Quick notes: NaMo's blunder | Sobriety is in...

• NaMo's faux pas: Modi's claim that KCR wanted to join NDA, seems to have amplified anti-incumbency in Telangana to the benefit of Kaangress



• Video analysis shows Gaza hospital hit by failed rocket meant for Israel. . Greta Thunberg's friends! . . .NYT cannot make up its mind




• Nonalcoholic Beer Sales Are Soaring: Sobriety is in! New, better-tasting zero-alcohol beers are experiencing explosive growth as alcohol consumption by young adults declines



• 5G was an overhyped technology bust: We can’t trust companies to be honest about how today’s buzzy technologies, including AI, driverless cars and the metaverse, will or won’t change our lives. The real world impact of technology aren’t always relevant to you.



• Japan's return to big league? Canon Prepares Nanoimprint Lithography Tool To Challenge EUV Scanners. Canon says that further refinements of its technology, its tool can achieve finer resolutions that can enable 3 nm and even 2 nm-class production nodes.



• Defying US Restrictions: China's Phytium launches 64-Core server CPUs



• Cancel Harvard: Israeli billionaire quits Harvard board after school’s response to Hamas attacks



• Dr. Larry Goodson: Kautilya - Noon Time Lecture




• The 2,500-year-old sport: Wrestling, in its rawest form, continues to flourish in the rural heartland of India.



• Roundup herbicide ingredient connected to epidemic levels of chronic kidney disease

Quick notes: Phoren degree | App store...

• Yale, Oxford campuses in India? Govt pushing for changes in laws.. Indian students spend about $15 billion each year pursuing degrees overseas.
  



• Swadeshi app store: More than 150 startups and firms in India are working to form an alliance and toying with the idea of launching an app store to cut their reliance on Google, Apple



• India eyeing Embraer’s commercial aircraft division: That Brazil has also floated the Embraer bid to China has added urgency to the discussions. 
  



• Make in India? Boeing F/A-18 Block III Super Hornets could be headed to India
  



• HAL choppers are ideal for China border: For such a small, light helicopter, the LCH is a formidable fighting machine.



• Tata Super-App: Tata taking on Mukesh Ambani could be India's Alibaba-Tencent



• Motor Cart: 18-year-old Muhammad Shibin from Kerala's Mallapuram designs a unique motor cart.




• KPs definitely supported article 370 until 1990 happened.:

When I tell RW Hindus that KPs were basically running India between 1947 and 1984, they look at me like I am from Mars. Seriously guys. This isn't some cooked up myth. pic.twitter.com/dp546TVynt

— Frank (@FrankBullit67) September 24, 2020




• What they don’t teach you in school :

Here’s what they don’t teach you in school about the British rule over India.

There’s a misguided idea that India should be grateful for the trains, democracy and law that the British empire ‘gave them’. pic.twitter.com/ThHuFouBUL

— VICE UK (@VICEUK) August 21, 2020




• Less Stealthy F-35: The U.S. is looking at ways to make the F-35 less stealthy for a sale to the UAE as Washington tries to overcome resistance from Israel. A working idea was for Israeli air defenses to be able to detect the UAE F-35s with technology that effectively defeats the stealth capabilities of the jets.

Quick notes: Horse domestication, Karnataka bungle...

• DNA Study Pokes Holes in Horse Domestication Theory:  “A lot of what we’ve published (on horse breeding and Eurasian population shifts) is probably going to be thrown out.”.



• In 're-education' program, China incarcerates thousands of Muslims: The program forces captives to renounce their religious and ethnic ties in favor of broad nationalism



• Karnataka bungle: “Once Modi and Shah left, the leaders here went into sleeping mode. The induction of former CM S M Krishna was not used for the benefit of the party. If the party had issued a ticket to Krishna’s daughter Shambhavi from Maddur, a better show would have been possible”.



• Caste math: A profile of the new Karnataka assembly



• Battery powered: Ola to add electric three-wheelers to fleet.... Honda may set up electric car battery plant in India.... Electric bicycle and motorcycle sales soar in Europe.



