According to Tamil tradition, Murugan taught Tamil grammar to Agastya, who then composed the grammatical treatise Agathiyam, regarded as the earliest Tamil grammar.
A similar tradition exists in Sanskrit. When a Satavahana king asked his minister Śarvavarman to simplify Sanskrit grammar and produce a concise grammatical text within a short period, Śarvavarman worshipped Lord Murugan. Pleased with his devotion, the Lord appeared before him and revealed a simplified system of grammatical sūtras. Thus was born the celebrated Sanskrit grammatical work Kātantra Vyākaraṇa (कातन्त्रव्याकरणम्).
Since the opening sūtra revealed by the deity began with the words “Siddho varṇasamāmnāyaḥ”, the grammatical tradition also came to be known as Kaumāra Vyākaraṇa (derived from Kumāra) and Kalāpa Vyākaraṇa, the latter traditionally associated with the plumage (kalāpa) of Kārttikeya’s peacock mount.
Interestingly, several scholars have noted striking similarities between the Tamil grammar Tolkāppiyam and the Kātantra system. They begin with the classification of sounds (letters), proceed systematically to word formation and morphology, and present grammatical rules in a manner intended for learners.
They concluded that both belong to the ancient Aindiram grammatical tradition. Significantly, the Pāyiram of Tolkāppiyam itself describes its author as “ஐந்திரம் நிறைந்த தொல்காப்பியன்” (Tolkāppiyar, who was well versed in Aindiram).
Hence it is clear that Murugan is celebrated as the guardian of both Tamil and Sanskrit. This shared legacy is a powerful reminder that India’s languages are threads of a single civilizational fabric, woven together by a common spiritual and intellectual heritage.
The story of how a 26 yr old, self-taught mathematician from Madras nearly "squared the circle" in 1913 is a deeply spiritual, historical & geopolitical reclamation of an ancient Indian science that the West spent centuries dismissing, only to rediscover & rebrand.
Bear with me for a min. This 1 is a little longer than usual....
In 1882, Western proof by Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that squaring the circle with an idealized compass & straightedge is mathematically impossible (because π is a transcendental number), but the ancient Indian mathematicians had solved this practically millennia earlier.
The Sulba Sutras (specifically the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra) are the oldest geometry manuals in human history. They were designed to construct sacred Yajna (fire) altars. The Vedic rituals required 2 main altars: the Garhapatya (which had to be a circle) & the Ahavaniya (which had to be a square).
The catch? Both altars had to cover the exact same surface area.
To solve this, Baudhayana laid out precise geometric instructions to convert a square into a circle ("circling the square") & a circle into a square ("squaring the circle"). His formulas yielded an approximation of π≈3.088. Other variations in the Apastamba Sulba Sutra yielded highly accurate ratios like 676/225 & 900/289.
For 1000s of years, Indian engineers used these manual, "rope & peg" geometric rules to construct colossal structural altars with staggering geometric precision, long before the Greeks even formalised the problem.
Now enters Ramanujan......
In 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan, lacking formal training/university libraries/contact with Western mathematical journals published his 1 page approximate construction in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.
His construction was so incredibly precise that if the circle's area was 140000 square miles (~ the landmass of Japan), the side of his constructed square would deviate from the perfect, impossible theoretical value by < an inch.
But the real goosebumps come from how Ramanujan found his formulas.
Modern Western mathematicians operate on a paradigm of rigorous, step by step logical proofs. Ramanujan did not. He famously declared:
"An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God."
He insisted that his family deity, the goddess Namagiri Thayar of Namakkal, would write these hyper-complex, multi-layered infinite fractions directly onto his tongue in his dreams/unfold scrolls of mathematics before his eyes. When he woke up, he would simply copy them down onto slate or paper.
When Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge, G.H. Hardy was stunned. Ramanujan was writing eqns for the partitions of numbers, modular forms & Mock Theta functions that would take Western mathematicians another century to prove. To Ramanujan, the universe was not a collection of logical proofs; it was a vast, geometric canvas of divine symmetry.
