గిల్గమేష్ గాధ - ప్రపంచంలోనే తొలి నవల

గిల్గమేష్ గాధ

ప్రపంచంలోనే తొలి నవల

 

త్రిపీడాస్తు దినేదినే : భోజ కాళిదాసుల కథ

త్రిపీడాస్తు దినేదినే

భోజ కాళిదాసుల కథ

Bandit Queen - A novel by Bankim Babu

 Bandit Queen

Bankim Babu

Excerpts:

Bhutanath village in Barendra county was where Profullo and her mother were going.  That was home to Profullo’s father-in-law, Hara Ballav Babu.  Profullo’s father-in-law was a wealthy man.
He owned land, houses, a temple, a walled garden, a lake.   All of this was but six miles from Profullo’s home.  Walking, Profullo and her mother reached there about three in the afternoon.
Once there, Profullo’s mother could barely make herself enter the house.  It was not that Hara Ballav Babu despised them for being poor.  No.  It was what had happened after the wedding.
Profullo was surpassingly beautiful, a matchless beauty.  This was why Hara Ballav had selected her for his son.  Delighted at this good fortune, Profullo’s mother had spent all her money on the wedding, and on lavish food for the groom’s party.  Unfortunately she had not provided half as much to her neighbors, the bride’s party.  Insulted, they had refused to eat and walked out.  Profullo’s mother had been angry, and had let her neighbors know it.  Deeply offended, they had taken their revenge.
On the third day of a wedding, the bride ritually enters her husband’s kitchen and touches the food and the cookware, showing that she is now part of her husband’s household, that she has a right to his food, and she has brought good fortune with her.
On that day, Profullo’s neighbors, (who had been invited to the feast) refused to eat.  Surprised, Hara Ballav had asked what, if anything, was wrong with the food.  Their answer shocked and dismayed him.  Profullo’s mother, they claimed, was a widow, and had lost caste by keeping bad company.  A rich man may do as he pleased, but they were poor people with nothing but their honorable caste to lose.  And they were not going to lose that by eating what Profullo had touched.  Why would they lie?
The next day Hara Ballav had sent Profullo home to her mother.
Now, as Profullo’s mother looked at Hara Ballav’s house, she trembled.  Yet they had come, they had screwed up their courage and come.  There was no going back now. Mother and daughter entered the house.
At that moment, Hara Ballav was taking his post-prandial rest.  Hara Ballav’s wife was getting her hair done – which meant having her grey hairs plucked out. 

Want to read the book?

No intention of impinging copyrights. Strictly for personal pleasure!

Download from Here!

Black Bison - Cave Painting

Black bison of the “Salon Noir” in the Niaux cave

Upper Magdalenian period (10,500 B.C.) and have been found in a number of caves

in France and Spain. The people who did this painting used a limited range of pigments,

probably for the most part, locally available natural earths. At least in some

cases, fatty material (perhaps animal fat) was mixed with the colors to serve as a

binder.

Warangal - Thousand Pillar Temple 1

Are there a thousand pillars really? No, 

Egyptian Poem

Here is an Egyptian poem along with its original pictogram text!

XVII

Do not lie abed fearing tomorrow;

day breaks, what will it be?

Man cannot know what the morrow will bring.

God dwells amid His perfections,

man must live with his failure;

And the words which men speak are fleeting,

and the creatures of God pass away.

So, say nothing that gives injury,

do not you yourself cause pain—

Even though harms attributed to God

be sealed with His own finger.

As there is no perfection apart from God’s hand,

so nothing flawed lives in His presence;

And should He wish to be rid of perfection,

He can destroy it all in an instant.

Be serious of heart, steady your thoughts,

and do not use your tongue to steer by.

Or say man’s tongue is the rudder of a ship,

the Lord of All is still pilot.

Ramasetu - A write up

I am not saying anything here either in support or otherwise of the matter.
I only found it interesting and thought my friends as well read it.

040117 Film Poster 5

Mayalokam!
A film from the famous Sarathi Studios

Cast:

P Kannamba
Shanatkumari
Kamala Kotnis
CSR Anjaneyulu
Bezawada Rajaratnam and others.

Where is the hero but?

