Saturday, September 19, 2020

Interesting word origins of some narcotic drugs

Mostly Indic/dharmika non-fiction with bits of good quality western fiction writing thrown in is an antifragile allocation of scarce reading time. The former eliminates your downside, and sometimes, the latter can pleasantly surprise you. Lee Child is famous for his Jack Reacher series:"A detective series where the detective commits more homicides than he solves". His books have some interesting turn of phrase that makes you think long after you've forgotten the story. Given the current 'drug busts' going on in India and the two rival camps that are slugging it out, here are some interesting word origins summarized from Lee Child's short nonfiction book 'The Hero' (my annotations are in parentheses):

Opium Poppy: western scientific name: Papaver Somniferum (the poppy that carries you to sleep). 

(Modern taxonomy credited to Carl Linnaeus may have been inspired by the traditional Indian Sanskrit approach to naming, and the latter is probably better, as noted in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different':

"..According to the assessment of William Jones, published in 1795, this taxonomy was more advanced than the standard Latin-based ones used by Western botanists. Jones writes: 'I am very solicitous to give Indian plants their true Indian appellations, because I am fully persuaded that Linnaeus himself would have adopted them had he known the learned and ancient language of this country …'")

German Pharmacist Friedrich Serturner refined Opium after several years of tinkering to produce the most potent chemical painkiller known so far.

Morphine: named after the Greek God of dreams.

Rival: from the Latin word Rivalis, one who competes over a river.

Barbarian: Greek word for those 'savages' who were unable to speak Greek. "To the Greeks, all that such people could manage was baa-baa-baa, like sheep. Hence ba-ba-rian." -Lee Child.

Addict: from the Latin word Addictus, a word for a person who is forced to become the slave of his creditor (like the bonded laborers of Zamindars).

A few decades after Morphine's invention, another German chemist, Felix Hoffman was tinkering with Morphine to synthesize Codeine, a milder and less addictive chemical for kids. After many experiments, he ended up creating something that was twice as potent and delivered twice the high of Opium. The chemist claimed it was not in the least bit addictive and it was subsequently put in a variety of western medicines, especially for women and children:

Heroin: from the German word for Heroic.

Hero: phonetic spelling of the Greek word 'gyro'. 

"What was heroic about [Felix Hoffman's] invention? There are two possibilities, I think, in a nineteenth-century context. Either he wanted to imply his product had been on a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, but it had survived, and it had emerged to do good, in the form of bringing pain relief and pleasure to the masses.  Or possibly he wanted to imply his own personal work on the project had been a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils. Either version would have been absurd, given the accidental nature of the discovery. But vanity knows no bounds." - Lee Child.

(A mild disagreement with Lee Child here. Discoveries invariably come from experimentation and field work done by craftsmen and practitioners. These discoveries are far less accidental than they appear to be when viewed from the future. When we patiently experiment and test contraptions in a smart manner that incorporates learning, it enables 'lucky accidents' to happen, or in this case, a bad one.

 

Contextual vs Situational Awareness

This topic came up for discussion in Satsangs earlier around the contextual sensitivity of dharma, ethics, Ayurvedic medicine, Sanskrit in Hinduism and dharma traditions of India.

We probably already have a working understanding of these terms. As part of my professional Ganita/AI work, we employ 'contextual learning' when building automated recommendation and decision support systems. For example, the products and service we would recommend to a traveler depends on many things including their journey context. The same traveler may benefit from different offers from the AI system depending on whether she is traveling on company business or making a leisure trip with her family.

When the lady is walking to her car at night in a dimly lit parking lot, she would benefit from  situational awareness. This SA is about a person knowing what is going on around him/her and anticipating changes. This is known to be particularly important for pilots.

Using the term 'situational dharma' would be tricky and lead to confusion. A useful comparison between these two types of awareness can found here that may be useful  In particular (emphasis mine):

"Situation awareness is a construct to describe operators’ knowledge about a dynamic environment and is defined as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future” by Mica Endsley (Endsley, M.R. (1995) Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems, Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64.).


Context-awareness is a construct to describe capabilities of a system. Useful is the article Dey, A.K. (2001) Understanding and Using Context, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(1), 4 – 7. Dey defines: “A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s tasks.


Sunday, August 16, 2020

#SattvicHamburgers Anyone?

Sattvic Hamburgers?


To make dharma sound 'appealing' and 'contemporary' to westernized audiences and young professionals, a common strategy employed by some Hindu intellectuals is to combine Sanskrit/Indic terms and western categories to produce neologisms.  
 
