Ravi the blogger

  Read a short history of Iran in the TOI a couple of days back and I could not but agree how necessary such a piece is at this stage. For one, there are a lot of misconceptions about Iran. The most commonly-held misconception is that Iran is Arabic-speaking which, of course, is not true. The Official language of Iran is Persian whose grammar is different from Semitic languages like Arabic, though most Iranians use a lot of Arabic-derived vocabulary in their speech. But fewer people are aware of the fact that about a dozen languages are spoken in Iran apart from Persian - Kurdish, with its dialects Kurmanji and Sorani on the north-west, Balochi, Sistani and Brahui on the trination border with Pakistan and Afghanistan and Arabic, itself, which is spoken by roughly 3% of the population in the south-western region of Elam where it might have replaced a now-extinct language called Khuzestani, a possible descendant of Elamite that might have survived until the 10th century AD. Then, the...

                                               The four prophets of Manichaeism - Mani, Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus, from the Chinese "Manichaean Diagram of the Universe". Manichaeism was founded by Mani who was probably born a Christian in the city of Ctesiphon (now in Iraq) in the Sassanian Empire. Manichaeism incorporated the precepts of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism and spread rapidly along the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire where, along with Mithraism, it emerged as a chief competitor to Christianity. St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean before his conversion to Christianity. The Sassanian emperor Shapur I (240-271) was an avid follower of Mani but after his death, the tide swiftly turned against the Manichaens. Varaharan (Bahram) I (271-274) was a devout Zoroastrian and follower and chief patron of the Zoroastrian priest...

  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...