Sunday 29 July 2018

தாலாட்டும் காவேரி

படம் - சண்முகப்ரியா 
கண்ணுக்கினிய காவிரி நீலச்சேலை பூண்டு நிலமளந்து பாய திருச்சி மலைக்கோட்டை மேலே வீற்றிருக்கும் கங்காதரனும் தாயுமானவரும் உச்சிப்பிள்ளையாரும் காணும் இந்த படம் இணைத்தில், சில நாட்களாக பரவி வருகிறது. நான் முதலில் பார்த்தது சண்முகப்ரியா வெங்கட் பகிர்ந்த படம். நேற்று முகநூலில் ஜடாயு ஏதோ ஒரு ஆற்றங்கரையில் பல பெண்கள் காவிரியை வணங்கும் காட்சியை பகிர்ந்தார். ரேவதி வெங்கட் உடனே ஒரு பாடலை பதிவிட்டார். உள்ளம் கொள்ளைக்கொண்ட இப்படம் இப்பாடலை எழுத தூண்டியது; நேற்று முகநூலில் பதிவிட்டேன்;  பல நண்பர்கள் பாடி பார்த்துவிட்டேன் என்று மகிழ்ந்து பின்பதிவிட்டார்கள்.
காவிரியை வணங்கும் பெண்கள் படம்- ஜடாயு
மலர்ந்து மணம்வீசும் சோலை பலகொண்ட பொன்னி நதி அன்னையே – தமிழ்
புலர்ந்து எழில்கொஞ்சும் சேலை வயல்பூண்டு சிலிர்த்த கலை அன்னமே

மலையில் விளையாடி கடலை மணம்சூட நடந்த இளந்தென்றலே - வளர்
குடகு மலை தோன்றி அரங்கன் நகர் கண்டு பொலிந்த தமிழ் மன்றமே

நாணல் செடி நாண நாடும் மடம் பழக பாயும் தாயல்லவா – நலம்
பேணும் பயிருயர அச்சம் தவிர்த்து வரும் புதுமை பெண்ணல்லவா

சங்க கவியாரம் சிலம்பு மணியாரம் தந்த புகழ் ஓங்குமே – உன
ங்க கரையிரண்டும் பொங்கும் கலையழகில் எங்கும் தமிழ் வீசுமே

அணைகள் அடைத்தாலும் ஆணை தடுத்தாலும் பிணைகள் உடைத்தோடுவாள்
சொல்லில் பொருள்போல அன்பில் அறம்போல அணைத்து தாலாட்டுவாள் 
காவேரி தாலாட்டுவாள்.


பரவலாக பகிரப்பட்டதால் மேலுள்ள படங்களை இங்கே சேர்த்துள்ளேன். எடுத்தவர்கள் யாராயிருப்பினும் இவ்வலைப்பூவிலிருந்து நீக்கச்சொன்னால் உடனே நீக்கிவிடுவேன்.