The tragedy of modern history is how these achievements are cataloged. When Western textbooks teach "squaring the circle," they treat the Lindemann 1882 proof as the ultimate "victory" of mathematical rigor. They treat Ramanujan’s 1913 paper as a "brilliant, quirky anomaly" by an eccentric genius.
What they leave out is that Ramanujan was not an anomaly, he was the modern peak of a 1000s yrs old, unbroken Indian mathematical tradition. His cognitive framework was shaped by the same Vedic-era mental patterns that gave the world the decimal system, the zero, trigonometry & the geometric approximations of the Sulba Sutras.
Ramanujan’s 1913 construction was the ancient Vedic priests' fire-altar geometry whispering through the mind of an Indian boy, proving that while the West declared the circle "un-squarable" by their rules, India had already solved the spirit of the problem under the starlight of antiquity.
Today, the multi-billion dollar fintech startups of India brag about "Buy Now, Pay Later" as if they invented fire. But 7 decades ago, a penniless orphan who spent his nights sleeping on empty gunny bags used a revolutionary currency to build India's retail empire: raw trust.
In the 1940s, a 12 yr old boy named Veraputhra Gnanadraviam Rajadas Panneerdas (often known as V.G. Panneerdas) fled his drought-stricken village in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, with nothing but ₹25 in his pocket. He arrived in Madras starving, homeless & desperate. He took the 1st job he could find, cleaning dishes & sweeping floors at a local ration shop in Saidapet. He worked like a machine by day & slept on jute bags on the floor by night.
By 1954, through sheer grit & skipping meals, he saved enough to set up a tiny tea stall, alongside vending newspapers door to door with his brother. A yr later, he opened a tiny, cramped shop selling alarm clocks, wall clocks & wristwatches.
But Paneerdas quickly hit a massive wall.
In 1950s India, luxury items like a simple watch/a bicycle/a radio were strictly for the elite. The working class Indian: the handcart pullers, the tea sellers, the low-wage clerks could only stare at the shop windows with longing. They could never afford to buy them upfront.
Paneerdas did not see customers w/o money; he saw humans with dignity. He made a move that his competitors called commercial suicide.
He walked out to a roadside cart puller, handed him a shiny new wristwatch & said: "Take it home today. Pay me just 1 rupee every week."
The concept was "Hire Purchase"... the grandfather of the modern Equated Monthly Installment (EMI). There were no credit scores, no digital bank verification & no collaterals. There was only a signature/a thumbprint in a small ledger notebook. People told Paneerdas he would be robbed blind & end up back on the streets.
Instead, a miracle happened. The poor of Madras proved to be the most honest paymasters in history. Defying all traditional banking logic, the default rate was virtually zero. The working class valued their honor & their newly acquired lifestyle too much to break Paneerdas’s trust.
Word spread like wildfire. The lines outside his shop grew so long they blocked the streets. Paneerdas rapidly expanded from clocks to bicycles, then to sewing machines & eventually to heavy home appliances, building a massive 3 story mega showroom under the legendary banner: VGP.
He single-handedly democratized the Indian dream. Decades before banks began giving loans to the middle class, VGP made it possible for an ordinary clerk to bring home a refrigerator/an electric fan. Later, he took the exact same philosophy into real estate, buying up vast tracts of land & offering affordable housing plots to the common man under his signature tagline: "Take possession now, pay later."
He started his life with absolutely nothing to his name, but before he left the world, V. G. Paneerdas had given millions of ordinary, struggling Indians the wealth of dignity & the power to own their own future, 1 rupee at a time.
Japan was our first office outside India and the US. That was 2001.
Yesterday, I visited our office in Yokohama and I'm reminded that we were a small unknown company from Chennai and we chose the hardest market first.
Nobody in Japan buys because of a brand or a pitch. They watch how you behave when something breaks, and if you pass that test they stay with you for decades. That patience got into our engineering culture and never left.
