Why Afghanistan never came under British rule?

India-Pakistan territories were under British rule in the 1800s, however Afghanistan was always independent. Actually not, Afghanistan came under British influence partially but soon was made independent. This wikipedia entry will explain it all.

There were a total of 3 wars fought between the Afghans and the British. The first 2 were aimed at preventing Russian influence in the region, however they ended in disaster for the British. They sent so many troops and very few came back. In the end they could just control the country from outside, but that control was quite weak and soon Afghanistan was free from all British influence after the 3rd war. If Indians had so much resistance, we would have been free long before 1947, however Indians aren't that vicious :-)

It will therefore take an Afghani who knows his people properly to rule the country. I hope Hamid Karzai has the necessary potential for the job.

Upper Caste Invasion Theory

I was looking up for something else, but came across this untrue account of Indian History. Makes me wonder how do they even dream up such ideas.

How did John Gambling survive?

From WABC website on "How Did We Ever Survive?". This speech by John Gambling described the contrast between how people are treated before and now. Now-a-days people behave as if the slightest incident is going to kill them; John talks about how people in his time have survived worse things.

The Swadesh List

No, it is not an Indian Schindler's list. "It is a list of prescribed items of basic vocabulary (variously featuring 100, 200 or 207 items) in two or more related languages." as explained by Wikipedia. It is used to compare 2 languages supposed to have a common root to find out when the languages could have seperated. That is called Glottochronology.

Can Planets cause Earthquakes?

Here is a 2003 paper published by Nitsche in IAMG.

I haven't worked out all the maths that the paper talks about but the main hypothesis is that earthquakes are causes when there is a fluctuation in the combined gravitational field of the planets over the earth. He has taken the example of a month in which there were 11 earthquakes and 4 of them co-occurred with planetary gravitational fluctuations.

Noah's flood

Was it the black sea flood or not?

Good Bye in Hindi

I have been thinking about this yesterday actually when an office colleague asked me how to say bye or good bye in Hindi. I was clueless. I had heard of "Alvida" but that sounded more Urdu than Hindi. I remember "Khuda Hafiz"(May God be with you) which I knew was purely Urdu. I thought about "Milte hain" (meet again) or "Phile Milenge" (we shall meet again) or "Chalte Hain" (I got to go) but they didn't sound like "bye" or "good bye". Finally, I asked a few of my office colleagues who "claim" to know a lot of Hindi (after going through the ritual of reading Jaishankar Prasad's works). They couldn't come up with anything better.

I searched a bit and found that there wasn't actually any Hindi word(s) for it. (or it was in extremely uncommon use). Anyway, it seems Sanskrit uses Namaste for both Hello and Good Bye and so can be used in Hindi, however I haven't seen anyone tell Namaste as Good Bye yet. I have people do the Namaste sign (which is clasping the two hands together) while greeting people off sometimes, so maybe that is what has survived of this Sanskrit method of saying Good Bye.

I will settle for "Chalte Hain" or "Phir Milenge" for now.

Just posting my photo ... didn't find any other way of putting the photo in my profile.

Dravidian Language in Pakistan

Did you know that there is a language close to Kannada or Tamil that is spoken in Pakistan? It is called Brahui. Comparison of Brahui with other Dravidian languages is done here. Some vocabulary is given here. If you compare the various Dravidian languages, you will see that they have retained the grammatical form but their vocabulary has been completely "persianized". For example, they use ni for you but they also use abba for father.

Rafay Murder Case

This was presented yesterday on CBS.

Another case of the eluding truth.

It kept coming back to my mind so I decided to unload onto the blog.

This is the second murder mystery in the 2 days since I started the blog. I just hope this doesn't become a trend. I must keep my mind on better things.

The Mystery of Anna Anderson

17th July 2005 (which just went past us) marked the anniversary when all of the Russian Royal family members were assassinated (or attempted to be assassinated). In the year 1918, Tzar Nicholas II and his nearest family members (wife, 3 daughters and son) were assassinated (or attempted to be assassinated) in the basement of Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg.

A woman surfaced in Germany within a few years after the execution, claiming to be Anastasia Romanov, one of the 3 daughters of the Tzar. She was named as Anna Anderson The next 65 years were spent by her (and her supporters) trying to prove that she was Anastasia and the (remanant) royal family trying to prove otherwise. She knew too much about the royal family, so she ought to have been the Grand Duchess but the final DNA evidence proved otherwise. Here are some details on that evidence.

If she really was a the Grand Duchess it was a fairy tale all gone bad. She escaped the execution, got married to a palace guard who was killed in a few years and spent years in German court trying to prove her identity. She came so close to proving her identity but then WW2 broke all chances. Germany was divided and papers related to court cases went missing. She got married to a certain Manahan, settled in VA and died in the 1980s. If she wasn't the Grand Duchess, then yes it served her right. But how does anyone know???

There are people who question the DNA evidence and there are people who accept it. Just like .. earlier there were people who analyzed what she knew about the Romanov family and took the two different sides. So what really is the truth.

Unfortunately, it seems there isn't any way of finding the truth in this world. What is the nature of truth? It is the state of affairs as they actually are. Now how does anyone find what the truth is? By observation. However, all observations are imperfect since the very process of observing requires belief on what you are observing. The 5 senses may be giving bad input to you. You may be in a matrix being fed data by computers ...

Anyway, the Romanov family was finally laid to rest

Languages In India

It is pretty surprising that there should be so many different languages in India. Considering that we started off with 2 or 3 seed languages (Sanskrit, proto-Tamil, anything else?) AND the huge amount of contact the different pre-British kingdoms had with each other, people should really be talking almost the same "evolved" languages. There should have been 2-3 languages in the country.

What I mean is ... why should people in state of Gujrat speak a language different than the people in Maharashtra? Both did evolve from the same Sanskrit (prakrit?) root. I do hope there was trade and diplomatic contacts between the two regions which hopefully involved talking. So why did they go in two different ways?

Another thing that bothers me is the absence of Greek, Kushan, Scythian and Parthian influence on any of the so called "North Indian" languages. All these Sanskrit derived languages should have been influenced by the invaders. Compare those cases with the influence of Arabic or Persian on Hindi. The latter seems to be more significant. Is it that there was some influence of the ancient invasions and we have become "used" to those changes in the language?

OK, enough babbling for now ...

On the title

I am not thinking much now. Visit this page later.