Ujjwol Lamichhane

Reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

2009-09-02T06:33:00.001-07:00

Midnight's Children (Paperback)

Midnight's Children: At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the date on which India proclaimed itself independent, 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers. Two are switched at birth, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the offspring of wealthy Muslims. Rushdie follows them them through 30 years of partition, violence and Indira Gandhi's iron-fisted rule. Saleem and Shiva; Knees and Nose 's story by Saleem for his son is in itself is autobiography by Saleem.

At last I finished it. After reading that Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children won Booker of Bookers in The Himalayan Times, I brought this book from my college library. After many failed attempts to read I left this book to dusting in shelf for two years. But then my twitter friend Abhishek recommended me to read this is an epic book of magical realism. Then I will all the determination to finish this novel started reading the Rushdie's second novel.

Then the journey from "The perforated sheet" consummated by "Abracadabra" started. Truly speaking I found the first lesson not so interesting and gripping, but the love for reading started from "Mercurochrome". This long read with great care from Salman Rushdie is a masterpiece on itself. Rushdie's style of writing is truly awesome and in itself is a amazing read for everyone. My almost one month's time (4th August to 2nd September) was worth turning every pages of this epic novel.

Reading Midnight's Children was a great addition to my read list. His awesome writing with intense vocabulary taught many new words to me. It broaden my view, taught me the history of the India from British colonialism to Independence. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, a telepath with an extraordinary nose. Though the protagonist is a Muslim but is as profoundly Hindu in his sensibility. Many saying are in the books are touching and truly realistic. I found this one great "It happened that way because that's how it happened." and there are many other like this.

I found this journey inside Saleems world breathtaking and amazing. The adventures from Kashmir, Agra, Delhi, Mumbai, Karachi, Dacca and other parts of the India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was a great lesson in an intensely interesting and awesome writing style. From Saleem's Nose to Shiva's Knees to Parvati's magic the Midnight's Children Conference is a an interesting milestone in the story. The dark story in the Sundarbans amazes the readers and also the lessons from snakes and ladders. And the love of and for Jamila Singer, childhood in India and adolescence in Pakistan and man-dog in the army makes the story bend a new twist and a great investment of time.

Though I am not a great critic, I don't have anything to criticise about this novel. I am grateful to Rushdie for what this novel taught me. And lastly Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is worth it's time investment and a must read for everyone.

PS: I would like to thank Abhishek Rane for encouraging me to read this book.

Presentation Slide:Sanskrit - restoring the lost glory

2009-08-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on Yala Maya Kendra I hosted a session on Sanskrit - restoring the lost glory. And the following is the presentation file of the session which i presented. The file is licensed under licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This the result of my almost 2 months of research on Sanskrit and the references are mentioned below.

Sanskrit

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References:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2173400.stm

http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-enlightenment.html

http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-nasa.html

http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/09/05/stories/2002090500340200.htm

http://www.samskritabharati.org/sb/20080822270/sanskrit-as-computer-language

http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Computational_linguistics

http://samskrute.blogspot.com/2009/02/sanskrit-and-computer.html

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/General/comp.programming/2004-06/0323.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1199965,flstry-1.cms

http://speaksamskrit.blogspot.com

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-142020037/gen-x-finds-sanskrit.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS-City-Jaipur-Restoring-lost-glory-of-Sanskrit/articleshow/4796539.cms

http://ratnuu.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/sanskrit-as-a-computer-language/

http://www.niyam.com/gnulinux/lfy/fy/FY-monthly-col.php?jun2k5

संस्कृत (Sanskrit)

2009-08-09T22:23:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Introducing Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indic language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the oldest languages in the world, and in use since 1200 BC as the religious and classical literary language of Indian Subcontinent.

This language contrasted with the languages spoken by the people, Prakrit - "Prototype, natural, artless, normal, ordinary".

It is also called dēva-bhāṣā meaning the "divine language".

The word Sanskrit means completed, refined, perfected. Sum (Complete) + krt (created).

Sanskrit was created and then refined over many generations (traditionally more than a thousand years) until it was considered complete and perfect.

Sanskrit is generally written in the syllabic Devanagari script composed of 51 letters or aksharas.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.

Forms of Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations (Samhitas), theological discussions, and religio-philosophical discussions (Brahmanas, Upanishads) which are the earliest religious texts of the Hindu religion.

