Author Archives: mAnasa-taraMgiNI

Some ruminations on asteroids and meteoritic falls

Recently, we received the news of a Russian spacecraft meant to bring some astronauts back to earth being hit by a meteorite. In early February we saw an obscure news item of the sighting of a meteoric fireball over Krasnoyarsk. … Continue reading

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Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

The dispiriting cloud cover lifted briefly on two nights (Wed 8/2/2023 and Fri 10/2/2023) finally giving us an opportunity to catch the latest Agni-putra-ketu in the welkin, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). On the first night, there was still some haze, … Continue reading

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The Vyomavyāpin in the Pāśupata-tantra and a discursion on nine-fold Rudra-mantra-s

The Pāśupata-tantra is a poorly understood śaiva text that is believed to be affiliated with the Pāśupata tradition of Lakulīśa. While the colophons of some manuscripts present it as “Lakulīśa-pravartita-Pāśupata-tantram”, internally, it presents itself as a teaching of Nandin to … Continue reading

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Bhāskara-II’s polygons and an algebraic approximation for sines of pi by x

Unlike the Greeks, the Hindus were not particularly obsessed with constructions involving just a compass and a straightedge. Nevertheless, their pre-modern architecture and yantra-s from the tāntrika tradition indicate that they routinely constructed various regular polygons inscribed in circles. Of … Continue reading

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Origins of the serpent cult and Bhāguri’s snake installation from the Sāmaveda tradition

Mathuran Nāga installations From the few centuries preceding it down to the first few centuries of the Common Era we see numerous installations of snake deities, i.e., Nāga-s, at various archaeological sites throughout northern India (most famously at the holy … Continue reading

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Two simple stotra-s, sectarian competition, and the Varāha episode from the archaic Skandapurāṇa

The Ur-Skandapurāṇa (SkP) or the “archaic” Skandapurāṇa ( the Bhaṭṭārāi edition known as the Ambikā-khaṇḍa) is a Śaiva text with affinities to the Pāśupata branch of that tradition. Though it is aware of the mantra-mārga traditions like the Mātṛ-tantra-s and … Continue reading

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The zombie obeys: a note on host manipulation by parasites and its ecological consequences

In 1858-59, as AR Wallace, one of the founders of the modern evolutionary theory, was exploring the Sulawesi Islands, he collected an ant, Polyrachis merops, that he sent over to England. Years later, the naturalist W Fawcett studying these ants … Continue reading

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Cārucitrābhisambodhi

Chakkalal and Mundalal saw that Gannaram Dakiya, the owner of the little eatery, had taken a bit too much of an ethanolic beverage and had forgotten to lock the safe with his phone, cards and some cash. They broke into … Continue reading

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RV 10.78

RV 10.77 and 10.78 are similarly themed sūkta-s to the Marut-s by our ancient clansman Syūmaraśmi Bhārgava. He is mentioned twice by authors within the RV – in RV 1.112.16 by Kutsa Āṅgirasa and in RV 8.52.2 by Āyu Kāṇva. … Continue reading

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The turning of the yugacakra

As the wheel turns, what goes up comes down and what is down comes up, again and again. There is a symmetry to the process in the downward and the upward movements, albeit in opposite directions. The old Hindus, right … Continue reading

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A sampler of Ramanujan’s elementary results and their manifold ramifications

As we have remarked before, Ramanujan seemed as if channeling the world-conquering strides of Viṣṇu, when he single-handedly bridged the lacuna in Hindu mathematics from the days of the brāhmaṇa-s of the Cerapada to the modern era. Starting around the … Continue reading

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A catalog of attractors, repellors, cycles, and other oscillations of some common functional iterates

One of the reasons we became interested in functional iterates was from seeking an analogy for the effect of selective pressure on the mean values of a measurable biological trait in a population. Let us consider a biological trait under … Continue reading

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The wink of the Gorgon and the twang of the Lyre

