related Links: Indian History Timeline

HOWTO: Develop Kerala

Finally we have a fool proof plan for making Kerala the hub of IT development. This plan is so perfect that once implemented, investors will be running to the state with the same enthusiasm with which Karunakaran is running towards the Communists.
Previously, some management types working for investors did some research on places to invest in India and came up with Kochi, Kerala. The person had used factors like educated workforce, access to airport, roads etc and Kochi was the perfect match like the hammer to the sickle or Prakash to a Karat.
A bunch of VC’s came with bag loads of money, made the decision to setup shop, and while trying to enjoy the trip were are stuck in a houseboat in middle on a lake in Kumarakom due to an instant hartal called by the Communists, protesting the lack of hartal for a month. The oarsman who was a Communist had deserted the boat.
After living on fresh fish for two days, the realization stuck them that they need to add more parameters into their Excel spreadsheet while choosing places to invest. Since then Kochi was blacklisted among all VCs and they instructed their travel departments never to book a ticket to God’s own country, even if an actual God ordered them. So no one invests in Kerala anymore.
If you have been reading news, you know that politicians have changed the name of Bangalore to its ancient name Bengaluru to more accurately reflect the 16th century infrastructure there. As a result, the name Bangalore is up for grabs.
Our plan consists of instantly renaming Kochi to Bangalore. Now when a VC wants to invest in Bangalore and books a ticket guess where he is going to land? I mean who calls his travel agent and says, book a ticket to Bengaluru? Before you know investors will be landing in the Kerala and creating startups. IBM, Microsoft and Google will be having offices in coconut groves and employees will be getting free Ayurvedic massages as perks.
By the time the Comrades return back from their conclave in Kolkatta, the palce would have changed like anything. Internet cafes would have changed to dotcoms. Old dilapidated shops which used to sell bananas, cigarettes and Ma magazines would be having a BPO operation on the side. DYFI members would be speaking Malayalam with an American accent and SFI activists would be enthusiastically discussing BitComet’s non-honoring of BitTorrent private flag.
Looking at this, the Comrades would be wondering if a coconut fell on their heads. They would take out their Nokia phones and dial each other to protest this invasion of globalization. Wouldn’t that be a sight to see.

Scientific Evidence = Hindu Conspiracy

According to Harvard Professor Michael Witzel, scientific evidence against the creationism based Aryan Invasion Theory is a Hindu conspiracy!

A few months back, Science magazine published a paper that disproves the Aryan Invasion Theory. You can read about that paper here.

The research shows that there was only a single dispersal from Africa, via a southern coastal route, across the mouth of the red Sea, through India and onward into Southeast Asia and Australasia. There was subsequently a northern offshoot from the Gulf region, leading ultimately to the settlement of the Near East and Europe, but this only occurred much later.

However, this turns out to be wrong. According to the Harvard Professor who supports theories based on Biblical creationism, this is nothing but a conspiracy hatched by Hindus!

Witzel claimed the changes were motivated by “Hindutva” forces and would “lead without fail to an international educational scandal if they are accepted by the California’s State Board of Education.”

Hindus had suggested changes in textbooks based on this paper to California’s State Board of Education. According to another “scholar” named James Heitzman who was on the “Super Review Team” to assess the facts placed by Hindus, the “undecayed body of Saint Francis Xavier” is actually a miracle! And Islam began when “Muhammad received visions in which the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of God to him.” Heitzman also states that Hinduism is based on speculations.

The activists led by Michael Witzel were also planning to contact BBC and make them take off the section on Hinduism that stated that the Aryan Invasion Theory “was not just wrong, it included unacceptably racist ideas.” Apparently, they temporarily succeeded in their efforts to foil the Hindu conspiracy to plant DNA evidence when BBC pulled down the page for two days, but the page was restored after BBC received complaints from people who believed in DNA evidence. [SABHA 4M Report]

For more on the text book issue in California, read this post by Sibin, who asks who the experts are.

Define Irony – II

Leftists in West Bengal on Thursday took up cudgels against the axing of Sourav Ganguly from the Indian team for the third Test against Sri Lanka, with CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta sending a protest letter to BCCI chief Sharad Pawar urging him to protect Indian cricket from politics. [Left flays axing of Sourav Ganguly]

In the same letter the CPI MP asked that Ganguly be included in the third test match, thus interfering in Indian cricket politically.

