Drawing Together

Line:

I

Rigid

Flowless.

Curve:

You

Smooth

Flawless.

Circle

Us

Ends begins

Fullness!

Predicting from the Past

Kottayam, Feb 23, 2010:

Five pairs of eyes are focussed on the board, less than a square foot in size, in the light of a single wick burning in a clay lamp. Across from these anxious souls sits a young man busy moving what appears to be beads on the board whilst scribbling frantically on a letter pad. After a few minutes, he sits back to revise the notes and begins to speak...and surprise! surprise! his jargon is almost entirely the all too familiar cricketing terms.

The ancient science of bead reading is coming back with a vengeance today after being totally recast into a cricket mould. Ajith Kumar Vallerpadam, the pioneer behind this rejuvenation belongs to an ancient family of astrologers in north central Kerala. "We've enjoyed thousands of years of good life exploiting the fear and greed of productive people by mumbling incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. Lately with education and encroachment of the so called western science, those of us who had made a career out of the true Indian "sastras" were beginning to feel the pinch. Luckily I chanced upon a way to combine two of India's greatest addictions, astrology and cricket. ", smiles Ajith.

It wouldn't be amiss to call him the Ashutosh Gowarikar of astrology. With dime a dozen astrologers crowding all the TV channels and every family having at least one retired uncle pursuing this "science" as a hobby, reinventing themselves was an imperative for families like the Vallerpadams.

Recasting bead astrology seems a no-brainer in hindsight. But as Ajith's relative and another practictioner Vikram Govindan Poonthuvilayadal notes, "It has been inside knowledge amongst our families that the whole Cowri based astrology evolved out of a simple tic-tac-toe like children's game in the past. It was the easiest way to mint money. Now it has lost most of its ground with women asserting themselves a little too much and divorces becoming all too common. People are not so easily buying into our "8 out of 10 matching" etc. Add to that the new fads of Vaastu, power stones etc which are so clearly superstitions. For the current revival, we did a reverse engineering sort of... by taking a popular sports paradigm and synergising it with an ancient prediction science."

If Vikram sounds like an MBA, it is because he is. After graduating from IIM-Z and finding himself without much prospects owing to the global recession, Vikram decided to go back to his roots. "It has always been about serving the people...for the right price", he beams.

The "New" Old Sastra

Sure enough the board does resemble a cricket stadium. Since photography was prohibited, we can only present to you a schematic diagram. The board has a miniature fence around it. At the center is the pitch with two rectangular wooden pegs at either end of it. The rest of the board has markings at different points eerily similar to fielding positions. The most important part of the prediction system are the beads from which the system gets its name. A total of 11 beads form the complete set. 8 of them are the "manchadi" seeds found commonly in Kerala. These are colored differently and represent Budha (Mercury), Shukra (Venus) , Chovva (Mars), Vyazham (Jupiter) and Shani (Saturn) along with other ancient celestial bodies of Rahu, Ketu and Gulika. A slightly bigger rudraksha bead represents the Sun. Moon and earth are cast in sandal wood beads of different sizes.

Ajith explains, "Blind fatalism has been the biggest drawback of all forms of astrology so far. Of course, after we have instilled fear or greed in the client, we used to further the monetary exploitation by suggesting "remedies" which used to work rather smoothly to our advantage till very recently. But off late, more and more people have started recognizing the simplicity of the con. But in "bead sastra", the client is also an important player. So it is very different. It is not out and out fatalistic. The individual participates. And since the whole procedure proceeds in a lingo very understandable to the client, there is an added confidence that was not there in the arcane mumblings that we used in earlier forms of our craft."

User-friendly to the core

The procedure of "bead sastra" is indeed fascinating in its simplicity. The chief practitioner, titled appropriately as the Ompyre drops ten of the eleven beads softly from his hand onto the "pitch". The beads bounce of the two wooden pegs called Vikadas or hit the fence which is called Bhavantari. It is perfectly fine if a few beads bounce over the Bhavantari. Once these beads are settled, the Ompyre moves them to the nearest marked positions on the board to each of them. This activity clearly resembles setting the field in cricket.

