Jagannatha Gajanana

With the Rath Yatra getting over this month (on Guru Poornima?), the MahaGanapathi in Whitefield had an appropriate crown.

The Rath Yatra contributed that phenomenal word, juggernaut, to the English language:

History has it that when the British first observed the Rath Yatra in the 18th century, they were so amazed that they sent home shocking descriptions which gave rise to the term 'juggernaut', meaning "destructive force". This connotation may have originated from the occasional but accidental death of some devotees under the chariot wheels caused by the crowd and commotion.

Personally, i am reminded of Kamal Haasan holding forth in Aakali Rajyam (songs):

జగన్నాథ రథ చక్రాలొస్తున్నాయి, వస్తున్నాయి
రథ చక్ర ప్రళయ ఘొశ
భూమార్గం పటిస్తాన్
భూకంపం పుటిస్తాన్

ఎక్కడికి రా?

భూకంపం పుట్టిన్చడానికి

Baba's Kafni

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxKafni

The Shri Sai Satcharita has an interesting story on Baba's kafni: (chapter 5)

There was a wrestler in Shirdi, by name Mohidden Tamboli. Baba and he did not agree on some items and they had a fight in which Baba was defeated. Thenceforth, Baba changed His dress and mode of living. He donned kafni, wore a langot (waist band) and covered his head with a piece of cloth. He took a piece of sack-cloth for his seat, sack-cloth for his bed and was content with wearing torn and worn out rags. He always said: "Poverty is better than Kingship, far better than lordship. The Lord is always brother (befriender) of the poor."

The wrestling bout is reminiscent of Sri Ramakrishna wrestling with Swami Vijnanananda. However, i find it unusual that Baba lost.

The same story, with the roles of winner and loser reversed, was presented by Swami on March 4, 1962, during a speech held on occasion of the Mahashivaratri festival: (The Life and Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi, page 67, middle)

I am reminded now of past events, events in my previous body. Even then, I had Sathya or Truth as my Support. A wrestler challenged Me for a fight and he was defeated before a large gathering of villagers. Pained by the insult, he invited Baba for a second tussle the next day, so that he might win back his lost reputation. The man swore that if defeated again, he would wear a long rough kafni and move about with his head covered in cloth. He dared Baba too to swear like-wise. Baba was in no mood to enter the arena again and he was quite prepared to concede the fellow the victory he craved. So he accepted defeat and himself donned the kafni and the kerchief. The wrestler felt great remorse and his insolence melted away. He appealed to Baba to resume his usual style of dress and released him from the obligation. But Baba stuck to his word. He was Sathya Itself. Then, as He is now, He wore the new attire.

But, the point i like the most about Baba's kafni is the observation by Srinivas Rao Gaaru:

Shirdi Baba's kafni, which came to his knees due to his height, covers Swami fully

Photomontage created from: Back cover of Shri Sai Satcharita—Verse by Verse and Wikipedia

The Case of the Sniffing Boss

After his quick handling of the case of the mai1ing domain, the TanSeer was involved in the following IM conversation:

WazZup: hey, you free for a while?
TanSeer: Sure, WazZup.
WZ: i am having a feeling that my work email is being read by my boss.
TS: oh…
WZ: whatever i am planning to do, my boss seems to be getting wind of it.
TS: oh, can't expect better from bosses; as it is, BOSS is double-SOB spelled backwards ;-)
WZ: heh, heh
TS: Anyway, where's your email hosted?
WZ: on google apps
TS: Oh, with your own domain name?
WZ: that's right
TS: Have you ever left your computer unlocked?
WZ: i wouldn't do that; but there was an instance when i was working with my boss on my computer, and some visitor dropped in, couldn't bring myself to lock the comp with the boss right there, but i was away only for a couple of minutes; when i got back, the boss was right there, waiting for me; he couldn't have done much in those two minutes
TS: Is your boss IT-savvy?
WZ: a bit, i guess
TS: Have you set a FWD rule to some other email ID?
WZ: why would i do that? this is my primary email id, with those 2+ gb
TS: Oh, but no harm in checking; click the Settings link at the top-right of your screen and navigate to the Forwarding and Pop tab.
WZ (after a while): son of a bush! his email id is right there in the forward box…
TS: Well, he's a savvy one, your boss; there's no way you can prove that HE put it there
(rest of the conversation deleted)

