Mallika Darling

"आपकी मल्लिका आने ही वाली है!!" (Your Mallika will be here soon!)

Every summer folks at our friendly neighbourhood Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable outlet tease me about my fondness for this particular variety of mango which happens to share its name with an old Bollywood siren, Mallika Sherawat.

The mango season in Delhi NCR almost always starts with Safeda. In the early summer season these are large, fleshy mangos with whitish bland flesh (hence the Hindi name) which gets sweeter with the rising heat. It sits on vendors carts and market shelves throughout the season even as the other varieties make their guest appearances - Kesar, Dussehri, Totapuri, Mallika, Denga, and Langda.

For many years I used to save the seeds of the ones that were outstanding in taste, texture and sweetness, and carefully try to germinate them in our terrace garden. Despite my careful efforts not one of them turned into a sapling, and I used to wonder why this was the case. It took a post from @ShreeHistory on X to remind me of some long forgotten lessons in Botany.

Mango trees are of two broad types: mono-embryonic and poly-embryonic. In poly-embryonic seeds each seed contains multiple embryos. Most of them are nuclear emproyos produced asexually from the mother's own tissue, making them genetic clones of the mother tree. A farmer just has to plant a seed to reproduce traits.

Most Indian varieties, on the other hand, are mono-embryonic. Each seed contains a single embryo produced by sexual reproduction, a genetic shuffle of two parents. A seed from a Hapus will invariably be a combination of new factors - not the original. So planting this type of mangos is a gamble - you may or may not get the traits you seek.

So the trick here is to do grafting. According to estimates, India has been honing mango cultivars for 6000 years by vegetative propagation. Earliest references to this appear in Kautilya's Arthashastra (300 CE), and in Surapala's VrishAyurveda tradition (1000 CE). The art of grafting, or Kalmi, was raised to new levels during the Mughal period.

The Europeans - especially Jesuit priests - had some hand in developing mango varieties along the Konkan coastline. Hapus or Alphonso is attributed to a Jesuit missionary / horticulturist Nicolau Alfonso, during the 1550s.

Where does all this leave my favourite Mallika? This one is an even more recent vintage. The variety is a hybrid of the South Indian Neelum and and the North Indian Dasheri, and was developed by Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi by Dr. Ramnath Singh, just a couple of decades ago!

-----------------------------------------------

LINKS & REFERENCES

* Mexican mangoes - Ataulfo - variety that arrived aroiund 1779 from the Philippines - slowly getting sweeter by the year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataulfo_(mango)

* Mallika - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallika_(mango)

Photography as Darshan

Raghu Rai, a famous Indian photographer, passed away this week (26/04/2026).

Having grown up seeing his amazing photographs in newspapers and magazines it felt a bit strange to see those same images turning up on the small but all pervasive screens of the new social media. Over the past few days, while we collectively mourn his passing, friends have posted PDF copies of his book "Picturing Time" (2015) on Whatsapp; YouTube algorithms brought up some of his earlier interviews where, with his usual charm and wit, describes his own world view, the difference between "drishti", the act of seeing, and "darshan" which is much more difficult to describe: 

Kehte hain ke kann kann mein bhagvan hai. They say that God exists in every grain. This is not to say that you lift a stone and you will find God. The ability to connect. With anything and everything. Significant or mundane. Precious or ordinary. When you start caring for everything, everything around you starts caring for you in some way or the other, so you stand connected. You connect with every inch of space and respond. It’s having a complete awareness of things, and by that I mean not only the physical but also the emotional and spiritual aspect. Even a breeze blowing — what does it do to you and the entire space around you? This is what is so magical about human life and the human spirit — that some people appear from somewhere, some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected — and that is darshan. This is the way I look at it.

It is quite amazing to think how Raghu Rai managed to turn up with his camera - almost Forrest Gump like - at almost every historical event over the past 60 years. He was there at Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's funeral (1966); the ascent, descent and assasination of Indira Gandhi; Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama; The Bangladesh Liberation War (1971); Pokhran N-tests (1974); Operation Bluestar and Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984), Kargil War (1999), not to mention his photo chronicles of some of India's greatest artists - Statyajit Ray, Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, MS Subbalakshmi, S Balachander.

In the last set, these are my favourites :)

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? 

----------------------------------------------------

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 

Fachu Kandi Pass - Notes from a Crossover Trek

This is a note to myself. As the years go by, and as details of our numerous treks in the Himalayas start to get mixed up, I find it necessary to write down at least some highlights and details of each trip. These notes may also be useful for those who discover that much of what see online, especially on website put up by travel companies, are either incomplete or simply inaccurate.

