10-20-2006, 11:08 PM
Bodhi,
The situation is that many of the technical people who are fighting the battle right now are doing it on their spare time. Their full time jobs are something else. Even with this they have made a dent. Such people working full-time should be able to turn the tide.
All the Indic research in IITs/IISC etc is still a labour of love rather than a full time pursuit.
It is still not rewarding enough in India for bright young folk to consider making this a career.
It is such a shame that even a century after original publication many of the original sanskrit works on astronomy, maths, tantra etc remain untranslated.
I remember reading history of maths where greeks were worshipped and even credited with "inventing" calculus because Archemedes had a limit procedure for getting area of a circle by summing up areas of small triangles. It was specifically mentioned, that there was no evidence that India ever thought of even most basic elements of calculus.
Now we know that it is fair to say that Calculus was invented in India by Madhava, Nilakantha etc. Taylor series, power series, idea of derivatives etc has been around in India for 100s of years before Newton & Leibnitz supposedly "invented" calculus. This realization dawned after a few Indians spent some time poring over Kerala maths texts.
Even now there is no systematic translation of these texts. You can't even buy them anywhere. They are tucked away in some old university libraries. When I check out many such old texts from a university library, I notice in most cases that I am the only person in the last 70-80 or even 100 years who has done that!
This is the conditions of sanskrit texts which actually got published. There are scores of manuscripts that haven't even been touched.
Recently I was trying to study a process in Samavedic texts called "Chala-prakriya", in which a letter (akshara) called chalAkShara is used as a error correction mechanism. For a R^icha there is a chalAkShara, same witha sAman, or even pada-pAtha. This error-correcting mechanism is much better than simple checksum and pretty ingenious. There have been sparse comments about it in few hard to get books. But it is too hard to get the original texts, because those manuscripts never got published. They are hiding in manuscript collections in England, or various locations in India. For one two page manuscript copy, the British Library London charged me 18 pounds! I see names of many manuscripts dealing with chalAkSharas in manuscript catalogues but have to put the effort and money to acquire them.
This is the state of affairs after half a century of independence, when leftist/marxist fatcats in JNU get paid handsomely to tarnish India, but no government agency would take upon itself to publish and translate these texts. NDA govt at least started the National Manuscripts Mission to preserve the scattered manuscripts. It took the bone-heads in the government this long to decide on even preserving the manuscripts.
The situation is that many of the technical people who are fighting the battle right now are doing it on their spare time. Their full time jobs are something else. Even with this they have made a dent. Such people working full-time should be able to turn the tide.
All the Indic research in IITs/IISC etc is still a labour of love rather than a full time pursuit.
It is still not rewarding enough in India for bright young folk to consider making this a career.
It is such a shame that even a century after original publication many of the original sanskrit works on astronomy, maths, tantra etc remain untranslated.
I remember reading history of maths where greeks were worshipped and even credited with "inventing" calculus because Archemedes had a limit procedure for getting area of a circle by summing up areas of small triangles. It was specifically mentioned, that there was no evidence that India ever thought of even most basic elements of calculus.
Now we know that it is fair to say that Calculus was invented in India by Madhava, Nilakantha etc. Taylor series, power series, idea of derivatives etc has been around in India for 100s of years before Newton & Leibnitz supposedly "invented" calculus. This realization dawned after a few Indians spent some time poring over Kerala maths texts.
Even now there is no systematic translation of these texts. You can't even buy them anywhere. They are tucked away in some old university libraries. When I check out many such old texts from a university library, I notice in most cases that I am the only person in the last 70-80 or even 100 years who has done that!
This is the conditions of sanskrit texts which actually got published. There are scores of manuscripts that haven't even been touched.
Recently I was trying to study a process in Samavedic texts called "Chala-prakriya", in which a letter (akshara) called chalAkShara is used as a error correction mechanism. For a R^icha there is a chalAkShara, same witha sAman, or even pada-pAtha. This error-correcting mechanism is much better than simple checksum and pretty ingenious. There have been sparse comments about it in few hard to get books. But it is too hard to get the original texts, because those manuscripts never got published. They are hiding in manuscript collections in England, or various locations in India. For one two page manuscript copy, the British Library London charged me 18 pounds! I see names of many manuscripts dealing with chalAkSharas in manuscript catalogues but have to put the effort and money to acquire them.
This is the state of affairs after half a century of independence, when leftist/marxist fatcats in JNU get paid handsomely to tarnish India, but no government agency would take upon itself to publish and translate these texts. NDA govt at least started the National Manuscripts Mission to preserve the scattered manuscripts. It took the bone-heads in the government this long to decide on even preserving the manuscripts.