SKoreaed

There are quite some nationalities out here in Palm Meadows. Kiddo, who's quite a gregarious sort, finds the folks from South Korea the rudest (btw, the South Koreans don't take it very kindly if you wonder whether they are from Korea. It's always South Korea for them). Can't quite understand the reason, but there was an inkling to the same from this incident.

Some folks were out on a golf course, when the South Korean in the group started "waxing" eloquent on how they were the most developed race. The reason: they don't have body hair! Just imagine the sort of brainwashing that must be going on with this sort of crap. He went on to say that the rest of the races weren't far removed from the apes. A white guy in the group shut him permanently with this:

Apes have better sex.

A Tale of Two Ganeshas

Last evening, was at my TaxCon's office to submit the returns for the last financial year. What a racket it has become! All sorts of questions were being asked in the TaxCon's datasheet: for instance, list all credit cards where purchases have been more than 200K. This is the latest requirement from the Income Tax Department, one gathers.

Met SivaKR and PRangarajan of BBU there; they are now with Vitage. They were also zapped by that datasheet; they beat it after a while. Hung around for a while and finally ensured that i didn't have to pay any more tax; submission of documents could be done later. Six more days to go, anyway :-)

On the way back, dropped in to see the Varasiddhi Vinayaka in 4th Block, Jayanagar.

Excusez-moi for the framing, but i got in to the middle path between devotees and squeezed off a quick shot

Without a doubt, this is the sweetest Ganesha i have seen in my life. The priests are extremely humble and the assistant of Chinnadevaru, the head priest, was there. The best thing i like about this temple is, of course, when i hang around for a while in front of the deity, i start crying.

Later, on the drive back home, i noticed something interesting. On the road further down the 560011 Post Office, there are two Ganesha temples. The deity in the smaller one is facing east while the one in the larger newer one looks west. The rush is always there at the smaller one, which reminds me so much of the Sampath Vinayagar temple in Vizag, while there are hardly any folks at the larger temple.

There's an interesting reason for this:

Temples where the deity faces east are the most popular and financially well-off

In వాస్తు వాస్తవాలు (The Secret World of Vastu), the author mentions that western-facing temples all face this issue. Looks like the Gods do not break their own rules :-)

Needless to say, the Varasiddhi Vinayaka temple in 4th Block faces east.

Will India be the Lords?

The Lord's test is tantalizingly (love that word) poised.

If the weather holds, my "predilection" would be India as the winners. The compound of the day (2+3 + 7 + 2+0+0+7 = 21 = 3) favors India, which adds up to 12.

Will Karthik do what Sachin hasn't been able to; score a century at Lord's?

Let's see.

Sammy's Twins

The second day of the Chinese course went off nice. Since both Kannada and Telugu are similar to Sanskrit, both Sammy and i didn't have much of an issue negotiating the slightly different and intriguing sounds in Mandarin; for instance, z is pronounced as the tsa sound as in Vatsa.

Later, Sammy took me to the KGA to solve the crosswords of the Daily Telegraph and the Times. The Daily Telegraph one went the way it should; the clues were cracked slowly, but surely. One we both liked was:

Ready to drop, like a boxer (3-5)

with a g at the end of the first word.

Sammy gave a couple of fundas as well. The government can only provide equal opportunity, it cannot make everyone equal. Since, as the Vidhana Soudha proudly proclaims, Government Work is God's Work, God must be using a similar idea. "Macha, I have given you the ability (to realize Me); now, it's up to you"!

Later, he came home. We were watching the Open in Scotland, when i asked him what was the most important thing he learned while playing golf: for instance, living in the present. He said, interestingly, that it was to be in a state of No mind.

What ails the one?

