Quick notes: Origins of farming | Cost of parking...

• Origin of farming: “A mainstream view is that farming came to South Asia through the large-scale movement of Iranian farmers. But the absence of Iranian farmer DNA in the Indus Valley individual suggests instead that farming in South Asia arose on its own, either through local invention or adoption of ideas or some combination”.
  Genome of nearly 5000-year-old woman links modern Indians to ancient civilization: “This research, for the first time, has established the fact that people of Harappan civilisation are the ancestors of most population of South Asia. For the first time, the research indicates movement of people from east to west.



• The high cost of free parking: Just because you don't pay anything for parking doesn't mean the cost is not there. It is still there, just the driver isn't paying for it... It is esitmated that in America, there are 8 parking lots for every car!




• Why India must prioritize Railways over Road transport: Railways require less land than most roads and that is visible even to the naked eye of an onlooker. This is especially important in the old world where many countries including India have dense populations and agricultural land is of great value.

Bankrupting nation going on full speed. Do we need the damn super expensive Nagpur Expressway? Or is it an ego trip of @nitin_gadkari and worse @Dev_Fadnavis at public cost. #MSRDC chairman under a cloud. Wake up people! pic.twitter.com/YOAJlujXoe

— Sucheta Dalal (@suchetadalal) September 1, 2019




• Finally, some sense: Nitin Gadkari says Hybrids must get same reduced GST benefit as EVs. . . . EVs not a panacea, can actually increase pollution where power gen is from coal.



• Kerala: Left Front shifts a little right on Sabarimala



• China 'hacked' Indian, other Asian telcos: To spy on Uighur travellers,  Chinese hackers have compromised telecoms operators in countries including India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Malaysia



• Zao: China’s face-swapping app provokes privacy poncern



• How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians: How a few thousand opium clerks controlled millions of peasants, forcing them to produce a crop that actually harmed them. The British Indian monopoly on opium continued until India won independence in 1947



• Insanity in the name of Vikas:

These are the ruins of the once-flourishing Dakhina Parswa Matha of Puri. Closely associated with Jagannatha Temple. A hub of the Maratha gurus. Half-faded murals & beautiful stucco— locals say all of it might be razed by the end of this week, for a wider road! 😭 #SaveHeritage pic.twitter.com/PPhZRnUO9w

— Prateek Pattanaik (@pattaprateek) August 22, 2019





ROFLMAO what did I predict would come out of samosaji's plans for vikas? This is what happens when u r too

Public Works Department's plan to axe trees planted by Padma Shri Thimmakka
to widen the road between Kudur and Hulikalhttps://t.co/FlzVTq5KhChttps://t.co/H8fPaCVwi3

— Spatel (@Rjrasva) June 3, 2019

Quick notes: Little Sun | Curbing cars...

• "Made In India" written all over "Little Sun": This is the most expensive mega-science effort India is participating in and globally ITER is the most expensive science project on Earth ever to be undertaken in the 21st century. India, by contributing to about 10% of the cost, gets access to 100% of technology.



• Ditch cars: In 2003, the share of cars was 14.8%. By 2031 that is expected to touch 40%. More cars will occupy more space. Our standard response to the traffic problem is making new roads and also widening the existing roads. But every time we make a new road or widen an existing one precious land is being used for it. The car owner gets most it for free for his use. The city indirectly pays for his car.
  
  While we are busy making bigger and wider roads many countries are moving in a different direction. Developed societies are not adding roads. Instead they are reducing cars and other private transport. Cities like Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Oslo and Mexico City are using methods like high parking fees, pedestrianising the streets in peak hours and keeping some days as no car days for curbing traffic. London, has started charging congestion fees from owners of cars and taxis coming to its central area.




• Long road ahead: Cities are saying ‘No’ to 5G, citing health, aesthetics.



• ‘Waterman of India’, Rajendra Singh: “Instead of politically administrative boundaries, we should recognise geo hydrological boundaries. Contractor-driven and corporate-driven solutions don't work. We need integrated watershed development”.

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• Honor killing in Kerala: Neenu's father, who hailed from the Latin Catholic community strongly opposed his daughter's relationship with Kevin, a Dalit Christian.



• How a Differential works (1937):




• Savarkar believed in AIT? Savarkar settles for the AIT and seems to indicate that the Aryans came from Persia and thereabouts. He inferred that upon coming to this land they felt a deep sense of oneness and belonging to the river that sustained them.



• Wellness at workplace: Overworked Indian employees just want a room to nap at the workplace



• A vegetarian beef farmer protecting his stock from slaughter:

Quick notes: Amazon model, Russian moves...

• Call to split up Amazon: "Amazon has operated its retail segment at a loss for decades, subsidizing the retail portion of its business with profits from other areas, such as web services. It's anti-competitive, it's predatory, and it's not right. They're not making money in retail, and they're putting retailers out of business"..... Lesson for India!



• Russia is arming the Afghan Taliban.... Putin tightens Turkey alliance with nuclear project... Yazidis remain in fear on Iraq's Mount Sinjar after attempted genocide



• Wide-body jets from China? Can a trade war now defer the day when China makes competitive wide-body jets?




• Abhinav Seetharaman: The beauty that is Sanskrit




• Doubtful intent: A questionable new study "explains" the origins of ancient Indians



• Breakfast cereal: Why cereal is NOT your best breakfast bet



• Dumping pesticides: Ducks are the future for pesticide-free rice farms

Quick notes: Congress crony, Sodium-ion batteries...

• Swaminomics: Dhirubhai Ambani was a notorious Congress crony and master manipulator. It's somewhat ridiculous for his companies to be called BJP cronies by Rahul. Modi's black money bill has created such fear among businessmen that many plan to give up their Indian citizenship and go abroad to escape prosecution.



• SJM:  Scrap FDI in multi-brand retail



• Dr Anand Kamat: Indian surgeon  re-attaches British man's head to spine



• Faradion: E-bike with cheap sodium-ion batteries



• Air pollution may be hurting our brains: Pollutants Could Hinder Cognitive Function Through Smell



• Wise squat: Is the desi posture the best way to deal with loo trouble?



• Saraswati River:

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

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)

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".

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!

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