Keezhadi Museum

 Around 2015, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) made an exciting new archaeological discovery south-east of Madurai in the Keezhadi village. What looked like urban settlements with houses built of standardized bricks and tiled roofs were found at a depth of about 2.5m. More significantly, they were dated between the 6th and 3rd century BCE! Pottery, beads, iron tools and weapons, teracotta tools and toys have been found. To put this in context, the only other urban settlement in India that is older than this is the Indus Valley (or Harappan) Civilization which dates back to the 3rd millennium BCE. 

Some of the pottery found in the site had inscriptions that seem to be Tamil Brahmi providing tantalizing circumstantial evidence that links this settlement with the Sangam poetry corpus. That is, if you are willing to take a leap of faith. Until now, the Tamil Sangam poetry itself has been dated to a much later period: 1st and 2nd century CE. In my humble opinion, the fact that there is Tamil Brahmi writing suggests the Keezhadi people were potentially Tamil speakers, but does not by itself mean their language was evolved enough to produce the poetry of the richness and sophistication of Sangam Tamil. On the other hand, I have always felt the current dating of Sangam poetry also highly suspect.  Compressing that vast corpus to 200 years seems like a rather tight fit. In any case, I am hoping findings like Keezhadi make historians revisit the dating of Sangam poetry.

There is also some controversy around the age of the pottery with inscriptions (as to which end of the 6th century BCE - 2nd century BCE time frame they belong to). The controversy is that, if they turn out to be older than the 3rd century BCE, then that pre-dates Ashokan Brahmi, the script that was used in Ashokan edicts found throughout India. However Tamil Brahmi has until now been considered an evolution of (Ashokan or Mauryan) Brahmi and not the other way around.

We cannot access the archeological sites themselves, where excavations are still going on. However an excellent museum has been put together that houses many of the artifacts and some model recreations from the Keezhadi site. We visited this museum recently and this post is inspired by that visit. 

As you enter the museum there is a small auditorium where they show a 15 minute video providing the historical context and background which is best seen before seeing the museum itself. 

Let me just give a brief background on stages of growth of a particular human culture or civilization before we see where Keezhadi fits in; human populations go though various stages in their development as a culture starting from hunter gatherers and three peiods of Stone Age, namely Paleolithic (Old), Mesolithic (Middle) and Neolithic (New) Stone Ages. In the Paleolithic period, large stone tools with  sharpened edges are usually found. In latter ages, smaller, more specialized tools and more polished stone tools are used. Some of these human cultures discover iron and/or copper and gold go through the Iron Age developing metallic tools, coins and weapons. 

As they go through these stages, humans move from a nomadic hunter gatherer life style to settled societies, with farming and agrictulture, producing food that can be saved across seasons. They start producing pots for storage. As the society becomes more sophisticated, it produces goods for leisure such as jewels and ornaments using beads and metals and toys and games. Coins from other remote civilizations can be found suggesting trade links to those societies. If they develop writing, they start making inscriptions or other signages on rocks, caves and pots. 

The Keezhadi settlement is clearly an Iron Age settlement which shows all the stages of development listed above:

• Walls made of standard sized bricks, tiles, ringed wells
• Terracotta pipes and brick-made channels for water
• Black and red pottery including Black Polished ware 
• Seals, Roman coins and arretine pottery shards suggest trades to remote civilizations
• Tamil Brahmi script in pot shards
• Many iron tools such as ladles, sickles and knives
• Beads of different kinds and small gold ornaments
• Toys like cube and cuboid dice made of ivory and terracotta

The museum includes references to Sangam Literature (especially Natrinai, Purananuru and Agananuru) that indirectly refer to some of the artifacts. The juxtaposition of Sangam poetry references next to artifacts might suggest a direct link but I found these connections quite tenuous.  For instance, next to an antimony rod that was evidently used for decorating a woman's eyelash, there is a citation of a line from a Natrinai poem that talks about a women's hazel eys with decorated eyelashes. 

On less controversial matters, I found the museum very well organized. Local design elements such as Athankudi tiles and wood work that is reminiscent of Chettinadu have been used tastefully in the multiple buildings that make up the museum. The sheer number and variety of artifacts on display for a settlement that was discovered only 10 years ago is quite remarkable. We went on a week day and the crowds were sparse; I hope the museum gets added to everyone's must-see list for Madurai. 

R. Balaji

On the New Test Cricket - part 1

 It is difficult to believe I haven't written more on cricket - the avid fan that I am, especially of the Test format. This is likely to be the first of a series of posts, so bear with me while I ramble and rant a bit on T-20 and then the pleasures of Test cricket. 

