When was that? I've been supporting people on Patreon since 2014 and it's basically been the same mix of independent comic artists and Youtubers the entire time. I know there was a ruckus when they kicked porn off the site, but I never knew they were on there in the first place.
Indira Gandhi is being painted in a complete negative light here, and the Princes and Kings and Nawabs are being glorified here.
Let me disagree.
The Princes, Nawabs, and Kings were all chosen based on birth and birth only and they are flag bearers of a classist society with no chance of upwards mobility. They were proponents of a system which was deeply sexist and castiest.
I am very glad that they were gotten rid of.
About Gandhi, she is among the best and worst Prime Ministers of India. She is the only one who suspended democracy and started emergency rule, and was an autocrat. On the other hand she implemented a lot of policies that pulled many people out of poverty, helped the freedom fighters in Bangladesh to gain freedom from the Genocidal and mass-rapist regime of Pakistan. Sje fully deserves the criticism for being an autocrat.
And on a different note, it is weird seeing an Indian woman being referred as Devi. Devi is not a last name. Even half a century ago, before the age of IDs, Indian women weren't allowed to hold the family name- before or after marriage. Their last name became Devi which means "goddess", literally.
It is still used informally in formal conversations and media. So if an Indian woman is X Y, where X is the given name, and Y is the family name, the woman can be referred to as X Devi.
Just Devi makes no sense. Foreign writers writing about India should know these.
Also, the title Devi is often divisive and casteist, as often only higher caste women were referred to as Devi (goddess), and women from lower castes were referred to as Dasi (slave).
Agree with most of what you said. Indira Gandhi was no saint and there were enough horror stories from her rein growing up that its ebossed on my brain.
But the royals weren't the goody-two-shoes as the article mentions. Most of them were so disconnected from the ground reality that it is hilarious to think they were capable of ruling anybody. The article mentions Jai's yearly visits to europe, in a time when half the country had barely enough to eat (this was before green or white revolution in the country). Gandhi's family was the from the same category, and I am glad none of them are in power anymore.
> Devi is not a last name
Agree..
> Even half a century ago, before the age of IDs, Indian women weren't allowed to hold the family name- before or after marriage.
We probably grew up in different parts of country, but I can definitely attest my grandmother having last name the same as my grandfather after marriage (her father's before getting married). I am almost certain that was the case with my great grandmothers too, but its a little hard to track it down to be 100% sure.
> often only higher caste women were referred to as Devi (goddess), and women from lower castes were referred to as Dasi (slave).
This was also not the case from where I grew up. For at least 100 years this was not the case. There was ridiculous caste segregation, and other casteist nonsense all over, but the naming didn't really reflect like this. Often the ruling class had some fancy titles, that the peasants didn't have, but they also didn't have any marker like 'dasi'.
1. They were gotten rid off long before Indira Gandhi came anywhere close to power. What she did do, was legislate the abolition of privy purses. These were part of the agreement that the GoI had with the princes at the time of accession. Indira violated that contract, because she was in power.
Her primary sins:
1. Emergency
2. Nationalization of banks, and other leftist causes.
3. Abolition of privy purses.
Hah. When I read about those privy purses I think about the startups dumping venture capital.
The GoI poured money on royals when they were entering 'the market' (governance), and when they had a strong market standing, they pulled a bait and switch, and raised prices (stopped giving out massive discounts, a.la. Uber, WeWork).
Not that I'm complaining, 9/10 royals where horrible people completely disconnected from the general population. Good riddance.
Whoa, you remind me of walking through College Street in Kolkata. A whole locality named after books- Boi Para (literally- a locality of books).
The place has colleges, schools, parks, and book shops- a whole lot of them. And the book shops kept and organized books randomly. Many focused on academic books but most did not.
It was a pleasure walking through the roads and buying second hand books based on pure interest and exploration.
I use a combination of pen and paper, and sticky notes on a wall mounted detective board for things to do immediately.
I also use Simplenote. Free with markdown support, sync, and publishable links.
I use Samsung Notes for trivial stuff, like chores or shopping list.
If I want to easily sketch inside a note app, OneNote is the best. But it is weird in a sense that there are two OneNotes- one that comes with Office, and anotherthatcomes with Win 10. But OneNote is buggy and slow. You can barely use it in mobiles. I don't use windows that much.
Which brings me towards Obsidian. Best data policy, custom plugins, and what not!?
I am using it everyday. I am using another sync service to sync between devices.
Learning new languages does add different layers to your personality.
I am native-level fluent in three languages, and have some level of fluency in three more.
Learning a new language opens a complete new door to a new culture, and way of thoughts through books, movies, songs, and so much more.
Even if you don't spend time to learn a culture well, i.e. don't listen to music or read literature, learning a new grammar, and very importantly, new words, do reshape you, and gives you new perspectives and ways of thoughts.
Not even a bit. I am hearing this "Python domination threatened by Julia" thing for the last 4-5 years (others have been hearing it since much earlier). Nothing changed.
I never got paid for writing Julia, nobody I know that used Python ever switched to Julia.
Only some niche research groups uses Julia in some universities.
Nowhere that I personally know off uses Julia in industry.
And I see no reason to use it either. I use PyTorch, fastai, and sklearn for work and play. Analysts uses R (and Excel at a previous work). Julia has no usable library to be used for practical, dependable tasks. Last time I checked, the pre-compile times for even the simplest functions were painstakingly high.
I have started to dabble with Jax/Flax, and the PyTorch XLA library. Amazong things happening in the TPU space. And it all uses Python.
A research group (in Astronomy) switched to Julia, but they used FORTRAN and MATLAB.
I don't see Python's domination threatened by Julia in any way.
Python, however faces competition from Go in network programming, and Rust for CLI programming.
This was a fascinating read. And this information about Indian dance gestures should not be seen separately from ancient Indian languages like Sanskrit.
If you are wondering how a gesture can mean multiple things, then I must tell you it all depends on the context. And truly master dancers and composers know how to tell two or more stories with one dance!
I regularly read something called "Vaishnava Padavali" which are ancient Bengali poems about Krishna and Chaitanya, but at the same time they convey very deeper meanings.
And it is not like metaphors in other languages, where one meaning is "hidden", the second (or third) meaning hides in plain sight.
If you interpret the meaning of a word in one way, you get one meaning, and if you do it another way, you get another. And you can string together multiple storylines and messages from one piece of text.
Let me give you an example- "Varshaa" in Sanskrit means monsoon. And "Varsho" means a year- it means the amount of time in which there is one monsoon. And again, "Varsho" are also mountains where clouds collapse to and brings monsoon. So, depending on the context (or multiple), "Varsho" could either mean a mountain or a year.
A man took it up a notch- Sandhyakar Nandi, who wrote a whole epic, which is a retelling of the Epic Ramayana on one interpretation, but is the life of Pala Emperor Ramapal on other.
In the same way, dance gestures can mean multiple things based on your interpretation. And different interpretations run parallely, together.
Sanskrit is a language with metaphors built-in in the language.
The entry barrier is extremely high, but Sanskrit poems, plays, and epics are one of the most profoundly intellectually stimulating pieces of text in the world.