ありがとうござい��す 🙏
Just like Thirupathi, Thiruthani would have gone to Andhra as well, if not for this legendary Tamil leader 'Silambu Selvar' Ma Po Sivagnanam who fought tooth and nail for TN's northern borders.
He is largely uncelebrated today because Dstocks hate Ma Po Si. They hate him because he was a self-taught scholar who truly loved Tamil literature for how inseparable it is from Hindu ethos and refusing to toe the line of D ideologues like EVR who said Tamils must collectively spit upon Silapadhigaaram.
This is 1 of the best 100% fictional & full of comedy piece, I have read in recent times. De casually throws in the phrase "Underage Siya at 20," which is factually, legally & logically absurd in India, where the legal age of majority & criminal liability is 18.
In Nyaya Sutras, Akshapada Gautama lists several types of logical fallacies used by sophisticated sophists to win debates using deception. 2 of them apply perfectly to Shobhaa De here:
A. Chhala (Quibbling/Trivialization) - De spends multiple paragraphs hyper-focusing on the victim's hair patch, calling it the "main motive" & writing flippant remarks like, "Come on, Siya… look at Anupam Kher!" De is trivializing a brutal crime into a shallow page-3 gossip column, trying to lower the moral weight of the act to match the superficiality of her narrative.
B. Viruddha/Savyabhicara Hetvabhasa (Contradictory/Irregular Reason) - De attributes the murder to deeper “fascinating subtexts” of class, coercion, privilege versus attraction, agency & “denied choice,” nodding to Gen Z sympathy for Siya as a trapped young woman. This reasoning is contradictory (viruddha)/erratic (savyabhicara): it directly undermines itself because a 20 yr old adult who can orchestrate multiple premeditated murder plots, divert ₹1 crore & bypass every legal/non-violent option demonstrates full criminal agency & convenience, not helplessness.
Shobhaa De’s column is a classic piece of Sophistry using flowery language, political deflections (bringing up the Ram Mandir & Modi out of nowhere) & superficial gossip to mask a terrifying moral reality.
When people try to find a "faultline" in the system to justify a 20 yr old adult's choices, they are engaging in moral cowardice. You do not look at a pilot who intentionally crashes a plane into a mountain 4x & write a column complaining about the airline's catering service. The pilot was an adult who owned the controls.
Do you know anyone from the following list?
1. Somabhai (82 years) - Retired Health Officer
2. Amrutbhai (78 years) - Former private factory employee, now retired
3. Prahlad (70 years) - Runs a ration shop
4. Pankaj (64 years) - Works in the Information Department
5. Bhogilal (73 years) - Runs a grocery shop
6. Arvind (70 years) - Scrap dealer
7. Bharat (61 years) - Works at a petrol pump
8. Ashok (57 years) - Sells kites and runs a grocery shop
9. Chandrakant (54 years) - Works at a cowshed
10. Ramesh (70 years) - No further information available
11. Bhargav (50 years) - No further information available
12. Bipin (48 years) - Works at a library in Ahmedabad
The individuals listed as numbers 1 to 4 are the real brothers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Numbers 5 to 9 are the sons of Modi's uncle Narasinhdas Modi, making them PM Modi's paternal cousins.
Number 10, Ramesh, is the son of Jagjivandas Modi.
Number 11, Bhargav, is the son of PM Modi's uncle Kantibhai.
Finally, number 12, Bipin, is the son of Modi's youngest uncle, Jayantilal Modi.
To all revolutionary journalists on Youtube:
Please meet all the individuals on this list.
I kindly request that you feature them on camera. Go to Gujarat and showcase the real stories of PM Modi's brother Arvind, who deals in scrap, and Ashok, who sells kites.
And yes, when in Vadnagar, don’t forget to fill up your car with petrol from Bharatbhai, who works at the Nyayra petrol pump there.
One of the Prime Minister's brothers works there filling petrol.
Everyone will see how PM Modi's brother is filling petrol in your car. If you get a chance, you can also buy some old tin utensils from Arvindbhai.