The discovery of the archetypal eclipsing binary Algol The likes of Geminiano Montanari are hardly seen today. This remarkable Italian polymath aristocrat from the 1600s penetrated many realms of knowledge spanning law, medicine, astronomy, physics, biology and military technology. Having … Continue reading

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Some poems

Below are some poems in English by our brother. He sends us his compositions in a much more transient medium making them hard to preserve or share. Hence, we decided to anthologize those we could recover and present them here … Continue reading

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The Kaumāra cycle in the Skandapurāṇa’s Śaṃkara-saṃhitā

Many khaṇḍa-s, māhātmya-s and saṃhitā-s attach themselves to the sprawling “Mega-Skandapurāṇa”. We use this term to distinguish it from the “Ur-Skandapurāṇa”, which was first published by Bhaṭṭārāi in the late 1980s and is now known to survive as three related … Continue reading

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Some notes on the runiform “Altaic” inscriptions and the early Turk Khaghanates: Orkhon and beyond

The early Turkic inscriptions from Mongolia and their discovery On February 27th, 731 CE (17th day of the Year of the Sheep), Kül Tegin, the great hero of the second Gök Türk (Blue Turks) empire, passed away in his 47th … Continue reading

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Vikīrṇā viṣayāḥ: India and the Rus

Our sleep was disturbed by a dream with a circulating motif whose exact story line, if any, was lost upon awakening. It started with a tall elderly man of West African ancestry playing cricket (batting) with the swagger of a … Continue reading

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Alkaios’ hymn to the Dioskouroi: Hindu parallels

In this note we shall see how even a short “sūkta” of the yavana Alkaios to the Dioskouroi (individually named Kastor and Polydeukes), the Greek cognates of the Aśvin-s, offers several parallels to the Hindu tradition in the Veda. In … Continue reading

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Some notes on the Indo-European aspects of the Anatolian tradition

Prolegomenon This section is primarily for students of the old religion who approach it from the Indo-Aryan direction and tend to be less aware of the West Asian material. The Anatolian branch of “Indo-European” (in quotes because this appellation becomes … Continue reading

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The death of Miss Lizzie Willink

Late that spring, Somakhya and Lootika were visited by their mleccha friend Irmhild. Letting her sleep off the jet lag, they left for work. Given the good weather, Lootika returned early to check on their friend and go out with … Continue reading

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Indo-European expansions and iconography: revisiting the anthropomorphic stelae

Was there an early Indo-European iconography? The anthropomorphic stelae There is no linguistic evidence for the presence of iconic or temple worship among the early Indo-Europeans. However, after their migrations, when they settled in the lands of sedentary peoples, they … Continue reading

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Geopolitical summary: March 2022

The autumn dawn As the 40th day of the autumn of 2016 CE dawned, the mahāmleccha left-liberals were sunning themselves in the last rays of the setting Ardhakṛṣṇa. He was the hero of the age for them, a veritable yuganātha, … Continue reading

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Human retroviruses, sociology of science, and biographical ruminations

We learnt via a recent obituary that the French researcher Luc Montagnier died a month or so ago after living for nearly 90 years. He along with his compatriot and erstwhile colleagues, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann discovered HIV-1. Subsequently, … Continue reading

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Transcripts of conversations: the addiction principle:

A friend recorded some of our verbalizations and made transcripts of them. He sent them to us to and we decide to edit them and post them as and when we get the chance — not out of a narcissistic … Continue reading

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Phantom impressions-1

Lootika had gotten her kids engaged with the beauty of the connections between multiplication tables, division and geometry. Leaving them to their labors, she went over to Somakhya’s desk to bring him to join her for the afternoon tea. Lootika … Continue reading

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A note on Śrī, Viṣṇu and śṛṅgāra

yaḥ pūrvyāya vedhase navīyase sumaj-jānaye viṣṇave dadāśati । yo jātam asya mahato mahi bravat sed u śravobhir yujyaṃ cid abhy asat ॥ RV 1.156.2 Whoever repeatedly performs rituals to the wise one to the ancient and the new one, Viṣṇu, … Continue reading

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Are civilizational cycles the norm?