This year our plan was to go for the Bali Pass trek, a high-altitude rote that connect the Har-ki-Dhun valley to Yamunotri. The weather gods however willed otherwise. This year the monsoon season had extended from July and August into September. Three months of heavier-than-usual rains and cloudbursts in this region had washed away some bridges. The forest department had refused to give permission for this route so our guides decided to take up the next best option - to take a diversion from the earlier planned route to cross over to the Yamunotri valley via the Fachu-Kandi pass. 

Crossover treks are fascinating. They could be a metaphor for life itself - especially when you are travelling with a group of friends in their 50s. The lush green forests of youth stretch out behind you, and what lies ahead seems barren, desolate and depressing unless, of course, you are in good company :) 

------- 

Itinerary

• Day 1 - 13/09/2025 (Saturday) - Tempo ride from Dehradun to Sankri -- Juddo waterfall -- Lakhwar bend-fork diversion -- Lakhamandal helipad -- Bernagad -- Kunwa
• Day 2 - 14/09/2025 (Sunday)- Sankri to Kedar Kantha Base-camp
• Day 3 - 15/09/2025 (Monday)- Across- Phulari Ridge -- Bhoj-Garhi Camp (3405 m / 11,170 feet)
• Day 4 - 16/09/2025 (Tuesday) - Bhoj-Garhi -- Pushtara Bughyal
• Day 5 - 17/09/2025 (Wednesday) - Kota-Damin Byepass -- cross tree-line -- Aruka camp (3829m)
•  Day 6 - 18/09/2025 (Thursday)- Past SaruTal -- KandaTal -- cross Fachu Kandi Pass (4356 M / 14,291 feet) -- Kurshil, Dubril Villages to Hanuman Chatti GNMN Lodge -- Evening aarti at hilltop temple
• Day 7 - 19/09/2025 (Friday) - Drive to Janki Chatti -- trek to Yamunotri Dham and back -- drive to Naogaon Shivalik Camp-Lodge
• Day 8 - 20/09/2025 (Saturday)- Drive to Dehradun -- train back to Delhi

Dynamics of the North East

At first glance Sanjoy Hazarika's book may seem rather dated. It gives a snapshot of the North Eastern states up to the early 1990s. 

Much of the turmoil described in the book has died down - insurgencies that roiled the North East for decades after independence has given way to a superlative push for development -  the new longest river bridge in India, 10,000km of new highways, railway links pushing further eastwards,  and ten new airports, a new impetus to the agriculture sector...all this has done much to integrate the region with the rest of the country. And yet, thanks to the recent troubles in Bangladesh, and the breakdown of trust and goodwill bodes ill for the seven sisters. 

This history of the seven sisters is a lot more complex than I expected. It also goes way beyond the unequal Treaty of Yandabo (1826) through which the British grabbed large swathes of Burma into British India.  The vast Brahmaputra valley has seen multiple invasions from the east of whom, perhaps the Ahoms lasted the longest.  Originally from the Shan region bordering Burma and China, the Ahoms conquered the area in the 13th century, adopted Hinduism, married into local communities and ruled for the next 600 years.  Even during this period it seems the tribes inhabiting the hills raided the plains but the rules were sanguine about pursuing them into the hills - 'can an elephant enter the hole of a rat?'

In terms of language and culture, a certain pecking order was imposed on this region. Soon after the British conquest of Assam, Bengali became the language of the courts and remained the official language till 1873. The Assamese in turn tried to impose their language on the hill states much to their resentment.

Partition of British India, tensions between India and Pakistan and  the creation of Bangladesh cut off the North East from its natural trading partners. The most accessible port at Chittagong went to Bangladesh even though it was located in Chakma region dominated by christian tribes. On top of this, power politics in North India forced the NE to subordinate it natural resources to states like Bihar. Petroleum extracted from Assam was sent in pipes all the way to Barauni refinery for processing!

Hazarika's book is a valuable record of the missed opportunities in the North East. It also provides a perspective on how the ongoing transformation of the seven sisters.

-------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

- PIB Press Note on the North East 

- 

Non Volatile Memories

 

Last Sunday I got a big scare - one of my newest external hard disk drives (HDD) let out a few scratchy noises and suddenly stopped working. Its LED light went out and the icon just disappeared from my desktop screen. Disbelief, panic!

I checked the plugs and ports, tried changing the USB port, tried restarting the system but the HDD just would not turn on. I had purchased this Seagate 2TB model just before Covid lockdowns! For a while, I just stared at the screen, shocked, confused, bewildered, wondering if I had just lost my collection of thousands of photographs, music, movies and other important documents.

Not sure of what to do next, iI checked for possible solutions online, hoping for some tips on how to resuscitate a cold metal box that held some of my prized collections and memories.

