Click here to view the embedded video.

There is also an article in their magazine – but that’s not online at this time.

It was a great evening full of friends, food and devotional music. I am not a very religious person but there is something about devotional music (irrespective of which religion it may be) that always touches a chord with me.

Anyway, here are the pictures I took the other day. I particularly loved capturing the moon over the temple. Enjoy.

Ganapati Festival BTL 2011, a set on Flickr.

To understand the significance of April 2, 2011, I have to go back 28 years, back to the summer of 1983.

I had just finished 10th grade, and that summer I took a trip to the hills of North India, as a part of a social work volunteer effort. I remember sleeping on the floor in this little unfurnished hut up in the hills, spending the days digging what would be the foundation of a village school. We had no electricity, no TV, the our toilet was to go out in the woods.

We did have a tiny transistor radio and we used that to listen to the Prudential Cricket World Cup, taking place in far away England. The West Indies were favored to win, the English were pretty good, and Australia and New Zeland weren’t too bad either. But India was no where in the picture, and no one really expected anything from our team. Our record, before this date had been dismal at best. But amazingly enough, India, led by Kapil Dev, this young Jat from Harayana, somehow made it to the semi-finals where we were facing England. There was little hope that we would go any further. The fact that we had made it that far was victory enough!

I remember, one late night, in this little room, with a bunch of kids my age, from different schools from around North India, crowded around the little radio, listening to the commentary of this semi-final game being played half-way across the globe. I don’t remember many of the details but two things do stand out. I remember hearing the commentator describing this young Indian batsman, Sandeep Patil, destroying the English bowling. And I remember, after the game was over, and India had won and made it to the finals, all of us, 16-17 year olds, standing up, in our pajamas, in this candle-lit room, spontaneously, beginning to sing the Indian National Anthem. Loudly, surely off key, but with gusto and pride.

A few days later I was back home in Delhi, watching the finals on our black-and-white TV. I remember West Indies destroying the Indian batting and then just as they started batting, the TV transmission died. (This was actually quite common back then.) I ran back to my radio, to keep up with the game, while keeping an eye on the TV, just in case the game came back on. I missed seeing the great catch by Kapil Dev that got rid of Viv Richards (who single handedly could decimate any opposing team). And then the West Indies wickets started to fall, and the TV came back, and I watched, what was the most amazing sight, the mighty West Indies collapse, and, wonder of wonders, India winning the world cup!

That was a defining moment for my generation and I remember it as clearly as it was yesterday. I doubt you can meet any Indian of around my age for whom this is not an unforgettable memory!

India, as a nation, had been going through a tough time. The Indira Gandhi government’s usurpation of power in 1975 (with the declaration of Emergency) was not too far from our memories. The government that had come after that had been woefully underwhelming, not even lasting a full term. Punjab was in flames, due to an insurgency that would (a few years later) consume Indira Gandhi herself. In the middle of all this was the world cup! It pulled us all, across India, together in ways that cannot be described. This victory was a turning point for all of us, a way of saying that our time had come. After this, there was little that we could no do!

Well a lot has changed in India since then. But India has never repeated that feat. India had never won another world cup.

Till today.

It took 28 years, but after a great game against Sri Lanka, in the 2011 world cup finals, India has done it again. Emphatically, and with grace India has won the world cup. Along the way India knocked out Australia (the winner of the past three competitions) and Pakistan (arguably as big a game as the final). As Joe Biden said, in a slightly different context, this is ****ing huge!

A new defining moment for a new generation.

Here is the sign cropped close

Here is the complete sign.

It is part of an advertisement for a packing and moving company. The painter droped the “f” in the word “shift!” I love the fact that this service is available through dialing a single phone number, from anywhere in the country and you can use any mode that you like to dial it in!

I am heading off to India tomorrow and will be gone for approximately two weeks. The main reason for this trip is to attend the International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil in New Delhi. I am scheduled to present and act as a resource person for a Round Table on Reforms in Teacher Education. I think this will be an extremely interesting conference and I look forward to learning a lot, as well as getting to meet some interesting people.