The genius of pioneers like Ajith and Vikram lies in renaming the positions after those on a cricket field. Thus the beads end up in 'silly mid on', 'gully', 'third man', 'deep extra cover' and so on. After the field has been thus set, the client who has been holding the "earth" bead is allowed to reorient the wooden pegs in any direction he or she wishes. Then after a small prayer, he or she drops the "earth" bead into the center of the pitch. The bouncing and trajectory of this bead is what forms the scientific core behind the prediction system. It is no longer all based on the Ompyre. The client is an active participant. "We live in the 21st century," says Ajith, "it is clear that human action has an effect on our lives. Our system completely acknowledges and incorporates this scientific truth."

A typical reading before interpretation can sound like a cricket commentary ball by ball. "Caught by Rahu on the Long on" or "Bhavantari through the mid off" form the basis of very elaborate and personalized predictions which the ever growing clientele swear are not just easy to understand but are also astonishingly accurate.

The "earth" bead is dropped only once for consultation in specific matters like investments and marriage. For marriages, the trajectories taken by the earth bead of the prospective bride and groom on their individual boards are compared for matching. Several such consultations are performed each morning by Ajith and Vikram who charge close to $100 for each. In the afternoons, these young men are busy training new Ompyres in this sastra.

Despite the relative newness of this reinvented science, clients have been pouring in from far and wide. The system has been quickly adapted to an online version that allows clients to consult remotely at the click of their mouse to drop the bead.

For more elaborate consultations like preparing the birth chart of a new born baby, a 5 day ritual is undertaken where the Sun bead is bounced instead by the Ompyre himself several times. This extremely strenuous activity comes at a hefty fee of $10000, but no price can ever be high for the highly accurate, scientific and above all customer friendly prediction system.

For SuppressIndia News Channel, Arun Surendran

Monday Musements

Alonosospeak :-)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/feb/22/fernando-alonso-formula-one-ferrari

Truly the Top Dawg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/22/tallest-dog-world-record

"....But the whole role-model-to-kids ­argument was a bogus mantra in the first instance. For one thing, kids don't care about or even comprehend their idols' sex lives, and for another, if you're so worried about the havoc ­Terry's shenanigans could wreak on impressionable minds, stop dredging up the details and printing them in simplified prose a child could ­understand, accompanied by massive photographs of his alleged ­mistress in her underwear."

Charlie Brooker comments on the apology frenzy!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/charlie-brooker-terry-kay-woods-adultery


Potentially very disturbing book. For the bane of mass production, vegetarian, meat or anything else, to go away, the voracious appetite of consumption must disappear...one individual at a time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/22/jonathan-safran-foer-factory-farming

He is bound to die if he watches a telugu potboiler, well majority of Indian movies for that matter :-)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/scientific-accuracy-hollywood-blockbuster

Sunday, Feb 21st

So “Obamism” feels at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list — one that got way too dominated by health care instead of innovation and jobs — and not the least like a big, aspirational project that can bring out America’s still vast potential for greatness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21friedman.html?ref=opinion

Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?em

Kerala’s tourism department is very happy with the Consumerfed initiative as it catches the attention of tourists visiting the backwaters of Kerala, an area that ranks above the Taj Mahal in National Geographic Traveller’s best destinations of the world.

http://beta.thehindu.com/life-and-style/article110612.ece

My Heart's Mirror

My heart

steams

a mirror, mercurial,

burnished in passion's flame

whose depths quiver

my nakedness

in reflection

rejuvenates.

Vain I stare

my mirror

past compare

till breath

dissolves

in embrace.