Nearly two and half decades back, we used to have several conversations with a late śūlapuruṣīya professor, mostly on topics with a biological angle. While not a mathematician, he had a passing interest in dynamical systems, for he felt that … Continue reading

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On the rise of the mātṛkā-s and the goddess Cāmuṇḍā

The roots of the mātṛkā-s in the śruti and the Kaumāra tradition The standard list of 7/8 goddesses known as the mātṛkā-s is a hallmark feature of the classical religion: Brāhmī, Māheśvarī, Kaumārī, Vaiṣṇavī, Vārāhī, Indrāṇī, Cāmuṇḍā, sometimes with the … Continue reading

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Huns, Uralics, and empires of the steppe

A map by Savelyev et al. for the geographic orientation of the reader of the below article. The Huns of Europe “The lord of the Huns, King Attila, born of his father Mundzuk, lord of the bravest tribes, who with … Continue reading

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Some observations on the Lekkerkerker-Zeckendorf decomposition of integers

In our youth, we learned of a nice arithmetic theorem of Lekkerkerker (more popularly known after Zeckendorf; hereinafter L-Z) that relates to the famous Mātrā-meru sequence : 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8… defined by the recurrence relationship . … Continue reading

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Subjective and objective insight

The black American scientist Sylvester Gates mentioned a curious personal anecdote in a talk. To paraphrase him, when he was in college, he had to take a calculus course. He mentioned how he could cut through differentiation as it was … Continue reading

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On the passing of E.O. Wilson

E.O. Wilson, one of the great biologists of the age, has fallen to the noose of the king, the black son of Vivasvān. He lived a long, productive, and eventful life, just 8 years shy of a century. He was … Continue reading

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Some words on mleccha cartels

An embedded anthropological study of social substructures is vital to grasp some of their features that seem baffling to the outsider or the “uninitiated” insider. Much of what we will be talking about here has been said in some form … Continue reading

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Relationships between incircles of the “equilateral triangles in a square” system

This note relates to geometric relationships that may be likened to the Japanese temple-tablet problems. The inspiration for discovering and exploring it came from an origami construction presented by the pioneer in that field, Sundara Rao of Kumbhaghoṇa, in the … Continue reading

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The Rāmāyaṇa in numbers: meters, sarga- and kāṇḍa- structure

In the extant Indo-European textual corpus, only in the Hindu collection do we find two complete early epics to complement the śruti. The Iranian epics come from a much later age than the core Avestan corpus, and in the Greek … Continue reading

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Sneha, snowstorms, the sun and the moon in enigmatic ṛk-s

That the Indo-European homeland was a cold place with snow is evidenced by widespread survival of two hon-homologous words for snow. Recently, a discussion on one of these words, sparked by some linguist, landed on my timeline on Twitter. From … Continue reading

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The strange case of the Āpastamba sprite

This is the second of the two stories that arose from incidents during the visit of Yaśaśravas, Somakhya’s cousin. With the autumnal vacations, Somakhya was having a good time with his visiting cousin, giving him lectures on the theory and … Continue reading

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Agni as the divine commander in the Veda and the Purāṇa

With the Sākamedha-parvan with the oblations to Agni Anīkavat having just passed, we present a brief note on Agni as the general of the deva army. Agni is presented as the commander of the deva-s in the brāhmaṇa literature. For … Continue reading

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The birth defects of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Pāṇḍu and related matters

This note has its origin in a conversation with Sharada. We originally intended to incorporate the core of it into one of our usual fantastical stories. However, following a second conversation with her, we decided that it might be best … Continue reading

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The rise of Navyonmāda, the subversion of the Mahāmleccha-s, Cīnānusāra and beyond

The past The dynamics of the establishment of the counter-religious unmāda-s are of some interest. The pūrvonmāda of pharaoh Akhenaten arose from the moha in his own head and was imposed on the populace due to his imperial power. It … Continue reading