Examples of oxymorons generated by sandwiching of incompatible Sanskrit/Indic terms and western social/economic/political categories include:

Vedic Liberalism
Dharmic Capitalism
Vedantic Socialism
Hindu Left / Hindu Right
 
Here, an Indic prefix is attached to the western category. Western academia often adds some western prefix to an Indic category:
Neo-Hinduism (Paul Hacker, exposed in 'Indra's Net' by Sri Rajiv Malhotra)
Neo-Vedanta
American Veda (credit Phil Goldberg) 

What is the problem?
The output western re-categorization generated after a deep immersion in 'English Samadhi' is reductionist and harmful. This should not be surprising given that the Sanskrit/Dharmika terms come with a far broader range of meanings and applicability that include the Paramartika while rejecting that which is anrta and adharma. On the other hand, the western component of the newly generated category is usually secular and materialist, and indifferent to Rta and Dharma. Neologisms coined by Abrahamic missionaries are not secular since their goal is to increase the curb-appeal of history-centric theology. They use a dab of dharmika paint to generate religious oxymorons that many gullible Hindus buy into:
 
Vedic Gospel     
Dharmic Fundamentalism
Christunatyam  
Christ Yoga 
Sufi Bhakti 
 
Whether you add poison to Devi's Prasad, or Devi's Prasad to poison, the deeper dharmic meanings get diminished and severely distorted, and ultimately digested into the western (secular or Abrahamic) category. 
 
We must decolonize and work harder to better understand and retain the original terms, and then apply them more effectively in a contemporary context.
 
 
 
 
 
 
References and Further Reading
Books by Rajiv Malhotra
 

Monday, January 13, 2020

The Revenge of the Morons

A quick note.

Post-CAA (Citizenship amendment Act), the morons have come home to roost and the Modi government has a big problem. On the one hand, Modi 2.0 has implemented its manifesto that effectively turns it into the most anti-moron leadership in India since, who knows, perhaps Chatrapathi Shivaji. On the other hand, for six years, its Human resources development / education department has done little to junk a decaying curriculum and repair the education system that mass produces idiocy. Many 13-14 year olds of May 2014 have graduated into full blown college-going idiots today who burned public property worth crores of Rupees in just days, and brazenly display anti-Hindu placards in the name of protest. WhatsApp university merely serves as a finishing school that polishes these kids off after academic hours, producing more perfect morons.

Sri Aurobindo envisioned the emergence of the Superman but instead what we are witnessing is the descent of man. http://indicportal.org/the-descent-of-man-stages-of-charvaka-ism/




Some opposition politicians and sections of the Hinduphobic English language media, the valedictorians of this mentally colonized system immediately grasp this point. These toppers understand the mindset of fellow dysfunctionals better than the rest and have quickly realized how to win over them- Dumb down and distort your messaging and reduce it to its lowest form by eliminating all reading material; communicate through Tiktok type clips, memes and silly slogans. The Nehruvian dinosaurs who still write a 1000 pompous words when 10 suffice can put out the long form for a few bucks. On the other hand, the government and its more aware supporters in the social media are fighting the battle based on reasoning and logic. Their lawyer base provide reams of sound legal arguments (ream for today's idiot secular = 1 whole page of rigorous language). Their researchers provide the historical context. Their watchdogs expose the horrifically Hinduphobic nature of reporting by the crooked media channels. All good and commendable efforts to educate the moron. However, some others give their CAT/GMAT/JEE scores and ranks in canned exams (another curse of this edu system) to 'empirically prove' their credentials. to idiots.
http://indicportal.org/rw-is-as-mentally-colonised-as-lw/

'Erudite' Hindus who were gullible enough to bring philosophy to gunfights, now bring marks cards.
http://indicportal.org/why-are-indians-so-gullible/

Looking at the placards, it appeared that the 'social sciences' mobs want the 'anti-Muslim' provisions of the citizenship amendment act to be withdrawn. For this, the government had to do precisely nothing since the CAA did not any such provision in the first place. Problem solved. Now the Hinduphobic mobs simply want the democratically produced act withdrawn because of imaginary problems. How to solve this? Here's a thought experiment (actually, it's a 5th standard school joke) - Imagine an elephant going into a matchbox. how will it get out? well, you just imagine it getting out. The CAA protests have reduced the discourse to a complete farce, which suits the morons just fine.  Even Shashi Tharoor joins the race to the bottom.

You had 5 years to fix the school and college system but you did not. You bragged about not changing a thing, and suddenly, the PM of India admits in 2020 that the history in school exams are flawed!

The morons are winning despite your perfect GMAT scores.

Like the Rakshasas getting powerful at night, adharmic mobs revel in ignorance.The CPI may have a few seats in the Lok Sabha but their leftist, materialist, anti-Hindu ideology influence hundreds of parliament seats today. Despite starting late, their web portals carry more traffic even though they know little CS and IT. They can hire the best Hindu CS and IT graduates to take care of stuff. Students emerging from the current school system are putty in the hands of their 'Urban Naxal' college professors. This cannot go on. The Modi gov has to start now and Indianize Indian education. Put Indic thought first. If the "Social science" departments that continually blare out anti-Hindu and anti-Indian literature and bile cannot shut up, then shut them down. Pseudoscience programs are universally worthless. And fix the diabolical UPSC exam material. It produces the bureaucratic crooks that trampled on Modi ji's five years of tapas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RYS6V76lRQ

Make in India cannot just be about making indigenous armaments, Swadeshi manufacturing and services. It is even more important for India to produce young Indian minds guided by Indic thought who will make and operate these things in the future, instead of these juvenile mindsets that can only think of burning and breaking stuff down. If India has to become a Jagadguru, it simply cannot afford a high percentage of morons like some rich countries today possess.

updated Jan 14, 2020 [ link to 2012 article by Sri Rajiv Malhotra on #MoronSmriti]
https://rajivmalhotra.com/library/articles/response-doctrine-sameness/