April 07, 2004
 

Personal

If you've ever doubted the veracity of claims by Indian philosophers, historians or the Hindutva brigade that ancient Indian mathematicians and philosophers invented/discovered virtually everything that is claimed to have been done by the Arabs or European mathematicians/astronomers etc, you should have been in my place on Sunday morning. As part of a religious ceremony, I was asked by the sastrigal to recite the Gayatri Mantra for as long as the various priests present displayed their knowledge of the few million mantras which exist in the scriptures. I have never really been a non-believer with regards to the achievements of the ancient Indian astronomers, mathematicians and life-science specialists. However, given the number of times I ended up reciting the mantra, I was forced to concede that I had seen the light and that it was indeed the ancient Indian mathematicians and philosophers who came up with the concept of infinity.

Amongst the mantras uttered were ones which beseeched Lord Indra to bless us with sons and grandsons to carry forth my ancestors' lineage. Given the advanced pre-natal scanning techniques available nowadays, I wonder if we'd be refunded the cost of the religious ceremonies along with a hardship cost for sitting at the altar, having had very little sleep in the last couple of days, if and when we did have a daugher rather than a son. If Lord Indra was happy with our prayers and he did bless us with a son, I plan to name him Indra. Indra, being the Rain God, is typically feted bigtime in Madras where there's an acute water scarcity. I hope I can buy him a toy elephant and toy horse and call them Airavata and Ucchaisravas. I hope he'd not end up having 1000 eyes as the original Indra did (or is it does?).

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Technology

Google's plans to launch its email product GMail could be seriously jeapordised if a British investment research house has its way.

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Link of the day

The longest single word (unhyphenated) .com domain name in the world.

Rambled @ 12:53 PM

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