Ravi the blogger

  1st Day at The Hindu Lit for Life 2015. It started with a short introduction and lighting of the ceremonial lamp by Nayanthara Sehgal following which there was a book reading session by Man Booker Prize 2013 winner Eleanor Catton who spoke of her travails and tribulations in writing of the experiences of an adolescent girl. Following Ms. Catton's lively talk, there was a session with Geeta Doctor, writer Nayantara Sehgal who is cousin to Indira Gandhi and Sehgal's biographer Ritu Menon. Sharp and coherent despite her advanced age, 87-year old Ms. Sehgal passionately defended Perumal Murugan's right of expression and spoke of a need for a writer's union. She also vividly reminisced the 1975 Emergency days when she virulently opposed the censorship and dictatorial measures of the Indira Gandhi government. Her talk was extremely frank and sentimental. After Ms. Sehgal's interview, we had a talk by Jonathan Harris on his book "Firangis" which is about the ...

The Pathans 550 B.C.- A.D. 1947 is a magisterial work of anthropology and history by Olaf Caroe (1892-1981) who served as the colonial administrator of North West Frontier Province shortly before India's independence and Partition in 1947. Having served in the Frontier for about three decades, Caroe had immense knowledge of these lands and the people who inhabited them. * According to legend, the Afghans traced their ancestry to one Malik Afghana, a Jew who lived in the Levant. This Malik Afghana supposedly migrated to Afghanistan in 550 BC. So they were among "the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel". During the time of the Prophet, the leader of the Afghans, Qais Abdul Rashid travelled to Arabia where he embraced Islam and returned to convert his people. However, Caroe is dismissive of these legends as chronicles of history. * The Pathan tongue, Pashto is an Indo-Iranian language, halfway, Caroe says, between Persian and Scythian. * Though Pashto is an Indo-Aryan language, the A...

  Indo-European language families are broadly classified into two groups - centum and satem languages. Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic belonged to the "centum" group while Indo-Iranian, Baltic and Slavic belong to the "satem" group. Proto-Indo-European, of which Greek is the closest living relative, is believed to have been a "centum" language. So, a process of palatisation of the initial velar *c (pronounced "k") must've taken place in "satem" languages turning it into a *ch and eventually to a sibilant *s. Now, it is possible to observe such changes in languages of non-Indo-European language families, too. The intial *c in Tamil, for example, must've undergone a change in the reverse direction into the Kannada *k, as in *cevi (ear) to "kivi" and *cedalu (termite) to "geddalu". Now, the linguist David Mcalpin who has championed the theory of Elamo-Dravidian family of languages propos...