Tag: Indic civilisation

Gorakh Hill for a quiet time

The highest point of Sindh, due for a major makeover. The views are remarkable and the journey is for the adventurous. Pleasantly surprised by the fact that Sindh has a 5688 ft peak and also by the name (probably since ancient times).

Yet as we climbed up towards the summit of Gorakh Hill, the mountain
hues were stunning. There was grey, ochre, brown and a speckle of green
here and there. The natural sculptures, fashioned by wind and water no
doubt, were a sight to behold. The climb was only punctuated by the
occasional sighting of a lonely shepherd tending his flock or a camel
herder watching over his beasts, or construction workers being hauled to
the top.


The sights as one climbed up the hill were indeed something for sore
eyes, reminiscent of the Grand Canyon in the US. At night, a canopy of
stars was visible in the clear sky above — more stars than one could
count. What is more, the silence was all-encompassing while the air was
crisp and cool.


A VIP rest house exists along with a regular guest house, while staff
quarters and tourist huts are under construction. While the weather in
Dadu and Johi below was pleasant, on Gorakh Hill it was absolutely
nippy. And as the sun came down, the cold started to bite. Late at
night, as load-shedding hit and the wind started howling on the pitch
dark hilltop, the feeling was otherworldly.

regards

Caste system explained?

We inherit our “social competences.” Social mobility is low in the USA (and everywhere else).The shadow of past poverty/prosperity lingers for 10-15 generations. Your surname says a lot about your prospects (which is a truly surprising conclusion). Gregory Clark does not say it explicitly but his surname test is implicitly a caste test, whereby people are classified by the work they do and the status they carry in society (nobles, artisans, shopkeepers).

….new research from Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez indicating that social mobility in the United States is not falling,
offering the not-so-reassuring news that the reason it isn’t falling is
that it’s been low for a long time.
 …..

………a different research program, associated with UC–Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, which argues that economic mobility is low almost everywhere. He reaches this conclusion with a different research method that lets
him explore much longer-term trends than most of the research you see
on this. …….if you have a noble surname in Sweden today, we know that
your father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father (or
whatever) was a member of the Swedish elite more than 300 years ago. By
contrast, if you have the last name “Andersson” then that means that
your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
wasn’t a nobleman and probably didn’t practice a skilled trade either.
That’s why he wound up with the generic surname. So we can look at the
present-day incomes of people with noble surnames and compare them to
the present-day incomes of people named “Andersson” and get a picture of
the long-term persistence of the noble/Andersson class gap.

And it’s all the more striking precisely because this identification
strategy is rather crude. A person with a noble surname could still be
of mostly lower- or middle-class ancestry and vice versa, so the
surname thing should underestimate the long-term persistence of the
class gap in Sweden.
…..

According to a new book, The Son Also Rises, by academic Gregory Clark, our chances of getting on in life are largely down to what our family did 300 years ago. Contrary to brighter estimates, which suggest that
past prosperity or poverty can be erased in three to four generations,
Clark reckons it takes 10 to 15.

“Social mobility rates are similar across societies that vary
dramatically in their institutions and income levels. Cradle-to-grave
socialist Sweden and dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America have similar
rates. Communist China and capitalist Taiwan have similar rates.

regards

Desi street food in London (and beyond)

Sounds (and tastes) pretty nice, just like the yoga-asanas, jhal muri from Kolkata enters English palates (and hopefully lexicon). Perhaps Londonistanis can compare notes and serve a few new pointers as well.

So what’s on the menu? Horn OK Please has been proudly serving dosa
and chaat since 2011; along with the classic Indian soft drinks like
Thums Up and Frooty that both delight the uninitiated and make long-time
fans come over all nostalgic. Rava, rice, and mung dosas, bhel puri,
pani puri, aloo tikki and samosa chaat form the core of a menu that’s
won them a legion of hardcore supporters.

When it comes to influences, Angus Denoon of The Everybody Love Love
Jhal Muri Express draws his from Kolkata’s culinary artisans. He learned
his finely-honed craft in that city, observing and absorbing. Angus
might be an Africa-born, British bloke; but, as many delighted customers
insist, his heart is Indian. As are his tools, and the gloriously gaudy
signs he commissions from his Bengal-based signwriter. All that would count for little were his food not also authentic. His
chaat captures the streetfood spirit; freestyling, applying andaz,
ever-evolving. Signature jhal muri is shaken into newspaper cones,
puchkas are piled onto palm leaf plates, deep cups of ghughi dal feature
a layer of crispy muri, chewy coconut chunks and a thick thatch of sev.