A YT video, "How Safe Is Your Data?" seemed like a good place to start. I was hoping to learn something reassuring from Christopher Barnatt, the acclaimed guru of Explaining Computers - on the lifespan of hard-drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), and other magnetic, solid-state and optical media. Far from being reassured, this video raised the panic levels!

Consider these facts presented by Barnatt -

• Magnetic tapes can last up to 30 years
• Most hard disk drives will last 3-7 years (!)
• SSDs depend on type of cells and number of re-writes, but should last 5-10 years. However if left un-powered for 1-2 years, data may be lost!

  In other works, as with everything else in life, nothing is permanent. More so in the world of charged electrons - a hard disk drive just wears out of spinning in circles; there is nothing solid about solid-state memory; Non Volatile Memory (NVMe) may be the latest thing when it comes to packing in superlative amounts of memory into tiny spaces but it is still volatile!

I have three HDDs - one each from Transcend, Western Digital, and Seagate. The oldest one is from Transcend and I had purchased it online in Japan in 2010 (15 years old!), and it stopped working last year. I tried accessing it from older laptops and Macs but it just refuses to show up on the desktop even after powering on.

So what is the solution? According to Barnatt, the most durable option (30+ years) is to burn all your important files into optical laser disks (high quality DVRs - read only). This however demands access to specialized equipment. Optical drives have all but disappeared from the new laptops. So the next best option could be to have multiple backups.

 As a first step I urgently needed a full backup of all my photos. Since the total size across HDDs came to around 750GB, I decided to try out the new kid on the block - NVMe SSDs. One thing I liked in particular about this option was that unlike traditional HDDs, you could order these à la carte. You could get the memory chips from the company you wanted (Samsung /WesternDigital / Crucial / Seagate), choose the capacity that I could afford (higher the better + you need to leave some space free for maintenance) and fit it into a a box enclosure of your choice.

So, after doing a bit of research and checking some options, this was my final configuration - 

• M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure from PI India (INR899) - comes with a GPT drive (GUID partition table), connecting cables (USB-C to C / USB 3.0), heat-sink sticker, pouch
• Gum-stick card - 2280 Western Digital/Sandisk Blue 580 M.2 NVMe 4gen (INR5399) -- a YT video from PI was useful for making sure it was fitted in properly
• Formatted on MacBook Air - exFAT (for MacOS+Win access) + GUID partition table (GPT seems more robust than MBR - master boot record) 

 So far the set up has been working beautifully. NVMe cards are so much more compact and seem sturdier than the clunky old HDDs! Now I hope the NVMe card will live up to its claim of being non-volatile.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

 
SSDs

• Explaining Computers (EC) - https://youtu.be/xA9Xq7hb6Q0
  
• M.2 SSD, PCIe adapters and USB enclosures - https://youtu.be/Ktqa11VT1xI (EC)
• SSD Life Expectancy - https://youtu.be/bv-IGhkcbP8
• M.2 NVMe Enclosures (desi gyan - BabaTech) - https://youtu.be/_huh7wb6Res - 
• How to Choose M.2 NVMe SSD - https://youtu.be/eGT-EIJNb_0 
• SD cards 2025 - EC - https://youtu.be/HtgIHfqQiC8
• SSDs - EC - https://youtu.be/F8k_XIEhKWo
• M.2 NVMe SSD explained (animated) - https://youtu.be/HvfIeTieXOI
• Wiki on M.2 SSD cards - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
  

• Partitions - GUID/GPT vs MasterBootRecord/MBR - https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive

 

 

Dholavira

An endless white expanse of saltpans, blue skies, and Dholavira.

If you are a history buff nothing quite prepares you for the ancient Harappan site of Dholavira. Perhaps you recall hearing about the place in school classrooms, or visits to museum galleries or books. Bits and pieces in our collective memory about the ancient civilisation that covered an area larger than known sites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China; cities with carefully designed streets, water supply and drainage systems, and of a script that is yet to be deciphered. And yet the scale of it all does not quite sink in until you see the place for yourself.

Kutch, the district in Gujarat where Dholavira is located, happens to the largest in India - 45, 674 sqkm! There are about a dozen Indian states that are smaller than this one district, including Kerala and Haryana.  Most of Kutch district barren scrubland or saltpans dotted with solar and wind farms. 

We reached the site after a long drive from Bhuj, with stopover at Hodka village, and a drive along the so-called "Road through Heaven" - a 50km road that cuts straight through an area that was once covered by the sea.

The open sea is today about 300km away from Dholavira. All available evidence suggests that maritime trade was the mainstay of this city with its seals and jewellery being found in the Nile Valley, Egypt.

Unlike most Harappan cities excavated so far, Dholavira is the only one which is built from stone. Most of this stone was quarried out of areas that became the large tanks for storing water. Canals, sluices and wells ensured that water was available throughout the city with special arrangements for those staying in the 'upper city', an area where the elites resided.