Classical Sanskrit

The Vedic form survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. Around this time, as Sanskrit made the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, the Classical period began.It is a significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit and is found in the Sanskrit of the Hindu Epics—the Ramayana and Mahabharata. There have been "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) in this form of Sanskrit.

Classical Sanskrit became fixed with the grammar of Panini (roughly 500 BC), and remains in use as a learned language until the present day.

Decline of Spoken Sanskrit

Over the centuries, the Prakrits underwent language change to a degree that vernaculars(native language of a country) and Sanskrit ceased to be intercomprehensible and had to be learned as a separate language, rather than a distinguished or noble register of the popular language.

A possible clue to termination of Sanskrit as a spoken language is provided by Kalhana who describes Samkaravarman (883–902) as:

"Thus this [king], who did not speak the language of the gods but used vulgar speech fit for drunkards, showed that he was descended from a family of spirit-distillers".

Traces of spoken Sanskrit Now

Sanskrit is used as everyday spoken language in the village of Mathoor near Shimoga in Karnataka state, southern India and in Jhiri Village in Madhya Pradesh's Rajgarh district of India. Inhabitants of all castes learn Sanskrit starting in childhood and converse in the language.

Specialty of Sanskrit Language

Misconception: A great misconception about Sanskrit is that it is a dead language; that it is out-dated; that it is not and can never be and was never a spoken language. Though the use of spoken Sanskrit has declined but Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras.

Sanskrit’s way of language

1. It is a natural language. There is a direct link between the sound and signs; it is phonetic. We write Sanskrit exactly as we say which means that the writing of Sanskrit language is based on the sound of the spoken form.

In other words, Sanskrit has no spelling; there are no silent letters either. In contrast to Sanskrit, you can't read many English words properly unless you know English to certain extant. This means that a student is assumed to have known already the English language before one starts learning it!

2. There is only one set of alphabet in Sanskrit. This avoids many complexities of writing capital / small and italic letters as they are in the Roman alphabet / European scripts.

3. There aren't many punctuation marks found in Sanskrit (Devanagari) script.

4. For writing Sanskrit language, any comprehensive alphabet can be used and vice versa.

5. Thanks to its phonetic scripts, there is an easy-flowing, natural and logical way to proceed while learning this wonderful language or to write any language after that.

6. There is logic in its sound system, and a natural continuity in its word-making as well as sentence-making.

For example, unless one has visited England, one cannot guess the correct reading of the names / places like Reading, Gloucester, Leicester, Peugeot, Plymouth….Chaos. in English, follows if not pre-learnt.

7. Sanskrit sentence structure is flexible. The declensions and the conjugations have a wide range. Hence every student has more freedom in composing sentences in Sanskrit. In contrast to this, every English sentence has to follow syntax (the law of particular order of words).

8. In Sanskrit, the order of words in a sentence does not matter. Thanks to this flexibility, a Sanskrit sentence may well follow any language the student is familiar with.

What’s unique?

1. Sanskrit is the oldest and living language on our planet.

2. Sanskrit is a spiritual language and is the language of Divinity; language of gods.

3. It is a language of classical literature which is rich and abundant.

4. As its name itself explains, it is systematized and perfected. Its alphabets are impeccably arranged. They are easy to remember and help in memorizing textual stanzas.

5. Sanskrit literature is unique in its overwhelmingly poetic character.

6. Rationality is in everything including the arrangement of its alphabets. It is perfected. The Devanagari script used to write Sanskrit is also complete. Being phonetic, it can easily be adopted to write any language.

7. It is a global language. It has no territory, has no bias; hence has no limitations.

8. Sanskrit is a 'world language' in the real sense of the term. It hasn't got local variations or vernaculars nor dialects nor usages of slang words. Its uniformity owes to this aspect as well.

9. It has written rules of grammar, phonetics, etymology and epistemology which are all followed wherever Sanskrit is used. The wonder that this bedrock of Sanskrit grammar, which is, allows its purity to continue no matter however it grows.

10. There is infinity in its word-formation possibilities and they are all well-structured, computerized long before the computers came in use.

11. There is a vibration or resonance in the sounds well-expressed in Sanskrit speaking.

12. Absolute freedom is in using this language because of "No syntax". This means that even a beginner can proceed with words as one’s thoughts progress.

