Mano P Haran

Whatever I do, I do with perfection. That is why Perfect is my middlename ! I take pride in doing everything perfect. (Everything includes "self eulogy", by the way ...)

So, yesterday when I was showing signs of getting feverish, my life motto of perfection came to mind. Let me fall sick properly and perfectly, I thought. Not your mild fevers and late 90s farenheits for me. Will have to score a century, cross it handsomely and stay 'not out', of course !

By mid-day on Sunday, I was progressing quite well on my mission. Vennila checked my temperature and was duly impressed ! "Appa, you are hot !". But, our doctors and adivasi nurses won't be easy to impress. They have higher standards and precise measures. I need to live up to their standards by tomorrow. Let me see.


But, one thing, I tell you. If I don't do it well, I will just quit. If by tomorrow, I don't score this century, I am going to just become well and quit this game. Wait and see ...!

At least in this vulnerable position, I must thank Durga and Vennila. No, no, wait. How about writing a blog on 'Me, the husband' and 'Me, the father' ? Good Idea ?

Computer Dependency

Sajan sent a mail to warn us all about our dependency on computers these days. There is a very simple test to know if and how much we are dependent on computers. It works quite well when sent through email. I wonder the test will work in Blogs also. Anyway, let me try it. And, you try it too !!

Here is the Question :

How many Legs do you have ?

Answer :

To find out the answer, look down ...

:-)

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To find the answer, you Look down, Not Scroll Down !!

Jargon Busters

There was a very good news item in The Hindu today (21st June 2008). It is a subject very dear to my heart. So, I am giving it below as it is :

British bureaucrats have been warned : no more synergies, stakeholders or sustainable communities. The body that represents the UK's local authorities has told its members to stop using management buzzwords, saying they confuse people and prevent residents from understanding what local governments actually do.

The Local Government Association sent out a list of 100 "non words" to be avoided. The list includes the popular but vague term "empowerment", "coterminosity", a situation in which two organisations oversee the same geographical area; and "synergies", combinations in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Officials were told to ditch the term "revenue stream" in favour of income, as well as the imprecise "sustainable communities". The association also wanted councils to stop referring to local residents as "customers" or "stakeholders".

The associations's chair, Simon Milton, said officials should not 'hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases'. He asked : "Why do we have to have coterminous, stakeholder engagement', when we could just 'talk to people' instead ?"

Well said, Simon. I too ask the same question. If I have the power, I will also pass law in India to abolish a whole lot of words, starting from the 'empowerment', 'stakeholders', 'capacity building'. To illustrate this point, here is a nice cartoon :

Why can't we talk simple ?! I have already written about searching being called 'Research'. Similarly, people do 'Desk Research' before starting their consultancy assignment. It is nothing but reading all the documents.

Instead of saying 'zero tolerance policy', we can simply say, "No..No .. NO ". Instead of saying "Local government's poor fiscal policy on aqua-surface infrastructure projects", we can easily say, "the Panchayat spent money unnecessarily on a bridge which collapsed".

There is another frightening thing. When such jargons are translated into Tamil. Just imagine what dreadful effect there will be, when lofty ideals like Empowerment, decentralisation, paradigm shift etc. get translated into Tamil. It is atrocious when people do not understand that sentence construction is different in our languages. In English, it may be okay to say 'We must have an understanding" as much as "We must understand it". But, in Tamil, we must only say, நாம் இதை புரிந்து கொள்ள வேண்டும். But, our NGO friends always say நமக்கு இது பற்றிய புரிதல் வேண்டும். Such things make even simple ideas complicated.

PS :

Read a cartoon recently where the son asks his father, "Dad, when will I become the fully owned subsidiary of you and mom ?"

Wireless

A cute joke. Thanks to Petra for sending this one.

A Japanese, American and Indian archeologist bet which of their countries was the highest developed one.

The Japanese one takes them to Japan, diggs 5.000 feet deep and discovers wires and says: "See, we were so modern we had wires already 5.000 years ago."

The American archeologist takes the others to America, diggs 10.000 feet deep, discovers wires from all over the world and says: "See, we were so modern we were globaly connected already 10.000 years ago !"

The Indian takes them to India, diggs 15.000 feet deep and discovers - nothing.
He says: "See, we were so modern, 15.000 years ago we were working already wireless."

Things have changed so much during the last few years that wires are considered highly restrictive. Freedom is equivalent to being wireless and without any strings whatsoever. First when I saw a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse (tail-less?), I was quite amused. But, these days, everything from modem to network to phones are wireless.

Till a few years ago, I used to think only 'soft' things like love and affection were wireless ...

Swatantara Software

Involvement with the Free Software movement has been one of the nicest things that has happened in 2008. Meeting some people who are passionate about making knowledge a commodity that is FREE and to be shared, rather than as a commodity to be reserved, reserved, sold and made money from. This is a refreshing thing in life!

Take Mr.Balakrishnan for instance. He is the Branch Manager of Indian Bank in Devarshola; posted from Ernakulam to this tiny place. He does banking only as a profession, whereas Teaching Free Software is his passion. Does not leave one opportunity to teach others something about free software. "Teaching Free software is my hobby", he says. Ambitiously, I have set a target for myself to learn Python programming for the next one year - after getting inspired by him.