There is a nice ASI museum at the site but not much information seems to be available on the web, except for some websites aimed at attracting tourists to the luxury tent-cities that are built every year. YouTube does have some good talks on the Harappan sites in general but IO am yet to come across anything that does justice to the the oldest known port city in ancient India.

--------------------------------------

REFERENCES and LINKS

YT - Michel Danino on Harappan Civilisation - https://youtu.be/_s5EDxuL0Vs

Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dholavira

https://www.evokedholavira.com/blog/dholavira-a-harappan-city-with-intricate-architecture-and-rich-history/

Kalidasa - Flights of Imagination

How does one express gratitude to an algorithm? :)

Social media in general, and YouTube particular, can lead you to some of amazing young talent. During the Covid years, there was this lady, Anuja K (Out of the Shruti Box), who demystified Indian classical music by relating it not only to popular Bollywood songs but also linked it to other systems of music in the world. There is also a new generation of historians like Anirudh Kanisetti (Thinking Medeival), who brings fresh perspectives to the way we examine our 'messy, bloody, colourful' past.

One aspect common to all these new content creators is that they understand not only the importance pitching to the right audience with appropriate tags and key-words, but also the need to keep their clips of just the right size - not too long, not too short.

This week the algorithm spirits led me to Navaneet Galagali who has a channel named "Rasaganga" for appreciating literature, poetry and music.  Perhaps it is my interest in Sanskrit that led YT to suggest Galagali's introduction to "Meghadootam", or the 'Cloud Messenger'. Written by Kalidasa, one of ancient India's greatest poets (5th century CE), Meghadoota, describes the plight of an exiled, lovelorn celestial (a Yaksha) who asks a passing cloud to carry a message to his beloved wife.

Sanskrit poetry can be dense and forbidding but Galagali introduces the Meghadoota beautifully in two short clips. Initially I was a bit skeptical when he started off with his Yankee accent but got hooked the moment he switched to reciting stanzas from "Purva Megha" (Eastern Cloud).

On the first day of Ashadha month,

he sees a cloud clinging to a mountain;

It appears as though an elephant

is head-butting the peak!

He welcomes the cloud with love and affection, imagines it be a sentient being, and requests the cloud to carry his message while remembering to take breaks along the way:

As you proceed, use the mountaintops,

as your resting spots;

And quench your thirst,

From the water in the streams;

For its a long way ti Alaka Nagari!

It is a long way for sure! - from hills and plains of central India, all the way across a specific Himalayan pass to the base of Mt. Kailasha where Alaka Nagari is situated.

Navaneet Galagali presents the poem so well that I found myself looking for specific stanzas in the original text. He has only skimmed over the first part of the 120 stanza poem and I look forward to the rest of his series on this, as well as his melodious recitations!

----------------------------------------------------

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ilgqmfO6Sy4?si=TGImXtbkvndbuHp1&amp;start=121" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Cloud's Itinerary :)

• Ramtek (Maharashtra)
• Amrakuta (Amarakantak
• Alaka (atop Mt. Kailasha)
• Vidisha (capital of Dasharana Desha)
• Neechairna Giri (Udayagiri caves)
• Avanti
• Ujjain 
• Shipra River
• Devagiri - temple of Skanda
• Charmanvari River (Chambal)
• Dashapura (Mandsaur)
• Brahmavarta (between Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers)
• Kurukshetra
• Kanakhala (near Haridwar)
• Gangotri
• Krauncha Pass / Hamsadwara (Niti Pass bordering Tibet - north of Nanda Devi National Park)
• Manasarovar Lake
• Alaka Nagari on 'the lap of Mt. Kailasa)

----------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* Meghadoota by Kalidasa (5th Century CE) - https://avg-sanskrit.org/avgclasses/Books&PDFs/kavya/Meghaduta/Kalidasas%20Meghaduta%20Skt%20Eng%20-%20KB%20Pathak%201916.pdf

* Meghaduta by Kalidasa - Ashadha maasa (part 1) | Navaneet Galagali - https://youtu.be/ilgqmfO6Sy4?si=ndbQS-DJjidY6A9G

* The cloud's journey - Meghaduta by Kalidasa (part 2) - https://youtu.be/O9JxBm4C1CQ?si=Qh7unO8WeASz5M0P

* Exploring the Geographical Data of Meghadoota - https://ggw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/168/1/1112-GW%20%20WESTRA%20M.%20%20Ma-thesis.pdf

* Blogpost - Jaladhara - https://karpuramanjari.blogspot.com/2015/06/

A Russian Realist in Ellora

 

What did Vasily Vereshchagin see in Ellora?