I will also be going to  Bangalore to meet with people at the Azim Premji Foundation (I had blogged about a recent visit by the CEO’s the Foundation here, and you can find out more about what they do in this news story). We are putting the final touches on a collaboration between the College of Education at Michigan State with the upcoming Azim Premji University. This is an exciting new initiative for the Foundation and I am glad that we (here at MSU) can be a part of it.

Anurag Behar	Dileep Ranjekar

I met Dileep (and other members of the foundation) a couple of years ago, when I was in Bangalore for a conference (see here). Ever since then, I have been working on developing a partnership between MSU and the foundation. There have been visits by people from the foundation to East Lansing, as well as visits by us to the foundation offices in Bangalore. The recent visit by Ranjekar and Behar coincides with an important new initiative started by the foundation.

As a critical component of the Foundation’s strategy, Azim Premji University has emerged as an institution for learning and research in education and relevant development domains. Its focus is to develop education capacity and foster the development of professionals who are committed to social change. Working closely with the Foundation’s other education and development programs, the University seeks to significantly strengthen the connection between theory and practice. Key foci include: (a) Preparing a large number of committed education and development professionals who can significantly contribute to meeting the needs of the country; and (b) Building new knowledge in the areas of education and development through establishing a very strong link between theory and practice.

The past few days have been an exciting series of meetings and discussions around this partnership and I am glad to say that we appear to have made some important headway towards this. Of course there is a lot to be discussed / negotiated but I am excited by the possibility of the College of Education and the Foundation working together, both in the short-term and long-term.

While they were here, Dileep and Anurag made a presentation to the broader MSU community. This talk was sponsored by the College of Education and the Asian Studies Center. Details of the talk are given below, as well as a copy of the poster that was prepared and a link to the ppt presentation.

Educational development in India: The role of the Azim Premji Foundation [Download PPT]

Dileep Ranjekar & Anurag Behar. Co-CEO’s of Azim Premji Foundation

In this presentation, Dileep Ranjekar and Anurag Behar will provide a brief overview of the Indian educational context, and the challenges it faces. They will describe the work of the Azim Premji Foundation (APF), its vision, missions, programs, work culture and operational strategies, positioning APF’s efforts in the larger context of dealing with a culturally and linguistically diverse setting as in India and highlight the major initiatives that Foundation has undertaken thus far, including their latest initiative the Azim Premji University.

Poster

Happy Diwali  2010

Readers of this blog know that every year I provide a link to the same
interactive Diwali eCard. Why change anything this year? So follow the link below,
turn your volume way up,  and remember to click on the sky
above the Taj Mahal for some fantastic yet
environmentally friendly fireworks

Take me to the
Interactive Diwali Card … .

Here is the poem.

Sweat

Sticky, icky, ew!
I wipe it off, and it trick-
les, right back again!

“trick-”

“-les”

down the page. Reminds me of one of my favorite poets, e.e.cummings and how he plays with words. For instance here is a poem by him

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

It takes a bit of effort to read but it is worth it. With some thought you will see that in the parenthesis is the phrase “a leaf falls,” broken up so that it runs down the page, rather than across it. So instead of “a leaf falls” you read

(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

Of course breaking it all up forces you (the reader) to read the lines in slow-motion, with pauses as it were. Also the shape of the letters comes through now as do the alliterative / symmetric “le” “ll” and “af” “fa” sounds. There is a visual and audio pattern here… a verbo-visual pun maybe. Sort of what Shreya did with the word “trickles.”

But there is more…

Outside the parenthesis is the word “loneliness” broken up so that you can see the words “one” sandwiched between two “L’s.” The “L” is written in lower-case, which again makes it look like the number “1″ or capital “I.”

l
one
l
iness

So the repetition of the idea of “one” or “I” (once as “one” and twice as the number or the “I”) emphasizes the solitary nature of this experience. It could be 1 leaf falling, or one person watching one leaf fall… And all the pieces come together to set up a sad mood of one lonely person watching one leaf fall

How clever of mr. cummings. And how cool that Shreya, discovered something similar in breaking up “trickles” into two parts, showing how the sweat actually

“trick -

- les”

down.