Mr. Vimal Joseph of an organisation called SPACE from Kerala kickstarted this process of shifting to free software a few months ago. And, the first thing Mr.Balakrishnan wanted was to start an informal group of people to promote Free software in Gudalur. Thus was born GUSS - Gudalur Users of Swatantra Software. "Swantantra" means Free in Malayalam. Again, Free is Free as in Freedom, and not Free as in Free Bear !

As true evangelists, it is not enough if we become belivers, but we must show the path to others as well ! We need to convert people. So, GUSS is organising a seminar cum demonstration of Linux. Here is the invitation :


Click on the image above to open an enlarged version in a new window.


Click on the image above to open an enlarged version in a new window.

As my contribution to the movement, I got the opportunity to design this invitation. Of course, using a Free software called Inkscape. How do you like it ?

As mentioned in the invitation, all are welcome ! On Sunday. At 10.00 AM. At the Just Change office near Kotharavayal village ...

The wise woman’s stone

A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone in the wise woman’s bag, admired it and asked the wise woman to give it to him. The wise woman did so without hesitation.


The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the jewel was worth enough to give him security for the rest of his life.

But a few days later he came back, searching for the wise woman. When he found her, he returned the stone and said,

“I have been thinking. I know how valuable this stone is, but I give it back to you in the hope that you can give me something much more precious.

If you can, give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”

I liked this short story very much. I liked the small twist in the end as well. When I read the first time, I thought he is going to realise that food is much more important than a precious stone or some such moralising thing. But, this ending is quite wonderful.

A tradition lost and found ...

Searching and Research have become synonymous these days. Google and the search engines give a false notion of a knowledge cap on all of us. Research is defined as an activity of browing through the thousands of web pages, and finding out the one sentence that we want. But, there was a time when information was not available at all and people were actually searching. And, how they did !

Bala gave a book by A.K.Ramanujan on the old Tamil literature. The most interesting part of the book for me was the preface. A brilliant introduction on the efforts put by people in collecting the old Tamil manuscripts. Thought of sharing it with everyone here.

Swaminatha Aiyar (1855-1942), a man of vast learning, was entirely unaware even of the existence of the breathtaking epics and anthologies of early Tamil, until he met a liberal-minded munsif (civil judge) named Ramaswami Mudaliar, in a small temple town, Kumbakonam. Aiyar records the date of this fateful meeting, for it was no less, as October 21, 1880, a Thursday.

To him, as to all students of Tamil literature, this date is “etched in red letters”. The munsif had just been transferred to that small town. When Aiyar met him, the judge asked him what he had studied and under whom. Aiyar named his well-known mentor and listed all the grammars, religious texts, and commentaries he had labored over. The judge, unimpressed, asked him, “That's all ? What use is that ? Have you studied the old texts ?”. He named some. Aiyar, one of the most erudite and thoroughgoing of Tamil scholars, was aghast that he had not even heard of them.

The judge then gave him a handwritten manuscript to take home and read. In his autobiography (the chapter is called “What is the use ?”), Aiyar says the good fortune of his past lives took him there that Thursday and opened a new life for him. Swaminatha Aiyar, who was 44 then, devoted the rest of his long life to roaming the villages, rummaging in private attics and the store-rooms of monasteries, to unearthing, editing and printing classical Tamil texts.


It is to him and to his peers, such as Ci.Vay. Damodaram Pillai (1832-1901), that we owe our knowledge of this major tradition. They rescued manuscripts from oblivion and put them into print and circulation. Pillai described the situation in the late nineteenth century in a preface he wrote to the first edition (1877) of one of the eight Anthologies :

Only what has escaped fire and water (and religious taboo) remains; even of that, termites and the bug named Rama's Arrow take a toll, the third element, earth, has its share ... When you untie a knot, the leaf cracks. When you turn a leaf, it breaks in half ... Old manuscripts are crumbling and there is no one to make new copies.

Even when they were available, the manuscripts had many errors and interpolations. Texts differed greatly from copy to copy. Only some scholars and some sectarian monasteries protected the texts they liked and revered. Each community studied its own texts. If, for some reason, a Saivite scribe copied a Jain text, important emendations were likely to be made. A few kings and rich men arranged for copies to be made when the old manuscripts fell apart. The scribes had to be well chosen and well paid. If someone wished to read a book, he had to go in search of it.



Manuscript owners did not lend them out, for good reason. They were guarded like treasures and passed from generation to generation in the family like heirlooms until some ignoramus threw one as a peace offering to angry floods or lighted the kitchen fires with it.

One reason for the complete absence of Buddhist manuscripts in the Tamil area (with one famous exception, Manimekalai), is that no one preserved them or copied them after the Hindu Saivites and Vaisnavites triumphed over Buddhism.

Jain manuscripts survived very well, because of a ritual practice called Sastradanam observed by the rich : the ritual called for giving new copies of old religious manuscripts to scholars on occasions like weddings. Regarding the expenses, the Christian scholar Rev.P.Percival said that he bought a palm leaf manuscript for ten pounds before 1835; when it was printed later, he could get it for two and a half shillings.



Written texts, and among them the very classics that are the pride of Tamils today, were thus precariously, expensively, often only accidentally, transmitted. The story of Swaminatha Aiyar dramatizes the transition from palm leaf to print, from a period of private sectarian ownership of texts to a period of free access to them.

We have read about this Swaminatha Aiyar in school. The only thing I knew was that he was called the Grandfather of Tamil - தமிழ் தாத்தா . But, I did not know this was the tremendous work he had done.