The world is perfect!

A friend of mine has this interesting email signature:

...........................................

My face in the mirror
Isn’t wrinkled or drawn.
My house isn’t dirty
The cobwebs are gone.
My garden looks lovely
And so does my lawn.
I think I might never
Put my glasses back on!

..........................................

Mera Bharat Mahan?

It would be incredible were it not a fact. At a government hospital in Chennai (in Royapuram, to be precise), two mothers gave birth at the same time. The hospital staff mixed the babies up so that the parentage became suspect when it came to handing them over. One of the two babies was male, the other female. Inevitably a furore resulted. DNA tests were conducted. It took a week but eventually the babies were handed over to the right mothers. A silent thanks to technology. A million curses to the hospital which could not handle a matter at once as simple and crucial as this.

In another event, this time in Tiruvallur, five children fell ill and were admitted to the government hospital after they were administered measles vaccine shots (which are meant for children below 13 months of age) at a Primary Health Centre earlier in the day. Three of them died. Another death occurred, for the same reason and on the same day, although the child received his measles vaccine at another PHC. Reportedly, the vaccines came from the same batch and might have been contaminated. However, about 20,000 other children have received vaccine shots from the same batch thus far without any incident. So what went wrong in these tragic cases? At any rate, four deaths later, the batch has been withdrawn from use and samples sent for examination. Perhaps I should say ‘purportedly withdrawn’. For the way things work, some careless nurse might still use one of the vials tomorrow and some more deaths may follow.

Both these incidents are reported in today’s Coimbatore edition of The Hindu (www.thehindu.in). I have no words to express my disgust and revulsion.

New Year and a scientific error

The last fortnight has seen a spate of New Year days. Last Monday, April 7, was Ugadi and Gudi Padva, for the people of Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra. This Sunday the 13th marked the beginning of the Tamil New Year (although there has been a fair bit of controversy over the decision of the incumbent DMK-led government to mark the beginning of the Tamil calendar with the month of Thai, which begins in the middle of January). The next day, the 14th, was Vishu for Malayalam-speakers, which coincided with Baisakhi in the Punjab and Bihu in Assam. A prominent exception to this spate of New Year days have been the Gujaratis, who celebrate their New Year on the day after Diwali.

The New Year is believed to spring from the transition of the sun from the raasi Meena (Pisces, or the Fish, among the constellations of the zodiac) to Mesha (Aries, or the Lamb). This year the transition brought to an end the Tamil year Sarvajithhu, and the beginning of the year Sarvadhaari. The Tamil calendar (which draws from the overarching Hindu calendar) consists of an iterative cycle of sixty years, with Sarvadhaari numbering twenty-second. It appears that the Tamil calendar does not follow an ordinal number year system. After consulting the almanac, my grandmother announced that the current year is the 5109th year of Kalyuga, and that is the only number that we seem to have, in contrast to other regional calendars in the country.

The Tamil year is a solar calendar while the calendars followed by the Kannadigas, Maharashtrians and Andhraaites are luni-solar, adhering to the movements of the moon as well as the sun. In the luni-solar calendars the months commence with the bright half of the moon. This explains why Ugadi (and Gudi Padva) is celebrated a week before the Tamil New Year (and Vishu, Bihu, Baisakhi et al). Ugadi always falls on the day after amavasya or the new moon. India's diversity extends to the various calendar systems followed by the people. For example, people in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra follow the Shaka era with the year 78 CE as the base year whereas those in Gujarat, Rajasthan and India's neighbour, Nepal, follow the Vikram Samvat era with the year 57 CE serving as the base year. Another interesting difference between the two is that while both are luni-solar in nature, the months in the Samvat calendars commence with the dark half of the moon (that is, the day after the full moon), in a mirror-like contrast to the Shaka calendars.

Despite minor differences, all calendars are rooted in an overarching system that may be called the Hindu calendar, which marks the year to the season. The Hindu calendar is based upon the observations made by astronomers of the sub-continent from Vedic times, with modifications being made periodically. The calendar system that we follow today seems to have taken roots around the middle of the first millennium CE. Curiously, despite their advanced attainments in astronomy our ancestors ended up making a mistake with the Hindu calendar. This lay in the phenomenon called the precession of the earth’s axis, wherein the motion of the earth around the sun is influenced by the rotation of the earth’s axis. Our astronomers, while aware of the phenomenon, failed to take it into account while calculating the length of the year. Consequently, the Hindu calendar year is about twenty-three minutes longer than actual, which implies that it accumulates a whole day in about 60 years. In the approximately 1400 years since it was designed, the present calendar has accumulated (with a minor approximation) a whopping 24 days. In other words, our calendar presently tells us the seasons with a lag of approximately 24 days, which is almost a month! Thus, the New Year, which is supposed to mark the transition of the sun from Meena to Mesha (or Pisces to Aries) is actually out of sync with the actual event for the sun has already entered Mesha following the spring equinox, which falls on March 21. Similarly, our observance of Makar Sankranti, which indicates the movement of the sun from Dhanusha to Makara (or Sagittarius to Capricorn) is late by a period of approximately 24 days. The actual event marking this transition has already occurred in the form of the winter solstice (when the sun shines right over the Tropic of Capricorn) on December 22! In this way, we are no longer celebrating our festivals in the same seasons as our forefathers.