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Some biographical reflections on visualizing irrationals

In our childhood, our father informed us that, though the school told us that , it was not valid. However, he added that for “small fractions” [Footnote 1] it was a great approximation. Moreover, the numerical problems, which we would … Continue reading

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Turagapadādi

This note stems from a recent conversation with a friend, where he pointed out that the graph representing all possible positions the horse (knight) can take on the chessboard from a given starting square produces interesting graphs. It struck us … Continue reading

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Asians and Pacific Islanders: The triangle

In our youth, we read with great excitement old books on anthropology obtained from a library with considerable difficulty. The excitement was primarily from learning about the osteology of extinct apes and monkeys, including the closest sister groups of Homo … Continue reading

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The shape of dinosaur eggs

Readers of these pages will know that we have a special interest in the geometry of ovals. One of the long-standing problems in this regard is: what is the curve that best describes the shape of a dinosaurian egg? While … Continue reading

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Matters of religion: the lesson by the lake

Sharvamanyu was with his preceptors Somakhya on Lootika on the shore of a lake in the midst of the mountains on a full moon night. It was the cremation ground for a lineage of Vs, who had historically specialized in … Continue reading

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Twin Āditya-s, twin Rudra-s

This note originated as an intended appendix to the article on Rudra and the Aśvin-s we published earlier. The first offshoot from that work, which we published separately, explored the links between Rudra, Viṣṇu and the Aśvin-s in the śrauta … Continue reading

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Self, non-self and segregation: a very basic look at agent-based lattice models

In our college days, a part time physics teacher from an old and respected V clan used to chat with us about issues of mutual interest that were beyond that of the rest of the class (or for that matter … Continue reading

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Bhairavānanda’s wicks: a retelling

It was early in the school year and the last class for the week, the English class. The students were restless as the sea at the time of the tide from the pull of the impending weekend. For the first … Continue reading

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Pandemic days: bālabodhana

As the pandemic grinds to a close or at least to a pause in some parts of the world, there is a certain fear from new mutants threaten that threaten break current the status quo. The strain that arose in … Continue reading

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Some further notes on the old Mongol religion-2

O fire mother, whose father is flint, whose mother is pebble, whose meal is yellow feather grass, whose life is an elm tree. An incantation to the Fire Goddess Ghalun-eke; translation from the Mongolian by Yönsiyebü Rinchen This note revisits … Continue reading

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Some talks at the Indic Today portal

We had a chat with with C Surendranath, Contributing Editor and (in part with) Yogini Deshpande, Editor in Chief of Indic Today. It is divided into four parts: 1) https://www.indictoday.com/videos/manasataramgini-civilization-counter-religion-continuity-collapse-i/ A few clarifications for this part: 1) We do not … Continue reading

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The cicadas return

Seventeen years after we first saw them emerge, like a great horde of Cīna-s invading Tibet, the cicadas of Brood X reemerged. 17 years is a good amount of time, making one pause to reflect on what has passed by … Continue reading

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Matters of religion: Varuṇāvasiṣṇavam, Agnāvasiṣṇavam and the vyahṛti-s

Like the clouds lifting after the monsoonal deluge to unveil the short-lived comforts of early autumn, the metaphorical pall over the nation cast by the engineer’s virus was lifting. Somakhya and Lootika were at the former’s parents’ house, relieved that … Continue reading

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Two exceedingly simple sums related to triangular numbers

This note records some elementary arithmetic pertaining to triangular numbers for bālabodhana. In our youth we found that having a flexible attitude was good thing while obtaining closed forms for simple sums: for some sums geometry (using methods of proofs … Continue reading

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Pandemic days: Vaccines and war

In American history-writing we come across various attempts to the justify the use of nuclear weapons on Japan in the closing phase of WW2. We often hear the claim that by using the nukes they avoided a large number of … Continue reading

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Generating simple radially symmetric art

