She cares not a turd':

Generally I absolutely hate people scribbling on books. They need to be pristine kids. The very idea of writing all over it is a bit foreign to me. It's like defacing them. 

But then defacement for somebody may be fascinating for somebody else. Here's a nice little investigative article on some scribbles on an old old book. 

And yes I do give a turd if you deface our books! 

Love

Baba

'She cares not a turd': Notes on a 16th century Squabble - Medieval manuscripts blog
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/01/she-cares-not-a-turd-notes-on-a-16th-century-squabble.html

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While we were preparing the catalogue entry for Harley MS 7334, one of our most recent uploads to Digitised Manuscripts, we came across a very curious marginal note, and would like to solicit your ideas about it.

Decorated initial ‘W’(han) at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, England (London or East Anglia, c. 1410), Harley MS 7734, f. 1r

But first a bit of background.  This manuscript is a relatively early copy of Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales, and was created c. 1410 in England, probably in East Anglia.  The scribe who penned it was responsible for other manuscripts containing the Canterbury Tales (such as Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 198, for example), leading some scholars to propose that it was a production of a commercial scriptorium specialising in such texts.  Harley MS 7334 has a rather complicated ownership history, and passed through a number of different hands during the tumultuous 15th and 16th centuries.  The task of untangling its provenance is both aided - and complicated - by the profusion of notes, signatures, and inscriptions that can be found throughout the manuscript, many of which were added by later hands.

Wavell and the Dying Days of the Raj: Britain's Penultimate Viceroy in India

Kannu

We walked about in sunny old Delhi. The city where one set of imperialists and colonisers, the Mughals, were overthrown by the next lot, The British. 

And after the divide and rule policy, the British desperately tried to keep India together. And then whilst Gandhi spoke for all Indians, Jinnah and Ambedkar, ironically all liberal lawyers blessed with some of the greatest minds known to India in the recent years, along with Nehru, managed to bollox it all up. There's nothing that irritates people who claim to speak for narrow groups than to be faced with people who speak for all. So for example, if somebody bangs on about nationalism, if you wanted to wind them up, speak to them about children's rights. If somebody talks about religion, cut them off by talking women's rights. At end of the day, see the universal declaration of human rights. That's a good one to memorise and use as principles son. 

In the meantime, read about great men with feet of clay who ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people in the partition of India. You walked in those grounds son, yesterday, where millions were uprooted and in many cases killed for being in the wrong religion. Bah. 

Love

Baba

H-Net Reviews
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37909

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Mohammad Iqbal Chawla. Wavell and the Dying Days of the Raj: Britain's Penultimate Viceroy in India. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi + 293 pp. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-906275-1.

Reviewed by Anirudh Deshpande (Department of History, University of Delhi)
Published on H-Asia (January, 2014)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Wavell and the Ironies of India’s Partition in 1947

Lord Wavell was destined to be the second-to-last viceroy of British India. A seasoned British imperialist soldier and an Old India hand, he was appointed to the post in 1943 and remained in office until March 1947 when his flamboyant successor Lord Mountbatten took over. Mountbatten succeeded Wavell in order to supervise the liquidation of the Raj. For various reasons, including his dashing personality and an interesting wife, Mountbatten has managed to attract more than his share of attention from scholars. In contrast, Wavell, who tried in vain to keep India united between 1943 and 1947, is almost a forgotten figure of history.

No doubt, history students know much more about the Mountbatten Plan than the Wavell Plan. The public, in general, has forgotten Wavell and the plans that he devised for India in the twilight of the Raj. In this book, Mohammad Iqbal Chawla highlights Wavell’s plans, which became increasingly impossible to execute in communally charged postwar India. By the time Wavell became the viceroy of Britain’s most important colony, the sun had set on the British Empire. The two world wars exhausted Britain and made it financially and politically subservient to the United States. In 1943, Britain did not have the political, military, and financial means to ensure a smooth and peaceful transfer of power to the Indians in the troubled and anxiety-ridden 1940s. The appointment of a veteran soldier as the viceroy of India, after the Quit India rebellion was quelled by the Raj in 1942, failed to produce a negotiated political settlement between the British and various Indian parties.

The Incredible Buddha Boy

Kannu

Here's one of those stories which keep coming up from the exotic orient. Where amazing inexplicable things happen.  When I was your age son, didn't really believe in God. Or that unseen power. Why would I? Brave man. Full of knowledge of the world. Science. Regression statistical analysis. There is no god. There's only nature. 

