Indian History!!

I have been egged by many people to write the next post, so I shall attempt to scribble something :-p

This ones for Lakshmi and Mr. SS (not Neta and not Chin!!) :-)

Of late, have been having a lot of discussions about a lot of things..but one thing that has surfaced a lot is India- it's past and to a slightly lesser extent, the Hindu religion! One interesting point that Chimney brought up and which I liked is: There is no Indian mythology - it is all Indian history!!! The stories from Ramayan and Mahabharat, about Indian Gods etc, which the West likes to call mythology, are actual events that happened and not some myth! Another thing that is largely unknown is the existence of civilization even before the Aryans came to India! The thing people are not aware of is that a lot of these facts were distorted by the British since they, probably could not accept the fact that Indians could have an older civilization than what the Brits knew and that it was much more advanced than those found elsewhere in the world.

We Indians are largely to be blamed for this as well, since we are not proud of our history and have hardly invested time and resources to find and provide conclusive proofs for these things. IIRC, there was recently some evidence found proving the existence of the stone bridge mentioned in the Ramayana! But how many people know about it? We have evidence of Harappa and Mohenjodaro civilizations, but it is not taught properly even in India, forget elsewhere in the world! Chimney even gave an example of what is taught about Indian history in the US (unfortunately I don't remember exactly what it was :-p), but it was something vague and inaccurate!

There are a lot of points which have come up, but it would take an entire day to list those :-p
But the idea behind this post is to get people thinking and where possible educate the rest about facts! We are doing our part by educating our non-Indian friends to the best of our ability :-)

And yes, the other topic I mentioned, Hindu religion, am not delving into details since that can quickly snow-ball into an argument about religions :-)

Tip of the Week!

Last week managed to drop yet another bluetooth headset in water and as expected it stopped working!
I was a lil disappointed as I had take great care since my last disaster and I had pulled this out instantly! But alas, that 1 second dip was enough for the thing to conk-off :-(

Anyways, was talking about this to bandhu (Mr. SA, my good pal in office) and he offered me some very interesting piece of advice...keep it in the freezer overnight and in the morning keep it in the sun! Yes, I could not believe my ears that he had just asked me to put a piece of electronic equipment in the freezer!! Well, I decided to give it a shot...i had nothing to lose and a minimum of 60 bucks to save! Next day took the headset out and kept it in my car the whole day (yes, it is that freaking hot these days)...went home, charged it and Voila! it started working!!!

And guess what, the dude has tried this with his cellphone and some other stuff and it has worked each time!

so the next time you drop some electronic item in water, head straight for the refrigerator! :-)

-uv.

p.s. don't forget to remove the battery (if any) before freezing it :-D

Positives!

I am a subscriber of AWAD and the person who manages it, manages to send words with interesting themes each week and he follows it up with a weekly digest of sorts where he collects interesting reader feedback. This weeks theme was : Forgotten positives and the featured words were:
evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly, corrigible (spell-check is reporting the first 3 of these words as misspelt words!! :-) )

Reading this week's feedback i came upon this very interesting bit of poetry (no am not becoming a poem lover :-p)

A very Descript Man .... J H Parker

I am such a dolent man,
I eptly work each day;
My acts are all becilic,
I've just ane things to say.

My nerves are strung, my hair is kempt,
I'm gusting and I'm span:
I look with dain on everyone
And am a pudent man.

I travel cognito and make
A delible impression:
I overcome a slight chalance,
With gruntled self-possession.

My dignation would be great
If I should digent be:
I trust my vagance will bring
An astrous life for me.

It is a wonderful piece of work mainly because it uses only positive words! try coming up with a piece which uses only positives and you will hopefully appreciate this as well...:)

Double dactyls !

I never have been a poetry person, but just read this interesting poem, called a Double dactyl, I got as part of the AWAD weekly issue:

The subject was the word maudlin (Def: 1. Overly sentimental. 2. Foolishly sentimental because of drunkenness - origin from Mary Magdalene).

email quote:

I'm reminded of poet James Merrill's decidedly unmaudlin double dactyl on the subject:

Higgledy piggledy
Mary of Magdala
Said to the Dolorous
Mother of God:

"Parthenogenesis
Ought to be left to the
Simple amoeba or
Gasteropod."

Double dactyls, as some of your readers may know, are a light verse form with very strict formal rules. DDs are quite difficult to write, but delightful when wittily conceived and carefully constructed.

--- end ---

One of the rules is to have the last line of first para rhyme with the last line of the second para! Truly awesome I think, given that it usually hard to make first line rhyme with the second :-)

Stereotypes!

After a long gap, I finally managed to go to India for a vacation. And the funny part is, when I left for India, when I reached there, whoever I met, everyone assumed I had come to get married! And everyone had the same reasoning...the dude is 20 something odd (ok closer to 30), going to India after such a long time for such a long time....is obviously going to see girls lined up by his parents and will pick 1 and marry her! I tried telling everyone that it is not the case, I am just going on a vacation (part of which was actually spent working from B'lore!), but no one believed me!

That's when I realized that Indians are, to a large extent I would say rightly so, stereotyped....we do our engg, come to the US for our Master's, get a job and H1, work for a couple of years, go to India, see a few girls short-listed by our parents, select one..get married, get her here on H4 or try to get her H1 done through a consultant...wait for the Green Card and while waiting continue slogging at work! Of course, in between they have kids who become US citizens and we feel happy that at least our kids won't have to go through all the we went through!!

Another part of this image is best explained by this story : When I had just moved back to the US and was planning to buy a car, I decided to check out some Ford cars only because a friend told me I could get a new one for under $10K! Turned out it was not the case..But when my boss' boss heard that...he was like how dare you break away from the template?! I was like what template?
He goes...a desi dude is never supposed to even consider buying a Ford! He has to either buy a Honda or a Toyota!! And then of course, the above thing about marriage was repeated for good measure :-)

The best part was a friend sending this about why I am still single...:)