Mysore Maharaja

Jayachamaraja Wodayar was a music lover and composer!

He was crowned on 8-9-1940

Story of Sugar

A story from about 2,500 years ago captures this foment. Two brothers were leading a merchant caravan of ox-drawn carts out of the town of Bodh Gaya in northeastern India when they noticed a man sitting beside the road. He was dressed in rags. Something about him caught the brothers’ attention. “Stop!” they hollered back to the cart drivers. The brothers sent a boy to run back and dip into their stores.

The boy fished out a container of milk and some road food; accounts vary regarding exactly what it was. In some it’s a knob of peeled sugarcane; in some, honey; in others a more stick-to-the-ribs concoction, rice cakes or sweet rice balls made with milk, honey, and molasses.

“Go ahead, eat!” the brothers yelled as the boy thrust the food at the man. They had a schedule to keep; an act of kindness could not take all day. But the man hesitated. Then he bit into the cake and smiled.

The man was Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. This incident took place a few weeks after his enlightenment. Buddhist scriptures say his insight, gleaned after a long struggle, freed the former prince from his desires: the cravings for food, sex, money, and success that cause the world endless trouble. Buddhism holds that all experience is tainted by cravings. For a while, Siddhartha had starved himself trying to extinguish them, but that had only made him crave food more. Now, thanks to his enlightened state, Siddhartha apparently ate the sweet treat with no trace of these cravings, just simple enjoyment.

This account from ancient times captures a world grappling with this intense new sensation, whose pure taste and granular form made it preferable to honey. The Buddha lived in a sugarcane-growing region, and during his lifetime, India was starting to develop sugar refining into an industrial art, and created the world’s first dessert cuisine. 

References to sugar started to appear in poetry, medicinal advice, and official records around the same time, including the Arthasastra, a governing manual written around 300 BC by a bureaucrat named Kautilya. He noted sugar’s different forms in order of rising quality: guta, sarkara, and khanda (the second two are the roots of “sugar” and “candy”; sarkara is Sanskrit for “gravelly”). Members of the Jain sect, forbidden to kill even the tiniest living creature, could not eat honey because it might contain bee embryos. They turned to matsyandika, or sugar candy. Sugar was thought to keep the forces that ricocheted around the body in balance. Indian doctors believed eating it conferred special healing powers, helped digestion, and made semen more potent. According to an Indian book of cures from the second century BC: “In such a man’s body even poison becomes innocuous; his limbs grow hard and compact like stone; he becomes invulnerable.” One elixir of ginger, licorice, gum, ghee, honey, and sugar, if sipped each day for three years, was thought to guarantee a century of youth.

The two merchant brothers from the above tale, Tapassu and Bhallika, became the Buddha’s first lay disciples: they continued to spread the Buddhist message on their travels. This reflects the later historical reality: to generate income, Buddhist monks tended sugarcane and refined it. Over hundreds of years, both traders and Buddhist monks traveled the Silk Road, spreading sugarcane and the means for refining it.

Family name! Japanese Style

You just cannot believe this!

There was a man in Sekiguchi who went every day to enjoy himself in the pleasure quarter (ura-machi) of Tono with its restaurants and brothels. The brothel he frequented was named Sankoro (the sun, moon, and stars brothel). So the locals called him Sankoro. Eventually, Sankoro became the family name, and it remains that way even now. 

Chinese history - Confucius and Lao Tze

Two great thinkers with far-reaching infl uence on Chinese history emerged
in the Spring and Autumn Period—Confucius and Lao Tze.

Confucius, named Qiu and style-named Zhongni, was a thinker of the State
of Lu. His thoughts were mainly recorded in The Analects of Confucius, a book
compiled by his disciples. The essence of Confucianism is Ren (benevolence)
and Li (ritual norms). He advocated the idea that “the benevolent loves his
fellow people,” and requested the rulers experience and observe the situation
of the people. He was against tyranny and arbitrary punishment. He advocated
the codes of loyalty and tolerance, and called for “not doing to others what you
don’t want to be done to you” (do unto others as you would have them do unto
you) and understanding others as a way to harmonize personal relationships
and stabilize the social order.