Vasily was a Russian realist painter who travelled across India during the 1800s and left us scores of amazing paintings that bring back to life a begone era. From the glaciers of Ladakh, grand palaces and warriors of North India, sculptures of the Deccan, as well as iconic images from the revolt of 1857.

A recent thread on this amazing painter appeared on X and it clearly seemed to depict a sculpture that I had seen and photographed in 2023 from one of the Jain temples of Ellora. It depicted a brightly coloured celestial perched on an elephant, and the caption read - "Statue of Vishnu in the temple of Indra in Ellora". Strangely, the same caption on Reddit and WikiArt as well.

I say 'strangely' because anyone who has travelled to Ellora would know that this particular sculpture is from the entrance hall of a Jain temple and that it does not depict Vishnu but Yaksha Matanga, the god of prosperity, sitting on an elephant. It is a stunningly beautiful, large piece of work dating back to the 9th century CE that sits at the entrance of of the rock-cut cave number 32 (Indra Sabha), opposite an equally impressive figure of Siddhaika Yakshini.

Vasily's painting also brings up intriguing questions - was this 1000+year-old sculpture in such good condition when he visited Ellora in the 1870s? The bright paints on the sculpture indicates that it was being worshiped even in the 1800s...if so who gouged out Matanga's eyes and broke his nose? Did Vasily leave any notes from his amazing travels to Central Asia and India?

----------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Vereshchagin 

* WikiArt - https://www.wikiart.org/en/vasily-vereshchagin/statue-of-vishnu-in-the-temple-of-indra-in-ellora-1876

* Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/1eaxh0p/left_statue_of_vishnu_at_ellora_caves_right/?rdt=52981

* WikiMedia - view of the entrance Cave-32 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ellora_Caves,_India,_Rock-cut_carvings_in_ancient_Jain_temple.jpg 

* https://www.indiathatwas.com/2014/07/ellora-cave-32-the-indra-sabha/ 

Ladakh Surprises

 

The first thing that hits you about Ladakh is the distances - everything is so far away!

What seems like a short drive through the valley turns out to be a long, winding, day long trip. You drive for one whole day and look a map in the evening to discover that 10 hours of driving has only revealed to you a small corner of Ladakh. The forbidding remoteness of the mountain ranges is only revealed in areas where the pukka roads end. 

You may have heard that Leh district is the second largest (after Kutch) in India, covering an area of 45,110 sqkm, with a population density of just 6 people/sqkm. The number may not mean much until you spend hours on the roads without seeing another human being, or consider, for perspective, that the whole of Kerala state is smaller at 38,863 sqkm!

One whole day to drive to Alchi Monastery, Nimoo Dam and back, another whole day to take you from Leh, across the Khardungla Pass, past Khalsar on the Shyok river valley, and then, past Thoise, to Turtuk.  Another full day through the Nubra river valley to its headwaters below the Siachen glacier. On both these routes, parts of the road is submerged under swift streams, and you see suspension bridges buffeted in the raging waters of the Shyok and Indus..

As you move from one valley to another, you see a distinct variation in the colour and hue of the mountains. Bald slopes that look light brown and beige colour in the Nubra Valley seem to shift to shares of purple and pink in the Zanskar ranges. 

Ancient Routes

On the road to Alchi, next to the Indus river, is a fenced enclosure with hundreds of petroglyphs. Some of these drawings on the boulders are said to date back to the Neolithic or Bronze age, showing ibex, snow leopards, hunting scenes. The more recent - and numerous - ones date back to the Buddhist era. Stylised chortens with human figurines dancing on top.

These drawings actually take advantage of the fact that the stone surface has a distinctly different colour. So whatever material they used for these drawings etched away the surface colour, leaving the lighter sub-surface colour exposed. Similar petrogyphs were also seen in the Nubra river valley. On our way back from Taksha village towards Pamanik hot-springs, a boulder stood by the roadside with the very same ibex drawings!

Around Diskit and Hunder, on the broad valley where the Shyok and Nubra rivers meet, you see a paradox. An area where there is plenty of fresh water, you see barely any vegetation. The whole area is covered with sand dunes. Double-humped bactrian camels forage among the bushes.  It is not difficult to imagine the times when long caravans of these camels carried goods, ideas and people across these mountain valleys, to Tibet, Yarkand and beyond, to Central Asia.

Rivers Running Backwards

Ladakh is flanked by two mountain ranges - Zanskar to the south and Karakoram to the north. Rivers flow very differently between these ranges - the Nubra flows south-east from the Siachen Glaciers, and then after going about 70km in this direction, abruptly changes to flow almost backwards to the north-west direction after joining the Shyok river at the Hunder-Diskit junction.

River Shyok, on the other hand, starts off from the same set of glaciers north of Siachen, flows in the same SE direction for more than double the distance, and near Dubruk, does a V-turn and flows westwards for about 200km and becomes the Indus before deciding that it must go southwards after all!