And then I started to see stuff that didn't make sense. And yes I learnt about fear. Fear for you two kids. Knowing that you are totally dependent upon me to raise you up like a good man, a good citizen and that you will have a good life. Do all I can to help. 

And god appeared. I'm not religious but do believe in God son. I'm not saying you have to do it as well. This is a journey all have to go through themselves. But what that, and meditation, helped me to get along in my life son. 

Another thing in this article, the author doesn't think through his religions in Nepal. It's actually a Hindu Kingdom but the way Hinduism works, it's very difficult to separate out in the layman. Buddha was considered and is still venerated as an incarnation of Vishnu. Go figure. It usually drives the Buddhists completely spare but hey, the Buddha himself never said that he was inventing a new religion or to worship him but that's what his followers did. Just like Christ. He never said that people need to become Christians, he just wanted to refocus people's minds on Judaism. And then people started worshipping him. 

Anyway I digress. Indian mythology is full of examples of our Rishi and munis going for long periods of time without eating or drinking while meditating. Me? I cannot do that. It takes too long. 

Oh another thing, beware of people who tell you that you have to show off your meditation. It's inward looking son. Just you and your mind and god. People go about doing huge productions out of meditation. Well that's fine but at end of the day, it's just you your mind and God. Or the universe. 

Love

Baba

Longform Reprints: The Incredible Buddha Boy by George Saunders
http://longform.org/stories/the-incredible-buddha-boy

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All photos by Jeff Riedel

WANT TO SEE A POSSIBLE MIRACLE? NO THANKS, I'M DOING MY TAXES

Last December, I got an e-mail from my editor at GQ. A 15-year-old boy in Nepal had supposedly been meditating for the past seven months without any food or water. Would I like to look into this?

I went online. The boy’s name was Ram Bahadur Bomjon. He was sitting in the roots of a pipal tree near the Indian border. The site was being overrun by pilgrims, thousands a week, who were calling this boy “the new Buddha.” He’d twice been bitten by poisonous snakes; both times he’d refused medicine and cured himself via meditation. Skeptics said he was being fed at night behind a curtain, that his guru was building himself a temple, that his parents were building themselves a mansion, that the Maoist rebels, in on the hoax, were raking in tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

I e-mailed my editor back: I was pretty busy, what with the teaching and all, besides which Christmas break was coming up and I hadn’t been to the gym once the preceding semester, plus it would be great to, uh, get an early start on my taxes.

Then we embarked on the usual Christmas frenzy, but I couldn’t get this boy off my mind. At parties, I noted two general reactions to the statement Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

One type of American—let’s call them Realists—will react by making a snack-related joke (“So he finally gets up, and turns out he’s sitting on a big pile of Butterfinger wrappers!”) and will then explain that it’s physically impossible to survive even one week without food or water, much less seven months.

A second type—let’s call them Believers—will say, “Wow, that’s amazing,” they wish they could go to Nepal tomorrow, and will then segue into a story about a transparent spiritual being who once appeared on a friend’s pool deck with a message about world peace.

Try it: Go up to the next person you see, and say, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

See what they say.

Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.

What I said, finally, was: This I have to see.

History of Singapore

Kids

Here's a short history of Singapore. I will be going there again this year and may well have you join me when I'm there. 

It's a lovely place. Bit humid and far too planned but nice place. Very good food. Very good indeed. Lovely place to walk around and see people, the zoo and the architecture. 

But to know a people you need to know the country's history kids. Singapore is one of the places where a strongly technocratic meritocratic government and society had taken root with a dose of authoritarism. And in return for giving up some of their freedoms, the Singaporeans have managed to have a very good economy. But societal divisions still happen. Recently there were riots in little India. The Malays don't speak to the ruling Chinese. Not that much anyway. Not that there's much to talk about eh? :) 

Interesting times. And good places. 

Love

Baba

History of Singapore - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore

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This article's introduction section may not adequatelysummarize its contents. To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, please consider modifying the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article. (discuss).(December 2013)

Part of a series on the

History of

Early history of Singapore (pre-1819)

Founding of modern Singapore (1819–26)

Straits Settlements (1826–67)

Crown colony (1867–1942)

Battle of Singapore (1942)

Japanese Occupation (1942–45)

• Sook Ching massacre (1942)

Post-war period (1945–55)

• First Legislative Council (1948–51)
• Maria Hertogh riots (1950)
• Second Legislative Council (1951–55)
• Anti-National Service Riots (1954)

Internal self-government (1955–62)

• Hock Lee bus riots (1955)

Merger with Malaysia (1962–65)

• Merger referendum (1962)
• Operation Coldstore (1963)
• Race riots in Singapore (1964)
• MacDonald House bombing (1965)

Republic of Singapore (1965–present)

• 1969 race riots of Singapore (1969)
• Operation Spectrum (1987)
• East Asian financial crisis (1997)
• Embassies attack plot (2001)
• SARS outbreak (2003)
• 2013 Little India riot (2013)

Timeline
Riots

Singapore portal

• v
• t
• e

The history of Singapore dates to the 11th century. The island rose in importance during the 14th century under the rule of Srivijayan prince Parameswaraand became a port until it was destroyed by Acehnese raiders in 1613

Unconditional Love

I had my pets and I know exactly what this feeling is :)

Please adopt a dog, we are desperate for good foster and direct adopter pet owners.

