Obsolescence, nothing escapes your wicked ways

 

Obsolescence, nothing escapes your wicked ways    

An all-original poem by Sujay Rao Mandavilli

 

Obsolescence, you always creep in,

Intransigence is your sister twin,  

Neither showing your fangs, nor raising your wings,

Non-change and non-progress are your veritable offsprings,  

Neither making your presence felt,

Yet everything scourged and bent,

You make everything seem and appear antiquated,

You make everything only fit in due course to be discarded,

You make everything seem and appear out of date,

Many are ready to bite your wicked bait,  

You make everything seem and appear old-fashioned,

With progress, growth and vitesse effectively pinioned,

You make everything seem and appear no longer fit for general use,

Everything loses steam in due course as your icy venom is let loose,

Obsolescence you always sneak in stealthily,

Obsolescence you crawl in and creep in through the back door sneakily,

Informing no one of your whereabouts or its coordinates,

Until all endeavour from its dyed in the wool tradition aberrates,

Unprepared, unsuspecting and ill-equipped you will be,

Though the results will eventually be there for all to see,                 

Never leave yourself off guard,

Never let yourself off the hook,

Obsolescence will catch up with you by hook or by crook,

Always be on your alert,

Always be on your vigil,             

Even the wise and the erudite shall not be spared,

Truth be told and bared,

Only the savvy and the adaptable will,

Technology is alone not to blame,

Though it has a role to play, too, all the same,  

Attitude, dogma and ideology are largely to blame too,

With self-imposed limits to the freedom of inquiry,

The vicious noise of other peoples voices snuff out all forms of enquiry,

Ideology makes us blind, it makes us immune to veracity,

To the perils and pitfalls of reality,

So is your inability to renew yourself anew,

And play your game wisely too,

Nonchalance is also a major culprit,                                          

Even as man cries out hoarse from the pulpit,

Innovation is stifled, its benign hands quashed,

Creativity is made a mockery of, and in turn smashed,

Despondency is let loose again,

Rigidity reigns supreme,

With no cautionary aposeme,

Ignorance is rampant,

And proves to be a veritable accelerant,

We wallow in his senseless arrogant proclamations and pompous naivety,

Dyed in the wool approaches lend their weight and abnormity,

And prevent you from bringing yourself uptodate with reality,

Drawing down all forms of preposity,

Only after its heavy and death clad hand has laid,

And all hope for the march of progress has smeared,

You blame your parents and your grandparents,

But obsolescence destroys in its wicked turn, all hopes for assonance,

And you shall fall victim and fall prey too,

Sooner or later,

To the mighty and unwavering hand of obsolescence,

All will fall and will be doomed.  

 

 

 

 

Why Indus script decipherment-based approaches must be abandoned in Indology

 Trying to read the Indus script as any one language is practically untenable and absurd. This is not only because the average length of the inscriptions is short - 4.6 signs, but also because most of the signs would obviously have been word signs (even though the Indus script was a logo-syllabic script as evidenced by the Dholavira signboard which points to the existence of larger inscriptions perhaps for more specialized use) -the presence of a large number of word signs would have been in large part due to the polyglot nature of the Indus valley - the signs would have had to be read by merchants, traders and artisans speaking different languages from different regions of the civilization - Trying to use prefixes and suffixes to read it as any language is obviously absurd and highly unworkable. I can use this "method" to decipher it as half the languages on the face of the planet earth. Naturally, people trying to decipher it as Sanskrit, Dravidian or any other language for that matter have also been unsuccessful. This approach is not just outdated or obsolete - it is antiquated, prehistoric and antediluvian. The first step must be to jettison it before we can make any meaningful progress in Indology.

Read my two papers on the Indus script and my paper on literacy in Post-Harappan India

THE LANGUAGES OF THE HARAPPANS AND THE LINGUISTIC IDENTITY OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION

 

THE LANGUAGES OF THE HARAPPANS AND THE LINGUISTIC IDENTITY OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION 

This is an extremely complex issue and needs to be treated with the attention it deserves. We also need to be prepared to deal with a high level of complexity always, and at all times. The IVC was pre-Sanskritic given that the IVC went into terminal decline in 1900 BC, and disappeared entirely by 1300-1400 BC unlike Vedic culture which flourished till 600 BC and beyond. The IVC also lay to the west of the Aryavarta. The IVC began from the Baluchistan region where Mehrgarh is located, while the Vedic homeland is to the north of the Punjab. It is also unlikely that so many millions of people all the way up to the Iran border were conversing in Sanskrit. There are also many different aspects of Indian religious traditions, not just Vedic. There were many different languages and language groups in the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent, even though a majority were speaking so-called IE languages. We had Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian languages, Burushaski/Proto-Burushaski, (isolate) etc. Since the people living in the Gujarat -Saurashtra region of the IVC did not migrate eastward to the Gangetic plains, it is likely that the early languages of this region were linear antecedents of the present-day languages of this region, albeit subsequently Sanskritized. We also had the vassal Ahar, Jorwe, Banas, Kayatha cultures to the east of the IVC who may have been speaking their own distinct and separate languages. Some researchers also claim that some Munda like languages were spoken by some people in the region, though all claims needs to be constantly scrutinized and validated. Therefore, the linguistic situation in the region is extremely complex indeed as it will be, given the fact the we are dealing with an area that stretches from Iran in the west to the Gujarat-Maharashtra border in the south to the Punjab region in the north-east.  All these hypotheses are also of course, not mutually exclusive. I had proposed that the Harappans were speaking "Many different languages (probably many different language groups) that included many languages that much later came to be known as the Prakrits of the Gangetic plains - when the migrations to the Gangetic plains took place in 1900 BC- It is also of course highly unlikely that terms such as Prakrits were used in the Indus valley for obvious reasons. This is a no-brainer. Post-Harappan artefacts have been found in many places in the subcontinent as observed by Gregory Possehl. Therefore, there was a continuity between Harappan and Post-Harappan cultures in many places of the subcontinent. Coming to Dravidian, a Dravidian language called Brahui was spoken in Pakistan by relatively small numbers of people- This language has not been proven to be very ancient. However, the presence of Brahui in the region will not automatically preclude the existence of other languages/language groups in the region given the fact that real world issues are always extremely complex, and it is not possible to oversimplify. Read the concept of non self-canceling contradictory evidence. Contradictory evidence is also the biggest blessing we can have in a study of Ancient India. Any one who tries to condense 5000 years of history of a vast region into a few lines will fail spectacularly. Brahui is also classified as a northern Dravidian language, and its speakers do not genetically resemble South Indians. One theory posits and postulates that Brahui speakers migrated from central India in the tenth century after Christ. (Josef Elfenbein and Jules Bloch) All theories must be critically evaluated and interdisciplinary and cross-cultural teams be instituted. Indeed, this is the way forward. The classification of languages into language groups and language subgroups must also be critically reevaluated from time to time. It is also our responsibility to pursue accuracy, and lay the foundations for a scientific temper in India and beyond. A script-based or a decipherment-based approach may not mostly work given that most inscriptions are short, and most signs may have been word signs. This is not withstanding the fact that the Dholavira signboard displays random sign repetition.   

Please read my papers on Indology.