Nikon D90 - Death of a Beloved Camera

My heart sank last week in Kamal-tal. 

I was taken a few family pics next to this lovely lotus pond in Naukuchiayal, Uttrakhand, when my Nikon-D90 suddenly stopped working. A strange growl inside the camera and then silence. I tried removing the 18-105mm lens, battery, memory card, rebooting time and again on different settings...but nothing would work. On the panel was an adamant "Err" message that just refused to go away. 

Back in the hotel, I looked up this problem on the net. There were numerous videos that explained how this error message would turn up even in the more advanced Nikon cameras. The mirror had jammed. It had got stuck at a midway point on a slant, blocking the aperture. Some of these self-help videos has a fix where a screwdriver's nudge would make everything click back in shape. There were also numerous shorts which simply showed the problem without offering any solutions other than 'if this happens, go to the service centre'.

Over the past 15 years a lot of memories had been captured in this sturdy, beautiful camera. I had purchased it from Akihabara, Tokyo,  in 2009 along with with a pair of binoculars ahead of my trek to the top of Mt. Fuji. Initially it had been a pain - especially on hiking trails - lugging around 1.5 kg of equipment (body 703g + 18-105mm lens 420g + bag). However the quality of photos made it completely worthwhile. So it stayed with me through innumerable family functions, treks, portraitures (Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8D), school functions and social events. 

So back in Noida, I looked up the nearest Nikon service centre and handed my D90 in. A few days back the service engineer called back to say that the problem had been solved - there had been an issue with the gears connected to the actuation motors. The repair cost me over Rs. 4000.

Is it time to let go? 

The last time I had a similar problem was in Japan, with my Canon G9. It was a sturdy-looking   pocket-sized, flip-screen camera which had died on me within a  year a purchase. Luckily it has still within the warranty period and I had taken it to the service centre and got it repaired for free. To be on the safe side, I had sold it at Wonderex-Tsukuba and got a fairly decent price for it.

There is no Wonderex in India and I don't have much hope of getting a good price for the old D90 body. So the question now is - what should be my next digicam? 

-------------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES

Nikon D90 mirror stuck - https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/74780/nikon-d90-mirror-stuck

Err - https://nikonites.com/forum/threads/error-shutter-release-button-mirror-stuck.13236/

Sweetness and Curvature

 This piece on Sahyadri Grapes was a revelation to me. 

It appeared on on ThePlate, an interesting publication I had not come across earlier; the style of writing was chatty and engaging and I learnt a whole lot of things about farmer-producer companies that are setting new benchmarks for the production and export of fruits and vegetables.

I was particularly surprised to learn about the barriers faced by Indian exporters in getting their products cleared, especially in the European markets. While some of these barriers, such as limits to pesticide residue, seem quite sensible from the point of view of health and wellbeing of the consumers, some others seem completely whimsical, bordering on Euromyths. The EU, it seems, sets standards on the curvature of bananas and limits the sweetness of fruits imported into their common market.

What exactly are these standards? Why were they adopted?

Curvature of Bananas: European Commission regulation 2257/94 decrees that bananas in general should be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature”. Those sold as “extra class” must be perfect, “class 1” can have “slight defects of shape” and “class 2” can have full-scale “defects of shape.” This standard applies to bananas of the varieties (cultivars) of Musa (AAA) spp., Cavendish and Gros Michel subgroups.

Far from being a whimsical, curvature of a banana seems to be a good indicator healthy growth - the amount and sunlight the plant was exposed to during its growth phase, and the resulting distribution of hormones.

Sweetness of Fruits: The Brix scale is used to measure the sweetness of fruits such as grapes. Article 50(2)(a) of Regulation (EU) No 1151/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council on quality schemes for agricultural products and foodstuffs. 

According to the Plate article, "..the Brix content for grapes to Europe must range from 16 to 20 degrees, whereas the Indian palate prefers sugar content 24 degrees or higher". The relevant EU regulations however seems to set only minimum limits for sweetness, ranging from 12-14 degrees on the Brix scale.

There have been reports of export consignments getting rejected for exceeding limits on pesticide content in the fruits, but have there been cases where a rejection has happened due to excessive curvature or sweetness? 

