Category: Blogs

Links

  • Prabhu has lot of pictures of Uthiramerur. This is the temple which had 10th century inscriptions describing the procedure for selecting an officer
  • Varnachitram looks at the yoyoing careers of Malayalam film makers like M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Padmarajan, Lohithadas, Renjith, and Renji Panicker.
  • In this blog we have come out against the moral police in India many times. Now Chenthil writes on the new rules imposed by the Police Commissioner for the city of Chennai for browsing which seem straight out of 1984.
  • Elections are in April in Kerala and there are many possible outcomes. Vinod analyzes them. Mind Curry gives some depressing statistics about the state.
  • Jo and Meera Manohar sing a beautiful Deepak Dev composition – Thumpi Kinnaram from the film Naran

Podcast Recommendations

When I heard about podcasts for the first time, the immediate reaction was to who would want to listen to some guy saying something using a microphone and some audio recording tool. Already there are many terrible blogs and if such people switched to talking, it would be just more noise. I was pleasantly surprised to listen to many podcasts, some Indian, some American, some amateur and some professional and realized that I was so wrong about this, as wrong as the Main Stream Media was about bloggers. I want to share some podcasts which are now part of my regular listening schedule.
Let me start with the only two Indian podcasts which are in my list. Both of them are done by amateurs, but the programmes have a professional quality.

  • A Podcast about Indian Music by Amit Varshneya: The first program I listened to in his series was the one on disco themed songs and was hooked. This program was an analysis of all the disco songs of the 70s and 80s with songs from Rishi Kapoor movies like Karz, Hum Kisi Se Kam Nahi and the songs of Nazia Hassan. This program usually has a bunch of songs either based on a theme such as Music Director or the best songs of the month with commentary by Amit
  • M-POD by Jo: This Malayalam podcast is a talk show on news, music, literature etc. The episode I liked was the interview with Pradeep Somasundaran, of Meri Awaz Suno fame, where he talks about his association with music director Raveendran and general news about the music industry. In case you did not know, Jo is a talented singer himself. (just listen to this song even if you don’t understand Malayalam)
  • KQED Forum with Michael Krasny: The only station my car radio is tuned to is 88.5 FM, the National Public Radio station. Even though there is a liberal bias to most of the programs, it covers a wide range of topics with great depth. Forum, one of best programs on NPR is broadcast from the station here in San Francisco is very topical and covers everything from what is happening around the world to interviews with authors. Forum is one hour long, sufficient enough to overload you with information.
  • News Hour with Jim Lehrer Jim Lehrer is the grand daddy of American broadcasting and this hour long daily news is broken into segments where just a few issues are covered, but in depth.
  • Science Friday NPR has a daily talk show called Talk of the Nation. On Friday’s it is called Science Friday and very topical science events are discussed.

Besides this, my subscriptions include ABC News Nightline, CBS News 60 minutes and Ebert and Roeper. The software I use for subscribing/listening to podcasts is Apple’s iTunes, which is a free download.
Tags:

Palm Leaf January Roundup

For those of you who don’t know the existence of The Palm Leaf, it is a blog focussed on Indian history, hosted here at varnam.org. Here is a sample of interesting posts from Janurary.
An important discussion in Indian history is if the Aryan invasion really happened? Did the Aryans bring ariculture to India.? According to research by Stephen Oppenheimer, Michael Petraglia and Hannah James, people migrated from Africa to the India and then to rest of the world and all non-African people are descendents of these people. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer who has been excavating in Harappa for many years thinks that there was no invasion and genetic studies agree with him. According to a study done at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Calcutta, Indians do not owe much genetic makeup to central Asians. Excavations done by the Archaeological Survey of India at Lahura-Deva in Uttar Pradesh has revealed that people in the Middle Ganga Valley started farming much before the Europeans.
Recent archaeological excavations led to the discovery of what is considered to be the oldest fort in Kerala. This fort was built by the kings of the Ay dynasty which ruled the land between Nagercoil and Thiruvalla from 7th to 11th century AD with Vizhinjam as the capital. From Kerala there were more details about the Kadakkarapally Boat which was considered to be a thousand years old, but turned out to be built sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries.
Such exciting discoveries are happening now and The Palm Leaf covers it all. Please add it to your blogroll.
Tags:

HOWTO: Read blogs more efficiently

Looking at the log files of varnam.org, I find that a lot of visitors do not use any feed readers, instead come to the site via a bookmark or by typing varnam.org/blog in the address bar. This means that you are visiting this site daily, to see if there are any words of wisdom from me and believe me, it is the most inefficient way to read blogs.
If you read news from about three hundred sources daily, imagine how much time would be wasted if you had to manually check each site for updates. Some folks like The Acorn have many posts each day, while Seriously Sandeep and The Palm Leaf are not updated daily. Now there is software available which can keep track of blogs, let you know which have been updated, all for free. This is how I read about three hundred blogs daily and efficiently.
Continue reading “HOWTO: Read blogs more efficiently” →