13. Flexibility or adaptability - Same sentence can be said in a variety of ways.

14. Its universality. It can do all functions, - scriptural (holiness), technical (precision and derivative power) and romantic (resourceful and flowery style) but can never be slang.

15. Has a very rational derivative power.

16. Its economy. Sanskrit letters can be used to write other languages as well.

17. Sanskrit words possess a special vibration of sound waves whose resonance is very effective. People use Sanskrit Mantras for healing. They owe this mystic character and holiness to the essential spiritual character of Sanskrit.

18. Spirituality has molded into Sanskrit! Hence its name, - perfection to be reached by any word.

By knowing Sanskrit, you are now in touch with a language which is very natural (sound-oriented), rationally developed or systematized in its structure and versatile in its usage even while retaining its purity and uniformity. Its ancient, abundant, full of variety and everlasting literature passing through the longest period of time has plentiful wonders to offer to those interested in any of them.

Benefits of the Sanskrit Knowledge

1. Since Sanskrit is the oldest language of our planet, your ability to speak it amounts to a unique experience (and perhaps your special status!).
2. Clear in speech, perfect in pronunciation, articulate in conversation, sharp in memory, rapid in thinking, logical in analysis, rational in understanding, accurate in expression and communication, familiarity with a wide variety of concepts, liberal in views and polite in behavior as well as a quick grasping of other languages and scripts also - are some of the benefits attached to and traditionally proverbial attributed to a Sanskrit scholar.
3. Sanskrit is really the world-language. Its knowledge helps in studying:
a. European things of the past as a lot of technical terms are similar between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hittite etc. in many technical fields like medicine, law, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and many more.
b. The languages, religion and cultures of the Middle east like Persian, Iranian and Arabic which owe a lot of similarity.
c. Indian things whether religions, philosophy, arts, science (like Ayurveda, Vedic mathematics, Vastu, Tantra, Kriyayoga and other specialisations) which are all the popular subjects in today’s world.
4. A glimpse of ancient world religions, languages, customs, traditions, culture can be easy to get through the glass of Vedic and Sanskrit literature.
5. In this modern age of computers, Sanskrit has one more thing to offer, - adoption of the already computerized contents or the Sutras in many of its technical subjects like Panini's Ashtadhyayi - the text book of grammar. Since both Sanskrit and the computer are having fewer irregularities, if not perfect, their combination should work marvelously for the benefit of mankind.
6. By knowing Sanskrit, you have an access to the most ancient, profound, rich and extensive literature of Sanskrit which strengthens your contacts / association/ understanding of a life style associated with that language.
In short, Sanskrit is the container of all that which is Indian subcontinent. In other words, understanding and appreciation of numerous Indian things whether music, dance, arts, rituals, tradition, religions, values, languages, science etc. will be easy for one who knows Sanskrit. The integrity of the Indian elements owe essentially to the Sanskrit language and literature which has the universal impact upon them.
7. You have now access to the most systematized oriental language.
8. You are now in touch with a language which is very natural (euphonic / built on sound factor), rationally developed, systematic in its structure and versatile in its usage even while retaining its purity and uniformity (without any regional vernaculars).
9. Sanskrit being the mother of all Indian languages and a sister of all the European languages, with its knowledge you are capable of learning most of the current world languages easily.
10. Owing to the spiritual contents predominant in its literature, the knowledge of Sanskrit adds many important dimensions to our personality.

On Sanskrit

1. “Sanskrit is the most convenient language for computer software programming.” - Forbes magazine(July, 1987)

2. “The most useful language for medication i.e. persons by talking Sanskrit will be healthy and free from disease like blood pressure, diabetics, cholesterol etc.. as talking in Sanskrit makes activate the nervous system of the human body so that the person’s body gets activated with positive charges” -American Hindu University

3. The language which contains most advanced technology in it in their books called Vedas, Upanishads, Shruti, Smruti, Puranas, Mahabhaarath, Ramayana etc... - Russian State University

4. Mother of all languages of the world - all the languages (97%) have been directly or indirectly influenced by this language. –UNO

5. The script used is known as devanagari or the "city of the gods." The phonetic accuracy of devanagari compares well with that of the modern phonetic transcriptions.