-------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* Why are bananas bent? - https://uniquetimes.org/the-curious-case-of-curved-bananas-why-are-they-bent/

* https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bendy-bananas-why-are-they-staying-eu-rules-b1080788.html

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/12/to-properly-explain-the-eus-bendy-bananas-rules-yes-theyre-real/?sh=4bcf67a86fc9

* https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/fresh-fruit-vegetables/table-grapes/market-entry

* https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/FFV10Carrots_2021_e.pdf

* Measuring sweetness - https://www.refractometer.eu/scales-for-sweetness-measuring

* https://www.yara.co.uk/crop-nutrition/grapes/managing-grape-sweetness/

* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52020XC0615(01)&rid=1

* Chaptalisation - process of adding extra sugar to grapes! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaptalization

* https://www.freshpoint.com/news/understanding-brix-is-a-higher-number-always-better/

* APEDA Guidelines (2007) - https://apeda.gov.in/apedawebsite/Grapenet/regu_fresh_grapes08.pdf

* Banana export guidelines - https://www.corpseed.com/knowledge-centre/export-banana-from-india

Global Rankings: Hunger, Democracy and Human Rights

Every year a a bunch of 'independent research bodies' publish 'global rankings'. More often than not, in India, these rankings become a subject of newspaper headlines, op-eds, TV debates and opinion pieces that dominate the public discourse for a while. At times rankings are also raised in the parliament, steering not only public policy one way or the other.

It was only last year that I caught a glimpse of the sleight of hand practiced those who prepare these rankings. The Global Hunger Index released last year ranked India at 107 (of 121 countries). Having witnessed first-hand the tremendous effort that went into ensuring the distribution of food stockpiles during the Covid years, these rankings seemed odd. It took only a bit of digging into the GHI charts to realise that the core issue was nutrition - not the availability or access to food. But, hey, 'hunger' sounds sexier.

Democracy is another bugbear. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) claims that Indian democracy has been in decline ever since Mr. Modi first took office in 2014, with its international ranking falling from number 27 in the world (just below Belgium) to number 46 (two spots below South Africa). The EIU now labels India a “flawed democracy” characterised by “serious deterioration in the quality of democracy under leader Narendra Modi”. Then there is the American government-funded think tank Freedom House which finds India to be only “partially free”, with an overall freedom rank of tied-85th in the world.

These rankings were taken to be the gospel truth until people started asking a simple question - on what basis where these rankings created? How does one compare a complex multi-enthnic, multi-lingual, multi-everything country like India, with, say, Luxembourg?

This year, Prof. Salvatore Babones, from the University of Sydney published a paper that examined how India fared on rankings related to democracy and human rights. A quantitative, comparative sociologist, Babones noticed that the rankings presented by agencies such as Freedom House, Sweden's V-Dem and the RSF Press Freedom Index, stood on rather shaky ground. 

The paper published by Babones has its focus on Sweden’s university-based Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-DEM) which ranks India at 108 in the world for electoral democracy (two places above Myanmar) and 97th in the world for liberal democracy (one place above Papua New Guinea). It claims that India is no longer a liberal democracy at all, but is now an “electoral autocracy” on a par with Russia!

On what basis are these rankings created? Turns out that behind the facade of 'higher mathematics' lies ideologically coloured opinions of carefully selected 'experts':

(1)  Freedom House  "index of freedom"  is based on a survey with a series of questions aimed at 'experts on India' (not necessarily Indians) . It has questions like - is the media free? are the elections fair? is the election commission unbiased? - all qualitative impressions summed up into a number

(2) Swedish V-Dem ranks India is an electoral autocracy alongside Russia and Turkey . This institute sends questionnaire to social science professors (the list is secret and it leans to the Left). This survey contains 5 parts - 2 objective parts: one about universal suffrage and whether officials are elected. All countries including Vietnam and Hong Kong get perfect scores here but not India. Why? Because 2 of 550+ Members of Parliament were selected from the Anglo-Indian community until 2019! The second set is a rating on technical criteria - is the electoral roll complete? was there any violence at polls? has any party been prohibited? Below a certain score countries are ranked as autocracies! Nothing in the survey looks at the obvious questions - are elections competitive? can the opposition realistically win? 

(3) RSF Press Freedom Index - again a survey - 'safety of journalists' -- has the govt ever jailed a journalist? -- 'they search of reasons to justify a score'.

It is great to see independent minded academics calling the bluff of these self-styled surveyors and purveyors of the "Charisma of Numbers".

--------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* YT Interview - The India Forum - https://youtu.be/AqSuXuWQyPg 

* V-Dem Sweden - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices_(V-Dem)

* (14Sep'22) The Print - https://theprint.in/opinion/why-indias-democracy-ranking-should-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt/1127765/

Credit Cards in Bhutan

In the age of digital payments it feels strange to carry around wads of currency notes. 

This is exactly what happened to me last week in Bhutan. For the entire duration of the trip that covered about 800km, from Paro to Thimpu, Punakha, Phobji Valley, Trongsa and onward to Bumthang and back, I was unable to use any of my credit or debit cards, let along e-payment apps like PayTM, GPay or Bhim-UPI. At all hotels and shops, my attention was drawn to the fine-print behind every card issued in India - "Not valid for payment in foreign exchange in Nepal and Bhutan".