Confucius also valued “ruling by morality” and “ruling with the ritual
norms.” He saw that one could maintain the political and educational system
of the country by encouraging self restraint, restoring rituals, and practicing
moral behavior. He attempted to correct the chaotic social class order in
accordance with the ritual system of the Zhou Dynasty and make it perfectly
justifiable, reflecting his conservative political ideology. However, Confucius
was not against improving and reforming obsolete ritual customs and
political orders on the basis of maintaining an outdated social class system.

Mencius and Xun Zi in the Warring States Period inherited and developed Confucius’ theory and made the political ideals and moral norms of Confucianism the mainstream of traditional thought in China for more than two millennia.

Lao Tze, surnamed Li, named Er, and style-named Dan, was a thinker of the State of Chu. Erudite and knowledgeable, he was once the historical official in the royal court of the Eastern Zhou, responsible for managing collections. Confucius once asked Lao Tze about “ritual norms.”

The Tao Te Ching, a book compiled by the followers of Taoism in the Warring States Period, records the thought of Lao Tze and is replete with the philosophy
and wisdom typical of the oriental world. Lao Tze denied the absolute authority of destiny, advocated following natural laws, and ruling without intervention. “Ruling without intervention” means not intervening arbitrarily. Lao Tze
warned the rulers not to oppress the common people too much.

However, his ideal that “though the noises made by the chickens and dogs can be heard, the people do not contact each other until death” and his concept of “making the people ignorant and without desire” led to some negative effects.
His philosophy sides, for example—high and low, front and rear, existence and void, difficult and easy, life and death, noble and humble—and everything could shift to the opposite. Lao Tze has been regarded by later generations as the founder of Taoism. His thought has had and continues to have a great influence on Chinese culture, including philosophy and ethics, as well as the mode of thinking, morality, and personality of the Chinese people. is rich in dialectic thinking. Lao Tze pointed out that everything has two contradictory Lao Tze on an Ox. It is said that Lao Tze, seeing that the Zhou Dynasty was declining, rode an ox out of the Hangu Pass and vanished from the earthly life.

Strange but True!

No detailing needed!

Spotted Horses

Here is something interesting from the science.
Prehistoric artists painted what they saw!

Interesting sure it is!!

Science and natural history are always fascinating!!

Marcopolo and Asia - How much to believe?

The travellers in the history gave glimpses of many places that the people of the world could not see for themselves. We all thought that they have always told the truth. Whatif they have not told the truth?

It has become a fashion now to reenact their adventures with all the comforts of present day.

Such dramas are bringing out a lot of information and are testimonials to the original travellers.
The following account is really interesting and talks about the places near to us. Read on.....

Wonders and Whoppers

"I tell you," wrote Marco Polo, "that this palace is of... unmeasured wealth." Its roof is sheathed in gold "in such a way as we cover our house with lead." Even the floors are gold, "more indeed than two fingers thick. And all the other parts of the palace and the halls and windows are likewise adorned with gold." In this gilded domain, he declared, lived the ruler of an island kingdom called Cipangu (that is, Japan), whose waters yielded red pearls "very beautiful and round and large."

Scholars believe Europeans had never heard of Cipangu before Polo told them about it in The Description of the World, which he started writing about 1298, a few years after he returned home to Venice from a 24-year Asian odyssey. Though fascinated, Polo's readers, according to one account, concluded that his tales were "fabulous...mere dreams." But as decades passed, some began to take Polo seriously. In Christopher Columbus' copy of The Description, which survives, "gold in the greatest abundance" and "red pearls" are written in the margin beside the Cipangu reports. Although the handwriting may not be Columbus', he is said to have sought Cipangu among the Caribbean isles on his 1492 voyage.

Columbus never came anywhere near Japan, of course, but what would he have found? Red pearls? Experts say the oysters that produce them don't inhabit Japanese waters. A golden palace? Japan's Golden Pavilion, the gold-leaf-covered Kinkakuji, was built in 1397, a century after Polo published.