Many people experience beauty in structures with bilateral, radial and rotational symmetries with or without recursion. The recursive or nested structure are the foundation of the beauty in fractal form, the generation of which has become increasingly easy for the … Continue reading

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The phantoms of the bone-pipe-2

Vidrum had been introduced to a synesthetic patient by a neurologist colleague. The patient’s manifestation of synesthesia left a rather profound impact on him; thus, when he had a break of an hour in his duties, wanting to explore the … Continue reading

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Pandemic days: Galtonism hits India

At some point last year, we stopped writing any further dispatches regarding the pandemic catastrophe from the disease because everything was playing out more or less as laid out in the earlier notes. There was the whole public drama around … Continue reading

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Making an illustrated Nakṣatra-sūkta and finding the constellation for a point in the sky

The illustrated Nakṣatra-sūkta Towards the latter phase of the Vedic age, multiple traditions independently composed sūkta-s that invoked the pantheon in association with their home nakṣatra-s as part of the śrauta Nakṣatreṣṭi or related gṛhya homa-s. Of these oldest and … Continue reading

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Johannes Germanus Regiomontanus and his rod

Even before we had become acquainted with the trigonometric sum and difference formulae or calculus are father had pointed to us that there was an optimal point at which one should stand to observe or photograph features on vertical structures, … Continue reading

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A great statistician, and biographical, numerical musings on ancient game

Recently my friend brought it to my attention that C. Radhakrishna Rao had scored a century. Born in 1920 CE to Doraswamy Nayadu and A. Laxmikanthamma from the Andhra country, he is one of the great mathematical thinkers and statisticians … Continue reading

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Modulo rugs of 3D functions

Consider a 3D function . Now evaluate it at each point of a integer lattice grid. Compute corresponding to each point and plot it as a color defined by some palette that suits your aesthetic. The consequence is a what … Continue reading

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A guilloche-like trigonometric tangle

Coprimality, i.e., the situation where the GCD of 2 integers is 1 is one of the fundamental expressions of complexity. In that situation, two numbers can never contain the other within themselves or in multiples of them by numbers smaller … Continue reading

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Huntington and the clash: 21 years later

This note is part biographical and part survey of the major geopolitical abstractions that may be gleaned from the events in the past 21 years. Perhaps, there is nothing much of substance in this note but an uninformed Hindu might … Continue reading

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The phantoms of the bone-pipe

As Vidrum was leafing through some recent case studies to gather the literature for his own production, he received a call from his chauffeur. He had fetched Vidrum’s new car. Vidrum went out to take a look at it. As … Continue reading

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Some notes on the Brahmayajña brāhmaṇa and Uttama-paṭala of the Atharvaṇ tradition

PDF version  The Brahmayajña brāhmaṇa (1.1.29 of the Gopatha-brāhmaṇa) of the Atharvaveda provides a glimpse of the Vedic saṃhitā canon as known to the brāhmaṇa authors of the AV tradition. The Brahmayajña might be done as part of the basic … Continue reading

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Some notes on the Henon-Heiles Hamiltonian system

Anyone familiar with dynamical systems knows of the Henon-Heiles (HH) system. What we are presenting here is well-known stuff about which reams of material have been written. However, we offer certain tricks for visualizing this system that make it easy … Continue reading

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Yajus incantations for the worship of Rudra from the Kāṭhaka ritual manuals

This article is available as a pdf document. The notes from it are appended below. The loss of the northern and northwestern Kṛṣnayajurveda traditions due to the Mohammedan depredations of Northern India (aided an abetted by the predatory Anglospheric regimes) … Continue reading

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RV 10.5

The Ṛgveda is replete with obscure sūkta-s but RV 10.5 might easily take a place in the top tier of those. One might even ask why even attempt to write a commentary on this. We admit we could be plainly … Continue reading

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Bṛhaspati-śanaiścarayor yuddham-2020 ityādi

