Longest Rock Art

The spectacular Indian rock art is not very well known both in India and outside. Though the most famous one is Bhimbetka (near Bhopal), there are other sites like Karabad,Shamla Hill and others. Now a record is being set in India, for the longest chain of ancient rock art.

The 12-km-long site, with most of its petroglyphs or pre-historic rock carvings intact, has been discovered in Mandsaur district of Malwa region, which is also home to Bhimbetka, the UNESCO world heritage site, 45 km south of Bhopal. The Rock Arts Society of India (RASI), which knew about the existence of the site for sometime, has now gone official saying the site in the Vindhyan tableland, a plateau lying north of the central part of the Vindhya range, is indeed the “longest chain of rock arts in the world”.

“Nowhere in the world has anybody come across such an extensive chain of rock arts with little interruption. What’s exciting is most petroglyphs are intact,” internationally acclaimed paleontologist and former RASI secretary G L Badam told TOI.

Earliest carvings in the chain are mostly of animals like rhino, nilgai , bear, panther, elephant, monkey, turtle and crocodile. But there are also pictures of cow, bull, buffalo, pig and horse. Experts have called the discovery of the Bhanpura rock arts as “an important milestone in the history of anthropology”. “The presence of a variety of rituals, processions and fighting scenes goes to prove the continuity of the art and early man’s culmination into community living,” said Badam. [World’s longest rock art chain in Vindhyas]

 

Lost & Found: Mini Continent

Mini-continent discovered

A mini-continent that was formerly joined to India has been discovered deep under the southern oceans by the world’s most powerful ice research vessel, said German scientists. They spoke as the ship, the Polarstern, docked on Saturday in its homeport of Bremerhaven, Germany, after a 19-month research voyage to Antarctica.
The ninth phase of the voyage was a study of the undersea Kerguelen Plateau, which was orphaned after the ancient continents separated, with India drifting away from Antarctica. The findings suggest that the plateau, about the size of Germany and France combined, is just the tip of a bigger piece of lost continental crust, the scientists said.
Geophysicists did seismic and magnetic surveys to explore the gap between the little-understood plateau and East Antarctica, the Alfred Wegener Institute of polar research in Bremerhaven said. “This plateau was created by a massive volcanic eruption shortly after India and Antarctica separated about 120 million years ago to form the Indian Ocean,” said geophysicist Karsten Gohl.
“For the first time, we have been able to see how the succession of volcanic deposits at the southern side of the Kerguelen Plateau, which reach right to the Antarctic continent, mostly have continental crust underneath them.
“Our findings show that a continental fragment of a size hitherto never suspected must have existed between India and the Antarctic.”

Reverse Evolution

 

That was a question from the first Republican debate held in the Reagan Presidential Library in California. Among the 10 candidates, the people who raised their hands to say that they do not believe in evolution are Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo (who?).

These people want to be the President of a county which  decoded the DNA, and the country which has the largest number of Nobel Prize winners. People in India and China, leaders of Tom Friedman’s flat world, would think this is one of those late night comedy sketches.

When you see the word, Christian Conservative in the website of any candidate, you should be scared.

We won't be landing on Saturn this trip

In an article about Santosh George, who could be India’s first space tourist, PTI writes

He will pay around Rs 1 crore for the two-hour-flight on SpaceShip Two but there will be no landing on another planet. The tourists will experience zero gravity and re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.[President meets India’s would-be first space tourist]

Imagine the disappointment of Santosh George, when he knows that he cannot get off at Saturn as planned. Seriously, how old is the person who wrote the PTI  article and how old is the Rediff editor who approved it?

Clown Prince Syndrome

After Mr. Future of India, Rahul Gandhi,  claimed that his party got freedom for India and divided Pakistan and did various sundry things, the party men seems to have got the idea on how to take it further.

The booklet — in Urdu and in Hindi — not only goes about proclaiming that the Congress was responsible for extending opportunity to Muslims to occupy top constitutional and political appointments, but also goes on to take credit for the rise of celebrities like Dilip Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Sania Mirza as well as a number of Indian cricketers.

“And that not only helped in Azeem Premji emerging as the richest man in the country, but also forging stars like Dilip Kumar and Sharrukh Khan to the top rung in the Indian film industry,” it declared. Lest his screen name be misunderstood, Dilip Kumar’s real name — Yusuf Khan — was mentioned within brackets.

It then seeks to assign the same reason to the fame achieved by top musicians — Amjad Khan (Sarod), Zakir Hussain (Tabla) and Bismillah Khan (Shehnai) besides cricketers — Nawab of Pataudi, Syed Kirmani, Azaruddin, Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan, Mohammad Kaif, Munaf Patel, Wasim Jafar , as well as tennis star Sania Mirza. [SRK, Sania, Azim Premji flourish thanks to us: Congress]

The respect for Abdul Kalam increases further as he made it to the top without help from the Congress.