Understanding HTTP

The protocol you use to browse the web, called HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that once a request is served, the connection between the browser and the webserver is terminated and for a new request to the same server, another connection is established.
For example, when you type https://varnam.org in your browser, an http connection is made from your browser to the server hosting this site. Now after visiting the site, you find that there is an anti-communist article of your liking and click on it. For this request, a new connection is made, even though it is to the same server. What this means is that, there is no memory of the previous connection.
To understand this concept better, let’s take the help of P. Musharraf, the man running the country next door. Today he issued a statement that Pakistan should have increased cultural ties with India as it would lead to ‘speedy resolution of disputes’.
Currently India is on the receiving end of the explosive Pakistani culture spread by organizations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and there should be some way for us to reciprocate, by exporting some movies of Uday Chopra, Suneil Shetty and Bobby Deol. This call for increased cultural ties comes at a time when Pakistan has banned the import of Indian movies and Musharraf, the friendly culture-vulture, seems to have forgotten it. If this export cannot happen, how can any ‘dispute’ be solved?
For the sake of the media, Musharraf produces these sound bites one after the other without any memory of the previous transactions, just like the HTTP protocol.

Expatriates and the Economy

Time Magazine has an article on the the 39th largest GDP in the world. That credit does not go to a nation, but to the expatriate community which sends money back home. The amount is set to cross $232B and in many countries the money from the expatriates have exceeded that from exports and foreign aid.
The article talks about immigrants from Africa, Indonesia and Mexico who work in Europe, Singapore and United States and send money back through both legal and illegal means of fund transfer. These migrants sometimes live in miserable conditions so that their family can have a decent life.

The life of squirreling away money is grueling: it involves years-long separation from families, miserable living conditions, and the threat of deportation for the many who are working illegally. All the same, remittances play a vital role in recycling money from the rich world to the poor one. “Migration is going up,” says Ratha. “We had better not wish it away, because it’s very much there to stay.” [Follow The Money]

India too has a large expatriate community which sends money back home and a vast majority of them come from my home state of Kerala. According to the Prime Minister of India, 2.5 million NRIs from Kerala alone contributed 50% of India’s $102 Billion of foreign exchange reserves in 2003. In 2004, India topped the list of countries which obtained remittances from abroad.
Some of these expatriates, especially the ones in Arab countries, live in miserable living conditions without access to fair trial and the right to practice their religion. The state of Kerala depends a lot on this NRI money obtained due to the globalization of labor and in turn they protest globalization of capital.
The article concludes witht the following observations

Vital though the flow of remittances may be, it cannot, on its own, lift entire nations out of poverty. Those who study the impact of remittances argue that the money allows poor countries to put off basic decisions of economic management, like reforming their tax-collection systems and building decent schools.
Remittances to poor countries can also mask the fact that they don’t produce much at home. [Follow The Money]

When it comes to Kerala, the second observation is right, but the first one is not. This NRI has money (along with other social reforms) has lifted the state of Kerala from poverty and if you walk around you will not find a single beggar there. But then once the umbilical cord from the Gulf countries is cutoff, the state may slip back into poverty.
Another disagreement with the article is regarding the image it portrays of immigrants in various countries are people being opressed. There are educated Indian immigrants in various countries who live in excellent conditions (sometimes even better than natives) with their families, without facing any threats of deportation.

The Inspiration behind the Indian Parliament Building

Apparently the design for the Indian Parliament was “inspired”. The inspiration comes from an eighth century Shiva temple in Madhya Pradesh.

Located in the non-descript Mitawali village of Morena district, the magnificent circular structure lies in a radius of 170 feet. The temple, dedicated to Hindu God, Lord Shiva, has figurines of 64 demigoddesses engraved on the circular inner wall. It also has 64 rooms, each with a ‘Shivlingam’- Shiva’s phallic symbol.
Archaeologists claim that the temple was a seat of Vedic and astrological studies in the olden days.
The Parliament building, designed by renowned architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, was constructed in 1927, 20 years before India’s independence in 1947. The building has been highly appreciated for its design across the world .It is touted to be among one of the world’s best architectural wonders.
But the temple, which the archaeologists and locals in Mitawali believe might have inspired the magnificent building, is in a state of dilapidation.
The Archaeological Survey of India, the autonomous body in-charge of India’s historical sites has only deputed a caretaker at the temple premises. Absence of any concerted renovation work is affecting the entire structure, especially the sculptures on the temple wall. [Central Indian temple that inspired Parliament lies in neglect]

Picture: Mitawli Shiva Temple

Interesting reading