The Kaumāra cycle in the Skandapurāṇa’s Śaṃkara-saṃhitā
Many khaṇḍa-s, māhātmya-s and saṃhitā-s attach themselves to the sprawling “Mega-Skandapurāṇa”. We use this term to distinguish it from the “Ur-Skandapurāṇa”, which was first published by Bhaṭṭārāi in...
View ArticleSome poems
Below are some poems in English by our brother. He sends us his compositions in a much more transient medium making them hard to preserve or share. Hence, we decided to anthologize those we could...
View ArticleThe wink of the Gorgon and the twang of the Lyre
The discovery of the archetypal eclipsing binary Algol The likes of Geminiano Montanari are hardly seen today. This remarkable Italian polymath aristocrat from the 1600s penetrated many realms of...
View ArticleA catalog of attractors, repellors, cycles, and other oscillations of some...
One of the reasons we became interested in functional iterates was from seeking an analogy for the effect of selective pressure on the mean values of a measurable biological trait in a population. Let...
View ArticleA sampler of Ramanujan’s elementary results and their manifold ramifications
As we have remarked before, Ramanujan seemed as if channeling the world-conquering strides of Viṣṇu, when he single-handedly bridged the lacuna in Hindu mathematics from the days of the brāhmaṇa-s of...
View ArticleThe turning of the yugacakra
As the wheel turns, what goes up comes down and what is down comes up, again and again. There is a symmetry to the process in the downward and the upward movements, albeit in opposite directions. The...
View ArticleRV 10.78
RV 10.77 and 10.78 are similarly themed sūkta-s to the Marut-s by our ancient clansman Syūmaraśmi Bhārgava. He is mentioned twice by authors within the RV – in RV 1.112.16 by Kutsa Āṅgirasa and in RV...
View ArticleCārucitrābhisambodhi
Chakkalal and Mundalal saw that Gannaram Dakiya, the owner of the little eatery, had taken a bit too much of an ethanolic beverage and had forgotten to lock the safe with his phone, cards and some...
View ArticleThe zombie obeys: a note on host manipulation by parasites and its ecological...
In 1858-59, as AR Wallace, one of the founders of the modern evolutionary theory, was exploring the Sulawesi Islands, he collected an ant, Polyrachis merops, that he sent over to England. Years later,...
View ArticleTwo simple stotra-s, sectarian competition, and the Varāha episode from the...
The Ur-Skandapurāṇa (SkP) or the “archaic” Skandapurāṇa ( the Bhaṭṭārāi edition known as the Ambikā-khaṇḍa) is a Śaiva text with affinities to the Pāśupata branch of that tradition. Though it is aware...
View ArticleOrigins of the serpent cult and Bhāguri’s snake installation from the...
Mathuran Nāga installations From the few centuries preceding it down to the first few centuries of the Common Era we see numerous installations of snake deities, i.e., Nāga-s, at various archaeological...
View ArticleBhāskara-II’s polygons and an algebraic approximation for sines of pi by x
Unlike the Greeks, the Hindus were not particularly obsessed with constructions involving just a compass and a straightedge. Nevertheless, their pre-modern architecture and yantra-s from the tāntrika...
View ArticleThe Vyomavyāpin in the Pāśupata-tantra and a discursion on nine-fold...
The Pāśupata-tantra is a poorly understood śaiva text that is believed to be affiliated with the Pāśupata tradition of Lakulīśa. While the colophons of some manuscripts present it as...
View ArticleComet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
The dispiriting cloud cover lifted briefly on two nights (Wed 8/2/2023 and Fri 10/2/2023) finally giving us an opportunity to catch the latest Agni-putra-ketu in the welkin, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). On...
View ArticleSome ruminations on asteroids and meteoritic falls
Recently, we received the news of a Russian spacecraft meant to bring some astronauts back to earth being hit by a meteorite. In early February we saw an obscure news item of the sighting of a meteoric...
View ArticleThe dreadful apport
Vrishchika had just finished her work on the diagnosis and possible treatment plan for a pediatric neurological patient on whom she was consulted. She had inferred that the child’s condition arose from...
View ArticleYantrasiddhi
The March 24 version of ChatGPT’s attempt at drawing the flag of India. It made an error in the color specification of “NavyBlue” in the xcolor package. We corrected that in order to let it compile....
View ArticleTricakra
The Sintashta-Petrovka cultures (today Southern Urals, core Russia, and Kazakhstan) provide the first uncontested evidence for chariot technology. They are believed to have started around 2100 BCE and...
View ArticleThe rise of yajña and Kauśika exceptionalism
The extant Vedic ritual is bifurcated into two domains the gṛhya (the household rites and rites of passage) and the śrauta (large-scale/grand rituals). First, in operational terms, they are...
View ArticleThe rise of the psychopath oligarchy
There are certain things in (geo)politics that are largely unsurprising to us because we had seen their seeds over a decade or two ago. In part, we were able to infer several things correctly in...
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