The question is why would any Indian want to make a payment in foreign exchange? India and Bhutan share open borders, and Indian currency is freely accepted everywhere, but the use of anything other than cash is quite difficult.  While it is possible to withdraw cash from the Bank of Bhutan (BoB) ATMs in the capital city, Thimphu, a steep fee of N300 is charged for each transaction.

How did this strange situation come to pass? How much of tourist income is Bhutan losing due to these rules?

Explanations available online point to apprehensions at the central banks that these steps are in place to prevent Hawala transactions and money laundering across the open borders...yet, things do not seem to add up. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

• Hawala transactions - https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/12/elqorchi.htm#:~:text=The%20hawala%20system%20refers%20to,transaction%20and%20the%20countries%20involved.
• RBI Rules - https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/FAQView.aspx?Id=66
• Hindi YT - https://youtu.be/zAdIYHdO7VU

Numbers in Perspective - II: Wages & Taxes

 

I was struck by this chart which appeared in a report published last week, titled, "The New India", by Morgan Stanley Research. 

The tapering bars represent manufacturing wages inAsia, and India figures at the right extreme, with a wage-rate per employee that is among the lowest in the world. At US$0.8/hour, India's wage-rate was lower lower than Indonesia at US$1, China at US$7.1 and South Korea at US$22.3. 

These might seem like random numbers until your place them in perspective. An hourly wage of USD 0.8/hour is about INR 64/hour. For an eight-hour work-day, the wage is just INR 512, or INR 13,412 for a 26-day-month. This leads us to an annual income of about  INR 1,60,944 for the whole year (~USD 2,000)! 

So the average manufacturing wage in India is not far from its latest per-capita GDP, which according to the World Bank, is now USD 2277 , or INR 1.82 lakhs. One just has to remember the average wages of a semi-skilled worker in Delhi NCR to realise that these depressing numbers are factual - a housemaid earns about INR 12,000 a month, a security guard about INR 15,000, and the sweepers & cleaners, or those employed by the unorganised sector, far, far lesser.

This also holds the answer to a related question - Why are the direct taxes collected by the Government of India so disproportionate to the population of the country?

Consider these facts:

• The largest employer of wage-earners is the farming sector, and agricultural income is tax-exempt in India
• A measly 5% of Indians actually pay tax. A maximum of around 80 million people out of 1.30 billion Indians (6.1%)
• India has only seven income taxpayers for every 100 voters, among the lowest of all G20 democracies
• Only about 40% of India’s population is currently employed or looking for work. So that cuts the 1.3 billion figure by more than half
• Only 3% of Indians take home an annual salary of more than ₹ 500,000 -  the government exempts all those who earn less than this.
• The threshold of ₹ 500,000 is actually over three times the per capita GDP of the country. For context, it’s just 1.1x in Indonesia, 0.9x in Mexico, and 0.4x in the Philippines.

It is possible for the government to capture more people in its tax net, if it really wants to, but it may not be the humane or even politically expedient option, given the current state of affairs of the average wage-earner in New India.

-------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* India - GDP per capita - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=IN- USD 2277 = INR 1.82 L

* * (15Mar2022) - https://www.livemint.com/news/india/how-many-indians-pay-tax-in-a-country-of-1-3-billion-govt-answers-11647352021053.html

* (20Feb2017) - Decoding India’s Low Tax Base Conundrum - BQ Prime- https://www.bqprime.com/opinion/decoding-indias-low-tax-base-conundrum

Numbers in Perspective - I: Capital Markets

The stock market in USA tanked a few days ago after Elon Musk finally decided to take over Twitter. 

While it is the dharma of markets to swing and sway wildly to various sentiments, one data-point stood out - the loss of market-cap suffered by seven top companies of USA was bigger than the entire capitalisation of the Indian market!

Only a few months ago the newspaper headlines had announced that India's equity market had broken into the Top Five Club in terms of capitalisation for the first time. At  $3.21 trillion, India was now UK ($3.19 trillion), Saudi Arabia ($3.18 trillion), and Canada ($3.18 trillion). 

All is is small change compared to the total market-cap of USA which is over $47 trillion...We have a long, long way to go!

----------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* (12 March 2022) - India breaks into world's top five club in terms of market capitalisation - https://www.business-standard.com/article/markets/india-breaks-into-world-s-top-five-club-in-terms-of-market-capitalisation-122031200004_1.html

* Visualising market capitalisation - https://howmuch.net/articles/all-stocks-capitalization-around-the-world

* Pearls of wisdom on investing in India - mostly from Mohandas Pai at a @TheRepublic event - https://youtu.be/Vtitg-o-8FI