Truth to tell, many of Marco Polo's tales of treasure were just that—tales. Tall tales. Readers who persevere in Polo's often confusing, disjointed text will encounter preposterous supernatural events and an astonishing bestiary, including men with the features of dogs. Some readers have even concluded that the book is a total fake. If Marco Polo went to China, British Sinologist Frances Wood asked some years ago in a book titled, appropriately enough, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, why did he fail to mention chopsticks, tea and the binding of girls' feet?

At the British Library, where Wood curates the Chinese collections, the switchboard lit up with calls from journalists and scholars. After all, Polo's book has ornamented libraries the world over for centuries and is regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the world's greatest travel accounts. Wood had taken on a global icon. "I knew that Marco Polo was a household name," she told an interviewer, "but I was unaware that millions of people all over the world felt passionately about him and would be baying for blood."

Polo's fellow Italians have long assumed that he was a fibber; both he and his text are known in his homeland by the name Il Milione, and many think it's because the book includes a million tall tales. But didn't Polo enrich Italy by bringing home pasta and ice cream? Nope, those are myths. Still, Italians weren't about to tolerate a challenge to Polo's integrity by a foreigner, and many other people in the world are likewise invested in him. In China, historians staunchly defend the man who helped put their country on the map.

About ten years ago, a staff writer for National Geographic, followed Polo's journeys across Asia, from Iraq to China and homeward via Sumatra, India and Sri Lanka, using his book as guide. (There are about 120 versions of his narrative; the one carried, generally considered the most authentic, is translated from a 14th-century copy in the French National Library.) Like others who have examined his writings closely, this writer was dismayed by his omissions and floored by his whoppers. But ultimately convinced of his essential truthfulness. Why? For one thing, his itineraries, as laid out by the sequence of book chapters, are fundamentally accurate, whether he's crossing Central Asia or central China. Where did he acquire that geographical information if he didn't make these journeys himself? No skeptical investigator has ever proved that he copied from some Arab or Chinese source. And while it's true that Polo is guilty of curious omissions (those chopsticks, for example), he expanded medieval Europe's meager knowledge of Asia with such hitherto-unknown names as Cipangu, Java, Zanzibar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), besides identifying China's great cities and describing such features as the Takla Makan Desert and the Yangtze River. Having followed Polo's tracks, this writer knew firsthand that he also got many things right, such as: both lapis lazuli and rubies are found in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan; in China's southwest a minority people eat raw flesh; people in Sumatra and Sri Lanka make a joy juice from fermented palm tree sap.

Polo also produced an extensive report on Hindu customs in India, a country that clearly fascinated him. But his great love was Catai, as he called China. No kingdom ever had a better PR person. Time and again Polo wrote of Catai's wealth in silk and spices (no exaggeration) and declared that people had "all things in great abundance." So far, so good. But soon he was claiming that Hangzhou had 12,000 bridges arcing over its canals, a ludicrous inflation, even though Hangzhou was the world's largest city at the time; he even accorded the much smaller Suzhou 6,000 bridges. "Take that, Venice!" he seemed to be saying to his canal-rich hometown. (A later traveler could find only 347 bridges in Hangzhou, including those in its suburbs, and just 290 in Suzhou.)

Polo practically bubbled with enthusiasm as he described the palace of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of Catai, in what is today Beijing. (He called the capital Cambaluc, a corruption of its Turkish name, Khanbalikh, "Khan's city.") The palace was "the greatest that ever was seen," with a hall large enough to accommodate 6,000 diners, and was encompassed by a wall four miles around. In some versions of his book, the wall grew even longer, in one case to 32 miles. Mangling his claims according to their own whims, The Description's translators, scribes and finally printers (beginning in 1477) often took his inconstant veracity down a further peg or two.

Whenever Polo mentioned Kublai, he laid it on thick. His hunting retinue, we are told, included 20,000 dog handlers; 10,000 falconers carrying gyrfalcons, peregrines, saker falcons and goshawks (Polo showed himself to be an avid birder); and unstated numbers of lions, leopards and lynxes to go after wild boars and other big animals. Still extolling his overlord—he claimed to have been a trusted servant of Kublai's regime—Polo wrote that the new year was celebrated in Cambaluc with a parade of Kublai's elephants, "which are quite five thousand, all covered with beautiful cloths," and with gifts to the ruler of "more than 100,000 white horses very beautiful and fine."