The below is only for information. Parts of it should not be construed as any kind of prognostication on our part. The great Hindu naturalist Varāhamihira describes various kinds of planetary conjunctions or grahayuddha-s in his Brihatsaṃhitā (chapter 17) thus: … Continue reading

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The cosine principle, radial effect and entropy in the generalized Lozi map

The generalized Lozi map is a good way to illustrate the cosine principle and the radial effects (in lay circles to which I belong in this regard, as opposed to mathematicians). The generalized Lozi map is a 2-dimensional map defined … Continue reading

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Prakīrṇaviṣayāḥ: Life, brains, warfare and society

1 On big brains An occidentally conditioned person remarked that “we were making bad use of the great brains we have evolved. Instead of using it for human betterment, we were expending it on killing each other with sophisticated weapons.” … Continue reading

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The old teacher

The summer of the year after the tumultuous events, Lootika and Somakhya were traveling to visit their parents. They were supposed to attend the marriage of Somakhya’s cousin Saumanasa but they found social engagements with a subset of the clan … Continue reading

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Bhāskara’s dual square indeterminate equations

PDF for convenient reading Figure 1. Sum and difference of squares amounting to near squares. In course of our exploration of the bhūjā-koṭi-karṇa-nyāya in our early youth we had observed that there are examples of “near misses”: . Hence, we … Continue reading

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Pandemic days-6: Genetic risk factors

The coronavirus that made its way to humans aided by the Cīna-s at Wuhan has now been with us for nearly an year. Right from the early days of this outbreak, one thing has been notable about this virus: some … Continue reading

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Counting pyramids, squares and magic squares

Figure 1. Pyramidal numbers The following note provides some exceedingly elementary mathematics, primarily for bālabodhana. Sometime back we heard a talk by a famous contemporary mathematician (M. Bhargava) in which he described how as a kid he discovered for himself … Continue reading

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The tale of the dolmen-dweller

The exams were over and the last semester of toil was all that stood between Vidrum and the dim glimmer he saw at the end of his metaphorical tunnel. He finally had some free time that he wished to savor … Continue reading

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Ruminations on meteorites, organics and water

In our times the Christian Anglo-Saxons were famous for their “war on drugs”. However, in the 1800s, when they lorded over India, they were famous as global drug dealers. On the morning of August 25, 1865 CE around 9:00 AM, … Continue reading

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Winners and Losers

Somakhya and Lootika were visiting the Śūlapuruṣadeśa for work reasons. Unlike their ārya ancestors, they did not like being on the move much. It was a rare occasion that both had been able to travel together and it brought them … Continue reading

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An arithmetic experiment and an unsolved problem

We realized that a simple arithmetic experiment we had performed in our youth is actually related to an unsolved problem in number theory. It goes thus: consider the sequence of natural numbers Then find the distance of to nearest prime … Continue reading

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Matters of religion-4

Pinakasena was visiting Somakhya and Lootika. He was seeking instruction on the Sadyojāta-mantra from his hosts: “O Ātharvaṇa and Śāradvatī, I wish to learn the rahasya-s pertaining to the deployment of the Sadyojāta-mantra to the great god Kumāra, the patron … Continue reading

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Conic conquests: biographical and historical

PDF file of same article Studying mathematics with our father was not exactly an easy-going experience; nevertheless, it was the source of many a spark that inspired fruitful explorations and life-lessons. We recount one such thread here, and reflect on … Continue reading

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Generalizations of the prime sieve and Pi

PDF version for better reading Eratosthenes, the preeminent yavana philosopher of early Ptolemaic Egypt [footnote 1], composed a hymn to the god Hermes of which only some fragments have come down to us. This connection to Hermes is evidently related … Continue reading

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Pandemic days: the fizz is out of the bottle

Just this morning our brother remarked that the fear of the virus has inverted this month with respect to the actual infection. We literally hear this: in the past few months, while home-bound, we at least had aural quietness for … Continue reading

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A simple second order differential equation, ovals and chaos

