blog@Yantrajaal

All of us are familiar with the Internet and the “World Wide” Web that has disrupted business models by connecting people in new and often unimaginable ways. But the Web and the Internet are not synonymous even though both are often spoken of in the same breath. The Internet is a hardware platform, that is boxes and wires connected together, and the Web is an application running on this amazing platform. If that confuses you, think of your laptop as a platform and Word and Excel as two common applications that run on the platform that also has other applications like Media players, that play music, PhotoShop that helps create images and Skype that allows you to talk to long distance friends “for free”. Your laptop platform and the suite of applications that you have installed on it are all local, but the Internet is a distributed platform that is made up of a number of connected machines. Similarly, the Web is a distributed applications, one part of which -- the browser, is located on...

I have always been puzzled by the image of Kali that we have grown up with. Why would a goddess appear naked ? Why should she be surrounded by images of murder, mayhem and destruction in the form of severed heads and hands ? Why should be standing or squatting on a lifeless Shiva ? Or as I learnt as I grew older, the actual image is that of a woman-on-man sexual act that has been sanitized by a sensitive society for "family viewing"! Gods and goddesses are supposed to be goody-goody figures that every society has conjured up to create a safe harbour for troubled times -- to protect and save helpless humanity in the face of uncomfortable challenges thrown up by a hostile environment. That is how primitive man created the mental image of the Divine. Someone who is loving and kind and benign and benefic and beautiful peaceful and calm and ..... so on and so forth. That is how the gods are supposed to be ... and then comes Kali and shatters that carefully crafted archetype wit...