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October 31, 2005
Thousands lakhs and crores oh my!
Those outsiders who follow the Indian press may occasionally come across statistics cited using the Indian system of numeracy. Rather than proceed in thousands, millions and billions, the Indian system of enumeration proceeds with thousands, lakhs and crores. Western systems of enumeration group digits by threes. The number 1048576 would be split up as 1 048 576 (one million, forty eight thousand five hundred and seventy six). The Indian system splits a large number into groups of two, except for the rightmost group, which contains three digits. A thousand ones make up a thousand (duh!), but a hundred thousand is a lakh and a hundred lakhs is a crore. 1048576 would thus be split as 10 48 576 (10 lakhs, forty eight thousand five hundred seventy six). Hindi newscasts frequently use the word arab (most likely unrelated to the ethnicity) to refer to one hundred crores. Other than that, modern Indian numeracy stops at the crore and anything higher is expressed just in terms of crores, e.g. one billion would be expressed as 10,000 crores.
The origins of lakhs and crores lie, as with so many other cultural artifacts, in Sanskritic antiquity. Lakh and crore are the modern day descendants of Sanskrit's laksha and koti. The ancients definitely knew what they were doing with the Sanskrit system of numeracy. There are named points for each power of 10 in the decimal system, all the way from 100 to 1018. The names are as follows| Number | Sanskrit | English equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ekam | one |
| 10 | dasham | ten |
| 100 | shatam | hundred |
| 1 000 | sahasra | thousand |
| 10 000 | dasha-sahasra | ten thousand |
| 100 000 | laksha | hundred thousand |
| 1 000 000 | dasha-laksha | million |
| 10 000 000 | koti | ten million |
| 100 000 000 | dasha-koti | hundred million |
| 1 000 000 000 | abja | billion |
| 10 000 000 000 | kharva | ten billion |
| 100 000 000 000 | nikharva | hundred billion |
| 1 000 000 000 000 | padma | trillion |
| 10 000 000 000 000 | mahapadma | ten trillion |
| 100 000 000 000 000 | shankhu | hundred trillion |
| 1 000 000 000 000 000 | jaladhi | quadrillion |
| 10 000 000 000 000 000 | antya | ten quadrillion |
| 100 000 000 000 000 000 | madhya | hundred quadrillion |
| 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 | parardha | quintillion |
By naming every power of ten, the ancient Indian system tried to combat number numbness, a term coined by the venerable but excessively-in-love-with-his-own-ideas academician, Douglas Hofstadter (it's hard to allot this guy a field, such as computer science, neuroscience, philosophy or psychology). The human brain can easily comprehend numbers under ten or even a hundred. Anything over that and you'll see eyes beginning to glaze over. I'd be willing to wager that this is somehow related to the magical rule of 150 that governs human social interactions.
It's well worth considering that the progress of human mathematics has usually happened as and when necessity dictated it. For example, zero was most likely invented in a business context, to indicate a perfect balance of credit and debit. The ancient societies of the Sanskritic era most likely didn't have 1018 of anything, but they definitely would have been perfectly at home with the concept of an exabyte (1018 bytes), which is a unit that modern storage technology is approaching only now. Heck, they'd probably even be comfortable with the magnitude of Avogadro's number: 1023. I don't know what drove the ancient Indians to come up with such a sophisticated system of numeracy when they probably had nothing to apply it to (perhaps the closest viable prospect is cosmogony -- the ancient Indians came up with the best estimate of the earth's 4.5bn year age before the advent of modern radiocarbon dating techniques: an eerily close 4.32bn). Viewed from another perspective though, it shouldn't come as a surprise, given the ancient Indian's passion for enumerating interesting things of all kinds.
Posted by Vishy at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2005
How much is this blog worth?
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
About time I announced how much I could rake in from the purported Web 2.0 boom using my blog. Some dude used Technorati's API to come up with a valuation technique for any blog. Each blog's worth is measured by how many links to it are present in the Technorati corpus. I am not blown away by my blog's supposed value, but I am rather pleased that 10 months of writing this stuff is reportedly worth $225 per month (and change) according to someone. Whoo hoo! For say ($225 / 160 hours per month), that's an hourly rate of $1.40 just for navel gazing! Rock on!
Posted by Vishy at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: cousin brother, cousin sister
cousin sister,/KUH·zin·sis·tuhr/,cousin brother/KUH·zin·bruh·thuhr/. Respectively, female or male child of your parents' siblings. Known in the West as first cousins, without any further gender qualification. Indian kinship terms are exceedingly elaborate, with single words for concepts that take many words to express in English. Cousin brother is most likely a direct translation of the Hindi chachera/mamera bhai, where the second word translates to brother. The first word denotes how their parent is related to you. Chachera is derived from chacha, which means father's younger brother. Mamera is derived from mama, which means mother's brother (no word on older or younger).