சலைவன்வாழ்த்துதிணை கமழும் உதகை வனம்

Friday 20 July 2018

Not Kumanan


Sunday dusk, at the Marina beach. Near the police booth next to the Gandhi statue. A lady was dissolving into hysterics. An occasional gasping howl.
Most of us didn't know what was going on. Maybe somebody had stolen her purse. Or worse, molested her.
The young policemen next to her looked about helplessly. Someone gave her a bottle of water, which she gulped; but spilt most of it on the grass.
There was a man holding a child next to her. He was quietly talking to another policeman. The lady started howling and ran here and there among the grass, screaming at the sky and the sea.
I looked at her in confusion, as did some of the public. My cousin's wife, standing next to me, muttered, "I think she lost a kid".
Oh God. The man with the small child must be the father. He has to look for his other child, without losing his grip on this one. Or his grip on sanity, as his wife was slowly going to pieces.
A sea of humanity, full of life, our beloved Marina, suddenly seemed a terrifying dark abyss. What do you do in this scenario? Could the police lock down the beach? Not a chance. Could they search for and find the child? What are the odds? Could we help? Or would we make it worse, if we tried?
The policemen must see something like this every time there is a large public gathering. What would be the psychological effect on them, if they had to see or experience something like this once or twice a month?
Our media, social consciousness, society often portray the police as heartless or brutal. Or incompetent. Or corrupt.
The woman at the beach had come a complete circle, still shaking and in tears. The man with the child was just standing there and slowly looking about. There were two policemen, one inside, one outside the booth doing nothing. Is our media and film industry correct? Are these guys in khaki uniforms just thugs working for white veshti crooks?
I remembered a school day incident when I came home at 8pm instead of 4.30 because I was angry with my father for scolding me severely that morning. I only returned home because I didn't know where else to go. My anger hadn't cooled, I wasn't hungry, I wasn't tired. I came back home because I didn't know what else to do. I spent the time between 4 and 8 in Nageshvara Rao Park. I rarely ever went inside the park, even though I walked past it back from school every evening. My favorite place was the playground across my house. If my parents had to search for me, where would they look?
Anyway, when I returned home, my father said nothing. I don't remember his expression. My mother wondered why I was so late but immediately laid out a plate and served dinner. I don't remember either parents' expression. I was too self absorbed in my own righteousness and justified anger. Only my grandmother was expressive, but I only vaguely remember her happiness. It is one of the great fortunes of my life that I don't remember much about the incident.
All this flashed through my mind as the drama played out on the beach. I wanted to leave, I didn't want to know how this tragedy would unfold. That kid would never be found... He would be exploited by a beggar gang or worse a criminal gang. Or worse.....Irresponsible parents, useless police, I thought. Even if they wanted to help what the hell could they do?
A policeman in a khaki uniform came running up the grass with a child in his arm. The woman screamed at the child in Telugu. I don't know the words, but we all understood......Where did your run away...after all, its the child's fault, he was irresponsible.
Apparently some of our police can do the impossible. They can find a needle in a haystack, a lost child in a sea of humanity, in the dusk, in fading light, when we can barely see each other.
There was no applause. Nobody yelled at the woman. The father didn't collapse in emotion. The rescued child didn't cry. The policemen did not get any public appreciation. No cameras flashed though everyone had a mobile phone. No journalist showed up. The policemen didn't break out into smiles of relief and pat each other on the back. The watching people went back to their previous activities.
And we left.
We simply left.

Similar Blogs



Autobiographical blogs




Monday 9 July 2018

Tamilnadu Orissa Comparative Timeline

This is a timeline (broad and imprecise) of the dynasties that rule Orissa,with a similar timeline of they dynasties that ruled Tamilnadu concurrently, as historians have reconstructed from inscriptions on monuments, copper plates, literary sources, coins etc.


A broad and imprecise timeline


Orissa (which was called Kalinga until about the twelfth century) and Tamilnadu have some interesting historical connections, though they are separated by the Andhra Pradesh geographically, roughly a 700 km length of land, with its own history. The most famous in Tamil is the 12th century epic Kalingaththu Barani, which narrates the march of the army of Kulothunga Chola to conquer Kalinga. Orissa has its own legend of the Kanchi-Kaveri raja, a fifteenth century king of the Gajapati dynasty, who invaded Tamilnadu and forcibly married a princess of Kanchi. Remarkably two of the largest temples in Orissa, Lingaraj in Bhubaneshvar and Jagannath in Puri were rebuilt by Choda Ganga kings of Kulothunga's lineage.  The largest, Konarak, was built by another Choda Ganga king Vira Narasimha Deva. The name Choda Ganga itself derives from the eponymous title of Rajendra Chola, Gangai Konda Chola - the Chola who conquered the land of the Ganga (Vanga or Bengal), after conquering Kalinga on the way.

The researches of British archaeologists in the nineteenth century, especially the decipherment of Brahmi by James Prinsep, led to discoveries of ancient connections. Evidence of the Maurya king Samrat Asoka's invasion and conquest of Kalinga, is found in the Prakritam inscription at Dhauli near Bhubaneshvar. Asoka mentions Choda (Chola), Pada (Pandya), Keralaputra (Chera) and Satyaputra in his inscriptions, which are the earliest non-Tamil evidence of these contemporaries, and dynasties of the Sangam age in Tamilnadu. Ironically, most of the Sangam literature referring to this period, including a reference to "Vamba Moriyar" (the new Mauryas), had been lost in collective Tamil memory and were rediscovered by U.Ve. Swaminatha Iyer, a hundred years after Prinsep's rediscovery of Asoka and the Mauryas.