With apologies to Isaac "Black Widowers" Asimov

There was this nice Google Group, which was chugging along like sixty.

One day, there was an accusation: One of the members had been sending weird messages on the side to another person on the list. The accused, who went by the alias of PradBrit on GMail, flatly denied this as claptrap.

The TanSeer in the group was summoned. This was a man who saw things on a tangent. While at work, he looked as if he was seeing things in one of those funny mirrors in a fair, which gave him a view denied others. Needless to say, he was a very good caricaturist.

He looked at the email ID of the accused. It went:

PradBrit@gmai1.com

He looked at it some more and increased the font a wee bit:

PradBrit@gmai1.com

and then some more:

PradBrit@gmai1.com

Then he noticed what was just a glimmer of a suspicion a few minutes before. The letter before the .com wasn't a letter at all. It was a digit.

The domain wasn't GMail after a11. Everybody lived happi1y ever after.

It's Raining Languages

Note: Photos added subsequently

Started off on learning Mandarin today.

Over the weekend, Sammy pinged me saying that he was starting off on Chinese in a few days and would i be interested? What's good for the careful Capri is great for the capricious Gemini :-)

Also, since it was a D8 and a Tuesday, the same combo as both our dates of birth, i thought it was a good omen.

Meandering in Mandarin

The teacher, Niraj Sinha, looking like a kid at 26, runs Nilian Chinese Academy. He had this nice one-room setup in Jagadish Nagar to teach about ten folks. Since Sammy and i were the only ones interested in a weekday course, we have a very good student-reacher ratio :-)

My Chinese Tutor

Some interesting facts about Mandarin:

• It is the language spoken by the maximum # of native speakers, a mind-numbing 867.2 million
• Since letters are more pictorial representations, its alphabet comprises around 160,000 characters. You are literate if you can read 5,000 of them, educated if you can do 6,000, and a marvel if you can crack 10,000.
• Characters are quite symbolic. The character for Good is created out of an image of a Mother carrying her baby, while that for Home is a roof over a pig.
• Sammy was mentioning that while a person who speaks only Cantonese can't understand another who speaks just Mandarin, both of them can very happily read each other's newspaper! The reason: the script is the same, but the sounds are different. Ah, what a far cry from Indian languages.
• You don't have to really learn the characters to speak. There's an easy way out called Pinyin, which is a basically a Romanized version of the Chinese script. Was wondering whether one could chat using Pinyin, and Niraj showed that then and there on his IM tool (not sure whether the Pinyin gets recast in Chinese script on the other end).
• The same sound (say, da) might mean different things based on the intonation: dā ("to hand over something"), dá ("to answer"), dã ("to hit"), and dà ("big"). That'd be a tricky one.
  
• There's little or no grammar. The tense of a sentence is clarified by using the relevant time-based word (y'day, this morning, tomorrow, etc.) This, i feel, is very good. The main reason i stopped doing the French course at L'Alliance, Chennai was, as Lawrence Elliott put it, the "insidious convolutions of French grammar" (blogged).
  
• Not all sounds can be converted into Chinese characters. Niraj was mentioning how there's no "ja" sound in Chinese and he had to make do with rendering the name of his academy as Nilian, lian meaning lotus, the same as Niraj.
  

With the help of the Chinese Name Generator, i have homed in on my Chinese name:

Nie Shen Ren

Later, in the evening, at the shuttle badminton court, ran into these two French dudes (i can always spot a Frenchie, mainly from their Gallic noses), who keep landing up every once in a while. The younger of the two is a sweet chap, so wished him with a "Comment ça va?" While going, the chap says: "Au 'voir". That's all we say, but it's nice.

Reminds me of Feynman's Latin or Italian? from Surely…:

And way up on the other side of a long area of grass, there's an Italian gardener putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily, "REzza ma LIa!" I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian--maybe it's Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.

And, of course, there's always Marcus Santamaria's Spanish is Easy site and blog.

The Devotee and the Devourer

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxDevDev

Saw an unusual line in a blog:

Let me, Thy prey, Surrender unto Thee and be consumed, and so have peace, O Arunachala!