To me it is an indication of her increasing comfort with language. It is only when we are comfortable with the rules that we start to break them, and it is there that true creativity and one’s one “writerly” voice emerges. So I would argue, despite Shreya’s thinking that it is a glitch, that it is not. It actually her noticing a pattern, imposed on her by the syllable count required by the Haiku structure itself, and then using that constraint for a creative purpose.

As for the mis-spelling of “glich” – I hope she doesn’t correct it. Because the poem now does have one glitch, the mis-spelling of the word “glitch.” How self-referential!!

All in all, what a wonderful way to begin a Sunday, reflecting on creativity and writing, inspired by a poem written by 11 year old Shreya. How very cool!!

For instance see these posts:

• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)
• Jugaad, India-genous creativity

There are lots of cool examples in this article but the one that stood out was this one:

This underwear sign presents an example of innovative thinking about space. Finding a drain
opening in the path of his endeavors, the artist spontaneously incorporated a navel (and home for a mynah bird)

How wonderful is that!! Read the entire article for more…

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.

I was reminded of this when I saw this TED video. Check it out…

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:

Dino eggs found in India

Archeologists in India, blinked
When they saw things that they thought were extinct
In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu
They found dino eggs, bones, and guess what, they found dino poo!

Independently of this, Sean Nash (of Nashworld) wrote a post (actually a mini-rant) about some mathematics related poetry he had found in Mother Goose (Read his complete post here: But Math is hard.) He was complaining in part about this poem (see below) and the negative feelings it could generate in his kids (and others too) about mathematics.

I wrote a comment on his blog describing Shreya’s Sci-Po project and Sean and I went back and forth a bit on his comments page, and that, as far as I was concerned, was that. Shreya wrote a few more Sci-Po’s, Sean went on with his life, till yesterday I received a note from Sean about a math blogger who had taken the idea of Sci-Po’s seriously and in a new direction.

“Math Mama writes” is a blog by Sue VanHattum, a community college math teacher interested in all levels of math learning, and the mama of a young son. She had a new post yesterday where she mentions Sean’s original posting and my comment on his blog. Building on my daughter’s Sci-Po’s she sets up a challenge for her readers, in essence to write Math-Po’s! She asks her readers, “to write a little kids’ poem …  that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way.” One reader has already taken her up on the challenge and I am sure there will be more to come.

In a post written many months ago (Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) I had described David Weinberger’s idea of the web as being small pieces loosely connected. These small pieces are there because someone took the time to put it out there, because they care about it deeply and passionately. I had written:

This idea of people putting things out there, not because they seek to make money but rather because they want to share their knowledge, their skills, their interests, and that what they put out there is immediately and widely accessible is what makes the web so interesting.

How cool is this entire sequence of events and the manner in which the openness of the web allows for such sharing of ideas and resources. This way a parent’s rant about Mother Goose, connects with a 5th grader’s blog and leads a number of people to write some cool poetry on mathematics! What an interesting and fascinating world we live in.

Image credit:  Iconfinder & Iconspedia

Sir, I was reading the article in Wikipedia on ‘Samarangana Sutradhara’ (King Bhoja’s treatise on Architecture). I was of the impression that there is no translation of the work in English. Though the article says that there is a translation by you of the work, the list of your works and publications on your webpage does not include any such work. Kindly let me know if you have indeed translated the treatise. If so kindly let me know how I can access a copy.

The fact that I had translated this ancient Sanskrit treatise came as a surprise to me.

I found the wikipedia entry and guess what, what the email said was indeed true. The exact words were:

Here are some verses from Samarangana Sutradhara, which describes characteristics a “sthapati” i.e. architect (based on translation by Punya Mishra).

Here is a screenshot of the wikipedia page (for the record), click on it for a larger image

So how did this come to pass?