2005 In Review

At the end of 2005 here is a look at the topics that were covered in varnam and some of the important posts, in blogmela style.
India: We discussed the story of how Natwar Singh was found with his hands covered with oil and lamented on the demise of the argumentative Indian. The ban on showing cigarettes in movies irritated us
There was some talk about the hypocrisy of the Communists in these posts: Man bites dog: DYFI opposes CPI(M), Your’s are small too, Not for the family, The Communist “U” turn, More Catholic than the Pope
How could we miss Praful Bidwai?. We analyzed some of his thoughts in Praful Bidwai: New Theorems and Praful Bidwai: In defence of Maoists
We also covered the mystery behind the death of Subash Bose in the following posts. Subhash Bose: Was not in Russia, Subhash Bose: The Investigations – II, Subhash Bose: The investigations, How did Subhash Bose die ?
Foreign Affairs: We talked about the Pakistani apologists and wondered about the stability of China. It’s been only few years and people seem to have forgotten the Taliban.
What does Musharraf want from the peace process?. He might get it since we are so flexible. We also find out how Chachaji messed up Nepal

Economy & Globalization: A Time Magazine article talked about the expatriate economy and we had some comments on how it applied to Kerala. India was a globalized country from historic times and so Why Fear Globalization?. Also if America was in control of globalization as portrayed, then why are American car manufacturers in trouble?
History: An Indus valley skeleton was discovered near Delhi. Cheraman Perumal’s trip to Mecca seems to be a myth. We also talk about the various manuscripts that were translated into other languages. We dispel another myth that Indian historical writing started with the arrival of Muslims.
We also found some uncanny similarities among various mythologies
Book and Movie Reviews: Engaging India, The Motorcycle Diaries, Blink, Lankaparvam (Malayalam), Massacre at the Palace, Maximum City, A Short History of Nearly Everything, State of Fear
We participated in the Book Tag meme and listed few of our favourite books.
Photos: Sunset, Thalikkulam Beach, Kerala, Temple Pond, Harippad, Kerala, Water Lily, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Butchart Gardens, Victoria, Canada

Humor: Kerala does not have many industries thanks to many world class factors. But now there is a way to make it the hub of development. For that you need to read HOWTO: Develop Kerala. We also thanked Microsoft for not entering the desktop widget race.
What is similar between Musharraf and HTTP?
Announcements: The history section of this blog was spun off into a separate blog called The Palm Leaf. It is expected to go IPO in 2007.

Interesting reading

Introducing PublicGyan – The Public Knowledge Exchange

Will Oil touch 70USD/barrel at the end of this month? Will Rahul Gandhi be made a cabinet minister by the end of 2005? Will Jagdish Bhagwati win the 2005 Nobel Prize or will Hillary Clinton contest the 2008 presidential elections?
The pundits on the blogosphere and the commenters have differing opinions on questions like the above. But are you willing to put money where your mouth is? If so take a look at PublicGyan, the Public Knowledge Exchange, where you can make predictions for the future and trade like the Iowa Electronic Markets. Nitin, the man behind the idea has an excellent introduction to this concept.
The site was implemented by the man who breathes technology – Srijith (with lot of support from his wife). Currently you can join only if you have an invite from one of the members. If you need one, please leave a comment with your real email address or mail me at jk at varnam dot org.

A new history blog

I am happy to announce a new blog, The Palm Leaf, devoted to Indian History, hosted here at varnam.org. From now, the regular blog will cover current issues whereas time travel will be done in the history blog. This new blog has been initialized with all the history posts from the original blog.
The word, Palm Leaf, was chosen as it was a popular medium of writing in India for almost two thousand years. Letters were written on a dried, smoothed, smoke treated leaves of palm trees using a stylus and then blackened with vegetable juice and lamp black. This site hopes to be the electronic version of those palm leaves.
Even though the tagline says, A look at India’s Past, I don’t plan to cover each and every topic related to our history. So you will not see much mythology or discussions of various religious texts. Instead there will be archaeological news, coverage of development of language, and information on people, places and monuments. There will be more posts about the Mauryan empire, Saraswathi-Sindu civilization and Kerala due to my current interest in those areas.
On the technical side, the new blog runs Movable Type 3.2 with dynamic publishing. This means that only the main page has a physical existence. Rest of the pages are created on the fly based on the request. The style of the new blog is the same as the old one, but it will be changed soon.