In most Indian extended families, there are separate words to mark the birth-order of same-sex siblings of one's parents. In other words, there would be separate words for one's mother's older and younger sisters or one's father's older and younger brothers. However, there are no separate words to mark the birth order of opposite-sex siblings of one's parents. In other words, the same words are used to refer to older and younger sisters of one's father or older and younger brothers of one's mother. This distinction might be due to remnants of ancient familial structures, where same-sex siblings of one's parents were accorded a status very close to one's parents -- almost surrogate parents (consider that extended families in ancient India often lived under the same roof). Same-sex siblings of one's parents would often be able to substitute for one's parents' caregiving duties. In contrast, opposite sex siblings would often end up in separate households after marriage and wouldn't be able to care for each other's siblings as effortlessly. Accordingly, cousins whose parents are same-sex siblings are considered to be related almost as closely as though they were direct siblings. Cousins whose parents are opposite-sex siblings are considered more distant than cousins whose parents are same-sex siblings. Consequently, it is easier for cousins related through opposite-sex siblings to marry than cousins related through same-sex siblings. Cousin marriages are not necessarily the norm in India, but are not nearly as taboo as they are in the United States.
Posted by Vishy at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
A Primer on Indian Family Names
Perhaps the earliest Indian television icon in American minds (unfortunately) is Apu from The Simpsons. Aside from conforming to just about every stereotype about poor, fecund, convenience-store owning Indian immigrants, Apu has the last name Nahasapeemapetilon. With such a family name, he also answers to the stereotype of having an impossibly long, hard-to-pronounce last name. Some Indian last names can make outsiders anxious because their spoken and written versions seem to be little more than a bunch of syllables strung together. Yet, all Indian names have a well-defined internal structure and meaning. This post is a primer about Indian last names. Its aim is not to be comprehensive but it will try to examine some kinds of Indian family names and show how their structure and meanings are related.
India's astounding diversity in languages, climates, costumes and geography far outstrips that of the entire European continent. Unsurprisingly, this diversity also extends to names. Different regions of India have different kinds of family names. This post will mostly concentrate on South Indian names, because they tend to be longer than their counterparts in other regions of India and because I, by virtue of being a South Indian, am most familiar with these names. I will still cover family names from other parts of India that follow easily recognizable patterns. Indian family names tend to be strong indicators of region, caste or occasionally both. If a caste-based name differentiation bothers you (despite the fact that the influence of caste has declined drastically in recent years), consider that something similar happens in the U.S. too, where the odds are overwhelming that someone named LaFawndah Jackson is black and someone named Prescott Anderson is white.
- Caste and clan names
- Family names like Agarwal, Jain, Saraswat and Pandit are all names of clans. In many cases, members of powerful clans would act in the name of the clan itself and have no significant identity outside of it. Members of such clans simply assumed the name of the clan as a last name when adjusting their names to the relatively modern requirements of having a separate first name and last name. Clan names are sprinkled all over the socioeconomic spectrum and need not signify a particular caste or economic class. Some others have last names that are explicit caste markers. Names like Iyer (pron. EYE-uhr) and Iyengar (pron. EYE-young-AHR) indicate a South Indian Brahmin origin. The last name Ojha (var. Oza) indicates the caste of oracles and soothsayers. More modern and colorful occupational family names do exist. The Parsis are a Zoroastrian community that emigrated to India several centuries ago to escape religious persecution in Persia. This community, which once found significant favor with the British occupiers of India, features names like Engineer, Contractor, Daruvala and Screwvala. The -vala in the last two names can be taken to mean 'seller', but is in reality a general Hindi suffix that associates the whole word's referent with the stem that precedes it. Daruwala (daru Hin. liquor) thus means someone who sold liquor. This custom of taking caste and other occupational names is not unlike taking last names like Cook, Cooper (barrel maker), Shoemaker or Goldsmith.
- Places of origin
- Indian family names may sometimes mark the place from where a family originated. The Western Indian state of Maharashtra has a prolific collection of family names derived from place names. Examples of this kind of family name include Punekar (a native of Pune), Chiplunkar (a native of Chiplun) or Jalgaonkar (a native of Jalgaon). The -kar is a Marathi suffix that indicates affinity to a place. Indian newspapers routinely refer to residents of Mumbai as Mumbaikars, the Indianized version of Bombayites. Other variants of this kind of family name include Hyderabadi, Najmabadi and Jodhpuri, which indicate ancestral domiciles in Hyderabad, Najmabad and Jodhpur respectively. The manner in which these are derived is identical to how Iraqi is derived from Iraq and Pakistani from Pakistan. Western equivalents of this kind of family name would be names like Wiener, Bilderberger and Van Antwerp.
