Yantrakaal

The Angkor civilisation that flourished in what is now Cambodia between the 7th and 12 centuries represents the high water mark of the Hindu cultural influence in South East Asia. Located between the Kulen Mountains and the Tonle Sap Lake, in Siem Reap province, are the remnants of nearly 250 Hindu temples built by Khmer kings who trace their lineage to traders and adventurers from India. Hard historical evidence of Hindu kings in Cambodia begins with the crowning of Jayavarman - II in 790 AD who built the first known temple but folklore refers to Kaundinya, a Brahmin prince as being the first Indian who came to the land of Khmers. Kaundinya's origins are lost in the mists of mythology but some say that he was from the Kamboj tribe, described in the Mahabharata as living near Gandhara. He might have been a prince who had been exiled after a palace coup or he might have been a trader who had set out from Tamralipta ( or modern Tamluk in Midnapur district of West Bengal), the well...

Anybody who has filed a General Diary (GD) or a First Information Report (FIR) in a police station in India would know the utter futility of the “recording” process. A handwritten document with a couple of carbon (or photostat) copies is handed over by the complainant to the policeman and these get stored first in a file and then the files are placed in a sack and stored in some dark and dusty room. The only proof of the existence of this document is a number, again entered manually, in a ledger that is kept in the police station. These dark, dusty rooms spread across hundreds of police stations in India containing sacks of files that in turn contain the handwritten documents is the only source of information about crimes and incidents that happen in India. The people who are directly concerned with these GDs and FIRs may keep a copy in their personal custody and provide it to whoever asks for it but for anyone else, including the government itself, retrieving any document is almost ...

Ever since I was a child growing up in Calcutta the advent of upcountry pilgrims for the Ganga Sagar Fair was an annual event. Every year, on the occasion of Makar Sankranti, when the Sun transits from Dhanu (Sagitarrius) to Makar (Capricorn), bus and train loads of pilgrims, mostly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, would descend on Calcutta and then head out towards Diamond Harbour and Sagar Island where the Ganga ( or Bhagirathi) river finally empties itself into the Bay of Bengal. The ashram and temple of Kapil Muni is the epicentre of a gigantic mela where 30,00,000 people gather to seek the blessings of Kapil Muni, Raja Sagar ( please note, this is NOT pronounced as Saagar, no long aa after S) and Raja Bhagirath, the king who "brought" the Ganga to this point. For the Bengali population of Calcutta, the Ganga Sagar Mela was never a big event and even if we had thought of visiting the place, the chaos that is traditionally associated with the event -- when 3 million people d...

All of us are familiar with the Internet and the “World Wide” Web that has disrupted business models by connecting people in new and often unimaginable ways. But the Web and the Internet are not synonymous even though both are often spoken of in the same breath. The Internet is a hardware platform, that is boxes and wires connected together, and the Web is an application running on this amazing platform. If that confuses you, think of your laptop as a platform and Word and Excel as two common applications that run on the platform that also has other applications like Media players, that play music, PhotoShop that helps create images and Skype that allows you to talk to long distance friends “for free”. Your laptop platform and the suite of applications that you have installed on it are all local, but the Internet is a distributed platform that is made up of a number of connected machines. Similarly, the Web is a distributed applications, one part of which -- the browser, is located on...

I have always been puzzled by the image of Kali that we have grown up with. Why would a goddess appear naked ? Why should she be surrounded by images of murder, mayhem and destruction in the form of severed heads and hands ? Why should be standing or squatting on a lifeless Shiva ? Or as I learnt as I grew older, the actual image is that of a woman-on-man sexual act that has been sanitized by a sensitive society for "family viewing"! Gods and goddesses are supposed to be goody-goody figures that every society has conjured up to create a safe harbour for troubled times -- to protect and save helpless humanity in the face of uncomfortable challenges thrown up by a hostile environment. That is how primitive man created the mental image of the Divine. Someone who is loving and kind and benign and benefic and beautiful peaceful and calm and ..... so on and so forth. That is how the gods are supposed to be ... and then comes Kali and shatters that carefully crafted archetype wit...

Last June, I had the good fortune to visit Pangong Lake, in Ladakh, on the Indo-Tibetan border -- shown in the movie 3 Idiots -- and spent a cold and windswept night in a tent at Spangmik. The place is awesome. A huge blue-green mass of salty water -- a remnant of the seas that got trapped between India and Tibet when the former rammed into the latter and created the Himalayan range -- is surrounded by immense snowy peaks that turn golden at sunrise. But what was even more impressive was the night sky with its hundreds of stars, that we in the cities have forgotten about. Thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Google Sky app on my smartphone, I could, for the first time in many, many years see and, more importantly, identify so many stars and constellations, including, Polaris - one of the most important stars used by ancient mariners to determine their position. Then it struck me -- in the past, stars were used to determine location but today the GPS location from my i...

A key challenge in building the "Internet of Things" is to be able to connect a device to a computer over the internet and to use as simple and lightweight an infrastructure as possible. In this post we demonstrate how a public XMPP chat server can be used to transmit data and commands from one device to another using a chat client at one end and a python "bot" sitting on the other end. We will demonstrate the ability to INSERT data into an SQLite  database, SELECT records from the same, play a variety of .wav files and execute any system commands on a "central" machine from any distant machine that supports an XMPP chat client. Before starting on this exercise, we searched the web for prior activity in this area and we came across this webpage  that suggests a similar approach for controlling devices over the internet, but the strategy explained here is simpler to code and implement. We looked for a list of public XMPP chat servers and selected ...