Test cricket remains the purest and most balanced battle of bat vs. ball. I realize I might antagonize T-20 fans, but I have always believed T-20 tilts the balance heavily in favor of bat over ball. When there is no fear of getting all out in a 20 over span, batsmen hit with impunity and scamper home in 20 overs with 5-6 wickets lost. So yes, lots of 4's and 6's to go wild over; but there is rampant run inflation (i.e. the value of a run, a 4 or a 6 has come down).  I wonder what will happen if they tweak T-20 to say 5 wickets down and you are all out, with 5 players who only bat and 5 who only bowl. 

The 50 overs ODI is a reasonable middle ground where the threat of getting all out remains. So I believe predictions of the demise of the ODI format are premature, but I could very well be proven wrong on this one, given the huge success of IPL (I recently learnt it is one of the top 10 leagues in the world across all sports -  measured in terms of the money in it). It remains to be seen whether 3 formats can survive, given the demands it puts on players and the cricketing nations to squeeze in local T-20 leagues, along with international competition.

So anyways, as a Test cricket fan, I never miss out on Indian test cricket and also watch the Ashes with great interest . There is something magical about the sheer visual image - players sporting pure whites on the lush green fields of England. The ball swings like crazy and 250 is a par score for a Test inning. Tennis fans can perhaps relate to this visual delight when they tune into the first week of Wimbledon every year; players in pure whites on pristine verdant turf.

When HD coverage started happening, for the first time, you could see the ball's movement in the air even before it pitched - yes there is movement before it hits the pitch and then movement after it pitches. And in slow motion, if the bowler has perfect seam position you can see which side of the ball is shiny. Which in turn determines the swing direction - towards the rough side in traditional swing and the other way when the ball gets older and starts 'reversing'. We could have an entire post on the art and physics of swing bowling.

If you grew up watching test cricket in the 80s and 90s, India always had great batsmen (Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Vengsarkar and Azharuddin), but we were never a fast bowling powerhouse, with Kapil Dev standing out as the only great seam bowler (and he only bowled medium pace) from that era. Overall we were a middling team. We would lose most test series against the dominant teams of that time, viz. West Indies, Australia and England. 

In the 2000s, the batting stayed strong, if not stronger with a formidable batting unit that consisted of Sehwag, Tendulkar, Dravid and VVS Laxman; not to mention Ganguly and a strong batting wicketkeeper in MS Dhoni. We continued to be strong in spin bowling with great spinning duos such as Kumble/Harbhajan Singh and more recently Ashwin/Jadeja. All of this resulted in some really solid performances at home where we could pulverize the opposition in spin-friendly pitches, but our record abroad was still mediocre, especially against Australia, England and Sout Africa. Zaheer Khan was a great swing bowler for a while, but fast bowling remained an area of weakness. 

Into the 2010s, we finally started producing genuine fast bowlers who could move the ball both ways.  This brings us to who we have now - Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and to a lesser extent Mohammed Siraj. These guys bowl regularly in the high 130s kph, and Bumrah can bowl in the low 140s kph with great accuracy. Bumrah is currently ranked the no. 1 bowler in ICC Test Rankings, a first for an Indian pacer. More on Bumrah later.

The batting dominance continued after the aforementioned unit retired. Kohli came in and has become arguably the greatest multi-format player of all time. As a Test batsman, his form has declined a bit in recent years, but still ranks easily among the top 10 around the world. Pujara took over "Wall" duties from Dravid and others like KL Rahul and Rahane have chimed in. May be there aren't as many now that will end up in the all-time-great list (Kohli being the only one). But at any given point in time, we have enough in-form batsmen to field two world-class batting sides. Youngsters like Shubman Gill and Yashaswi Jaiswal show great promise.

Thanks to a stronger and more balanced bowling unit (as in both pace and spin), India has beome a cricketing powerhouse in the last 15 years or so. Nowadays we almost always win series at home against anyone and have started winning abroad as well, with back to back series wins in Australia being the highlight. South Africa is the only place where we are yet to win a series. India is often ranked no. 1 or 2 in the World Test rankings. In the new World Test Championship format (which is a 2 year cycle), India is the only team that reached the finals in both instances of so far. True, we lost both the finals to NZ and Australia respectively, but reaching both finals is a testament to the team's consistency over this period.

I wrote all of the above without looking at any numbers, I then looked it up and thankfully the numbers as produced by Google Gemini confirmed my impressions*; India has steadily gotten better as a Test cricket team over the last 4 decades. The following table is reproduced verbatim from Gemini's answer to my question "India's Win loss draw record in Test cricket matches in the last 50 years by decade". 