- Personal attributes
- This is where Indian family names share a lot of similarities with family names around the world. A particularly distinctive attribute of a family originator was codified as that family's hereditary name when the law of the land required every citizen to have a last name. Once again, Maharashtrian names take the cake with the sheer variety as well as, frankly, bizarreness of family names. Names of this kind include Khare (the truthful one), Khote (the liar), Gaitonde (the cow-face) and Kirtane (the hymn singer). Other family names, such as Chaudhuri, Kotwal and Patil are administrative titles that used to adorn tax collectors and accountants.
- Religious names
- Religion has historically played a strong role in India and is the fount for a number of family names that are usually rooted in mythology. Most of these names tend to be concentrated in South India, which has been less ravaged historically by foreign rulers who systematically persecuted overtly religious names. Names may refer to major deities of the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, Rama, Krishna or Ganesha, to any of their thousands of co-names, Narayana, Gopala and Shankara, or to any of the thousands of holy men (corporeal or mythical) India has produced, such as Bharadwaja, Valmiki or Kashyapa. Some family names such as Vijayasarathy ('the charioteer of victory') allude to India's ancient epics such as Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Religious names tend to be among the longest family names and often try to outdo each other in flair and grandiosity. If you want to construct your own long religious names, use the table below to pick a name from each column and string them together. Not all possible combinations would work, but the next time you see an impossibly long Indian last name, it will be easier to break it down into its constituents.
Venkata- raman Rama- nathan Krishna- swami Gopala- ramanan Raja- chandran Muthu- eswaran Shiva- subramanian Radha- gopalan Bala- krishnan
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Nahasapeemapetilon doesn't actually mean anything and is entirely a figment of Matt Groenig's imagination. Thank you come again!
Posted by Vishy at 11:49 PM | Comments (2)
October 18, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #21: What's the Michelin Man's name?
The Michelin Man has been one of the abiding icons of the automobile industry. He inspires an aww-so-cute feeling almost universally as he makes his appearances on TV and in the print media. Did you know though that the name of this lovable rubber-ringed creature is Bibendum?
A recent issue of Fortune magazine profiled this veritable icon of advertising, who was born no less than 107 years ago! He first appeared on an April 1898 poster with the slogan Nunc est bibendum (Latin for "Now is the time to drink").
Notice how the glass he is holding up is filled with nails and glass? That's an allusion to how Michelin tires could just 'drink up' nails and glass without puncturing, whereas other tire brands of the time failed. A rather weird sales pitch for a tire, if I do say so myself. The bibendum ('to drink') part of the slogan stuck nonetheless and continues to be the official name of the Michelin Man to this day.
Posted by Vishy at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: cold drink
cold drink./KOH·ld·REENK/. Any cold nonalcoholic beverage, such as Coca Cola, Pepsi or other sodas (which some weird few call pop). Advertised ubiquitously on Mumbai-area billboards and shop signs in Marathi letters that can be transliterated only as Koldreenk, not cold drink as English speakers say it. When an Indian host receives a guest, they frequently ask them in the vernacular, "Hot? Cold? Tea, coffee, cold drink?", which should be understood as their asking the guest if they want a warm or a cold drink, such as tea, coffee or cold drinks.
As an aside, India has had several indigenously manufactured soft drinks that have a rich sweet taste as elusive as that of New York's pizza. I attribute it to the distinctive taste of sugar from the sugarcane that grows in the Indian heartland. Of course, there's also the healthy Indian urge to experiment with tastes that the Western tongue wouldn't dream of daring to attempt (Coca Cola with garam masala, anyone?). My favorites have been Limca (think 'a nonalcoholic Smirnoff Ice'), Gold Spot (think 'a fizzier orange Fanta'), Thumbs Up (think 'a much fizzier version of Coca Cola') and Maaza (a mango drink available in Indian stores in the U.S.). In Southern India, several towns feature goti soda, a salty carbonated drink sold in a bottle sealed with a glass marble (goti: glass marble, Marathi) and panneer soda, a carbonated drink flavored with a distinctive rose taste (panneer: rose, Tamil). Other drinks, such as Frooti (much idolized by the hilarious Ludakrishna and MC Vikram) are served in paper cartons. Their provenance as a cold drink in the above sense is murkier; only some would consider Frooti a proper cold drink.
In contrast to all the above, several sociocultural groups in India use the bare noun 'drink' to refer generically to alcoholic drinks.
Posted by Vishy at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #20: How is blond hair used in weather measurements?