Outside the capital, England is enjoying Indian street food fresh
from the Rajah Grill – ‘Urban Rajah’ Ivor Peters’ roving pop-up project.
Manchester has Aarti Ormsby’s Chaat Cart; Birmingham the Keralite
Pop-Up Dosa; and Leeds the unstoppable, award-winning Manjit’s Kitchen,
whose legendary Chilli Paneer Wrap now merely needs referencing by
acronym.

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1857

A piece of shared history between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.

The
relics are of Indian soldiers from the 26th Native Infantry Regiment
deployed at Mian Mir, near Lahore, in 1857 which had mutinied after the
Revolt of 1857
began. On July 30, 1857 soldiers of the regiment under the leadership
of Parkash Pandy killed a British major and a sergeant major and headed
towards Ajnala town where they were overpowered and arrested by a large
British contingent.

Around 200 soldiers were put in a cage-like
room in Ajnala where they died of asphyxiation while the remaining 282
were shot and their bodies were dragged and thrown in the well which
later came to be known as Kalian Wala Khu (well of blacks). Later the
local gurdwara management changed its name to Shaheedan Wala Khu.

Sarkaria said if
government didn’t provide them sufficient land for raising memorial,
they would keep the relics in the gurdwara precincts till they gathered
enough money to buy the land and erect a memorial. After that they would
cremate the relics and immerse the ashes in Goindwal Sahib and
Haridwar.

Apart from the remains 70 coins from 1830 —
1835, two British medals, three gold balls and an amulet were recovered
during the excavation by the Gurdwara management, local volunteers and
historians without government support.                                                                         
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Exotic food

In Bengali there is a saying: with enough money you can buy tiger’s milk. In China you can probably have a taste of tiger flesh (and rhino and elephant and…).

In Nigeria apparently you can carry out your indulgences a bit further than that. It seems there are literally no boundaries, food without borders so to speak. Bon appetit!!

A tip-off led police to the macabre discovery in Anambra, Nigeria,
with 11 people being arrested and AK-47 guns and other weapons being
seized. Human flesh was apparently being sold as an expensive
treat at the restaurant, with authorities saying that roasted human head
was even on the menu.

“I went to the hotel early this year, after
eating, I was told that a lump of meat was being sold at N700, I was
surprised,” a pastor who had visited the eatery said.

“So I did not know it was human meat that I ate at such expensive price.
“What
is this country turning into? Can you imagine people selling human
flesh as meat,” he added. “Seriously I’m beginning to fear people in
this part of the world. “

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Sava-asana at 7000 ft

Sanskrit for Hinduism (like Arabic for Islam) is dev-bhasha, the language used by denizens of heaven. Unlike Arabic though Sanskrit is a dying language here on earth. However, there is one silver lining- Sanskrit words are finding wide currency in the west as related to Yoga asanas (postures). Since the denizens of the west are very sincere (and are happy to mix earthy commercialism with spiritual advancement), they will learn all the correct words (and hopefully the proper pronunciation as well). Yay!!!

You could be forgiven for dismissing
ski yoga as the latest gimmick for people with more money than sense (and there
are certainly plenty of those here).

Holidays that combine skiing and yoga
classes are nothing new, but doing yoga on skis takes the concept a step
further. The Swiss yoga piste, also
known as the chill-out slope, was dreamed up by Sabrina Nussbaum, a local ski
instructor and yoga teacher. She noticed that her fellow ski instructors
were taking up yoga after suffering knee and back injuries, and thought that
everyone could benefit from skiing in a more “yogic” way.

Sabrina has selected four particularly
scenic sites at which to do eight asanas (yoga postures). The slope is a red run and the sites themselves are
off-piste, so beginners would struggle to reach them, but really the postures
can be done anywhere on the mountain. You can pick up a “Yoga on
Snow” leaflet at the surrounding ski lifts and follow the routine for
free.

We
started, appropriately, with a tadasana (mountain pose). I
dropped my poles, stood up straight and closed my eyes. Sabrina told me to
relax my feet and be aware of the mountain beneath them. It may have been the
fresh air and sunshine, or the altitude, but I immediately felt relaxed and
happy. After each pose, we skied for a while, applying the principles of the asana to the skiing…..We stopped on top of an easy run to work on prana, or life force. This involved covering my ears and concentrating on my breathing. We
skied down with our ears still covered, focusing on breathing calmly – quite
difficult when you can’t hear other skiers whizzing up behind you.

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The Taj is Indian..or is it?

Symbols are very important, often they help define a nation. The students make a convincing case that the Taj is “Pakistani,” they make an even more convincing case that studying history is important.