Culture Vultures

In Pakistan

However, photos in the Pakistani media have shown Bakhtiar being helped by a male instructor during a charity parachute jump in France last month to raise money for victims of the devastating October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.

Another picture shows a woman – apparently Bakhtiar – hugging the instructor.

Two clerics at Islamabad’s Red Mosque, in reaction to the media report, issued a fatwa demanding her dismissal, two days after setting up a court to deliver Islamic justice in a bold challenge to President General Pervez Musharraf. [I didn’t hug instructor: Pak minister]

In India

The cultural capital of the country Varanasi has reacted sharply to the kissing by Hollywood actor Richard Gere of Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty during an HIV/AIDS awareness programme at New Delhi.

The self-styled cultural cops of Shiv Sena took out a procession and torched an effigy of Shetty to register their protest at Luxa area here today. The Shiv Sainiks were raising slogans such as ‘Shilpa Shetty hosh mein aao’, ‘Hindustan ki sanskriti se khilwad band karo’ and ‘nari ka apman band karo’.[Sainiks torch Shilpa Shetty’s effigy]

Next time Manmohan Singh sees Musharraf, he better not hug him.

Sacrificial victims from the Indus Valley?

When news came out that  United States would ask for help from India for the war in Iraq, there was massive opposition in the country. The politicians did not want our soldiers to be sacrificial victims in a war we opposed. A new story suggests that there could have been sacrificial victims from India in Iraq, but about 4600 years back.

Excavations done at Ur in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s retrieved some skulls which were 4600 years old. These skulls were found in what is called ‘Great Death Pit’ which had the bodies of 74 sacrificial victims and royal retainers.

According to one story, these women adorned with ornaments walked to the tomb, drank poison and lay down to die to join a king in his afterlife. The debate now is not on whether they were sacrificial victims, but on how they were killed. CAT scans are being done now to see if the women were killed above the ground and then mummified.

Another theory that is getting tested alongside is if the victims were bought from the Indus Valley Civilization. For this the enamel from the teeth of the sacrificial victims would be compared to the remains found in Indus Valley.

Ancient Sumerians and Akkadians relied heavily on imports since the land was not rich in natural resources. Indian merchants of that era, finding a niche market, exported goods to Mesopotamia and Harappan seals have been found various Mesopotamian sites dating to 2400 BCE.

Still it is not clear why Indian women would be sacrificed for a Sumerian King.

Deconstructing Leftist Indian History

Jaffna, in a brilliant post corrects the Marxist slant in Indian history and suggests future course of action.

The Marxist school is an effort, inadvertent or otherwise, to demolish the grand narrative in Indian history linked to Hinduism, to selectively deconstruct the past and to localize all Indian history in caste and region. India is reduced to a mere collection of castes, linguistic groups, religions and geographic regions. No underlying unity at the ideological plane is recognized except for the Buddhist interlude or Islam under the Sultanate!

The central thesis of the Marxist Indologists that no Hindu civilizational superstructure existed – as captured by Amartya Sen’s statement that “there is no Hindu civilization” – can be refuted by even a cursory study of the history of Cambodia, by which I include what is today South Vietnam and the early dynasties therein, or of Java and its neighboring regions. The study of the literature of Khmer and Javanese, not to mention the archeological finds in both places reveal the motifs of Hindu classicism first pieced together in a systematic manner in the Gupta period. 

The moment has arrived to deconstruct the Marxist school. Those who had the education and rigor to do so are few. There is a paucity of intellectual capital. I can only think of Arun Shourie, the late Sita Ram Goel  – he unfortunately did not publish a seminal work on history preferring to critique the individual Marxist historians instead, Meenakshi Jain, B. Lal and Koenraad Elst. It is time to build on this legacy. The concept of civilizational Hinduism is indeed relevant, the Marxist deconstruction notwithstanding.  [The Indian Left and History]

Lost & Found: Palm Leaf Manuscript penned by Swati Tirunal

Rare text of Swathi Thirunal found

The text, ‘Sandupuruvarnanam,’ describing the unique feature of erstwhile royal state of Travancore, was recently traced by manuscript researchers at Manoormadam Kottaram in Mavelikkara in Alappuzha district.
Out of the 57 palm leaves of this text penned by Swathi Thirunal in Malayalam script, 31 have been found among a bundle of manuscripts in a box at Manoormadam, Assistant Co-ordinator of Manuscripts Post-survey Programme, P L Shaji told PTI.
From the inscriptions on the text, it could be learnt that they were written in AD 1839, he said.