Decade	Played	Won	Lost	Drawn	Win%	Note
2020s (2020-2023)	54	30	13	11	55.56	Current period
2010s (2010-2019)	82	41	24	17	50.00	Kohli Era
2000s (2000-2009)	81	34	28	19	42.53	Tendulkar, Sehwag & Dravid era
1990s (1990-1999)	80	27	34	19	33.75	Azharuddin & Tendulkar era
1980s (1980-1989)	81	20	31	30	24.69	Gavaskar & Kapil Dev era

So overall, it is an exciting time to be a cricket fan in India. And then Test cricket itself is evolving. We have a new breed of young cricketers (aforementioned Jaiswal, Shubman Gill and the swashbuckling Rishabh Pant) who defy conventional wisdom and bat with supreme confidence and aggression. There is this thing called Bazball that England has been playing in the last few years which has brought a new fearless (or reckless?) and aggressive approach to Test batting. Their record over this period is not bad at all (14-6). But is it because of Bazball? Would they perhaps have an even better record if they did not play Bazball? 

More on Bazball and other recent trends in Test cricket in the next post.

Balaji 

* I checked ChatGPT as well and it returned different numbers which puts both the ChatGPT and Gemini numbers in question; however both sets of numbers confirm the same trend - that India's win percentage in Tests has been improving every decade since the 90s, till midway through the 2020s. 

 

  

   

Cultural and religious connections between South India and South East Asia

Recently we traveled to Bali which piqued my interest in this topic and has been reinforced by a recent lecture I attended. As we learned while preparing for the Bali trip, while Indonesia is predominantly Islamic, the population of Bali is mostly Hindu, Balinese Hindu to be specific. 

We grew up learning about Rajendra Chola's military expedition to South East Asia. As per K. A. Nilakanta Sastri's treatise on South Indian History, Rajendra's naval expedition resulted in victory over the Sri Vijaya kingdom, forcing the Sri Vijayan king, Sangrama Vijayatungavarman to accept Chola suzerainty. The Sri Vijaya kingdom at the time, spanned the Malayan peninsula and Sumatra (the largest Indonesian island).  It is well known that Rajendra Chola earned the title Kadaram Kondan after this expedition. Kadaram is the Tamil name of modern day Kedah, a port in modern-day northern Malaysia. 

It might be tempting to say that the connection to South East Asia was initiated by this expedition. That would be inaccurate and simplistic to assume that cultural connections happen solely through or as a result of warfare. The connections between India - especially South India -  and South East Asia had clearly started 100s of years earlier. After all, the rulers of the Sri Vijayan dynasty (modern day Indonesia/Malaysia) and the Khmer Dynasty (modern day Cambodia) bore Hindu/Sanskrit names*. Nilakanta Sastri states that diplomatic relations existed between the Chola and Sri Vijaya kingdoms since at least Rajaraja Chola's (Rajendra Chola's father) time. 

The more immediate impetus for this post is from a very interesting and insightful lecture  I had the privilege to attend, by  Prof. Vasudha Narayanan, (Dept. of Religion, University of Florida) on Vishnu Temples and Iconography in Cambodia. Dr. Vasudha covered multiple examples of how deities and stories from Hindu mythology have been interpreted and represented sculpturally by Cambodian sculptors including at the world-famous Angkor Wat temple. Following are some excerpts and my take-aways from this talk.  

The story of the churning of the Ocean of Milk (பாற்கடல்) by the Asuras and Devas has for some reason attained a lot of significance in Cambodia and is a common motif across the country. It is a fascinating story of how Lord Vishnu takes multiple forms - first the Koorma (tortoise) Avataram that supports the Mandara Mountain which is used to churn the ocean to extract the amirtam (the nectar of immortality) and later takes on the form of Mohini to oversee the distribution of the amirtam to the devas and asuras.  Dr. Vasudha talked about the massive 49-metre bas relief panel on the eastern gallery of the outer wall of Angkor Wat that depicts the churning scene **.  

There is a curious character near one end of Vasuki the snake's tail (the snake is used as the rope to churn) on the panel. It is a robust looking monkey figure bigger than the churners next to it. This character has been previously identified as either Hanuman or Sugriva by scholars. 

Photo courtesy of Bahnfrend licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

However, Dr. Vasudha has made a compelling case that this is none other than Vali. Perhaps the most compelling evidence she cites is from Kambaramayanam, where Vali's participation in the churning effort is mentioned. It should be noted that in Valmiki's Ramayana there is no mention of Vali's involvement. Kamban however mentions this in multiple instances including one where Vali is mollifying his wife Tara saying he - whose strength helped the Devas themselves in churning the ocean - can handle his brother Sugriva in battle. There is also a 13th century Telugu text called Ranganatha Ramayana that mention's Vali's involvement in the churning of the ocean. Dr. Vasudha also showed a relief panel of the churning scene in the Virupaksha temple at Pattadakkal in which a monkey figure is shown (which happens to be an amazing heritage site in its own right as a Badami Chalukya temple from the 8th century). 