Felt lucky for it, the entire line, and ended up on Poetry Chaikhana, Sacred Poetry from Around the World:

28.
Let me, Thy prey, surrender unto Thee and be consumed, and so have Peace, Oh Arunachala!
I came to feed on Thee, but Thou has fed on me; now there is Peace, Oh Arunachala!

God as the Devourer! Shucks, what a thought. As it is, Arunachala is the Fire aspect of Shiva.

An earlier post, Arunachala Ramana, had a similar idea, but in a more pleasant manner:

I have seen a wonder, a magnetic hill that forcibly attracts the soul. Arresting the activities of the soul who thinks of it even once, drawing it to face itself, the One, making it thus motionless like itself, it feeds upon that sweet [pure and ripened] soul. What a wonder is this! O souls, be saved by thinking of this great Arunagiri, which shines in the mind as the destroyer of the soul [the ego].

The Greatest Praise One Can Get

The other day, my Google alert for Shivkumar Sharma gave me a very pleasant surprise. Got this link on Technorati. The very first photo didn't look like one, when i realized that it was my own posting on Flickr many moons ago!

Shivji & Swami

Shivji narrates in Journey with a Hundred Strings: (paragraph with highlighted section above; here're the readable pages)

I also chanced to be present for Baba's sixtieth-birthday celebrations, where he invited me to perform before the massive audience of five lakh. As I heard Baba's words, my eyes filled with tears. 'Shiv Kumar Sharma is one of my truest followers, and if you desire to experience Nirvana in music, listen to his music.' This moment and these words have stayed in my heart, giving me solace in times of stress or sorrow. Playing before such a massive gathering, packed with Baba's worshippers from over all the world, is something I shall never forget. When I finished, Baba called me to his side before the august crowd and international press, and slipped a diamond ring around my finger.

Had the sense to take Shivji's autograph on the same page.

But what i really like about Shivji is how well his head is screwed on. In 'No matter how well I play, I’m never satisfied', one finds:

You have got national awards and international recognition. Have they changed your outlook towards music?
Getting awards is nice but I derive maximum satisfaction from the response I get from the audience. If a person comes to me after the show to say that he or she was moved to tears, that is the best award.

Personally, listening to his Water has always been a joy.

WYSIWYG*

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxWYSIWYG

Sri Ramakrishna used to tell his devotees:

You don't have to do all that I did. It's enough if you do one-sixteenth of that.

Probably that's why he had 16 direct disciples. And, looking at all the stuff they went through, one can only say they were kings without the kinks; rajas without the rajas.

A couple of days back, came to the end of the chapter on Swami Vijnanananda (Wiki) in God Lived With Them where i found two interesting XPs: (page 620, bottom)

One day he was joking with a devotee: "Do you know the meaning of the word rum? [In Bengali it sounds like Ram, i.e., Lord Ramachandra.] It is a kind of liquor. You cannot know it unless you drink it. Similarly, you cannot know the glory of God's name unless you chant it."

and right on the next page: (621, bottom)

Once a prominent barrister of Calcutta said to the swami, "Maharaj, we don't understand God; we understand money, property, and the material world." Swami Vijnanananda listened to him with closed eyes. Then, placing his hand on his own chest, he said: "Whatever you say is true from your standpoint, but I have experienced the one pervading consciousness behind this manifested world. I have seen it with my own eyes." The barrister was speechless.

His XPs of the "one pervading consciousness" are detailed in pp. 608-9: (click the image below for a readable version)

The swami gives a simple method to check whether a vision is genuine or not: (page 603, bottom)

During his early days in Allahabad, Vijnanananda would go for a daily bath before sunrise in the Triveni (literally, three braids), the confluence of three holy rivers. One day after his bath, while reciting a hymn to the Mother Ganges, Vijnanananda had a vision. The goddess Mother Triveni appeared as a beautiful young girl with three braids hanging down her back and then disappeared again into the water. He was overwhlemed by the vision. After chanting, when he began to walk towards the ashrama, he saw Mother Triveni walking in the same direction with her braids dangling. After a while she disappeared. When Brahmananda heard about this vision, he confirmed it as genuine. Vijnanananda himself said: "The test of a true vision is this: It leaves a lasting spiritual impression on the mind that generates awareness and bliss. I still get joy when i think of that virginal form of the Divine Mother."

