I am currently reading her “The Hindus : An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.  It’s a fascinating 690 page tome that purports to cover the history of India from 50 million BCE to the current.

There is much we don’t know, though.  Consider the Aryans, the people who came after the Indus Valley Civilization.  Wendy calls them the “Vedic people” to avoid the Nazi/ racial connotations that the word “Aryan” has acquired over the years.  Here are the various theories she says historians have about the Aryans/ Vedic people:

1.  They invaded India from Central Asia;

2. They peacefully migrated from Central Asia;

3.  They were always resident in Punjab, and actually migrated outwards to Iran, Anatolia, Greece, Italy and ancient Britain.

4. The Vedic people lived in the Indus Valley.

You can see they have managed to cover all possibilities – clearly Wendy and other historians really don’t know much about who the Aryans/ Vedic people were and where they came from.   That is understandable – we are, after all, talking about around 1700 BCE.  But what I find puzzling is that Doniger then confdently goes on to assert that the Aryans/ Vedic people (whoever they were) were in fact cattle thieves.

She says in Page 111 :

As nomadic tribes, the Vedic people sought fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses.  As pastoralists and, later, agriculturists, herders and farmers, they lived in rural communities. Like most of the Indo-Europeans, the Vedic people were cattle herders and cattle rustlers who went about stealing other people’s cows and pretending to be taking them back. One story goes that the Panis, tribal people who were the enemies of the Vedic people, had stolen cows from certain Vedic sages and hidden them in mountain caves. The gods sent the bitch Sarama to follow the trail of the cows; she found the hiding place, bandied words with the Panis, resisted their attempts first to threaten her and then to bribe her, and brought home the cows (10.108).

The Vedic people, in this habit (as well as their fondness for gambling), resembled the cowboys of the nineteenth century American West, riding over other people’s land and stealing their cattle.

Now, all I can see from the above story is that the Aryans/ Vedic people were cattle herders and that sometimes other people stole their cattle.    Clearly, you’d think, this story cannot be the basis for Wendy’s cattle-stealer theory, even though she mystifyingly includes it here.   But apparently it is.

When I searched online on what other historians think about the cattle-stealing myth, I found that the whole story is really a symbolic one, as a lot of things in the Vedas are.

This post has a detailed explanation of the various symbolisms involved – for instance, one explanation is that the PaNis are the demons of darkness, stealing the rays of light and hiding them away at night, and SaramA, the Dawn, recovering them in the morning, as a matter of daily routine.  In  his essay “The Legend of the Lost Cows in the Rg Veda”    Dr. Gopalan R.  Shastri explains that in the Vedas, the Sanskrit word go means both “cow” and “light” and the “finding and recovery of the lost cows means the finding of Surya, the finding or conquest of the Swar Loka, the abode of Surya”.

The American philosopher and historian John Fiske writes in the Atlantic Monthly (Vol 48) that “the struggle is not for a herd of perishable cattle, but for dominion of the universe”.  He says “these celestial cattle, with their resplendent coats of purple and gold, are the clouds lit up by the solar rays; and the demon who hides them in the cavernous rock is the  fiend of darkness..”

I am baffled as to why Wendy, who holds a doctorate in Sanskrit, first chooses to take the literal meaning when she must surely understand the symbolism involved, and second, why she does not even mention the alternate interpretation of the text that many historians believe.

Instead, she goes on to talk about the “scornful attitude of these Ancient Indian cowboys…  towards  the  “barbarians” (Dasyus or Dasis) whose lands they rode over (adding insult to injury by calling them cattle thieves).”  From there, she goes on to compare the Aryans’ treatment of the Dasyus to the American cowboys’ treatment of the Navajos, and more in the same vein.

An Aryan/ Vedic era Cowboy?

I find it exceedingly hard to believe that the sages who wrote the Rig Veda could be cattle thieves.  But they certainly were cattle herders, and they had horses.  So I am now stuck with this mental picture of a priest in white robes galloping across the vast plains of Punjab on a horse, white robe flying in one direction in the wind, tufted hair flying in another.

The priest is from Sanjay’s Flickr stream. The photoshopping is mine.

