Running, Pain and Latin

Distance running is a fun way to learn Anatomy, and Latin :)

A part of the fun is of course taken away by the fact that these lessons come packaged in pain. A few years ago, after what seemed like a regular run, my right heel started hurting. I thought I had stepped on a sharp stone, or that I had twisted my heel. After many unsuccessful sessions of massages, rubbing in balms and oils (esp. Murivenna), I looked up the symptoms on the web and discovered "Plantar Fasciitis". It has nothing to do with plantations of fascists. This is simply latin for inflamed feet - plantar (sole of the foot) and fascia (band/sheath of tissue) with -itis (inflammation). For some reason this painful condition is also called "policeman's heel".

Another term you hear among the latinised running communities is "IT Band Injury". Anybody can get this injury - not just software engineers or musicians - because IT here stands for Ilio-Tibial. And the band here refers to a tendon that stretches along the length of the longest bones in your body - the tibia. An injury of this connective tissue gives you IT Band Syndrome (ITBS) - an aching or sharp pain on the outside of your knee or hip. Once again massages are not of much help and what worked in my case was simple, consistent exercises - toe-curls, rolls, stretches.

Last Sunday, 22 Feb., 2026, we had the New Delhi Marathon (NDM). This year's event was sponsored by Cognizant and attracted over 30,000 participants in four events: Full Marathon (42 km), Half Marathon (21 km), 10km and 5km races. I participated in my usual Half Marathon. It was a well organised event with plenty of water-stations, good signages, clean toilets, decent food (hot chole-kulche!), band-baaja, and nicely spaced out dispersals (no clash with the 5km folks walking abreast). I even managed to meet an old college friend from Trivandrum after 36 years, and in getting back to the sub-2-hour timing (1:58:22)!

A day after the run I am now back to my Latin vocabulary. The new words are - Quadriceps and Iliopsoas - the two sets of muscles that seem to have developed Delayed Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). It is peculiar pain that makes the simple act of descending staircases particularly painful.

Quadriceps femoris is Latin for 'four-headed muscle of the femur'.  The four heads are - Rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius and vastus medialis. Vastus is a Latin word meaning "vast," "immense," "huge," "enormous," or "monstrous", while rectus simply means "straight", "upright", or "direct". Straight and huge - the quadriceps are the largest muscle sets in the human body.

Is there a way to avoid this pain? If past experience is anything to go by, it is unprepared muscles that develop DOMS after a distance run. So would isolation exercise like leg extensions help? Let's see...

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REFERENCES & LINKS

• https://www.samsonphysicaltherapy.com/blog/why-the-front-of-your-thighs-hurt-after-running
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliopsoas
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricep
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitis
• https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21967-iliotibial-band-syndrome
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thonakal_Gopi
• https://www.uniindia.com/news/sports/sports-delhi-marathon-leads-spd18/3750206.html
• Timing - https://mysamay.in/event/info/4fbe9261-c999-4868-9a1e-acd64b0b79f8

 

 

How Did They Know?

 

Each civilisation had a different way of looking at the stars. They found different patterns and linked them to a wide range of traditions, legends and stories. 

What is amazing is not the patterns but the level of detail they were able to observe in the night sky. A few years ago the jolly, ebullient Khurshed Batliwala gave a talk listing out a few things ancient Indian scientists observed and recorded - 

The Great Bear and Arundhati-Vashishta

The core pattern of this constellation is hard to miss. It looks like a giant kite with a long tail. The Greeks called it Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and saw a far more elaborate pattern - the quadrangle of the kite became the torso of the bear, the tail became its neck and head while the surrounding stars took the shape of a fat tail and spindly legs. 

Ancient Indians, on the other hand, focused on the core form and called it the "Sapta Rishi" - the seven sages - Bhrigu, Vashista, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha and Kratu. Of these Vashista is of special interest because the ancients noticed that this bright spot in the sky was not one but two different stars in close proximity - a double-star. They named the second star after the sage's wife, Arundhati. Each of these stars correspond to the following Arab-Greek equivalents:

• Bhrigu - Benetnash
• Vashista ("most excellent) - Mizar ("girdle")
• Angiras - Alioth 
• Atri - Megrez
• Pulastya - Phecda
• Pulaha - Phecda
• Kratu - Dubhe 

Brightness of celestial objects is measured in Apparent Magnitude. This is on a reverse logarithmic scale, which means that the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. In the Great Bear constellation, the brightest star is Alioth (mag 1.76 - 33rd brightest in the sky), followed by Dubhe (m 1.79), Alkaid, Mizar / Vashishta (m 2.23), Merak, Phecda, and Megrez. 

Note that Mizar / Vashishta is not the brightest, yet it is a well-known naked eye double star with the fainter star Alcor (Vashistha's wife, Arundhati - 'washed by the rays of sun'). This is the double-star, as Batliwala points out, that newlyweds in South India view formally because they rotate in perfect synchrony, and symbolise a balanced, harmonious, and lifelong marriage of mutual respect. References to this symbolic traditions are found in early Vedic literature, including the Rig Veda and especially the Brahmanas (like Taittiriya Brahmana). Out of the thousands of stars in the night sky how did the ancients decide to select this double star?

