Every commentor on this blog, knows there are family and relatives and who bonk the servants or help in South Asia.
H. M. Brough the Bro probably would say I am talking gibberish, i.e bonk.
Bonk and bonk and parte.
Words are bad not the reality
Many (of my vintage) listen to Santana eg Oye Como Va
How many know the meaning.
http://sbarrkum.blogspot.com/2011/02/celia-cruz-oye-como-va-and-cubanpuerto.html
Where Will Sundar Pichai Take Google?:
There were louder executives at Google. There were brainier ones. There were more aggressive ones and those who were doubtlessly better at throwing a sharp elbow, too. And many more political ones — even if those who have been running one of the world’s most powerful companies continued to think of themselves as benign, long after it was clear to everyone else that they were many things but that.
Most of them are gone. Most are as rich as Croesus. But they’re not at the pinnacle of one of the mightiest companies on the planet.
Because in the end, the nice guy — Sundar Pichai — finished first. Mr. Pichai on Tuesday was named chief executive of Alphabet, the company chassis under which the unbeatable and wildly profitable search engine lives, along with a number of other less impressive initiatives. The soft-spoken executive, who was born in India, had worked his way up a long ladder from product manager to vice president to chief executive of Google. Now this big announcement.
Page and Brin will still control the company. Pichai is the public face. A friend who used to work at Google says
– He’s not too bright
– He’s not too courageous
– He lacks deep vision
This is probably what you would expect from someone who is there to take Page and Brin’s implied marching orders.
Pichai gets compared to Satya Nadella of Microsoft. But at least Nadella has pivoted Microsoft in many new directions, fundamentally transforming the OS and productivity application company into something much more diverse.
On this weblog, there is sometimes a silly debate between Hindu nationalists and anti-Hindu anti-nationalists about the scope and size of Indian and Hindu cultural spheres (the terms “Indian” and “Hindu” being interchangeable for much of history). I stumbled onto this comment from Isidorus of Charax (a Greek subject of the Parthian Empire) in his Parthian Stations:
19. Beyond is Arachosia, 36 schoeni. And the Parthians call this White India; there are the city of Biyt and the city of Pharsana and the city of Chorochoad and the city of Demetrias; then Alexandropolis, the metropolis of Arachosia; it is Greek, and by it flows the river Arachotus. As far as this place the land is under the rule of the Parthians.
Here Isidorus is alluding to the Indo-Greeks who were dominant in much of Afghanistan and Bactria to the north. “White India” in the first few centuries A.D. seems to have meant the Helmand Valley, modern southern Afghanistan.
Apparently in the Avesta this region is asserted to be staunchly Zoroastrian. Either there is confusion and misrepresentation, or, Zoroastrianism retreated during this period. Though this specific case can be dismissed, it does seem to be a fact that under the Parthians and Sassanids the eastern and northeastern fringe of the Iranian world was coming under strong Buddhist influences. In the early period, Buddhism was, of course, the “Indian religion” (just as Islam was and is the “Arab religion”), so presumably, it was a vector for Indian cultural influence.
From the 90’s: Milie Jackson:
Parte, if you cant get it up you need to parte.
Ladies go on strike, no Parte, no Pusse
If you cant get it up get down
if you cant get down because of rheumatism and arthritis
Then just sit her on the dresser
Better if you take take your false teeth out
I am reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century. In it, he mentions the legends and oral history of some Burmese that much of Bengal was once inhabited by people like the modern Burmese: Buddhist, and East Asian in appearance.
I don’t know what to think about these sorts of memories, but after spending a day (for various reasons) looking at mtDNA (direct maternal) and Y (direct paternal) ancestry in various groups: I am more and more convinced it is plausible that much of Bengal was inhabited by a Tibeto-Burman people.
The reason is that in Bangladesh it looks to be that ~10% of the mtDNA and ~10% of the Y chromosomes are East Asian. This is in line with the genome-wide ancestry. To the west and south of Bengal, there are peoples with even more East Asian ancestry, the various Munda tribes. But these groups have a different profile. 30% of their ancestry is East Asian. But 60% of their Y chromosomes are East Asian, while 0% of their mtDNA is East Asian.
One thing we know about the Munda is that they speak Austro-Asiatic languages. Genetically their East Asian component seems to have mixed with people deeply related to the Andaman Islanders, before mixing again with a people with affinities to South Indian tribal people. Additionally, the Munda have almost no “steppe” affinity. This is curious because this occurs only among some South Indian tribal groups. Even among non-Indo-Aryan South Indian populations, such as the Reddy of Andhara Pradesh, there is some steppe ancestry.
Genetically it seems that the earliest mixing of East Asian and “indigenous” ancestry in the Munda dates to the period between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago. I am now open to the possibility that the Munda arrived in the Indian subcontinent via the Bay of Bengal. And that the northern Munda languages are actually expansions from a southern expanse.
In any case, the situation in Bengal seems to be different. If there were Munda in Bengal, they didn’t leave much of an imprint from what I can tell. The admixture into the Bangladeshi genomes dates to about 1,500 years ago. Rather than an intrusion of Tibeto-Burman people into the plains of Bengal, this may indicate an expansion of Indo-Aryan agriculturalists into the lands of slash and burn Tibeto-Burman agriculturalists.
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On this episode Razib talks to our resident Maratha philosopher, Amey, discussing US immigration, Ayodhya and whatever else comes up.
I decided to run qpAdmin on a large number of the South Asian Genotype Project members. The codes should be self-evident for the individuals. The Indus Periphery samples are from the Reich dataset. The steppe is all Sintashta samples from the recent publication (I removed outliers). The Andamanese hunter-gatherers are from the Andamans.
Some of the populations are not good fits on the India cline. Adding Dai as East Asian improves the fit for the Bengali Kayastha. But it messes it up for most of the others.
Please note that these are individuals. There is going to be variance within populations.
Continue reading Some admixture coefficients for South Asian Genotype Project members