Click here.

 

The hard graft of finding a graduate job in the City of London

Note the point being made by the chap who says that he should've applied for internships son. And also look at the competition, 135 applications for every position. I get weekly requests to meet at least 2-4 students every week and do try to meet them.
Even with an internship it's challenging. By the time you graduate son, the banking industry will be even more competitive and shrunken.
So next year, besides you having fun, do try to get an internship. Start looking for these roles son. Otherwise you'll have regrets. Like this chap did. It's very very corrosive son. Avoid. Plan ahead. Be slightly paranoid. Remember you judge yourself with what you think you've done while others judge you by what you're done.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Love
Baba

 

The hard graft of finding a graduate job in the City of London
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By Emma Jacobs
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Two Londoners with degrees in Maths took a novel approach to the jobseekers’ market by touting for work in a public square….

Competition for graduate- level jobs is fierce. According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month, almost half the UK’s new graduates are working in non-graduate jobs. Forty-seven per cent of those who had finished their degree in the past five years were working in roles such as sales assistants and care workers. Recent analysis by the Financial Times showed that people who graduated this year are earning 12 per cent less than their counterparts before the financial crash.

Typically, positions at investment banks or fund managers are highly contested. These industries receive 135 applications per job, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters…..However, they believe that it was perhaps a mistake not to have applied for internships when still students. “I wanted to focus on my degree. I got the chance to study in Hong Kong for a year and I wanted to do well,” says 23-year-old Mr Abbas.

Read the full article at: http://on.ft.com/1gIsit6

The problem with high frequency trading

I was working in Solomon brothers son when I first came across algorithmic trading. This is around 2000. You were 5 years of age then. We launched 4 of these models and the limit was 50000$ per day. 3 would propose trades and one would decide and then launch the winning trade. 

Life has moved on hugely since then son. It's become something like skynet from the terminator days lol. The equity markets are really strange. There is no money to be made. Take a look at the major players, hardly anybody on the sell side makes any money because there's no margin. Spreads are so tight. And therefore it's difficult. Good for retail investors like you and I but for the big boys it's getting stupid. The buy side, the asset managers and fund managers, who buy and hold for longer periods are still around and will be so as well but it's going to be a difficult time for equities son. So do think again about your career option of being a stockbroker. Not enough money. 

Be somewhere where technology supports you. Like you come up with new complex instruments and strategies while technology helps. Or go into the advisory business where you need to take nonlinear decisions. Combine your mathematics knowledge with knowledge of technology, philosophy, politics, economics and something that you will pick up later on - psychology. That's what's will help pay huge dividends son. 

Love

Baba

The problem with high frequency trading | Felix Salmon
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/06/the-problem-with-high-frequency-trading/

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Last night, on BBC Radio 3, I was featured reading an essay about high frequency trading. I hope it’s fun to listen to, but if you want to read it, here you go.

One of the many consequences of global warming is that it’s now, for the first time, possible to drill under the sea bed of the Arctic ocean. The oil companies are all there, of course, running geological tests and bickering with each other about the potential environmental consequences of an oil spill. But they’re not the only people drilling. Because there’s something even more valuable than oil just waiting to be found under the Arctic.

What is worth so much money that three different consortiums would spend billions of pounds to retrofit icebreakers and send them into some of the coldest and most dangerous waters in the world? The answer, of course, is information.

A couple of days ago, I called a friend in Tokyo, and we had a lovely chat. If he puts something up on Twitter, I can see it immediately. And on the web there are thousands of webcams showing me what’s going on in Japan this very second. It doesn’t look like there’s any great information bottleneck there: anything important which happens in Japan can be, and is, transmitted to the rest of the world in a fraction of a second.