And yes, you might also spot PM Modi’s sister-in-law selling groceries in the Ghee-Kanta market of Vadnagar.
While most politicians focus entirely on selfish gains and the well-being of their families,
Narendra Modi works solely for the country and nothing else.
Nowadays, we associate the stereotype of Indians excelling in math to Silicon Valley businesses/competitive exams. Centuries earlier, rural India had a highly advanced, beautifully poetic system of mental math that enabled ordinary village children, even those w/o paper/pens, to calculate complex arithmetic instantaneously.
The system got its name from Subhankar Das, a legendary mathematician from 14th-century Bankura, Bengal. He came to understand a basic fact about human nature: our brains are awful at remembering dull abstract eqns, but we are fabulous at remembering rhythms, rhymes & riddles.
He translated intricate math eqns into Bengali rhythmic verses.
The Subhankari system taught kids using folk riddles instead of teaching them x, y variables. Children in rural traditional schools, known as pathsalas, would sing their way in solving heavy arithmetic, land surveying, currency conversion etc, all in their heads (Manash-anka/mental math).
A pond has bloomed with lotus flowers and bees are humming in. If every lotus has a pair of bees, 1 lotus will be empty. If 1 bee sits on each lotus, 1 bee is left w/o a flower. Tell me, how many bees & how many lotuses? A child learning western math today would have to write down simultaneous algebraic equns:
y = 2(x−1)
y =x+1
A village kid trained in Subhankari would visualize the pattern through the rhythm of the verse & shout out the answer instantly: 4 bees & 3 lotuses.
The system was designed not just for puzzles; it was quite useful. It had special rhyming algos to measure the area of irregular agricultural fields, convert weights & find interest rates w/o touching pen & paper.
When British East India Company took over, they did not find an uneducated, illiterate mass. In the 1830’s, William Adam, a British official was assigned to survey education in Bengal. To his astonishment, almost every village had a Pathsala & to his surprise, ordinary peasants were highly literate & numerate.
So, how did they end this system? They did not just ban it; they systematically choked it out using 3 strategies.
1. Thomas Babington Macaulay asserted that Indian knowledge was worthless. Britain needed to create a class of persons, Indian in blood & colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals & in intellect. This was the essence of the 1835 Education Act.
The British colonial govt withdrew all state support, land grants & patronage from the traditional Pathsalas. If a school wanted funding or recognition, it had to teach the British curriculum which meant ditching oral Bengali math rhymes & adopting standard British textbooks, slates, and pens.
2. The British Empire was wary of polymaths/local geniuses who could independently compute things using their vernacular imagination. Thus, they militarized clerical maths. In order to run the incredible bureaucracy of the East India Company, they needed an enormous army of obedient clerks & bookkeepers.
Western mathematics stressed a structured, rigid, sequential, written process (showing your work on paper). Even if a Subhankari-trained student gives the correct answer instantly using mental maths, the British system gives zero for it because it does not match the layout in the western textbook. To land a government job/get admittance into a university, you had to forego Shubhankari.
3. Subhankari was intimately tied to local Indian systems of measurement: units like the hath (cubit) for length, bigha for land & monetary conversion involving cowries (shells), aana & rupees. Thus, dismantling subhankari & other such systems de -linked local units of the metric system.
The British centralized economy & standardized measures in law to western imperial measurement (inch, foot, yard & pound). Due to Subhankari's hardwired formulas being used to calculate local Indian units, these became functionally redundant in colonial marketplaces. The last traces of Subhankari almost vanished from mainstream schools when India was adopted the decimal/metric system post-independence.
By replacing an oral, rhyming system with expensive paper, pens & foreign textbooks, the British effectively took math which used to be a community-wide oral art form accessible to the poorest village child & turned it into an elitist, anxiety-inducing subject that required formal institutional schooling.
The question is not whether NEET needs security. It certainly does.
The larger question is why a civilian entrance exam has reached a point where it requires CRPF, CISF, IAF airlift, AI surveillance and PMO level monitoring.
