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World Classical Tamil Conference – A Perspective

Updated 27 June 2010 6:45PM -  The 78 page conference schedule is online at the wctc2010 site for those that want to use data to test MSS Pandian’s assertions that i refer below.

Updated 27 June 2010 6:45PM: Several people asked me how much time it took to do the research. The hypothesis was published on this blog as a post . I had formulated the hypothesis a few months before publishing. It took me nearly a year from then to collect the evidences needed, although the paper is only 5 pages long.

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My paper presentation

It was  a great honor for me to present at this conference. My presentation was alongside Asko Parpola, the man who won the Classical Tamil award from the government.  I presented my paper on 25th June 2010 at the conference. As it turned out, the prior track in the same room was delayed by 20-30 min and i got allotted 10-12 min by Session Chair Dr. Iravatham Mahadevan. Fortunately, i had prepared the previous night to deliver it in 10 min anticipating such schedule issues. On the day i managed to finish it in 9 min 30 seconds.

I had recorded my talk and have uploaded the slides with audio to slideshare and it is embedded below.

Session Chairman’s comments

Mahadevan Sir mentioned in his closing comments that as a 81 year old he was passing the baton to young researchers like me, which made me swell with pride. Another proud moment – later after we got down from the dais, he said “we have been looking at the seal for 40+ years and you are the first one to find the differences in the bangle in the same seal”.

Thank you all

A thank you to all my colleagues and twitter pals and my family for encouraging me every step of the way in the conduct of my research. As a newbie researcher into the IVC (just over 2 years), it is a huge honor for me that my paper was selected for the conference amongst the 1000s of papers that were submitted.

Responding to Right Wing Criticisms Hurled at the Conference

Before i begin, i want to make sure you all know that i have no political connections to the DMK party or its members.

The first set of criticisms come from the right wing Hindutva folks for whom any linguistic pride in anything other than Sanskrit or Hindi is Chauvinism. This is pure unadulaterated bullshit. That India should speak one language and have one religion is based upon very very outdated theories on nation-building. One would think that with the demise of the Soviet Union that such outdated theories will be in the dustbin. Not so for our right wing which still wants to cling to it.  

Obviously due to the fact that the conference is about Tamil’s antiquity, several paeans to Tamil was sung. Any one with a half a brain engaged in research can easily tell that Tamil’s antiquity is well-supported by incontrovertible evidence. And that the Dravidian language family is likely older than Sanskrit and Indo Aryan Languages in the Indian Subcontinent. There is enough evidence to support this claim as well for those who will look with an open mind.

Responding to Scholarly Criticism

Some scholars that i respect have also criticized the conference.  This article by MSS Pandian of N Delhi is an example. Some of his criticism about the extravagance is probably reasonable. In all fairness to the TN Govt,  any event of such scale where several lakhs of people attended, is bound to raise questions of extravagance.  But we expect more from a scholar like Pandian. Let us look at this statement from his article:

The academic sessions, which are going to be intellectually enervating, have no less than 20 papers on Karunanidhi and five on his daughter Kanimozhi. If Karunanidhi has claimed that about 5000 scholars from all over India are participating in the conference, he has his own standards of scholarship.

I doubt if Pandian even cared to look at the conference agenda. I have the agenda with me and i looked through it. There were approximately 1200 papers and i could count 6 or 7 papers dealing with MK’s and Kanimozhi’s literary works [Not to mention that MK is a serious and legit Tamil scholar]. Let us give the benefit of doubt to Pandian and assume it is 25 papers.  25 out 0f 1200 comes to 2%. I personally attended several paper presentations and the amount and the high quality of research being discussed is just mind-boggling. To dismiss all the 1200 papers because 25 are potentially tainted is ridiculous.  We expect better from people like Pandian.

My Own  Impresions

There were 2 parts to the conference – the public part and the research part. The public part drew several lakh people and was chaotic much like any tourist trade fair. The agenda was also quite political to further the interests of the DMK party.  The research part is where i spent most of my time. It was a spectacular conference with all the arrangements nearly flawless. Students from local colleges were the volunteer force and they did a very good job of running the conference. the food/sanitation arrangements were extremely good. The CODISSIA hall is world class. I hope all of the facilities are not temporary. It doesn’t look like they were but i wasn’t sure. On the whole, i think the TN Govt must be congratulated for putting up such a grand event. Wonder why such a  research conference doesn’t take place atleast once in 2 years.

Conclusion

I believe that India’s strength is its diversity. Language is a key element of that diversity. I wish all the major languages of India hold such research conferences and encourage true research in the respective languages so that we don’t lose the priceless heritage available in every language.

Additional Notes & References:

1. Asko Parpola’s acceptance speech. The Hindu has uploaded his entire dissertation online.

2. Asko Parpola presented his theory on the Wild Ass just before my presentation. It was a brilliant presentation with the depth of research that is stupendous. You can read Parpola’s Op Ed on the subject in The Hindu.

2. Madhan Karky has uploaded some pictures from the event.

3. You can read the coverage of the event on twitter by several people including myself at the hashtag #WCTC.

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Tablets – New Wine In Your Old Bottle

“Well Apple fans needs a new device every few years like an addict who needs a new high with a larger dose or different weed” This was what I thought when Apple announced iPad back in January 2010.