But I still did have to customize the theme.  For one thing, I wanted green instead of blue.  I wanted to have my own custom header image, I wanted to change the default font and of course the colors.  It should have been simple, and it is, but it’s incredibly time-consuming.  It would be much faster if you knew exactly which shade you wanted for each area of the site, but if you go through the trial-and-error method, it takes a lot of time. As it was, I was obsessively tweaking all weekend.

This is how the theme actually looks like if you use it without any customization :

There were a few hiccups along the way, like the tabbed sidebar widget which insisted on destroying my entire layout when viewed in IE.  But most of them were resolved by digging though the forum archives, though that did take some time as well.

Most of the changes I needed could be done by editing the stylesheet, but there were some (like Sujatha’s idea of removing the text excerpt from the slideshow) which actually involved editing php files.

The customized theme, as you cannot help noticing, is green.  But is it easy on your eyes?  Would most of you rather prefer blue  (just in terms of readability) ?  I hope you will answer these and other questions in the poll below.  Please don’t limit yourself to just the poll – I’d really appreciate detailed comments /critiques.

There are Free magazine-style themes, and there are Premium (read paid) themes, and then there are the so-called “Freemium” or Free Premium themes. The Premium themes have a simple proposition – they are (usually) more professional- looking, easily customizable with lots of theme options, and you get theme support if you run into any problems or want help on customizing something.

Shefaly recommended the Thesis theme, which she uses on her professional blog. It’s a nice, clean theme, though I wondered if it was too clean for me, and I noticed that Shefaly had needed outside help on customization.

Atahualpa Theme

Thesis is one of the most popular themes available, and there are some widely-read bloggers who use the theme, and a near-cult following.  But there is a debate going on whether Thesis is really the best theme out there.  I found that at least one Wordpress theme designer – Mayank thinks that Atahualpa is better than Thesis.

Atahualpa is a terrific theme by any standard.  It has 2 dozen option pages (really) and free support.  If I hadn’t been looking for a news-style theme rather than a blog style theme, Atahualpa would have been my first choice.

Atahualpa options page titles

Two Magazine styled themes with theme-options pages are Isotherm news and Igloo News. Jaypee Habaradas has a nice review of Isotherm News where you can see a snapshot of the options page.

One theme I really loved was Hybrid News.  It is a free theme, and its developer Justin Tadlock even had a long rant about premium Wordpress themes and how he would not be entering the pay-for-use theme market. I downloaded and installed Hybrid News – it’s a little more complicated than others because it’s really a child theme of the Hybrid Theme, and because it has any number of layout styles and accompanying php files, and just a single, woefully inadequate options page.

Now, I have learnt to do simple stylesheet CSS customization – changing fonts, colors, headers and even widths (of sidebar, header etc). But changing php files is something I hesitate to do, and in this case it was even more complicated by the sheer abundance of php files the theme had.

So I looked for theme support, and what did I find? You need a paid subscription to sort out any issues. Now how is that any different from having a premium theme? To me, this seemed like a bait-and-switch way of doing the same thing that other developers are upfront about.

The irony is that theme support does not even have to come from the theme developer – the support forums are mainly a place where people help each other out and also showcase their customizations. In fact, the support forums are where, as a developer, you can see all the bugs in your theme.

So I can see more rationale for a developer to charge for the theme than for supporting it.  And besides, I would rather spend the money on a fully customizable theme than have to hang out in the support forums hoping to get the developer (or someone else) to troubleshoot my blog.

What theme do you think I ended up choosing?  How do you like it?

I am walking towards winter, I know
In summer the fruits ripen and fall
In autumn the leaves ripen and glow
and now they too lie fallen below.

I am walking towards winter, I know
The lush green grass is covered
with a red and gold autumn throw
and soon it will be covered in snow.

I am walking towards winter, I know
leaving bright days and cheery sun
for day-long dusk and feeling low
It’s like going through a tunnel, except
this one takes a few months to go.

- Lekhni

(c) The Imagined Universe

More here.

I’ve heard of people abandoning their dogs and cats in this recession.  So was it just a matter of time before a few of them moved on to abandoning their own children?