It reflects a serious loss of confidence in normal exam governance.
Students are already facing retest pressure, admit card glitches, extended scrutiny and military grade arrangements before entering the exam hall.
Annamalai’s concern is not against security; it is against a system where students pay the price for institutional failure.
@annamalai_k@BJP4TamilNadu@BJP4India@PMOIndia
#ExamReform
#NEET #Annamalai #StudentJustice
We must purge the virus of subterranean separatism from Tamil Nadu politics.
I often remind my team "We are drawn from the same pool of talent as any other company, we are not special in any way, and if we have to achieve better results, we must show that through our hard work and perseverance".
Tamil Nadu is Bharat 🙏
மீண்டும் மீண்டும் குற்றவாளிகளாக வேலை தேடி இங்கு வந்த வட மாநிலத்தவர் சிக்கும்போது அவர்களை #வடமாநிலத்தவர் எனக் குறிப்பிடாமல் என்னவென்று சொல்வது? அவர்கள் நம்மூர் பெயர்களோடு வளைய வரும் பங்களாதேஷ் மக்களாகக் கூட இருக்கலாம். pan card, ration card என்று போலி தஸ்தாவேஜுகளை TMC அவர்களுக்கு ஏற்பாடு செய்து கொடுத்ததே! வீட்டில் Deep cleaning செய்ய வரும் சிலரைப் பார்த்து பங்களாதேஷ் மக்களோ என்று சந்தேகித்திருக்கிறேன்.
It is incredibly frustrating to watch celebrity chefs & pop-history influencers look directly into a camera & confidently state, "Did you know our favorite South Indian staple, the Idli, actually came from Indonesia?" This entire narrative is a colossal house of cards. It is a classic case of academic confirmation bias that transformed into viral disinformation.
When an entire nation is taught to believe that they could not even figure out how to steam w/o foreign intervention, we have to look at the raw data to puncture the bubble.
Almost every single article/tweet/celebrity chef video claiming that the idli is Indonesian can be traced back to exactly 1 source: a single speculative paragraph written by the late food historian K.T. Achaya in his 1994 book, Indian Food: A Historical Companion. Achaya theorized that between 800-1200 CE, Indonesian kings traveling to India brought royal chefs who introduced a fermented, steamed dish called "Kedli."
Yrs after this book was published, investigative food journalists (such as Janaki Lenin) & linguistic researchers actually went to Indonesia to look for this legendary precursor. The word "Kedli" does not exist in any Indonesian language/dialect/historical dictionary. There is no historical record/recipe/anthropological trace of an ancient Indonesian dish called "Kedli." Achaya completely misread/manufactured the term based on a loose phonetic guess, yet it became an accepted "fact" because no 1 bothered to check the data.
The claim that India did not have idlis until the 12th century is thoroughly obliterated by our own ancient libraries. The evolution of the idli is meticulously recorded in indigenous Indian encyclopedias & literature centuries before Achaya’s timeline:
- 920 CE (Vaddaradhane): A classical Kannada text by the Jain monk Shivakotiacharya explicitly details a dish called Iddalige. It was a staple food item offered to Jain ascetics. - 1025 CE (Lokopakara): The earliest available Kannada encyclopedia, written by Chavundaraya II, gives a literal recipe for it: soaking split black gram (Urad Dal) in buttermilk, grinding it into a fine paste, mixing it with spices & the clear water of curd.
- 1130 CE (Manasollasa): The Western Chalukya King Someshvara III wrote a monumental Sanskrit encyclopedia detailing royal cuisine. He explicitly gives the recipe for Iddarikā describing how the urad dal cakes are prepared & cooked.
When skeptics are confronted with these ancient texts, they quickly shift the goalposts. They argue: Okay, fine, India had Iddalige, but it was just made of Urad Dal. It did not use rice/long fermentation/steaming... those techniques came from Indonesia! This is textually & technologically false.