A "Ma Nishada" mind map :-)

Product of a lazy cold cloudy Saturday morning :-)

The origins of Ramayana are said to lie in the first sloka uttered spontaneously from Sage Valmiki's shoka (sadness). While bathing in the river, he observed a pair krauncha (heron family) birds in love. A hunter shoots down one of the birds with his arrow. Witnessing the sorrow of the surviving bird, Valmiki reacts against the cruelty of the hunter with "Ma Nishada" (Abstain! Wild Man). Why "wild man/hunter" should be referred using a word that shares roots with 'black' and 'night' can make another equally interesting discussion about the racial prejudices in Ramayana. But here I want to sketch a mind map of another thought. And keeping in mind that this is a facebook note, not a journal paper, read on :-)

Michael Wood in "Story of India" talks about the origins of human speech lying probably in imitating bird song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSFxYwai9rA, (3:00-7:00). The meaningless but ordered pattern of sounds still survive in ancient Brahmin families of Kerala taught religiously ritualistically from generation to generation.

Genetically now we know that the FOXP2 gene plays a crucial role in the human ability to manipulate tongue, mouth, throat to produce complex array of sounds. It is a very tricky genetic combination discussed at length in "Not A Chimp" (Jeremy Taylor). Without this gene and related epigenes we wouldn't have had speech and therefore language and therefore civilization. 'Not A Chimp' does not discuss much about why such a gene might have come about.

Random mutation is an easy explanation. But from epigenetics and 'horizontal evolution', we can now seriously consider the possibility that genetic change occurred from behavioral change. We are now open to the possibility of even the simplest behavior affecting the body deep into genetic level. We are aware that at the lowest level genes at the beginning of life were acquired from across species in the same environment. Neanderthals and other lost cousins of Homo Sapiens apparently never managed to acquire FOXP2 (Milestones of Civilization, Blandford).

Was it because our prehistoric ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, paused to listen to the birds instead of hunting them down that I am able to express this to you online today?! Was it because a sage saw beautiful romance in a pair of birds than tasty dinner that we are who we are?!

It is fascinating to consider that an ancient epic can be interpreted to allude to possibly the very origins of mankind.

Now before any idiot misconstrues this to be an argument for Hindu supremacy, I'd like to quickly mention about the apple: The apple from the Garden of Eden. It is true that the origin Hebrew or Aramaic versions of the Bible don't refer to apple, but simply talk about a "fruit" of the forbidden tree. It probably became apple only much later with the King James version. However, apple is a marvelous fruit and its use in genesis can be interpreted quite philosophically.

Inside an apple, every single seed is genetically different. There is no predicting what type the fruits will be from a tree born from an apple seed. All the specific varieties of apples are grown in orchards with trees synthetically grafted. If we plant two seeds from a red delicious apple, we are going to end up with two trees bearing totally different types of apples. With that in mind, did the feeling of individuality get mankind (and womankind) ousted from Eden? Like the apple seed, did Adam and Eve forget where they came from or realize that they are each "different" in their minds as well based on their physical individuation? But I am not going to call John Chapman (Johny Appleseed) the one true messenger of God :-)

Since I mentioned Ramayana and Bible, I will finish with Mohammad. Koran calls human the one who points and names. That is the most beautiful, precise definition of our species covering the essence of language. Word is indeed God here too.
Only Carolus Linnaeus came closer to this when he simply put "Know Thyself" (Nosce te ipsum) as the definition of the species Homo Sapiens in Systema Naturae.
As always I look at my own mind maps and repeat, "Ma Nishada"

December begins

It is the month for stock taking. Definitely been a great year. Lots of websites have been busy listing the "best" and "worst" of the year and some have even ventured to prepare lists for the entire decade.

XFM's songs of the decade: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/xfm-names-songs-of-the-decade-1831907.html

and music websites: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/the-25-best-music-websites-1803346.html

For anyone who is sane but interested in all the hoopla surrounding 2012 and Mayan calendars, I strongly recommend Anthony Aveni's book. Dr. Aveni is a professor of Astronomy and Anthropology, (fantastic combination that!) at Colgate university. More about him here: http://anthonyfaveni.com/

He writes with great clarity and easy to understand analogies. The book is adequately illustrated. I'm surprised there isn't a whole bunch of books connecting Mayans and the stock market periods. There is plenty of fodder there for those who want to see "connections" :-)