* The computer term applies to real life as well :-)

Belt up or go bust

A stunning video on why everyone in a vehicle should strap up!

Snapping the Web

Sometime back, added Snap Shots to my blog.

However, felt that it's "TDS" for every blogger and web site to do this sort of fingering to their web/blog template. The correct place it belonged was as a browser extension.

And, sure enough, they have released a Firefox add-on. The sensible guys that they are, they have done it for Firefox first.

Won't be long before this company too is snapped up by Google :-)

See it in action for a sample blog: (Gopa, i presume that you have not added Snap Shots to your blog)

The Wonder of Cristo Redentor

The New 7 Wonders of the World are out and it's a no-brainer that the Taj Mahal made it. Last week, AirTel sent an SMS asking folks to vote for the TAJ by sending an SMS free!

What i really liked was that Christo Redentor, my favorite shot of Jesus Christ in Rio ("God created the Earth in six days, on the seventh He created Rio") de Janeiro, was also there in that list.

It always reminds me of Mt. 11:28:

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

You can see a 3D version of the same in Google Earth.

Like to think that this is the inspiration for this wonderful church my parents and i saw just after Nevadihalli bridge while driving down to Mangalore on 27.APR.2007:

A Privilege

FedEx Makes It Five in a Row at Wimbeldon

It was a great privilege to watch that epic FedEx vs. Rafa clash at Wimbledon. It will be talked about for a long time.

If ever there was a ding-dong battle, this was it. FedEx went through in the tie-breakers in the 1st and 3rd sets while Rafa easily had the better of him in the 2nd and 4th. Rafa had his chances in the 5th, but squandered away those break points in the 2nd and 4th games of the last set.

Anyway, i was totally glued to the TV right through those 3 hours and 45 minutes. It was paisa vasool or VFM (Value for Money) through and through.

In the process, he equaled the five in a row of Bjorn Borg.

Björn Borg Digests That Fact

Kiddo had the last word when he observed:

Your zodiac tried his best, but mine prevailed.

Ah well, FedEx is a D8C8, anyway.

Mind, the Body & Soul?

Was "mule"-ing over some stuff from What Defines an Incarnation? this morning:

Two observations as a prelude to the same:

1. Edgar Cayce says that the soul enters the body at the time of delivery, not at the time of conception. From a design standpoint, this makes a lot of sense (based on the condition of the body, allocate the soul). So, naturally, one person wondered who sustains the fetus. Edgar Cayce answered that it was the Spirit.
2. Swami talks of two birds on the branch of a tree. One is going through the motions of Life, while the other is just observing.

After reading 1, I wasn't clear on the equation between the soul and the Spirit. A little while after reading 2, I hired a driver. One day, while going back home, I observed the following:

• All along, i was driving.
• When the driver came in, i moved to the background.

Suddenly, it struck me that it's the same at the time of delivery. The Spirit moves to the background and is an observer for the rest of one's Life.

This background Spirit is the Oversoul or the Paramatma and what we XP as the Conscience, constantly guiding us in Life, if we would just listen to it :-)

What was bothering me was the driver in front, with a mind of his/her own. But what about his/her soul?

It's my hypothesis that when a jiva, an ordinary soul, enters the body, it becomes the mind. That is, the mind is the result of the soul entering the body. And once a baby is delivered, there are only two entities within it:

• The mind, which becomes the driver, for better or for worse
  
• The Paramatma, who does back-seat driving only when asked :-)

At the time of death, the mind is dissolved and the soul, free once more, moves on: (holographic examples within brackets)

• To merge in the Great Infinite Spirit (like the river joining the sea), or
  
• To Heaven/Hell (water evaporated into the skies) and go through the cycle once more.
  