• NASA satellites reveal freshwater decline: In northern India, groundwater extraction for irrigation of crops such as wheat and rice have caused a rapid decline in available water, despite rainfall being normal throughout the period studied. The fact that extractions already exceed recharge during normal precipitation does not bode well for the availability of groundwater during future droughts.



• Diabetes type 2: Beans in diet could prevent high blood sugar.... Early time-restricted feeding improves blood sugar control and blood pressure.

Quick notes: Hybrid plane, Spewing power plants...

• Hybrid electric plane: The turbine powering the generator will run on jet fuel and provide power for the electric engine. Any excess power from the generator will be stored in banks of batteries in the fore and aft holds with the stored energy to be used during take-off and landing... Similar to the Serial Hybrid architecture in Chevy Volt.





• Surround Delhi with a deep ring of forests: Not only will this modify the weather within the city, but the forest will absorb a major portion of airborne dust from across the Thar Desert and from Pakistan. Without afforestation, even if you take all cars off road, it would just scratch the surface of Delhi's smog.



• Pollution from power plants: The worst of this pollution runs from north of Patna in the state of Bihar to south of Raipur in the state of Chhattisgarh.




• BJP feeds the hostile media: Modi govt spent Rs 3,755 crore on publicity blitz - 1,656 crore on electronic media and Rs 1,698 crore on print media. The govt's allocation for pollution abatement in the last three years has been only Rs 56.8 crore.



• Marxist-Leninist-Maoist: Left alliance sweeps Nepal elections, Oli set to return as Nepal PM



• Oneness:




• Satya Nadella's off-break: Microsoft's Redmond campus to have a cricket field.



• You are being programmed: Facebook and others had succeeded by exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology... Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them.



• Sri Rama Setu is man-made:

Are the ancient Hindu myths of a land bridge connecting India and Sri Lanka true? Scientific analysis suggests they are. #WhatonEarth pic.twitter.com/EKcoGzlEET

— Science Channel (@ScienceChannel) December 11, 2017

Quick notes: Expanding evangelism, Fourth Turning...

• A nod to evangelical Christian supporters: Trump pledges to end political limits on churches.
  
  The Christian right sees Saudi Arabia and India in the same light:

I predicted during US elections that Trump's support base will demand expanding evangelism in India. | https://t.co/tbnZ9S7wfX

— Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) February 2, 2017




• A symbol of imperial conquest: How the British stole the Kohinoor from a child



• Jaswant Singh Rawat: The hero who prevented the Chinese from invading Assam



• The Fourth Turning: The history of a people moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called "saecula."



• Ford's CEO: "The future of cities has almost nothing to do with cars".



• Pedestrian-only streets: Seoul’s version of the High Line -- turning an old overpass into an elevated urban park



• Silent Valley: A forest that survived 'development'



• H-1B? Snake Hunters From Tamil Nadu Recruited By US To Catch Pythons



• Expected to cost $62 billion?? India’s govt to bring free Wi-Fi to 1,050 villages

Quick notes: Land of the pure, Diplomatic extortion...

• Land of the pure: Telangana to spend Rs. 1 lakh on each student -- Hindus need not apply! 71 new minority residential schools to be launched in the current academic year, and each school would be built on a sprawling five-acre land at a cost of Rs. 20 crore.



• Dynasty outsider: Narasimha Rao's body was not let in AICC compund



• More power to you, Hindus! The Persian Empire fell before Islamic onslaught in a decade. Hindu India never gave up in over a thousand years.



Oh, drowned was that armada (of Islam), when it reached the mouth of Ganga!




• Erdogan will accelerate Islamization now:  His diplomatic extortion racket has degraded military efforts against ISIS.



• Fecal Transplants Can Be Life-Saving: “This is something nature put together over millions and millions of years.”



• Green tea is not as healthy as you think: Among other concerns, high Fluoride levels.



• Supercapacitors in EVs: Not yet on par with batteries or fuel cells, but close enough to be competitive with them given that it has some qualities that are superior to batteries.