The inscriptions of Kharavela, a king of the Mahameghavana dynasty, was also deciphered by Prinsep, though subject to later reinterpretations by Cunningham and others. Among several contemporaries, Kharavela claims to have destroyed a 113 year old federation of Tamils (Tamira desha sangaatha) and having conquered Chodas (Cholas) and Padas (Pandyas) and brought back their treasures, including baskets of pearls, carried by elephants.

The histories of Shailodbhava, Bhaumakara and Somavamshi dynasties, comes almost entirely from copper plates, and an inscription in the Brahmeshvara temple in Bhubaneshvar, now reported as lost (how!?) or alternatively, moved to the Calcutta (and lost in Calcutta, maybe).

I thank Shyam C Raman, who prepared a better, more informative timeline for the THT Orissa Site Seminar, from which I have borrowed the information. Thanks also to  Ramki J, for the Kharavela video.

My other attempts at timelines

Tamilnadu and Gujarat
Tamilnadu and Karnataka
Tamil literature
Sanskrit literature
The Rediscovery of Asoka and Brahmi

Other Links

Indian Columbus Blog of Orissa temples
Sudharanam's poem - அசோகத்தூண் கண்டெடுத்த காதை

My explanation of Kharavela inscription (video)

Monday 2 July 2018

The Mathematics of Thales


Most of us who have gone to school, know of Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid as the famous mathematicians of ancient Greece. Some of us have heard of other great mathematicians like Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Apollonius, Aristarchus, etc. But, Thales?

Most schools of the world today, I suspect, teach science and mathematics from a predominantly European syllabus. This is partly an effect of European colonization of most of Asia and Africa, and dimunition of native populations in the Americas and Australia,  in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian calendar.

I am currently reading a book titled “Archimedes” by Thomas Little Heath, originally published in 1920, on Kindle. It is a free download, and part of a Men of Science series.

“Greek authors from Heredotus downwards (meaning, after him) agree in saying that geometry was invented by the Egyptians and that it came into Greece from Egypt,” writes Heath.

He quotes an account : “Geometry is said to have been invented among Egyptians, its orgin being due to the measurement of plots of land. This was necessary because of the rising of the Nile, which obliterated (erased) boundaries appertaining to separate owners…. Thales first went to Egypt and thence introduced this study into Greece.”

What we know today as the Pythagoras theorem, about the hypotenuse of right angled triangles, is listed as Proposition 47 in Volume I of Euclid’s “Elements”, the standard European and Arab book of mathematics from the first to eighteenth centuries. The word Elements is the Greek word for Numbers, which in the eighteenth century was adopted into French, English etc for the most basic objects in Chemistry. The word Geometry is formed from two words Geo (Earth) and Metry (measurement). The Sanskrit word for measurement is Maatra. Greek and Sanskrit are part of the Indo European language family, so these words originate from the same root. The Sanskrit word for geometry is Shulba Sutra. Shulba is the Sanskrit word for rope or string; the earliest surviving books are not about  land measurement or business but measurement of altars for yajnas. Parallelly, jyotishaas (astronomers) developed a different stream of mathematics to determine time based on the movement of celestial objects.

“Thales, who had travelled in Egypt and there learnt what the priests could teach him on the subject, introduced GeoMetry into Greece. Almost the whole of Greek science and philosophy begins with  Thales. His dae was about 624-547 B.C. First of the Ionian philosophers, and declared one of the Seven Wise Men in 582-581, he shone in all fields, as astronomer, mathematician, engineer, statesman and man of business,” says Heath.

What fascinated me is what follows, which is Heath’s listing of the contributions of Thales to mathematics and astronomy.