As things stand, we know we don’t have a cure for AIDS, all we have are retroviral drugs that can slow the spread of the disease. The UN reports that 4 million people are taking retroviral drugs every year for treatment of AIDS.  On the other hand, 2.7 million more people were infected with HIV in 2007 alone (and the UN expects 2008 to have been worse.)

So drugs are clearly never going to be enough; we would need preventive vaccines.  The bigger problem seems to be funding.  Seth Berkley mentions in this recent New York Times op-ed that in 2008, public and private funding for  AIDS vaccine research declined 10% year on year. The recent Thai vaccine research controversy certainly wouldn’t have helped funding either.

Enter Dr. Sudhir Paul, and his research.

This post came about because Sujatha wanted me to do a tag (more of a “spread-the-word” really) about Dr. Sudhir Paul and his research into developing an anti HIV vaccine.  Dr. Paul is a Professor in the University of Texas and also the husband of Ruchira Paul of Accidental Blogger fame. Not only is he trying out a low-cost and different approach to developing the vaccine against the HIV virus, he is also exploring a different funding approach.  I’ll let the tag do the talking:

Mission Anti-HIV

As Dr. Paul says in this video, the ‘abzyme’ approach to attacking the virus at the special weak point could pave the way to developing a low-cost and highly effective approach to attacking the HIV virus, and in the long run, other deadly or debilitating viruses. (More information is available at the website for the Covalent Immunology Foundation.)

Rather than just rely on funds from mega-pharmaceutical companies, the foundation is making an appeal to the general public to contribute small amounts of money, believing that the power of the numbers on the internet can help finance this research and pave the way to a lower-cost vaccine than can be generated via corporate funding alone.

The results of the Thai AIDS vaccine trials have been much trumpeted in the news media, even if it helped only 23 less people get full-blown AIDS in the experimental group with the placebo group, with a grand total of 16000 people in the trial. However, doubts are beginning to set in on whether those results might be purely statistical in nature, rather than a real breakthrough.

Dr.Paul’s approach could very well be one of the more promising current modes of attack against the HIV virus.

So, I’m tagging you, my friends in the blogosphere, if you are convinced, to please consider passing on the above information via your blog, and to tag five others in turn, so this can spread like…well, a virus.

If you’d like to donate money, I notice the Covalent Immunology Foundation has a donation page where you can donate amounts starting from $5.

But whether or not you decide to donate, I hope you can join me in spreading the word.  It doesn’t have to be a tag – it can be an email forward, a badge in your blog (if someone can create one!), a discussion among friends, or any other way you can think of.   You and I did not go on any pulpit and talk about saving the world.  But if this research succeeds, maybe we will have helped a little to do just that.

Those online searchers weren’t the only ones reading my old posts. I ended up reading my old recipe posts too – starting with the gulab jamun post, to see how I had made it last year and the mistakes I had made. Reading the post (and especially the comments that followed it) turned out to be a great idea – I could make even better gulab jamuns this year. But more than that, reading the post made me nostalgic.

We may think of a personal blog as just an online diary, but it is more than that. In terms of revealing our thoughts, it is obviously better than the other ways we keep our memories – like pictures or videos. Even if we kept diaries/ journals, we wouldn’t have as long entries as our blog posts tend to be.

But the key difference between a personal blog and all those other memory records is – the blog is interactive. So when I was re-reading my old recipe posts, I could also see others’ perception of it. In fact, I found the comments (and my responses) quite revealing.

When you throw in the Johari window concept and others like it, having a blog does seem a great way to bring about self-awareness and possibly self-improvement. I wonder why more psychiatrists don’t recommend it – shouldn’t we be seeing a slew of “therapy blogs”? Or does that category already exist?

For my part, I don’t know if my blog has helped in my self-improvement, but it has certainly brought about gulab jamun-improvement

Happy Diwali/ Deepavali to all of you!

Then there was a basket which had been possibly attached to the balloon with the boy in it – and it was caught on tape falling off.  (That is to say, it was either a basket, they said, or a speck of dust on the camera). Then the experts said maybe the balloon could carry a boy after all.

Then there was no basket either, and the boy (Falcon Heene) was all along in his own home.