In our youth as a consequence of our undying fascination with ovals we explored many means of generating them. In course of those explorations we experimentally arrived at a simple second order differential equation that generated oval patterns. It also … Continue reading

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Viṣṇu, the Marut-s and Rudra

This note might be read as a continuation of the these two earlier ones: 1) The Aśvin-s and Rudra 2) The roots of Vaiṣṇavam: a view from the numerology of Vedic texts In the Ṛgveda (RV), the Marut-s are seen … Continue reading

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Pandemic days-4: viruses get new hosts

That we have come to be in these pandemic days evokes some wonderment or even disbelief among laypeople. The general thinking of a large section of the populace is that this event is something completely unexpected or out of the … Continue reading

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Rāsabha-nyāya-śikṣā

Vrishchika had been seeing several kids of patients affected by the chemical leak that had happened sometime ago. While she saw some purely for routine clinical practice, she was also particularly interested in the several cases exhibiting heterotaxy and had … Continue reading

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Chaotic behavior of some floor-squared maps

Consider the one dimensional maps of the form: , where is the fractional part of What will be evolution of a under this map when or ? We can see that for it will tend converge. However, the behavior is … Continue reading

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Notes on miscellaneous brāhmaṇa passages from the Yajurveda

The upasthāna ritual is performed to let the sacrificial fire remain in residence after the primary oblations are complete. In the triple-fire śrauta rite this is done at the āhavanīya altar with several incantations specified in the saṃhitā-s of the … Continue reading

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The culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-3

We saw a list of famous elderly people whom the virus has already placed in the abode of Vaivasvata at the time of writing. We recognized at least two names: (1) Robert Carroll the paleontologist, whose hard to find book … Continue reading

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The culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-2

Ensconced in the apparent safety of the 4 walls the mind looks out into the completely silent streets with hardly a soul or even a passing ratha — a mere 120 days have made the world look and sound different. … Continue reading

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The culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-1

While many thoughts crowd our mind we have hardly felt the drive to put them down on a more visible medium. Such is the nature of the times when things happen reminding you of the inexorable turning of the yuga-cakra. … Continue reading

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Snatches

Vidrum had called on his friends Somakhya and Lootika on a quiet afternoon to accompany him for a climb on the trails of Vidrumavistāra that lay beyond Viṣṭhaparvata. The fierce fighting arising from a surprise ghazvat of the makkha-viṣaya-dānava-s had … Continue reading

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The Plague: historical, biographical and current: a brief roundup

Globalization is not a new thing. The Indo-European empire of the steppes was perhaps the first one. In addition to having a serious component of our genetic ancestry and most of our memetic inheritance in it, we can still see … Continue reading

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Two squares that sum to a cube

Introduction This note records an exploration that began in our youth with the simple arithmetic question: Sum of the squares of which pair integers yields a perfect cube? Some obvious cases immediately come to mind: . In both these cases … Continue reading

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Difference of consecutive cubes, conics and a Japanese temple tablet

Introduction In our part of the world, someone with even a nominal knowledge of mathematics might be aware of the taxicab number made famous by the conversation of Ramanujan and Hardy: the smallest number that can be expressed as the … Continue reading

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The Mātrā-meru and convergence to a triangle

What is presented below will be elementary for someone with even just the mastery of secondary school mathematics. Nevertheless, even simple stuff might present points of interest to people who see beauty in such things. Consider the following question: Given … Continue reading

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The Aśvin-s and Rudra

The twin Aśvin-s and Rudra are both Indo-Aryan reflexes of two deity-classes which can be reconstructed as likely being present in the Proto-Indo-European religion. Both are likely to have even deeper roots going back to even earlier religious traditions across … Continue reading

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The roots of Vaiṣṇavam: a view from the numerology of Vedic texts

While glorified with a 1000 names in the famous stotra of the early Sātvata tradition of the Mahābharata, in the texts of an even earlier period the god primarily went under that name Viṣṇu. Indeed, even the litany of the … Continue reading

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