In Astronomy, Thales:
  • Predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May, 585 BC
  •  Discovered the inequality of the four astronomical seasons
  • Counselled the use of the Little Bear instead of the Great Bear as a means of finding the pole (i.e. North Pole)

In Geometry, the following theorems are attributed to Thales:
  1. That a circle is bisected by any diameter
  2. That the angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal
  3. That if two straight lines cut one another, the vertically opposite angles are equal
  4. That if two triangles have two angles and one side respectively equal, the triangles are equal in all respects (what we now called Side-Angle-Side congruency)
  5. Was first to inscribed a right angled triangle in a circle, which means he was first to discover that the angle in a semi circle is a right angle.



Thales also solved two problems in practical geometry
  •         He showed how to measure the distance from the land, of a ship at sea (using Proposition 4 above)
  •         He measured heights of pyramids by means of the shadow thrown on the ground


Heath adds, “Their character (of the theorems) shows how the Greeks had to begin at the very beginning of the theory.”

Thales was a practical man, a businessman, and indulged in theoretical excursions perhaps as a pasttime. Pythagoras came a generation after him, and founded a school of mathematics. Euclid’s famous Elements is dated to the first century, AD, six hundred years after Thales. Pythagoras was interested in Mathematics as a leisure activity and an intellectual pursuit. So were most of this followers; his students and such people who pursued Geometry as an intellectual pursuit were collectively called the Pythagoreans. They coined the Greek word Mathemata (μάθήμάτα) from which comes the English tatbhava word Mathematics. The Greek word Mathemata literally means “Subjects of Instruction”.

Both Thales and Pythagoras traveled extensively around and past the shores of the Mediterranean sea, not just Egypt. Other historians of mathematics conjecture that Pythagoras traveled to Persia and perhaps even India. Ancient Greeks themselves acknowledge the Egyptian origins of their mathematics. Through formal and inductive methods, and intellectual pursuits, the Greeks elevated mathematics to a much higher levels, especially in Geometry. Strangely very few people of the Roman Empire that succeeded Hellenic Greece did not continue in this path, though the Persians and central Asians who acquired Greek books via Alexander of Macedonia’s conquest, did. Europe almost entirely abandoned mathematics and science for a millennium, until the emergence of Italian city states and Fibonacci’s ventures to Baghdad.

Pythagoras is introduced to us as the fountainhead of Greek mathematics, just as Aryabhata or some Vedic rishis are mentioned as the fountainhead of Indian mathematics. No mention is made at all of the Egyptian origins of Greek mathematics. Similarly while there are some references to Greeks and Romans in Indian mathematical texts, especially of Varahamihira, in those times, there was no attempt at studying the history of mathematics or acknowledging foreign elements borrowed.

I find Thales a fascinating character, more so perhaps than even Varahamihira. He reminds me of Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and Sir William Jones. And Mahendra Varma Pallava.

I strongly recommend Heath’s biography of Archimedes, from which I have excerpted. The list of his books and their titles also tell you what the level of mathematics was in Hellenic Greece. I also hope to read some biography of Apollonius, whom Simon-Pierre Laplace equates with Archimedes as the great mathematicians of ancient times.

On a linguistic note, you can read each letter in the word μάθήμάτα based on Greek letters use in modern mathematics texts – mu, alpha, theta, eta, mu, alpha, tau, alpha. Notice that Greek has separate letters θ and τ for tha and ta like Sanskrit and Tamil, whereas English doesn’t. So English has to use two letters th for the equivalent of theta or த. That’s another story for another occasion, another blog.

There seem to be some pictures or sculptures of Thales, though I don’t know if they are authentic.
Thales - source : Wikipedia
This one is from Wikipedia. Several Greek philosophers kings and others were depicted in paintings on vases, stone sculptures, bronzes, etc. Unfortunately such depictions in India were rare before the Gupta period; any pictures you see of mathematicians like Aryabhata, Bhaskara, or Varahamihira are entirely the product of recent artists’ imaginations.

Related Blogs and Videos

  1. Archimedes by Thomas Little Heath (free Kindle edition)
  2. Detailed article on Thales
  3. Video of my talk on Astronomy and Mathematics of Ancient Cultures
  4. My essay on Aryabhata (The Week magazine)
  5. Notes from Manjul Bhargava lecture on history of Indian mathematics
  6. Antoine Lavoisier