blog@Yantrajaal

On the occasion of Janmashtami, when India celebrates the birth of the Divine Soldier-Statesman who stands at the confluence of history and myth and still moves the hearts and minds of many of us, I present what I believe to be is the horoscope of Lord Krishna. for my earlier blog on the historicity of the Mahabharata War, please read this post.

Thanks to 50+ batches of B.Tech engineers who have passed out through its portals -- and have subsequently percolated into every kind of business on the planet -- IIT Kharagpur is a fairly well known name in the literate parts of the world. Riding on the back of this illustrious tenant, the sleepy railway junction of Kharagpur has emerged from the obscurity of being another town in Midnapore and has also achieved the status of place that people actually go to, not just merely come from ! Those of us who have been to Kharagpur or  arestill there are also aware that the institute premises  include the famous Hijli Jail and is adjacent to the Salua Airforce base which was the home of the Very Heavy Bomber Squadron of the RAF during the Second World War. But what is origin of the name Kharagpur ? A quick search through Google reveals that there are quite a few stories about the place but the consensus is that it is named after the Khargeshwar Shiva temple that is located in the ...

When I was in school, my knowledge about World War II was built up by reading war comics -- or Commando Comics, as they were called in the 1960-70s. This had led me to believe that the British soldiers were all smart and brave whereas the Germans were either fools or cowards and could only shout "Achtung ! Achtung !!" before they were all killed ! It was only much later, when I had come across an English translation of “The Foxes of the Desert” by Paul Carell that I came to realise that the Germans too were equally brave and smart. I also understood that history is generally written by the winners and in such history, the winners always come across with flying colours. Could this be the case with the Mahabharata ? And in this epic story of the war between Good and Evil, is it that the Pandavas are shown to be righteous and good simply because they won the war and had the luxury of writing the history ? How honest and righteous were the Pandavas anyway ? Consider the follo...

AstroArchaeology & The Historicity of the Mahabharat School and college text books on Indian History begin with the Indus Valley Civilisation ( also known as the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation ) because anything earlier to that is considered non-proven or possibly un-provable myth. Hence the Mahabharata war, that shook the foundations of North Indian politics,has been consigned to the mysterious twilight zone between myth and history as has been the personality of Krishna, the foremost political figure of the time. The Mahabharata era has been notoriously difficult to describe in terms of traditional traditional historical'hardware' like pottery, ruins, coins or even physical manuscripts. However a 'software' approach can and does lead to very positive results. Software, as we all know, is independent of the physical media that carries it. Hence information encoded in software can be extracted, decoded and processed to yield interesting results. While extant ph...