Meanwhile, the National Guard had been called in, helicopters and special aircraft were operating rescue missions,TV cameras were following the balloon every second on live TV  and the experts were gabbing nonstop, even if they were contradicting each other and themselves every few minutes.

Falcon Heene with his father (pic: CNN)

If this does not make any sense to you, well, it doesn’t to me either.  But this is the sum total of four hours of non-stop, breathless reporting all afternoon by both CNN and MSNBC.  Balloon boy (in various forms) was also trending #1, 2, 3 and 4 on Twitter, and I’m sure millions of hours of productivity was lost today by people watching TV at work.

Sigh.  Does this country have nothing better to focus on?  Why is it that we don’t find the health care debate  (or any other serious issue) as riveting as a balloon boy who wasn’t ?

The report itself is about human migration, and there are really no surprises there.  People from medium and high HDI index regions move equally to developing and developed countries. People in very HDI regions move mainly to developed countries.   We know all that already, so let’s look at the list itself, and India’s place in it.

India is classified as a medium HDI country, much below such notables of human development as Algeria and Mongolia and Equatorial Guinea. Oh, even the occupied Palestinian territories fare better than India. That alone is enough to tell you all you need to know about the measures the UNDP researchers were using, and their relevance. Yes, at an absolute level India does need to improve on life expectancy and literacy and so on.   But are we really worse off than Turkmenistan or Suriname ?

This is how, according to the report, HDI is measured:

The human development index (HDI) is a summary measure of a country’s human development.   It measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions:
• a long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth;
• access to knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate and the combined gross enrolment (sic) ratio in education; and
• a decent standard of living, as measured by GDP per capita in purchasing power parity(PPP) US dollars.

These three dimensions are standardized to values between 0 and 1, and the simple average is taken to arrive at the overall HDI value in the range 0 to 1. Countries are then ranked on the basis of this value with a rank of 1 representing the highest HDI value.

Clearly, freedom, democracy or general human happiness are not part of HDI.

I’m also not sure how the researchers account for variances within the population – you could expect, for instance, that the Maldives (rank 95) would have a more homogeous HDI than India – i.e. everyone in India would not have the same HDI. So they are relegating a billion people to a lower HDI than most of them might have.

But the last part is the best – the report says they take an average of life expectancy and literacy and GDP, and compute the average HDI for that country.

This means that if you have, say, an oil-rich country with very high GDP and decent life expectancy but very low education levels (and no individual freedoms and a lot of societal restrictions), that country would score high on the HDI?  Nice.   This is not even hypothetical – if you take a look at the list, you’ll see several examples.

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that 15 minutes of fame is all this list deserves.

I have an uncle who insists on getting handwritten letters. Even though he is nearly eighty now, his own hand writing is neat and legible, and is the sort of cursive writing you rarely see these days.

In fact, as things stand, you are not likely to see cursive writing much longer. Many schools in the US have apparently stopped teaching cursive writing altogether. In any case, I wonder how much writing students do these days anyway – I wonder what the proportion of typed up assignments versus handwritten ones is. Most students would even argue that cursive writing, or any handwriting is an unnecessary skill, as they will spend most of their working life typing up reports on computers and are unlikely to do any writing by hand.

Handwriting tells us something about ourselves and our state of mind, as any graphologist will tell you. But even if you were no graphologist, there is something very pleasing about reading a handwritten letter (assuming, of course, that the writing is legible).

I found myself delighted to receive a long, handwritten letter from my almost-eighty year old uncle in the mail. But what is even more surprising is that I really like replying to him by hand. I won’t pretend that my unaccustomed fingers did not ache at first, or that my writing wasn’t a little shaky to start off, but soon I was writing as neatly as I once used to. It was really nice to meet my own handwriting – I haven’t seen it for a long time now, and it brought back memories. (I glimpse snatches of my writing when I write a check, but with online billing, even that has become a rarity.)

That’s how it is for most of us, right? When was the last time any of you had a chance to write something by hand?

Also, given a chance, would you rather type or write a letter? Would you appreciate a hand-written one more?

I’m glad I did not have the option to type this letter. But I know that if I had the option, I would have typed too, and missed out on all this. As it is, you can see I needed a break from all that writing – to type out a blog post. All right, break over. I am off to complete my letter.