Sanskrit and the computing

We have greatly underestimated the sacred power of language. When the power of language to create and discover life is recognized, language becomes sacred; in ancient times, language was held in this regard. Nowhere was this more so than in ancient India. It is evident that the ancient scientists of language were acutely aware of the function of language as a tool for exploring and understanding life, and their intention to discover truth was so consuming that in the process of using language with greater and greater rigor, they discovered perhaps the most perfect tool for fulfilling such a search that the world has ever known—the Sanskrit language.

There has recently been an astounding discovery made at the NASA research center. The following quote is from an article Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence, which appeared in AI (Artificial Intelligence) magazine in spring of 1985, written NASA researcher Rick Briggs.

"In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor.

But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of liguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old."

This discovery is of monumental significance. It is mind-boggling to consider that we have available to us a language which has been spoken for at least 3000 years that appears to be in every respect a perfect language designed for enlightened communication. But the most stunning aspect of the discovery is this: NASA, the most advanced research center in the world for cutting-edge technology, has discovered that Sanskrit, the world's oldest spiritual language, is the only unambiguous spoken language on the planet.

He further comments, "The degree to which a semantic net (or any unambiguous nonsyntactic representation) is cumbersome and odd-sounding in a natural language is the degree to which that language is 'natural' and deviates from the precise or 'artificial.' As we shall see, there was a language (Sanskrit) spoken among an ancient scientific community that has a deviation of zero."

Considering Sanskrit's status as a spiritual language, a further implication of this discovery is that the age-old dichotomy between religion and science is an entirely unjustified one. It is also relevant to note that in the last decade, physicists have begun to comment on the striking similarities between their own discoveries and the discoveries made thousands of years ago in India which went on to form the basis of most Eastern religions.

Perhaps the greatest hope for the return of Sanskrit lies in computers. It's precision play with computer tools could awaken the capacity in human beings to utilize their innate higher mental faculty with a momentum that could inevitably transform the world. In fact the mere learning by large numbers of people in itself would represent a quantum leap in consciousness, not to mention the rich endowment it would provide in the arena of future communication.

Sanskrit as computer programming language

- Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never been equaled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in the world."

- An interesting point about Panini's grammar is that it "is notably descriptive; it does not attempt to tell people how they should speak and write; Panini was only concerned with what people actually did say and write." This underscores the point about Sanskrit as a natural language.

- [Sanskrit's] potential for scientific use was greatly enhanced as a result of the thorough systemization of its grammar by Panini. ... On the basis of just under 4000 sutras [rules expressed as aphorisms], he built virtually the whole structure of the Sanskrit language, whose general 'shape' hardly changed for the next two thousand years."

- In order to create the grammar, Panini "invented a notation which is equivalent in its power to that of Backus [BNF], and has many similar properties: given the use to which the notation was put, it is possible to identify structures equivalent to the Backus '|' and to the use of the meta-brackets '<' and '>' enclosing suggestive names. Panini avoided the necessity for the character '::=' by writing the meta-result on the right rather than the left."

- "Panini uses metarules, transformations, and recursion in such sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine. In this sense Panini may be considered the father of computing machines."

- Joseph argued that "An indirect consequence of Panini's efforts to increase the linguistic facility of Sanskrit soon became apparent in the character of scientific and mathematical literature," i.e. that the flourishing of Indian Subcontinetal mathematics may have been a direct consequence of the systematization of the grammar of Sanskrit, and of the formal tools which were developed in order to do this.

- "We can now assert, with the power of hindsight, that Indian subcontinent linguists in the fifth century B.C. knew and understood more than Western linguists in the nineteenth century A.D. Can one not extend this conclusion and claim that it is probable that Indian subcontinent linguists are still ahead of their Western colleagues and may continue to be so in the next century? Quite possible; all we can say is that it is difficult to detect something that we have not already discovered ourselves."

- What might be other features of the grammar that have not yet been rediscovered in computer science remains to be seen. But it is suggested that aspects of its structure will have implications for further advance in computer science, knowledge representation, and linguistics. In particular we can hope for significant applications in natural language processing. The ongoing analysis of the structures of Paanini and those of the later grammarians and logicians will be aided by the development of software to implement it on a digital computer.