As it turns out, many years ago I had a series of writings on my website called a-musings. This is before I had a blog, in fact, before even the idea of blogging had entered the general consciousness. One of the pieces I had written was about the ‘Samarangana Sutradhara.’ You can read the original article here: Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? What the ancient science of Vastushastra can teach us today. In this article I had quoted some text from the ancient treatise based on a handout I had received when I was a student at the Industrial Design Center. If my memory serves me right, this handout was given to us by Professor Kirti Trivedi for a course on Indian Thoughts and Traditions. I have no idea where that translation came from – but I had carried the handout with me when I came to the US, and it was from there that I had gotten the text. Of course my mistake was not making that attribution to Professor Trivedi in my original writing. I guess someone who was creating the wikipedia entry did a web search and came up with my page and assumed that I had made the translation. Strangely enough they did not include a link to my article!

A look through the history log for the article shows that the mistaken attribution was made at the very beginning. The page was created back on December 13, 2005 – and the first draft (see here) had the mistaken attribution in it.

As errors go, this is a relatively minor one. I use Wikipedia pretty much every day, and will continue to do so. However, this story does reveal a problem with the Web 2.0 shared authorship model. Essentially topics that do not have a large avid following will not receive the same level of scrutiny and editorial effort as ones that do. For instance, I am sure an error this nature, for instance on the wikipedia page on the TV series House would be caught and corrected immediately. This form of “accumulated advantage” (a.k.a. the Matthew Effect) has been observed in many other phenomena (Wikipedia page here). This is a huge problem for Wikipedia (and other such aggregators of user generated content) and something that needs to be addressed in the near future.

Numbers are seen as being critical to developing our understanding of a subject. As Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907) said:

… when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

More succintly he said, “To measure is to know.” Numbers provide us (particularly academics) with credibility.

Of course this dependence on mathematics and numbers can often be misplaced. I am always impressed how we use numbers mindlessly – sometimes to levels of accuracy that don’t really convey much. I was reminded of this while reading a recent NYTimes article A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing.

In this article, the author attempts to explain the size of one petabyte of data. They say that,

A petabyte of data is roughly equivalent to 799 million copies of the novel “Moby Dick.”

It was the 799 that caught my eye. Why 799? Do we know for sure that 798 million would be completely off base? Wouldn’t 800 be better – at least from the point of view of being easier to remember. Where did that number come from anyway? I spent a bit of time trying to recalculate it and depending on the kinds of approximations I made, and the assumptions about the size of Moby Dick I kept coming up with somewhat different answers. Now others have tried to explain the size of a petabyte with different analogies. Here is one, and another.

But the point I am trying to make here is not as much about calculating a petabyte but rather about how we often thoughtlessly assign specific numbers where such specificity is not warranted. I captured a great example of this in an elevator in India. Take a look at this picture.

What struck me, when I walked into this elevator were the precise weight that this elevator could carry, 1768 kilograms!! Where did this number come from? A bit of backward calculation reveals that 1768 is 26 (the maximum number of people the elevator could carry) times 68. Of course this bit of back-calculation doesn’t answer anything. The source of these numbers is still a mystery. I guess the assumption is that an average person weighs 68 kg. How valid is that? What if there were 25 people who weighed 68 kg and one who weighed 69 getting into this elevator? Would the whole system go kaput? Would it not have been safer to go with 70 kilograms as being the average weight? That would give us some margin here just in case. Providing some margin for error maybe important given that people don’t usually read these signs. And if there is an error margin, why this weirdly specific maximum weight restriction, 1768?

What these two examples have in common, in my mind, have to do with how we make approximations, rounding up, rounding down, only to end up with highly specific numbers which are quite fictional in their accuracy!! Hmmm….

Of course this is no way negates the importance of numbers in our lives. Numbers as Lord Kelvin said, ensure that we know something about the topic at hand. Support for his position comes from an unlikely source, the author Samuel Beckett (of Waiting for Godot fame).

Here is a quote from his novel Molloy which to me is just a perfect example of how mathematics can help us understand phenomena that on the surface seem quite incomprehensible. And it is hilarious to boot (and also explains the use of the word flatulence in the title of this post). Enjoy:

I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics can help you to know yourself.

I don’t think any scientist could have said it better!

Click on the picture for a larger version

Of course, much of the effect comes from the inadvertent yet appropriate peeling of the paint from the letter “R.” But fun nonetheless.