• Rasgulla's Odisha origin: Committee formed to settle the issue of rasgulla's origin today confirmed that the sweet had its roots in Odisha

Pure in her course, from the Mountains to the Ocean

As well as presenting us with images of a powerful, fast-flowing, roaring river the Rig Veda tells us something else, very, very clearly, that at first sight does not appear to be historically accurate at all. It tells us that the Sarasvati known to the Vedic priests and sages ran unbroken from the mountains to the ocean: 

This stream Sarasvati with fostering current comes forth, our sure defence … the flood flows on, surpassing in majesty and might all other waters. Pure in her course from the mountains to the ocean

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: the satellite studies indicate that the last time the Sarasvati flowed into any ocean may have been more than 10,000 years ago – in other words during the final millennia of the post-glacial meltdown. The combination of the remote-sensing evidence and the textual evidence carries an interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rig Veda were in the Sarasvati region at a time when that river still ran all the way to the sea, and this would be closer to 8000 BC than it is to 1000 BC. 

It goes without saying that such a date is not just ‘somewhat earlier’ but dramatically, startlingly, inexplicably earlier than any of the conventional chronologies for the presence of Vedic Aryans in the Punjab. So has the modern science of remote sensing revealed one of the deeper layers of the Vedic palimpsest? Or is it just a fluke that what appears to be an accurate geographical account of the Sarasvati river as it last looked 10,000 or even 12,000 years ago seems to have been preserved in the Rig. 

Since leading mainstream scholars like Gregory Possehl have already all but accepted the heretical possibility that Vedic civilization was present in the Punjab by 2000 BC (on the basis of the colorful description of a full and turbulent Sarasvati) it seems invidious of them to ignore or sidestep the Rig’s equally colorful description of the Sarasvati flowing to the sea. However, this is exactly what Possehl does. Quoting the relevant passage (‘pure in her course from the mountains to the ocean’), he admits that ‘the Vedic pundits thought that the Sarasvati went to the sea’ but explicitly advises students to treat this observation ‘critically, not literally’ – presumably because to take the observation literally would imply an ‘impossibly’ early date for Vedic civilization. 

 

Graham Hancock: Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

"The most exquisite language ever made"

Q: How did your association with Sanskrit begin? What is its place, according to you, in India's current cultural landscape?

Aatish Taseer: It began from a simple desire to go further into India's literary past than my education permitted me to. Elsewhere, this would seem a very natural thing. In India, it was full of a political and historical charge. Sanskrit had become more a symbol than a language and, on both sides of our cultural divide, it roused strong emotions that had very little to do with the language and its literature.

I felt that, like those books that people ban without reading, Sanskrit had been removed from the realm of thought, and made an object of politics and piety, of oppression, of reverence and contempt. It was my aim to avoid these things, and go straight to the language which, as an object for the mind, is among the most exquisite ever made.


(Good, now start Ghar Wapsi in Pakistan)

Quick notes: Rs 300 Cr baggage, Sundar Pichai...

• Evangalical baggage: Thanks to Jairam Ramesh, the Modi government will have to shell out Rs 300 crore — over the next two years — and deal with a society registered in the UPA regime packed with “eminent persons” (mostly Church Activists) which include members of Sonia Gandhi’s NAC.



• Sundar Pichai: The Most Powerful Man in Mobile



• India can use: Type an SMS message in English and receive a text back with its Spanish or Chinese translation.



• Weavers became beggars: For at least two centuries the handloom weavers of Bengal produced some of the world's most desirable fabrics, especially the fine muslins, light as "woven air", that were in such demand for dressmaking and so cheap that Britain's own cloth manufacturers conspired to cut off the fingers of Bengali weavers and break their looms. Their import was ended, however, by the imposition of duties and a flood of cheap fabric – cheaper even than poorly paid Bengali artisans could provide – from the new steam mills of northern England and lowland Scotland. Subsequently, India became the exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs – raw cotton and jute, coal, opium, rice, spice and tea – rather than manufactured goods
Colonialism lives on: We won't give up on multi-brand FDI say retail MNCs



• pSecularistan:

UPA cleared jamat-e-islami's Malayalam channel MediaOne in no time, but Janam TV by Hindus stuck for 2 yrs http://t.co/nCkTxG8fgG
— NewzMirror (@newzmirror) June 23, 2014




• Aereo: Finished?