For the last six months, many electronics consumers are excited about the arrival of the new(?) category devices – tablets. Though the concept is nothing new, the latest avatar use best of the breed technologies – touchscreens, longer battery life, more power and memory and a strong ecosystem of applications and content. All forms of media is going agog over the Apple’s announcement – some excited, some disappointed but mostly talking about this. Instead of going deep into the technology details, I wanted to touch upon few things like social aspects, economics and media impact of such devices.

There is certain group we call early adapters/ Apple fanboys/ Kool Aid-geeks who will but anything that starts with an ‘i’ and sold by Apple’. Let us keep them aside and talk about regular consumers. What would they look for in a tablet and how will they use it? One thing that occurs to me whenever I use iPhone either at my office or my couch is – screen size. Many times I find that the full browser in the iPhone is underutilized due to the smaller size. It has great form factor, usually responsive though I might like a little more processing power and longer battery life, and importantly literally unlimited choice of applications.  But to read any thing using Safari or mail apps, is a royal pain. Now ipad is literally 3 times the diagonal width of iPhone. Will that be good enough for our needs? We will see.

Extensibility – As we all know, with iphone 3G,  Apple showed the world, that hardware and OS are only so much. It is the applications that matter.  With at least 150K potential applications  that can be readily used, the ipad is truly powerful.  I think we can easily replace, many special devices from POS terminals to FedEx delivery guys terminals with special apps. The sky is the limit I think.

Economics – Today we have to spend $300 (in US) for any decent net book.  If we consider a typical net book buyer and their primary reason to buy such a computer, it is usually to check email (web based probably) , browse Internet,  chat, view photos and social media. May be watch few movies though the integrated video cards are usually sloppy.  All these can be done in an ipad elegantly but more. In my opinion, spending that extra $200 (some say Apple tax) may be worth it, particularly, if the plan is to buy now. If we can wait for 8 more months, I expect to see tablets from HP, HTC and Motorola (and Nokia) with more power and battery life, better built in accessories like webcam for less than $300. Buy it or wait, still worth it than Net book. For enterprises, the low cost barrier and high usability should be a very good deal.

The TCO for a typical laptop (say from Lenova), costs enterprises anywhere from 2K to 3k with 2 years warranty, plus high cost software. My guesstimate the same for a tablet will be 60% of that or laptops. Plus less shoulder pains for the workers carrying them.

Social Impact – Amazon, in a way, paved way for these sub 10″ tablets with it’s best selling Kindle. I did not use it much, but it says something if it is the best selling item on their site.  Apple added multi-touch, and I am sure Android will polish it and perhaps make it better as well as open source it.  I will not be surprised if tablets replace typical laptops people carry around. For example, at my work I use Outlook 70% of the time, and remaining 30% all other apps including browsers, skype etc. All these and more can be done with a tablet. With such a potential for becoming ubiquitous, will the laptops become extinct? For example I did not see more than 20 CRT consoles in my entire work place. They got replaced by laptops or laptops with port replicators connected to keyboard, mouse and LCD consoles. Well we can get these for tablets like ipad now. And it is only beginning. Will school children just take one tablet instead of their entire bag of books? What about Doctors, sales people, executives? Why not?  Suddenly useful computing power. It doesn’t matter if I have a computer with 3 GHz processor in my home. And if it has only few free and purchased applications. With these tablets, and their apps price dynamics, we have very high utilization of mobile computing power.

Ergonomics Let us give it to Apple. They craft beautiful hardware. It is like an art and design philosophy.  But others are not far behind. I am very impressed by HTC, Samsung and Nokia.

What do readers think about tablets? Quick poll.

• What is your typical usage of personal computer?
• What are your thoughts on the tablets?
• Do you plan to purchase one?
• How do you want to use tablets, if you purchase one?
• Do you agree to what I wrote above
• Are there any other additional aspects we can cover around the tablets?

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Can positive experiences be life changing?

I will soon be embarking on a trip to Nigeria as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program (https://www-146.ibm.com/corporateservicecorps/). Lots of folks who have been through the program have blogged about their experience as life changing. And this got me thinking – Will my trip be life altering too? My guess – probably not. And here is why – I cannot think of one event in my life where my perspective and principles (if I had any ) has changed dramatically. Yes, there might have been tweaks here and there, but not diametrically opposite view.

When my daughter was born, I was obviously elated, but I did not have that ‘aha’ moment where I looked at my daughter’s eyes for the first time and everything changed. When people say things change for them in such a moment, I cannot grasp what that change could be.  I love my daughter to death and yes certain things changed in my life when she was born (like it does with marriage etc.), but my outlook towards life and for the most part perspectives remained mostly the same.

Recently, my classmate lost his wife and son to a tragic accident and it got me thinking more about my own family and daughter. Is it that for some people it is only negative experiences that can be life altering.  You do not realize what you have unless it is gone and only then does it have an impact?

Or is that I am just a cold hearted person and wired differently?

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Just an opinion on “Indian Culture”

What I want to share is just a personal opinion, hoping to know what others think about it.