Dr. Vasudha also showed instances where the Cambodian representation of stories from Hindu texts is different from how they are typically seen in India. 

• There are sculptures representing the story of Vishnu protecting his devotee Gajendra the elephant from the crocodile. In Cambodia, the crocodile is above Lord Vishnu which is very different from how it is portrayed in India. 
• The reclined posture of Lord Vishnu on Adhiseshan the multi-headed serpent is usually depicted with Vishnu's head on the left. However in Cambodia, it is more commonly depicted with his head on the right. There are rare instances of this in India as well which Dr. Vasudha has identified; she has come up with a correlation of the direction the scultpture is facing to which side the head is positioned.

It is as if Cambodian sculptors had access to the same texts, but perhaps not the Indian iconography and came up with their own. Or as Dr. Vasudha stresses, there is the possibility that they did not necessarily have access to the texts, but had knowledge of the same stories that are narrated in those texts. 

R. Balaji

P.S.

* It is also interesting to note the an suffix of the male rulers' names which bears similarity to Tamil (and Malayalam?) names - as opposed to other Indian languages which do not have the an suffix; e.g. Bheeman in Tamil vs. Bheema in Telugu/Kannada or Bheem in Hindi).

** See this WSJ article for a nice description of the panel at Angkor Wat. 

An objective measure of how majestic a mountain is

Ever since our days in Seattle, I have been endlessly fascinated with mountains like Rainier and Denali - mountains that stand much taller than their neighbouring mountains thereby offering dramatic and spectacular views, often from long distances. It turns out there is an objective measure that measures this quality: topographical prominence (thanks to a Windows screen saver photo of Mt. Kilimanjaro which led me to this Wikipedia page). Some really high peaks (like K2) don't have as much topological prominence as they are surrounded by mountain masses that are also very high.

By Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work, GFDL 1.2, Link

The definition of topographic prominence is a bit tricky but makes intuitive sense if you think about it. Wikipedia defines it as " the height of a mountain or hill's summit relative to the lowest contour line encircling it but containing no higher summit within it". Basically:

1. Find the maximal land area surrounding the peak which contains no higher peak. 
2. Find the lowest point in that area. 
3. Topographic prominence is the height of the peak from that point. 

Now, which mountain do you think is #1 in terms of topological prominence? As per another helpful Wikipedia page on the Ranking of Mountains by Topological prominence, it is indeed Mt. Everest. Well, no surprise there, you might say. But I was actually surprised. I knew that you need to get to a very high altitude before you even see Everest. The base camp for a mountaineer making an attempt at Mt. Everest is at a whopping 17000 ft. So I would have thought Mt. Everest's topological prominence would be around 12000 ft, not that high. I thought even Mt. Rainier might beat it, Denali for sure. You can see Denali from 100 miles. 

But then if you go back and read the definition again, Mt. Everest gets the top nod based on a technicality. You see, as per step 1, you need to find the maximal area surrounding the peak which contains no higher peak. Since there is no higher peak than Everest, the maximal area is the Earth's entire landmass (or at least Eurasia if you want to be very precise). And the lowest point in that area (step 2) is sea level. Hence the topological prominence of Everest is its entire height from sea level, all 29000ft of it. So the measure actually doesn't really work that well for the tallest mountain in the world because it is no. 1 by definition, but it works well for others. So none of the high peaks in the Himalayas other than Mt. Everest  come up in the top 10, because they are surrounded by really high contiguous landmasses that includes higher peaks  and they don't stand out as much. 

Not surprisingly, Mt. Aconcagua and Mt. Denali the tallest mountains in South and North America respectively are 2nd and 3rd in the list. And Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa is fourth.  And my favourite neighbourhood Mt. Rainier comes in at a respectable 21st  in the list. 

- Balaji

BSVI, diesel cars and air quality

Overdrive magazine has been serving the needs of my inner car-buff, replacing Car and Driver from earlier days. Recently they have been publishing some good primers on automobile technology including one on electric cars. In the latest issue they have a good in-depth article on the new BSVI (BS-6) emission standards (http://overdrive.in/…/everything-you-need-to-know-about-bs…/) that is going to come into effect from April 1, 2020. What this means is that all new vehicles (big and small, 2-3-4 wheelers) sold after this date have to comply with BSVI emission requirements which are much more stringent than BSIV (BS-4) which was adopted in 2017. BSVI is based on the European standard Euro 6.