Quick notes: Air we breathe, Dosa special...

• Indian cities have dirtiest air: New Delhi's small particulate content is twice as high as Beijing’s.



• Water wars: Ethiopia dams Nile, rejects communism, tackles poverty.



• Masala Dosa to Die For: NYT does a super lengthy piece on Saravana Bhavan.



• "Hindu Scholars Proven Right": History Channel on Dwaraka discovery

Discovery of Dwaraka

• 12,000 year city on the western coast of India. Sensational findings, definitely worth watching. And there goes the AIT fable! (...check the video from 32 min on)




• Graham Hancock's Underworld - Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age.
  
  
  
• Pulp Fiction: Watch the shredding of Mortimer Wheeler's fantasies. (...check the video from 17min on)

Hitler Has a Following in India

To the extent that German history is taught it’s in the context of “the view that had Hitler not weakened the British Empire by the Second World War, the British would have never voluntarily left India.” 

The country’s Jewish community—some 5,300 people—is one of a few in the world to have never been persecuted by their countrymen.  Solomon Sopher, president of the Baghdadi Jewish community in Mumbai, agrees: “We have never been persecuted by any caste or creed. Not even by the Muslims.” He adds that Indians are prone to “hero worship” of strong military leaders. 

Business Week: Hitler Has a Following in India

Dievas dave dantis; Dievas duos duonos

• Lithuanian: dievas dave dantis; dievas duos duonos
• Sanskrit: devas adat datas, devas dasyati dhanas

God gave us teeth, God will give us bread. (Not sure who found this Sanskrit proverb but shouldn't teeth be danta in Sanskrit too? Again, is it bread or grain?)

Perhaps their geographic isolation helped the Lithuanians retain their Sanskrit connection more than any other people.

Sanskrit	Lithuanian
Singular 1st --- as-mi --- 'I am' 2nd --- asi --- 'thou art' 3rd --- as-ti --- 'he, she, it is'	- es-ù --- (older es-mi) es-ì --- (<*es-si) ẽs-ti ---'there is'
Dual s-vah --- 'we two are' s-thah ---'you two are' s-tah --- 'they two are'	- ẽs-ava ---(older es-va) ẽs-ata --- (older es-ta) ——————
Plural s-mah 'we are' (more than two) s-tha 'you are' (more than two) s-anti 'they are' (more than two)	- ẽs-ame --- (older es-me) ẽs-ate --- (older es-te) ——————

As someone said, "a Sanskrit scholar could understand and be understood by a Lithuanian farmer".

NYT/IHT journos interview of Shourie at Harvard

Audio transcript of Arun Shourie's interview at Harvard recently.
Worth hearing in its entireity -- the man, as always, is super articulate and super sharp.
Hear him demolish some of the usual canards about oppression, muslims etc.

This guy is truly a titan among nationalists!

http://anand-g.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-q-and-with-arun-shourie-of-bjp-at.html

Indian Inbreeding, Genetic Risks, Aryan Invasion Theory

Medical research results show a particular genetic past that has resulted in unique genetic risks specific to an unmixed tribal-dominated society:

The researchers' work also has surprising and important medical implications. They discovered that many groups in modern India descend from a small number of founding individuals, and have since been genetically isolated from other groups. In scientific parlance this is called a "founder event."

"The finding that a large proportion of modern Indians descend from founder events means that India is genetically not a single large population, but instead is best described as many smaller isolated populations," said Singh. Thangaraj continued, "The widespread history of founder events helps explain why the incidence of genetic diseases among Indians is different from the rest of the world."

Founder events in other groups, such as Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, are well known to increase the incidence of recessive genetic diseases, and the new study predicts that the same will be true for many groups in India. "It is important to carry out a systematic survey of Indian groups to identify which ones descend from the strongest founder events," said Reich. "Further studies of these groups should lead to the rapid discovery of genes that cause devastating diseases, and will help in the clinical care of individuals and their families who are at risk."