I was travelling in the U.S recently and had a chance to interact to few of my close friends from college.When we were discussing about our kids and how they have grown are interacting with us, this thought came across to me.

Is Indian culture about the way we talk, behave, dress or arts etc? I felt maybe it is something a little different.

There are two traits which is strong in the environment which makes the Indian culture Hierarchy and Resource Constraints.

 Hierarchy

Whether we like it hierarchy exists everywhere, but it is transforming. In my house even today I take permission( to be honest at least FYI my dad if I am going to be late in coming back). One thing this helps me in work it is much easier for me handle hierarchies than my counterparts in U.S. Interestingly they grew here but have spent close to 20 years there that their thinking has transformed. I am not judging that it is good or bad here. It is an observation. They find it difficult to comprehend this rules of hierarchy in functioning of systems at work or outside. I find U.S returned colleagues struggling to adapt this culture over here.

Resource Constraints

There are resource constraints every where in India. From roads to housing to things at work. Being in I.T I can comment on a few things. Product guys in U.S take RAM on computers for granted.In India it is a struggle to get 2GB machines but newer products expect 8GB to be a decent system requirement.The fact is this is a huge constraint. When I walk into our offices in U.S I find desktops with dual monitors that too 19 inch ones and individual rooms for developers to help them work productively.It is cool and nice. I love dual monitors and I ratify it does improve productivity. But in India dual monitors is unimaginable. Recently I saw LCD monitors fixed on the walls of developers and the developer’s desktop reduced to a foot in breadth. Gosh it causes a serious pain in the neck ( pun intended ). There is no way adjust the angle of those monitors also. Hey screw ergonomics, space matters and real estate is expensive.

But the beauty of Indian culture is to accept these attributes as a natural occurrencea and work with it. Imagine a society where all are equal, life will be quite boring actually. If all are intelligent then the word intelligent becomes “just about average”. In physics if there is now high/low how will the electricity flow. There will be have and have-nots. The challenge in life is to accept and work with it. But it is an interesting game we try to equalize it only to realise, we tipped the scale in another direction. Think about the U.S supporting the mujaheddin to balance out Russia, they ended up creating a different kind of imbalance. We will have resource constraints at all levels and in different contexts. Constraints helps us innovate, invent. This introduces newer constraints. Read this “Parable of Horseshit“  interestingly cars( fuel guzzlers and CO2 emitters) where a solution climatic problem at some point in history now we have it and that is a problem.  I think the nice thing about Indian culture helps you embrace these constraints in a positive manner and work with it. It helps us look at constraints with a more positive attitude at least for me. This culture helps accept a constraints without too much frustration. In India you always expect to have constraints and there is a dearth for resources. The environment helps us build this culture – “there are constraints and challenges learn to work with it to succeed.”. Sometimes I feel the western culture does not have as their environment does have a need for it. Which I think works in that environment.

Would love to hear other thoughts/views on this.

P.S : I have assumed readers are in India when I started writing this post, I realise that there are readers from outside India also. Please read it in this perspective.

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Was the Indus Valley Civilization Illiterate?

Prolog

As mentioned in my previous post , I am pleased to announce that my first paper jointly authored with Priya Raju and NK Sreedhar got published by the International Institute of Tamil Studies.

Background

In 2004, Farmer, Sproat & Witzel released their controversial paper titled [PDF] “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization” . The paper made the claim that the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was illiterate in a forceful and strident manner.

Since then, a number of attempts have been made to disprove this paper. Most of the attempts have tried to use interesting methods – [PDF] statistical techniques, [PDF]conditional entropy , [PDF 7.7MB] markov chain model etc to prove that the Indus inscriptions encode speech.  We had previously covered Asko Parpola’s effort to counter FSW.  Parpola’s efforts were not accepted by FSW.

We found that, to our surprise, many years after FSW, no one actually had published a comprehensive analysis of all the points made by FSW.  We decided to do just that in our paper.

Illiterate Indus?

As a newbie researcher, i found the FSW paper very useful to understand the state of the Indus research. As we researched every point FSW makes, we learnt even more about the IVC.

It was a long grind to get the paper published after several iterations. We are grateful to the International Institute of Tamil Studies for publishing our paper.

Special thanks to Michel Danino, Iravatham Mahadevan, Bryan Wells, M Meenakshisankar, PK Karthik and some reviewers who want to be anonymous  for their painstaking reviews. Iravatham Mahadevan, my guide at the Indus Research Center, went through the paper line by line 3 or 4 times to make it into an academic quality paper.  Special mention goes to Priya Raju for making the paper readable after Michel Danino’s critical review, not to speak of her contribution to the actual research which is quite significant. NK Sreedhar has made several contributions to the paper including the key one on the Singletons.

Thanks to JK at Varnam blog for introducing me to Michel Danino.

Epilog

With all due respect to FSW, we reached the conclusion that most of their arguments can be refuted. The paper can be downloaded at Response_to_FSW2_Paper_v3.1-Final .  If you are really interested in the IVC research, i strongly recommend that you read the FSW paper as well as our response to it. Please chime in with your comments.