But if you’re a City trader, a fraction of a second is a veritable eternity. Let’s say you want to know the price of a stock on the Tokyo Stock exchange, or the exact number of yen being traded for one dollar. Just like the light from the sun is eight minutes old by the time it reaches us, all that financial information is about 188 milliseconds old by the time it reaches London. That’s zero point one eight eight seconds. And it takes that much time because it has to travel on fiber-optic cables which take a long and circuitous route: they either have to cross the Atlantic, and then the US, and then the Pacific, or else they have to go across Europe, through the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean, and then up through the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.

But! If you can lay an undersea cable across the Arctic, you can save yourself about 5,000 miles, not to mention the risk of routing your information past a lot of political flash points. And when you’re sitting in your office in London and you get that dollar/yen exchange rate from Tokyo, it’s fresh from the oven, comparatively speaking: only 0.168 seconds old. If everybody else is using the old cables and you’re using the new ones, then you have somewhere between 20 milliseconds and 60 milliseconds when you know something they don’t.

Retracing how a Georgian Queen ended up in Goa

This was a fascinating story about how a Georgian Queen from the Eastern Caucasus region ended up in Goa, India. I quote the main bits from here.

In the year 1613, the emperor of Persia, Shah Abbas I led an army to conquer the Georgian kingdom and Queen Ketevan became his prisoner. The queen was held in Shiraz, southern Iran for approximately ten years, but in 1624, the emperor sent soldiers to convert her to the Islamic faith and to force her into his harem. However, she resisted his orders and as a consequence was tortured and strangled to death on 22 September 1624.

Ruined bell tower of the church of Our Lady of Grace within the St. Augustine convent in Goa. Image: Ramesh Lalwani (Flickr, used under a CC BY 3.0)

Remains taken to Goa

In 1623, a year before her death, two Augustinian friars had arrived in Shiraz to start up a mission and succeeded in gaining the queen’s trust, becoming her confessors. At some point after her death these same friars unearthed the remains of Ketevan and hid them. In 1627, some of these remains (the right arm) were taken to Goa and kept in a black box or stone sarcophagus on the second window along the Epistle side of the chapter chapel in the St. Augustine convent.

Over time the convent had been enlarged and rebuilt in places, but in 1835 the church underwent partial demolition, and in 1842 the main vault collapsed. After this episode, the convent rapidly became ruinous and valuable artefacts belonging to the religious complex had been either sold or lost.

Despite the fact that the exact location of the queen’s relics is mentioned in a Portuguese document, all efforts to find them had proved unsuccessful due to difficulties in the interpretation of the convent layout. However, a ground map of the convent was reconstructed on the basis of the literary sources and the help of local historians. After a topographical survey within the convent was carried out, the chapter chapel and window were finally located.

As per the literary sources, the relic box of Queen Ketevan was expected to be at the second window of the chapter chapel towards the Epistle side. Therefore, this area was systematically explored in 2004 for a stone sarcophagus, which was found broken into pieces due to the collapse of the wall. Whilst clearing the rubble the team also found an arm bone. Two other bone relics were recovered from outside the second window area, within intact stone boxes.

More proof

While the archaeological and historical data were consistent with the relic being the remains of Queen Ketevan, the archaeologists needed to somehow conclusively prove that the bone belonged to her. They approached the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad who isolated DNA from the bone. Based on the sequence variation in the mitochondrial DNA, they assigned a haplogroup U1b to the sample.

After surveying the mitochondrial DNA sequence of 22,000 individuals from the Indian sub-continent, none of them belonged to U1b haplogroup. However, two out of 30 Georgians analysed have the same haplogroup, suggesting that the bone excavated in Goa is likely to be the remnant of Queen Ketevan of Georgia.

I found the story deeply moving. how this lady ended up on Goa. Her Wiki entry is very interesting as well. She seems to be a very brave woman. She seems to have actually led the Kakhetian nobles against an ursurper’s attempts to take the crown. She was tortured with red-hot pincers in 1624 and died.

William Forsyth composed a whacking big poem called as the Martyrdom of Kelavane (1861) and thankfully its fully available online here. Here’s the first few lines

Know ye the story of Queen "Kelavane ? 
She was no daughter of the days of joy; 
Her tears were countless as the stars of heaven. 
The radiant beauty and the queenly graee, 
That glorified the morning of her y-ears, 
Were sighed away in sorrow long ere noon. 
The fervour of her solitary faith, 
That burn*d like some lone beacon of the sea, 
With no kind ndghbourhood of hopeful hearts. 
Kept shining through the tempest all night long. 
Until it faded in the dawn of heaven. 
And so it was, because she stood alone 

This is what she looked like

Nice boots :)

It was good to read about another lady from Iran who was given succour in India…Like the Zoroastrians.