This also helps me understand an observation by Sri Ramakrishna better:

When a man merges his buddhi, his intelligence, in Bodha, Consciousness, then he attains the Knowledge of Brahman; he becomes buddha, enlightened.

Global Swarming

or: How al-Qaida Learned al-Gebra and made the గుండె go గాబరా

Suzanne White FWed an article that had an interesting section:

Gen. Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, recently noted in a speech that during the cold war "the enemy was easy to find, but hard to finish," because the Soviet Union was so big and powerful. "Intelligence was important" back then, he added, "but it was overshadowed by the need for sheer firepower."

In today's war against terrorist groups, said General Hayden, "it's just the opposite. Our enemy is easy to finish, but hard to find. Today, we are looking for individuals or small groups planning suicide bombings, running violent Jihadist Web sites, sending foreign fighters into Iraq."

Heck, this is exactly what the latest NatGeoMag was talking about in an exquisite piece called Swarm Behavior. Don't miss it; i particularly liked this:

"In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair."

A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

Arunachala Ramana

Ever since my visit to Tiruvannamalai in mid-April, Arunachala has been getting under my skin.

He favored me with an unusual shot when i took this:

Thanks to the cloud, the top of the hill became a full circle very nicely (detail below).

The same adorns my pooja room now (large-size and original-size photos).

Later, He got into my eye on 04.MAY; more in MOPA.

Nowadays, just to think of that majestic hill, is to become "mind"-less, with tears of joy streaming down the face.

Where the mind is at rest, that's your Guru.

What's the power of Arunachala?

Ramana Maharshi tells Viswanatha Swami: (The Power of the Presence, Part Two, page 230, bottom)

You have learned all this (Sanskrit verses). Not so in my case. Before I came here I knew nothing and had learned nothing. Some mysterious power took possession of me and effected a thorough transformation. Whoever knew then what was happening to me? Your father, who was intending in his boyhood to go to the Himalayas for tapas, became the head of a big family. And I, who knew nothing, have been drawn and kept here for good! When I left home in my seventeenth year, I was like a speck swept away by a tremendous flood. I knew neither my body nor the world, whether it was day or night. It was difficult even to open my eyes—the eyelids seemed to be glued down. My body became a mere skeleton. Visitors pitied my plight because they were not aware how blissful I was. It was only years later that I came across the term 'Brahman' when I happened to look into some books on Vedanta which had been brought to me. I was amused and said to myself, 'Is this [experience or state] known as Brahman?'

In The Power of Arunachala, one reads:

I have seen a wonder, a magnetic hill that forcibly attracts the soul. Arresting the activities of the soul who thinks of it even once, drawing it to face itself, the One, making it thus motionless like itself, it feeds upon that sweet [pure and ripened] soul. What a wonder is this! O souls, be saved by thinking of this great Arunagiri, which shines in the mind as the destroyer of the soul [the ego].

Later on in the same article, one observes:

There are many incidents in the life of Sri Bhagavan that illustrate his great love for the divine name Arunachala, but perhaps the most striking occurred during his last moments. About twenty-five minutes before he left his body, the assembled devotees began to chant Aksharamanamalai. Hearing the name of his beloved Arunachala, Sri Bhagavan opened his eyes, which shone with love, and tears of ecstasy rolled down his cheeks.

It was the privilege of JB and mine to be present when the same was sung around the time (8:47 PM) of Bhagavan's samadhi on 14.APR (this year).

At the very end of The Power of the Presence, Part Two (page 249, middle), one finds:

A devotee once asked Bhagavan: 'Who are you Arunachala Ramana? Are you God or a siddha?' Bhagavan who was living in Virupaksha Cave at the time, replied in verse: 'The Supreme Self, the blissful pure consciousness sporting within the heart of all gods and creatures, is Arunachala Ramana.'

A Case of Mistaken Identity

My Google Alert for Ramana sent me a link to this love-ly video:

Bridging Heaven & Earth Show # 68 with Ramana & Lorin Grean

It had some very interesting stuff right at the start of the discussion with Yukio Ramana (i found him very soothing):

… a case of mistaken identity that one thinks that one is this person that's caught up in all these problems…to see oneself as one truly is, with no central location at all.