It's true that Mongol lords reveled in the royal hunt, a huge spectacle, and that they celebrated holidays grandly. And no doubt Kublai, like many Asian potentates, kept stables of elephants as a mark of power—but nothing like 5,000. And historians are confident that he didn't hunt with any 20,000 dog handlers or 10,000 falconers. "The numbers are staggering—they're obviously exaggerated," says Professor Morris Rossabi of the City University of New York, author of the definitive study of Kublai's reign. It is difficult to imagine his people maintaining, for example, a royal herd of 100,000 steeds in the region of Beijing. "People in the north didn't grow enough food to sustain themselves," Rossabi says. "Most of it had to be brought from the south. I can't believe they devoted tremendous amounts of pastureland to having 100,000 horses." Some scribes who copied Polo's text shrank the elephant herd to 500 or omitted it altogether, probably smelling excess, while one version raised it to 105,000.

Still, Polo had plenty of authentic marvels with which to astonish his countrymen—black stones that burned better than wood; money made of paper, porcelain, asbestos; huge oceangoing ships. And he documented China's wealth in silk and spices as well as its commerce with India, Java and other parts of Asia—valuable information for a trading state like Venice.

So why all the hyperbole? We'll never know for sure, but exaggeration is sometimes a character defect in adventurers—Walter Raleigh's gold-strewn El Dorado comes to mind. And in 13th-century Europe, even outright lies were a literary conceit. Grotesque beasts and magical doings were routine in the modest libraries available to even the most educated Europeans. The Histories of Herodotus, for example, told of gold-digging ants in India and winged snakes in Egypt.

I believe Polo kept a journal during his travels; if not, how did he manage, when at last home in Venice, to set down the wealth of detail that he had accumulated during his two dozen years of travel? Polo's diary: what a sensational discovery that would be! He doesn't say he kept one, but a version of The Description that appeared in Venice in the 1500s, supposedly based on authentic manuscripts, declares that he brought home "writings and memoranda." And these, it is said, were shared with a writer who helped him produce his book. That person is identified at the beginning of the text as Rustichello of Pisa, who'd been reworking some of the romantic stories of King Arthur, and whose writings had found their way into European libraries. According to Polo, he met Rustichello in a Genoa prison, into which Polo had been thrown after being captured in a sea battle between Venice and rival Genoa about 1298. Sounds like another tall Polo tale, but so far as scholars know, it's true.

Scholars see the hand of Rustichello in the book's account of a battle between Genghis Khan and Prester John, a Christian ruler in Asia, early in the 13th century. With its huge loss of life—although no body count was recorded—the engagement made a good story. Too bad there was no such person as Prester John; as historians know today, he was entirely a European invention. The legend was no doubt well known to Rustichello, while less so to Polo.

It is suspected that Rustichello concocted the tale of robbers able to "make the whole day become dark" as they swept down upon travelers. Polo described such an attack on his caravan in the desert of Iran. The passage continues, suspiciously, in the third person: "Moreover I tell you that Master Marc himself was as good as taken by that people in that darkness."

Then there are the mangonels, or catapults, Polo writes about. According to the author, Polo, his father and uncle helped build huge rock-hurling machines that inflicted terrible damage on the city of Xiangyang as Kublai pressed his conquest of the southern Chinese dynasty, the Song. Chinese as well as Persian sources describe the destruction, but credit Syrians employed in Kublai's army for the catapults. In any case, the siege occurred in 1273, and almost all authorities believe the Polos didn't reach China until two years later. Polo probably heard of the siege and took note of it. It may be that Rustichello, always attracted to stories of battle, came across it somewhere in his reading and decided to make the Polos military engineers.

Starting home by ship in 1291 or 1292, Polo was forced to spend five months on "Java the Less"—Sumatra—waiting for monsoon winds to shift so that he and his shipmates could sail northwestward toward Ceylon and India. Polo reported, accurately, that cannibals dwelled on Sumatra and, less accurately, that the island was home to some strange beasts, including enormous unicorns, in size "not at all by any means less than an elephant."

