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.

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

I read this quote and immediately realized that this rule applies to teaching as well. I have often described teaching as doing two things – making the strange familiar (an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon falling into the earth’s shadow) or making the familiar strange (all matter is essentially empty space). What is common is the sense of surprise we experience in both cases.

It appears to me that very often we forget the value of astonishment and awe in teaching and learning. This is where the quote above really connects with my idea of teaching. Repeating the quote but by changing just one word—replacing “art” with “teaching.”

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all teaching we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

How do we as educators meet this goal of “astonishing us all.”

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 … .

The almost perfect pentagon that showed up on the surface
of the boiling lentils!

How cool is that. And does it mean something that five is a magical number (see this, this and this). As this page on numerology says

Five is the symbol of human microcosm. The number of the human being. Human forms—the pentagon when arms and legs are out stretched. The pentagon is endless —sharing the symbolism of perfection and power of the circle. Five is a circular number as it produces itself in its last digit when raised to its own power. The pentacle, like the circle symbolizes whole, the quincunx being the number of its center and the meeting point of heaven, earth, and the four cardinal points plus the center point.

Five is also representative of the Godhead – Central Creator of the four fours plus itself equalling five. Five is the marriage of the hieros gamos as combination of feminine and the masculine. Feminine being even, as 2, in frequency and masculine being odd as 3 in frequency = 5.

The number five symbolizes meditation; religion; versatility. It represents the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing) everywhere except in the East. In the East there are six—the extra being Mind. We find meanings to five in the five petaled flower, five pointed leaves–especially the ROSE. The Rose has much symbolism, but also the lily, vine, all of which represent the microcosm.

The five pointed star depicts individuality and spiritual aspiration, and education when it points upward. The five pointed star pointing downward represents witchcraft, and it is used in black magic. Noted: There is a very broad difference between witchcraft and black magic.

The number five formed the first counting process from which all else came.

Hmm… so what does this magical appearance of the pentagon mean?

If we believe that every pattern has some underlying explanation, can there be a more mundane explanation? I have a possible hypothesis of what lies behind this phenomena… but what do you think? Where did this pattern come from?

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.

Enjoy.

You can also read a poem written by Shreya on Diwali on her blog Uniquely Mine.

How sad is that!

A few decades ago it was audio-cassette technology that led to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Ayotollah Khomeni had been exiled to France and his speeches would be secretly smuggled into Iran – where an informal underground network of people would dub and re-dub these tapes and pass them around. New technologies lead to new ways of sharing information, new ways to mobilize.

My heart goes out to these protesters as I obsessively track news coming out of Iran. The two best sources of news on this are Andrew Sullivan’s  Daily Dish and The Lede of the NYTimes. Or better still follow the incoming Twitter-feeds collected here.

I am not sure I quite buy into the argument being made in the allegory of the cave, or whether there is one “strict” interpretation of it. The other day I stumbled upon a lovely, stop-motion animated, version of the allegory. Check it out below:

The only strange thing in the video was the music they used, particularly towards the end. I sounded very much like an instrumental version of a Bollywood film song… kinda weird. [If you want to hear the actual song this reminded me of go here.]

Incidentally you can find out more about the Plato’s Allegory video by going here.

They have been charged — in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech — with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”.

And this, in a secular country!

So far Johann Hari has refused to apologize for what he wrote, and rightfully so. In this piece in the Huffingtonpost titled: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote. The entire article is worth reading in full but here is a key quote:

Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth — especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.

I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want — as long as I too have the right to respond.

I don’t think anybody could have said it more clearly and emphatically. For more information on this read the blog Butterflies and Wheels.

This is what he wrote:

Punya, I read the novel and it does not seem to me, as you interpret, that the character decides to become a fundamentalist. Notice the term fundamentalist is moderated by the term of ‘reluctance’. Which is his way of saying, “look! I am on the edge and my reluctance—which may have its own basis in many things—keeps me from going that way.” The ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is not the ‘Fundamentalist.’ Every pedestrian, the waiter, and others strolling on the mall in Lahore come across as both regular people and also possible fundamentalists and assailants. Fundamentalism in this narrative is seen as precipitated in the reaction and paranoia of the visitor. His use of the term does not seem to me to be a reference to the Wahabist ideology that has typically come to be lumped under the rubric of fundamentalism.

In his novel, this man, that women, any one around is depicted as possibly carrying a concealed weapon that could be pulled out for attacking the visitor. It is merely a depiction, and consequence, of paranoia. That is to say, they appear in the narrative as on the verge. It goes without saying that the reaction and paranoia is adding to the ranks of fundamentalists. What do you think drones, for example, are achieving? Do you really think they are hitting al-Qaida there by drone missiles? The Islamic nationalism can be interpreted as a reaction of being pushed in the corner into the so called ‘Muslim World.’ I always used to say that this damn thing Muslim world does not exist except that we are bringing it into existence by calling it one and by uniting people by providing them with a common denominator.

I can see where Irfan is coming from, and upon reading his comments, I realize that I underplayed the importance of how fundamentalism is “precipitated in the reaction and paranoia of the visitor.” Reading his thoughts also reminded me just how tongue in cheek Mohsin Hamid’s text is – it is never clear whether Changez really means what he is saying or is just playing with the listener (and through that with the reader). That said, I think I stand by my response… though (as I had noted) my response may have been colored by the recent happenings in Mumbai.

Charles Darwin
12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.

It’s been

for crying out loud!

This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection (which the deniers of evolution can point to as well as example of divine intervention) but rather to imperfection (which is somewhat more difficult to explain by non-evolutionists – why would an all-powerful deity make mistakes). The lesson here is that imperfections point to a contingent historical past. Tracing these imperfections allows us to make inferences about how things came to be. Think of the Qwerty keyboard, to take an example from technological evolution, an artifact from the days of early manual typewriters, that actually required a design that would slowdown people’s typing speed to prevent the keys from getting stuck.

Just came across another page devoted to the same issue, just with more examples.

This was created by a team called Boymongoose. You must check out there other Christmas inspired song, a version of Jingle Bells called Single Girls.

Wishing everybody a great break…