Gentlemen used to prefer blondes. Nevertheless, there seems to be no end to jokes about people with blond hair. Lately, it also seems like brunette is the new blonde. However, meteorologists still prefer blondes to brunettes for, of all things, measuring certain weather indicators.
Straight blond hair is on average thinner than brunette hair. In the presence of moisture, the keratin that makes up a strand of blond hair is more susceptible to absorbing it, losing tension and expanding. Blond hair therefore provides a much more reliable measurement of humidity than other hair types. Blond human hair was used to measure humidity until electronic means were available. To think that human hair is actually useful somewhere other than the human head! A strand of nylon is said to be similarly sensitive to humidity and can be used to make a simple hygrometer.
Posted by Vishy at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2005
Battle lines in instant messaging?
Today, Yahoo! and Microsoft came to an agreement to let their instant messaging networks interoperate. Widely prevalent analysis has it that by doing so they are taking aim at AOL, who has the largest market share in instant messaging in the United States. With their networks put together, Yahoo! and Microsoft will have more users than AOL's network -- a clear challenge to IM's biggest player at the moment, AOL.
But is something else going on here? This year has shown unprecedented investment by Internet companies into the realm of instant messaging. Yahoo! has introduced voice capabilities into its IM client. Google entered the instant messaging market with its offering, Google Talk. Google Talk debuted with Jabber, an open IM protocol that promised eventual interoperability between the walled-off instant messaging networks of the time. Google Talk is currently in its infancy, but it could prove to be a force to reckon with for Yahoo! and Microsoft if some of the other projects executed by Google are any indication.
This interoperability move by Yahoo! and Microsoft comes at a time when significant units in both companies are in head to head competition with Google in the area of online advertising through their portals. In bringing their IM networks together they have effectively united against their common rival, Google. By interoperating between themselves, they have stolen some of the thunder of Google Talk, the upstart that promised network interoperability. It also opens up the path to future cooperation between these two companies in initiatives to contain Google. This alliance is essentially the instant messaging equivalent of the Google-Sun partnership announced two weeks ago. I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! and Microsoft decided to go steady in other future initiatives.
It would of course be foolish to think that the Microsoft-Yahoo! partnership isn't taking aim at AOL because the overt purpose of their alliance is to dwarf the single largest player in instant messaging (moreover, given the significant contribution of AOL to Google's ad revenue -- AOL is the only named third party in Google's filings with the SEC -- targeting AOL's market share may strangle one of Google's major revenue streams after all). However, under the radars of many observers, alliances have formed and battle lines have been drawn on both sides. It should make for a very interesting battle between the upstart and the established players for the hearts and minds of Internet users.
Posted by Vishy at 11:11 PM | Comments (2)
October 10, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: to sit on someone's head
to sit on someone's head. To take undue advantage of someone after they have shown you a little bit of kindness. Appears to be a direct translation of the Hindi phrase, sar par baith jaana.
Usually used contemptuously to berate someone's continued request for favors. For example, when traveling long distances on Indian Railways in second class coaches (aside: possibly traumatic for outsiders, yet highly recommended if you want to see the soul of India), people with no reserved seats will frequently board the train and ask nicely if one of their ass-cheeks could please share your reserved seat with you for just a little while. Trying to be nice and being eager to make a new acquaintance, you may let them share your seat with you properly. Then, as they get more comfortable, out come the elaborate spread of food and outstretched legs that push you further into the corner of your legitimately reserved seat. Soon afterwards, long-lost cousins emerge mysteriously from the woodwork and join the stowaway. After much pleading and cajoling from the stowaways in small doses, it eventually becomes a party of stowaways, with the result that you get completely marginalized in the very seat you legitimately purchased. In sum, you gave 'those types' one little inch of leeway and they ended up sitting on your head.
Posted by Vishy at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: thermocol
thermocol./thərmo·kAWl/. A polystyrene insulating material manufactured in the U.S. as Styrofoam®. In common American language, this trademark is referred to simply as a common noun, styrofoam. The Indian form, thermocol, is in currency in a few other countries as well, notably Japan and Australia, as revealed by a Google search. This form makes the insulating function of the material more explicit. There seems to be a significant presence of a variant spelling of this word, thermocole.
Thermocol is a very versatile material. In India, it is used in many ways, including packaging and making towering cutouts of political figures, gods and goddesses. The much-celebrated Ganapati and Navaratri festivals in Mumbai feature large thematic public displays involving copious amounts of thermocol. What is strictly a utilitarian material in the U.S., used solely for packaging and manufacturing drab excuses for tableware, is actually used by Indians to great artistic effect.
Posted by Vishy at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)