This error in our calendars has not remained uncorrected. Far from it. Newly independent India set up a Calendar Reform Committee in 1955, led by the physicist Meghnad Saha, which tried to rectify the gaps in the traditional calendar system. On the basis of its recommendations, a uniform Indian National Calendar encompassing the various regional calendars was adopted in the year 1957. However, the use of this calendar is confined to official usage. For popular purposes, we continue to use our erroneous regional calendars.

So, does this take the sheen off our New Years? I don’t know. We live in an age where the significance of events has largely been forgotten and replaced by a cultural symbolism. In other words, we celebrate many of our festivals, not so much for their underlying importance but more as a matter of custom: because they have been celebrated year after year by people before us. Thus, while there is compelling reason for us to rescue our calendars before they turn into an overly embarassing anachronism, there is still enough justification to see the joie de vivre and enthusiasm of our festivals as a cause for celebration in themselves. That, at any rate, is my two-bit!

(While this post draws from several sources in order to confirm the facts mentioned, for an interesting and a more detailed and complex discussion on the scientific error bit one may refer to http://www.frontline.in/: article entitled Medieval Mistake under the issue dated March 15-28, 2008.)

Telugu-speaking Tamils

On the day of Ugadi recently, my grand-aunt was here and we got talking about the Telugu-speaking communities of Coimbatore, for whom the day marked the beginning of the New Year in their calendar, which seems to follow the Shaka era. (The Shaka calendar is approximately 78 years behind the Gregorian calendar, so that this Ugadi marked the beginning of the Shaka year 1930.) The most prominent among them are the Vishnu-worshipping Naickers, who also call themselves Naidus. The word Naicker seems to come from Nayak, which was the title for middle-level chieftains under the Vijaynagar Empire. The Naidus of Coimbatore are a prosperous community who have who contributed much to Coimbatore’s twin reputation as a city of entrepreneurs as well as a centre for higher education. Their enormously successful foray into the textile industry in the first half of the 20th century was made possible by the investment of sizeable agricultural surpluses accumulated by virtue of money-lending and shrewd economic sense, a sine qua non in matters of commerce. Even today, almost the entire stretch of Avanashi Road, from LIC at one end to SITRA on the other, is Naidu territory. (One must add that there are some sub-castes of Naickers whose mother-tongue is Kannada. E.V. Ramasamy Naicker ‘Periyar’, for instance, belonged to one such sub-caste.)

There is then the Telugu-speaking community of Devanga Chettiars, weavers by tradition but carrying the belief that their ancestors were kshatriyas. They have contributed to the city one of the landmarks of Coimbatore – the Devanga Chettiar High School near Poo Market. They worship at the Sowdeswari Amman Temple on Raja Street, along with another Telugu-speaking sub-caste of the Chettiar clan, the Komutti Chettiars, who apparently prefer to be called Vysials. The latter are businessmen, and seem to specialise in jewellery. Besides, some of the famous saree showrooms, such as Nalli’s are also believed to be owned by members of this caste. (Somebody correct me if I am wrong!) The Vysials have also left their imprint on the city. Many of the jewellery shops on Raja Street supposedly belong to them; in addition, they have a whole street named after themselves, Vysial Street in the heart of Coimbatore.

A Telugu-speaking community with a curious name is the 24-Manai Telugu Chettiar. They are again a trading community, but are clustered mainly around Madurai and Thanjavur, and in Kongu Nadu they are spread across the towns of Pollachi, Udumalpet and Coimbatore. T.S. Avinashilingam Chettiar, a doyen of education, and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya as well as what is now the Avinashilingam Deemed University, was also a Telugu-speaking Tamil, belonging to the cotton-trading community of Tiruppur Chettiars (I presume they have a more formal name that I am ignorant of). Both of the remarkable institutions that were founded by this Padma Bhushan awardee and lifelong bachelor were born out of the enormous profits earned by his family during the War years.

There are probably many more Telugu-speaking communities that I am not aware of (and which I shall be extremely happy to be informed about). The upshot of this discussion is that contrary to perception, Tamil Nadu is not as homogenous a land as it appears. It is a land enriched by the presence of various communities that are Tamil by virtue of many generations of residence here, and speak the language eloquently, but break into a non-Tamil tongue (which, besides Telugu, can be Kannada, Tulu, Marathi or Malayalam) upon their return home. They have preserved, in more or less pristine form, many of their traditions and customs, even as they have probably evolved new ones. Such ecumenical diversity is a cause for pride and celebration.