Why Tunisia's Islamist Party Agreed to Give Up Power

There are four fascinating political experiments going on son, in the Islamic governing political economic spheres. Like in Iran, turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Mind you, pretty much all Muslim countries are constantly struggling with democracy, rule of law and the role of Islam. But these 4 are the furthest advanced. Iran has had the longest history of constitutionalism going back almost 100 years. Turkey started even earlier but stuttered. Egypt frankly started and has now gone back even further. Tunisia seems to be the most advanced and if I had to put money down, I would say that Tunisia will reach civilisation the earliest compared to the others. Despite the issues they are facing with assassinations and demonstrations. It's an urbanised society so the usual rural obscurantist structures are avoided. Mind you, the Bahrain example is the counter example for urbanism. Then again the gulf Arabs are particularly well noted to be a bunch of weirdass morons. There's a very good reason why Allah decided to emerge his religion in the gulf. Imagine what they would have been without it when you see what they have done up till now with it. 

But politics is this. The spirit of consensus and compromise. And religion usually doesn't allow you to do so hence the utmost importance of having a secular structure son. 

I'm hoping Tunisia can show the way to how a liberal consensus driven democratic society with some elements of Islam can be part of this modern world son. Turkey went a bit too far with the secularism so it's trying to get back into balance. Iran went totally the other way with religiously driven politics. And well you know the utter mess Egypt is in. 

So interesting days ahead to watch how Tunisia is going to play out.

Love

Baba

Rory McCarthy | Why Tunisia's Islamist Party Agreed to Give Up Power | Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/lets-make-a-deal

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Three years after the popular uprising that brought down President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, demonstrations, sit-ins, and strikes have become part of daily life in Tunisia. Railway workers, customs officers, and doctors went on strike earlier this month over changes to their working conditions; next month, taxi drivers will begin an open-ended sit-in to protest rising fuel prices. Politics often seem hopelessly polarized, with Islamists led by the political party Ennahda pitted against their secular opponents in parliament in a manner not unlike Egypt’s bloody rivalries. And the assassinations of two prominent liberal politicians, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, by Islamist militants earlier this year brought public anger against Ennahda into the streets, as many Tunisians blamed the Islamists for a soft embrace of extremist groups. It appeared that Tunisia — whose largely functional democratic transition has set it apart from the other Arab Spring countries — would no longer avoid the violence that has undermined the other revolutions and uprisings across the Middle East.

But for the first time in a long time, the political class has reached an accord. On December 14, after weeks of broken promises and missed deadlines, Tunisia’s rival political parties finally agreed on a deal to dissolve the Ennahda-led government and create an interim administration led by a compromise prime minister. If all goes according to plan, Mehdi Jomaa, who had previously served as minister of industry, will lead a caretaker government of technocrats until elections can be held next year, most likely after the summer. It’s further confirmation that, despite their ideological differences, Tunisia’s Islamists and secularists are perfectly capable of cooperating. It’s also another sign of pragmatism from the Islamists, who in October 2011 swept the first elections after the fall of Ben Ali. Now Ennahda, an Islamist force that sees itself as both a grassroots movement and a political party, has agreed to bow to the demands of its critics and give up power.

Aztec codices

Kids

I saw these codices in the Mexico City museum of anthropology. They are extraordinarily beautiful works of art. They don't have words or letters. But like the Han script or the mandarin or Japanese or Korean script, they are ideograms. Pictures. The Chinese Japanese and Korean characters have now evolved from the original picture to an idealised character but in these codices, you can see the original diagrams. Each of them tell a story. They are long, anything between 5 to 15 meters long, folded up and people will read from them. 

The colours are vibrant, 600 years since they were created. And I fogged up the glass cabinet by peering so closely at them. 

I'm trying to find a replica of these documents for our home but in the meantime you can read about them here or if kannu goes to oxford, then we can go see them in that museum. 

Absolutely beautiful. And Diya, these are examples of what you want to do, illustrations :) 

Love

Baba

Aztec codices - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codices

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Detail of first page from the Boturini Codex, depicting the departure fromAztlán.

Aztec codices (Nahuatl: Mēxihcatl āmoxtli Nahuatl pronunciation: [meː'ʃiʔkatɬ aː'moʃtɬi]) are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they are largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives.^[1] The colonial era codices not only contain Aztec pictograms, but also Classical Nahuatl (in the Latin alphabet), Spanish, and occasionally Latin.

Although there are very few surviving pre-conquest codices, the tlacuilo (codex painter) tradition endured the transition to colonial culture; scholars now have access to a body of around 500 colonial-era codices.