Batliwala goes on to describe other instances in ancient records and traditions that make us wonder about their perceptiveness:

• The depiction of Varaha avatara in iconography carrying a round earth, long before the Egyptians of Greeks discovered that the earth was round;
• Antares ("like-Mars"), the 16th brightest star in the sky was named "Jeshta" (biggest, eldest, oldest). How did they figure that this star is 40,000 bigger than the sun, ad one of the biggest stars known to man?
• Rust-proof pillars - the one displayed in Delhi and another the Kollur pillar, said to have been built by tribals to welcome Adi Shankaracharya (8th century CE)
• Metallurgy - Zinc extraction from ore was known for 4000 years . A difficult metal to extract because it liquifies at 997C and turns into gas at 1000C. So it had to be extracted within a 3 degree window. The ancients metallurgists did this by turning the furnace up-side down. This technology was copied by the Chinese and in turn, patented by William Champion (1709-89) in Britain
• The value of Pi up to 30 decimals encoded in a Krishna sloka in the KatapayaSankhya format where numbers associated with alphabets: (eg., 1 = ka, ta, pa, ya)

Recently a few more examples turned up in a post titled, "How Much did the Ancients Know ? It’s fascinating". It records the work of one Dharampal (1922–2006), an Indian Gandhian thinker and independent historian who became known for re-examining India’s pre-colonial society using British archival records. 

Dharmpal notes that Hindu astronomers, many years BCE, represented the planets in ways that encoded precise astronomical knowledge. Jupiter was depicted with four dancing girls circling around it. Saturn was represented as a figure with seven arms, one of which grasped a ring. 

• The Dancing Girls of Jupiter: Four moons of Jupiter were not known in Europe before 1609, when Galileo first observed them through his telescope. Even then, only the third and fourth satellites were occasionally visible to the naked eye, and only in the clearest atmospheric conditions. The fact that Hindu astronomical tradition represented Jupiter with exactly four attendant figures suggested a knowledge of these satellites that predated European discovery.
• The Seven Arms of Saturn: Until 1783, European astronomy recognised only five satellites of Saturn. The sixth satellite was not discovered until 28 August 1789, when William Herschel identified it. The seventh satellite was observed by Herschel only after he had completed his grand telescope of forty feet focal length, and was first seen on 17 September 1789.

There is no mention of lenses or telescopes in the scriptures and records, so how did ancient Indians see and record details of celestial bodies with such amazing accuracy? 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Katapayadi Sutra - https://www.eviolinguru.com/kadapayadi-sutra.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_(star)

How much did the ancients know? - https://substack.com/home/post/p-188261182 

Kyauktada Katha

George Orwell's book, "Burmese Days" is centred on a fictional town called Kyauktada 'in Upper Burma'. It is the story of an English timber merchant named John Flory set in the 1920s. Kyauktada is actually a district in Yangon so it seems Orwell drew his inspiration for this story from his stay at a small town called Katha ('story' in many Indian languages), on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The book brings to life the life and times of the British colonial enterprise in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of a merchant named John Flory. He lives in a small, insular community of Britishers who are already nostalgic about the violence used to bring the natives to heel. In the words of the local administrator, "In my young days, when a butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. Ah well, Eheu fugaces!"

Flory is a misfit at the  British-only club, an oddball in the sense that he is not as disdainful of the locals. An Indian doctor, Veeraswami  - 'very slimly' according to his compatriots - is a good friend with whom him enjoys long conversations. It is in these conversations that Orwell frames his views on  the Empire. Here the roles are reversed, it is Veeraswami is a a loyal subject of the empire, an admirer of all things British, while Flory is the skeptic who thinks he is living a lie -

"But my friend, what lie are you living?' 

"Why, of course, the lie that we're here to uplift or poor black brothers instead of to rob them.. Look at our schools - factories for cheap clerks. We've never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians..."

This anti-Empire line of thought is expanded through the Veeraswami-Flory conversations:

"What was at the centre of his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For his brain to develop - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are absolutely committed to the wrong way of life - he has grasped the truth about the English and the Empire. The Empire is a despotism - benevolent no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object..."

"The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the army. Given the Army, the officials and business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

"With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love - yes, English men do often love Indians - native officers, forest rangers, hinters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. but alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is a loss of prestige."

No wonder Orwell was wary of a backlash if the book were to be published first in Britain. He wisely decided to publish this book in USA instead.

I loved the flowing prose in "Burmese Days", and the way he brings out his characters - especially the Burmese ones. One particularly obnoxious one is Ko Po Kyin, "the crocodile" and his wife, Ma Kin Kin...dressed in a guangbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin and, and a paso of Mandalay silk. Another interesting character is is Ma Hla May, Flory's mistress who aspired to be a bo-kadaw - a white man's wife - but is discarded as soon as Elizabeth, a young lady turns up at Kyauktada. The crocodile uses her to undermine Flory and destroy his rival, Veeraswami. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', especially if she turn up at the most unexpected places screaming Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like ('Give me the money') !

This is only my second Orwell book after Animal Farm many years ago. It is William Dalrymple's podcast on that led me to Burmese Days, so if you don't have the time read books do listen to this particular series on the remarkable life and times of George Orwell.

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LINKS and FURTHER READING

* Orwell and Dalrymple on English Class (2022) - https://quillette.com/2022/05/02/orwell-dalrymple-on-english-class/

* Empire Podcast - Episode 302 - https://youtu.be/s_vrCr3XW8o?si=92s71EOZ5hjpqvh6