Critics often cite the 7th-century Chinese traveler Xuanzang, who claimed India did not use steaming vessels. But we do not need a specialized metallic Chinese steam-cooker to steam food. For millennia, Indians practiced Kopotapaka & basket-steaming, tying a thin muslin cloth over a standard clay pot (Kunda) filled with boiling water, placing the batter on top & covering it with a lid. In fact, the Kanchipuram Idli is still steamed in traditional bamboo baskets lined with Mandhara leaves.
To say India did not understand fermentation until the 12th century is a historical joke. India is the cradle of complex biomaterial fermentation. The Rigveda & Ayurvedic Samhitas from 1000s of yrs ago are packed with advanced formulas for fermenting grains, herbs & dairy to create Asavas, Arishtas, Kanji & Dahi (Curd). The natural wild bacteria (Leuconostoc mesenteroides) required to leaven idli batter live natively on the husks of black gram found right here in the subcontinent.
Why do celebrity chefs keep repeating this lie? Because of a deeply ingrained post-colonial inferiority complex that dominates modern food media. There is a structural bias that assumes any advanced, scientific culinary technique, like molecular leavening/pasteurization/specialized steaming must have been imported to India from somewhere else. It sounds edgy, counter-intuitive & intellectual for a chef to tell an Indian audience that their national breakfast is not actually theirs.
The idli is a native, organic, ground-up evolutionary masterpiece of South Indian kitchen science. It evolved naturally from the lentil-based Iddalige of the 9th century into the perfectly balanced rice & lentil fluffy wonder we eat today. The next time a chef tries to tell you the idli is from Indonesia, ask them to show you the recipe for "Kedli." Watch how fast they fold.
A water buffalo appears in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. The animal is native to India. Nobody asks how it got there.
We did. The answer changes everything. 🧵
2800 BCE — An Indus merchant is living at Susa, writing in two scripts simultaneously.
2500 BCE — An Indian buffalo appears on a Mesopotamian frieze.
2050 BCE — A Harappan colony in Bahrain: 92 seals recovered from one site.
1675 CE — Bhai Lakhi Shah, Banjara landholder on Raisina Hill, Delhi.
Same corridor. Same community. 4,300 years.
The people who moved that buffalo were the same community whose descendants supplied the Mughal army at 100,000 oxen per campaign.
The Banjara. The vanajāraka guilds of 12th-century Rajasthan. The sārthavāha of the epics.
One logistics institution. Fifteen centuries of documented evidence. One corridor.
The buffalo didn't migrate. It was transmitted.
#Archaeology #IndusValley #Banjara #Mesopotamia #IndianHistory
Full paper (open access): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20557583
Two-tier CRPF+CISF escort with IAF airlift.
4-layer CCTV with AI surveillance.
Biometric & facial recognition before entry.
Multiple layers of frisking.
Multi-level oversight with direct monitoring from the Prime Minister’s office.
Yes, you read it right. But these are not arrangements to buy high-level, classified, military-grade software. These are the arrangements made by the Ministry of Education for the NEET retest scheduled for 21st June 2026.
Every student would appreciate the government's efforts to prevent paper leaks by implementing additional security measures and enhanced monitoring. But an increase in scrutiny before entry, extended frisking, and an increase in the overall exam time from 180 minutes to 195 minutes will only add to their already ballooning exam pressure.
While the government has taken measures to contain leaks, they have forgotten the additional burden they have imposed on a young student before they take up an assessment, one that they have spent months preparing for, dissolving the entire purpose of our exam system and the NEP 2020’s goal to reduce “Exam Stress”.
Despite all these arrangements for the examination, there are issues with downloading the admit cards, and NTA has assured students that it will resolve them at the earliest.
Yes, there are challenges that demand meaningful solutions. However, I am concerned that the approach devised for the NEET retest may not resolve the issue; instead, it risks creating a new set of problems.
"India can remain sovereign only if it has a sovereign AI."
India have missed several technological buses in the past. We are still catching up with a few. Entire digital ecosystem in next 30 years will be mounted on AI. We can't afford to miss this one.