Yet, in a class of undergraduate students at one of Pakistan’s best
universities, precisely this question was animatedly debated during a session
on Pakistan’s history, with some students stating that the Taj was part of
Pakistan’s history, and others implying that it was ‘Pakistani’. These students had all taken a course
in Pakistan Studies prior to starting their undergraduate degree…


Pakistani history has been a contentious topic where different sets of
narratives give differing accounts of what Pakistani history is and, hence, how
one imagines Pakistan. Given the eventual partition of British India and the
creation of Pakistan, some historians have claimed that Pakistan was ‘created’
in 712 AD when an Arab invader came to what is now part of Pakistan.


Hence, if the history of Pakistan is the history of Muslims in India, and
just as Mohammad bin Qasim can become part of a certain legacy and heritage and
can be caricatured as the ‘first Pakistani’, so too can the Taj as ‘being’
Pakistani. Pakistani history and a history of Pakistan’s people and their land,
become two conflicting narratives.


As a consequence, ‘Pakistani’ history, ignores the history of the people who
live in what was Pakistan (West and East) and what is left of it. Mohenjodaro,
Harappa, and the history of the people
of Pakistan is dominated by a north Indian (largely Hindustani) Muslim history,
and that too only of kings and their courts.


In the most ingenious and creative recent book to be published on Pakistan’s
emergence as a political idea, historian Faisal
Devji in his Muslim Zion raises
some fascinating and sophisticated arguments which complicate any simplistic
notion of what passes as Pakistani history.


His book is a highly nuanced and multilayered understanding of the ideas
which led to the justification and creation of Pakistan, and while many of
Devji’s conceptualisations need to be contested, for our purposes his statement that Pakistan’s history lies
outside its borders, gives rise to some of the problems of imagining a history
of Pakistan described here, and allows some to claim the Taj Mahal as
‘Pakistani’.


Moreover, if this claim that Pakistan’s history lies ‘outside its borders’
is valid, and indeed in many critical ways this is certainly the case, it also
implies, that the country which came into being called Pakistan, in this
hegemonic notion of history, really has no history of its own. The so-called
‘freedom movement’ was fought in a foreign land, the land of the Taj Mahal, not
the land of the people who inherited a country called Pakistan where their
ancestors had lived for millennia.
 

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Idolatry runs wild

Tamil society led by the Great Man used to take great pride in breaking Ganesha idols  and burning Rama portraits (to symbolize a break with Brahminical hegemony). The Dravida movement was perhaps even more focused on rooting out all Hindu traditions (superstitions) than the communists. Even a few years ago Karunanidhi was calling Hindus thieves.

Now we have this.

The Chief Minister of the state, J Jayalalitha
celebrated her 66th birthday yesterday the 24th February 2014. All over the
state, posters and hoardings of the leader were put up by her enthusiastic
admirers and party workers. One of the posters portrayed the Chief Minister as
Goddess Lakshmi. 
Actress
Khushboo landed in trouble recently when she offended a Hindu religious outfit
by wearing a saree with Lord Rama, Krishna and Hanuman printed on it. Also
actor Jai starrer ‘Naveena
Saraswathi Sabatham‘ was in
the fire as the film portrayed God as watching a Kuthu song and being
glamorous…..
Last year
when Rajinikanth had a quiet 63rd birthday, one poster put up by a few
overenthusiastic fans had both his fans and the superstar in trouble. The
controversial poster depicted the Superstar standing in a queue to cast his
vote and the Gods Ganesha and Vishnu standing in the same queue, squeezed among
other people. A religious outfit was outraged by this depiction of Rajinikanth,
and promptly lodged a police complaint.

The same Ganeshas that were being destroyed earlier have now re-incarnated (resuscitated) as Rajnikanth the living God.

As an outsider it appears to me that the symbolic (and not so symbolic) expulsion of Tamil Brahmins has perversely led to the dominant Shudra communities being relaxed about superstitions, image worship and the rest. On top of this you have now Tamil hindus complaining about blasphemy. Karunanidhi is calling Modi a hard worker and a good friend. The whole thing is of course very silly but quite sinister as well.

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Copts- elites amongst elites

as per Gregory Clark (The Son Also Rises). Indian Christians merit a separate category (why? they are all Brahmins). Separate Iranian Muslim category (there must be a large count of Iranian non-muslim physicians). Chinese are surprisingly low down in the ranks. Black African is possibly the most meaningless classification (the author would probably like to single out black non-Americans, but then there is also black Haitian).

As far as Indians are concerned it would be of interest to look at data across generations- first generation, second generation,…and so on.

regards

Brown Pundits