"I tell you quite truly," Polo continued about Sumatra, "that there are men who have tails more than a palm in size." And on an island that he called Angaman—probably referring to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal—"all the men...have the crown of the head like a dog and teeth and eyes like dogs." Tales of strange creatures abounded in Asia as well, and Polo (who apparently never set foot on the Andamans) may have heard about them from sailors. It's also possible that he—or Rustichello—simply drew on the elaborate mythical bestiary of Europe's Middle Ages. (Or perhaps, as John Larner argues in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, Polo was simply describing the islanders metaphorically.)

Even as he served up these wild reports, Polo methodically cataloged a South Asian cornucopia, about which Europe knew almost nothing: the nutmeg and aromatic roots of Java, the camphor and coconuts of Sumatra, the pearls, diamonds and pepper of India, ivory from several places—these and many other goods, all tantalizing to European merchants, were commingled with the beasts and fantasies. It's as if the world, as Europeans viewed it, were a mix of real and unreal.

Some readers took notice of things "which are reckoned past all credence," as a Dominican friar recorded. When Polo was dying, in 1324, friends urged him to remove "everything that went beyond the facts," presumably to cleanse his soul.

Polo refused, saying he had not written half of what he had seen. He might have added: "And only half of what Rustichello and I invented."

Bhagyamati - Was she for real?

Sri KVBhoopal Rao and his book "Bhagyamati"

Sri Bhoopal Rao hails from the clan of Akkanna and Madanna, the ministers in the Golkonda dynasty. He is a historian and written much on the subject. I met him when he could be called an old man. But his enthusiasm was almost contagious. He strived to study the history of Qutabshahis and published his results.

The book in question was published when the 400 years were to be celebrated. I was also somehow involved in those celebrations planned extensively but never happened.

Sri Rao took all the pains to impress about the theme of his work and saw to it that it was published.

Sri Krishna Satry garu, an equally serious researcher and former head of AP State Archeology Department wrote the introduction to this 96 page book in Telugu. The theme is about the existence of a lady by name Bhagamati. People want to call the city as Bhagyanagaram without even knowing the history. It is interesting to note that the name now prevailing, Hyderabad, is also after the same lady who after embracing islam became Hydermahal.

“భాగమతి గాధ తాలూకు అనేక సాక్ష్యాధారాలను  వెలుగులోకి తెచ్చి భాగమతికి ఈ పుస్తకం ద్వారా జీవం పోసి భూపాలరావుగారు చరిత్రకారులలో ఒక ప్రత్యేకస్థానాన్ని సంపాదించుకున్నారు.” Says Sri Krishna Sastry. He also narrates his visit to the tomb in Rein Bazaar supposedly belonging to Bhagamati or Hydermahal.

The book reads well. Sri Rao’s skill and felicity with the language and expression make it interesting. I do not know whether I can comment that research findings in the book are few and the author himself agrees to this fact. However he makes a case for the colorful existence of the lady love of Quli Qutub Shah the ruler of Hyderabad..

Sri Rao’s passion for the topic is evident in the preface he wrote under the title “Mansuloni Mata”.

It is really his heart and not just dear to his heart.

Unabashed, he says, “తిట్టమరిగిన నోరూ, తిరుగమరిగిన కాలూ స్తబ్ధంగ ఉండలేవంటారు విజ్ఞులు. ఉద్వేగంగ దౌడు తీయుటకు అలవాటు పడిన నా మనస్సు, జవాశ్వం లాగ ముందుకురకటం మానలేదు.” These words from an old man !!

Two experts Sri Sastry mentioned above and also Sri BNSastry, an epigraphist and literary historian, endorse the work.

Couple of exerpts from the book makes an interesting reading.

Even today many believe that the story of Bhagamati is just that, a story, and such a female never existed. There is another group which strongly believes in her existence. There is no doubt about the three people mentioned in this entry being from the later group. They plead the case and almost prove her existence.

 (Click on the images to see them in big size)

I feel all people interested in history and particularly local history  should be reading such works. I really do not know if the book, published way back in 1993 is now available in any shop. I do not know whether Mahamantri Madanna Trust is active still.

The address given in the book is:

Mahamantri madanna Trust

3-4-526/41

Lingampally

Hyderabad