Yantrakaal

based on an article by Devdatta Kali The Adoration of the Durga is the biggest and most popular festival in Bengal and coincides with Sharad Navaratri that is celebrated in the rest of Hindu India. The celebrations kick off from Mahalaya, the last day of the first dark fortnight of Ashvin, when Hindus recall and honour their ancestors. Mahalaya is associated in the popular Bengali psyche with a radio program produced by Birendra Krishna Bhadra for All India Radio, where the the Devi is symbolically invoked. This program is a combination of devotional songs and readings from the Chandi - a text that is revered by those who believe in the Divine Feminine or Shakti. For many of us, the radio program serves as a nostalgic reminder of a long vanished youth but very few of us have explored the mystical message of the Chandi. This article is an attempt in this direction. According to legend, Durga sat on the tip of a needle for nine days, doing a severe penance to destroy the evil Asura ...

1. I revere the Mother ! The Mother Rich in waters, rich in fruit, Cooled by the southern airs, Verdant with the harvest fair. 2. The Mother - with nights that thrill in the light of the moon, Radiant with foliage and flowers in bloom, Smiling sweetly, speaking gently, Giving joy and gifts in plenty. 3. Powerless ? How so, Mother, With the strength of voices fell, Seventy millions in their swell ! And with sharpened swords By twice as many hands upheld ! 4. To the Mother I bow low, To her who wields so great a force, To her who saves, And drives away the hostile hordes. 5. You our wisdom, your our law, You our heart, you our core, In our bodies the living force is thine. 6. Mother, you're our strength of arm, And in our hearts the loving balm, Yours the form we shape in every shrine. 7. For your are Durga, bearer of the ten-fold power, And wealth's Goddess, dallying on the lotus-flower, You are Speech, to you I bow, To us wisdom you endow. 8. I bow to the Goddess Fair, Rich in...

Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) are something that I have been writing about extensively in my other blog the-Imagineer . However the posts in that blog address the technological and economic aspects of this emerging phenomenon. Here I wish to explore the philosophical implications. But before I attempt to link MMORPGs to Vedanta, let me state clearly upfront that I am not one of those who believe, and try to convince everyone else, that all technology that we see today was known and available to ancient Hindu society. While I am not a pseudo-secularist who revels in trashing each and every aspect of Hindu civilisation, I am also equally sceptical of wild claims about the usage of airplanes in the Ramayana and of nuclear missiles in the Mahabharata. And in particular I have no love lost for Vedic mathematics ... that collection of simple formulae and mathematical shortcuts that have been erroneously compared to the wonders of Euclid and Pythagoras. What I do hav...

All students and enthusiasts of the History of the Motor Car are aware of the Red Flag law that was in effect in England in the closing years of the 19th century. This was the time when engineers were making the first hesitant attempts to put a steam engine on a horse carriage to see if they could make a self-propelled vehicle that was both light enough to move and yet safe enough for the passengers ... and there were many ideas that were explored. Engineers in England, as well as in France, Germany and other industrialised nations were carrying out various experiments to study different options ... with different degrees of technical and commercial success. But England was the only country where the legislature -- that is Parliament -- had unilaterally and ignorantly mandated that self-propelled vehicles were a danger to the population and hence should they venture out on public roads, they had to be preceded by a man, walking in front, with a red flag. This arbitrary piece of ...

Is SecondLife a pre-cursor to a new version of the world wide web ? Let us take a close look at how SecondLife is very similar ( or dissimilar ) to the web in general. The web is one of the many applications ( like chat, smtp-mail, ftp ) that runs on the IP infrastructure of the internet. Of course it is the most popular application. SL is also another application complete with a client and a server. The web consists of websites ( or groups of websites ) that individuals build and hope to draw traffic to. SL consists of islands, regions and individual 'properties' that people build and hope to draw traffic to. On a website, you can do various things .. make it 'beautiful', both visually as well as with music etc, to increase its attractiveness. You can also enable your website to hold chat sessions, or enable it with eCommerce to transact business. Properties and regions on SL can also traverse the same path. They can initially be simply 'beautiful' places to be...

Yesterday was a red letter day in my exploration of Virtual Worlds when I participated in a real company meeting inside SecondLife , an MMORPG that has been featured in BusinessWeek magazine. When the Lotus Notes meeting invite arrived from an unknown US colleague, I had been put off by the unearthly 1:00 AM in the night ? and then I looked closely at the venue and was taken back to read location @SecondLife !!! This was so intriguing and exciting as well that I immediately suspended my self imposed curfew on conferance calls after 9:00 PM and accepted the invitation. Fortunately I had an avatar in SecondLife ... though it was a very rudimentary one. Basic male(!) with bare minimum clothes and through him I entered SecondLife at the appointed hour and teleported myself to the location that my company had set up. And wow ! what a simulation ! Full 3D conferance room with attached lounge. Company posters on the walls, standard powerpoint presentations running on the screen. It was a b...

The millions words of criticism that have been written to condemn the illogical, ineffective and downright detrimental ban that the Government of India sought to place on accessing certain websites ( and associated domains )are HARDLY ENOUGH to assuage the feelings of extreme outrage that has been felt by the internet community in India. Those who are internet-illiterate, and that would include a large percentage of the Indian bureaucracy, cannot ever hope to understand the feeling of helplessness, anguish and despair that those of us, who choose to live in cyberia for a large part of the day, had experienced. It is similar to cutting of both the daily supply of newspaper and access to the local transport system !!! Good thing is that finally public opinion has been strong enough to modify government policy and the blogs are back again ... but what about geocities ? Most of today's bloggers may not be aware of geocities, but those of us who had started builing websites in the seco...