- The specific issues of immediate interest to the computer scientist include analysis of the arrangement of the rules and search for other arrangements that are equivalent in terms of their generative power. The formal aspects of these arrangements and their relationships is likely to help increase the notion of distance between grammars. Such a notion is of immediate relevance for machine translation. Given two languages with grammars that are close in structure, as in the Indo-Aryan family of languages, one would expect the translation across the languages to be relatively easy. A formalizations of the notion of closeness is also likely to give pointers regarding how an automatic translation might proceed.

- One great virtue of the Paaninian system is that it operates at the level of roots and suffixes defining a deeper level of analysis than afforded by recent approaches like generalized phrase structure grammars21 that have been inspired by development of computer parsing techniques. This allows for one to include parts of the lexicon in the definition of the grammatical structure. Closeness between languages that share a great deal of a lexicon will thus be represented better using a Paaninian structure. These fundamental investigations that have bearing on linguistics, knowledge representation, and natural language processing by computer require collaboration between computer scientists and Sanskritists.

- Computer oriented studies on it would also help to introduce AI (artificial intelligence), logic, and cognitive science as additional areas of study in the Sanskrit departments of universities. This would allow the Sanskrit departments to complement the program of the computer science departments. With the incorporation of these additional areas, a graduate of Sanskrit could hope to make useful contributions to the computer software industry as well, particularly in the fields of natural language processing and artificial intelligence.

Conclusion and restoring the lost glory

There may be argument that why do we switch back to Sanskrit if we have plenty of development already in other language being used for computing. The first and simple reason is because Sanskrit is simple to learn.

At the same time, humankind has fallen far behind the advancements in technology. The precarious state of political and ecological imbalance that we are now experiencing is an obvious sign of the power of technology far exceeding the power of human beings to be in control of it. It could easily be argued that we have fallen far behind the advancements in technology simply because the languages we use for daily communication do not help us to make the distinctions required to be in balance with the technology that has taken over our lives.

The linguistic perfection of Sans-krit offers only a partial explanation for its sustained presence in the world for at least 3,000 years. High precision in and of itself is of limited scope; like mathematics, it generally excites the brain, but not the heart. Like music, however, Sans-krit has the power to uplift the heart. It's conceivable that for a few rare and inspired geniuses, mathematics can reach the point of becoming music or music, mathematics.

The extraordinary thing is that it offers direct accessibility to anyone to that elevated plane where the two—mathematics and music, brain and heart, analytical and intuitive, scientific and spiritual—become one. Great discoveries occur, whether through mathematics or music or Sans-krit, not by the calculations or manipulations of the human mind, but where the living language is expressed and heard in a state of joy and communion with the natural laws of existence.

So, Let’s start to restore our lost glory....

Barcamp Ktm 2009

==संस्कृत(Sanskrit) restoring the lost glory==

'''Ujjwol Lamichhane, Dhalko-17,Kathmandu,Nepal'''

'''Description''': A session on making aware, inform and introduce the people about language of God including its specialty, potential in computing as computer programming language and others and on restoring the lost glory. This session can get interesting and boring at the same time. This presentation should be considered as a systematic compilation of the information on Sanskrit to inform and discuss the ways to restore it. It must be emphasized that the views expressed in this session are not intended to start a big debate on the language itself but on the way to revive the language. THE SESSION IS: "I will introduce Sanskrit and we will brainstorm ways to revive it with some already from my side." PS: Don't expect detailed info’s on it as it is indented just to ignite the fire. (By a high school boy who himself don't know the language)

References:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2173400.stm

http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-enlightenment.html

http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-nasa.html

http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/09/05/stories/2002090500340200.htm

http://www.samskritabharati.org/sb/20080822270/sanskrit-as-computer-language

http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Computational_linguistics

http://samskrute.blogspot.com/2009/02/sanskrit-and-computer.html

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/General/comp.programming/2004-06/0323.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1199965,flstry-1.cms

http://speaksamskrit.blogspot.com

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-142020037/gen-x-finds-sanskrit.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS-City-Jaipur-Restoring-lost-glory-of-Sanskrit/articleshow/4796539.cms

http://ratnuu.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/sanskrit-as-a-computer-language/

http://www.niyam.com/gnulinux/lfy/fy/FY-monthly-col.php?jun2k5

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