PY says this in a slightly different way:

center everywhere, circumference nowhere

Can't help recalling this discussion with Sri Ramakrishna as well:

MASTER: "This world is the lila of God. It is like a game. In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil. The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation.
...
HARI: "But this play of God is our death."

MASTER (smiling): "Please tell me who you are. God alone has become all this-maya, the universe, living beings, and the twenty-four cosmic principles. 'As the snake I bite, and as the charmer I cure.' It is God Himself who has become both vidya and avidya. He remains deluded by the maya of avidya, ignorance. Again, with the help of the guru, He is cured by the maya of vidya, Knowledge.

Langda Tyagi

Manish made a surprise visit last morning and dropped off a hamper of langda mangoes, brought all the way from UP. Pretty nice of him. They were a bit raw, so we left them to ripen. WiFi clarified that the green of the mango never goes, only a few streaks of yellow kick in to indicate that it's ripened.

In the evening, Nicolasaki was eying them as she likes them raw with a dash of salt. Told her that i was planning to offer them to the Old Mother, the next day being a Tuesday. She dropped the idea after that.

So Langda Swaha became Langda Tyagi, who is, of course, my favorite character in Omkara.

A few months after i bought the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (on Pi day in 1992), one of my TCS pals casually opened it and was quite zapped as he came upon this passage in the Master's Visit to Vidyasagar:

What is the significance of the Gita? It is what you find by repeating the word ten times. It is then reversed into 'tagi', which means a person who has renounced everything for God. And the lesson of the Gita is: 'O man, renounce everything and seek God alone.' Whether a man is a monk or a householder, he has to shake off all attachment from his mind.

For all those who are quibbling :-) about the tagi and the tyagi, here's a slightly longer discussion: (source)

Sri Ramakrishna: What happens when you read the Gita? If you repeat the word Gita ten times, it becomes tagi. Only he who has renounced his attachment to "lust and greed" and who can direct a hundred percent of his love to God can understand the essence of the Gita. One doesn’t have to read the whole of the Gita. Just say, "Tagi, tagi", and it is done.

Dr. Sarkar: Tagi needs the extra letter "y" to become tyagi [the correct Sanskrit word for a renouncer].

Mani: Goswami Navadvip said to Thakur that one can do without adding the letter "y". When Thakur attended the festival at Panihati, Goswami Navadvip talked to him about this context of the Gita. The Goswami said, "By the root 'tag' it becomes 'taga'. Add the 'i' suffix to tag and it becomes 'tagi'. Both 'tagi' and 'tyagi' convey the same meaning."

Wah TAJ Boliye

Looks like quite some action is coming up this Saturday (7.07.007).

• Lots of folks planning to take their saat pheras at 07:07 PM
• The New Seven Wonders of the World will be announced.

If you haven't already done it, you can vote for the Taj Mahal by sending an SMS with the text: (source reference)

TAJ

to:

4567

from any mobile phone in India.

NEW WONDER: A hot air balloon replica of Taj Mahal near the monument at Agra. Balloonists from all over the world have pledged to vote for its inclusion in the new list of seven wonders of the world.

"Four"gone, high-fiver

One more week to go for Wimbledon, but looking at the form King Federer is in, one can safely say that he'd equal the five-in-a-row feat of Bjorn Borg. The ToI reports:

It was billed as a showdown between Roger Federer and Marat Safin but it proved something of a damp squib as top seed Federer, gunning for a fifth consecutive title here, dismantled hulking Russian Safin 6-1, 6-4, 7-6 on Centre Court. The Swiss lost his last Grand Slam clash against Safin in a memorable semifinal at the Australian Open in 2005 but he dished out ruthless vengeance here with a masterly display.

"I don’t know if I played phenomenal, I just think I played the right way against Marat,” Federer said after his 51st consecutive grass-court victory.

As it is, the final is on his day, the 8th.