Whence and why did such various groups of people make their way to these parts, abandoning their original towns and villages? History probably has elaborate insights to offer but I choose to end this song of sixpence with a delightful extract laced with wry humour:

My ancestors were Telugu-speaking Naidus, but the family had lived in the Tamil country for many generations. My seventh grandfather cut down the forest, ploughed the first field and built the first house in our village. We must have been in Tamil Nadu even before that, but from where in Andhra we came and where we lived until we made a home in our present village remains unknown. Nor do we have any idea as to whether we came as conquerors or perhaps as refugees…The only clue is a very old sword sheathed inside what looks like a walking stick, which has been in our family for as long as anyone can remember. On the strength of his slender evidence, the martial background of the family was presumed, but rarely insisted upon.

(The passage is taken from the memoir Climbing the Coconut Tree, authored by Kasthuri Srinivasan, industrialist and founder-director of the South Indian Textile Research Association - SITRA. Srinivasan was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, and an illustrious son of Coimbatore. There is today an art gallery in his name on Avanashi Road in the city.)

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar and Tamil poets

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar lived in the early 18th century. He was a wealthy man, a Muslim and an owner of ships. If one is to judge from the paeans composed in his name by the itinerant and innovative Tamil versifiers of his era and later ones - and I am taking M. Krishnan’s word for this - he was an extraordinarily generous man, a benefactor of poets. The indigent freelance poet, who wandered from land to land visiting one prospective patron after another, went to him with great expectations. Apparently, the songs in his praise that have outlasted him suggest that he was a person with a great love for the Tamil language, and show that he let nothing, least of all religion, come in the way of his noblesse oblige when called upon by a poet with a hole in his pocket and free-flowing verse at the tip of his tongue.

Thus, one such verse in his praise, translated by M. Krishnan from the Tamil (as is the case with all verses in this post), reads as follows:

Spent with his blaze the sun is red; the eyes
of women redden in the toils of love:
the poet’s heart grows red reading the classes –
and Seethakkaathi’s hands are red with giving.

These lines come from the stylus of Padikkaasuthambiran, a contemporary of Seethakkaathi. This poet also has to his credit some angry, resentful verse in self-castigation of his pursuit of poetry, a calling that embraced the goddess of learning only to be abandoned by the goddess of wealth. One such vituperative poem goes thus:

Foredoomed, with many callings there, we chose scholarship witlessly, thinking it great.
We did not learn the street magician’s art, dance the pole-dance, or practise sleight-of-hand.
Not born full-breasted prostitutes, we did not, abandoning accursed Tamil, enter service with women as their go-betweens.
To what a wretched life have we been born!

The fortunes of the poet depended greatly upon the munificence, or lack of it, of the patron he went visiting. These patrons, who could be mighty kings, but more realistically speaking, were generally little more than petty chieftains, landlords or merchants, could be unpredictable, ranging from the open-handed to the tight-fisted, and from the miserly to the downright mean. It was not uncommon for the poet, trudging for days together from his village to the town, to arrive at the patron’s stately home and sing his laurels employing the latest novelty in technique and rhythm, only to find his expectations belied. For example, here is a verse by Ashtavaadhanam Saravanaperumal Kavirayar of Ramanathapuram laden with a thick patina of satire:

‘Whom visits me?’–‘A poet’–‘And where are you from?’
‘From Vadakasi.’–‘What brings you here?’
‘Your fame has brought me here.
Hearing of you we have composed sweet verses in your praise.’
‘You were not wise. Which of my long line of forefathers has
listened to verse? A slight unknown in all my ancestry
is what you bring! Go far away before there is bloodshed.’

The poet would leave no stone unturned to thaw the heart of the most pitiless of misers. Thus, Chockanaathappulavar tried to seduce the springs of kindness in the bosom of a certain Bhoja, saying:

Bhoja, when as a thunderstorm you showered
gold-rain upon the spread of the earth beneath,
not a drop touched me, for my poverty
shielded me wholly with its deep umbrella!

In the case of Seethakkaathi, one imagines, poets sang his praise in all sincerity, free from the anxiety that their lyrical labours would be found wanting by a man so generous. Legend has it that a weary poet reached Seethakkathi’s town only to hear of his death. Making his way to the cemetery where the merchant was being buried, he burst into verse, his elegy hinting that the patron’s life had been claimed by the weight of poverty that the poet had brought with him. At this, the dead Seethakkathi’s right hand, bearing a diamond ring, flung open in the direction of the disappointed seeker. Even in death, the great patron did not disappoint.

(The contents of this post are based upon M. Krishnan’s essay, Verse for a living, from Ramachandra Guha, ed. (2007) Nature’s Spokesman: M. Krishnan & Indian Wildlife, Penguin Books, New Delhi. This book is a must-read for nature-lovers, enthusiasts of Tamil literature, aficionados of cricket, and lovers of the English language.)