...

To shed light on genetic variability across the Indian subcontinent, the research team analyzed more than 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups, representing 13 states, all six language families, traditionally "upper" and "lower" castes, and tribal groups.

These genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations. "Different Indian groups have inherited forty to eighty percent of their ancestry from a population that we call the Ancestral North Indians who are related to western Eurasians, and the rest from the Ancestral South Indians, who are not related to any group outside India," said co-author David Reich, an associate professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

On the other hand, it validates the Aryan Invasion Theory, that says invaders came down from the north into the subcontinent, which was already inhabited.

The Rise of Indian Game Developers

There's a new racing game coming out, called "Streets of Mumbai":



The game's developer Trinegames also has other titles in the works, like Legends of Great India:

"Legends of Great India” is a Real Time Strategy Game that captures the epic stories and characters of Ancient India. Players will be able to experience the power of heroes and Gods such as Arjuna, Hanuman, Ganesh, Ram, Shiva and many more. With their help you must save the future of India from all evil, including Ravan and all else who desires evil. The goal for the game is to have the Indian people discover their inner gamer. By creating an interactive world filled with the stories and cultures that the Indian people have grown to love and cherish. The Game is set to be as epic as all the traditional stories, utilizing great godly powers, and commanding hundreds of troops. Legends of Great India has completed pre-production phase and the game production is currently going on.

Some narrow-minded people will no doubt protest these delightful new products from Indian mythology, but I think they'll re-acquaint and re-popularize such mythological tales with the young masses.

Rajivayana

Let us remember the amazing tale of the Rajivayana.

Once upon a time there was a young prince from a powerful royal family, who confronted a demon tyrant who ruled from the island of Lanka. The young prince was quickly blown up by an agent sent by the demon king, splattered to oblivion. His widow Sita Maino had to take over the reins of power after his death. She ordered her obedient fuzzy-faced servant ManmoHanuManmohan to secure the kingdom and lead the fight to victory over the demon king. The demon lord's forces were soon reeling from a prominent defection, sealing his fate. But questions were being asked of the princess, and whether she was pure and faithful to her departed husband. Since she may not pass an Agni Pariksha, let's hope she decides to hop on the next flying chariot to return to her mother soil.

As they said on Battlestar Galactica:

• "oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ tát savitúr váreniyaṃ"(O Creator, May we attain ultimate glory through your strength)
• "All of this has happened before, and will happen again."

Hanuman: the Videogame - for Playstation2

While the look may be a little dated, it's still alright for an early attempt.

Koenraad Elst: review of Srikant Talageri's new book

a very readable review and synopsis of Srikant Talageri's latest assault on the assorted Aryan Invasion/Migration/Tourism theories.
http://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-book-about-great-book.html

the gist - chronologically, the later parts of the Rig Veda correspond to the earlier parts of the Avesta - thus showing that the vedas pre-date Avesta. if AIT is right - it would be the other way round and the avesta would be the earlier text; but sadly for Witzel, Frontline editors and assorted Indian Marxists like Romila Thapar - it is not so.

I was unable to get through Talageri's previous books - they were too specialised and academic. this is one project that could really use a popular, HistoryLite retelling- the sort of stuff that Doug Brinkley or Stephen Ambrose put out in America.

http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=322

That argument can be simply stated. Rigveda and Avesta have a lot in common—names of people, animals, meters, geography. However, the Early Books of Rigveda have very little in common with Avesta, while the Middle Books have a little more. But it is the Late Books of Rigveda that have a lot in common with Avesta, pointing to a period of contemporary development.

I have not read the latest Srikanth Talageri book - but it looks like he has once again nailed the AIT non-sense and conclusively proved that the migration was outward from India to the Northwest i.e. the Out of India theory.

of course - Michael Witzel and his Christist loving fans (like The Chindu) will simply make this disappear by magically editing wikipedia.

both of Talageri's books need to be watered-down for the layman - perhaps a dumbed down version can be serialised in popular magazines - or on the net. this is one project crying out to be funded!

.