BSVI impacts diesel cars more because diesel engines pollute more and car-makers will have to equip diesel cars with cleaner running engines and more importantly install post-emission devices like DPF (diesel particulate filters) to meet the standards. This means that diesel cars will get more expensive. Also, in order to meet BSVI, diesel cars also need to use BSVI diesel. Indian gas refineries have been working on producing the cleaner burning diesel which should become available throughout the country by April 1st. Cars sold before the date of course can continue to run and they can use the BSVI diesel and will emit a bit less. BSVI implies significant reduction in nitrous oxides, sulphur content and particulate matter (80-90% reduction) all of which have been linked with respiratory and other illnesses. It will perhaps take years to see any noticeable improvement in air quality as more BSVI vehicles replace older cars. But it looks like a good thing.

In a nutshell, cleaner diesel, less emissions from new diesel vehicles, more expensive diesel cars.

Spreading positivity - kudos to Indigo Airlines

So, for a while now, when I read the newspaper in the morning, I get depressed because almost everything being reported is negative. This happens to some extent in social media as well. I recently participated in a Mindfulness workshop where people echoed this concern. So I have made a resolution to do my small bit and spread positivity around.

The first one I want to do is to appreciate Indigo Airlines for their on-time performance and how seriously they take it. I have been taking some late evening flights recently; while it is par for the course for most airlines to accumulate delays over the day, I was impressed how Indigo was on-time even in these evening flights. They seem to obsess about it to the point which causes some inconvenience to passengers (like they put you in the bus and go wait in the tarmac while the arriving passengers from the plane you're about to board are still disembarking; this helps parallelize and shorten the deboarding/boarding process); but I will take this minor inconvenience any day over waiting in the airport for a flight that got delayed by 2 hours. They also do smart things like adding some buffer to their flying time. This surely implies that they are not jamming in as many flights as they possibly could in a day at the cost of on-time performance. 

And there are some signs that this may be infectious. In the last GoAir flight I took, they started asking the passengers to help in getting the cabin ready for the next flight to shorten the time they are on the ground (something Indigo has been doing for many years). 

- Balaji

A Tale of Two Lakes

It is the monsoon season and we seem to be enjoying a normal monsoon here in Hyderabad. With the water crisis in Chennai being in the news, can't help but feel thankful to be in a city that hasn't reached that crisis point.   We see quite a few lakes within the city of Hyderabad still filled with water especially during the business end of the monsoon season and this year I look at them with a bit more appreciation.

My wife recently told me about the Aminpur Lake which is less than 5km from our house. She thought it could be a nice picnic spot. The lake is reachable from Miyapur by hanging a left off of the Bolaram Road. To reach the lake you have to continue as the street becomes a dirt road perhaps better navigated on a vehicle with high clearance. You have to walk across an expanse of brush to reach the lake. Along the way there is enough flat ground for kids nearby to have appropriated as a cricket field. Past the makeshift cricket field, as you approach the lake, if you're lucky, you will see - what do you know? - a flock of flamingos, pink ones!  As we walked closer for a better look, we must have breached their safety zone and the entire flock took to flight and settled themselves further inside in the lake.  Clearly the lake is not very deep even in the middle.

The entire flock assuming their flight pose of outstretched legs and long necks was a sight to behold. I was too stunned, that I missed the moment to capture it on camera. Apparently flamingos have been transiting through this lake every year as a stop in their migratory route. Word has it that in recent years, they - confused allegedly by climate change - have settled here in the lake for good.

The other lake that we have come across recently is the Shaikpet Kotha (New) Cheruvu (Lake). Multiple NGOs are attempting a cleanup of this lake (see recent Indian Express news article). This lake is right in the middle of town with settlements all around. The lake has clearly seen better days and looks anything but new. At some point the city saw fit to build a wall around the lake with what looks like a walkway that goes around the lake inside the wall. However, the whole setup is in a sad state of disrepair. The walkway is overrun with vegetation. The wall has been breached on one end close to the main road and GHMC seems to be using it as a garbage dump area. Sewage is being dumped on the other side. Plastic and construction waste is everywhere. Places that are clean enough are taken up by vendor stalls and vehicles many of them old and abandoned.

The lake itself is brimming with water and could be a great place to hang out for the neighbourhood if it can be cleaned up and the already existing walkway around the lake is made usable. Right now, it looks like a herculean task but there are some tenacious folks from Ananda Foundation and Krithi Foundation who are on this, so here is hoping for the best.

- Balaji